Octavio Paz served twice in the Mexican embassy in India. In 1951 when he was transferred from Paris to Mexico?s newly opened embassy in Delhi – apparently a punishment for his participation in events commemorating of the Spanish civil war the anniversary. He was transferred to Japan soon after.
He was sent back as Mexico?s Ambassador to India eleven years later when he was already well established as a poet. He stayed on until 1969 when he resigned his post in protest against Mexican government?s repression of the student uprising of Oct 1969.
His book – ?In Light of India? (written in 1993) is more a collection of essays on India than a memoir of his years there. But it benefits from the anecdotes of his years in India and the insights that he gained during his stay.
Paz has a searing intellect and breathtaking depth of knowledge on comparative literature, religion and history. He uses them to reach interesting and provocative conclusions.
In the concluding two chapters he compared the theological foundation of Eastern religious traditions with that of Judeo-Christian ones.
I do not entirely agree with his conclusions. I always felt that Hindus for a very long time have jived far more with the rituals of religion established at a much later time than with the abstract theological ideas established in the Vedic ages (we probably would have avoided a lot of grief otherwise). But irrespective of wheather you agree with him or not, his discursive journey through the intellectual history of Asia, Europe and native American traditions is a rich and stimulating read.
This is a book of personal impressions, sometimes a little disjointed and shallow, sometimes brilliant – but always engaging. Take for example the following extract:
?The difference between Hindu and Christian asceticism is even more marked than between their eroticism. The key word of Western eroticism ? I am referring to the modern West, from the eighteenth century to the present ? is violation, which is an affirmation of the moral and psychological order. For Hindus, the key word is pleasure. (Ed: I suppose he is not talking about the contemporary VHP variety) Similarly, in Christian asceticism, the central concept is redemption; In India, it is liberation. These two words encompass opposite ideas of this world and the next, of the body and the soul. Both point towards what has been called the ?supreme good?. But there the similarity ends ? redemption and liberation are paths that lead from the same point- the wretched condition of man ? in opposite directions. ?.
The origin of the Christian cult of chastity is not in the Bible but in Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism. Nature and the body are not condemned in Genesis or the other books of the Old Testament. ?? Christianity probably would not have adopted Plato?s pessimistic vision had it not been for two ideas that, although they do not appear in Greco-Roman tradition, are the true sources of Christian attitude toward the body: the belief in a unique God, creator of the universe, and the notion of Original Sin. These two ideas are the spinal column of Judaism and Christianity, and the point of convergence of the two. In the story in Genesis, God makes man from the primordial mud, and his companion from one of his ribs. A material creation, like that of a sculptor with wood or stone. Adam is made of mud, and Even is ?bone of (his) bones and flesh of (his) flesh.?. The first divine mandate is to be fruitful and to multiply.
In Eden there are two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit of the first is the food of immortality, and while Adam and Even live in the Lord?s garden they will not know death. As for the other tree God expressly forbids them to eat its fruit. ?. Adam and Even ate the fruit and God expelled them from Eden. Their failure was disobedience. But the root of that failure is something infinitely more serious: they preferred themselves. Their sin was not loving God, their creator, but instead loving themselves and wanting to be gods. ?. Within this conception is a condemnation of the love of the body. The Platonic condemnation of the body was made to reinforce the notion of Original Sin: the shameful preference of the creature for itself. The true idol of mankind is man himself.
?..From the Hindu perspective, the story in Genesis is meaningless. Apart from certain incoherencies in the narrative, there is an idea that is difficult for Hindu tradition to accept: the notion of a creator God. ? In general, the Hindu sacred books say that the universe is the result of the working of mysterious and impersonal laws. From the Vedic era on, religious thoughts knew a unifying principle, which the Upanishads called Brahman, the being of man. Yet they never inferred from this principle the existence of a God who was the creator of this world and of men. That which is divine, not a divinity, is the creative force and the matrix of the universe. The idea of the Original Sin, the consequences of the first disobedience, in which the shameful love of man for himself and his indifference to the Other and to the others is incomprehensible to Indian tradition. The universe was not created, and thus there is no Lord, no command, and no disobedience.”
(Click below for the rest …)

“Indian divinities, like those of Greece and Rome, are sexual. Among their powers is an immense procreative force that makes them endlessly couple with all kinds of living things and produce new individuals and species. The activity of the universe is sometimes seen as an enormous divine copulation
?.Indian philosophy always depended on religion; it was an exegesis, not a criticism. And when it broke with religion, it was in order to found a new religion: Buddhism ?..To condemn the body and human sexuality in a tradition like Hinduism would be to condemn the gods and goddesses, the manifestations of a powerful cosmic sexuality. The Hindu chastity and asceticism must have another source.
??.The opposing attitudes of Hindus and Christians towards the human condition- the karma and Original Sin, moksha and redemption- are also apparent in their different visions of time. Both are manifestations and consequences of temporal succession: they not only exist in time and are made of time, but they are also an effect of an event that determines time and its direction. That event, the case of Christianity, occurred before the beginning of time: Adam and Eve committed their sin in a place that previously was immune to change: Paradise. The story of humanity begins with the expulsion from Eden and our fall into History. In the case of Hinduism (and Buddhism), the cause is not anterior to, but rather inherent in time itself. In Christianity, time is the child of Original Sin, and thus its vision of time is negative, although not entirely so: man through the sacrifice of Christ and through the exercise of his freedom, which is gift of God, is capable of saving himself. Time is not only a life sentence, it is also a test. For the Hindu, time in itself is evil. By its very nature impermanent and changing, it is illusory: a lie with a charming appearance that is nothing but suffering, error, and finally the death that condemns us to be reborn in the horrible fiction of another life that is equally painful and unreal.
The complexity of Hindu cosmography and the enormous duration of its cycles seem to belong to the logic that rules nightmares. In the end, these cosmographies vanish: we open our eyes and realize that we have lived among phantasms. The dream of Brahma, what we call reality, is a mirage, a nightmare. To wake is to discover the unreality of this world. The negative character of time is not the consequence of Original Sin but of its opposite; man?s Original Sin or fault is to be the child of time. The evil is in time itself, Why is time evil? Because it lacks substance: it is a dream, a lie, maya.
For Hinduism, time has no meaning, or more exactly, it has no meaning other than its obliteration by total Being, as Krishna tells Arjuna. The conception of time explains the absence of a historical consciousness among the Hindus. India has had great poets, philosophers, architects, and painters, but it has never had, until modern times, had a great historian. Among the various means of negating time among the Hindus, there are two that are particularly astonishing: metaphysical negation and social negation. The first prevented the birth of that literary, scientific and philosophical genre we call history. The second, the institution of the castes, immobilized society. ?..”