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THE SECRET LORE OF INDIA AND THE ONE PERFECT LIFE FOR ALL The Secret Lore of India and The One Perfed Life for All being A Few Main Passages from the Upanishads Put into English Verse with An Introduction A Conclusion by W. M. Teape M. A., Edin. and Camb. B. D., Camb. formerly Vicar of Ford In the Diocese of Durham CAMBRIDGE W. HEFFER SONS LTD. 1932 Foreword THIS is the first fruits of a life-long study of the foundations of Eastern and Western Religious Thought. How the author was led to the study is described in the Preface. It is a parallel presentation of these Foundations and a consideration of their relation to each other. So far as the writer knows, this has not yet been done. He has looked in vain for any who might have assisted him in his task. Apparently he is a pioneer. His position is easily accounted for. It was only toward the close of the eighteenth century that the intrepid Sir William Jones, 1 through his acquirement of a knowledge of Sanskrit, rendered the language and literature of the ancient Hindus accessible to European scholars, and only at the close of the nineteenth, that the documents that give the religious thought thereof began to be published in a European tongue. All through the hundred years that thus passed the elements and character of that religious thought were a problem and constitute a problem still. 2 Even the course of the stages that led up to the Secret Lore is not clear. The author gives here the course of thought as it seems probable to him after his searching the works of our latest scholars. Happily for his purpose, however, the character of thought when the Secret Lore arose and what that Secret Lore was, taken in its simple meaning, areclear. It is rather the implications the Secret Lore involves that constitute the problem with regard to it. Also, it brings with it subsidiary questions galore. The difficulty in such a task as the authors is to know when to stop and sum up ones discoveries. There is so much to investigate and think over. Yet for an explorer, even though much more may lie ahead, it is well to halt now and then and take measure of what he has gained. So the writer deems himself fortunate to have come to possess a friend who urged him, for a certain reason, to put his pen 1 Judge of the High Court at Calcutta. 2 See Dr. E. J. Thomas in his Foreword to V. G. Reles Vedic Gods. vi FOREWORD to paper and write out largely as he could his discoveries. The result is this work. It is accordingly, as has been said, a first ingathering. It looks, if life and ability be granted, to further researches. One cannot but hope for the better fortune still, that readers of the book will be attracted to join the adventure. However, if the general task of the author proved to be a lone employ, it was happily not so with his adoption of the mode in which he here presents his Selections from the Secret Lore He had long known of John Muirs Metrical Translations from Sanskrit Writers, and it was Paul Eber hardts Der Weisheit Erster Schluss that showed him how the versification should be done. Eberhardts renderings confirmed the conviction he himself had by experiment arrived at, that verse brings out, as cold prose cannot do, the true sense and impress of what these teachers have to tell. The Selections naturally are the pice de resistance of the Book, and to enable their understanding the author has added a few notes and aVocabulary of certain important Sanskrit terms. This Main Part of the book is preceded by an Introduction, and followed up by a Conclusion. The Introduction consists of Two Parts. The Former Part traces the Sacred Tradition from its beginning, on, probably, the now-Hungarian plain, through the Caspian period and the early and late Vedic Period, to the rise of the Secret Lore, which is the climax of the Veda. The Latter Part describes the course of development, as the author finds it, of the Secret Lore itself...
ISBN - 9781406769098
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Pages : 364
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