Immutable India
Octavio Paz, Mexico's Nobel-Winning Poet, was that Country's Ambassador
to India until he resigned in 1968 to protest the Mexican government's massacre
of protesting students at Tlatelolco Plaza.
His reflections here are excerpted from his just published
memoirs, In Light of India (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1997). Use
with Permission.
Mexico City - In the West, since the end of the
18th century, change has been overvalued. Traditional India, like the
old European societies, prized immutability. For the Indian philosophical
tradition, whether Buddhist or Hindu, impermanence is one of the signs
of the imperfection of human beings and of al living things. Even the
gods themselves are subject to the fatal law of change. On of the values
of caste, for traditional Hindu thinking, was precisely its resistance
to change. The center of the caste system. I repeat, is religious: the
notion of purity. Purity depends, in turn, on the belief in karma: We
are responsible for our past lives. Caste is one of the links in the chain
of births and rebirths that makes up existence, a chain of which all living
things are part. Brahmans and Kshatriyas are superior because they have
been born as humans at least twice. They have already traveled part of
the way on the difficult road of births and deaths.
back to index
|
