Chapter II, Hinduism, What People Want, Summary and Analysis

Hinduism advocates that people can have what they want, which sounds hedonistically exciting but, in reality, tosses the problem of "wants" into the lap of the individual. Surprisingly, the aesthetic Hindu does not scold people who seek pleasure in life. Man is born with pleasure-pain reactors that inherently lead all humans to seek the former and try to avoid the latter. Hinduism recognizes that the world is filled with vistas of beauty and pleasure that are appealing to man. So long as the search for pleasure does not harm another living being, Hinduism allows mankind to indulge itself. Testing this theory, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard attempted a life guided by the search for pleasure and found that it ultimately led to complete failure. The Hindu is not surprised by such a...