Nicolas Bommarito has just published some of notes on Hinduism of the French philosopher
Simone Weil (1909–1943, pictured) as
Dharma and Detachment: Writings on Indian and Tibetan Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2026). In a review of this book,
Sunny Kumar notes “During her exile in Marseille in 1940, she [Weil] was introduced to the Gita by
René Daumal, an Indologist. On Daumal’s suggestion, she also read
René Guénon. Daumal’s and Guénon’s influence can be discerned in Weil’s reading of the Gita and other Hindu texts.” This seems to be Kumar’s own view, as Guénon is not mentioned by Bommarito. Daumal certainly knew and valued Guénon’s works, so Kumar is probably right. The review can be read in the
Journal of Hindu Studies (2026)
here.
4 comments:
Thanks again dear Pr. sedgwick for your excellent studies on traditionalism.
This article is short and It would be interesting to know if Simone Weil really read Guénon's books and what were the ones she read.
About René Daumal his views on "hindouism" can not be seen very accurate: he did what he could with the tools he had. His point of view was the official brahmanic version. Daumal followed a while Ravi Shankar when he came in France before the war if I remember well.
About many false ideas about "hindouism" I suggest a very interesting book written by Guy Deleury "L'Inde continent rebelle", which really sweeps away a lot of clichés about the fantasmatic ideas on India. Even if Guénon had the great merits to put in pieces some false ideas on this topic, he idealized other things.
Deleury wrote about the "élucubrations" of Guénon. The term is rather hard but it's anyway true that the reality of India is a bit far from the "jardin à la Française" that one can have after reading Guénon's books and articles.
For me the most astonishing thing was that Guénon considered Coomaraswamy as an authority on these matters. Not to mention Coomaraswamy bizarre (to say the least) connections with Crowley, the Boston scholar could not be seen as impartial; in fact I think he put a lot of Guénon's conceptions in his works. When he seemed to contest the master it was to draw Bouddhism into a sort of expansive Hindouism, pretending that the non existence of any "atma" was in fact a misunderstanding. I guess it was a sort of attempt to save Guénon from the absurd theory of a entirely "heretic" buddhism. Walpola Rahula in his book "The teachings of the Bouddha" - in his preface- is very severe with Ananda Coomaraswamy.
For the anecdot I join this curious interview of Rama Coomaraswamy 's son, Rama, who depicts Guénon's house in Cairo, full of the noise of a blasting radio. Very curious.
https://www.svabhinava.org/friends/JoaquinAlbaicin/RamaCoom-english-frame.php
PS: I just made a mistake: that's Môhan Wijayaratna in his book "Les Entretiens du Bouddha" who criticizes Coomaraswamy.
PS 2: I must made another little correction: Guy Deleury, on page 172 of the book I've mentioned, tells that Daumal intended a concert by Uday Shankar (brother of Ravi) in 1931 and followed the band for a while.
Deleury quotes Daumal; " I felt I was in a dream, as dreaming of a very antique country made of men more wise and more beautiful, of a golden age"...
In fact contrary of what remained in my memory, Deleury tells that Daumal had a certain distance (as least in a part) from the strict brahmanic views of Guénon.
Then Daumal saw the Hindouist genius as a sort of genius of the whole people , a mixing of Aryan and Dravidian ethnies, even against the will of the Brahman to preserve their privileges.But in another quotation Daumal tells however of the "more civilzed art of the Aryans".
Deleury writes this remarkable sentence: "It was a disoriented era that sought in that past a way to escape its present. Some people fell into the habit of making India says what they wanted to hear, rather than listening to what India had to say for itself."
Deleury however claims about Daumal : "What an admirable independent mind for an admirer of Guénon and a reader of the sanskritists of the time...But he lost his temporay independence when he fells under the claws of the sinister Gurdjeff"...
In a way I think that Daumal was, as Antonin Artaud, a poet whose mind was too "artistic" to fully fits into Guénon's concepts. When an "artistic" mind tries to practice ( as a painter painting or a musician playing) Guénon's views it can unfortunately lead to Schuon 's syncretist madness.
"Dieu ne peut être présent dans la création que sous la forme d'absence."
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce (1947)
"God can only be present in creation under the form of absence."
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (translation by Emma Crawford)
This resonates deeply with Guénon’s distinction in Les états multiples de l’être (Ch. III, “L’Être et le Non-Être”), where the principle of manifestation (Être/Being) is necessarily limited, while the Infinite (total Possibility) belongs to the Non-Être (Non-Being). Creation thus implies the “absence” of the full transcendent reality, an intriguing point of convergence with Weil, likely mediated by Daumal.
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