William Atkinson - The Essential Works of William Walker Atkinson - 50+ Books in One Edition

Having its head-waters back in the early centuries of history, the Hindu philosophical thought has flowed down through the ages, irrigating and nourishing many fertile fields of philosophy, metaphysics and religion. There is very little, if anything, in these fields of thought which may not be traced back to the Hindu influence. Max Muller and Paul Duessen have borne evidence that in the Vedas and the Upanishads may be found the seed-thoughts for every philosophical conception that the Western mind has ever evolved. As an authority has said: “Every possible form of human philosophical speculation, conception or theory has been advanced by some Hindu philosopher during the centuries. It would seem that the Hindu philosophical mind has acted as the finest sieve, through which strained the volume of human philosophical thought, every idea of importance being gathered and applied, by someone, at some time, in India.”

Victor Cousins said: “When we read the poetical and philosophical monuments of the far East—above all those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe, we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.…India contains the whole history of philosophy in a nutshell.” Sir Monier Williams says: “Indeed, if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozites more than two thousand years before the existence of Spinoza; and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin; and Evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution had been accepted by the scientists of our time, and before any word like ‘Evolution’ existed in any language of the world.”

Prof. Hopkins says: “Plato was full of Sankhyan thought, worked out by him, but taken from Pythagoras. Before the sixth century, b.c., all the religio-philosophical ideas of Pythagoras were current in India. If there were but one or two of these cases they might be set aside as accidental coincidences, but such coincidences are too numerous to be the result of chance.” Davies says: “Kapila’s system is the first formulated system of philosophy of which the world has a record. It is the earliest attempt on record to give an answer, from reason alone, to the mysterious questions which arise in every thoughtful mind about the origin of the world, the nature and relations of man and his future destiny.…The human intellect has gone over the same ground that it occupied more than two thousand years ago.” Hopkins says: “Both Thales and Parmenides were indeed anticipated by Hindu sages, and the Eleatic school seems but a reflection of the Upanishads.” Schlegel says: “Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.”

The Orient—India in particular—is the home of the Idealistic Philosophy which is now exerting such an influence on Western thought. So closely identified with idealism is the highest Hindu philosophy that to the average person all Hindu philosophy is identified with idealism. But this is quite wrong. India, the home of idealism, and whose thought has carried that doctrine to its last refinement of tenuity, is also the home of every other form of philosophical thought which has ever been evolved from the mind of man. As far back as the time of Buddha, we find there had been in existence for many centuries various schools of philosophical thought far removed from idealism, many of which have been revamped or rediscovered by modern Western thinkers. We find some of the oldest Buddhistic writings vigorously combating these heterodox schools and pointing to their errors. The following quotation from Dr. J. E. Carpenter will surprise many readers: He says:

“The eagerness with which the speculations concerning the ‘self’ were pursued may be inferred from the conspectus of sixty wrong views about it, according to the Buddha.…On the other hand, there were teachers daring enough to deny the first principles on which the Brahmanical were all based, viz., karma . Such among the Buddha’s contemporaries were the agnostic Sanjaya, who repudiated all knowledge of the subject; the materialist Ajita of the hairy garment, who allowed no other life, rejected the claim to knowledge by higher insight, and resolved man into the four elements—earth, water, fire, air—which dispersed at death; the indifferentist Purana Kassapa, who acknowledged no moral distinctions, and consequently no merit or reward; and the determinist Makkhali of the Cow-pen, who indeed recognized the samsara (the chain of rebirth and phenomenal existence), but admitted no voluntary action, and hence no karma (the fruit of action), each individual only working out the law of its nature which it could not modify or control, the sole cause of everything being found in niyati , destiny, impersonal necessity, or fate.”

In addition to the schools mentioned above, the Hindu school of materialism, the Charvakas, or Lokayatikas, was founded about three thousand years ago, and has always had a following, although despised by the orthodox Hindu. The Charvakas not only held to the material nature of the universe and all things contained therein, but also held that the individual perished at the death of the body, there being no such thing as a soul. They held to the ideal: “Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” They denounced the priests as impostors, and all religions as fallacies designed to delude and rob the people, and reviled the Vedas, or Sacred Books, as drivel and falsehood cleverly formulated to delude and control the people. These doctrines will have a familiar sound to the Western reader of to-day—and yet they were current in India from five hundred to one thousand years before the Christian era, and have had followers ever since.

In philosophy, and in religion, India has given birth to the highest possible and lowest possible conceptions. There have been no heights to which the Hindu mind has feared to climb, and there have been no depths into which it has not descended. The most refined ideals and the most gross conceptions have been entertained by the Hindus. The mental and spiritual soil which has given nourishment to the noblest philosophical plants and trees, from which have come the fairest flowers and the richest fruits, has also given life to the most noxious weeds and the most poisonous varieties of mental and spiritual fungi. In the garden of Oriental thought, one searching for the rarest and most beautiful flowers and richest fruit will find it—but he must beware of the mental toad-stools, spiritual deadly night-shade, and psychic loco-weed which beset the paths. In Hindu thought the extremes meet—it is the land of the spiritual paradox.

While it is true that the various orthodox Hindu schools of philosophical thought apparently differ materially from each other, it will be found that these differences are but upon points of interpretation and theories of the manner in which the One reality manifests as the Many of the phenomenal world. In other words, the differences are regarding the “ how ” of the manifestation, rather than the fundamental principles themselves. Under the various schools of the Hindu thought will be found a common fundamental principle of the One Life and One Self of the universe. All true Hindu thought believes that the ultimate Reality is One, and that the phenomenal universe is composed of manifold and varied manifestations, emanations, or reflections of that One. It is the same fundamental thought that caused the Grecian conception of the World-Spirit. Whether this One be called the Absolute, Brahman, Krishna, or simply “That,” by the various Hindu schools, it is always regarded as One.