This blog intends to present the readers some of the famous passages from English literature including poetry, fiction, essays, history, philosophy and other areas that I have come across in my reading at various points of time in my literary life.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my
life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the
final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to
which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that
human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of
man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing
left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation
of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express
himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honourable
way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he
carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I
was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in
perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
"Why should you think that beauty, which is the most
precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless
passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the
artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And
when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you
must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you,
and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and
imagination."
The word 'Vedanta' meant originally the end of the Vedas, that is; the Upanishads. Today India applies it to that system of philosophy which sought to give logical structure and support to the essential doctrine of the Upanishads, the organ-point that sounds throughout Indian thought-that God (Brahman) and the soul (Atman) are one. The oldest known form of this widely accepted of all Hindu philosophies is the Brahma- sutra of Badarayana (c.200 B.C.)- in 555 aphorisms, of which the first announces the purpose of all: Now, then a desire to know Brahman. Almost a thousand years later, Gaudapada taught the esoteric doctrine of the system of Govinda, who taught it to Sankara, who composed the most famous of Vedanta commentaries, and made himself the greatest of Indian philosophers.
In his short life of thirty-two years Sankara achieved that union of sage and saint, of wisdom and kindliness, which characterizes the loftiest type of man produced in India. Born among the studious Nambudiri Brahmans of Malabar, he rejected the luxuries of the world, and while still a youth became a Sannyasi, worshipping unpretentiously the gods of the Hindu pantheon, and yet mystically absorbed in the vision of all-embracing Brahman. It seemed to him that the profoundest religion and the profoundest philosophy were those of the Upanishads. He could pardon the polytheism of the people, but not the atheism of Sankhya, or the agnosticism of Buddha. Arriving in the north as a delegate of the south, he won such popularity at the assemblies of Benaras that it crowned him with its highest honour, and sent him forth, with a retinue of disciples, to champion Brahmanism in all the debating halls of India. At Banaras, probably, he wrote his famous commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and Brahma Sutras in which he attacked with theological ardour and scholastic subtlety all the heretics of India, and restored Brahmanism to the position of intellectual leadership from which Buddha and Kapila had deposed it.
There is much metaphysical wind in these discourses, and arid deserts of textual exposition; but they may be forgiven in a man who at the age of thirty could be at once the Aquinas and the Kant of India. Like Aquinas, Sankara accepts the full authority of his country's Scriptures as a divine revelation, and then sallies forth to find proofs in experience and reason for all scriptural teachings. Unlike Aquinas, however, he does not believe that reason can suffice for such a task. On the contrary he wonders 'Have we not exaggerated the power and role, the clarity and reliability of reason?' Jaimini was right: reason is a lawyer, and will prove anything we wish. For every argument it can find an equal and opposite argument, and its upshot is a skepticism that weakens all force of character and undermines all values of life. It is not logic that we need, says Sankara, it is insight, the faculty (akin to art) of grasping at once the essential out of the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporal, the whole out of the part. This is the first pre-requisite to philosophy. The second is a willingness, to observe, inquire and think for understanding's sake not for the sage of invention, wealth or power; it is a withdrawal of the spirit from all the excitement, bias and fruits of action. Thirdly, the philosopher must acquire self-restraint, patience and tranquility. He must learn to live above physical temptation or material concerns. Finally, there must burn, deeper his soul, the desire for a blissful absorption in the Brahman of complete understanding and infinite unity. In a word, the student needs not the logic or reason so much as a cleansing and deepening discipline of the Soul. This, perhaps, has been the secret of all profound education.
Sankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle point never quite clearly visioned again until a thousand years later. Immaunel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. How, he asks, is knowledge possible? Apparently, all our knowledge comes from the senses, and reveals not the external itself, but our sensory adaptation-perhaps transformation of that reality. By sense, then, we can never quite know the "real"; we can know it only in the garb of space, time and cause which may be a web created by our organs of sense and understanding, designed or evolved to catch and hold that fluent and elusive reality whose existence we can surmise, but whose character we never objectively describe; our way of perceiving will forever be inextricable mingled with the thing perceived.
This is not the airy subjectivism of the solipsist who thinks that he can destroy the world by going to sleep. The world exists, but it is Maya-not delusion, but phenomenon, an appearance created partly by our thought. Our incapacity to perceive things except through the film of space and time, or to think of them except in terms of cause and change, is an innate limitation, an ajnana or ignorance whence we see a multiplicity of objects and a flux of change. In truth there is only one Being, and change is 'a mere name' for the superficial fluctuations of forms. Behind the Maya or Veil of change and things, to be reached not by sensation or intellect but only by the insight and intuition of the trained spirits, is the one universal reality, Brahman.
This natural obscuration of sense and intellect by the organs and forms of sensation and understanding bars us likewise from perceiving the one unchanging soul that stands beneath all individual souls and minds. Our separate selves, visible to perception and thought, are as unreal as the phantasmagoria of space and time; individual differences and distinct personalities are bound up with body and matter. They belong to the kaleidoscopic world of change; and these merely phenomenal selves will pass away with the material conditions of which they are a part. But the underlying life which we feel in ourselves when we forget space and time, cause and change, is the very essence and reality of that Atman which we share with all selves and things and which, undivided and omnipresent, is identical with Brahman, God.
But what is God? Just as there are two selves-the ego and Atman and two worlds-the phenomenal and nominal-so there are two deities; an Ishvara or Creator worshipped by the people through the patterns of space, cause, time and change, and a Brahman or Pure Being worshipped by that philosophical piety which seeks and finds, behind all spare things and selves, one universal reality, unchanging amid all changes, indivisible amid all divisions, eternal despite all vicissitudes of form, all birth and death. Polytheism, even theism, belongs to the world of Maya and Avidya; they are forms of worship that correspond to the forms of perception and thought. They are as necessary to our moral life as space, time and cause are necessary to our intellectual life, but they have no absolute validity or objective truth.
To Sankara the existence of God is no problem for he defines God as existence and identifies all real being with God. But regarding God as creator or redeemer. There may, he thinks, be some question. Such a deity, says Sankara, cannot be proved by reason; he can only be postulated as a practical necessity, offering peace to our limited intellects, and encouragement to our fragile morality.
The philosopher, though he may worship in every temple and bow to every God, will pass beyond these forgivable forms of popular faith. Feeling the illusoriness of plurality, and the monistic unity of all things, he will adore, as the Supreme Being, Being itself indescribable, limitless, spaceless, timeless, causeless, changeless Being, the source and substance of all reality. We may apply the adjectives "conscious" intelligent, even "happy" to Brahman, since Brahman includes all selves and these may have such qualities. All other adjectives would be applicable to Brahman equally, since it includes all qualities of all things' essentially though Brahman is neuter, raised above personality and gender, beyond good and evil above all moral distinctions, all deference and attributes, all desires and ends. Brahman is the cause and effect, the timeless and secret essence of the world.
The goal of philosophy is to find that secret, and to lose the seeker in the secret found. To be one with God means, for Sankara, to rise above-or to sink beneath-the separateness and brevity of the self, with all its narrow purposes and interests, to become unconscious of all parts, divisions, things, to be placidly at one, in a desireless Nirvana, with that great ocean of Being in which there are no warring purposes, no competing selves, no parts, no space, and no time. To find this blissful peace (Ananda) a man must renounce not merely the world but himself; he must look upon suffering and death as Maya, surface incidents of body and matter, time and chance, and he must not think of his own personal qualities and fate. A single moment of self-interest or pride can destroy all his liberation. Good works cannot give a man salvation, for good works have no validity or meaning except in the world of space and time. Only the knowledge of the saintly seer can bring that salvation which is the recognition of the identity of self and the universe, Atman and Brahman, soul and God, and the absorption of the part in the whole. Only when this absorption is complete does the wheel of reincarnation stop; for then it is seen that the separate self and personality, to which reincarnation comes, is an illusion. It is Ishvara, the Maya-God, that gives rebirth to the self in punishment and reward; but "when the identity" of Atman and Brahman "has become known, then," says Sankara, " the soul's existence as wanderer and Brahman's existence as creator" (i.e., as Ishvara) "have vanished away." Ishvara and Karma, like things and selves, belong to the esoteric doctrine of Vedanta as adapted to the needs of common man; in the esoteric or secret doctrine, soul and Brahman are one, never wandering, never dying, never changed.
It was thoughtful of Sankara to confine his esoteric doctrine to philosophers; for, as Voltaire believed, as only a society of philosophers could survive without laws, so only a society of supermen could live beyond good and evil. Critics have complained that if good and evil are Maya, part of the unreal world, then all moral distinctions fall away, and devils are as good as saints. But these moral distinctions, Sankara cleverly replies, are all within the world of space and time, and are binding for those who live in the world. They are not binding upon the soul that has united itself with Brahman. Such a soul, by definition, does not move in the sphere of desire and (self-considering) action. Whoever consciously injures another lives on the plane of Maya, and is subject to its distinctions, its morals and its laws. Only the philosopher is free, only wisdom is liberty.
It was a subtle and profound philosophy to be written by a man in his twenties. Sankara not only elaborated it in teaching and defended it successfully in debate, but he expressed snatches of it in some of the most sensitive religious poetry of India.
Ten religious orders were founded in his name, and many disciples accepted and developed his philosophy. One of them, some say Sankara himself, wrote for the people a popular exposition of the Vedanta-the Mohamudgara, or "Hammer against Folly"- in which the essentials of the system were summed up with clarity and force.
11
"Fool! Give up thy thirst for wealth, banish all desires from thy heart. Let thy mind be satisfied with what is gained by thy Karma... Do not be proud of wealth, of friends, or of youth; time takes all away in a moment. Leaving quickly all this, which is full of illusion, enter into the place of Brahman... Life is tremulous, enter into the place of Brahman... Life is tremulous, like a water-drop on a lotus-leaf... Time is plying, life is waning-yet the breath of hope never ceases. The body is wrinkled, the hair grey, the mouth has become toothless, the stick in the hand shakes, yet man leaves not the anchor of hope... Preserve equanimity always... In thee, in me and in others there dwells the Vishnu alone; it is useless to be angry with any body, or impatient. See every self in Self, and give up thought of difference."
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Nevertheless there is comparatively little crime in India, and little violence. By universal admission the Hindus are gentle to the point of timidity; too worshipful and good-natured, too long broken upon the wheel of conquest and alien despotisms, to be good fighters except in the sense that they can bear pain with unequaled bravery. Their greatest faults are probably listlessness and laziness; but in the Hindus these are not faults but climatic necessities and adaptations, like the dolce far niente of the Latin peoples, and the economic fever of Americans.
The Hindus are sensitive, emotional, temperamental, and imaginative; therefore they are better artists and poets than rulers or executives. They can exploit their fellows with the same zest that characterizes the entrepreneur everywhere; yet they are given to limitless charity, and are the most hospitable hosts this side of barbarism. Even their enemies admit their courtesy, and a generous Britisher sums up his long experience by ascribing to the higher classes in Calcutta "polished manners, clearness and comprehensiveness of understanding, liberality of feeling, and independence of principle, that would have stamped them gentlemen in any country in the world."
The great public rite was sacrifice or offering; the great private rite was purification. Sacrifice, to the Hindu, was no empty form; he believed that if no food was offered them the gods would starve to death. When men were cannibals human sacrifices were offered in India as elsewhere; Kali particularly had an appetite for men, but the Brahmans explained that she would eat only men of the lower castes. `It is to the credit of the Brahmans that they refused to take part in any sacrifice that involved the shedding of blood.
A little more to our taste was the religious precept to bathe daily; here again a hygienic measure, highly desirable in a semitropical climate, was clothed in a religious form for more successful inculcation. "Sacred" pools and tanks were built, many rivers were called holy, and men were told that if they bathed in these they would be purified in body and soul. Already in the days of Yuan Chwang millions bathed in the Ganges every morning; `from that century to ours those waters have never seen the sun rise without hearing the prayers of the bathers seeking purity and release, lifting their arms to the holy orb, and calling out patiently, "Om, Om, Om."
Benares became the Holy City of India, the goal of millions of pilgrims, the haven of old men and women come from every part of the country to bathe in the river, and so to face death sinless and clean. There is an element of awe, even of terror, in the thought that such men have come to Benares for two thousand years, and have gone down shivering into its waters in the winter dawn, and smelled with misgiving the flesh of the dead on the burning ghats, and uttered the same trusting prayers, century after century, to the same silent deities.
The unresponsiveness of a god is no obstacle to his popularity; India believes as strongly today as ever in the gods that have so long looked down with equanimity upon her poverty andher desolation.
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more about the author.
‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said.
‘We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. But in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in ‘The Times’ occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
‘Except——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
It is really painful to read the phrase “the mystic muck of India” in “Atlas Shrugged” written in 1957. There seems to be a grain of truth in what Ayn Rand wrote about our country long ago.This is what she wrote:
"You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People's States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it's evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity— you declare that the looters' ideals are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one's wealth away.
Then you wonder why your children join the People's thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters' conquests keep creeping closer to your doors—and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.
"You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters' fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa—that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.
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