The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c6.s1.84

c6.s1.84

I would ask you to remember in this connection my friend, the late Professor Max Müller, one of the translators of the Upanishads—Mokshamūlara, as the Hindus called him during his latter days. It happens that *moksha* is the Sanskrit word for "salvation," and *mūla* means "root." To the Hindus his name means "Root-of-salvation," or, as we might say, with a different turn, "Salvation Müller." I do not imagine that Müller believed in the Hindu salvation, which is release from the chain of lives and deaths in the course of transmigration. But if freedom of mind partakes of the flavor of salvation, "Salvation Müller" he was. Max Müller's eminence as a scholar and writer is well known to you; less generally well understood, perhaps, is the liberalising quality of his thought, which he exercised untiringly during more than half a century. Among Europeans he was pre-eminent for the spirit of sympathy and fairness which he brought to the study and criticism of Hindu religious thought.