The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-historySpengler, Oswald
History
The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-history
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
The historian who is intent upon establishing causal series counts
only the influences that are present, and the other side of the
reckoning--those that are not--does not appear. With the psychology of
the “positive” influences is associated that of the “negative.” This
is a domain into which no one has yet ventured, but here, if anywhere,
there are fruits to be reaped, and it must be tackled unless the answer
to the whole question is to be left indeterminate; for if we try to
evade it, we are driven into illusory visions of world-historical
happening as a continuous process in which everything is properly
accounted for. Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man
of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as
presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the
man himself. The closed-off act of A can be vivified by B only out of
his own being, and _eo ipso_ it becomes B’s, his inward property, his
work, and part of himself. There was no movement of “Buddhism” from
India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists’
store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who
fashioned out a _new_ mode of religious expression having meaning for
Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases
is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves,
as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the
observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not
transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own
spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and
Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as
far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol--but
two different souls, each going its own way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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