Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński Read Free Book Online

sob.
    “I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t believe that I would return.”
    It was December 1956. People were still coming out of the gulags.

RABI SINGS THE UPANISHADS
    I ndia was my first encounter with otherness, the discovery of a new world. It was at the same time a great lesson in humility. Yes, the world teaches humility. I returned from this journey embarrassed by my own ignorance, at how ill read I was. I realized then what now seems obvious: a culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at a mere wave of my hand; one has to prepare oneself thoroughly and at length for such an encounter.
    My initial reaction to this lesson, and to the implied necessity of an enormous amount of work on my part, was to run back home, to return to places I knew, to my own language, to the world of already familiar signs and symbols. I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormity and diversity, its poverty and riches, its mystery and incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me. Once again I was glad to travel only around Poland, write about its people, talk to them, listen to what they had to say. We understood each other instantly, were united by common experience.
    But of course I remembered India. The more bitter the cold of the Polish winter, the more readily I thought of hot Kerala; the quicker darkness fell, the more vividly resurfaced images of Kashmir’s dazzling sunrises. The world was no longer uniformly cold and snowy, but had multiplied, become variegated: it wassimultaneously cold and hot, snowy white while also green and blooming.
    When I had free time (slivers only, as there was much work at the paper) and some spare change (unfortunately, an even rarer commodity), I searched for books about India. But my expeditions to ordinary bookstores and antiquarian dealers ended fruitlessly most often. In one used-book shop I found
Outlines of Indian Philosophy
, by Paul Deussen, published in 1907. Professor Deussen, a great German specialist on India and friend of Nietzsche’s, thus explained the essence of Hindu philosophy: “This world is mâyâ, is illusion … All is illusive, with one exception, with the exception of my own Self, of my Atman … [man] feels himself everything,—so he will not desire anything, for he has whatever can be had;—he feels himself everything,—so he will not injure anything, for nobody injures himself.”
    Deussen reproaches Europeans. “European idleness,” he complains, “tries to escape the study of Indian philosphy”—though perhaps “despair” is the more accurate motive since, in the course of four thousand years of uninterrupted development, this philosophy has evolved into a system so immense and immeasurable as to intimidate and paralyze all but the hardened daredevil and enthusiast. Furthermore, in Hinduism the sphere of the unfathomable is boundless, and the rich variety of what lies within it is characterized by the most bewildering, mutually contradictory, and stark contrasts. Everything here turns in the most natural way into its opposite, the boundaries between material things and mystical phenomena are fluid and fleeting, one becomes the other or, simply, eternally is the other; being is transformed into nothingness, disintegrates and metamorphoses into the cosmos, into a celestial omnipresence, into a divine way that disappears into the depths of bottomless nonbeing.
    There is an infinite number of gods, myths, and beliefs in Hinduism, hundreds of the most varied schools of thought, orientations, and tendencies, dozens of roads to salvation, paths of virtue, practices of purity, and rules of asceticism. The world of Hinduism is so great that it has space enough for everyone and everything, for mutual acceptance, tolerance, harmony, and unity. It is impossible to count all the holy books of Hinduism: one of them alone, the Mahabharata, numbers some 220,000 sixteen-syllable verses, which is eight