Paul Deussen

"Whatever may be the discoveries of the scientific mind, none can dispute the eternal truths propounded by the Upanishads. Though they may appear as riddles, the key to solving them lies in our heart and if one were to approach them with an open mind one could secure the treasure as did the Rishis of ancient times."

"The Upanishads have tackled every fundamental problem of life. They have given us an intimate account of reality." ...."On the tree of wisdom there is no fairer flower than the Upanishads, and no finer fruit than the Vedanta philosophy,'... 'The system of Vedanta, as founded on the Upanishads and Vedanta Sutras and accompanied by Shankara's commentary on them---equal in rank to Plato and Kant---is one of the most valuable products of the genius of mankind in his researches of the eternal truth.'"

"[T]he study of Schopenhauer, combined with the reading of the New Testament, shaped itself inside my mind into a harmonic whole, which united the most powerful claims of science with the equally imperative needs of the religious mentality in a completely satisfy- ing way. Schopenhauer’s name was always on my lips; I plagued people [ hardly knew with it; the whole day, in so far as it belonged to me, I devoted myself to his ideas and at night, they followed me into my dreams. .. ."

"Moreover, the autonomy and differentness of Indian thought could have a very healthy impact on Europeans, ‘“‘who have been born and bred on classical antiquity and the Bible”; the encounter, he believed would result not in ‘“‘a superficia] transformation, but one that stirs the [western tradi- tion’s] very depths.” Those who had met Indian thinkers personally, he continued, could appreciate their profundity and breadth of knowledge, while also seeing the one-sidedness in them that they do not perceive. ‘“Who knows,” he continued, “‘if a similar sort of one-sidedness and narrowness also inheres in us, and in all of the traditional conceptions, in which we were raised, and if we might not learn just as much from the Indians as they can from us, if perhaps in a different way?’’4°"

"In the universa] quest for knowledge, recent European “‘progress” in the natural sciences did not matter, for the ancients— Indians and Europeans— already understood nine-tenths of Being; indeed, natural forces and human nature “were grasped in a more pristine and clear way by the ancient philosophers ‘who lived much nearer the gods’ ... than the later ones, that is, by [those] whose vision was not muddied by a jumble of traditions.”4*"

"This encounter laid the foundations for the medieval world, he wrote, one that represented a world-historical mixing of “rivers of two different kinds of water [the classical and the Semitic] ... but the union was an unnatural one and could not endure. The human spirit at the end of the medieval period awoke to consciousness of its own power and attempted to free itself from the fetters the Middle Ages had put on it. Modern philosophy [beginning with Kant] is this struggle for freedom.”’"

"The excellent textual critic [Kritiker] but philosophically less well-advised writer of the famous Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss, in the publication of his old age The Old Faith and the New, throws out the question: ‘‘Are we still Christians?” and answers it with a clear and decisive No. But he who is able to remove the philosophical kernel from the historical and therefore accidental shell, he who no longer holds to mere words and is able to recognize a thing when it appears under a different name and in new clothing, he will, even in the wake of all the achievements in historical research, natural science and philos- ophy answer Strauss’s question: Are we still Christians? With an equally clear and decisive Yes. For the essence of Christianity extends far wider than its name and consists in an idea, which is as eternal as the world and will never be extinguished: it is the Indian-Platonic- Christian idea, that our life on earth is not an end in itself... that indeed the highest task of life consists in ... separating ourselves from all inborn egotism ..."

"Deussen is certainly the freest among scholars in the expression of his opinion about the Vedanta. He never stops to think about the "What they would say" of the vast majority of scholars. We indeed require bold men in this world to tell us bold words about truth; and nowhere, is this more true now than in Europe where, through the fear of social opinion and such other causes, there has been enough in all conscience of the whitewashing and apologising attitude among scholars towards creeds and customs which, in all probability, not many among them really believe in. The greater is the glory, therefore, to Max Müller and to Deussen for their bold and open advocacy of truth!"

"If Max Müller is thus the old pioneer of the new movement, Deussen is certainly one of its younger advance-guard."

"But Paul Deussen — or as he prefers to be called in Sanskrit, Deva-Sena — and the veteran Max Müller have impressed me as being the truest friends of India and Indian thought. It will always be among the most pleasing episodes in my life — my first visit to this ardent Vedantist at Kiel, his gentle wife who travelled with him in India, and his little daughter, the darling of his heart — and our travelling together through Germany and Holland to London, and the pleasant meetings we had in and about London."