... Karmayogin Passing Thoughts Vedantic Art The progress a new tendency or a new movement is making can be measured by the amount of opposition it meets, and it is encouraging to note that the revival of Indian Art is exciting intellectual opponents to adverse criticism. Mr. Vincent Smith, a solid and well-equipped scholar and historian but not hitherto... hitherto noted as an art-critic, recently lectured on Indian Art, ancient and modern. It is not surprising that he should find little to praise in the characteristic Vedantic Art of our country and seek to limit its excellence to a few masterpieces. Neither is it surprising that he should object to the revival of the national traditions as restoring Brahminic separateness from the traditions of the rest... Truth reveal itself in form, such as will ensure its conquest of prejudices based purely on inability to receive or welcome new impressions. The answer to that crucial question cannot be doubtful. Vedantic Art reveals spirit, essential truth, the soul in the body, the lasting type or idea in the mutable form with a power and masterly revelation of which European art is incapable. It is therefore sure ...
... intuitions in art started from the same power, but the surrounding or subordinate mental operations were of a different character and colour. And in art itself there are different kinds of intuition. Shakespeare's seeing of life differs in its character and aims from Balzac's or Ibsen's, but the essential part of the process, that which makes it intuitive, is the same. The Buddhistic, the Vedantic seeing... ordinarily, place this mind before anything ancient, Hindu, Buddhistic or Vedantic in art and it looks at it with a blank or an angry incomprehension. It looks for the sense and does not find any, because either it has not in itself the experience and finds it difficult to have the imagination, much more the realisation of what this art does really mean and express, or because it insists on looking for what... have rejected a certain Vedantic intuition, since Buddha neither accepted nor rejected, but simply refused at all to speculate on the supreme cause. His intuition was confined to the cause of sorrow and the impermanence of things and the release by extinction of ego, desire and Sanskara, and so far as he chose to go, his intuition of this extinction, Nirvana, and the Vedantic intuition of the supreme ...
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