We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich inward.
I am the East. I have philosophies, I have religions, who would exchange them for airplanes?
Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-Tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won't break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon.
Religion is the peculiarity of the growth of the Indian mind.
No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions.
Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.
The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.
In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.
The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions.
In ancient days the Pythagoreans were used to change names with each other,--fancying that each would share the virtues they admired in the other.
The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.
India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world
The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty.
I'm not really hip to too much of the Zen or the Buddhist point of view, but you see I don't have to be because I just know that they're all the same, it's all the same, it's just whichever one you want to take and it happens that I'm taking the Hindu one.
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
