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Feature Book Review
“This volume is a set of still photographs taken years ago of an illustrious group whose generation is now passing rapidly off the Indian intellectual stage.”
The Indian Mind (Essentials of Indian Phliosophy and Culture)
edited by Charles A. Moore, with the assistance of
Aldyth V. Morris. Honolulu : East-West Center Press and University of Hawaii Press, 458 pp., $9.50.
This book is a collection of papers by participants (chiefly Indian) in the East-West Philosophers' Conferences 1939, 1949, 1959, and 1974. Though all the papers have been published previously, most of them have been some what revised here. The concentration of Indian papers in one volume highlights the distinctive features of the Indian contributions to the conferences, and provides a convenient work for use in courses on Indian philosophy, religion, and civilization,
The scope of the book is much less comprehensive than the title. One might well contend that it contains the essentials of Hindu philosophy, but it most assuredly does not present the essentials of Indian culture. Most of the contributors are Hindus trained in Sanskrit and in European philosophy of an Edwardian British vintage. The exceptions are : one Hindu lawyer (C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar), one Hindu historian (Tara Chand), one Sinhalese Buddhist (G. P. Malalasekera), and a Japanese Buddhologist (Junjiro Takakusu). There is no Muslim though approximately 150 million inhabitants of geographic India are Muslims. Are their minds not Indian minds? No Indian Christians, Jains, or Sikhs are included, either. In short, the communal representation is much less complete than at most contemporary Indian philosophical conferences. This would not matter much if the papers did justice to Indian thought as a whole, but they don't.
The sizable Muslim contribution to Indian thought and culture is ignored by most of the writers, and dealt with-briefly and well-only by Tara Chand, the historian. The Hindu writers regard Buddhism and Jainism as Israelites regarded Ishmaelites-of the right lineage, but the wrong branch.
