Mircea Eliade YOGA IMMORTALITY AND ... - Brihaspati.net

Director of the Sanskrit College, Calcutta and my teacher
Nae Ionescu,
University of Bucharest
PROLOGUE
The story of the discovery and interpretation of India for the European mind is really
exciting. Not-so we shall regret the discovery geogrdfico, linguistic and literary, or
shipments and searches, in a word, everything that constitutes the foundation of
Hinduism Europe, but mainly to cultural adven-tures caused by the increasing revelation
of the lan-guages, Indian myths and philosophies. Raymond Schwab, in his beautiful
book La Renaissance Orientale (Payot, 1948) has described a good number of these
cultural adventures. But the discovery of India prosi-gue, and nothing makes us think that
this brought to term, because a culture andlisis reveals fordnea primarily as bus-cdbamos
or what estdbamos prepared to discover. The Discovery of India habrd recently
completed when the creative forces of Europe are inevitably exhausted.
When it comes to spiritual values, the contribution of philology, however indispensable it
may be, does not exhaust the richness of the object. It would certainly have been
superfluous to want to understand the budis-mo while the texts were not edited correctly,
and how-do the various Buddhist philology were not formed yet. Ana-give that
comprehension of this vast and complex spiritual phenomenon was not infallibly secured
by these excellent instruments work are critical issues, multilingual dictionaries, the
historical monograph. Of abor-give an exotic spiritualism, especially man understands
what std predestined to understand their vocation, their own cultural orientation and the
orientation of the 'historical moment it belongs to. This truism is of general application;
The image we have created the "inferior societies" during the nineteenth century, largely
derived from the positivist attitude, anti-religious and a-metaphysics of some excellent
explorers and ethnologists, who treated "savages" with the ideology of a contempordneo
of Auguste Comte, Darwin or Herbert Spencer was found between
"primitives" in any aspect, "fetishism" and "childish" religious, simply because you could
not see anything else. It took the thrust of European metaphysical thought-border ate of
this century, the religious revival, the multiple procurement action of depth psychology,
poetry, the microphysics, in order to understand the spiritual horizon of the " primitiveing
"the structuring of its symbols, the function of its myths, its mystical maturity.
In the case of India, the difficulties were considerable mds even, on one hand, it was
necessary to forge the tools, advance the philology; on the other hand, selecting those
aspects of Indian spiritualism mds permeable to the European mentality. But, as
expected, what seemed mds-permeable was just mind what mds replied to the urgent
problems of European culture. The interest in comparative philology Aryan-Hindu, was
mainly forcing sdnscrito study by mid-nineteenth cen-tury, as well as one or two
generations atrds, India was seen "taking place under the impulse of philosophy idealistic
or through the charm of the primary imdgenes who had just returned to discover the
roman-ticismo alemdn. During the second half of last century, India was interpreted
primarily in terms of mythology naturist and cultural fashion that the latter had