Nirad Chaudhuri  hat in seiner “Circe” eine Interpretation von Vedanta (resp. Advaita) gegeben, die allen europäischen Interpretationen seit Schopenhauer diametral oder schlimmer, völlig abseitig entgegensteht.

Er stellt die spirituelle Bedeutung der bei uns so hoch geschätzten indischen Philosophie seit den Veden für Indien selber in Frage, die anstelle der erhofften Erleuchtung, wie sie im Westen so sehr ersehnt wird, nur als Weg zur Auslöschung, ohne jede spirituelle Überhöhung, verstanden werden könne.

Im Folgenden eine Auswahl von Zitaten aus “The Continent of Circe”. Mehr dazu im verlinkten PDF.

Nothing, to my thinking, makes the movement of the Hindu mind from the bodily suffering to the pessimistic philosophies dearer than the story of Buddhism, the first philosophy of sorrow to appear in the existence of the Hindus. Siddharta, according to the well-known legend., went out on pleasure excursions, and one after another saw a man bent with age, another stricken by malady, and a third borne on a bier. These sight weighed on his mind as a terrible nightmare until, going out a fourth time, he saw a man with a shaven head, and wearing clothes dyed with red ochre, walking along calmly. He was so struck by the bearing and countenance of this man, that he went up to him and asked who and what he was. The man replied that he was a mendicant who had left the world and its ways, forsaken friends and home, and thus found deliverance. At last, Siddharta saw a way out of the fears which had haunted him in the previous weeks, and he also decided to leave the world.