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BRAHMANISM
the traditional priestly view of the cosmos. Yet, as we have seen, they went beyond it without dissolving or even criticizing it; for the sphere in which they delved was not the same as that which the priests had monopolized. They turned their backs on the external universe-the realm interpreted in the myths and controlled by the complicated rituals of the sacrifice-because they were discovering something more interesting. They had found the interior world, the inward universe of man himself, and within that the mystery of the Self. This transported them far from the empire of the numerous anthropomorphic deities who were the vested governors of both the macrocosm and the sense functions of the microcosmic organism. The introverted Brahmanic philosophers were therefore spared that head-on collision with the priests and with the past which Democritus, Anaxagoras, and the other scientist-philosophers of Greece experienced when their scientific interpretations of the celestial bodies and other phenomena of the universe began to controvert the ideas held by the priests and supported by the gods. The sun could not be both a divine, anthropomorphic being named Helios and a glowing sphere of incandescent matter; one had to settle for one view or the other. When a philosopher's focus, on the other hand (as was the case in India), is on a mystery the counterpart of which in the established theology is but a metaphysical, anonymous conception, well above and beyond the anthropomorphized powers, and revered simply as the indescribable fountainhead of the cosmos (an ens entis with which the polytheistic, more concrete, popular ritual cannot be directly concerned), then there can be neither an occasion nor a possibility for any outright theological-philosophical collision.
The new direction of thought nevertheless brought about a really dangerous devaluation both of the ritualistic theology and of the visible universe with which that theology was concerned; for instead of devoting attention to the gods and the outer
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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 |