The Aryan Path May 1939

But with the onslaught of that tempest which began to sweep the earth with the outbreak of the Great War and has continued in the raging ideologies the incredibly cruel perscutions and the undeclared wars of the present moment mankind has been compelled to look its destiny sternly in the face and to realize more and more acutely that it is on the wrong path. [...] The one truth which appears as the common feature of the whole Buddhist world at the height of Buddhist Civilisation from Bamyan in Afghanistan to Horyuji in Japan beginning with the marvelous Stupa of Sanchi and the caves of Ajanta and continuing across Indonesia Angkor and Borobodur the magnificent flowering of Buddhist Sculpture and Painting in China up to the Sung Period the great c [...] From the moment in the third century B. C. when the Symbol of the Wheel and of the Footprint of the Buddha the Bodhi-Tree under which the Buddha attained Illumnation appeared for the first time in Indian Art through all the various anthropological and ethnic types in which every Buddhist nation has tried to express its ideal of the Buddha-Image the spiritual hierarchy of the Universe is cle [...] The philologists go on quarrelling about the meaning of Sanskrit and Pith terms which become as clear as daylight as soon as we look for eample at the magnificent painting of the Great Bodhisattwa amongst the frescoes of Ajanta or at the Naked Buddha in the Museum of Sarnath or at any of the wonderful masterpieces of Buddhist Art in the Freer Gallery at Washington or in the Boston Museum of [...] It is essential to have agreement among the educated classes of the whole world about the meaning of the Buddhist Ideal because it is and will remain the Leitmotif and the driving power of Eastern Ideaism of Asiatic Humanism of all that is noble in the civilisations of the Far East.