22
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
yielded abundant food, and man was relieved of the toil and
struggle for existence. The Indian never felt that the world
was a field of battle where men struggled for power, wealth
and domination. When we do not need to waste our energies
on problems of life on earth, exploiting nature and controlling
the forces of the world, we begin to think of the higher life,
how to live more perfectly in the spirit. Perhaps an enervating
climate inclined the Indjan to rest and retirement. The
huge forests with their wide leafy avenues afforded great
opportunities for the devout soul to wander peacefully through
them, dream strange dreams and burst forth into joyous
songs. World-weary men go out on pilgrimages to these
scenes of nature, acquire inward peace, listening to the rush
of winds and torrents, the music of birds and leaves, and return
whole of heart and fresh'in spirit. It was in the asramas
and tapovanas or forest hermitages that the thinking men of
India meditated on the deeper problems of existence. The
security of life, the wealth of natural resources, the freedom
from worry, the detachment from the cares of existence,
and the absence of a tyrannous practical interest, stimulated
the higher life of India, with the result that we find from the
beginnings of history an impatience of spirit, a love of wisdom
anq. a. passion for the saner pursuits of the mind.
Helped by natural conditions, and provided with the
intellectual scope to think out the implications of things,
the Indian escaped the doom which Plato pronounced to be
the worst of all, viz. the hatred of reason. "Let us above
all things take
eed," says he in the Phado, "that one mis-
fortune does not befall us. Let us not become misologues
as some people become misanthropes; for no greater evil can
befall men than to become haters of reason." The pleasure
of understanding is one of the purest available to man, and
the passion of the Indian for it burns in the bright lIame
of the mind.
In many other countries of the world, reflection on the
nature of existence is a luxury of life. The serious moments
are given to action, while the pursuit of philosophy comes up
as a parenthesis. In ancient India p1Ulosophy was not an
auxiliary to any other science or art, but always held a
prominent position of independence, In the West, even
