Page:Life and Teachings of Sri Ramanujacharya.djvu/9

 Author. -(with rising anger) Enough ! What care I about your coins and inscriptions, your pillars and mounds, the dry bones of History. To me it is of far more im- portance how a man lived and worked among his fellows, than when and where he was born and died ; where he was at a particular date ; when he wrote such and such a book; whether he was tall or short, dark or fair, single or married, a flesh-eater or a vegetarian, a teetotaller or no ; what particular dress he affected, and so on. And yet, more important still it is to me what a man thought and wrote, than how he lived and died. Your Orientalists ! Heaven save me from the brood. Mischief enough they have done, those human ghouls that haunt the charnel-houses of Antiquity, where rot the bones of men and events of the Dead Past. They have played sad havoc with the fair traditions of our fore- fathers, that placed ideas before facts and theories, and the development of a nation’s heart before ‘ historical finds ’ or ‘ valuable discoveries.’ Many a young man of promise they have turned awa) to paths uncongenial, where his bray betrays the animal within the skin. You will find no such antiquarian twaddle in my book* But yet, when I come to think of it, I too have thrown a sop to the Orientalist Cerberus ; I too have burnt incense to strange gods and lit a candle at the altar of the Prince of Darkness— -I mean my notes and the comparative references therein.

Narada, — {taken aback) But the sources of information —

Author. — {impatiently) Come now ; have done with your blessed sources. Trot them out, I say.

N&rada.— {brightening up) Of course the Visishtdwaita Catechism is your sheet-anchor.