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RECENT VEDANTA LITERATURE
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unusual rapprochement between Vedanta and Christian philosophy. In Christian philosophy history is all important; in Vedanta it is usually ignored. But for Christianity no less than for Vedanta the goal of our endeavor is eternal. And for Vedanta no less than for Christianity, so Mahadevan maintains, the significant progress by which this goal is attained is the history of the world in time.
A cursory summary of Vedanta thought from ancient times to the present is given by Professor P. T. Raju of the University of Rajputana at Jodhpur in his Idealistic Thought of India. This historical survey of Indian philosophy is restricted to the idealistic schools because idealism is the true philosophy or, as he puts it in the preface, "idealism can be avoided, it seems to the author, only if we forbear to carry our thought to its logical extreme." And idealism is most highly developed in India, for "the idealistic systems in the West have not carried to the end their lines of argument” (p. 13). Indian idealism means Vedanta and Buddhism. There are two chapters (idealism as "theory of reality” and "theory of value") which define idealism as understood in Western philosophy, two on the various schools of Vedanta, two on the schools of Buddhism, and two on contemporary Indian idealists.
It is not clear what sort of reader Professor Raju had in mind when writing this book, for the accounts of the Vedanta and Buddhist schools are too brief to be of value to a reader with much knowledge of the subject and too vague to be of value to a reader without any such knowledge. The chapters on contemporary idealists are perhaps the most valuable. This discussion attempts to be comprehensive. He says (p. 19), “All contemporary thinkers, particularly the academical, have been critically examined"-a claim which may cause some soul searching among professors of philosophy not included, and even those who are included may have their gratification tempered by the author's reference (p. 25) to "the present philosophical stagnation in India.” These philosophers (Gandhi, Aurobindo, Krishnamurti, Bhagavan Das, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Hiralal Haldar, K. C. Bhattacharya, and Iqbal) were contemporary when the book was being
& P. T. Raju, Idealistic Thought of India (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
