An invasion of peace

To quote Sri Aurobindo, the great sage and nationalist leader, in his Foundation of Indian Culture:

'At no time does India seem to have been moved towards an aggressive military and political expansion beyond her own borders, no epic of world dominion, no great tale of far-borne invasion or expanding colonial empire has ever been written in the tale of Indian achievement. The sole great endeavour of expansion, of conquest, of invasion she attempted was the expansion of her culture, the invasion and conquest of the eastern world by the Buddhistic idea and the penetration of her spirituality, art and thought-forces. And this was an invasion of peace and not of war, for to spread a spiritual civilisation by force and physical conquest, the vaunt or the excuse of modern imperialism, would have been uncongenial to the ancient cast of her mind and temperament and the idea underlying her Dharma.'

The Rishi and poet Sri Aurobindo in 1949, wrote in his Postscript to The ideal of Human Unity:

In Asia a more perilous situation has arisen, standing sharply across the way to any possibility of a continental unity of the peoples of this part of the world, is the emergence of Communist China. This creates a gigantic bloc which could easily engulf the whole of Northern Asia in a combination between two enormous Communist Powers, Russia and China, and would overshadow with a threat of absorption south-western Asia and Tibet and might be pushed to overrun all up to the whole frontier of India, menacing her security and that of Western Asia with the possibility of an invasion and an over-running and subjection by penetration or even by overwhelming military force to an unwanted ideology, political and social institutions and dominance of this militant mass of Communism whose push might easily prove irresistible.

Claude Arpi is a French dentist tuned Tibetologist living in India. He is also the author of 'The Fate of Tibet' and an advisor to Friends of Tibet (INDIA) Posted by Vinayagam Dharmasivam at 2:11 AM at 2:15 AM