Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines

indiscriminately. Without doubt, dictionaries and compilations have their relative utility, which we do not intend to dispute, and one cannot say that all this labor is spent in pure loss, especially if one considers that those who provide it would most often be incapable of producing anything else; but unfortunately, as soon as scholarship original: "érudition"; here meaning academic book-learning or the collection of facts without deeper insight. becomes a "specialty," it tends to be taken as an end in itself, instead of being a simple instrument as it normally should be. It is this encroachment of scholarship and its particular methods that constitutes a real danger, because it risks absorbing those who might perhaps be capable of engaging in another kind of work, and because the habit of these methods narrows the intellectual horizon of those who submit to them and imposes an irremediable distortion upon them.

Moreover, we have not yet said everything, and have not even touched upon the most serious side of the question: works of pure scholarship are, in the output of Orientalists Guénon uses this term to describe Western academics (philologists, historians) who study the East through a strictly European lens., the most cumbersome part, certainly, but not the most harmful; and, in saying that there was nothing else, we meant to imply nothing else that had any value, even of a restricted scope. Certain individuals, in Germany especially, have wanted to go further and—still by the same methods, which can yield nothing further here—have attempted to carry out the work of interpretation. In doing so, they bring to the task the entire set of preconceived ideas that constitutes their own mentality, with a manifest bias toward forcing the conceptions they deal with into the usual frameworks of European thought.

In short, the capital error of these Orientalists, the question of method aside, is to see everything from their Western point of view and through their own mentality, whereas the first condition for being able to correctly interpret any doctrine is naturally to make an effort to assimilate it and to place oneself, as much as possible, at the point of view of those who actually conceived it. We say as much as possible, for not everyone can succeed equally, but at least all can try; yet, far from this, the exclusivism of the Orientalists we are speaking of and their systematizing spirit original: "esprit de système"; referring to the tendency to force complex ideas into rigid, pre-defined academic categories. go so far as to lead them, by an incredible aberration, to believe themselves capable of understanding Eastern doctrines better than the Easterners themselves: a pretension that would be merely laughable if it were not joined with a determined will to "monopolize," in a sense, the studies in question. And, in fact, there are hardly any others concerned with them in Europe, besides these "specialists," except for a certain category of extravagant dreamers and bold charlatans Guénon likely refers here to the Theosophists and various occultist groups of the early 20th century, whom he viewed as misrepresenting Eastern thought as much as the academics did. who could be regarded as a negligible quantity if they did not also exert a deplorable influence in various