The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 4/Writings: Prose/On Dr. Paul Deussen
ON DR. PAUL DEUSSEN[1]
More than a decade has passed since a young German student, one of eight
children of a not very well-to-do clergyman, heard on a certain day
Professor Lassen lecturing on a language and literature new — very new even
at that time — to European scholars, namely, Sanskrit. The lectures were of
course free; for even now it is impossible for any one in any European
University to make a living by teaching Sanskrit, unless indeed the
University backs him.
Lassen was almost the last of that heroic band of German scholars, the
pioneers of Sanskrit scholarship in Germany. Heroic certainly they were —
what interest except their pure and unselfish love of knowledge could German
scholars have had at that time in Indian literature? The veteran Professor
was expounding a chapter of Shakuntalâ; and on that day there was no one
present more eagerly and attentively listening to Lassen's exposition than
our young student. The subject-matter of the exposition was of course
interesting and wonderful, but more wonderful was the strange language, the
strange sounds of which, although uttered with all those difficult
peculiarities that Sanskrit consonants are subjected to in the mouths of
unaccustomed Europeans, had strange fascination for him. He returned to his
lodgings, but that night sleep could not make him oblivious of what he had
heard. A glimpse of a hitherto unknown land had been given to him, a land
far more gorgeous in its colours than any he had yet seen, and having a
power of fascination never yet experienced by his young and ardent soul.
Naturally his friends were anxiously looking forward to the ripening of his
brilliant parts, and expected that he would soon enter a learned profession
which might bring him respect, fame, and, above all, a good salary and a
high position. But then there was this Sanskrit! The vast majority of
European scholars had not even heard of it then; as for making it pay — I
have already said that such a thing is impossible even now. Yet his desire
to learn it was strong.
It has unfortunately become hard for us modern Indians to understand how it
could be like that; nevertheless, there are to be met with in Varanasi and
Nadia and other places even now, some old as well as young persons among our
Pandits, and mostly among the Sannyasins, who are mad with this kind of
thirst for knowledge for its own sake. Students, not placed in the midst of
the luxurious surroundings and materials of the modern Europeanised Hindu,
and with a thousand times less facilities for study, poring over manuscripts
in the flickering light of an oil lamp, night after night, which alone would
have been enough to completely destroy the eye-sight of the students of any
other nation; travelling on foot hundreds of miles, begging their way all
along, in search of a rare manuscript or a noted teacher; and wonderfully
concentrating all the energy of their body and mind upon their one object of
study, year in and year out, till the hair turns grey and the infirmity of
age overtakes them — such students have not, through God's mercy, as yet
disappeared altogether from our country. Whatever India now holds as a proud
possession, has been undeniably the result of such labour on the part of her
worthy sons in days gone by; and the truth of this remark will become at
once evident on comparing the depth and solidity as well as the
unselfishness and the earnestness of purpose of India's ancient scholarship
with the results attained by our modern Indian Universities. Unselfish and
genuine zeal for real scholarship and honest earnest thought must again
become dominant in the life of our countrymen if they are ever to rise to
occupy among nations a rank worthy of their own historic past. It is this
kind of desire for knowledge which has made Germany what she is now — one of
the foremost, if not the foremost, among the nations of the world.
Yes, the desire to learn Sanskrit was strong in the heart of this German
student. It was long, uphill work — this learning of Sanskrit; with him too
it was the same world-old story of successful scholars and their hard work,
their privations and their indomitable energy — and also the same glorious
conclusion of a really heroic achievement. He thus achieved success; and now
— not only Europe, but all India knows this man, Paul Deussen, who is the
Professor of Philosophy in the University of Kiel. I have seen professors of
Sanskrit in America and in Europe. Some of them are very sympathetic towards
Vedantic thought. I admire their intellectual acumen and their lives of
unselfish labour. But Paul Deussen — or as he prefers to be called in
Sanskrit, Deva-Sena — and the veteran Max Müller have impressed me as being
the truest friends of India and Indian thought. It will always be among the
most pleasing episodes in my life — my first visit to this ardent Vedantist
at Kiel, his gentle wife who travelled with him in India, and his little
daughter, the darling of his heart — and our travelling together through
Germany and Holland to London, and the pleasant meetings we had in and about
London.
The earliest school of Sanskritists in Europe entered into the study of
Sanskrit with more imagination than critical ability. They knew a little,
expected much from that little, and often tried to make too much of what
little they knew. Then, in those days even, such vagaries as the estimation
of Shakuntala as forming the high watermark of Indian philosophy were not
altogether unknown! These were naturally followed by a reactionary band of
superficial critics, more than real scholars of any kind, who knew little or
nothing of Sanskrit, expected nothing from Sanskrit studies, and ridiculed
everything from the East. While criticising the unsound imaginativeness of
the early school to whom everything in Indian literature was rose and musk,
these, in their turn, went into speculations which, to say the least, were
equally highly unsound and indeed very venturesome. And their boldness was
very naturally helped by the fact that these over-hasty and unsympathetic
scholars and critics were addressing an audience whose entire qualification
for pronouncing any judgment in the matter was their absolute ignorance of
Sanskrit. What a medley of results from such critical scholarship! Suddenly,
on one fine morning, the poor Hindu woke up to find that everything that was
his was gone; one strange race had snatched away from him his arts, another
his architecture, and a third, whatever there was of his ancient sciences;
why, even his religion was not his own! Yes — that too had migrated into
India in the wake of a Pehlevi cross of stone! After a feverish period of
such treading-on-each-other's-toes of original research, a better state of
things has dawned. It has now been found out that mere adventure without
some amount of the capital of real and ripe scholarship produces nothing but
ridiculous failure even in the business of Oriental research, and that the
traditions in India are not to be rejected with supercilious contempt, as
there is really more in them than most people ever dream of.
There is now happily coming into existence in Europe a new type of Sanskrit
scholars, reverential, sympathetic, and learned — reverential because they
are a better stamp of men, and sympathetic because they are learned. And the
link which connects the new portion of the chain with the old one is, of
course, our Max Müller. We Hindus certainly owe more to him than to any
other Sanskrit scholar in the West, and I am simply astonished when I think
of the gigantic task which he, in his enthusiasm, undertook as a young man
and brought to a successful conclusion in his old age. Think of this man
without any help, poring over old manuscripts, hardly legible to the Hindus
themselves, and in a language to acquire which takes a lifetime even in
India — without even the help of any needy Pandit whose "brains could be
picked", as the Americans say, for ten shillings a month, and a mere mention
of his name in the introduction to some book of "very new researches" —
think of this man, spending days and sometimes months in elucidating the
correct reading and meaning of a word or a sentence in the commentary of
Sâyana (as he has himself told me), and in the end succeeding in making an
easy road through the forest of Vedic literature for all others to go along;
think of him and his work, and then say what he really is to us! Of course
we need not all agree with him in all that he says in his many writings;
certainly such an agreement is impossible. But agreement or no agreement,
the fact remains that this one man has done a thousand times more for the
preservation, spreading, and appreciation of the literature of our
forefathers than any of us can ever hope to do, and he has done it all with
a heart which is full of the sweet balm of love and veneration.
If Max Müller is thus the old pioneer of the new movement, Deussen is
certainly one of its younger advance-guard. Philological interest had hidden
long from view the gems of thought and spirituality to be found in the mine
of our ancient scriptures. Max Müller brought out a few of them and
exhibited them to the public gaze, compelling attention to them by means of
his authority as the foremost philologist. Deussen, unhampered by any
philological leanings and possessing the training of a philosopher
singularly well versed in the speculations of ancient Greece and modern
Germany, took up the cue and plunged boldly into the metaphysical depths of
the Upanishads, found them to be fully safe and satisfying, and then —
equally boldly declared that fact before the whole world. Deussen is
certainly the freest among scholars in the expression of his opinion about
the Vedanta. He never stops to think about the "What they would say" of the
vast majority of scholars. We indeed require bold men in this world to tell
us bold words about truth; and nowhere, is this more true now than in Europe
where, through the fear of social opinion and such other causes, there has
been enough in all conscience of the whitewashing and apologising attitude
among scholars towards creeds and customs which, in all probability, not
many among them really believe in. The greater is the glory, therefore, to
Max Müller and to Deussen for their bold and open advocacy of truth! May
they be as bold in showing to us our defects, the later corruptions in our
thought-systems in India, especially in their application to our social
needs! Just now we very much require the help of such genuine friends as
these to check the growing virulence of the disease, very prevalent in
India, of running either to the one extreme of slavish panegyrists who cling
to every village superstition as the innermost essence of the Shâstras, or
to the other extreme of demoniacal denouncers who see no good in us and in
our history, and will, if they can, at once dynamite all the social and
spiritual organizations of our ancient land of religion and philosophy.
- Notes
- ↑ Written for the Brahmavâdin, 1896.