Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta

General Observations on the Vedānta

Contrary to the opinions most commonly held among Orientalists, the Vedānta is neither a philosophy nor a religion, nor something partaking more or less of both. To consider this doctrine from such standpoints is a most serious error and condemns one in advance to understanding nothing of it; indeed, it betrays a complete unfamiliarity with the true nature of Eastern thought, whose modes are altogether different from those of Western thought and cannot be confined within the same frameworks. We have already explained in an earlier work that religion, if the word is to retain its proper meaning, is something wholly Western. The same term cannot be applied to Eastern doctrines without improperly extending its meaning to such a point that it becomes quite impossible to give it even a reasonably precise definition. Philosophy likewise represents an exclusively Western point of view, one far more external than the religious point of view and hence still farther removed from what is at issue here. As we said above, it is an essentially ‘profane’ kind of knowledge, even when it is not purely illusory; especially when we consider what philosophy is in modern times, we cannot help thinking that its absence from a civilization is nothing particularly regrettable. In a recent book, an Orientalist asserted that “philosophy is everywhere philosophy,” thereby opening the way to every sort of assimilation, including those against which he himself quite rightly protested elsewhere. What we dispute is precisely that philosophy exists everywhere; we refuse to take as “universal thought,” to use the same author’s expression, what is in reality only an extremely particular mode of thought. Another historian of Eastern doctrines, while acknowledging in principle the inadequacy and inaccuracy of the Western labels that people seek to impose on them, nevertheless declared that he saw no way of dispensing with those labels and used them as freely as any of his predecessors. This seemed to us all the more surprising because we ourselves have never felt the slightest need to resort to this philosophical terminology, which would still have the disadvantage of being rather forbidding and needlessly complicated even if it were not misapplied, as it always is in such cases. But we do not wish to enter here into the discussions to which all this might give rise; we wished only to show by these examples how difficult some find it to escape the ‘classical’ frameworks within which their Western education has enclosed their thought from the outset.