Kenneth Saunders (1883-1937)

[KALKI]

Kenneth James Saunders (died 1937) was an orientalist and writer of numerous books on the Far East. He would go on to commit suicide in a style that the coroner at his inquest described as being reminiscent of that used in "India and the East".


Death

Saunders committed suicide aged fifty-four by burning himself in a hut on the South Downs, just outside Eastbourne where he lived the last few years of his life. His doctor, John Bodkin Adams (later tried for murder in 1957 and suspected by the police of being a serial killer), gave evidence at Saunders' inquest but is not suspected of having had any part in his death. The coroner Dr Edward Fitzwilliam Hoare described how Saunders had "upset the paraffin near his head and was rendered unconscious very quickly. I think it is possible - he was a student of Oriental affairs - that he might have had some idea of trying this death by burning which is not uncommon in India and the East."[2] His sister Joyce described how he had "travelled a great deal in India, where he was employed by the Maharaja of Baroda, and in the Far East."

Books
Gotama Buddha: a Biography, 1923
Buddhism
Buddhism And Buddhists In Southern Asia
Epochs in Buddhist History, 1921
Gospel for Asia, 1928
The Story of Buddhism
Buddhism in the Modern World
The heart of Buddhism : being an anthology of Buddhist verse

[KALKI]

Kenneth Saunders (1883-1937) author of The Heritage of Asia has written:

"India is not only a mother of civilization, she is pre-eminently a spiritual mother of Asia. Her arts - noble architecture, fresco painting, sculpture, chamber-music and poetry - these have in India been handmaiden of religion. And this is no less true of her poetry from the rich anthology of the Rig Veda and the Great Epics to the lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore, the best of which are hymns. The tradition, too, of her education, from the university of Nalanda, where ten thousand students sat at the feet of religious teachers, to the guru seated under a tree with his handful of disciples, has been pre-eminently religious. India, in a word, is a God-intoxicated country; and her philosophy, which has in many ways and by many centuries anticipated the systems of European thought, is for the most part a religious philosophy; it deals with the One behind the many, the Real behind the illusory, and is perhaps man's most courageous attempt to reach an ultimate unity.

The essential unity of ancient India may be sufficiently demonstrated for our purpose by two facts. Firstly, her sacred places are known and visited by all; they are a common heritage, and a network of pilgrim-roads links them one with another. "The institution of pilgrimage," says a Hindu writer, "is entirely an expression of love for the motherland, one of the modes of worship of the country which strengthens the religious sentiment and expands the geographical consciousness." Whether amidst the snowy peaks of the Himalayas or the palm-fringed shores of Bengal or Madras, these shrines are all set in scenes of great natural beauty. Indian religion and Indian patriotism are, the, inseparably intertwined; the motherland is a holy land, one for every Indian from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin."





Mark Twain called Benares older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.

***


India's noblest gift to humanity - a belief that the unseen and intangible values are stronger and more real than the things of sense, and to this, her philosophy, with its unshaken conviction that there is One behind the many. One alone supremely real, bears witness.

Her most ancient prayer is a summary of her immemorial quest:

From the unreal to Reality
From death to Immortality.

(source: The Heritage of Asia - By Kenneth Saunders p. 35 - 41 - Student Christian Movement Press).

We may say schematically that India has been more concerned with the mystical than the ethical, with the beauty of the unseen mind at play in the universe…..”

In the golden age of Korea, too, something of Indian mysticism and of Chinese humanism was blend in a fine synthesis which inspired the Japanese….”

(source: The Heritage of Asia - By Kenneth Saunders p. 24 - Student Christian Movement Press).