In the twenty-first century ... “India will conquer her conquerors”.

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" Around the middle of this century Arnold Toynbee predicted that at

its close the world would still be dominated by the West, but that in

the twenty-first century " India will conquer her conquerors " .1

Preempting the place that is now held by technology, religion will be

restored to its earlier importance and the center of world happenings

will wander back from the shores of the Atlantic to the East where

civilization originated five or six thousand years ago. "

 

The spiritual heritage of India is one of the world’s standing

miracles. It would rank among the greatest human achievements were it

not that “achievement” isn’t really the right word. It is more like a

reception - the opening of a people to receive, through inspiration,

The Breath of the Eternal. For the outbreathing of the eternal is

what India has taken truth to be - see infra, p. 8. We know

that “Hinduism” is a label affixed by outsiders. Long ago, people to

the west of the Indus River mispronounced its name and called those

who lived on it or to its other side “Hindus,” and in time “Hinduism”

came to be used for their beliefs and practices. The Indians

themselves knew no such word. There was no need for them to think of

the truth by which they lived as other than the sanatana dharma, the

Eternal Truth. It was Truth Itself—truth that had become incarnate in

the tradition that sustained them.

 

How the incarnation was effected is itself an interesting point. In

the West we tend to think of knowledge as cumulative: bits of

information get joined in bodies of information that can grow

indefinitely. India recognizes a kind of knowledge that fits this

model, but she considers it " lower knowledge " —knowledge that is

gained by reason and the senses playing over objective, finite

particulars. Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently. Or

rather, it doesn't proceed at all, for it enters history full blown.

It is futile to ask when this higher knowledge first appeared, for

India has no notion of absolute beginnings—beginnings require time,

and time for India is not absolute. The most we can say is that when

a new cosmic cycle opens there are souls waiting in the wings, so to

speak, with the higher wisdom already in store. Who these souls are

is not a generic accident: India has no place for chance or accident—

the law of karma precludes it. The men and women who are born wise on

the morning of a new creation are so because, though the world they

enter is young, they themselves are not. Their jivas (individual

psyches) having being held over from preceding cosmic cycles, they

are already `old souls'—old chronologically, to be sure, but more

importantly in experience... Their concluding legacy to the

phenomenal world is to impregnate the new cycle with reflective

knowledge of the truth they have assiduously shepherded. Keeping in

touch with this truth through meditation, these rishis (seers)

transmit it orally, direct from guru to disciple, until eventually

their oral tradition gets committed to writing. In India the texts

that result are the Vedas.

 

If we see the Vedas in this light, as apertures through which the

Infinite entered conscious human awareness in South Asia in the

present cosmic cycle, what word of the Infinite do the Vedas impart?

First the warning that on this topic words are unequal to their task.

They can be useful, of course, or the Vedas themselves would not have

been written, but a fundamental Vedic teaching concerns the

limitations of words themselves when directed towards ultimates.

Sooner or later these ultimates phase beyond language entirely. Neti,

neti, not this, not this; the map is not the terrain, the menu is not

the meal—the Vedas never tire of repeating this basic point. In this

kind of knowing, words do not cause understanding; at best they

occasion it: from spirit to spirit communion leaps. The

word " Upanishads, " denoting the culminating sections of the Vedas,

makes this point in its very etymology. Deriving from the roots which

when conjoined mean to approach (upa) with utter (ni) firmness to

loosen and destroy (sad) spiritual experience, it warns the reader

right off that the topics he is about to encounter call for more than

book learning. For their province is that `higher mathematics' of the

human spirit where knowing merges with being. Upanishadic truth is so

subtle, so abstruse, that purely objective, rational intellectuals

are likely to miss it entirely—off such intellectuals it rolls like

water off oil. Only when discerned in a life that is living it—a life

that incarnates it in its outlook, moods, and conduct—does truth of

this order become fully convincing. "

 

Huston Smith, in the foreword to " The Spiritual Heritage if India " by

Swami Prabhavananda

 

1. Culturally, not politically, Toynbee's prediction appeared in an address he

gave to The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh University in November, 1952.