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sake of the right orientation of action and not for the sake of negating action. When Professor Daya Krishan says that “At best, it is a necessary evil, something that has to be done if a society or personality, or culture is to survive at all. But then one's heart is never in it; one does it only to the minimum extent required and that too in a perfunctory manner,” he might not have real contemplatives like Christ, Mahāvīra, Buddha, Gāndhī, etc., in his mind, but pseudo contemplatives at the ordinary man's level. Professor Daya Krishna's article seems to me, in a way, the falsification of historical experience, which he himself, I hope, probably would not like.
Apart from these general comments, I wish now to raise some points concerning his paper in this Journal. 1) The statement that “the contrast between the values
that pertain essentially to the realm of action and those that do not has seldom been drawn in axiological thought” and the statement that “in India the controversy between the path of knowledge and the path of action has been perennial” – these are contradictory. He tries to evade this contradiction by saying that this distinction between knowledge and action is not quite the same as he is trying to point out. This is not convincing. This very problem of the relation and distinction between active and contemplative values is just the same as the problem of Karma-yoga and Karmasaṁnyāsa in the Gītā. The sthitaprajña of the Gītā, the Arhat of Jainism and the Bodhisattva of Buddhism direct our attention towards the problem of contemplative and active values. What I wish to point out is that this problem has always concerned the Indian mind and is not new to it. And I
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Spiritual Awakening (Samyagdarśana) and Other Essays
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