Arthur Osborne - Adventures on the Path #3

[Guest guest]

 

 

ADVENTURES ON THE PATH

.....................

 

Even before the quest started I had found kindred souls in

England opposed to modern civilization with its materialist

values, its divorce from nature, its rush and noise and

superficiality. But when I got to Poland I found the viewpoint

of Eastern Europe was quite different. There modernism and

industrialization still had a glamour. The term of contempt for

a slum, for anything dirty or old-fashioned, was ‘Asia’, while the

national pride was a coalmine or a steel foundry. If I even

mentioned my viewpoint I encountered the suspicion that I

was the cunning Englishman who, having industrialization in

his own country, was trying to beguile East Europeans into

putting up with backwardness in theirs. I was to find the same

spirit in the East. In fact, I was to find that it was in the West,

among those surfeited with materialism, that the renewed search

for spiritual meaning was arising, while the East was rushing

headlong into modernism.

 

I found that even the traditional arts and sciences, about

which Guenon wrote so much, were disappearing. The last

generation of Siamese architects had refused to initiate apprentices,

saying that the age of tradition was ended. As a result, modern

buildings in the Siamese style, such as the university in which I

taught, were mere imitations planned by Italian architects.

True, there were the Buddhist monasteries in Siam, and

I might have made a more careful investigation of them, but

so far as I could gather from talks with my students and

colleagues there was no very potent spiritual current there.

Yes, there had been a Buddhist monk in the north who was

said to be very holy and many people had visited him, but

he was dead now. No, there was no one else. Incidentally, I

recently saw, as a sort of confirmation, on reading The Wheel

of Life, the autobiography of my postwar successor at the

university, John Blofeld, who is a Buddhist, that he found

no living current in Siamese Buddhism but had had to go to

Sikkim to seek a guru.

Guenon’s description of the East, I found, would have

been idealized and doctrinaire even in an earlier age; today it

simply would not apply.

We soon heard from Martin that he had taken up a post as

English lecturer at Cairo University. Guenon also was living at

Cairo and Martin got to know him and gradually became a

sort of unofficial secretary to him.

Before long Martin wrote to us that he had found a Muslim

guru, approved of by Guenon, became a Muslim, and had been

initiated by him. He also expressed the opinion that we should

probably eventually be driven to join the same religion and

even to follow the same guru.

 

With Guenon’s approval, our group had undertaken

the translation of his books, each selecting one. Martin was

translating Orient et Occident and I its sequel, La Crise du

Monde Modern which appealed to me as a beautiful, condensed

and fundamental work. I finished the translation just before

the war spread to the East, and I am told that Luzac published

it under the title The Modern Crisis. I never saw a copy; I

was cut off by the war at the time, and later I never troubled

to get one.

 

One of the benefits of this work was that it enabled us to

correspond with Guenon, who was very punctilious about the

details of translation and about preserving his long sentences

and careful system of punctuation. In the periodical for which

he wrote he had inserted an announcement that he could not

answer personal letters or give advice or guidance. Perhaps this

was necessary to avert a flood of correspondence in answering

questions and explaining points of difficulty.

 

I took advantage of this correspondence to tell him of the

disappointment I had experienced from the contrast of the

present reality of Siam with his idealized picture of the East,

and it was partly as a result of my representation that he, or

Martin Lings for him, explained in the English translation of

Orient et Occident that eastern countries of today do not

correspond with his description of the traditional East. Such an

explanation was, however, inadequate; the books should have

been revised throughout to make it clear that it was not the

East as it is that was being described but an ideal.

........................

from Arthur Osborne's MY LIFE & QUEST