The Dance of Shiva- Fourteen Indian Essays

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number of us in Europe for whom European no longer suffices-dissatisfied children of the spirit of the West, who feel ourselves cramped in our old abode, and civilisation who, without depreciating the subtlety, the brilliance, the heroic energy of a philosophy which conquered and ruled the world for more than two thousand years, nevertheless have had to confess its insufficiencies and its limited arrogance. We few look towards Asia!

Asia, the great land of which Europe is but a peninsula, the advance guard of the army, the prow of the heavy ship, laden with a thousand wisdoms... from her have always come to us our gods and our ideas. But, in the course of the many circuits made by our peoples who followed the track of the sun, losing contact with our native East, we have deformed, for our own ends of violent and limited action, the universality of her great thoughts.

And now the Western races find themselves trapped deep in a blind alley, and are savagely crushing each other out of existence. Let us snatch our souls from the bloody rout! Let strive to win back to the great crossways whence flow out to the four points of the sky streams of human genius. Let us climb back to the high plains of Asial.

It is true that Europe has never scorned the roads of Asia when the business in hand was pillage or extortion, or exploitation of the material riches of her countries under the banner of Christ or of Civilisation. But what benefit has she drawn from Asia's spiritual wealth? That has lain buried in collections and in archaeological museums. A few brilliant tourists, members of Academies, have nibbled at its crumbs, but the spiritual life of Europe has derived no benefit from it. Who, amid the disorder in which the chaotic conscience of the West is struggling, has sought whether the forty-century? Old civilisations of India and China had not answers to offer to our grief, models, it may be, for our aspirations? The Germans, with their more exacting and unhappy vitality, have been the first to ask of Asia that food which their starved spirit can no longer find in Europe; and the disasters of these last years have precipitated this moral evolution, arising out of the disillusionment of political action and the exaltation of the interior life. A few noble pioneers, like Count Kayserling, have popularised the wisdom of Asia. And certain of Germany's purest poets, as Hermann Hesse, have so far fallen under the spell of Eastern thought as to subside into silence among the souls of the artist-sages of the Celestial Empire.

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