Word: hindus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reincarnation, the individual soul is born into the natural form which is appropriate to its age. The Indians recognized a hierarchy of spiritual age among men which had no relation to the physical or chronological age of a man's body. Unlike the Buddhists, the Hindus attempted to order society on this principle through a rigid hierarchy of hereditary classes. A youngster of the Brahman class -- on top of the social ladder -- was therefore older, in spirit, than an aged man of a lower class. In theory, an intellectual and spiritual aristocracy ruled Hindu society...
...Buddhists thought of beauty and personal love not only as evanescent feelings of the outward path -- as the Hindus saw them -- but as snares to be avoided. The Buddhists considered artists lowly people not even to be admitted to the ceremony of offering to the dead...
...Hindus never forgot that art was part of life, the field of holy Pursuit and Return. Yet the early Hindus, at best, saw the artist as a courtesan who made his occupation the knowledge and fulfillment of sensual pleasure...
...Both Hindus and Buddhists placed great value on the strict discipline of Yoga and they soon recognized that the concentration of the artists was very similar. Those who practice Yoga concentrate on an object until they can overlook the distinction between themselves and the object they are contemplating. Through this concentration a man reputedly achieved a harmony or unity of consciousness...
...both the viewer and the artist are swept into total involvement with the subject matter. The art attempts to stimulate a complete fusion of idenity between the viewer or artist and the subject of the work itself. Hindus believed that all knowledge was directly accessible to the concentrated and "one-pointed" mind without the direct intervention of the senses...