“There are quagmires1 and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha2. What I adore in him is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our immortality3 by proving our inevitable4 annihilation. He taught, in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego5 and its periodical reincarnation, an obvious absurdity6 which implies a knowledge of the profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and alternately collective and[180] individual. This discovery, which he did not formulate7, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that paradise of unripe8 fruits....
“Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one half of the universe; and the mind of ordinary texture9 sees barely a hemisphere of truth. Afflicted10 with a congenital ‘nervous headache,’ humanity thinks with only one half of its brain, with the eastern lobe11 or the western, the ancient or the modern; its mind nibbles12 its own tail; the antinomies pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed that he had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to open. He possessed13 the complementary virtues14; he was religious and rational; while he summed up within himself the mysticism of the east, his was the most scientific of the minds of antiquity15, at a time when science did not exist but was merged16 in philosophy. The moderns who have sought to condense into a system the collective and hardly initiated17 effort of science have pitiably failed, for they have[181] thought only as westerners, entangled18 in the contradiction of idealistic aspirations19 and materialistic20 arguments, whereas Buddha’s formula might still and almost without breaking down contain this gigantic effort and yet not hamper21 it. From the death of the prince-philosopher, down to the flights of contemporary science, true thought has not advanced one step; Arab or Christian22 spiritualism and its reagent, positivist or scientific materialism23, are recoils24 in contrary directions, false monisms which, taking the extreme for the supreme25, seek to fix the centre of gravity on the circumference26 of the wheel. The explorers of the Beyond must set out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis and scientific analysis and drag these rival sisters by the hand.
“Truth shines at the centre of a circle of onlookers27 and we must pass through its flame to recognize a brother in the adversary28 opposite. We must reach the centre of space to discern the identity of its cardinal29 points: ‘Totum et Nihil, Alter et[182] Ego.’ The longing30 to convert others must yield to the need of completing and balancing our own point of view. In the sacred forest, which pioneers have penetrated32 on all sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must necessarily draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet, they can hear one another and give one another mutual33 encouragement. The most modest cry of discovery may be welcome in the solitude34 and silence in which the truth of the future is ripening35....”
2
I thought it well to preserve this page. It sets forth36, in a remarkable37, though perhaps too rapid summary, two or three of the great problems which in reality are only one and to which, unless we give up everything, we are bound to attempt the answer: the problems of immortality or annihilation, of
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