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

View full book text
Previous | Next

Page 625
________________ TANTRA female conceives by the male and transforms his seed into their common offspring, a new formation of their substance. Such is the miracle of the enigma, Māyā-Sakti. Hers, therefore, is an erotic life-philosophy, precisely the opposite and exact compliment of the sterilizing, stern, sublime, ascetic thinking of the Jaina-Sārkhya schools. The concern of the latter is to divide, to cleanse of each other, and finally to separate forever, the life-principle, which is incorporeal, and the principle of both gross and subtle matter, which is lise-conditioning, life-staining and -obscuring. In the long course of Indian thought, this stern ascetic attitude has been able to celebrate its moments of victory, and these monicnts have contributed immeasurably to the recoloring and renovation of Indian lifc. But that life itself, in accordance with its own innate dialectic principle of transformation, has then inevitably brought to pass a new miracle of absorption, assimilation, and rcstatement: time and time again, great, vigorous, tropical India has adopted the sublime way of sterilization, the way supremely represented in the teachings of the Buddha and in Sankara’s Vedānta; but always the power and wisdom of the erotic-paradoxical monism of life-and of the Brāhman understanding-has again successfully reasserted its force. Brahman, śakti, the force-substance of Indian nondual philosophy, is the principle that enters, pervades, and animates the panorama and evolutions of nature, but as the same time is the animated and pervaded, entered field or matter of nature itself (praksti, natura naturans); thus it both inhabits and is the manifested universe and all its forms. As the unceasing dynamism of the transitory sphere of becoming and withering away, it lives in all the changes of birth, growth, and dissolution. But, simultaneously, it is remote from this sphere of change; for in its quiescent, dormant, transcendent aspect it knows no phases and is detached from both the living and the dead. The names ascribed to it are concessions to the human mind. This 600

Loading...

Page Navigation
1 ... 623 624 625 626 627 628 629 630 631 632 633 634 635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676 677 678 679 680 681 682 683 684 685 686 687 688 689 690 691 692 693 694 695 696 697 698 699 700 701 702 703 704 705 706 707 708 709