I am not a Sanskrit or Pali scholar, but, better than that, a lover of books that are eternal in their wisdom. The purpose of including the wisdom of India with the wisdom of China is to communicate a joyful experience of the beauty and wisdom of that country’s literature and share it with my readers. In the process of compilation, I could not have enjoyed it more if I had taken a trip to India. How could it be otherwise? The contact with poets, forest saints and the best wits of the land, the glimpse into the first awakening of Ancient India’s mind as it searched, at times childishly and naively, at times with a deep intuition, but at all times earnestly and passionately, for the spiritual truths and the meaning of existence—this experience must be highly stimulating to anyone, particularly because the Hindu cultuie is so different and therefore has so much to offer. One sees the ideas and the ethos of a nation as revealed in Its literature, which have activated and moulded that people for three thousand years. Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India or hope to share with It the freedom and equality of peoples which we in some lame and halting fashion are trying to create out of this morally and politically chaotic world. In accordance with Chinese courtesy, I have put the section on the wisdom of India first, reversing the order suggested by the title. If I have put China first in the title, it is because I strongly suspect that the average reader does not suspect India has as rich a culture, as creative an imagination and wit and humor as any China has to offer, and that India was China’s teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world’s teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, 3THE WISDOM OF INDIA 4 phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop. But the great age of Western appreciation of Indian literature and philosophy, the age of Sir William Jones, Franz Bopp and Sir Edwin Arnold, has passed. The enthusiasm that came with the discovery of Sanskrit and the founding of the science of Indo-Germanic philology, directly inspired by it, soon evaporated, i860 marked the turning point. G. T. Garratt writes in his extremely informative article “Indo-Bntish Civilization” in The Legacy of India (Oxford) ; “This phase was not fated to last. His [Sir William Jones’s] successors soon began to adopt that slightly hostile and superior attitude which characterizes the work of Englishmen writing on Indian subjects. . . . From about 1836, this tradition had become firmly established. India was the ‘Land of Regrets’ in which Englishmen spent years of exile amongst a people half savage, half decadent.” “After the Mutiny • . . new types of Englishmen went out East, including journalists and schoolmasters; they brought their wives, and were visited by tourists; within India a domiciled English and Eurasian population was growing in numbers and developing a life of its own. . . . The British were rapidly developing into a separate caste, strongly reinforced by the new officials, planters, and business men who came crowding out East after i860. There was a natural tend- ency for writers to concentrate more upon this colony of their expatriated countrymen,” producing a mass of cheap novels, “nearly all of which are grossly offensive to (the Hindu) race.” “They are interesting for the light they throw upon the bureaucracy during the most static, self-satisfied, and sterile era of British rule, from about 1870, till the end of the century. The greater part of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian works is direcdy in this tradition, though it is illumined by his own genius. . . , Apart from the ‘Jtmgle’ books, the greater part of his Indian fiction aqd verse is concerned with these two [European and Eurasian] tiny communities, the officials and military officers, and the subordinate Euro- peans and Eurasians. Round them surges the immense sea of Indians, but nearly all of this subjected race who appear as individuals are minor characters, mostly domestic servants or women kept by Englishmen. The few educated Indians who come into his pages seem to have been introduced to satisfy the deep-seated prejudices of the English in India. . . . Kipling allowed himself the most astounding generalizations about Indian duplicity and mendacity, or the physical cowardice of certainINTRODUCTION 5 races.” When Sir Edwin Arnold wrote about i860 in his Preface to his translation of the Httopadesa, “No one listens now to the precipitate ignorance which would set aside as ‘heathenish’ the high civilization of this great race/’ he did not know what he was talking about. India today has become an untouchable topic, and the most untouchable topic is about the untouchable caste of the Englishmen in India—I must for- bear to touch the topic now. The average Western attitude toward India may be summed up in a sentence which contains a fourfold untruth: “All I know about India is that the Hindus are Buddhists, and as the Nirvana of Buddha’s teachings means extinction, obviously India has nothing to contribute to the world civilization.” The first untruth is that the Hindus are Buddhists, which they as a nation are not. Characteristically, the Hindus have rejected Buddhism as the Jews have rejected Christianity. The second untruth is the assumption that the meaning of Nirvana is ever understood by the conditioned, finite, logical intelligence of man. The third untruth rises from the fact that India has actually produced a vast, rich imaginative literature and philosophy, besides Buddhism, and that the Indian culture is highly creative and in fact has enriched the world literature with the droll humor that we associate with the Arabian Nights. And the fourth untruth is the denial that the essential spiritual concept of man in both Hinduism and Buddhism, their essential denial of materialism, and their stand on non-violence arising from those re- ligions, have anything to teach to the modern world. Buddha taught that the greatest sin is ignorance or thoughtlessness, and that the holy life begins with, and is founded upon, moral earnestness and the spirit of inquiry and self-examination. This sin of thoughtlessness about India has to cease. Nobody is going to profit by making the problem of India or British rule in India an untouchable topic. It is my firm belief that this generation of elderly statesmen is hopeless, and that we must begin by educating a new generation toward a more correct view of the Indian nation. The basic material concerning the beliefs of Hinduism, the national religion of present-day Hindus and their leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, is to be found in the first section on Hindu piety. It is characteristic of Indian thought that, in India, religion and philosophy are inseparable. In India, no “link” between philosophy and religion is necessary and the problem of finding that fatal missing link in the modern world does not exist. Hindu philosophy and the knowledge of6 THE WISDOM OF INDIA God are inseparable as Chinese philosophy and the questions of human conduct are inseparable. We do not know whether we are coming to the close of an epoch; we do not know whether our highly specialized and departmentalized thinkers are capable of reuniting science, philosophy and religion. But it is evident that India is a land overflowing with religion and with the religious spirit. India produced too much religion, and China, too little. A trickle of Indian religious spirit over- flowed to China and inundated the whole of Eastern Asia. Not too little, but too much is India’s trouble. It would seem logical and appropriate that any one suffering from a deficiency of the religious spirit should turn to India rather than to any other country in the world. It is apparent that only in India is religion still a living emotion today, and that the Christian doctrine of turning the other cheek could be turned into a national movement, practiced by the masses, only in India and in no other country in the world. India’s paradox is the pacifist’s paradox the world over. But peace can come only from non-violence and disbelief in force, and non-violence can come only from India, because the Indians seem really to believe in it. In the realm of imaginative literature, the great Indian epics will speak for themselves. The comparison with the lhad and the Odyssey is inevitable. I have preferred to give the whole story of the Ramayana, rather than give incomplete selections from both; those interested may read the Mahabharata in the Everyman’s Library edition. I have, for reasons of space, also found it necessary to exclude the great dramatic poetry of Shakuntala, by Kalidasa, “the Indian Shakespeare” (Everyman’s) and the popular classical drama, Little Clay Cart (tr. by Arthur William Ryder, Harvard Oriental Series). It may also be a complete revelation to find that the fabulous Hindu mind is responsible for the genre of animal fables and many stories of the Arabian Nights type, in which Buddhist and non-Buddhist litera- ture abounds. “Numerous European fairy stories, to be found in Grimm or Hans Andersen, including the magic mirror, the seven-leagued boots, Jack and the beanstalk, and the purse of Fortunatus, have been traced to Indian sources,” writes H. G. Rawlinson, in his article “India in European Literature and Thought” in The Legacy of India. “Many of them are to be found in the Gesta Romanorutn, the Decameron, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales!' The story of the Three Caskets, used in the Merchant of Venice, is found in the romance of Barlaam and Josa- phat, which is too clearly the story of Buddha, who was changed intoINTRODUCTION 7 a Christian garb, and later canonized as a Christian saint as St. Josaphat! And everyone of course knows the story of the Milkmaid who dreamt of her wedding and overthrew the milk pail, now to be recognized in its original form as the story of the Brahman’s Dream, included in the selections from the Panchatantra. Lastly, I have included important selections from Buddhist canons and non-canonical works, chiefly from the Mahayana, or the “Greater Vehicle School,” or the school of “Northern Buddhism.” I confess to a personal bias, and have largely used Mahayana texts based on Chinese translations from the Sanskrit. The study of Pali, which rose to importance about 1880, has shifted the emphasis to the Hinayana texts of the school of “Southern Buddhism.” And I believe that, apart from scholarly convenience in the study of Pali, any satisfactory interpretation of Buddhism as a religion for the common man must come from the Mahayana texts. This I have tried to make plain in my introduction to the selection from the Surangama Sutra, In spite of the wealth of the Pali Tripita\a, I rather think the final gleanings as a living belief for the student of larger human truths must be somewhat barren. I think it is possible to take the three selections, the Hymns from the Rigveda, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Dhammapada, the latter two being reproduced here complete, as milestones in the development of Hindu thought and find therein the best fruit of the Hindu speculation about the meaning of man’s existence on earth. India’s achievements in the field of the positive sciences have naturally not been included. It is interesting to note that when Houston Chamberlain, the English apostle of Aryanism, wanted to prove eliminated all accent marks except those for long vowels in the selec- tions. For variations in spellings of the same word, see the short note pre- ceding the “Glossary of Hindu Words.” Finally I have to thank Dr. Taraknath Das of the College of the City of New York who has been helpful in guiding me to certain interesting references, as well as explaining certain obscure Indian terms, and in going over the proofs of the Indian section of this book,INDI 列印 類別: 文章