Hindu Medicine c5.s1.12

c5.s1.12

This indeed was Zimmer's greatest gift: that he was able to divine the truth with his inner eye, a faculty that, in his opinion, was no merit, nor even an advantage. On the contrary, much as he hated shallow dialectics, he had an almost childlike admiration for those who were good at reasoning, at presenting conclusions from a well ordered argument. "Ich kann nicht denken," I am incapable of thinking, he used to say with sincere regret. But visionary as was his approach to any topic, it was at the same time distinct, sharp, and clear-cut. Moreover, his thought tended to become concrete, to take on flesh and blood. One day we walked along the Neckar, while he was trying to explain to me the Hindu attitude toward death. "To die—that means to cross *this* river in a boat and then to look back from over there to the eddy here." He would not use the old simile *in abstracto*; it was infused into the reality of the surrounding world. The water we saw became the dividing line