How the Twain Shall Meet

...Yet it is understanding or the lack of it that will be the key to our survival or destruction in this century: "A war with modern weapons of mass destruction would mean general suicide if not the extinction of all life on earth...

...For it has long been conceded that, of all Jewish sects, the Essenes show the clearest resemblance in Palestine to the world-denying spirit of Indian religion...

...When passions run high, a rational fear of the consequences cannot be relied on to preserve peace...

...If we fail to get together, it is not due to lack of knowledge but to a faltering of morals, a failure of spirit...

...What is needed, says Radhakrishnan, is best expressed in the Greek word meta-noia, which means a change of consciousness, an inner evolution, a higher level of understanding...

...For if, as these new discoveries indicate, Jesus was not a dissident Pharisee (as had been hitherto thought) but an Es-sene, then the argument for the possible Buddhist influence on the founder of Christianity is immeasurably strengthened...

...He looked upon the universe as closed and not infinite...

...Josephus is also the source of the very interesting story of the last stand of the Jews against the Romans at Massada in...

...Nineteenth-century notions of progress derived from the theories of Darwin (as well as the variant in the form of Marxist determinism) are inadequate...

...The great danger which the author discerns is what he calls aggressive nationalism...

...Even the ordinary newspaper reader might feel slighted to have such information given to him as if there was something revelatory about it...

...Peace is not the mere absence of war...

...History for him is the realm of the incalculable...

...He cites with pride the well-known fact that the spread of Buddhism was not accompanied by the spilling of "a drop of blood...

...He tells us there that "Einstein, who just passed away, changed our thinking about the world...

...I have myself spoken in Hindu temples, Jewish synagogues, Buddhist monasteries, Christian churches and Moslem mosques without any compromise of my intellectual conscience or injury to the religious tradition of India...

...But there are, fortunately, better things than this in the book...

...it is always ambiguous...

...The Indians knew the Jews as Kalamis, the people of the law...

...The author misses an excellent opportunity to buttress this side of his argument with the evidence that is implied by the Dead Sea Scrolls...

...When our consciousness is raised above the normal, when meta-noia occurs, we apprehend the unknowable and experience a joy so extreme that no language is adequate to describe the ravishment of soul, when it meets in its own depths the ground of its own life and of all reality...

...The conclusion toward which Radhakrishnan directs his thought is certainly hopeful: "We are living at the dawn of a new era of universal humanity...

...There is a thrill of hope, a flutter of expectation as when the first glimmer of dawn awakens the earth...

...Left out completely is the speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1947 which popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain...

...The audience which heard these things was not composed of school children but of university students and philosophers...

...The author suffers the consequences of the survey method...

...The author's memory seems to be selective at some points...

...Its author, the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, has had an academic career ranging from Oxford University to the Hindu University at Benares...

...It has no simple meaning...

...Being an Indian, he can hardly reject nationalism itself...

...What might save the world, according to this view, is a religious awakening...

...Some Greeks even believed that the Jews were descended from the Hindus...

...His theory of relativity helped nuclear fission...

...He held that matter and energy were different manifestations of the same thing...

...In this context, he makes a plea for the immediate relevance to our situation of "the Eastern religions [where] the fulfillment of man's life is an experience in which every aspect of his being is raised to its highest extent...

...How this idyllic picture can be made to square, however, with the serious clashes occasioned by religious differences in India in the past generation is not altogether clear...

...Brandeis University "There are no fundamental distinctions between the East and the West"—that is the keynote of this book, composed of the Beatty Memorial Lectures delivered at McGill University in 1955...

...The material of these lectures is not always on the same level, however...

...We need not merely a closer contact between East and West, but a closer union, a meeting of minds and a union of hearts...

...In the course of this disquisition on what used to be called Universal History, the author's learning turns up many things which are fresh to the general reader...

...What we have in these lectures might perhaps be called a reverie upon human history...

...How superficial such a bird's-eye view of vast areas of human experience can get is illustrated by the close of his three-and-a-half-page description of science from the earliest times to the present...

...It is the aggressive variant that he fears...

...Distinctions of a physical character diminish in importance as the understanding of the significance of the inner life of man increases...

...That the man who produced these lectures (to say nothing of the books which entitled him to deliver them in the first place) should occupy a high position in the political hierarchy of his country is something which we in the "West" must find sufficiently astonishing...

...The burden of the past is heavy on the mind of the world...

...While some of it is new, provocative, stimulating, much seems worn and unilluminating...

...Thus Churchill is twice quoted as very much in favor of coexistence with Russia—once in 1944, and again in 1954...

...Josephus, it seems, cited a pupil of Aristotle who quoted his master's belief that "the Jews are descended from Indian philosophers...

...it is the development of a strong fellow-feeling, an honest appreciation of other people's ideas and values...

...India is the one country where we find temples, churches and mosques in peaceful co-existence...

...which the leader Eleazor, in his final speech to the besieged garrison, cited the example of the Indian philosophers' contempt for life to encourage them to the self-immolation which he was proposing...

...India, as Radhakrishnan pictures it, is a land of almost ideal tolerance of differences...

...Worse than that, they are misleading, ultimately pessimistic, because they demote man and make his destiny something independent of his will or understanding...

...For example, how many people know anything about the surmised relations of the Indians and the Jews...

...Radhakrishnan produces striking parallels not only between Christian parables and Buddhist ones (that has been clone before) but also one I had never seen between a story told of King Solomon and one told of the Buddha, in which it is unclear who exactly is indebted to whom...

...For Radhakrishnan, there is nothing necessary about the way in which this history has developed...

...At present, he is Vice President of India...