René Guénon... he lived 1886-1951... and he was wise.
The French scholar René Guénon had some knowledge about eastern and western spirituality. And he united these two strains, east and west, into a shiny amalgam of wisdom. Thus, he became a prophet of Perennialism, the idea that all religions share a common conceptual unity.
Guénon's opus is large and impossible to summarize in one blog post.
Here I'll just deliberate on some diverse stuff... things I've found enlightening when reading Guénon.
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In Guénon's book The Lord of the World we read about "sacred tradition of nonhuman origin (apaurusheya)".
This can be the foundation of a traditionalist creed, a statement saying: "we have to go beyond the human condition".
Specifically, Julius Evola said that. And I quote that saying of his in my new Evola study.
Evola was partly a disciple of Guénon. And what they both mean with "going beyond the human condition", is: there is more to life than mere humanity...!
Oh, the humanity...!
Mere humanism isn't enough to create a viable, holistic worldview.
We need divine influxus. We need God, gods, divine presence. We need the old, established "sacred tradition of nonhuman origin (apaurusheya)". That is, the Perennial Tradition of Bible, Gîtâ, Upanishads, Emerald Tablets, Edda, and similar god-inspired writ.
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Guénon wisdoms... what more do I have...?
In many of his books Guénon speaks of "sense of eternity" as the mark of extinction for an adept. La sense d'éternité. -- This, in all its seeming simplicity, is a very useful concept to capture the indescribable talent needed to be a god-influenced wiseman.
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Guénon also wrote a book called Fundamental Symbols – the Universal Language of Sacred Science (Symboles de la Science Sacrée, 1962). – Here he for instance said the following: a symbol can have many meanings, one role doesn’t cancel out the other. A telling quote is:
Lightning is represented in sensible form by the well known ‘flaming sword’, quite apart from other meanings that this may have at the same time, for it must be clearly understood that every true symbol always contains a plurality of meanings which, far from being mutually exclusive or contradictory, harmonise together and complete one another.+++
Guénon was unique among modern scholars in this respect: he allowed for nirukta.
In interpreting classic Hindu texts, Guénon allowed for ancient etymologies to play along. He wasn't solely into the Western mode of philology, whereby the text is analyzed with modern forms of grammar and etymology, established in Europe from the early 1800s and on. Now, to be sure, Guénon also had this "modern etymology" knowledge in him, but he also allowed for some "nirukta" etymology, present in documents like the Upanishads.
Let us look at Guénon's Vedânta book, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedânta. In this he for instance mentions a nirukta reading of svapiti, to sleep... and it becomes "svam apîto bhavati", "he has entered into his own self", Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.1. Now, an ordinary Western Indologist would only mention this as an example of false etymology. He would say that "svapiti", he sleeps, is present tense of the root svap; end of story. However, in this case, letting the nirukta reading play along, we get a spiritualization of the actitivity of sleep: "svam apîto bhavati", "he has entered into his own self". Therefore nirukta readings are useful for the esoteric-spiritual scholar. Along with modern linguistic methods.
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Hereby something else from Man and His Becoming According to the Vedânta. This goes to the heart of the discipline of translatiing traditional documents. In short: you can't just translate "as it is", you must comment on the wording chosen:
The exposition which follows is taken from the Brahma-Sutras and from their traditional commentary (and by that we especially have in mind the commentary of Shankaracharya), but we must point out that it is not a literal translation; here and there we shall find it necessary to summarize the commentary and also to comment upon it in its turn, without which the summary would remain practically incomprehensible, as in fact very often happens where the interpretation of Eastern texts is concerned.+++
[To this we get a note by Guénon himself, which also is rather apt:] It may be remarked, in this connection, that in Arabic the word tarjumah means both ‘translation’ and ‘commentary’, the one being looked upon as inseparable from the other; its nearest equivalent would therefore be ‘explanation’ or ‘interpretation’. It can even be said, where traditional texts are concerned, that a translation into a vernacular tongue, to be intelligible, should correspond exactly to a commentary written in the actual language of the text; a literal translation from an Eastern into a Western language is usually impossible, and the more one strives to keep strictly to the letter, the greater the danger of losing the spirit; this is a truth which philologists unfortunately seem incapable of grasping.
To be "a hip man of the 2020s" you must learn the Guénon parlance: “Tradition primordiale, l’Hyperborée de la Nord, le tradition hyperboréenne”... vous savez, c’est très simple... ”déterminer le point de jonction de la tradition atlante avec le tradition hyperboréenne”... ça va...!
In other words...
René Guénon advocated the Hyperborean Tradition, the original form of perennialism, preceding that of Atlantis... of this he said a few words in The King of the World, and in Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles. This latter volume is a 1970 translation into English, with these two key chapters for Hyperborean wisdom:
. Atlantis and Hyperborea
. The Place of the Atlantean Tradition in the Manvantara
Guénon here for instance speaks of a polar Tula being the origin of the Mesoamerican Tula. Referring them both to the Nordic Thule he goes on to intimate a polar origin for Hyperborea.
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I have been reading Guénon’s vedānta book... L'homme et son dévenir selon le vedanta... the one I've already mentioned... Man and His Becoming According to the Vedânta... and hereby some words and concepts from it, all useful to the traditional-spiritual student:
Ānanda – beatitude, bliss, Sw. salighet.Guénon's vedânta book may not be an easy read... and it's downside is that since its writing in the 1920s the West has learned more about Hindu religion... Guénon had to clarify some stuff that today is evident to us... like the Hindu tradition being self-contained and more elaborate than the Abrahamite paradigm... that said, L'homme et son dévenir selon le vedanta is a great study of perennialism, portraying Hindu religion as a conceptually impressive edifice, useful to any religious scholar of note.
Brahma vidya – divine knowledge.
Jīvanmukti – liberation while living a life as a human being.
Jnāna caksuh – the mind’s eye, cf Old Nordic hugauga; intellectual intuition.
Jnānendriya – faculty of sensation.
Karmendriya – faculty of action.
Tanmatra and bhûta – elements.
Sacchidānanda – the intuitive way, a state of serenity = samprasāda.
Purusha – essence.
Prakriti – substance.
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Conclusion: go thou to René Guénon and be wise...
Literature
Man and His Becoming According to the Vedânta (L'homme et son devenir selon le Vedanta) 1925
The King of the World (Le roi du monde) 1927
Fundamental Symbols – the Universal Language of Sacred Science (Symboles de la Science Sacrée) 1962
Formes and Cosmic Cycles (Formes traditionnelles et cycles cosmiques) 1970
Related
A Portrait of Julius Evola, presented on this blog
Svensson: a rebel for tradition
Shankara, an 8th century CE vedânta scholar