Book Title: Philosophies of India
Author(s): Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd

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Page 417
________________ BRAHMANISM of course experienced the usual, long-tested good effects; nevertheless the real adventurers and heroes of the supreme enterprise of the human spirit would follow the direct, much more intense, rapid and dependablc, interior, psychological way of the new esoteric dispensation. The Supreme Being, according to the Hindu vicw, is not avid to draw every human creature into his supramundane sphere immediately, through enlightenment, nor even to broadcast to everyone identical and correct notions concerning the nature and function of his divinity. He is not a jealous God. On the contrary, he permits and takes benign delight in all the differing illusions that beset the beclouded mind of Homo sapiens. He welcomes and comprehends every kind of faith and creed. Though he is himself perfect love, and inclined to all of his devotees, no matter what their plane of understanding, he is also, and at the same time, supremely indifferent, absolutely unconcerned; for he is himself possessed of no ego. He is not of the wrathful nature of the Yahwch of the Old Testament. He makes no totalitarian claim, like the Allah of Mohanımed's coinage. Nor does he demand that sinsul mankind should be reconciled to him through such an extreme payment as the supreme sacrifice of the Redeemer-the God's own son, his alter ego, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who, becoming incarnate as the sole adequate victim, the scapegoat branded as a criminal, the Lamb that takes upon itsclf the sins of the world, relieves unclean mankind of its merited death by shedding his own precious blood, hanging on the cross as history's most conspicuous victim of judicial murder. “Whatsoever devotee seeks to worship whatsoever divine form (rūpa) with fervent faith, 1, verily, make that faith of his unwavering. He, united to that form by that faith, keeps it worshipfully in mind and thereby gains his desires-which, in reality, are satisfied by Me alone. Finite, however, is the fruit 396

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