Typing this up in it’s entirety because it’s just that good. Daumal’s perspective on Buddhism here is not one commonly found nowadays. One must keep in mind that Daumal was a scholar of Sanskrit and the Vedas, and so would be more inclined to see Buddhism as a heresy, as I imagine it was seen by the Vedic sages. Daumal also discusses, and seems to agree with, Mrs. David-Neel’s take on the concept of “anatta” or “not self”, a topic of deep interest for me. I’m leaving this up for a few days, please do take the time to read it; and remember, this was written in France in 1936. Western spiritual seekers along Eastern routes, this is the history of your people; learn it well.
“This would only be another book on Buddhism if the author had not been a Buddhist, had not lived a great part of her life in Buddhist countries, and had not already published four or five animated books which this one completes and illuminates on her life in Tibet.”
“Thinking and living as a Buddhist does not deny a deep sense of Occidental culture and a very critical spirit. Mrs. David-Neel approaches Buddhism as a method, an art of living: true of all doctrines useful for deliverance – the rest is error or lost time. The Buddha said it in similar terms. Our century needs this shouted in its ears. It would be desirable to shout, loudly, another Buddhist rule: be your own lamp and disbelieve everything that you have not actually experienced; for our “science” applies this rule exclusively to a knowledge of external objects.”
“The Buddhist doctrines, with their common base and divergences, are elucidated by principles of superior utility and direct experience. Mrs. David-Neel shows this essential very clearly with a marked and justified preference for the oral doctrines of the “Great Vehicle,” which gives adaptations of the Buddhist teaching to the social and religious traditions of the northern Buddhist countries.”
“After reading the book, and reflecting on its contents, I realized that these great principles have nothing which is especially Buddhist; it is only our civilization that ignores them. Buddhism adopted them from the Hindu tradition, from which it later separated. Why don’t we, then, take them from the Brahmanic sources, instead of searching for them in the Buddhist heresy? The Hindu tradition, because it is a tradition, embodies all aspects of life, and in particular the stages, professions, ceremonies, and institutions. The result is that the Brahmanical texts, with their purely Indian references, are not very accessible to the Occidental. Whereas Buddhism, in separating itself from the social life of India, established a more universal expression; in appearance at least, for it will become truly universal only when it integrates itself into the quotidian life of the individual and his society: the Buddhist heresy becomes then a tradition culture, as in Tibet, in the form of Lamaism. Heresy is the messenger of tradition: where it settles, it dies in fertilizing the seed of a new tradition.”
“It is necessary – and this is simply to take Buddhism to the letter – to judge the Buddhist teaching on its actual utility. If not, certain of their formulas will be in great danger. Thus the disdain of Buddhism (that of the South, at least) for social life; its mistrust (theoretically) of the old Hindu rule of the human stages, according to which a man could not “retire into the forest until having experienced a normal human life” and having seen “the children of his children”; and too, the formula of the “nonreality of the I,” which has lead unhappy theosophists to moral and spiritual annihilation. A formula, so well corrected by this definition of nirvana, cited by Mrs. David-Neel: “Nirvana means the perception of reality as it truly is. And when, by a complete change (a turning inside-out) in all methods of mental processes, there follows an understanding of oneself (by oneself) – this I call nirvana.”
“A philosopher might regret that the speculative doctrines of Buddhism, with its various cosmological and theological schools, have not been explicated by the author. But this is of little importance, as it has been done in many other works. Mrs. David-Neel, with good reason, wished to speak to us about Buddhist life and not about Buddhist “philosophy” (which thrives especially well in our European imagination).”
“In the appendix, the author gives numerous citations, translations from Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan; and several pages – one would have liked more – on the Zen sect. A patriarch of this sect said:
To look for illumination by separating oneself from this world, is as absurd as to search for the horns of a hare.
And:
Do not think of good, do not think of evil, but look, in the present moment, at your original face – the one you had before you were born.”
“For this citation alone, the book is a treasure, a treasure difficult to find.”
