Why has India lost her greatest light, Buddha’s path of redemption
1002 India lies between the Asiatic north and the Pacific south, between Tibet and Ceylon. India ends abruptly at the foothills of the Himalaya, and at Adam’s Bridge.
At one end, a Mongolian world begins, at the other, the “paradise” of a South Sea
island.
Ceylon is as strangely different from India as is Tibet.
Curiously enough, at either end one finds the “spoor of the elephant,” as the Pali Canon 2 calls the teaching of the Lord Buddha.
1003 Why has India lost her greatest light, Buddha’s path of redemption, that glorious synthesis of philosophy and opus divinum}
It is common knowledge that mankind can never remain on an apex of illumination and spiritual endeavour.
Buddha was an untimely intruder, upsetting the historical process, which afterwards got the better of him.
Indian religion is like a vimana, or pagoda.
The gods climb over one another like ants, from the elephants carved on the base to the abstract lotus which crowns the top of the building. In the long run, the gods become philosophical concepts.
Buddha, a spiritual pioneer for the whole world, said, and tried to make it true, that the enlightened man is even the teacher and redeemer of his gods (not their stupid denier, as Western “enlightenment” will have it).
This was obviously too much, because the Indian mind was not at all ready to integrate the gods to such an extent as to make them psychologically dependent upon man’s mental condition.
How Buddha himself could obtain such insight without losing himself in a complete mental inflation borders on a miracle. (But any genius is a miracle.)
the slow transformation of the gods into ideas.
The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs.
He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal.
Thus he says the wrong things at the right time.
Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history.
The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of
eternity.
Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing.
1005 The remote goal of the transformation process, however, is very much what Buddha intended.
But to get there is possible neither in one generation nor in ten.
It obviously takes much longer, thousands of years at all events, since the intended transformation cannot be realized without an enormous development of human consciousness.
It can only be “believed,” which is what Buddha’s, as well as Christ’s, followers obviously did, assuming—as “believers” always do—that belief is the whole thing.
Belief is a great thing, to be sure, but it is a substitute for a conscious reality which the Christians wisely relegate to a life in the hereafter.
This “hereafter” is really the intended future of mankind, anticipated by religious intuition.
1006 Buddha has disappeared from Indian life and religion more than we could ever imagine Christ disappearing in the aftermath of some future catastrophe to Christianity, more even than the Greco-Roman religions have disappeared from present-day Christianity.
India is not ungrateful to her master minds.
There is a considerable revival of interest in classical philosophy.
Universities like Calcutta and Benares have important philosophy departments.
Yet the main emphasis is laid on classical Hindu philosophy and its vast Sanskrit literature.
The Pali Canon is not precisely within their scope.
Buddha does not represent a proper philosophy. He challenges man!
This is not exactly what philosophy wants.
It, like any other science, needs a good deal of intellectual free play, undisturbed by moral and human entanglements.
But also, small and fragmentary people must be able to “do something about it” without getting fatally involved in big issues far beyond their powers of endurance and accomplishment.
This is on the right road after all, though it is indeed a longissima via.
The divine impatience of a genius may disturb or even upset the small man.
But after a few generations he will reassert himself by sheer force of numbers, and this too seems to be right.
1007 I am now going to say something which may offend my Indian friends, but actually no offence is intended.
I have, so it seems to me, observed the peculiar fact that an Indian, inasmuch as he is really Indian, does not think, at least not what we call “think.”
He rather perceives the thought. He resembles the primitive in this respect.
I do not say that he is primitive, but that the process of his thinking reminds me of the primitive way of thought-production.
The primitive’s reasoning is mainly an unconscious function, and he perceives its results.
We should expect such a peculiarity in any civilization which has enjoyed an almost unbroken continuity from primitive times.
1008 Our western evolution from a primitive level was suddenly interrupted by the invasion of a psychology and spirituality belonging to a much higher level of civilization.
Our case was not so bad as that of the Negroes or the Polynesians, who found
themselves suddenly confronted with the infinitely higher civilization of the white man, but in essence it was the same.
We were stopped in the midst of a still barbarous polytheism, which was eradicated or suppressed in the course of centuries and not so very long ago.
I suppose that this fact has given a peculiar twist to the Western mind.
Our mental existence was transformed into something which it had not yet reached and which it could not yet truly be.
And this could only be brought about by a dissociation between the conscious part of the mind and the unconscious.
It was a liberation of consciousness from the burden of irrationality and instinctive impulsiveness at the expense of the totality of the individual.
Man became split into a conscious and an unconscious personality.
The conscious personality could be domesticated, because it was separated from
the natural and primitive man.
Thus we became highly disciplined, organized, and rational on one side, but the other side remained a suppressed primitive, cut off from education and
civilization. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Civilization in Transition, Para 1002-1008
Carl Jung Civilization in Transition
