Like conscience, too, love needs no authentication or validation by any authority outside itself. Speculations about love’s credentials, or lack of credentials, cannot either enhance or diminish love’s absoluteness.2
First, which kind of love characterized by Toynbee is it that Siddhartha says was a necessary condition for his enlightenment? Second, do you 1.
Dhammapada: A Collection of Verses. Translated from the Pali by F. Max Muller. In Sacred Books of the East. Edited by F. Max Muller. Translated by Various Oriental Scholars.
Volume X, Part I.
2.
A. J. Toynbee. Experiences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
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Chapter 12. Govinda
think Toynbee is mistaken that is the desire for Nirvana is not “the kind of desire that takes us out of ourselves and carries us beyond ourselves”?
4. Could Siddhartha have reached enlightenment without his varied history? He states, “. . . I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished. . . ” In this manner, Siddhartha claims he understood the perfection of the world.
5. In what ways is Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God”3 explicated in this chapter?
3.
Henry David Thoreau. The Writing of Henry David Thoreau. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Vol. 1, 371.
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Index
death, 74, 97
and lust, 70
desire, 23, 29
Agni, 125
despair, 85
alms, 23
Dhammapada, 126
appearance, 20
discontent, 9
(see also Maya)
DocBook, ii
as reality, 34, 42
Dogen Kirgen, 116
Arahat, 84
egoism, 20, 127
archetypes, 11
Eightfold Path, 26
Aristotle, 20
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9
ascetics, 5, 12
emptiness, 105
Atharva-Veda, 34
enabling, 107
Atman, 2, 16, 34, 43, 81
enlightenment, 15, 83, 127
awakening, 34
essence of world, 42
behaviorism, 38
(see also Brahman)
Berman, Morris, 9
fast, 57, 12
Bhagavad-Gita, 97
(see also think, wait, fast)
