PREFACE

IN THE WEST a great many difficulties stand in the way of any attempt at a close and serious study of Eastern doctrines in general or of the Hindu doctrines in particular, and the greatest obstacles are perhaps not those which originate from the Easterners themselves. Clearly, the first condition for such a study, and the most necessary of all, is to possess the mental qualifications for understanding the doctrines in question, and by this we mean for understanding them truly and thoroughly; it is this aptitude which, with very few exceptions, is lacking among Westerners. On the other hand, the fulfillment of this one vital condition can be considered a sufficient qualification, because once it is recognized by Easterners they show no reluctance whatever in communicating their thoughts without reserve.

But if there is really no other serious obstacle to the study of the Eastern doctrines except the one we have just mentioned, how is it that orientalists, that is to say Westerners who devote themselves to the study of Eastern things, have never managed to overcome the difficulty? One could hardly be accused of exaggeration in maintaining that they never actually have overcome it, seeing that so far they have only succeeded in producing works of erudition, valuable perhaps from a certain point of view but nevertheless of no interest at all when it comes to the question of understanding even the most simple of true ideas. The fact is that a knowledge of grammar and an ability to make a word for word translation are not in themselves sufficient to enable a person to enter into the spirit of a language or to assimilate the thoughts of the people who read and write it. One might even go further and say that the more a translation is scrupulously literal the less likely it is to be faithful or to reveal the true nature of the original thought, because the correspondence between terms of expression belonging to two different languages is far from exact. Especially is this the case when those languages are widely separated, not merely from a philological standpoint, but also by reason of great diversity in the conceptions characteristic of the peoples speaking them; no amount of book-learning will be of any avail in bridging differences of this nature. For that purpose something more is wanted than a mere 'textual criticism' losing itself in an endless maze of detail, something more than the methods of grammarians and scholars, more even than the so-called 'historical method', indiscriminately applied, as it is apt to be, everywhere and to everything. No doubt, dictionaries and similar compilations have their relative uses, which no one wishes to dispute, nor can it be said that all such work is entirely thrown away, especially when one remembers that those who devote themselves to it are as often as not unsuited to other branches of study; unfortunately, however, as soon as erudition becomes a 'speciality' it tends to be regarded as an end in itself instead of a means to an end, as it normally should be. It is this invasion of the intellectual field by erudition with its special methods that constitutes a genuine danger, because it threatens to absorb the attention even of people who otherwise might perhaps have been capable of devoting themselves to work of another kind, and also because the habits that grow with the use of such methods narrow the intellectual horizon and cause irremediable harm to those who submit to them.

But this is not all, for we have not yet touched on the most serious side of the question. Among the many productions of the orientalists, works of pure erudition, although admittedly the most cumbrous, are not the most harmful; when we said that their studies amounted to no more than this, we meant nothing more of any value, even in a restricted sense. Certain people, however, have wished to go further by embarking upon the task of interpretation while still continuing to employ their usual methods, which have nothing at all to contribute in this sphere; at the same time they introduce all the preconceived notions which go to make up their own particular mentality, with the manifest intention of forcing the theories they are studying into the habitual framework of European thought. In short, questions of method apart, the cardinal error of these orientalists is to look at everything from their own Western standpoint and through their own mental prism, whereas the first condition for the correct interpretation of any doctrine is to make an effort to assimilate it by placing oneself as far as possible at the viewpoint of those who conceived it. We have said 'as far as possible' because everyone cannot be equally successful, though everyone can at least make the attempt; on the contrary, the exclusiveness of the orientalists we are referring to, and their predilection for 'systems', have the effect of making them believe, owing to some extraordinary aberration, that they are able to understand Eastern doctrines better than the Easterners themselves—a presumption that would be merely ridiculous, were it not also allied to a fixed determination to establish a kind of 'monopoly' over the studies in question. Actually, except for these specialists, there is hardly anybody in Europe who takes an interest in such matters, unless one includes a certain class of extravagant dreamers and enterprizing charlatans who could be treated as a negligible quantity if they did not also exercise a deplorable influence in more respects than one. We will go into this side of the subject in greater detail when its turn comes.

Confining our criticism for the moment to those among the orientalists who might be described as 'official', we wish by way of a preliminary observation to draw attention to one of the abuses that arises most frequently from the application of the 'historical method' already alluded to: this is the error that consists in studying the Eastern civilizations as one might study some civilization long since extinct. In the latter case it is clear that, for want of a better alternative, one is obliged to be content with approximate reconstructions of the past, without ever being sure of establishing an exact correspondence with what formerly existed, there being no way of obtaining direct proof. It is forgotten, however, that the Eastern civilizations, or those at least with which we are at present concerned, have continued to exist without interruption to the present day, and that they still possess their authorized representatives, whose advice is of incomparably greater value for the understanding of those civilizations than all the academic learning in the world; only, if the intention be to consult these people, one should not start out from the curious principle that one is oneself better informed as to the real meaning of their ideas than they are themselves.