Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.8

c8.s1.8

India is altogether a land of types, not of individualities stamped with their own dies. Life begins and passes away there, as the plant blooms and withers, subject to the dull rule of the laws of Nature; and the laws of Nature can produce nothing but typical forms. Only where the breath of freedom floats are those proud forces of manhood unfettered, which enable man to become, and dare to become, something individual, like himself alone. Thus on all pictures in the Indian epics, despite their splendid colouring, there lies that strange torpor which makes men look like spectres, to which the draught of vivifying blood had been denied: and this effect is owing to this cause above all others, that the domain of this poetry does not extend to the point where the particularly characteristic life of the individual begins. This range was closed to Indian poetry because the Indian peoples themselves were denied the power to develope individualties. And in the same way in the history of Indian thought, there also the power at work is not the individual mind, but always merely the great Indian folk-mind, that which the Indians, if questioned regarding the origin of their sacred writings, denominate the sacred Vedic spirit. Through all there operates an unindividual universal, and the individual bears only those marks with which the universal mind has endowed him.