Paperbacks on Asia

...In fact, in spite of the statement on its cover, her book was far less concerned with "the ancient traditions and modern ideas by which half the world's people live" than with an interpretation of the political and sociological conditions of those people...

...And then, hoping to review oriental ideas and bring my studies gracefully to a close by linking them to world thought, I read Vera Micheles Dean's The Nature of the Non-Western World (Mentor, $.50...

...Though no optimist (he felt that Western civilization had exhausted itself in its materialist pursuits and that the bankrupt East might, through Western education, become so Westernized as to destroy in a nightmare war both Eastern and Western civilization), Coomaraswamy hoped that India might revitalize her spiritual heritage and that the West might, through contact with Indian thought, learn humility...

...And, though she denies it, the book seems written very much from a Western point of view, a missionary point of view prepared to bring the benefits of Western culture to the backward peoples of the globe...

...After introductory chapters outlining the basic points of view common to all Indian Philosophy, Zimmer makes a systematic study of Jainism, which he considers the most ancient survival of a pre-Aryan culture, Sankhya, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Tantra...

...My reading started in the best possible way—with Lafcadio Hearn's Tales and Essays from Old Japan (Gateway, $1.25...

...This big (687 pp...

...And his re-telling of such legends as Urashima and the Daughter of the Dragon King in "The Dream of a Summer Day," or the tale of the widow who had become like a child in "The Nun of the Temple of Amida," have much grace and warmth...

...All of them place an emphasis on an inward vision...

...To round out my Indian education, I decided to read Ananda K. Coom-araswamy's The Dance of Shiva (Noonday, $1.45...

...Reading Philosophies of India (Meridian Books, $1.95) was something more like work...

...Zimmer's great achievement, it seems to me, is in making clear this transcendental core, this emphasis in Indian thought on contemplation as the ultimate road to spiritual fulfilment...

...The divine syllable OM, through the contemplation of which man can be lifted beyond the limits of flesh into the peace of the absolute, from the world to the void, echoes over and over through these texts...

...Shifting without warning from anecdote to parable to mystic, inclusive statement on the nature of all things, The Upanishads represent one of man's greatest efforts to transcend the limits of life itself...

...and very carefully documented study had evolved out of a set of lectures by the great Indologist Heinrich Zimmer who, at the time of his death, was preparing them for publication...

...Joseph Campbell, who completed Zimmer's unfinished chapters and who added supplementary critical notes, saw the book through the press in 1951...

...Paperbacks on Asia By John Unterecker Instructor in English, City College of New York Now that a great many publishers are slanting their paperback lists toward a college and university market, it becomes increasingly easy for the casual reader to fill in his own areas of ignorance...

...these works (a mixture of dialogue, statement, incantation, hymn and meditation) focus primarily on techniques for achieving that identification of the individual self with Brahman which is the goal of the Hindu saint...

...To my surprise, her version of Indian thought seemed astonishingly hazy...

...Hearn, who died in 1904, was remarkably sensitive to the spirit of the people with whom he spent the last fourteen years of his life...

...He also wrote beautiful prose...

...This month, for instance, I've read five paperbacks—at a total cost of $5.65—which, in one way or another, focused on the traditions and philosophy of India and the Far East...

...Dating from as early as 800 b.c...

...all of them seek this essential reality behind the creatures and objects of the physical world...

...The Upanishads (Mentor, $.50), Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester's translation of twelve of the principal texts, was therefore my next assignment...

...Now published in a very handsomely illustrated paperback edition, it should find the audience that it most certainly deserves...

...Taking as her province Russia, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, she attempts to evaluate each era's technological progress toward equality with the West...

...With only a little ingenuity, or with the help of New American Library's Good Reading (Mentor, $.50), a first-rate list of trustworthy books arranged by subject, he should be able inexpensively to construct a sound course of reading on almost any topic...

...In studying each of them in turn, I was more impressed by the links between them than by their differences...

...Coomaraswamy, who spent nearly half of his long life in the United States, was a passionate exponent of the Indian point of view...

...But, as Zimmer points out, these are not exclusive philosophies, radically different from one another...

...Though it is a hopeful book (readers of The New Leader may, for instance, find its treatment of the current crop of Soviet leaders almost breathtakingly generous), it is also one which—at times at least— replaces reality with what all of us wish reality might sometime be...

...Reading Hearn was pure delight...

...With Zimmer's book for background, one can move easily into a study of the Indian documents themselves...