The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays

Each race contributes something essential to the world’s civilization in the course of its own self expression and self-realization The character built up m solving its own problems, m the expenence of its own misfortunes, is itself a gift which each offers to the world. The essentia! contnbution of India, then, IS simply her Indianness, her great humiliation would be to substitute or to have substituted for this own character (Jta bh&vd) a cosmopolitan \encer, for then indeed she must come before the w orld empty handed

If now we ask what is most distinctive in this essential contnbution, w e must first make it clear that there cannot be anj thing absolutely unique in the expenence of any race. Its peculiarities will be chiefly a matter of selection and emphasis, certainly not a difference m specific humani^ If we regard the world as a £amil> of nations, then we shall best understand the position of ilitdjr Jy recogTn2TTig“iirder*ilfcrcilAi7 vtihrmribrigert ii*‘is iltttT possesses the vinlity and enterpnse of jouth, but has passed through many expenences and solved many problems which \ounger races have hardly yet recognized The heart and essence of the Indian expenence is to be found m a constant intuition of the unit} of all life, and the instinctive and ineradicable conviction that the recognition of this um^ is the highest good and the uttermost freedom All that India can offer to the world proceeds from her philosophy This philosophy is not, indeed, unknown to others — it is equally the gospel of Jesus and of Blake, Lao Tze and Rumi — but nowhere else has it been made the essential basis of sociology and education