Ananda
K. Coomaraswamy, scholar/philosopher/art historian, had complete
mastery of dozens of languages, including ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit
and Pali, as well as expertise in arts produced by dozens of ancient
and medieval cultures and civilizations.
The way Coomarasawmy's
writing fluidly combines insights and quotes from such sources as the Rg
Veda and the Upanishads, Buddhist and Jain scriptures, Plato and
Aristotle, Eckhart and Ruysbroeck, to name several, is truly remarkable.
This volume of his writing edited by Roger Lipsey and published by Princeton University Press contains twenty-seven essays with titles such as The Vedanta and Western Tradition, Sri Ramakrishna and Religious Tolerance, Measures of Fire, The Tantric Doctrine of Divine Biunity and The Meaning of Death.. For the purposes of this review, I will focus on the following two essays:
Lila
- the Sanskrit word describing any kind of playing. The following is a
quote from this Coomaraswamy's essay: "Here we shall be chiefly
concerned with the reference of Lila to the divine manifestations and
activity thought of as a "sport", "playing," or "dalliance." . . . The
emphasis is, we realize, always upon the idea of a "pure" activity that
can properly be described as "playful" because the game is played, not
as "work" is ordinarily performed, with a view to secure some end
essential to the worker's well-being, but exuberantly; the worker works
for what he needs, the player plays because of what he is. The work is
laborious, the playing hard; the work exhausting, but the game is
recreation."
Reading Coomarasway's essay, we come to see how, in
many respects, this playing, this spiritually-infused way of living, is a
crystallization from the world's wisdom traditions. Indeed, the author
underscores how a spiritual playing is not uniquely Indian; rather,
Coomaraswamy includes quotes from Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart
and Jakob Böhm on spiritual playing as the highest form of living.
Keeping this idea of lila in mind, we now turn to Coomaraswamy's last essay in this collection, The Seventieth Birthday Address,
where he gives warm thanks to all of those individuals and
organizations who provided him generous support in his thirty plus years
as director of the Indian collections in the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston. He then goes on to say, "Looking at the works of art that are
considered worthy of preservation in our museums, and that were once the
common objects of the market place, I could not but realize that a
society can only be considered truly civilized when it is possible for
every man to earn his living by the very work he would rather be doing
than anything else in the world - a condition that has only been
attained in social orders integrated on the basis of vocation,
svadharma." Thus we have Coomaraswamy's severe assessment of modern
civilization: an entire world society where the vast percentage of the
population is forced to work as joyless drudges, employed in jobs that
are tedious, frustrating, grueling and spiritually vapid.
Coomaraswamy
ends his address by emphasizing that he has never created his own
philosophy or desired to establish a new school of thought; rather, he
has always sought to understand what has been stated in such texts as
the Rg Veda, Upanishads ,The Bhagavad Gita, The Dhamapada, and by such
thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Plotinus and Meister Eckhart.
And what was Coomaraswamy planning when he retired from his professional
position as author/scholar/museum director? He said he would return
with his wife to India to seek more direct and all-encompassing
spiritual enlightenment beyond the sphere of the logical, rational and
scholarly.
What a man, what a life, and fortunately for us modern
readers, what a body of literature. I couldn't imagine a finer
collection of essays bringing together the treasures of the world's
wisdom traditions. Fiat Lux.
Ananda K Coomaraswamy, 1877-1947
Comments
Post a Comment