INTRODUCTION

Dialogues with the Guru is a two-voiced meditation on the attainment of deliverance in accordance with the purest Vedantic orthodoxy. In virtue of his ancestry as well as of his training in the Sastras, the author, R. Krishnaswami Aiyar, has made a faithful and judicious interpreter of the teaching of Sri Sankara’s school. His aim is that the authentic truth shall not be forgotten in that territory where the Guru of gurus gave it form.

In the past, as in the present, gurus to comment the venerated texts have assuredly never been wanting. But here it is a question of showing how the highest truth can serve us in practical life, and how the concrete and multiple difficulties of the modern man, private and professional alike, are to be overcome by a wisdom which is not only classical but indeed immutable.

True in the absolute, Vedanta is no less so at the temporal level. Resolving abstract problems, it must correspondingly solve all the points of conscience that line the path of a man or woman from birth till death. Eternity is contemporary with all ages. And orthodoxy is presented here in terms of an integral ‘eternalism’—an adequate presentation of the immutable truth as the condition of salvation, of deliverance, for all beings.

This manual, which places the purest traditional knowledge within the grasp of the most modern Hindu, should also be a matter of keen interest to India’s Western friends, for it is dissemination of this kind alone that can prevent its civilization, with its so rich past and so rich future, from foundering in a chaotic humanism. May Sanatana Dharma guarantee the ever-livingness of the Indian soul ! PAUL MASSON-OURSEL Sorbonne, Paris