The document summarizes passages from André Malraux's book "The Temptation of the West" about culture, leisure, and the role of sports. It discusses how twenty years ago the Popular Front in France first created a Ministry of Sports and Leisure. However, leisure does not necessarily mean culture. The passage also discusses how in Western culture, the gods are dead but demons remain very much alive. A second passage discusses a conversation Malraux had with Nehru about the Bhagavad Gita and reincarnation. A final passage discusses Christianity's proclamation that the path to the deepest mystery is through love, which is more powerful than death or justice.

1. André Malraux
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968

2. BuddhistText
The elephant is the wisest of all
the animals, the only one who
remembers his former lives;
and he remains motionless for
long periods of time,
meditating thereon.
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3. p. 244 – 1948/1965 –TheTemptation of theWest
“In our country, the first Ministry of Sports and Leisure was created by the
Popular Front – in other words, about twenty years ago. But if there is no
culture without leisure, there is certainly leisure without culture. Beginning,
precisely, with sport. Nevertheless, with the exception of sport and games,
what does leisure mean, if not the world of the imagination? There, our gods
are dead, and our demons very much alive and kicking. Obviously culture
cannot replace the gods, but it can reveal the heritage of the nobility of the
world.”
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4. p. 143 – 1 58/1965 – Anti-Memoirs
“Were you not struck,” he asked me, half-smiling, half-serious, “by that
saying in the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘He who really does what he should will
obtain what he wants’?”
When I met Nehru for the first time in 1935, I had asked him, “What
connection do you see between nonviolence and reincarnation?” He
remembered our talk: “Tolstoy is supposed to have asked Gandhi the
same question.” “What was Gandhi’s answer? The same as yours?”
“What was my answer?” “Roughly, ‘Reincarnation had to be the fertilizer.’”
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5. p. 161 – 1944/1965 – Anti-Memoirs
The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path to the deepest
mystery is the path of love. A love which is not confined to men’s feelings,
but transcends them like the soul of the world, more powerful than death and
more powerful than justice: “For God did not send his son into the world to
judge the world, but to save it.”
…In what oriental text had I read, “The meaning of the world is as inaccessible
to man as the behavior of the chariots of kings to the scorpions they crush”?
It was all as though my supreme value wasTruth – and yet what didTruth matter
to me that night?
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6. 9/29/2013 jgillis767@aol.com 6
veritas