Notes toward a pragmatic "Perennial Philosophy" (part 2): Not just fruits, but roots, too

In the same edition of the Bhagavad-Gita that I cited in the previous post, Aldous Huxley’s Introduction is immediately followed by a short essay, presumably authored by the text’s translators, Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. It’s fair to assume that it represents the views of the Vedanta Society that sponsored the translation in 1944. The essay provides a summary of the Mahabharata, explaining where and why the Gita is situated within that massive epic, and it would scarcely merit comment except for one throwaway paragraph that appears in it. The opinion it expresses seems quite offhand, as if the idea should be self-evident to any intelligent reader. Before I get to that, however, permit me to expand on something I said in the previous post. There I said that any pragmatic Perennial Philosophy must take seriously the divergences as well as the convergences of the various traditional “spiritual paths” and their stated final aims. Likewise, I would append that it must take seriously those different paths’ origins, meaning thereby each tradition’s particular understanding of its own identity and – as part of that – the unique identity of its founder(s), assuming it has any that can be identified. It must accept, too, that different communities, while remaining respectful of one another, should acknowledge the irreducible differences between them, and not confuse a healthily inclined philosophia perennis with some view to achieving an ersatz “syncretism.” For a tradition to sacrifice aspects of its identity would simply mean the end of that tradition, not a broadening of it. It would become something else, not itself, and its valuable content would be dissipated. Syncretism spells the death of what is truly perennial, which by its nature is indefinable.