/lit/ - Literature

>the caste system is ba-

Is Ananda Coomaraswamy worth reading? Where do I start?

>>13544933
Sankaracarya’s dictum, ‘Verily, there is no other transmigrant but the Lord’ (satyam, nesvarad anyah samsari, BrSBh, 1.1.5) startling as it may appear to be at first sight, for it denies the reincarnation of individual essences, is amply supported by the older, and even the oldest texts, and is by no means an exclusively Indian doctrine. For it is not an individual soul that Plato means when he says: ‘The soul of man is immortal, and at one time comes to an end, which is called dying away, and at another is born again, but never perishes .. . and having been born many times has acquired the knowledge of all and everything’; or that Plotinus means when he says: There is really nothing strange in that reduction (of all selves) to One; though it may be asked, How can there be only One, the same in many, entering into all, but never itself divided up; or by Hermes who says that ‘He who does all these things is One, and speaks of Him as ‘bodiless and having many bodies, or rather present in all bodies’. The ‘Lord’ of whom Sarikaracarya speaks is, of course, the Supreme and Solar Self, Atman, Brahma, Indra, of all beings Overlord, of all beings King’, whose omniformity is timeless and whose omnipresence enables us to understand that He must be omniscient (sarvanubhuh, BUt II.5. 19, cf. IV.4.22 and SA, XIII); Death, the Person in the Sun, Indra and Breath of Life, ‘One as he is Person there, and many as he is in his children here’, and at whose departure ‘we’ die (SB, X.5.2.13, 16); the Solar Self of all that is in motion or at rest (RV, 1.115.1); our Immortal Self and Inner Controller ‘other than whom there is no seer, hearer, thinker or knower' (BU, III.7.23, III.8.11); the solar Indra of whom it is said that whoever speaks, hears, thinks, etc., does so by his ray (JUB, 1.28. 29); Brahma, of whom it is said that our powers ‘are merely the names of his acts’ (BU, 1.4.7, cf. 1.5.21); the Self, from whom all action stems (BU, 1.6.3; BG, 111.15); the Self that knows everything (MU, VL7). Whether as Surya, Savitr, Atman, Brahma, Agni, Prajapati, Indra, Vayu or madhyama Prana-yadrgeva dadrse tadrg ucyate (RV, V.44.6)6—this Lord, from within the heart here, is our mover, driver and actuator and whole source of the evanescent consciousness u that begins with our birth and ends with our death (MU, II.6d, III. 3).12 We do nothing of ourselves and are merely his vehicles, and instruments (as for Philo, passim). This ‘higher’ (para) Brahma is that ‘One, the Great Self, who takes up his stand in womb after womb .. .as the omniform Lord of the Breaths'.

>>13274988

The educated man of today is, moreover, completely out of touch with those European modes of thought and those intellectual aspects of the Christian doctrine which are nearest those of the Vedic traditions. A knowledge of modern Christianity will be of little use because the fundamental sentimentality of our times has diminished what was once an intellectual doctrine to a mere morality that can hardly be distinguished from a pragmatic humanism. A European can hardly be said to be adequately prepared for the study of the Vedanta unless he has acquired some knowledge and understanding of at least Plato, Philo, Hermes, Plotinus, the Gospels (especially John), Dionysius, and finally Eckhart who, with the possible exception of Dante, can be regarded from an Indian point of view as the greatest of all Europeans. The Vedanta is not a “philosophy” in the current sense of the word, but only as the word is used in the phrase Philosophia Perennis, and only if we have in mind the Hermetic “philosophy” or that “Wisdom” by whom Boethius was consoled. Modern philosophies are closed systems, employing the method of dialectics, and taking for granted that opposites are mutually exclusive. In modern philosophy things are either so or not so; in eternal philosophy this depends upon our point of view. Metaphysics is not a system, but a consistent doctrine; it is not merely concerned with conditioned and quantitative experience, but with universal possibility. It therefore considers possibilities that may be neither possibilities of manifestation nor in any sense formal, as well as ensembles of possibility that can be realized in a given world. The ultimate reality of metaphysics is a Supreme Identity in which the opposition of all contraries, even of being and not-being, is resolved

- A.K. Coomaraswamy

Where do I start with Coomaraswamy, is it important to start with his earlier works like Guénon? Also, to anyone who's read a lot of him what would you say is his best book?

traveling to india and china and want to read some of his art books. anyone know what's up with coomaraswamy?

In the wake of some recent threads on Traditionalism, I find passage very interesting:

" "Thus there are two aspects of the past that need to be considered if we would like to stay in a ‘tradition’. First, one should be aware of the complex interpersonal relations of people, present at different crucial moments when a tradition crystallises itself in something ‘new’ or changes direction. Second, one should keep in mind that in those cases a decision implies the will of the participants to take a ‘risk’. In the same way we are conveyed to take a risk when we decide to take our own stay in a tradition and push it in a new direction."

The word ‘risk’ is obviously important for Certeau. It becomes a keyword in the final part of this text and the ground for an apology of ‘heresy’. To be faithful to the past is grasping the aspect of risk that the preceding generations and the founding fathers have taken. We are deceived if we think that our task consists in a further elaboration or deployment of a momentum that starts in a certain point in history and has gone through various stages of elaboration. There is nothing Hegelian in Certeau’s thought. A living tradition does not consist in continuity. Being faithful to a tradition is to become a faithful ‘heretic’. A heretic is not someone who steps out of a tradition, but someone who takes the risk to make of a tradition something new. But in taking this risk, he or she should be aware of the way the past is still living in us. This is the necessary and true heretic dimension of dealing with the past. There exists however another form of heresy that Certeau condemns:

"the heresy of those believing that they can do without the past and do not question their roots." "

Source: Fragmented Christianity and Elusive Mystical Bodies. On Michel de Certeau

https://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/14432081/PVDM233DeCerteau.pdf


Opinions?