Eastern Thought India

EASTERN WISDOM (V): INDIA After an honorable start, India failed to attain through its own efforts the level of technical and scientific competence of the West. As with China, the failure was traceable to a different way of looking at the world. East and West started with the same pessimistic assumptions: the human condition is precarious, painful and fleeting. Theories of Megara, Simonides of Chios and the Greek tragedies all passed judgments on existence fully as bleak as Buddha´s. But the responses were different. In the West, they suggested actions to improve the situation; in India, evasion. Western man sought to remedy the misery of his condition by mastery of the world; the Hindu sought to escape the world by mastery of self, of the internal life of the spirit. The Western mind believed in the reality of the external world and undertook to impose upon it the power of man‘s will; the Hindu regarded the external world and the idea of Ego as illusory, and sought to submerged personality in the quietude of the impersonal and timeless „Self.“ The highest wisdom was to escape from the wheel of rebirths by the technique of depersonalization, to be had through the mastery of knowledge of Samkhya or the psychosomatic methods of the deliverance of Yoga. The purpose in both cases was to enter in an ecstatic fusion with the Absolute (Brahma), who in his positive form is Being itself, and in his negative form is Nothingness, the Nirvana. To this metaphysics, with its denial of the wish to live, must be added a compartmentalization of Hindu society which prevented the invigorating circulation of elites that alone can keep a society healthy. There was no possibility of rising from one caste to another; there was no „social ladder“ to climb. Nothing was done prior to 1950 to change this situation.