Best 10 quotes of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy on MyQuotes

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    Free thought is a passion; it is much rather the thoughts than ourselves that are free.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    If the “signs and wonders” are lightly dismissed, it is not because they are unreal, but because it is an evil and adulterous generation that asketh for a sign.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    It is in fact surprising that such a body of doctrine as the Buddhist, with its profoundly other-wordly and even anti-social emphasis, in the Buddha's own words "hard to be understood by you who are of different views, another tolerance, other tastes, other allegiance and other training", can have become even as "popular" as it is in the modern Western environment. [...] We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we are in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the “truth” and “original form” of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    One would begin, for example, by remarking that the Vedic doctrine is neither pantheistic" nor polytheistic, nor a worship of the powers of Nature except in the sense that Natura naturans est Deus and all her powers but the names of God’s acts; that karma is not ‘‘fate’’ except in the orthodox sense of the character and destiny that inhere in created things themselves, and rightly understood, determines their vocation; 5 that 'maya' is not ‘illusion", but rather the material measure and means essential to the manifestation of a quantitative and in this sense “material”, world of appearances, by which we may be either enlightened or deluded according to the degree of our own maturity; that the notion of a “reincarnation” in the popular sense of the return of deceased individuals to rebirth on this earth represents only a misunderstanding of the doctrines of heredity, transmigration and regeneration; and that the six darshanas the later Sanskrit “philosophy” are not so many mutually exclusive “systems'’ but, as their name implies, so many “points of view" which are no more mutually contradictory than are, let us say, botany and mathematics. We shall also deny in Hinduism the existence of anything unique and peculiar to itself, apart from the local colouring and social adaptations that must be expected under the sun where nothing can be known except in the mode of the knower.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modern writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements are untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    We find “Nirvana” rendered by “annihilation” (no one stops to ask of what?), though the word means “despiration”, as Meister Eckhart uses the term. I accuse the majority of Christian writers of a certain irresponsibility, or even levity, in their references to other religions. I should never dream of making use of a Gospel text without referring to the Greek, and considering also the earlier history of the Greek words employed, and I demand as much of Christian writers. To THE NEW ENGLISH WEEKLY, LONDON - January 8, 1946

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.

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    Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

    While there may have lived an individual teacher who gave the ancient wisdom its peculiarly “Buddhist” coloring, his personality is completely overshadowed, as he must have wished it should be, by the eternal substance with which he identified himself. In other words, “the Buddha is only anthropomorphic, not a man”.