17 Honouring and Preserving the Vedic Tradition of Nepal Lokendra Bahadur Chand – Former Prime Minister, Government of Nepal “I n Nepal we naturally have an attraction to Veda and Vedic culture but maybe we do not understand what is Veda be- cause it’s on the verge of disappearing soon. The Maharishi Foundation is trying to fill this gap by bringing the element of ‘consciousness’ into each area of life—agriculture, education, etc. Education here was lost in rote learning and making the students memorize and repeat without any deep understanding of what they were learning. I have not seen any NGO’s or Government organizations participating in reviving our lost tradition—only the Maharishi Foundation has come out for this timely revival and we all need to participate in it. The Maharishi Foundation has made a great effort to re-establish the ideal of a Vedic Gurukul now across Nepal in about 58 schools.” Dr. Govinda Tandann PhD – Secretary General, Pashupatinath Area Development Trust “M aharishi’s contribution to Nepal is great because he informed the Nepalese people in 1974, for the first time in the history of Nepal, about the scien- tific technique of Transcendental Meditation. Maharishi wanted to renew a seed of spiritualism that seemed long lost over time. Then Maharishi found a qualified person in Deepak Baskota to chair the Nepal Maharishi Foundation that is promoting Yoga and Yagya across the nation and re-vitalizing our Gurukul programme with Maharishi’s key technology of Transcendental Meditation. “Maharishi played a very significant role in the field of Vedic knowledge by presenting it in our generation in the language of modern science. The scientists, scholars, doctors, and engineers in the West from the highly developed nations who supported Maharishi in bringing out the sci- entific truth of this knowledge, have been a tremendous help in reviving the Vedic knowledge.” APPRECIATION FOR THE NMFVC PROGRAMME