Per Wiki,Claudius Buchanan (12 March 1766 – 9 February 1815) was a Scottish theologian, an ordained minister of the Church of England, and an extremely 'low church' missionary for the Church Missionary Society.
From his works, we collect this gem:
(page 208)
6. The moral state of the Hindoos is represented as being still worse than that of the Mahometans. Those, who have had the best opportunities of knowing them, and who have known them for the longest time, concur in declaring that neither truth, nor honesty, honor, gratitude, nor charity is to be found pure in the breast of a Hindoo. How can it be otherwise? The Hindoo children have no moral instruction. If the inhabitants of the British isles had no moral instruction, would they be moral? The Hindoos have no moral books. What branch of their mythology has not more of falsehood and vice in it than truth and virtue? They have no moral gods. The robber and the prostitute lift up their hand with the infant and the priest, before an horrible idol of clay painted read, deformed and disgusting as the vices which are practised before it. *
* The Hindoo superstition has been denominated lascivious and bloody. That it is bloody, is manifest from the daily instances of the female sacrifice, and of the commission of sanguinary or painful rites. The ground of the former epithet may be discovered in the description of their religious ceremonies: "There is in most sects a right-handed or decent path; and "a left-handed or indecent mode of worship".
See Essay on the religious ceremonies of the Brahmins; by H.T. Colebrooke, Esq. Asiat. Res. Vol VII p 281. That such a principle should have been admitted as systematic in any religion on earth, may be considered as the last effort of mental depravity in the invention of a superstition to blind the understanding, and to corrupt the heart.
PS: for the curious, here is an exposition of the vama (left-handed) and dakshina (south, facing east, the south would be on the right) marga Tantra.
From his works, we collect this gem:
(page 208)
6. The moral state of the Hindoos is represented as being still worse than that of the Mahometans. Those, who have had the best opportunities of knowing them, and who have known them for the longest time, concur in declaring that neither truth, nor honesty, honor, gratitude, nor charity is to be found pure in the breast of a Hindoo. How can it be otherwise? The Hindoo children have no moral instruction. If the inhabitants of the British isles had no moral instruction, would they be moral? The Hindoos have no moral books. What branch of their mythology has not more of falsehood and vice in it than truth and virtue? They have no moral gods. The robber and the prostitute lift up their hand with the infant and the priest, before an horrible idol of clay painted read, deformed and disgusting as the vices which are practised before it. *
* The Hindoo superstition has been denominated lascivious and bloody. That it is bloody, is manifest from the daily instances of the female sacrifice, and of the commission of sanguinary or painful rites. The ground of the former epithet may be discovered in the description of their religious ceremonies: "There is in most sects a right-handed or decent path; and "a left-handed or indecent mode of worship".
See Essay on the religious ceremonies of the Brahmins; by H.T. Colebrooke, Esq. Asiat. Res. Vol VII p 281. That such a principle should have been admitted as systematic in any religion on earth, may be considered as the last effort of mental depravity in the invention of a superstition to blind the understanding, and to corrupt the heart.
PS: for the curious, here is an exposition of the vama (left-handed) and dakshina (south, facing east, the south would be on the right) marga Tantra.
