Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines

FOREWORD

Many difficulties stand in the way, in the West, of a serious and deep study of Eastern doctrines in general, and Hindu doctrines in particular; and the greatest obstacles in this regard are perhaps not those that may come from the people of the East themselves. Indeed, the first condition required for such a study—the most essential of all—is obviously to possess the necessary mindset to understand the doctrines in question; we mean to understand them truly and deeply. Yet, this is an aptitude which, except for very rare exceptions, is totally lacking in Westerners. On the other hand, this necessary condition could be regarded at the same time as sufficient; for when it is fulfilled, the people of the East have not the slightest reluctance to communicate their thought as completely as it is possible to do so.

If there is no other real obstacle than the one we have just indicated, why then have the "Orientalists"—that is, the Westerners who concern themselves with the things of the East—never overcome it? Guénon uses "Orientalist" specifically to refer to academic scholars (philologists, historians) of his era, whom he believed treated living traditions like dead museum specimens. And one could not be accused of exaggeration in asserting that they have indeed never overcome it, when one observes that they have only been able to produce simple works of erudition original: "érudition"; here meaning academic book-learning or the collection of facts without deeper insight., perhaps estimable from a specialized point of view, but without any interest for the understanding of the slightest true idea. This is because it is not enough to know a language grammatically, nor to be capable of making a correct word-for-word translation, to penetrate the spirit of that language and to assimilate the thought of those who speak and write it. One could even go further and say that the more a translation is scrupulously literal, the more it risks being inaccurate in reality and distorting the thought, because there is no true equivalence between the terms of two different languages, especially when these languages are very distant from one another—distant not so much philologically as by reason of the diversity of the conceptions of the peoples who employ them; and it is this latter element that no amount of academic scholarship will ever allow one to penetrate. For that, something other than a vain "textual criticism" original: "critique de textes"; the academic practice of analyzing the history and variations of a manuscript to determine its original form. extending as far as the eye can see on questions of detail is required; something other than the methods of grammarians and "literary men," and even other than a so-called "historical method" applied to everything