The Alchemy of Happiness — trans. Claud Field (1910)
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
The translator’s English as printed (Claud Field). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
WISDOM OF THE EAST
THE ALCHEMY OF
HAPPINESS
BY AL GHAZZALI
TRANSLATED FROM THE HINDUSTANI
BY CLAUD FIELD
"Knowledge of a part is better than ignorance of the whole" (Abu'l Feda)
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
p. 1910
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface 7
Introduction 17
CHAP.
I. The Knowledge of Self 19
II. The Knowledge of God 31
III. The Knowledge of this World 43
IV. The Knowledge of the Next World 51
V. Concerning Music and Dancing as Aids to the Religious Life 64
VI. Concerning Self-examination and the Recollection of God 75
VII. Marriage as a Help or Hindrance to the Religious Life 87
VIII. The Love of God 100
EDITORIAL NOTE
The object of the Editors of this series is a very definite one. They desire above all things that, in their humble way, these books shall be the ambassadors of good-will and understanding between East and West—the old world of Thought and the new of Action. In this endeavour, and in their own sphere, they are but followers of the highest example in the land. They are confident that a deeper knowledge of the great ideals and lofty philosophy of Oriental thought may help to a revival of that true spirit of Charity which neither despises nor fears the nations of another creed and colour. Finally, in thanking press and public for the very cordial reception given to the "Wisdom of the East" Series, they wish to state that no pains have been spared to secure the best specialists for the treatment of the various subjects at hand.
L. CRANMER-BYNG.
S. A. KAPADIA.
Northbrook Society,
185 Piccadilly, W.
EDITORIAL NOTE
The object of the Editors of this series is a very definite one. They desire above all things that, in their humble way, these books shall be the ambassadors of good-will and understanding between East and West—the old world of Thought and the new of Action. In this endeavour, and in their own sphere, they are but followers of the highest example in the land. They are confident that a deeper knowledge of the great ideals and lofty philosophy of Oriental thought may help to a revival of that true spirit of Charity which neither despises nor fears the nations of another creed and colour. Finally, in thanking press and public for the very cordial reception given to the "Wisdom of the East" Series, they wish to state that no pains have been spared to secure the best specialists for the treatment of the various subjects at hand.
L. CRANMER-BYNG.
S. A. KAPADIA.
Northbrook Society,
185 Piccadilly, W.
PREFACE
Renan, whose easy-going mind was the exact antithesis to the intense earnestness of Ghazzali, calls him "the most original mind among Arabian philosophers." Notwithstanding this, his fame as a philosopher has been greatly overshadowed by Avicenna, his predecessor, and Averroes, his successor and opponent. It is a significant fact that the Encyclopædia Britannica devotes five columns to each of the others and only a column and a half to Ghazzali. Yet it is doubtful whether it is as a philosopher that be would have wished to be chiefly remembered. Several of his works, it is true, are polemics against the philosophers, especially his Tehafot-al-falasifa, or "Destruction of the Philosophers," and, as Solomon Munk says in his Mélanges de philosophie Juive et Arabe, Ghazzali dealt "a fatal blow" to Arabian philosophy in the East, from which it never recovered, though it revived for a while in Spain and culminated in Averroes. Philosopher and sceptic as he was by nature, Ghazzali's chief work was that of a theologian, moralist, and mystic, though his mysticism was strongly balanced by common sense. He had, as he tells us in his Confessions, experienced "conversion"; God had arrested him "on the edge of the fire," and thenceforth what Browning says of the French poet, René Gentilhomme, was true of him:
Human praises scare
Rather than soothe ears all a-tingle yet
With tones few hear and live, and none forget.
In the same work he tells us that one of his besetting weaknesses had been the craving for applause, and in his Ihya-ul-ulum ("Revival of the Religious Sciences") he devotes a long chapter to the dangers involved in a love of notoriety and the cure for it.