Special Collection: Kaniok

Book Donation by Erich Kaniok

Two years ago, the Embassy of the Free Mind received a generous book donation from Erich Kaniok and his wife Marijke, consisting of no fewer than 2,000 titles in the fields of philosophy, science and spirituality from various cultures and ages. The books that we acquire in our lives, or those that ‘happen’ to come our way and know how to find us, usually reflect our own search for wisdom and knowledge. In the case of Erich Kaniok, this search must have been a very adventurous and fascinating one: walking past the shelves, we encounter a wide range of subjects: Mahayana, Hinayana and Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, theosophy, anthroposophy, Western and Eastern mysticism, non-dualism, new science and such original thinkers as Krishnamurti, Meister Eckhart, Jakob Lorber, and others.

 Erich Kaniok grew up in the historical old town of Vienna, where he taught for a number of years after having graduated. Already at an early age he was ‘spiritually committed’, an approach to life which took him to the Netherlands in the late 1960s. Here he was active in the Rosicrucian movement for over four decades. In his lectures and meetings, Erich often made use of stories, which were published in a series of volumes over the years. Examples of these are the series ‘Verhalen & parabels uit Oost & West’ (Stories & Parables from East & West), with such titles as Sleutels tot het hart (Keys to the Heart), Taal van de stilte (Language of Silence) and Lente in je hart (Spring in One’s Heart). He also compiled a volume of stories and parables from China entitled Het geluk van Tao (The Happiness of Tao).

Two volunteers, Greetje Voerman and Reinout Spaink, have been cataloguing the Kaniok donation for the Ritman Library with great enthusiasm in the past year. It soon became clear in the process that this donation broadened the library’s scope in several respects: a broadening in the sense of a more colourful palette of categories, which have now also come to include more contemporary and topical themes, and a broadening in a geographical sense, enriching the library with a considerable number of titles in the field of non-Western spiritualities and cultures. 

 It may be asked in how far this is compatible with the original aim of the Embassy of the Free Mind’s library, which is to focus on the main collecting areas Hermetica, Alchemy, Mysticism, Rosicrucians and Gnosis & Western Esotericism. Perhaps one of the answers is that it has become increasingly clear in the course of the decades that insights into what we might broadly refer to as the ‘Western realm of thought’ cannot be viewed outside the development of Eastern thought. Both have exerted an intense reciprocal influence on each other in the past millennia.

 One example is the initiative by the Buddhist emperor Ashoka to make contact with thinkers and rulers in Alexandria (in present-day Egypt), Antioch (present-day Turkey) and Athens to propagate Buddhism, around 250 BCE. The texts which Ashoka commissioned to be carved in India on iron commemorative pillars, on rocks and in caves, the so-called edicts, include an account of his activities in the Hellenistic world. It is obvious from these texts that he had a clear grasp of the political structures in these Western regions. The names and courts of the foremost Greek kings at the time are mentioned, and it is also noted that they had all been introduced to the teachings of the Buddha through the monks that Ashoka had sent to them. A few Pali texts also make mention of the fact that some of Ashoka’s missionaries were monks from Greece.

In one of the Indian commemorative pillars we find the following text: ‘The victory by Dhamma took place here, even as far away as six hundred yojanas [6,000 kilometres], where the Greek king Antiochus rules, beyond where the four kings called Ptolemy II, Philadelphus, Antiochus II, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander rule.'

Hinduism, too, has been of major influence on Western thought. In the six darśanam or schools of Hindu thought, each of these schools represents one aspect of the knowledge of all of reality. When these six darśanam are arranged in pairs of two, the outcome is three systems of thought with accompanying systems of proof, which are very similar to what is referred to in the West as religion, philosophy and science. These latter three are actually nothing else but the reflection on a socio-cultural and collective plane of the three aspects that make up our individual consciousness, and with which we try to grasp ultimate reality – the three dimensions, in fact, of our cognition. A full grasp of this ultimate reality cannot be achieved by one of these three separately, but only by integrating them. It is even more interesting to find that virtually all contemporary currents within science, such as empiricism and positivism, can be found in these darśanam of thousands of years ago.

It is therefore very plausible that Buddhist and Hinduist thought must have left traces within the Western tradition everywhere. A proper understanding of Western-Hermetic thought will have to take into account Eastern thought and its development, while this effort to overcome the traditional dichotomy between ‘Eastern and Western thought’, cannot but inspire creative processes that may very well lead to unexpected and new insights into the origin and meaning of Western-Hermetic thought.

Perhaps the time has come to finally add to the famous and often quoted lines by Rudyard Kipling: 'Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet' the two lines that immediately follow but are always omitted: 

'But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’

 

Erich Kaniok passed away in the spring of 2019, but the Kaniok collection is forever an integral part of the Embassy of the Free Mind.