Buddhist Pantheism, according to Hegel

"It is a sad thing to think that nature speaks and that mankind does not listen." — Victor Hugo

Hegel writes in The Philosophy of History: "The lama, among the Buddhists of Tibet, is the intermediary between God and the people. Thus, God watches over the people. This is closely related to pantheism in general. However, it is not the Indian pantheism, in which all mountains, all rivers, all Brahmanas are divine, so that Brahma* is immediately present in them. In contrast, in the Lamaist cult, the unbridled and limitless pantheism has gathered itself into the One. These peoples distinguish themselves from the Indians in general by their superior state of freedom. They recognize themselves in God, since they conceive of Him as a man, and they have a friendly intuition of their God; thus, they have attained a freer God." **

Hegel does not compare based on social or political facts but rather according to his own analysis of the situation, filtered through his own values. This approach is still practiced today.

According to the French values I grew up with —and those of Western countries— democracy is a form of government that aspires to an ideal political system where liberty, equality, and fraternity are offered to all, even to foreigners. These values were something to be proud of. In the 1970s, China and the USSR —and before them, Nazism and fascism— made our democracies seem all the more desirable, reflecting a deep-seated hope for humanity in which peaceful coexistence and love would be the ultimate fruit.

Today, however, our national leaders, intellectuals, and military officials declare with passion and repetition that Ukraine and Israel are democracies... The pedagogical reasoning they seek to instill in us is that Ukrainians and Israelis are more civilized than Russians, Chinese, Iranians, or Arab-Muslims in general. It is this self-centered ideology that leads Hegel to claim, despite opposite reality, that Buddhist pantheism offers more freedom to its people than the pantheism of the Indians.

In practice, this kind of thinking led to Jean-Paul Sartre traveling to the USSR or Simone de Beauvoir visiting China, and upon returning from these totalitarian states, they both declared —bolstered by the full weight of their philosophical and analytical expertise— that they had loved their trip and what they saw there.

"Freer than the God of the Hindus"?

At this stage of his incursion into the religions of India, despite having written extensively on the subject, Hegel does not seem to have taken into account the teachings of the Bhagavad-gita, in which Krishna, God, is magnificently depicted in a human form —and this, long before Buddhism.

We do know, however, that Hegel gave a lecture in which he refined a critique of the Bhagavad-gita. Yet here, he does not acknowledge it, and his position contains two errors: first, according to Hindu scriptures, God did indeed descend to earth in human form as Krishna; and second, Krishna appeared before Buddha!

Even today, this false idea —that Buddha predates Krishna— is still propagated, particularly by specialists in ancient literature and religions.

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* He likely meant Brahman.

** P. 294 (Éd. Le livre de poche)Buddhist Pantheism, according to Hegel.