orientalists

"H. Kern in his book Over het woord Zarathushtra (1867) states, “the Bactrian (i.e. Avestan) is so (greatly) related to the Old- Indian language (Vedic), and in particular, that of the Vedas, that without exaggeration it can be called a dialect thereof.”"

"The Doctrine (“”Dhamma“”) allows one to attain a state in which suffering can no longer take root, because one embraces eternity. “”nibbàna“”, liberation, is nothing more than this imperishable state, removed from the becoming of things. (p. 27)"

"After all, “'nibbàna”' is not a concept: this is why attempts to illustrate it through language and logic lend themselves to various misunderstandings. Some Buddhists understand it literally: as a state of “extinction”, comparable to the extinguishing of a flame. Yet the Buddha often criticised proponents of the nihilistic interpretation: “nibbàna” should not be conceived as pure nothingness. [...] It does not designate the abyss of a void, nor a worldly dimension comparable to those that exist: it can simply be said that pain is definitively eliminated there. (pp. 72-73)"

"If the West’s roots lay in Griechentum, he wrote, “‘... [our western culture] has also been influenced and made fruitful by the Orient, in many and lasting ways, and that ought not to be forgotten or left unsaid. It was, precisely, German scholars whose hard work established these facts and contributed the foundations for a truly historical, and comprehensive, understanding of European cultural development.’"

"The entire work is a treatise on perception, on optimal cognitive modes that replace erroneous ones. (p. 55)"

"Patañjali, or whoever wrote on his behalf, seems to follow a “Kantian” line of thought: it is necessary to understand that knowledge is attributable to a subject; but this activity is not creative, and must take into account an objectively existing world. (pp. 10-11)"

"The right-thinking are irritated by the nonconformist's lack of predictability, even by his occasional failure to show himself as such."

"Yoga implies objectless subjectivism, calling into question the transpersonal components of being. The self, the centre of an identity that is not only ours, is naked. (p. 44)"

"If one wanted to summarise the essence of Buddhism in one sentence, it could only be this: everything that is transient is painful. In fact, after all, suffering (“”dukkha“”) is nothing more than transience. (p. 27)"

"The Master wanted to provoke our critical spirit so that, by studying his doctrine, we could probe ourselves. [...] In Great Vehicle Buddhism, the need for such an orientation was recognised. For example, an important passage from a collection of Ch'an, a school of Chinese Buddhism, points to the need to free oneself from attachment to the Dhamma as well. Until one forgets even the Dharma, one still cultivates a sense of self, that is, the illusion of constituting a separate individuality in relation to other creatures. One becomes attached to a vision, an opinion, and is incapable of uniting, in perfect compassion, with all beings. (p. 88)"

"It is also important to bear in mind that this present struggle, tremendous and unique as it may seem, is not the first of its kind, but is really nothing other than the present phase of a contest which has been going on between East and West for thousands of years. Action on the part of one side has always immediately called forth a reaction on the part of the other, and one may rightly doubt whether the Occident has always supplied the action, and the Orient the response, as is now the case, or whether the initiative has not rather changed from one side to the other in the course of history."

"The Buddha was a proponent of simple, direct teaching aimed at liberation and free of theoretical frills: his intent was purely pragmatic. His distrust of various speculative positions, which could be reduced to mere opinions, is well known. (p. 26)"

"[The Buddha] advised bhikkhus to be an island (“'dìpa”') or a refuge for themselves. After his passing, their only support or bulwark would be the Dhamma. His legitimate successors would ultimately be only those who had managed to take refuge in the Dhamma, that is, in themselves. (p. 75)"

"In Yoga there is a precise correspondence between theory and practice. This is far from the case with those European philosophers who admired India, such as Schopenhauer, who limited himself to ethical indications, while Yoga goes into the details of a method of the body and mind, of consciousness. (p. 17)"

"We console ourselves, for the most part, with the superiority of our cultivation, which we consider to be qualitatively ‘higher,’... One reveres the uniqueness of Greek Geist, but with closer contact with this Asian world one cannot help raising the suspicion that our feelings of superiority are built on the quicksand of ignorance."

"It was also religious need which in the educated circles of the West provided the most powerful impetus for the study of the Orient. The world of the West was captivated in its inner being by the information that it received through the Bible about the peoples of the Orient. But that which sufficed to please the taste did not satisfy the curiosity, which was afterward awakened. The Bible’s accounts of language, morals and religions of the Egyp- tians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Medes and Persians were too scant not to inspire the desire, in the era of the renascence of the sciences, for richer and more trust- worthy information about the lives of the peoples of the East. So arose, at first, in closest connection to the Biblical scholarship inspired by the Reformation, an oriental philology and archaeology. These [sciences] limited themselves for many centuries to the study of the language and religion of the Semitic people. But towards the end of the previous century the languages and literatures of the Sanskrit-Indians and the Zoroastrian Persians were redis- covered, and then arose, quickly and at the same time as the philological study of Semitic languages and religions, Sanskrit and Zend philology, to which soon too Egyptology and Sinology were added."

"... The Bible is the book through which the world of the West, even in times of the most melancholy isolation, remains persistently tied to the Orient. Even when one ignores its character as a sacred book of revelation, and examines it from a historical and geographical standpoint, the Bible can be seen as a world-historical book of wonders, as the book which ever again reawakens in the Aryans of the West, who have deserted their homeland, that longing for the Orient which binds peoples together..."

"But it was Sanskrit, not Hebrew, whose pure linguistic forms were lovingly cultivated by many of the late romantics, and it was the ethical wisdom of the Rig Veda, Hermann Brunnhofer claimed, which represented the ‘‘ethno-psychological foundation’”’ of the Germans, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Indians; “in reading the Vedas,” he wrote in 1893, “‘tat tvam asi, ‘that art thou’ resounds in our racial subconsciousness and fills us with pride. ...”"

"The longing for the Orient accompanies the Occidental from the cradle to the grave. When the young farmer’s wife of the Far West, deep in the most remote forest valley of the Rocky Mountains, holds her first-born child on her lap and imparts to him the elements of the Christian faith, she tells him about the shepherds of Bethlehem in the land of Judea, far, far on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. She tells him about the star, which the wise men from the land of Chaldaea followed, and then of the rivers of the Nile and the Euphrates, of Mount Ararat on which Noah’s ark came to rest after the Flood, of Mount Sinai from which Moses brought the earliest tables of the law to the people of Israel, of the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre and Sidon, of the world conquerors Cyrus of Persia and the Pharoah in Egypt-land."

"Peter von Bohlen claimed in 1835, the historian of the Orient must treat all people equally: ‘... he must learn to regard the wonders, which belong to the very spirit of the ancient legends, as an inviolable national inheritance, neither setting them aside by forced interpretations, nor proscribing them as the offspring of pure imagination or intentional deception, but simply endeavoring to discover the original nucleus of fact... .”” Moreover, he continued, the historical critic must strive, “unbiased by preconceived opinion, fully to understand and fairly to estimate the individual character of every people, according to their own standard of perfection, their peculiar turn of thought and their mode of action... .”"

"There is hardly a branch of theological science which has till quite recently been brought to so little certain and recognised results as the history of the Christian Liturgy. This arose in the main from the practical necessity that the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist in the representative continuance and application of the sacrifice of Christ, in opposition to the Protestant polemic, should be shown to be the primitive Christian form. But in a period of more than three centuries little more was done than to collect the material, which recently from their great numbers, critical inquiry rather tended to confuse than to enlighten."

"He was an enthusiastic student and one of the foremost Semitic scholars of modern times."

"What separates art from science? The gift; To it, proud knowledge must concede the crown. Scholarship certainly knows how something ought to be But it cannot create it — that you alone, art, can do."

"Wie aus Duft und Glanz gemischt Du mich schufst, dir dank ich's heut."

"What I offer here is not a translation; that would be superfluous. Rather, [I offer] an attempt to bring closer to us a beautiful foreign tale, through reworking it as German poetry ... I have attempted to reach this goal of nationalizing [the poem] by making the episodes stand alone, but also by dressing [them] in class-appropriate German costume, excluding everything foreign which is only understandable to us by learned means and is not immediately [understandable] through the feelings, while still retaining the local color, insofar as it does not destroy the poetic impression, but seems to strengthen it."

"Rückert today is largely forgotten and was, even in his day, an almost uncategorizable individual. Was he a poet or a scholar, a writer or a translator, a German nationalist or a universalist, a Christian or a pagan? He did, in fact, inhabit all of these identities, often simultaneously, and it would take at least one very fat book to do his intellectual career justice."

"O unbelievers, I will not worship that which ye worship, nor will ye worship that which I worship. ... Ye have your religion, and I my religion."

"God obligeth no man to more than he hath given him ability to perform."

"God loveth not the speaking ill of any one in public."

"O men, ... respect women who have borne you."

"Let not thy hand be tied up to thy neck, neither open it with an unbounded expansion, lest thou become worthy of reprehension, and be reduced to poverty."

"As for him who voluntarily performeth a good work, verily God is grateful and knowing."

"Of his mercy he hath made for you the night and the day, that ye may rest in the one, and may seek to obtain provision for yourself of his abundance, by your industry, in the other."

"Wheresoever ye be, death will overtake you, although ye be in lofty towers."

"Fight for the religion of God."

"If God should punish men according to what they deserve, he would not leave on the back of the earth so much as a beast."

"Woe be unto those who pray, and who are negligent at their prayer who play the hypocrites, and deny necessaries to the needy."

"Whosoever flieth from his country for the sake of God’s true religion, shall find in the earth many forced to do the same, and plenty of provisions."

"O true believers, take your necessary precautions against your enemies, and either go forth to war in separate parties, or go forth all together in a body."

"Your God is one God, there is no God but He, the most merciful."

"Turn, therefore, thy face towards the holy temple of Mecca, and wherever ye be, turn your faces towards that place."

"Wherever ye be, God will bring you all back at the resurrection."

"It is evident that the Chinese attitude of mind is undergoing a great change through contact with Western ideas and learning; what is less evident is that deeper layers of the nation have not been reached."

"To identify his (Zoroaster's) country, one has to take into account the importance they attach to cattle."

"Meantime they are more open to the reception of Christianity, the surest road to civilization, than any other section of the population. They would then prove the most assured supporters of the present state of things."

"He had to learn to sing, readily and accurately, all the tunes that were used in the many distinct Soma-sacrifices, and he had also to know which strophes were required for each sacrifice and in what order they were sung. Therefore, that the young priest might master all the tunes thoroughly and have any one at command at any moment, each was connected with a single stanza of the right metre, and the teacher made his pupils sing it over and over again, until tune and stanza were firmly imprinted, in indissoluble association, in the memory."

"The spruce beauty of the slender red line."

"Soon the men of the column began to see that though the scarlet line was slender, it was very rigid and exact."

"Martin Haug explained it, than to shifts in power balances such that resistance now seemed futile. But interestingly, Haug was willing to “unlearn much that he had learnt in Europe” and to accept ‘‘the fact that European scholarship must often stand corrected before Indian tradition....”"

"In the Vedas as well as in the older portions of the Zind-Avesta (see the Gathas), there are sufficient traces to be discovered that the Zoroastrian religion arose out of a vital struggle against a form which the Brahminical religion had assumed at a certain early period.‘ ... “These facts throw some light upon the age in which that great religious struggle took place, the consequence of which was the entire separation of the Ancient Iranians from the Brahmans and the foundation of the Zoroastrian religion. It must have occurred at the time when Indra was the chief god of the Brahmans."