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ALL THE GODS WITHIN US
in the Bhagavad Gita and the sacraments of the Tántric "five good things” (pañcatattva), the secular initiate is inspired to a challenge and assimilation of the immanent aspect of absolute Being, which is no less audacious than the corresponding effort, in the penitential groves, to assimilate the transcendent.
The Brāhman mind, in other words, did not capitulate unconditionally to the principle of world-rejection. The psychophysical problems posed by the Vedic monist philosophy that matured during the period of the Upanişads are as open to world-assertive as to negating replies. The more ainply documented Indian philosophical tendency, and the one first encountered by the Western scholars, was that represented in the schools of the Vedānta and Hinayāna, but in recent years the power and profundity of the Tāntric system have begun to be appreciated, and therewith has been facilitated a new understanding of Indian life and art. Indeed, one could only have been amazed had it becn found that in the most durable civilization known to history the sole intellectual response to such a dictum as "All Is Brahman" had been that of a monastic renunciation of the manifest for the unmanifest aspect of the metaphysical equation. Had we not learned what we now know of the philosophy of the Tāntric Āgamas, we should have had to
traditi
tion; for as the Indian centuries open their secrets to us we become more and more aware of the power of something very different from the sublimated melancholy of the monks, in the life-loving Hindu contemplation of the delicacies of the world of name and form. In the majestic sculptural rendering of Siva Triniūrti at Elephanta," in the now well-known South-Indian bronzes of the Dancing siva,60 in the plantasınagoric "foam and mist” style of the great masterpieces of Bhājā,
pos
SOITIESUCILI DOIL
59 Cf. Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, pp. 148-151, and fig. 38. 60 Ib., pp. 151-175, and fig. 38.
597
