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TUE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST
way. He landed hard and was a little huri, but more greatly shocked. Covered with dust, limping, bruised, and unsettled in his mind, he returned to the teacher and recounted his confusing experience. The guru listened serenely, and when the tale was told, simply replied, “Indeed, you are God. So is the cleplant. But why did you not listen to God's voice calling to you from the mahout, who is also God, to clear the way?”.
To some extent, real philosophical thinking must always be difficult to grasp in the whole range of its implications. Even though expressed with uller clarity and the most precise logical consistency, it yet remains elusive. If the words of Plato and Aristotle, for example, had been finally mastered by their interpreters during the centuries that have clapsed since their first inspired expression, they would certainly not be the vital topics of everrenewed, passionate debate and research that they remain to this very moment. A profound truth, even though comprehended by the most penetrating intellect and expressed in accurate terins, will be read in conflicting fashions during subsequent periods. Apparently assimilated and integrated, it will yet continue to be a source of new and startling discoveries for generations to come. Antiquity possessed the whole text of Heraclitus, not merely the few scanty fragments and stray references that have survived to us, and yet he was known even then as the "obscure one." He is nevertheless the first master in Western literature of the trenchant sentence and the succinct, crystal-clear aphorism.
It is said that Hegel, that most lofty and powerful of the Romantic philosophers-at once clear and cryptic, abstract and realistic-was being comforted by one of his pupils when he was lying on his deathbed in 1831, prematurely stricken by cholera. The comforter was one of his most intimate friends and distinguished followers; and he was seeking to reassure the master by telling him that, should he be taken away before completing his encyclopedic, gigantic work, there would remain his faithful pupils to carry on. Hegel, serene as the antarctic silence, on 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 |