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INTRODUCTION
An interesting feature of 20th century western literature and thought is the number of writers and thinkers who seem to look up to the East for guidance. T. S. Eliot and the late Aldous Huxley are two outstanding instances which come to mind. Scholars such as Dr. Albert Schweitzer have written books on Indian Thought and its Development. Universities of various countries have special departments of Indology. Why this re-awakening of interest in India and the East? In 1947, the famous historian, Dr. Arnold Toynbee, in his lecture “The Unification of the World and the Change in Historical Perspective", pointed out that with the advent of the air age “the locus of the centre of gravity of human affairs may be determined not by physical but by human geography," and that this shift was bound to be towards the East. One of the major causes of this change, according to Dr. Toynbee, would be a steadily growing interest in religion. “Of one thing we can be fairly confident: religion is likely to be the plane on which this coming centripetal counter-movement will first declare itself," and therefore, this new perspective in the study of history should lead us “to relegate economic and political history to a subordinate place and give religious history the primacy. For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race.”
Religion is the serious business of the human race-does this not ring as a timely warning to a world which seems to be tottering perpetually on the brink of a major conflagration, a world and its inhabitants so full of tensions that there are more neurotics today than at any other period in
