Dr
ANANDA COOMARASWAMY:
THINKER
AND PHILOSOPHER
Eric
Gill, the reputed writer and critic, observed of Dr Ananda
Coomaraswamy: “Others have written about life and
religion and man’s work. Others have written good, clear English. Others have
had the gift of witty exposition. Others have understood the true significance
of erotic drawings and sculpture. Others have relationships of the true and the
good and the beautiful. Others have had apparently unlimited learning. Others
have lived. Others have been kind and generous. But I know of no one else in
whom all these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I can only say no
other writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and
piety, with such wisdom and understanding.”
It
is no exaggerated statement of Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy’s many-faceted genius. It is apparent that his
capacious mind should have had no difficulty in exploring the fundamental
truths of life, religion and art. His labours in everyone of the fields of intellectual study appear not to
have left him merely a scholar of indefatigable energies but a thinker of such
original power of penetration that the quintessence of his wisdom always
settled down in his evaluations of the theories of art and expositions of
precepts of religion. His language gained in its clarity and brevity with more
of his constant ruminations on the traditional concepts and his unsparing
vigils kept up in gathering genuine pieces of ancient art and with an equally
revived awareness of the philosophy behind such traditions. There is no
contamination of the pseudo in his
reasoning of the merits of ancient pictorial representations and sculpture.
Indeed, our debt to him will be more and more appreciated with the passage of
time when historians of religion and philosophy will turn to his writings for
‘source-material.’
If
in interpretation of the theories of Indian Art particularly he excelled others
in his understanding of its basic principles and deep philosophy, he had no
less travelled far in his approach of the problems in
culture and religion which had all along encouraged separatism and chauvinism
among peoples of the world. His knowledge of many languages such as Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Tamil, Persian, etc., had inured him against
any hasty or ill-considered criticisms of their merits. Owing to his
well-grounded linguistic acquisition he was able to study the scriptures in the
respective tongues without at the same time losing his individuality in
appraising thought encased in them. No doubt, his plea had always been to
insist on the need of efficiency in learning other languages in order to be
fair in assessment of the excellences and defects of other cultures than his
own. He said: “The time is fast coming when it will be as necessary for the man
who is to be called ‘educated’ to know either Arabic,
Sanskrit or Chinese, as it is now for him to read Latin, Greek or Hebrew. And
this above all, in the case of those who are to teach about other peoples.
Further, the existing translations are often in many ways inadequate...” Apart
from his zest for knowledge, any one can discern the earnestness of his to be
just and impartial in whatever he said.
It
is this trait in his character which could alone elevate everything else of his
achievements. Unless there is utter sincerity and rectitude of conduct in a
scholar, much of what has contributed to the furtherance of knowledge by his own researches may have little influence on others
working in the same field. There is a story in the Mahabharata
which illustrates the closest association of every other of man’s attributes
for recognition with ‘Seela’ or rightful conduct. Indra once begged of the great devotee, Prahlada,
to lend him Seela in his possession. When Prahlada acceded to his request, a huge form emanated from
his body and left him. Questioned as to what such a form signified, he answered
that it was that of Dharma and once Seela was
abandoned, naturally Dharma also
could hardly reside in him. The story emphasises the
fact of human failings easily enshrouding a person the moment good conduct or Seela was given the go-by.
It
is, therefore, a matter for no surprise that Dr Ananda
Coomaraswamy never ignored the claims of rectitude
and charity on his mental make-up. Though normally to a person of his birth of
a Ceylonese father and a British mother, it could have been doubted whether the
tensions and contrasts of such duality could have been to his advantage,
unusually in his casse, his personality developed,
profiting by both the influences of the East and the West. The happy result was
a capacity in him for interpretation of the East to the West and of the West to
the East.
Especially
in the matter of religion his approach brought him credit for a closer
perception of the one sustaining Truth behind all forms of worship. In a
pamphlet entitled ‘Path that Lead to the Same Summit’ he had occasion to
observe: “It is no longer only for the professed missionary that a study of
other religions than his own is required...If comparative religion is to be
taught, the teacher must surely have recognised that
his own religion is only one of those that are to be compared; he may not
expound any ‘pet theories’ of his own, but is to present the truth without
bias, to the extent that it lies in his own power. One cannot but ask whether
the Christian conviction is ineradicable that his is the only true faith, can
consistently permit himself to expound another religion, knowing that he cannot
do so honestly.1
In
the course of his elaboration of the thought, he had recourse to deal with the
problem of ‘tolerance’. He opined thus: “Tolerance then, is a merely negative
virtue, demanding no sacrifice of spiritual pride and involving no abrogation
of our sense of superiority.” In conclusion of the essay he said: “There are
many paths that lead to one and the same mount; these differences will be
apparent the lower down we are, but vanish at the peak; each will naturally
take the one that starts from the point at which he finds himself; he who goes
round about the mountain looking for another is not climbing. Never let us
approach another believer to ask him to become ‘one of Us,’
but approach him with respect as one who is already ‘one of His’ who is, and from whose invariable beauty all contingent
being depends”. 2
His
satisfactory explanation of Hinduism as more often misinterpreted and therefore
more exposed to criticism of an uninformed kind, will prove how much of sanity
and power of comprehension are needed to go to the root of any knowledge. Let
us hear him. His words at no time could be misunderstood. He viewed the whole
aspect of Hinduism with a conciseness which astounds the student of philosophy.
He said: “Very many misconceptions of Indian religion still persist, even in
scholarly circles. Hinduism, for example, is described as a
polytheism, but no more polytheistic than Christianity, in which
connection you may be surprised to learn that no less an authority than St.
Thomas Aquinas affirms that we cannot say the only God, for deity is common to
several.” And just as the Mohammedans have mistakenly regarded Christianity as
polytheism, so Christians have been mistaken in calling Hinduism as polytheism,
the fact being that neither Christianity nor Hinduism is polytheistic, though both
are polynominal; an infinity of designations of the
first principle being in fact inevitable, precisely because of its infinite
variety and omni-modality when regarded from our point of view, however
perfectly simple and one and the same it may be in itself.
“In
the same way Hinduism had often been called a pantheistic faith; pantheism
being the doctrine that everything is God, and God identical with all things
and not at the same time infinitely more than all things. In fact, however,
this doctrine is consistently and emphatically repudiated in Hinduism by
repeated affirmations both of immanence and of transcendence, and by a repeated
distinction of the ‘finite’ and unintelligible aspects of deity.
“There
can be no question but that from Hindu point of view man’s last end and
beatitude are only realised when he no longer knows
of any distinction between ‘himself’ and the spirit of God; just as, to employ
a simile common to Ruysbroeck and the Upanishads,
when rivers reach the sea, their individuality is confused with that of the
sea, and we can only speak of the ‘sea’. 3
This
Advaitic concept necessarily looks somewhat laboured, but remains the only natural understanding of the
goal of all man’s striving for liberation. Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy could not remain satisfied with only this
much, but should lead on to the further point that man’s last end cannot imply
only such doctrine as that the finite and variable individuality of man can
assume the infinite and immutable being of God. He would point to the truth
that “these two have never been divided, otherwise than in terms of the human
logic by which our own limited individualities are sustained; for the Spirit is
impartible”. 4
Religion
is not the only subject which attracted his attention. Vegetarianism equally
claimed his full probe and satisfactory explanation. Starting from the concept
of ‘ahimsa’ as the chief
governing principle for avoidance of animal food, he elaborated how originally
in Hinduism it grew, how later in Buddhism which was adopting as one of the Pancha Seela precepts,
the prohibition of taking of life. Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy could not refrain from referring to the
slaughter of animals that Buddhists avoid but the eating of meat that they
accept. He deplored much that in modern times the practice of eating flesh has
greatly increased in
Everything
of Western origin got copied by most of the Eastern countries and he could not
resist exclaiming in dissatisfaction that; “the strange thing is that it seems
to be impossible to change or ‘progress’ for Indians without throwing
everything of the past, good and bad together, and taking to the outer life of
a European in its place, also good and bad together.” He strongly felt that,
“if they could keep the many excellent features of their own culture and
civilization and profit only by adopting a few new ideas from the culture and
civilization of others, they might make real progress instead of progressing,
as so often happens, backwards.
Some
of our modern notions such as ‘mass literacy’ came in for criticism at his
hands. He felt that in “our blind faith in literacy it not only obscured for us
the significance of other skills, so that we care not for what subhuman
conditions a man may have to earn his living, if only he can read, no matter
what, in his hours of leisure.” He further added that perhaps the clearest
result of modern literacy has been to maintain and enlarge the gulf between
learning and wisdom. 6
Finding
refinement among the sophisticated members of our society descending to a
slothful indulgence in fanciful objects of pleasure, he could vehemently
proclaim: “We have gone so far as to as to divorce work from culture and to
think of culture as something to be gained in hours of leisure; but there can
only be hot hours and unreal culture when work itself is not its means; if
culture does not show itself in all we make, we are not cultured.
On
one fundamental point in appreciation of art he did not fail to warn people
against their indifferent observation of anything of value with a contempt born
of physical enjoyment alone as the sine
qua non of art contemplation. He gave a timely warning to people when he
said: “Art is intellectual, not a physical virtue; beauty has to do with knowledge and goodness of which it is
precisely the attractive aspect: and since it is by beauty we are attracted to
a work, its beauty is evidently a means to an end and not itself the end of
art; the purpose of art is always one of effective communication.”
Pages and pages of his profound utterances
concerning art and life one can go on multiplying, but that if said would
require no more elucidation of his great inner urge as a thinker and
philosopher is what he himself mentioned at, perhaps, the last of his public
appearances, namely, the Boston dinner on the eve of India’s independence on
the 15th of August, 1947, thus: “I ask of you to say ‘good-bye’–equally in the
etymological sense of the word and in that Sanskrit ‘Svaga’–a
salutation, that expresses the wish: ‘May you come into your own,’ that is, may
I know and become what I am no longer this man, so and so, but the Self that is
also the Being of all beings, myself and yourself.”
1 Paths that Lead to the Same
2 Ibid.
3 Paths
that Lead to the Same Summit.
4 Ibid.
5 Vegetarianism
in Ceylon.
6 Bugbear
of Literacy.