The Dance of Shiva · 11 of 14

Intellectual Fraternity

from the entanglement of good and evil. We read in the dramatic canon of Dhanamjaya, for example: “There is no theme, whether delightful or disgusting, cruel or gra- cious, high or low, obscure or plain, of fact or fancy, that may not be successfully employed to communicate aesthetic emotion.” We may also note the words of Chuang Tzu: “The mind of the sage being in repose, becomes the mirror of the Universe.” * and compare them with those of Whitman, who avows himself not the poet of goodness only, but also the poet of wickedness. It is sometimes feared that the detachment of the Asiatic vision tends towards inaction. If this be partly true at the present moment, it arises from the fullness of the Asiatic experience, which still contrasts so markedly with European youth. If the everlasting conflict between order and chaos is for the present typically European, it is because spiritual wars no less than physi- cal must be fought by those who are of military age. But the impetuosity of youth cannot completely compensate for the insight of age, and we must demand of a coming race that men should act with European energy, and think with Asiatic calm — the old ideal taught by Krishna upon the field of battle: “Indifferent to pleasure and pain, to gain and loss, to conquest and defeat, thus make ready for the fight. … As do the foolish, attached to works 1 so should the wise do, but without attachment, seeking to establish order in the world.” Europe, too, in violent reaction from the anarchy of laissez- faire, is conscious of a will to the establishment of order in the world. But European progress has long remained in doubt, because of its lack of orientation. It is significant that the discovery of Asia should coincide with the present hour of decision: for Asiatic thought again affirms the unity and inter- dependence of all life, at the moment when Europe begins to realize that the Fruit of Life is not easily attainable in a society based upon division. In honouring the genius of Shakespeare, then, we do not merely offer homage to the memory of individual, but are witnesses to the intellectual fraternity of mankind: and it is that fraternity which assures us of the possibility of coopera- tion in a common task, the creation of a social order founded on Union. COSMOPOLITAN VIEW OF NIETZSCHE Certainly, Nietzsche was not a philosopher in the strict sense of the word. He is essentially a poet and sociologist, and above all, a mystic. He stands in the direct line of European mysticism, and though less profound, speaks with the same voice as Blake and Whitman. These three might, indeed, be said to voice the religion of modern Europe — the religion of Idealistic Individual- ism. If it were realised that his originality does not consist in an incomprehensible and unnatural novelty, but in a poetic re- statement of a very old position, it might be less needful to waste our breath in the refutation of theses he never upheld. It is true that we find in his work a certain violence and exag- geration: but its very nature is that of passionate protest against unworthy values, Pharisaic virtue, and snobisme, and the fact that this protest was received with so much execration suggests that he may be a true prophet. The stone which the builders rejected: Blessed are ye when men shall revile you. Of special significance is the beautiful doctrine of the Superman — so like the Chinese concept of the Superior Man, and the Indian Mahd Purusha, Bo- dhisattva and Jivan-miikta. Amongst the chief marks of the mystic are a constant sense of the unity and interdependence of all life, and of the interpenetra- tion of the spiritual and material — opposed to Puritanism, which distinguishes the sacred from the secular. So too is the sense of being everywhere at home — unlike the religions of reward and punishment, which speak of a future paradise and hell, and attach an absolute and eternal value to good and evil. “All things,” he says, “are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured”: “I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of superearthly hopes” : “For me — how could there be an outside of me? There is no outside”: “Every moment beginneth existence, around every ‘Here’ rolleth the ball ‘There.’ The middle is everywhere” : “Becoming must appear justified at every instant . . . the present must not under any circum- stances be justified by a future, nor the past be justified for the

Insight

This short essay ends on the line that the discovery of Asia coincides with Europe’s present hour of decision, and that the new world will need men who act with European energy and think with Asiatic calm. The phrasing dates the essay perfectly. 1918 is the year the First World War ends. Coomaraswamy is writing into the catastrophe of European self-destruction and proposing that the East has resources Europe will need. The same diagnosis runs through Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918, the same year), through Tagore’s lectures on nationalism (1916-17), and would soon run through Carl Jung’s writings on the Eastern unconscious. What Coomaraswamy adds, and what would mature in his later work, is the claim that Europe’s recovery is not a matter of borrowing techniques from Asia but of remembering what Europe itself once knew before the modern period.