There are only two pathways to looking at the world: the causal way or the unpredictable: or to use my metaphor . . . the horizontal or the vertical . . . In the context of Indian philosophy, we could say, either there is duality or non-duality.

(194)

Rao, using a method akin to scientific reductionism, ensures that the crux of the matter boils down to one contest—between duality and non-duality.

For him, ‘There are indeed no horizontal solutions, the human has no answer ever.’ (192) Locating this contrast in a trans-civilizational dialogue with André Malraux, Rao quotes the latter as saying, ‘You remember what Dostoevsky said: Europe is a cemetery of ideas—yes, we cannot go beyond good and evil. We can never go, as the Indians can, beyond duality.’ (46)

The dukkha, the deep suffering that we experience as human beings, is, therefore, the distress of duality, the sadness of time, process, growth, decay, causality, contingency—in a word, the sorrow of temporality, of horizontal existence. As Rao observes, ‘In the dissolution of the object, then is happiness.’ (80) The dissolution of the object, of the world itself, is only possible by a radical negation. It is a negation that rests on the denial of objective reality, of anything other than the self. Upon such a negation of duality, the whole world is reduced to its primal state of pure consciousness, Advaita (non-duality).

Raja Rao characterizes earthly life as an exercise in duality; that is why the merely mundane feels like a curse, Sisyphian or otherwise:

For the world is war—the war of the opposites. Good and bad, night and day, man and woman, are all, as it were at war with each other, in the sense that the two things can never be at harmony—harmony is always transcendence.

(82)

The world, which is duality, which is the war of opposites, craves for peace, a peace that comes only from transcendence: ‘Thus transcendence is man’s only need. In transcendence there is neither man nor woman, day nor night . . .’ (82)

The purpose of the world is to lead, force, us to transcendence. Every object, in other words, points by its very partiality and limitation to that from which it arises for the time being and to that in which it dissolves upon its true cognition—the absolute, the ultimate reality, non-separate from us. The aim of life, according to this view, is ‘the abolition of duality, of contradiction—and of the peace it should bring to one’ (liii). It is in this schema that India is ‘not a country (desa), it is a perspective (darsana)’ (10). And the meaning of India is ‘Knowledge, Jnana, itself the “I”’ (196), as the last page of the book, once more, affirms.