A motley sheaf of sometimes-absorbing, sometimes-baffling spiritual stanzas.
Internal dialogue is the key to communing with the divine, according to this rapturous but often murky volume of mystical devotions.
Dash, an Indian psychiatrist, dispenses his philosophical teachings in a series of short, one- or two-paragraph prose poems that center on august, thematic figures. One figure is the ineffable Almighty, an entity of love and righteousness that subsumes the individual: “No act is mine; no thought is mine, and no name is mine, neither is any personification,” Dash writes. Another figure, almost as awesome but more down-to-earth, is the author’s mother, a being of “sanity and saintly love” who is “closer to [him] than each drop of blood in [his] arteries.” Dash evokes his mother in tenderly specific terms, departing from his usual abstract tone: “Before dawn she would clean the utensils left dirty from the previous night…giving me some cold rice and curry to eat…do[ing] aarti [, a Hindu ritual,] around a Tulsi plant.” Soon, a “Master” emerges to impart Buddhism-inflected philosophy—“Mind is just a function, and you can make it no mind”—to a vaguely Christ-like “son of the Lord…who is hungry, hunted and weeping.” Dash further elaborates on Yogic-Buddhist principles of happiness, enjoining readers to “attain the value of nothingness,” renounce worldly desires (“sexual and sensual urges are slavery, while celibacy is freedom”) and emulate his own inward meditative journey of “talking to self.” Dash’s loose, free-associational prose shifts through a number of registers, sometimes intimately prayerful, sometimes caustically prophetic—“I shall destroy the world of cruelty, dishonesty, and of massacre”—and includes sketchy stories reminiscent of Kahlil Gibran’s parables. However, the text strains for grand, cryptic pronouncements that often misfire (“In silence the human race slowly progresses towards the time zone, moving relentlessly”). At its best, however, Dash’s poetic imagery feels vivid and fresh: “This moment is like a child carrying a lit candle and progressing towards the church, like the silence of the blue sky in the summer afternoon.”
A motley sheaf of sometimes-absorbing, sometimes-baffling spiritual stanzas.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482801576
Page Count: 182
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
