From Marco Polo, the legendary first visitor to China from the West, to the Indian pop guru Baghwan, Elmar Schenkel has a dazzling array of personalities dancing, who are inspired by the lively, sometimes surprising, sometimes disconcerting, but always highly interesting and enlightening exchange between the Far East and the Occident procreate. In three major chapters – India, China, Japan – Schenkel, born in 1953 and emeritus English scholar from the University of Leipzig, collects portrait sketches that demonstrate how intertwined Far Eastern thought and action in religion and mythology are with Western traditions of thought and belief.
But that’s not all, because not only real encounters play a role, but also projections, dreams and illusions. One thinks of the enchanted Shangri-La, hidden somewhere in the Himalayas in Tibet and untraceable for the mere mortal like the grail castle of Montsalvatsch once was in the medieval occident. Or that wonderful place of Xanadu, where Kublai Khan had a domed palace built, as it says in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem fragment, the allegedly first poem written under the influence of drugs: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree”.
The most influential Indologists have never set foot in the land of their yearning – and probably didn’t want to either
The effect of such healing places, reaching up to the present day, where wisdom and peace, prosperity and happiness are assured to the people who live there, if they renounce all those material and selfish pursuits that harden heart and mind. In any case, Schenkel’s portraits become a varied and contradictory West-Eastern gallery of images, which makes one want to read more about them.
The biographies of the two Indologists Max Müller (1823-1900) and Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943) show the dreams that India alone triggered in the minds of German poets and thinkers. Müller, son of the “Winterreise” poet Wilhelm Müller, who was a great connoisseur of Greek without ever having been to Greece, became the first and most important translator from Sanskrit and other ancient Asian languages. Based on his extensive knowledge of ancient India, he developed the scientific concept of comparative religious studies and comparative mythology and was the first to hold the new chair for comparative literature at the University of Oxford.
Elmar Schenkel: On the way to Xanadu – Encounters between East and West. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2021. 368 pages, 26 euros.
Max Müller, on the other hand, is still one of the portal figures of Indian research for Indologists and also in India itself – Goethe Institutes are often referred to as “Max Mueller Bhavan” in India – he was forgotten in the German-speaking world after his death. The term “Aryan”, a word from Sanskrit, goes back to him, although he only related it to his research into the relevant language family. Müller protested energetically that others then turned it into a concept of racism with horrific consequences. It is against all logic to equate language families with physical race or descent.
In this dark context, Schenkel also traces the life of the monstrous Nazi supporter Savitri Devi, who fanatically believed in Hitler, the swastika and the victory of the Aryans, tirelessly met old and neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers: Born in France, she is always in relevant circles still known.
The great India researcher Max Müller was never even in India. Heinrich Zimmer, also an Indologist with great after-effects to this day, never set foot in the land of his longing and probably didn’t want to, lest he be woken up from his romantic dreams of an all-wise, ancient culture by the harsh reality of Indian life.
Schenkel also investigates the fatal myth of the “Yellow Peril”.
Indian gurus, swamis and yogis were always admired when they came to the west. Like Vivekananda at the Conference of World Religions in Chicago in 1893 or Rabindranath Tagore, the first Indian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, on his world travels, which also brought him together with Albert Einstein, they caused a sensation with their outstanding education and great speeches on peace and wisdom. You became famous as a teacher beatles like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Or, as propagandists of non-violence like Mahatma Gandhi, they continue to inspire Western civil rights movements to this day. The magic of India also had a lasting effect on Rudolf Steiner, Hermann Hesse and CG Jung.
The China chapter then begins with the pilgrimage of the Uyghur monk Rabban Bar Sauma to Rome. The journey will take about ten years. Previously, Nestorian Christians, condemned as heretics at the Council of Ephesus in 431, had evaded as far as Sumatra. The great admirer of China, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, makes an appearance, and Schenkel investigates the fatal myth of the “Yellow Peril”, which was then transferred to Japan with the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Finally, in the last chapter, Japan turns out to be the most distant culture. Much remains mysterious: the strictness and “purity” of Zen Buddhism, the concentration of haiku poems or the colorfulness and poetry of Japonism, i.e. the Japanese fashion, art, music and literature that emerged particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under the impression of the famous woodcuts by Hokusei and others, think of Claude Debussy’s “La mer” or Van Gogh’s fascination with Japan. For their part, however, the Japanese took the initiative after the Second World War, not only getting to know the West but also being inspired by its strengths. Western philosophers and researchers such as Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, on the other hand – like many of their predecessors – continue to seek foreign things in the country. Mystery cultural exchange.