ORIENTAL WISDOM in OCCIDENTAL LITERATURE (WaltWhitmanand T.S. Eliot)

Abstract

From the vast storehouse of philosophic thought, “the infinite greatness of the past”, emerges India as an integral symbol of man’s quest for the infinite---India with her “flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes, old occult Brahma intermittently far back, the tender and junior Buddha….”

 --A Passage to India by Walt Whitman--

All the great philosophers of the world have recognized the supremacy of the unknown over the known, the transcendental over the empirical. If the senses of the body do not ultimately lead us on to the Divine Self, they have not performed their true function, it is propounded in Indian texts. Whenever the Western world, especially the American writers, sought to explore the transcendental nature of reality, they turned to theOriental wisdom of Vedic India.Occidental literature, therefore, has always been thriving on Oriental wisdom.Evidently, Vedic knowledge of ancient India carried the western writers,those who sought to embark on a spiritual quest, beyond the confines of empirical experience.The synthesis of oriental and occidental wisdom offers a sustainable path of a harmonious co-existenceand interconnectedness to humanity. VasudhaivaKutumbkam,a Sanskrit phrase in Indian scriptures, teaches that the whole world is one (my) family.Verily, oriental wisdom is ‘a gate opening on the whole world of spiritual truth and experience and the view it gives us embraces all the provinces of that supreme religion’. [Sri Aurbindo]. The spirit of Hinduism is not dogmatic. It was the essential liberality of Hindu thought and transcendentalism that appealed naturally to Western scholars, its appeal extending to writers of all nationalities and religions, notwithstanding human limitations.The whole oeuvre of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot makes an emphatic statement, revealing how deeply theOrientalwisdom of Vedic India transformed their poetic vision and sensibility to provide it a universal undertone running parallel with occidental wisdom.