India' s Priceless Heritage (An Old and Rare Book)

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Shri Nani A. Palkhivala has earned a name for himself in his professional field of law and jurisprudence. But he has understood the dis tinction made by psychologist Carl Jung of Zurich between achievement, on the one hand, and culture or personality, on the other, or as our Vedanta expresses it, between function, on the one hand, and being, on the other. And Jung warns that he who carries over to the second half of human life the philosophy of the first half, namely, achievement -all that constitutes worldly success-and makes that second half "merely a pitiful appendage of life's morning", must pay a heavy price for doing so with damage to the soul, with diminution of personality, with inner poverty of spirit. For, "money-making, social existence, family, and posterity are nothing but plain nature-not culture. Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature." And there is a human growth beyond the purposes of plain nature; this is the spiritual nature of man, the manifestation of the para prakrti, or higher nature, as the Gita expresses it in its eighth chapter. This spiritual growth is the privilege and opportunity of every human being; and India has developed the science and technique of it to perfection.

The reader of this little book by Shri Palkhi-vala will get a glimpse into this science and technique, into this supreme science and technique, para vidya, as our Mundaka Upanishad describes it. And very aptly the book has been titled "India's Priceless Heritage". And the reader will not fail to be impressed that the writer writes from conviction, and not from scholar-ship, not like the spoon that serves the soup not knowing its taste itself!

Since our political independence, many of our people exhibit life, action, and behaviour which clearly show their poverty and distortion of soul in their mad rush in the field of worldly achievement; they function like foul swampy canals cut off from nourishment from the flowing Ganga, and they, in spite of their so-called education, accordingly, have become a problem to themselves and a problem to the nation. They need to connect themselves with the ever-flowing Ganga of their nation's spiritual and cultural inspiration. Shri Palkhivala compares all such to "a donkey carrying a sack of gold-the donkey does not know what it is carrying, but is content to go along with the load on its back".