Heinrich Zimmer

"We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason, why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy and yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom."

"The whole edifice of Indian civilization is imbued with spiritual meaning."

"Finally, however, under the onslaught of Islam, from the eighth century to the tenth, both Buddhist and Manichaean as well as the Nestorian Christian culture and monuments of the region were destroyed.... In the north very little survives of the ancient edifices that were there prior to the Muslim conquest: only a few mutilated religious sites remain. It is clear from Indian literature that both temples and images must have existed in the second century BC and perhaps earlier. Very little architectural evidence remains, however, antedating the epoch of the Gupta dynasty (C. AD 320-650), for it was precisely in the Ganges Valley, the central and chief area of the Gupta empire, that the Muslim empire flourished a millennium later and most of the monuments above ground were destroyed by the sectarian zeal of Islam. The oldest stone ruins that have been found represent not the beginnings of a style, but fully developed forms... Since the earliest important body of Indian art surviving to us stems from the century of Asoka, it is predominantly Buddhist. During subsequent periods, however, Buddhist and Hindu (Brahmanical) themes alternate in rich profusion. The two traditions flourished side by side, even sharing colleges and monasteries, for nearly two millenniums, until about the height of the Muslim conquest (C. AD 1200), Buddhism disappeared from the land of its birth."

"When I was a student, the term "Indian philosophy: was usually regarded as self-contradictory, a contradictio in adjecto, comparable to such an absurdity as "wooden steel." "Indian philosophy" was something that simply did not exist."

"Hegel's argument—and it is still the argument of those who entertain the old reluctance to confer the title "philosopher" upon the immortal thinkers of India and China—is that something is missing from the Oriental systems. When they are compared with Western philosophy, as developed in antiquity and in modern times, what is obviously lacking is the ever-renewed, fructifying close contact with the progressive natural sciences—their improving critical methods and their increasingly secular, nontheological, practically anti-religious, outlook on man and the world. This is enough, we are asked to agree, to justify the Western restriction of the classic term."

"Hardly any other Indological book has had such a long life as a standard work on the early history of the Do-Aryan tribes who immigrated to India as Heinrich Zimmer's habilitation thesis "Altindiisches Leben", published in 1879. This presentation by the Berlin Indo-Europeanist and Celticist on the cultural conditions of the Indian Arya is based on a meticulous evaluation of the Rgveda. For almost a century it has retained this reputation to a certain extent up to the present day. It has produced a standard judgement that still lives on today in part in the work of Indologists and historians of India and whose basic statements have only been questioned to a limited extent - despite the much more differentiated view of the cultural milieu and religion of the Rgveda and of the migration problem associated with the question of the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans that archaeological and ethnoarchaeological research in South, Middle and Central Asia has brought about over the last sixty years."

"Given this appreciation of his person, it is understandable that the image of the Aryans that Zimmer created could become part of the overall national image of the ancestors of the Germans and as such was later received by those who derived the historical role of the Aryan race from the "oldest cultural conditions". Zimmer's reputation as an exact philologist also contributed to the fact that the correctness of this image was never doubted and the pattern of interpretation that gave rise to it was not generally questioned."

"Frits Staal... describes Heinrich Zimmer, an exponent of this ethnic division of Indian thought, as “the author of an original but one-sided description of Indian philosophies — based on an interpretation not free of racial prejudice: according to Zimmer, there is in Indian thought an opposition between the monist Vedanta philosophy which stems frorn the Vedic Aryans and the realistic dualism of Jainism and Buddhism which he links with the ‘original’ Dravidian India." He dismisses this as “romantic ideas not verified in reality”."