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THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUCCESS
the ingredients through his deeds and desires in former existences, and that now again he is preparing his own future.
The situation of the Hindu despot forsaken by Fortune (śrī), crushed by Fate (ilaivam), engulfed by Time (käla), is like that of Napoleon on the rocks at Saint Helena. And there is an apposite remark of the Little Corsican on destiny and fortunc, which voices an attitude strikingly similar to that of the Hindu. At the period of the climax of his rocketlike carcer, in 1810, when he was still on tolerable terms with Russia, there was held a congress of kings and princes in the heart of Germany, at Erfurt in the Duchy of Weimar, over which Napoleon presided. The glamour of the gathering was reflected in a remark that his master of ceremonies, the Count Ségur, one day used as an excuse for arriving late to a meeting of his emperor's privy council: he had had difficulties making his way through the antichamber, he declared, for it was so crowded with kings: "Il y avait tant de rois." At the conclusion of the congress, when Napoleon was departing from this spectacular pageant, his host, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, brave Charles Augustus, the friend and protector of Gocthe, was standing at the door of the imperial carriage to see the emperor away. And when the host wished good luck to his departing overlord, whom he heartily disliked, Napoleon, now inside the carriage, practically rebuked him for his levity by replying that in the career of a man of destiny, like himself, there was a time when nothing could stop his rise, but thien, unawares, there might come a turn when all was changed, whereupon a straw tossed by a child would suffice for his fall. This was a haughty rejection of the concept of an accidental, personal “luck” (the power of Fortuna, fortune, śri) for such men as he, and a cryptic pronouncement pointing to the vast impersonal destiny of the stars.10
10 This idea of the stars or "the star" that presides over the hero-career is one that has been common in the West since the Renaissance. The humanists of that progressive time revived Greco-Roman astrology for the sake of those freethinkers who had just discarded the authority of the
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| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |