10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating, October 21, 2005
This book comprises Joseph Campbell's private journals during his first visit to India. Before Campbell set off for India, he had already established a worldwide reputation in the field of Indian mythology through translating the works of Heinrich Zimmer. In 1954, he was awarded a fellowship to travel and conduct research in India for future publications on Indian mythology. In this book, which was not written for publication, but intended to be solely Campbell's private record of his journey, Campbell is confronted with the realities of India for the first time, and he is shaken to the core by how different India is from what he had been led to expect.
Campbell's stay in India lasted approximately 6 months, during which time he traveled extensively throughout the country. He started off the journey in the company of Swami Nikhilananda and several female devotees. Together with this troop, Campbell visited various Ramakrishna Missions and temples. Before long, however, he began to lose interest in this party, as he observed that the Ramakrishna Missions seemed to play a much smaller role in Indian society than he had ever imagined. He began to travel independently, visiting temples and talking to people he met along the way (mainly intellectuals, who were able to discuss philosophy in English). He also struggled to book a dance tour for his wife, Jean Erdman, a well-known artist of modern dance.
For the first three months of his journey, Campbell is so affected by culture shock that he is practically incapacitated. Although he had traveled widely in Europe, from the descriptions in these journals, he had no experience traveling in the Third World. He had a most un-adventurous palate, so he ate European food where it was available, and then complained mightily about its quality. His attitudes towards hotels and service were inflexible, and he seemed to lack the sense of humor and ability to let things slide that are essential for dealing with a culture that is completely alien to one's own. He is strongly patriotic and greatly dismayed by Indian criticisms of his own country.
The extent of his ignorance concerning Indian art is illuminated by his reactions to Indian dance. At the first Indian dance recital he attended, he was outraged by the fact that only he and another Westerner found the performance at all interesting. But instead of trying to understand why the Indians in the audience were not impressed, he was simply outraged that they didn't react the way he did. At the next recital that he attended, he noted that the Indian members of the audience seemed to have a separate set of values for judging the performance than his own. As he became more familiar with the classical dance forms by attending a few lectures, he gradually began to develop an appreciation for the art. When his wife arrived and began her Western modern dance tour, he seemed to expect Indians to approach this foreign dance form in the same way that New Yorkers or Parisians might, forgetting or being entirely ignorant of the role of dance in Indian society and the different set of aesthetic values associated with dance.
Nonetheless, the notes presented here are fascinating because in them, we can see Campbell coming to terms with Indian culture. Whereas before this trip, he imagined India as drawn for him by Krishnamurti, Nikhilananda, and Zimmer, he finally begins to build his own understanding of the culture during this journey. This understanding is colored not only by his visits to temples and conversations with philosophers, but also by the mundane struggles to book his wife's dance tour.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Crucial for Understanding The Masks of God, January 28, 2010
"Baksheesh and Brahman" consists of diary entries chronicling Campbell's six month stay in India in 1954-55. The work is divided chronologically into three periods: The first two months are spent more or less in the company of Swami Nikhilananda and reach their climax when Campbell witnesses the great Durga Puja, as he meditated upon the theme of the Sacrifice that was so essential to his later works. During the following two months, he encountered in Bombay the art historian Alfred Salmony, who led him through a series of Buddhist and Hindu temple caves. Finally, Campbell's wife, Jean Erdman toured the country with her popular dances, performances that led him through a labyrinth of artistic circles.
What will most surprise readers familiar with Campbell's veneration of Eastern wisdom is his disillusionment with its modern culture. By 1954, Campbell had become so saturated with Indian culture that, as he would later say, he practically felt like an Indian. Until he actually visited the country: "Nothing is quite as good as the India I invented at Waverly Place, in New York," he wrote to Jean. Campbell claims early on in the diaries that he had come to India seeking spiritual instruction, or at least confirmation of his own interpretations of its philosophy, but that he had found only politics instead. "We are witnessing the birth of a new, patriotically oriented religiosity," he wrote.
We must recall that India, during the period of Campbell's visit, was undergoing a crucial epoch of transformation. The British had been chased out by Gandhi scarcely ten years before Campbell arrived there, leaving the country in a condition somewhat analogous to that of a drug addict who has recently broken the habit, but still suffers withdrawal. India, that is, had become so used to outside aid that it could not quite resist the temptations of American machines and goods.
Campbell perceived the larger pattern of political and economic dependence repeating itself in microcosm in the form of beggars, fake sadhus, and other con-artists persistently attempting to swindle him. Their incessants cries for hand-outs--"baksheesh! baksheesh!"--leads Campbell to identify the larger political pattern with the smaller sociological one. His term for the whole pathology is The Baksheesh Complex, i.e. something for nothing.
Furthermore, the sophisticated metaphysics of classical Indian culture which he studied earlier was by then all but extinct. Instead, classical Indian religiosity in its more refined forms--as articulated by Vyasa, Nagarjuna, Bodhidharma--had been degraded, even by its professed gurus (including Nikhilananda) to the level of mere bhakti, the way of devotion to a god or person in the form of mere worship. Such a mode of religiosity was all too common in the West, and Campbell had come to India to get beyond it, but what he found disappointed him.
"The clue to the Indian psychology of 'spiritual superiority,'" he writes, "is supplied by Nikhilananda's statement that Vivekananda was a proud man and did not wish to receive something for nothing: he saw that India required the machinery and organizations of the West. He therefore determined to give the West the spiritual goods of India in return. The fact was, however, that the West did not need these 'spiritual' goods as badly as the Orient needed the West's 'material' goods; also, that the Oriental spiritual gift was not quite as great as Vivekananda had to pretend to himself to bolster his pride. The pattern has been to pretend that the West is without native spiritual fare, so that the exchange will seem to the Indians themselves to be a fair one."
On the other hand, India's spirituality was far too complex for Campbell to dismiss it altogether. Recognizing a general environment of reverence for all things sacred with a mode of ubiquitous spirituality absent from the West since the Middle Ages, he tells of an episode wherein he witnessed an Indian waiter touch with reverence the shoes of a man sitting quietly by himself reading the Upanishads. "It was precisely the kind of reverence brought to the feet of the swamis," Campbell writes. "I think there is something here that can hardly be matched by anything known to me in the West. No effort was made to touch the feet of the chap reading V. Gordon Childe."
The value of Oriental thought and life ideals to the West has been much debated by Western thinkers. Campbell's narrative descriptions of his outward social experiences are counterbalanced by his reflections on the nature of this valuation. "The Oriental psyche," he writes, "is structured so differently from that of the West...that the guidance of an Oriental guru cannot but mislead the Westerner...we cannot yet speak therefore of the Orient having something very important to teach us."
The central revelation to Campbell during his travels in India was that the structure of the Oriental psyche is based on completely different first principles than those of Occidentals, and what those axioms make possible for Hindu culture, such as yoga, reincarnation and karma, cannot produce similar results in our own. Likewise, the postulates of our own physics--the laws of motion, the calculus, universal gravitation--make possible the proficiency with which we are able to make and produce machines.
Campbell insists that the Indian concept of the psyche lacks the critical, judgmental function that mediates between the Freudian id and superego. In India, there is only the "I want" and the "Thou Shalt,"; there exists no "I think" or "I object." Consequently, Campbell sums up the differences in outlook: "Every instant of traditional Oriental life is one of sati, wherein the claims of the individual personality are immolated." For the Westerner, on the other hand, "Every moment...is one of personal decision, wherein a consciously considered choice is made: the individual takes upon himself the responsibility and does not assign it simply to his dharma."
Culture forms which result directly from these contrasting ideas of the psyche are the Western tragic drama, on the one hand, and the idea of reincarnation on the other. Their concepts of destiny (one unfolding from out of the individual will, the other from the impersonal Will of the cosmos) are mutually incompatible (no matter what Ken Wilber tries to get you to believe).
The climax of the book comes when Campbell finally visits a sophisticated holy man, Shri Krishna Menon of Trivandrum. Seated before him, Campbell asks: "Since all is Brahman, all is the divine radiance, how can we say 'no' to ignorance or brutality or anything?" Shri Krishna's answer: "For you and me, we must say 'yes.'"
Though Campbell vows in these diaries "never to speak or write again for India," his love for its culture and wisdom did not end with his journey there in 1954. What Campbell admired about India was the refined teachings of its classical period. Indeed, Campbell's experience with modern India and its political insecurities, poverty, and impersonality, turned him away from the culture as a whole only for a while. Campbell did find much to admire in India during his stay there, after all: the beauties of its ancient, crumbling temples; the sophistication of its elegant cultural elite; its beautiful dancers and musicians.
I pointed out that Campbell insisted that the West had nothing to learn from the East. Later on, however, when asked about the positive value of what we could learn from the East, he spoke from a more matured viewpoint: "I would define the great value of the Oriental instruction for us as this: the translation of mythological symbols into psychological references. We have read our own mythological symbols as historical references...The same symbols come to us from the Orient, however, read as having a psychological reference, representing powers within the human spirit...which are to be developed and which can be evoked by contemplation and meditation on appropriate symbolic forms. The symbols then point to things that are in ourselves. This is what the Orient is telling us."
--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion."
--SEE ALSO MY LECTURE ON CAMPBELL ON YOU TUBE
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
