In his famed 1945 essay, The Yogi and the Commissar, Author Arthur Koestler contrasted their ways of coping with the world—the commissar trying to change his environment, the yogi trying to change himself. Having qualified as an expert on the commissar's way of doing things (he resigned from the Communist Party in 1938), Hungarian-born Author Koestler, 55, journeyed to India and Japan last year to investigate the yogi's. He came back with a cargo of provocative conclusions that are causing controversy in Britain around his new book, The Lotus and the Robot, to be published in the U.S. next spring. His main conclusion runs counter to longstanding, if vague, Western intellectual belief in the East's great spiritual superiority. Says Koestler: "To look at Asia for mystic enlightenment and spiritual guidance has become as much an anachronism as to think of America as the Wild West."
Giggling & Mysticism. Barrister Christmas Humphreys, longtime head of the British Buddhist Society, counters that Koestler cannot talk about Zen from the outside as if it were a religion or a philosophy, when it is nothing less than enlightenment. Critic Cyril Connolly, while praising the book, suggests that Koestler has the "metaphysical shortcoming" of not being able temperamentally to deny the existence of the physical world. But Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung surprisingly praises Koestler's "needful act of debunking, for which he deserves our gratitude."
Author Koestler, born a Jew but now a "seeker after truth" without religious affiliation, reports: "I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European." He descended from his plane into the fetid air of Bombay—"I had the sensation that a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head"—and picked his way through a series of visits with what he calls "contemporary saints." There was white-bearded Vinoba Bhave, marching through India in tennis shoes, seven days a week, year after year, persuading the rich to give their land to the poor. Koestler rather admired him, but doubted his final effectiveness. When the fervid hordes who follow him got out of hand, Koestler observed, Bhave "gave an astonishing display of saintmanship," zigzagging through the crowd at a trot, pushing and shoving them into awed order.
Mystic Krishna Menon (no kin to India's Foreign Minister) distressed Koestler with his custom of inviting his followers to reap the spiritual benefits of listening to "the bathroom noises of the Swami's morning toilet." Anandamayee Ma was nearly 63, but she looked like "a gypsy beauty in her forties." She played constantly with her beautiful toes, and disconcerted Koestler by giggling and writhing while she delivered her spiritual wisdom to a rapt audience.