This philosophical meditation, which deals with death as question, presence, and even teacher, begins with Ramchandra Gandhi’s penetrating essay ‘On Meriting Death.’ What does it mean ‘to merit’ death? To provide an answer, I travel through RCG’s corpus, in dialog with contemporary theorists such as Sri Aurobindo, Daya Krishna, and Mukund Lath. RCG implies that the question about ‘meriting’ death, and life, is not and cannot be ‘personal’ or ‘isolated’. For X to die, is for his close and distant samāj (...) a matter of losing him and living without him. Hence meriting death, as also life, is a joint venture which involves deep understanding regarding non-isolation as the heart of the human situation. RCG’s creative thinking, or svarāj in ideas, reaches its peak when he dares to offer an answer of his own to the piercing question kim āścaryam, ‘what is amazing?’ raised in the Yakṣa-praśna episode of the Mahābhārata. For RCG, the heart of the matter is not the ‘ungraspability’ of one’s unavoidable death, or the perennial search for ‘permanence’ in vain, but our failure to perceive ‘that in the martyā which is amṛta,’ i.e., a sense of solidarity in the face of death, connecting ‘I and Thou,’ which he derives from the icchā mṛtyu of his grandfather, the famous Mahatma. (shrink)

Excerpt from Personas, Obras, Cosas Un cenobita con sayal del color de la tierra abre un portón; entramos. Dos hileras de cipre ses ensimismados con su follaje recio, de un verde casi negro, conducen a la íglesuca y al apo sento del capellán. En la sacristía se ven dos cua dros que figuran una antítesis dolorosa: es uno la imagen horrenda de una pobre ánima del purga torió ardiendo en llamas de ocre; en un rincón del lienzo está escrito: Alma (...) en pena. En el otro cuadro se lee: Alma en gracia; representa una mujer tan bella, con unos ojos tan azules, unos cabellos tan augustos y dorados y unos labios tan deleitosos, que a no hallamos tamaña altura so bre el nivel del mar y de los instintos, alguna in quietud nos sobrecogería. Luego conviene dejarse ir, lasa la voluntad, por el campo austero que se abre en derredor. Las ermitas están desparramadas en la cima, ocul tas en la espesura. Cada una tiene su huerto, largo de algunos pasos, ceñido por blanca tapia que se recala entre las chaparras y las higueras. Cada una tiene un ciprés y una espadaña. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)