Hinduism and Buddhism Quotes

“[...] Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not.”
― Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, Hinduism and Buddhism

“It is in fact surprising that such a body of doctrine as the Buddhist, with its profoundly other-wordly and even anti-social emphasis, in the Buddha's own words "hard to be understood by you who are of different views, another tolerance, other tastes, other allegiance and other training", can have become even as "popular" as it is in the modern Western environment.
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We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we are in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism

“If the “signs and wonders” are lightly dismissed, it is not because they are unreal, but because it is an evil and adulterous generation that asketh for a sign.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism

“One of the strangest controversies in the history of Orientalism turned upon the “origin of bhakti”, as if devotion had at some given moment been a new idea and thenceforth a fashionable one. It would have been simpler to observe that the word bhakti means primarily a given share, and therefore also the devotion or love that all liberality presupposes; and so that inasmuch as one “gives God his share” (bhagam), i.e. sacrifces, one is his bhakta. Thus in the hymn, “If thou givest me my share” amounts to saying “If thou lovest me”. It has often been pointed out that the Sacrifice was thought of as a commerce between Gods and men: but not often realised that by introducing into traditional conceptions of trade notions derived from our own internecine commercial transactions, we have falsified our understanding of the original sense of such a commerce, which was actually more of the potlatsh type, a competition in giving, than like our competitions in taking.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism

“We who play the game of life so desperately for temporal stakes might be playing at love with God for higher stakes—our selves, and his. We play against one another for possessions, who might be playing with the King who stakes his throne and what is his against our lives and all we are: a game in which the more is lost, the more is won.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism

“One would begin, for example, by remarking that the Vedic doctrine is neither pantheistic" nor polytheistic, nor a worship of the powers of Nature except in the sense that Natura naturans est Deus and all her powers but the names of God’s acts; that karma is not ‘‘fate’’ except in the orthodox sense of the character and destiny that inhere in created things themselves, and rightly understood, determines their vocation; 5 that 'maya' is not ‘illusion", but rather the material measure and means essential to the manifestation of a quantitative and in this sense “material”, world of appearances, by which we may be either enlightened or deluded according to the degree of our own maturity; that the notion of a “reincarnation” in the popular sense of the return of deceased individuals to rebirth on this earth represents only a misunderstanding of the doctrines of heredity, transmigration and regeneration; and that the six darshanas the later Sanskrit “philosophy” are not so many mutually exclusive “systems'’ but, as their name implies, so many “points of view" which are no more mutually contradictory than are, let us say, botany and mathematics. We shall also deny in Hinduism the existence of anything unique and peculiar to itself, apart from the local colouring and social adaptations that must be expected under the sun where nothing can be known except in the mode of the knower.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism

“La individualidad es motivada y perpetuada por el deseo, y la causa de todo deseo es la ignorancia (avidyā).”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduismo y budismo (Orientalia)

“sino en sacrificar (hacer sagrado) todo lo que hacemos y todo lo que somos, en santificar cada acto natural por una reducción de todas las actividades a su principio. Decimos «natural» de forma intencionada para dar a entender que todo lo que es hecho naturalmente puede ser sagrado o profano según nuestro grado de conocimiento, pero que todo lo que no es hecho naturalmente es esencial e irrevocablemente profano.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduismo y budismo (Orientalia)

“en otros términos, quien dice ingestión dice asimilación. En palabras de Meister Eckhart: «el alma se une con Dios como el alimento con el hombre, que así se vuelve ojo en el ojo, oído en el oído; así en Dios el alma deviene Dios»; pues «yo soy lo que me absorbe más que yo mismo».”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduismo y budismo (Orientalia)

“Dios da tanto como podemos tomar de él, y la medida de su ofrecimiento depende de la medida en que «nosotros mismos» nos hayamos abandonado.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduismo y budismo (Orientalia)

“Es habitual tratar la cuestión de sus nombres, Agni, Indra, Prajāpati, Śiva, Brahama [Mitra, Varuna], etc. de la forma siguiente: «lo nombran múltiple, a él que, en realidad, es uno»;38 «según como se muestra, en eso se convierte»;39 «toma las formas que se representan quienes lo adoran».40 Los nombres trinitarios —Agni, Vāyu y Āditya, o Brahama, Rudra y Vishnu— «son las más altas personificaciones del supremo, el inmortal y el incorpóreo Brahama… su devenir es un nacimiento uno de otro, son participaciones en un sí común definido por sus diferentes operaciones… Estas encarnaciones están llamadas a ser contempladas, celebradas y, finalmente, rechazadas. Por medio de ellas, uno se eleva cada vez más arriba en los mundos; pero donde todo termina, se alcanza la simplicidad de la Persona».41 De todos los nombres y todas las formas de Dios, la sílaba monogramática Oṁ, que totaliza los sonidos y la música de las esferas cantada por el Sol resonante, es la más excelsa.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduismo y budismo (Orientalia)

“While there may have lived an individual teacher who gave the ancient wisdom its peculiarly “Buddhist” coloring, his personality is completely overshadowed, as he must have wished it should be, by the eternal substance with which he identified himself. In other words, “the Buddha is only anthropomorphic, not a man”.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism

“We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modern writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements are untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant.”
― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism