Ambassadors Of India

"If experience is the soul of religion, expression is the body through which it fulfills its destiny. We have the spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change."

"[The moral hero is] fighting for the reshaping of his own society on sounder lines [his] behavior might offend the sense of decorum of the cautious conventionalist."

"Feeling the unity of himself and the universe, the man who lives in spirit is no more a separate and self-centered individual but a vehicle of the universal spirit. [Like the artist, the moral hero does not turn his back on the world. Instead], He throws himself on the world and lives for its redemption, possessed as he is with an unshakable sense of optimism and an unlimited faith in the powers of the soul."

"The moral hero, guided as he or she is by the ethical experience, who carves out an adventurous path is akin to the discoverer who brings order into the scattered elements of a science or the artist who composes a piece of music or designs buildings."

"Intuition must be not only translated into positive and creative action but shared with others. There is a sense of urgency, if not inevitability, about this. One cannot afford to be absolutely silent and the saints love because they cannot help it."

"In the chessboard of life, the different pieces have powers which vary with the context and the possibilities of their combination are numerous and unpredictable. The sound player has a sense of right and feels that, if he does not follow it, he will be false to himself. In any critical situation the forward move is a creative act."

"If the new harmony glimpsed in the moments of insight is to be achieved, the old order of habits must be renounced. Moral intuitions result in a redemption of our loyalties and a remaking of our personalities."

"Poetic truth is different from scientific truth since it reveals the real in its qualitative uniqueness and not in its quantitative universality. Poetry is the language of the soul, while prose is the language of science. The former is the language of mystery, of devotion, of religion. Prose lays bare its whole meaning to the intelligence, while poetry plunges us in the mysterium tremendum of life and suggests the truths that cannot be stated."

"The experience or the vision is the artist’s counterpart to the scientific discovery of a principle or law. What the scientist does when he discovers a new law is to give a new ordering to observed facts. The artist is engaged in a similar task. He gives new meaning to our experience and organizes it in a different way due to his perception of subtler qualities in reality."

"In emotional vibrancy experience is recollected not in tranquility... but in excitement."

"Even in the act of composition, the poet is in a state in which the reflective elements are subordinated to the intuitive. The vision, however, is not operative for so long as it continues, its very stress acts as a check on expression."

"Technique without inspiration, is barren. Intellectual powers, sense facts and imaginative fancies may result in clever verses, repetition of old themes, but they are only manufactured poetry. It is not simply a difference of quality but a difference of kind in the source itself."

"In Indian Philosophy he not only laid a stone foundation surely and truly but also built an edifice that shall outlast any philosophic storm. It was not so much a history as an exposition, and the exposition was vivid, vital and gripping. It was full of feeling. It made an epoch by itself. It was the two volumes of Indian Philosophy in the "Library of Philosophy" that showed that there was hardly any height of spiritual insight or rational philosophy attained in the world that has not its parallel in the vast stretch he dealt with that lies between the early sages and the modern Naiyaikas [leaders]."

"Religion to him is essentially a concern of the inner self securing a spiritual certainty which lifts life above meaningless existence and dull despair, giving worth to values, meaning to life, confidence to adventure. He was impatient of the sorry scheme of things of the present day when the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. He thought of a day when the strong cease to be greedy and the weak learn to be bold. For things were never settled quite until they were settled right."

"As an academic, philosopher, and statesman, he was one of the most recognized and influential Indian thinkers in academic circles in the 20th century. Throughout his life and extensive writing career, he sought to define, defend, and promulgate his religion, a religion he variously identified as Hinduism, Vedanta, and the religion of the Spirit."

"[He] has been held in academic circles as a representative of Hinduism to the West. His lengthy writing career and his many published works have been influential in shaping the West’s understanding of Hinduism, India, and the East."

"The implicit acceptance of Śaṅkara’s Advaita by the smarta tradition is good evidence to suggest that an advaitic framework was an important, though latent, feature of his early philosophical and religious sensibilities."

"The theology taught in the missionary school may have found resonance with the highly devotional activities connected with the nearby Tirumala temple, activities that he undoubtedly would have witnessed taking place outside the school. The shared emphasis on personal religious experience may have suggested to him a common link between the religion of the missionaries and the religion practiced at the nearby Tirumala temple."

"He attended Elizabeth Rodman Voorhees College in Vellore, a school run by the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church in America where he was introduced to the Dutch Reform Theology, which emphasized a righteous God, unconditional grace, and election, and which criticized Hinduism as intellectually incoherent and ethically unsound. This is where he encountered what would have appeared to him as crippling assaults on his Hindu sensibilities. He also would have witnessed the positive contributions of the social programs undertaken by the Mission in the name of propagation of the Christian gospel."

"He inherited from his upbringing a tacit acceptance of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedanta and an awareness of the centrality of devotional practices associated with the smarta tradition."

"What Vivekananda, Savarkar, and Theosophy did bring to him was a sense of cultural self-confidence and self-reliance."

"In 1904, he entered Madras Christian College was trained in European philosophy was introduced to the philosophies of Berkeley, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Fichte, Hegel, Aristotle, and Plato among others. He was also introduced to the philosophical methods and theological views of his MA supervisor and most influential non-Indian mentor, Professor A.G. Hogg."

"Between 1914 and 1920, he continued to publish. He authored eighteen articles, ten of which were published in prominent Western journals such as The International Journal of Ethics, The Monist, and Mind. Throughout these articles, he took it upon himself to refine and expand upon his interpretation of Hinduism."

"[He] was no longer content simply to define and defend Vedanta. Instead, he sought to confront directly not only Vedanta’s Western competitors, but what he saw as the Western philosophical enterprise and the Western ethos in general."

"Tagore was his most influential Indian mentor. Tagore’s poetry and prose resonated with him. He appreciated Tagore’s emphasis on aesthetics as well as his appeal to intuition. From 1914 on, both of these notions — aesthetics and intuition — begin to find their place in his own interpretations of experience, the epistemological category for his philosophical and religious proclivities...he would repeatedly appeal to Tagore’s writing to support his own philosophical ideals."

"He was for the first time out of his South Indian element — geographically, culturally, and linguistically when he took up the Calcutta and the George V Chair (1921-1931) in Philosophy at Calcutta University."

"Throughout the 1920s, his reputation as a scholar continued to grow both in India and abroad. He was invited to Oxford to give the 1926 Upton Lectures, published in 1927 as "The Hindu View of Life", and in 1929 he delivered the Hibbert Lectures, later published under the title "An Idealist View of Life". His most sustained, non-commentarial work, "An Idealist View of Life", is frequently seen as a mature work and has undoubtedly received the bulk of scholarly attention to him."

"In his mind, he had identified the “religious” problem, reviewed the alternatives, and posited a solution - An unreflective dogmatism could not be remedied by escaping from “experiential religion” which is the true basis of all religions."

"While Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) as he defined it best exemplified his position, he claimed that the genuine philosophical, theological, and literary traditions in India and the West supported his position."

"[He] was knighted in 1931, the same year he took up his administrative post as Vice Chancellor at the newly founded, Andhra University at Waltair, served there for five years as Vice Chancellor. In 1936, not only did the university in Calcutta affirm his position in perpetuity but Oxford University appointed him to the H.N. Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics. In late 1939, he took up his second Vice Chancellorship at Benares Hindu University (BHU), and served there during the course of the second world war until mid-January 1948, two weeks before Gandhi’s assassination in New Delhi."

"During the 1930s and 1940s the issues of education and nationalism came together for him, and his vision was of an autonomous India. He envisioned an India built and guided by those who were truly educated, by those who had a personal vision of and commitment to raising Indian self-consciousness."

"He was appointed by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as Indian Ambassador to Moscow, a post he held until 1952. It provided him the opportunity to put into practice his own philosophical-political ideals came with his election to the Raja Sabha, in which he served as India’s Vice-President (1952-1962) and later as President (1962-1967)."

"As an Advaitin, he embraced a metaphysical idealism. But his idealism was such that it recognized the reality and diversity of the world of experience (prakṛti) while at the same time preserving the notion of a wholly transcendent Absolute (Brahman), an Absolute that is identical to the self (Atman). While the world of experience and of everyday things is certainly not ultimate reality as it is subject to change and is characterized by finitude and multiplicity, it nonetheless has its origin and support in the Absolute (Brahman) which is free from all limits, diversity, and distinctions (nirguna). Brahman is the source of the world and its manifestations, but these modes do not affect the integrity of Brahman."

"The success of art is measured by the extent to which it is able to render experiences of one dimension into terms of another. Art born out of a creative contemplation which is a process of travail of the spirit is an authentic crystallization of a life process. Its ultimate and in its essence, the poetical character is derived from the creative intuition (that is, integral intuition) which holds sound, suggestion and sense in organic solution."

"We can see objects without the medium of the senses and discern relations spontaneously without building them up laboriously. In other words, we can discern every kind of reality directly."

"All art is the expression of experience in some medium."

"Psychic experiences are a state of consciousness beyond the understanding of the normal, and the supernormal is traced to the supernatural."

"Creative insight is not the final link in a chain of reasoning. If it were that, it would not strike us as inspired in its origin. Intuition is not the end, but part of an ever-developing and ever-dynamic process of realization. There is continual system of “checks and balances” between intuition and the logical method of discursive reasoning. Cognitive intuitions are not substitutes for thought, they are challenges to intelligence. Mere intuitions are blind while intellectual work is empty. All processes are partly intuitive and partly intellectual. There is no gulf between the two."

"The presentation of facts in logical form contributes to a confusion between discovery and proof. If the process of discovery were mere synthesis, any mechanical manipulator of prior partial concepts would have reached the insight and it would not have taken a genius to arrive at it."

"Knowledge when acquired must be thrown into logical form and we are obliged to adopt the language of logic since only logic has a communicable language."

"The readjustment [of previously known facts] is so easy that when the insight is attained it escapes notice and we imagine that the process of discovery is only rational synthesis."

"The insight does not arise if we are not familiar with the facts of the case... The successful practice of intuition requires previous study and assimilation of a multitude of facts and laws. We may take it that great intuitions arise out of a matrix of rationality."

"The art of discovery is confused with the logic of proof and an artificial simplification of the deeper movements of thought results. We forget that we invent by intuition though we prove by logic."

"In any concrete act of thinking the mind’s active experience is both intuitive and intellectual."

"Logical knowledge is indirect and symbolic in its character. It helps us to handle and control the object and its workings."

"Intuitions are convictions arising out of a fullness of life in a spontaneous way, more akin to sense than to imagination or intellect and more inevitable than either."

"Intuition is a distinct form of experience. Intuition is of a self-certifying character (svatassiddha). It is sufficient and complete. It is self-established (svatasiddha), self-evidencing (svāsaṃvedya), and self-luminous (svayam-prakāsa). Intuition entails pure comprehension, entire significance, complete validity. It is both truth-filled and truth-bearing Intuition is its own cause and its own explanation. It is sovereign. Intuition is a positive feeling of calm and confidence, joy and strength. Intuition is profoundly satisfying . It is peace, power and joy."

"Wars of religion which are the outcome of fanaticism that prompts and justifies the extermination of aliens of different creeds were practically unknown in Hindu India."

"The intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. The worshippers of the one jealous God are egged on to aggressive wars against people of alien cults. They invoke divine sanction for the cruelties inflicted on the conquered. The spirit of old Israel is inherited by Christianity and Islam."

"The disciples surrounded with cheap marvels and wonders the lonely figure of that serene Soul, simple and austere in his yellow robes, walking with bared feet and bowed head towards Benares."