The Oriental Philosophy Approaches, Easily, Loftier
Themes Than The Modern Aspires To; And No Wonder If It Sometimes
Prattle About Them.
_It_ only assigns their due rank respectively
to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the
latter.
Western philosophers have not conceived of the
significance of Contemplation in their sense. Speaking of the
spiritual discipline to which the Brahmans subjected themselves,
and the wonderful power of abstraction to which they attained,
instances of which had come under his notice, Hastings says: -
"To those who have never been accustomed to the separation of
the mind from the notices of the senses, it may not be easy to
conceive by what means such a power is to be attained; since
even the most studious men of our hemisphere will find it
difficult so to restrain their attention, but that it will
wander to some object of present sense or recollection; and
even the buzzing of a fly will sometimes have the power to
disturb it. But if we are told that there have been men who
were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of
abstracted contemplation, begun in the earliest period of
youth, and continued in many to the maturity of age, each
adding some portion of knowledge to the store accumulated by
his predecessors; it is not assuming too much to conclude, that
as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, by exercise,
so in such an exercise it may in each have acquired the faculty
to which they aspired, and that their collective studies may
have led them to the discovery of new tracts and combinations
of sentiment, totally different from the doctrines with which
the learned of other nations are acquainted; doctrines which,
however speculative and subtle, still as they possess the
advantage of being derived from a source so free from every
adventitious mixture, may be equally founded in truth with the
most simple of our own."
"The forsaking of works" was taught by Kreeshna to the most
ancient of men, and handed down from age to age,
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