PROLOGUE

One of the most widely disseminated systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of existence that direpted him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully conditioned experience.

The implication of this postulate is unmistakably apparent: that like Adam and Eve in Paradise he should never have abandoned, by forfeit of its terms of blessedness, the primal Edenic state, but somehow should have repressed the insensate desire for conscious existence, the initial offense against the benison of non-existence.

The world of the middle twentieth century is dangerously divided between the two great sectors of East and West. At the moment of writing the schism is marked by a differentiation in the philosophies of economics, government, politics and other elements in less conspicuous degree. It is a challenging question, however, whether the fundamental cause of cleavage between Orient and Occident is not still and always the difference in the profoundest conceptions entertained in the realm of mental and spiritual philosophy. Always in human history it has been the case that surface conditions, physical, economic, material, stand conspicuously forward in the public eye and appear to be the big issues pressing for solution. So they come to be regarded as the prime factors of causation.

Generally, however, their ostensible importance reflects a superficial and shallow envisagement of the actualities. For, on deeper scrutiny, they will mostly be seen to be themselves only the manifestations, the outcropping symptoms of more deeply underrunning strata of ideological conceptions. Out of the heart--and it should be added--out of the mind, are the issues of life. Thought is now recognized to be the primal creative energy in the cosmos. Thought, mind, gives the initial propulsion, and also sets the mold, as Plato so sagaciously set forth in his scheme of the archetypal

v

ideaforms, for the shape of things to come in the creation. Therefore, it is in all likelihood true that the great wall of division between East and West is still constructed of the great stones of philosophical ideality, with their psychological coefficients.

It seems hardly beyond dispute that the preamble enunciated in the first paragraph of this Prologue, stating the primary postulate of the Hindu philosophy, carves out in the sharpest possible outlines the central, the basic and the critical difference between the thought structure of Orient and Occident. And looking at that keystone proposition in the philosophical edifice of Eastern reflection, it is a grave question whether the West is not warranted in regarding it, from the standpoint of its own generally affirmative evaluation of life, as a baleful menace and outright peril to its future security and welfare.

The West postulates the supreme value of the life lived here by units of conscious being in physical bodies: the East denies it. It needs no particular depth or perspicacity of mind to perceive in this situation the essential irreconcilability of the two views, or modes of thought, and likewise to discern the precariousness in the impact of the two ideologies, the sensitive rawness in the enterprise of furthering coexistence or the interblending of the two. When two hemispheres of the world, hitherto in long isolation from each other, are now suddenly thrown into close association, the possibility of their harmonious reciprocation of differing modes and codes of motivation for life conduct will inevitably be difficult in proportion to the depth of the abyss between the contrary views. The meeting of the East and West is one of the gigantic world phenomena of the present epoch in human history, and it promises to become not only a most engaging problem confronting the philosophic mind, but as well the most grimly challenging and practically critical task for the world's statesmanship. It is indeed fraught with the ominously intense and vital issues of historical destiny for the entire world.

It sharply, then, behooves the philosophical acumen of the West, in particular, to examine the principles, in Greek terms, the fundamental archai, of the Eastern ideology, with a view to evaluating it as sound and salutary in its impact on the West's own affirmative emphasis on life's value, or as perilous to its way of thought and life. The ideologies of the two hemispheres of the world are now

vi

and will be increasingly in clash. Whether the conflict is to be controlled and directed with wisdom adequate to softening the impact and effecting an eventual rapprochement toward harminization and synthesis, is a question and a problem pregnant with the portent of destiny.

The Orient, India in particular, has contrived to spread abroad the legend of the East's consummate achievements of the highest and purest spiritual systems in the world. Yet when the West looks at these systems and finds them so negative to its own estimate of positive value, so lagging in the drive for aggressive activity, it is taken aback and made hesitant to counterbalance the inflow of Indian philosophy in its counsels and its motivations. It sees that the difference in ideological modes complicates every effort on its part to work together with the East toward desirable ends by hitching it in a team with a horse that will not pull when it pulls. The East--as witness India's invariable posture of neutrality on practically every matter calling for vigorous and often necessarily risky action--clamps a brake on aggessive policy. There must be times and situations in which only swift positive action can stave off disaster and save the day. The East's inherent committal to indecision and passivism thus becomes, from the West's point of view, a constant and dangerous liability.

Two influences are at work to delay the recognition of the West's peril from the infusion of Eastern thought codes into its psychic life. The first is the West's general obsession by the common religious tradition or persuasion of the sanctity, amounting almost to immunity from critique, of anything labeled and rated in the category of "spiritual." Its own religious tradition has rendered it obsequiously deferential to the name and psychic implications of "spirituality." The appellative disarms suspicion or distrust. It becomes a freely accepted passport to any interest or movement flaunting its shibboleth. However slow and reluctant the average citizen of the West may be to accord welcome to Eastern ideas, he is not likely to apprehend danger from systems whose chief characterization has been broadcast as "spiritual."

The second is the want, so far, of more studied acquaintance of Western people, both lay and academic, with the true nature, bent and import, and therefore the real potential for harm, of the Hindu philosophies. In spite of extensive delving into the East's religious

vii

literature, Western study has not been penetrating enough to catch the full force of the realization of the ultimate destructive potential lurking in its pervasive negativism. It is not clearly seen that the final outcome of this philosophy is the destruction of man. Since man's drive for existence is predicated as the cause of the misery of existence, the logic of Eastern thought demands that he still his craving for life and desperately strive to ceave to live. He is insistently urged to break the chain of causation of life's woes and bring them to an end--by ending himself. To live involves the conscious entity in dolorous and unending woes. Therefore the constant burden of Hindu philosophical lucubration is a seeking of ways to "kill out" with fell intensity of purpose, all the manifestations of the consciousness of life possible to and through man's organic equipment of body and brain, all his sensations, feelings, thoughts, and hush their raucous cacophony of a consciousness dialectically rated as false. The motive for such a crushing of the outward cognitions of existence is asserted to be that the inner core of being of the unit life may relapse into the condition of causeless and consciousless being, undisturbed by the outer turmoil and strains of living. Thus in the final outcome of all its thinking, the philosophy of India rests on the proposition that it is better not to be. An echo of this affirmation is found in The Light of Asia in the sentence: "No wonder the infant weepeth, being born." Its philosophy is a threnody. It greets life with the salutation of a wail. Buddhism pipes but the one note in the chanting of its Hymn of Life: "Sorrow and the cause of sorrow," and seeks not any joy in life, but the end of sorrow, and can see no way of attaining it save by the end of its own existence. "To both Jainism and Buddhism life is a calamity to be avoided at all costs," writes the greatest of living Hindu philosophers today, Radhakrishnan, Vice President of India. Max Mueller, renowned early Orientalist, has registered the amazing fact that India is the one nation in history that has refused to accept life on life's own terms.

If, as the rest of the human family has instinctively felt or been universally persuaded, this life has been generated as a gift and boon of Infinite Being, ultimately if not at every moment potentially dynamic for blessedness, then the negative posture of Hindu ideation comes as near as anything could to being the cardinal sin against the spirit of the creation. Never does Indian philosophy

viii

postulate bliss as either the current experience or the end reward of an evolution of life toward it as a goal. It is life itself that blocks us off from bliss; a lingering in the time dimension inhibits the attainment of timelessness. Bliss can arise only from the ceasing of life. The road to the consummation of ananda runs through the land of denial, of negation. "Negative thinking is the highest form of understanding," avers Jiddu Krishnamurti, true to the tradition of his native country. God projected his creation, looked it over and pronounced it good. As far as human participation in it is concerned, India flatly disagrees with God: it declares that man's life in the world is not good. India does not join in the Psalmist's address to God: "What is man that thou are mindful of him?" but--if it addresses or even acknowledges a God at all--tacitly charges the divine Power with having precipitated his creature, man, into a purlieu of abomination without cause or purpose adequate to justify its pains.

Indian thought indeed has never dreamed it an obligation of the human mind to rationalize man's life in the world. It simply passed judgment on it, and that negative. Its droning monotone of condemnation has bred only one spur to human action in the spirit of aggression, and that has been the incitement toward exertion of effort to escape. Transcending even the Christian cry of "salvation," its one inspiring call to action has been the shibboleth of "liberation." India seems to consider that life has caught man in a trap, or that man has by some fault or dereliction trapped himself, and the sole philosophical motive is to effect an escape from this predicament.

The Occident must take accurate stock of this influence and estimate its possible deleterious effects on its own life. Under a sort of initial glamor and the witchery of a novel and in many ways enticing philosophy, the West has rather generously manifested a cordial receptivity to the Oriental systems. Indeed in circles of mystical occultism the philosophy has been welcomed, embraced and elevated to a place of transcendence over all forms of Christian or Western tradition. What may be the injurious effect at this critical juncture in world affairs of the injection of the sedative and narcotic power of negativism, detachment, passivism and ultra-subjectivism into the counsels of Western incentives to action, looms now as a question of the utmost gravity for Western polity.

ix

India has never to any perceptible degree taken the most tentative step toward relating, much less integrating, spiritually with the life in the world. To be spiritual is just to be dissociated from the world. Its operative slogan expressing the goal of spirituality is yoga, union. Yet here again the concept is wrenched away from its mundane reference, so that yoga is made to be a union of consciousness with superconsciousness, not the union of consciousness with its instrument, its prime objective in migrating to earth.

Egyptian naturalistic religion, Hebraic esoteric Kabalism, Greek rational and mystical philosophy emphasized as the consummative achievement of human consciousness "the union of the above and the below." But India scorns the below, and somehow expects the union to be all above. This is an illegitimate mesalliance, a union of an unnatural and impossible kind. For the two things assumed by it to be the parties and partners in the union are both on the same side, the positive side, both of the essence of spirit, whereas the only union that life makes is the linking together of the two opposite forces of the polarity, spirit and matter.

India strains by repressive practices to sever the link between soul and body and thus to free the spirit from the thongs of the body. This is in defiance of life and nature which aim to wed the two in a union for the generation of new life. The philosophy that would disintegrate this union of polarity is the real delusion of errant human thinking. Soul was sent to earth to marry its body, so that through its tie with an appropriate engine of atomic power it might deploy its noumenal energies out in creative accomplishment. The true union, or yoga, is designed to be consummated not by detachment, but by attachment to an instrument made dynamic by its composition from atomic units. Spirit comes to earth to give physical implementation to its archetypal purposes by linking itself with its coefficient of atomic energy. In India's own pantheon every god had his sakti, or energy coefficient, without whose arm of power he was, as any would-be father without his wife, unable to generate a new birth of life. The significance of the allegorical marriage of the Sons of God and the daughters of men in ancient dramatic typology was apparently wholly lost on Indian systematism. The mate that soul takes unto itself must not be of its own gender, but its opposite. The marriage of the Bride and the Lamb can be no

x

homosexual abnormality. Spirit moves down to earth to wed matter, not to scorn it, to crucify it, to flee its embrace.

The potentialities for the virtual reorientation and sanification of all human philosophy through the acceptance of this ground-fact of all understanding must be overwhelmingly apparent.

It does not seem to have become a postulate of thought that the life and consciousness of each unit or cell in the body of the cosmos must be, however rudimentary, dim and shadowy, an inceptive expression of what the total cosmic Being feels, desires, thinks and wills. If each unit is the Total in seed potentiality, then the forms of its push to outward expression of its life must be of the nature and pattern of its cosmic Parent. Therefore what man, the creature, feels, thinks and wills, must reflect the motivations of the Whole. This certifies the principle of the ancient wisdom that the experience of the part, either tiny or stupendous, is in and a part of the experience of the Total. If the part desires to live, it is in that sphere and segment of its body the desire of the Supreme Life to live. In and through each cell the universal Father seeks to experience the Lila, the delight of conscious existence, and through the cells of his body he gives himself that delight.

If presumptuously we begin to attribute a mistaken and unworthy motive to the activities of the All-Power, we simply throw down to Infinite Wisdom the gauntlet of our childish impertinence. Each part, the tiniest, is a new-born seed potential of the All. But it is a portion of the All, that All itself renewing itself in germ and ovo, and destined in a time development to enjoy the infinite life of the All. It is a new projection of the life of the All motivated, as Sri Aurobindo now so positively expresses it, by the desire of the Infinite to multiply his own consciousness by increase of Being. For one of these child growths to stand on the philosophy that the yearning for life is the one basic cause of all evil, is for it to throw up into the face of the Absolute Life the accusation of acting contrary to good purpose. For in asserting that it is wrong for the cell unit to exist, the privilege of life is denied to the Whole of which the units are the constituent parts. India's negative philosophy thus denies to Infinite Being the boon of having life and that more abundantly.

The right of Life to increase its capacity for delight in existence must be both the first and the final ground and postulate of all

xi

philosophy. The word Lila is perhaps the greatest single word in the human lexicon--or the divine. It is the ultimate answer to all inquiries of the speculative prying mind of man bent irrepressibly on satisfying its hunger for knowledge of the why of existence. Life exists; and we exist, because a Consciousness-Power that originates, constitutes and consummates all that is and ever will be, wishes and wills Lila, delight of life, for itself and for its numberless creatures through whom it multiplies its being and increases its capacity for delight. However falsely, inadequately, ignorantly the creature, man, in his imperfect state misconceives and misapplies the phrase, it is true that the end answer to the insistent why of all the universe is inescapably the cry of the Church: it is the will of God. When the working of that will brings eventualities that shock the human sense of right and goodness, our tiny minds revolt from the acceptance of the idea that this is God's Lila or ours, and we call it evil. Our thought refuses to be reconciled to the understanding that God wills and creates evil. Yet all this abhorrence registers the failure of our partial and immature potential of knowledge to comprehend the entirety, the organic wholeness and synthetic unity of life in its vastness. We are as yet unable to view the cosmic operation in its immensity, but see it only in its minutiae and its particularity. Now we see in part and through a glass darkly. We see things only in their immediate relativities. Our myopic vision, limited to a short range of relationships, can not see things in larger context. We see things out of proportion, out of focus, too near to discern how in proper focus the "evil" elements blend into a synthesis that is beautiful and good.

One Scriptural passage does not establish any proposition as final truth. Nevertheless, with our universal attribution of a divine wisdom to the sacred Scriptures (of the West), there does stand in this volume of Holy Writ at least one positive and unequivocal statement that God does create evil. In Isaiah (46:7) the text runs: "I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and I create evil: I the Lord do all these things." Two things must be held in mind in evaluating a passage like this: first, that "evil" is a human concept and thus is subject to a partial or erroneous conception of its true nature; second, that as the result of our limited range of view, and our imperfect powers of understanding, the necessities for stress and strain involved in the polarized relation of consciousness

xii

and instrument are difficult for us to comprehend. Polarity is the prime law of all manifest existence, and while it has been envisaged in abstract theorization, it has not been accorded its vital place in concrete thinking. Clearly recognized in the scientific field, it has not been carried into the counsels of theology and philosophy. In his created universe the Lord of Life has made objectively visible his intent and his nature. If we would know him, and through him ourselves, his children and the inheritors of his nature, indeed made in his image and likeness, we must brood over his works. For the works reveal the worker.

India has persistently exhorted us to deny the works, turn our eyes away from them and to seek peace and bliss in detachment from the life in which they become manifest. The attitudes, therefore, of East and West are almost diametrically at variance as to the primary direction of human effort, as well as to its objectives. The clash of the two movements of thought in the years ahead will bring into sharp focus the crucial issues of human destiny.

In India as in other lands, the wisdom and the precepts of a lofty primeval revelation have been viciously transmogrified into forms of gross popular superstitions. As pertinent to India this degeneration of high truth into crude misconception is testified to by no less an authority than Radhakrishnan, the eminent Hindu philosopher and statesman. With the grave issued involved, it therefore becomes the self-defensive concern of the West to subject the siren Eastern philosophies to the most searching of probings in order that Occidental psychic modality may be spared the injurious consequences of its adulteration from the narcotic influence of seductive negativism. Happily a more piercing introspection of the primordial and archetypal groundwork of India's philosophy in the Vedas and the Upanishads discloses that the doctrine of maya, or illusion, and both the non-reality and the evil nature of the life in the world, are in fact not the true teaching of India's aboriginal wisdom.

It therefore becomes an enterprise charged with the mightiest import for world life for ages in the future, that the West should acquaint itself familiarly with the message of India's True Voice.

xiii