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.

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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.

Can anyone conceive of a more pitiful failure, from the moral point of view, of courage, and from the biological of vitality? Where would a man stand in regard to faith and effort once he allowed himself to be intimidated by the commonplace lot of all flesh?

However, the connexion between this failure of  the Hindus and their philosophies need not be established only by interference from legend. It is laid bare in so many words in all the texts. Our metaphysical systems were not enacted for their own sake, but for a practical end.

‘Jagad’eva dutikha-pamka-mmagnam’-uddidhirsuh par- ama-karuniko munik anviksikim praninaya.

Seeing the world sunk in the mire of sorrow, the most compassionate sage composed his philosophy in order to rescue it.’ ‚So declared a commentator on the Vaiseshik or atomic system of Hindu philosophy.

Even more emphatic and direct is the declaration of Samkhya, which to my thinking is the most typical system of Hindu philosophy. The very first couplet of the earliest extant text of this school says that philosophical inquiry arises from the impact of threefold sorrow, with prompts the effort to discover the means of ria of it. Equally unambiguous is the later aphorism: Now, I’m putting an end to three kinds of sorrow lies the goal of human effort. The rejection of the intellectual motivation could not be more uncompromising.

Suffering of the first kind, proceeding from the sea, is again of two sorts—bodily and mental, the first originating in the disturbances of wind, bile, and phlegm: and the second from the emotions, e.g. lust, anger, greed, delusion, fear, envy, or sadness. Suffering from these causes occurs within the personality, and therefore these are called sufferings due to the self.

Suffering from external sources is also of two kinds: that due to other living creatures or of inanimate things; and that which is caused by supernatural agencies. In order to leave no room for doubt as to the first external source, the following are specifically mentioned: thieves, enemies, lions, tigers, buffaloes, snakes, mosquitos, scorpions, crocodiles, trees, and stones. In the second source are placed spirits like yaks has, rakshasas, vinayakas, and planets, among the troubles inflicted by them are stormy rain, hail, heat, and cold.

But once it is admitted that Hindu philosophy is a philosophy of failure on the bodily plane, it must also be acknowledged that it has given to that failure a grandeur of expression which no mere failure could ever hope to have. There are few systems of philosophy and religion known to me which make the proclamation of universal and inescapable sorrow so resonant. Compared with it, vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas is a trifle didactic, despite the ring; and Job’s lament is personal, in spite of the passion which makes it infinitely greater art than any Conscious art. In these Hebrew texts sorrow remains on the earth, but in Hindu philosophy man’s suffering, arising not from his higher nature but only from his body, envelopes the whole cosmos. It is as if the dust of the Gangetic plain was rising to permeate the nebulae. Bodily suffering felt with this intensity naturally generated a passion commensurate with it.

It seems to me that the Western interpreters of Hindu philosophy, and more so their Indian imitators, have committed a great mistake and done harm by intellectualizing it too much. Much of the modern writing on the subject. Is just dry as dust, choking, and soul-stripped logic-chopping, which belabours the and until it feels sick of Hindu philosophy.

A little thinking will show why the passion had to come. The suffering of the Hindus in everyday life was so drab and even sordid, and again- it was so continuous and irritating that no man, if he knew he was condemned to live with it for ever, could hope to save himself from utter degradation except by raising the suffering to a level at which it could be borne without shame, and on which it would not be so cowardly, squalid, and repulsive as it was in life.

It was the perpetual sight of an oozing of uncleanliness into the consciousness, taken with the visible fact: of the proneness of all things to decompose in a tropical country, that created the characteristic Hindu concept of tamas, as the lowest of the grata or attributes. The word tamas literally means darkness, but in Hindu thought and feeling it stands really for a very comprehensive term for all kinds of squalor—material, biological, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. Suffering his tamas was the Hindu hubris.

Yet the Hindu Idealists saw that it was to this that their people were being driven by the relentless environment. They did not identify the power behind the degradation as Nature herself as she was in their country but even without discovering the cause they were sufficiently frightened by the effect, and realizing that total escape from physical and mental suffering was impossible, tried at least to redeem it—to take it from its Indian inferno a Hindu purgatory, where it could be chastened. They succeeded in that.

But the purgatory was also terrible. Dante’s is an idyll in comparisons The ways of deliverance recommended by the philosophers were more difficult to tread than even the via dolorosa of worldly existence, from which they sought to divert men. The tragedy of all the systems of Hindu philosophy is that they confront man with only one choice: Remain corruptible and corrupt flesh, or become incorruptible and incorrupt stone. The alternatives presented were both cruel, but in a country which was excruciatingly cruel, could there be any kind of life which was not so? The only improvement that could be brought about was that which lay between the cruelty of degradation, and the cruelty of ennoblement.

Thus there is nothing to be surprised at if Samkhya, which (let me repeat) is in my view the most typical of Hindu philosophies, is also the most cruel in the presentation of the alternatives. There is no end to the sorrow of hunger, it declares, for it is ever-recurring; there is no respite from bereavement, because after the death of one son another might the; does it appear to you that death will release you from sorrow for you will be reborn and come again into its grind mill; there is no hope in that salvation which is identified with absorption in the Absolute Brahma—none at all. because a drowned man may rise again. Where then is the end of suffering? The Answer of Samkhya is awful, when taken seriously. It lies in the total severance of the bond between Purusha and Prakriti—two highly technical terms which have, been elaborately explained, but which in sum are fairly simple notions. Prakriti is all – that a man can feel, yearn for, and even be; Purusha is an abulute which for all human purposes is annihilation, Nirvana or extinction. Even the Nyaya system defines salvation in such terms. It is, according to Nyaya, the sleep of the dreamless man who never wakes. What happiness!

No wonder then that the Vedantist who regarded the world as an illusion was himself held up to ridicule in Hindu society as an illusionist. To ordinary Hindus he and his fellow-philosophers appeared like men who were devoid of common sense, if not even sense. The philosophers were not credited even with being able to speak grammatical Sanskrit. The idea that the Hindus had great love and reference for philosophy and respect for philosophers is a figment of the European mind. What we respect are the Sadhus, possessors of occult power, not philosophers who professed to possess only knowledge, and that useless in our eyes.

Thus rejecting their own philosophies for two reasons —the intrinsic negation and the queerness of the philosophers, the Hindus in their suffering remained as unsupported in spirit as they were in the body. They lived on in pain but they never discovered that it sprang from their inability to accept their new home and their nostalgia for the old but forgotten home.

Zitate Chaudhuri