Indianism has cast Buddhism out of India

Home > E-Library > Works Of Disciples > Nolini Kanta Gupta > Volume-2 > Buddhism And Hinduism Hinduism, one may even say, Indianism, has cast Buddhism out of India, the mother country, to the wonder of many...Buddha was accepted as an Avatar; he was given a divine status in the Hindu Pantheon. Divested, apparently, of all heterodoxical and controversial appendages, he was anointed with the sole sufficing aspect of supreme kindness, universal compassion.

Even so, in and through this Assumption, not a little of the peculiarly Buddhist inspiration entered the original organism. The most drastic and of far-reaching consequence was the inauguration and idolisation of monastic life, which has become since then in Indian conception, the summum bonum, the supreme goal of human existence. It was not without reason that India's older and truer tradition cried out against Shankara being a crypto-Buddhist (pracchanna bauddha), who was yet one of the most consistent and violent critics of Buddhism.

Life is an expression of the Divine Presence, earth is the field of labour for the gods-such was the original old-world Vedic view. It was the Buddhist dispensation that made life an inferior truth, a complex of unreality and decreed that the highest aim of man is to disappear from life. after life's fitful fever to sleep well -that seems to have been the motto given...

Buddhist logic consideres negation as a simple contrary to affirmation; it is not an entity, it is the lack of entity. Zero or cypher means simple absence. Hindu logic makes of negation a positive statement but on the minus side, even as Hindu mathematics did not consider a zero as valueless but gave a special value, a value of position to it. Do we not hear of negative positives (positron) in modern science today?

The Buddhists deny likewise the real existence of general ideas: according to them only individuals are real existences, general ideas are mere abstractions. The Hindus, on the other hand, like Plato who must have been influenced by them, affirm the reality of general ideas-although real need not always mean material.