Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Quotes

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we arc in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.

~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.

~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Those who think of their house as only a ‘machine to live in’ should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.

~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy