RE: Digest Number 1300

[Guest guest]

Hi Sadaji,

 

You say:

 

<<Dennis, that statement of T.S. Eliot is not what

Krishna said thousands of years ago - "you have only

choice in action, and never on the results thereoff' -

karnmanyevaadikaaraste maa phaleshu kadaachana'.

But Krishna's statement is not only more emphatic but absolutely scientific.

>>

 

I don't think there is any real disagreement here. I have said many times

that there is no free-will in reality and the whole business of doing and

getting results is ultimately illusory. Nevertheless, I also maintain that,

at the level of vyavahAra, where we apparently live out this play of ours,

we do endeavour to follow sAdhanA (i.e. 'for us there is only the trying')

but we also know that so-called 'Self-realisation' is not so much a 'result'

of this but an act of 'Grace' (i.e. 'the rest is not our business'). I

genuinely believe that Eliot's Four Quartets is a masterpiece of Advaita

philosophy, intentional or not.

 

sukhaM chara,

 

Dennis

[Guest guest]

Namaste,

 

There should be no doubt it was intentional!!

"

http://members.brandx.net/user/autopoy/colompapers/timewaste.html

 

Eliot at Harvard intensively textually studied the Brihadaranyaka

Upanishad in Sanskrit, laying the foundation for his writing of

Wasteland,

 

http://www.gosai.com/chaitanya/saranagati/html/nmj_articles/east_west/

east_west_6.html

 

T.S. Eliot and the

Three Cardinal Virtues

 

T.S. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, studied at Harvard,

the Sorbonne and Oxford and received the Nobel Prize for literature

in 1948, drew his intellectual sustenance from Dante, Shakespeare,

the Bible, St. John of the Cross and other Christian mystics, the

Greek dramatists, Baudelaire, and the Bhagavad Gita. Over and over

again, whether in The Wasteland, Four Quarters, Ash Wednesday or

Murder in the Cathedral, the influence of Indian philosophy and

mysticism on him is clearly noticeable.

 

Eliot was a twenty-three year old student at Harvard when he first

came across eastern philosophy and religion. What sparked his

interest in Vedic thought is not recorded but soon he was occupied

with Sanskrit, Pali and the metaphysics of Patanjali. He had also

read the Gita and the Upanishads as is clear from the concluding

lines of The Waste Land. The Waste Land ends with the reiteration of

the Three Cardinal Virtues from the second Brahmana passage in the

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: damyata (restraint), datta (charity) and

dayadhvam (compassion) and the state of mind that follows obedience

to the commands is indicated by blessing Shantih shantih shantih,

that Eliot himself roughly translated as "the peace that passeth

understanding." But it is the Gita that evidently made a more

permanent imprint on Eliot's mind. It will be found relevant not only

to The Waste Land, but to The Four Quarters, The Dry Salvages, and

The Family Reunion. The tolerance preached by the Gita is echoed in

Eliot's use of imagery drawn from several religions. As Prof. Philip

R. Headings has remarked in his study of the poet, "No serious

student of Eliot's poetry can afford to ignore his early and

continued interest in the Bhagavad Gita." [21] In a sense Eliot

follows in the giant footsteps of Emerson and Thoreau and the early

Transcendentalists, but, it would seem, with a greater sense of

urgency and relevance.

 

 

 

Charles Rockwell Lanman who taught for over forty years, publishing

such works as Sanskrit Reader and Beginnings of Hindu Pantheism. But

his greatest contribution was planning and editing of the Harvard

Oriental Series. In his time he was responsible for influencing such

students of his who were later to achieve literary renown as T. S.

Eliot,

 

 

The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the

philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he

derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later

reading of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted

through his life. In the academic year 1909-10 he was an assistant in

philosophy at Harvard.

>From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard reading Indian philosophy

and studying Sanskrit. "

 

[P.S. During his studies in Oxford, his marriage broke up. Bertrand

Russell was the cause, who influenced him in more ways than one!]

 

 

Regards,

 

Sunder

 

advaitin, "Dennis Waite" <dwaite@d...> wrote:

> Hi Sadaji,

I

> genuinely believe that Eliot's Four Quartets is a masterpiece of

Advaita

> philosophy, intentional or not.

>

> sukhaM chara,

>

> Dennis