Insight Editions · No. 462
The Way to the Labyrinth
Memories of East and West
Alain Daniélou
A complete study edition of Alain Daniélou's memoir The Way to the Labyrinth: a Breton childhood and forest altars, the arts, America and 1920s Paris, Raymond Burnier, Tagore and Shantiniketan, Benares and initiation as Shiva Sharan, the war years and temple surveys, Gandhi and Nehru, Pondicherry, Zagarolo, the Berlin and Venice music institutes, a Hindu view of the West, and old age.
A study guide to The Way to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West by Alain Daniélou (first published as Le chemin du labyrinthe, Opera Mundi, Paris, 1981; English edition New Directions, 1987; expanded edition with a postface by Jacques E. Cloarec). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the author's estate or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
CORE CLAIM
A life can be read backwards. Looking from old age to childhood, Daniélou finds that chance disappears and a single thread, "like Ariadne's clew", runs from a sickly boy's forest altars in Brittany to a Shaivite initiate in Benares and a scholar in his Labyrinth near Rome.
SCOPE
A prologue, 23 chapters (the first twenty published in 1981, the last three added in 1992 and 1993) and a postface by Jacques E. Cloarec (2016). Childhood, the arts, America and Paris, India, Benares, the war years, independent India, the return to Europe, the Berlin and Venice institutes, a Hindu critique of the West, and old age.
KEY FIGURES
Raymond Burnier, Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Karpatri, Vijayanand Tripathi, Shivendranath Basu, Gandhi and Nehru, Nicolas Nabokov, Yehudi Menuhin, his brother Cardinal Jean Daniélou, his mother, a founder of a Catholic teaching order.
BEST FOR
Readers of Daniélou who want the life behind the books, and anyone curious about India in the 1930s to 1950s seen by an outsider who chose to become an insider.
The Book on One Page
The Way to the Labyrinth is Alain Daniélou's memoir, first published in France in 1981 as Le chemin du labyrinthe: Souvenirs d'Orient et d'Occident and in English by New Directions in 1987. This study edition follows the expanded text with the later supplement.
The memoir opens with a theory of time. Time is an illusion, a chain of moments along "the spiral of life". Read forward, a life looks like a string of accidents; read backward, it looks like a destiny. Daniélou also insists that each person lives several lives at once (spiritual, emotional, sensual, intellectual) and that moralists go wrong when they try to force them into one portrait.
The story then moves in four great movements. Europe and the arts (chapters 1 to 7): a sickly, home-schooled child in a devout Catholic family discovers the sacred in the woods, then painting, music and dance; he studies in America, serves in the navy, lives in 1920s Paris, meets the Swiss photographer Raymond Burnier, and travels with him to Afghanistan, India, Java and around the world. India (chapters 8 to 12): the two friends rent a palace on the Ganges in Benares, Daniélou learns Hindi and Sanskrit, studies music and philosophy with traditional masters, is initiated into Shaivite Hinduism as Shiva Sharan, spends the war years in the Himalayas surveying temples, watches independence with deep distrust of Gandhi and Nehru, and later works in Madras and Pondicherry. Return to the West (chapters 13 to 18): exile in Europe, the house at Zagarolo, publications and recordings, the Berlin and Venice institutes for Asian music, recording trips across the world, and the death of Raymond. Judgment and old age (chapters 19 to 23): a "Hindu's view" of the West, a balance sheet of his life, and the late chapters on new work, deaths of friends, and free will.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Discovery of the Divine | Forest altars in Brittany; the Priory of Resson. |
| 2 | The Years of Childhood | A saintly, cold mother; an absent father; brothers and sisters. |
| 3 | The Arts | Painting at thirteen; music and dance as forms of communion. |
| 4 | The Discovery of the World | America, the navy, Algeria, Paris in the twenties, Raymond, Afghanistan. |
| 5 | First Contacts with India | Uday Shankar, Shantiniketan and Tagore; Java. |
| 6 | Interludes | The Paris studio "La Montsouricière" and its circle. |
| 7 | Travels | Henry de Monfreid, Paris to Calcutta by car, around the world. |
| 8 | Life in India | Rewa Kothi, Hindu learning, music, initiation. |
| 9 | Away from the Turmoil | The war years, Almora, discovery of the temples. |
| 10 | Political India | A hostile portrait of Gandhi and Nehru. |
| 11 | Encounters | Roerich, Kangra, and other figures. |
| 12 | Southern India | Adyar, Pondicherry, the ashrams. |
| 13 | Return to the West | Exile, the Paradiso, nobility, Zagarolo. |
| 14 | The Message of India | Publications and recordings. |
| 15 | Sundry Characters | Nabokov, Menuhin, Corbin and others. |
| 16 | Berlin | The Berlin institute and the death of Raymond. |
| 17 | Music of Many Lands | Recording trips from Cambodia to Mexico. |
| 18 | Venice | The Venice institute and festivals. |
| 19 | A Hindu's View of the Western World | A world adrift: society and religion. |
| 20 | Balance Sheet | Who am I? On death. |
| 21 | New Adventures | Old age, new books, the Kama Sutra, Mithraism. |
| 22 | Departures | Deaths of friends; the AIDS "hecatomb". |
| 23 | The Choice of Free Will | No guru, no creed, only Shaivite teaching. |
Prologue: The Spiral of Life
Before telling any story, Daniélou explains how he wants the story to be read.
Time read backwards
"Time is only an illusion, a chain of separate moments in man's journey through the everlasting present." When we follow a life "from old age back to childhood", he writes, "chance is no longer a factor, nothing happens by accident." Childhood is the consequence of maturity, not the reverse. He denies that this is predetermination; it is "simply a reality of the world".
Several lives at once
"Each of us lives several different lives." Our spiritual destiny is independent of our emotional, sensual and intellectual lives, and we should not try to merge the portraits. There are moments when we must surrender to "mysterious inner forces" that inspire our most irrational acts, "sometimes in defiance of human law", because those acts fulfill us most truly.
The book opens with a note by François Mauriac (1960), who calls Daniélou the author of Hindu Polytheism, brother of Père Jean Daniélou and son of a mother "quite possibly a saint", and asks: "Who will write the mystery of the Daniélous?" The epigraph is from Aristotle: "The rightness of the path you have chosen will be measured by your happiness."
Reading key. Happiness as the measure of a path and the separation of a person's "several lives" are the two principles the whole memoir defends, against family, church and society.
The Discovery of the Divine
The memoir's founding scene: a child who builds altars to the gods of the forest.
The retreat in the forest
Daniélou was "a sickly child". Doctors predicted he would not live long, so he was never sent to school and knew no children besides his siblings. At the family house in Locronan, Brittany, he cleared paths into a wild, overgrown wood and made "small sanctuaries" adorned with crosses, images of the Virgin and Saint Ronan, and "small rounded pebbles". They were fetishes "through which I could communicate with the higher mysteries."
When the adults found the altars they saw only the crosses and decided he was a saint. His mother, who had close ties with Pope Pius X, obtained a golden cross blessed by the pope and a first communion at the age of four. The boy felt "sad and indifferent" and never returned to his "profaned, desecrated retreat". Years later he sold the cross. The lesson he draws: "the religion of men had nothing to do with the divine reality of the world."
The Priory of Resson
He spent two winters in a house beside the remains of a Templar abbey, with a governess and a servant who warmed his nightshirt by the fire. A hollow-sounding field, a brook called Le Resson and its ice bridge stayed with him as images of a world full of hidden presence.
The pattern set early. A private, nature-centered sense of the sacred; an institution that misreads and appropriates it; and a quiet act of refusal. The same sequence returns with Catholicism, with Western scholarship and with Indian reformers.
The Years of Childhood
A long, frank family portrait, and an account of an education that taught him mainly what to reject.
Portrait of a family
His mother, of the Clamorgan family, was proud of an ancient lineage; the children doubted it until they inherited parchments going back to the thirteenth century. She founded a religious order for women teachers. Daniélou saw her faith as "an invisible interloper" and "a monstrous aberration, at any rate, a betrayal". He felt that "in another time" she would have delivered him to the Inquisitor. At twenty-one, turned out of the house, he lived in a small studio whose rent she agreed to pay.
His father, author of political works he never read, was "a tender, absent father" who loved trees, fog and solitary walks. Among his siblings, the most prominent was Jean, the future Jesuit and cardinal, who as a young man moved among the Paris avant-garde and became a close friend of Jean Cocteau. The youngest brother, Louis, joined de Gaulle in London in 1940. His sister Christine later escaped her convent with help from Raymond Burnier and went to Tagore's university in 1935.
Friendship, love and a "negative education"
From early childhood, "animals were much more important to me than human beings." He describes early affairs with candor. His conclusion about schooling is plain: "All the things I have ever learned I discovered on my own," so his knowledge was "erratic and filled with enormous gaps" and his approach unconventional.
CRITICAL LENS. The mother's portrait is one-sided by design. The postface notes that his "very unflattering portrait of his mother" caused "much grinding of teeth" and that his American publisher asked him to change names and situations. Read the family chapters as testimony from a wounded son, not as a balanced biography.
The Arts
Painting, music and dance appear as the first real religion of his life.
In 1920, aged thirteen, at a hotel on the Mediterranean coast, someone gave him a box of watercolors. He had never studied drawing or visited a museum. He began walking out every day to paint the countryside around Grimaud and Saint-Tropez.
Painting became "a sort of ecstatic semi-conscious rite". He let colors and shapes "express themselves through my paintbrush, which seemed guided by a force other than my own", and talked aloud to the colors, because "the sky is never blue, the grass is never green". Each scene stayed "as vivid in my mind as the memory of a first kiss".
He also studied piano, singing and dance, and absorbed French and other poetry. That training in verse, he says, later helped him translate Indian texts into English.
Takeaway. For Daniélou the arts are a way of knowing, not decoration. The same idea underlies his later claims that music, architecture and ritual express cosmic principles.
The Discovery of the World
America, the navy, Paris in the twenties, and the meeting that set his course.
America
A scholarship sent him to an American college. His father hoped languages would one day get him a consulate post. He had already "declared myself a homosexual" and found that his college friends treated this "as quite natural". A first love affair produced a revelation: "There must be a God for such happiness to be possible!" He had long ceased to believe in "that severe schoolmaster" of a Christian God.
Reflections on America
He describes early American society as driven by two forces: adventurers who became the heroes of popular myth, and persecuted sects with "missionary zeal and vehement puritanism". Power, he claims, has always been held by puritans, so that "only a hypocrite or a saint can be elected to political office."
The navy, Algeria and Paris
Military service horrified him: sailors were caged in the hold for small offenses and rats ran down the hammock ropes. In Paris he moved among artists and had an affair with Maurice Sachs, but remained "a young savage" out of tune with society.
Raymond
Then a friend introduced him to Raymond Burnier, a nineteen-year-old Swiss in sky-blue pajamas who "had made up his mind to seduce me and become my friend". The friendship, free of "constraint or obligation", became "the only solid element" in Raymond's life. They shared "a deep sense of the subtle and divine reality of the world", which Raymond felt by intuition and Daniélou by intellect.
The Afghan episode
Their first great journey took them to Kabul. Daniélou describes a land once fertile, whose irrigation had been destroyed by invaders and never rebuilt, and the two friends made a small documentary film.
Raymond Burnier. Photographer, heir to a Swiss fortune, Daniélou's companion for decades. His photographs of Indian temples became a joint life's work. Daniélou also describes a dark "double" in him that brought fits of depression and cruelty.
First Contacts with India
The first Indian experiences: dance, Tagore's university and the music of Java.
Uday Shankar
In Calcutta they met the dancer Uday Shankar and his troupe. Daniélou had already met him in Paris. Uday's younger brother, Ravi Shankar, was then fifteen and studying dance and music. Daniélou later followed Ravi's training with Alla ud din Khan at Maihar.
Shantiniketan and the friends of Tagore
At Shantiniketan, the elderly Rabindranath Tagore let them stay as long as they wished, though visitors were normally allowed only three days. Tagore asked Daniélou to direct his school of music. He declined: "I was not sufficiently interested in songs." His sister Christine later took charge of the women's section.
Java
In Solo he first heard the traditional court music of Java, unknown in Batavia but still "in all its beauty and refinement" at the sultan's court. After several years of travel between Paris, Shantiniketan and elsewhere, the friends settled in Benares, "the center of India's true culture".
Takeaway. His first view of India came through Tagore's modern, reforming milieu. He later judged it a half-Westernized India and turned to orthodox Benares instead.
Interludes
A Paris studio and its circle in the early 1930s.
In 1933 Raymond found a two-story studio on the Rue de Montsouris, which the friends called La Montsouricière. It held a Blüthner grand piano, a desk, a sky-blue cupboard and a zebra skin; they slept on mattresses. Daniélou was still studying dance. Javanese dishes and a neighborhood dessert fed their parties. Pierre Arnal lived with them for a time and later helped run the Venice institute.
Twenty years later, returning to France, he found that most of that "fanciful, unconventional" world had vanished. He adds an aside on young people who join political movements "the same way they become fanatical about sports", and argues that twelve-year-olds should get a real civic education rather than abstract political ideas.
CRITICAL LENS. Here, as in many places, a vivid anecdote leads into a sweeping social judgment. The memoir is full of such jumps; enjoy the anecdotes and test the generalizations separately.
Travels
Pirates, colonial officials and a drive across Asia.
Henry de Monfreid
Raymond dreamed of sailing through Oceania. They were sent to the adventurer Henry de Monfreid at Obock. On the ship to Djibouti in 1934 the colonial officials were "mediocre, racist, arrogant", knowing nothing of the countries they would rule. Monfreid sailed them through the night smoking opium, with a silent Dankali crew.
Paris to Calcutta
They drove overland through Iran, from Meshed to Zahedan, on roads so rough the car broke a spring; Raymond replaced it himself, with no mechanic for miles.
Around the world
They also crossed the Pacific to Honolulu, the Philippines, Japan and China. Daniélou notes that "colored people were not allowed on the upper decks" of the American ship. Portraits include the health-food celebrity Gayelord, a champion of health food.
Takeaway. The travel chapters show his steady contempt for colonial mediocrity and his delight in people who live outside convention.
Life in India
The heart of the memoir: Benares, Hindu learning and initiation.
Rewa Kothi
In 1937, walking on the ghats with a young Brahman guide, Raymond asked whether one could live in one of the palaces. They rented Rewa Kothi, owned by the Maharajah of Rewa, for a hundred rupees a month. It had a cloister, a small Shiva shrine served daily by a Brahman priest, an eighty-foot hall with a marble loggia over the Ganges, and towers where each friend had a study. A thirty-inch lizard named Ashoka ran in the courtyard.
The discovery of the Hindu world
He learned Hindi and Sanskrit and "for a long time" read nothing else. The scholar Vijayanand Tripathi answered his questions on religion, philosophy and society. He felt he had "to make a clean sweep of everything I believed I knew"; the new values were as foreign to him "as if I had suddenly found myself transported into Egypt during the reign of Ramses II." Questions he put to Swami Karpatri, answered in articles in the journal Siddhanta, became the basis of his book Hindu Polytheism.
Initiation
Swami Karpatri ordered his disciple Brahmanand to perform the initiation of Daniélou and Raymond. After fasting, purification, a full shaving of the body and a bath in the Ganges, he received the name Shiva Sharan, "He who is protected by Shiva". It was "very simple, like a kind of game", yet "I had finally become what I had been meant to be all along."
Traditional education and Indian music
He describes Brahman schools such as the Dharma Sangh Mahavidyalaya. In classical music he "finally discovered a deep, complex, refined, and subtle art" and studied with Shivendranath Basu (Shantu Babu), learning the vina.
Little by little I entered into a mode of thinking so subtle, so complex, and so difficult that I sometimes felt myself reaching the limits of my mental faculties.
Alain DaniélouCRITICAL LENS. Daniélou claims that he and Raymond are "the only foreigners who were ever initiated and incorporated into orthodox Hinduism" and the only foreign names in the register of the Lingaraja temple. This is his own statement, not documented in the book. His India is also the India of one circle, orthodox Brahman Benares and Karpatri's traditionalists, which he treats as "true" Hinduism.
Away from the Turmoil
The Second World War seen from the Himalayas, and the temple surveys.
The years of war
When war came, communication with Europe stopped. French citizens tied to Vichy were interned; Daniélou was suspected because of links with "the pro-Japanese Hindu world", but friends in the Viceroy's circle protected him. He had met Subhas Chandra Bose, whom he calls affable, brilliant and daring.
Almora
A doctor sent him to the mountains for his weak heart, and the friends discovered Binsar and Almora, with an expatriate colony he sketches in comic portraits. Here he describes Raymond's "double", the moods that kept a gifted photographer from fulfilling himself, and his own efforts to save negatives Raymond wanted to destroy.
Discovery of the temples
Using maps from the Department of Archaeology, they set out to photograph temples, fording rivers, building rafts and arriving "covered with dust" like "statues just pulled out of a mudbath".
Raymond's double. Daniélou presents his friend as two beings: the intelligent, sensitive Raymond and "the other", cruel and deceitful in depression. It is one of the memoir's most personal passages and explains why much of Raymond's work survived only through Daniélou's care.
Political India
The memoir's most polemical chapter: Gandhi, Nehru and independence.
Daniélou met Gandhi and Nehru often. He found Gandhi "quite repulsive": a "puritanical" revolutionary who, he claims, identified his ideology with his own desire for power. He portrays Gandhi as supported by the commercial class, describes his campaign in South Africa as a movement for Indian traders' privileges, and argues that noncooperation and the khaddar campaign ruined the economy and closed textile mills.
He links Gandhi's ideas to an "eclectic religion" shaped by theosophy and Western influence, opposed to the orthodox Hinduism he valued.
CRITICAL LENS. This is a hostile, partisan portrait that most historians would reject in tone and in many claims. It reflects the views of the Hindu traditionalist circle Daniélou belonged to, which opposed the Congress. The postface notes that even Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, enjoyed the book, while observing that Nehru and Indira Gandhi are "hardly presented in it in an amiable light." Read it as a minority view from inside a specific milieu.
Encounters
Portraits of figures he met in India.
The painter Nicolas de Roerich, who had fled Russia through Mongolia and Tibet, lived in the old palace of the Rajahs of Kulu. Mrs. de Roerich, "a kind of seer", sent him her book Agni Yoga and invited him; the visit was an excuse to see the Kangra valley, famous for its miniatures, many of which an English Resident had burned as obscene.
He also portrays a European diplomat called Stas, a man of "vast culture" whom Nehru respected, and who, he says, improved Nehru's attitude to France.
Takeaway. The "encounters" show how much of Daniélou's India passed through a cosmopolitan circle of exiles, aristocrats and artists, alongside his Brahman teachers.
Southern India
Leaving Benares for Madras and Pondicherry, and a critique of the ashrams.
Madras
Raymond settled at Adyar, the world center of the Theosophical Society, but grew bored with its "hushed, cloistered, and puritanical" atmosphere. The Society's president offered Daniélou the directorship of the Adyar Library, with its manuscripts. Seeing the Ganges recede from his house as "a sign", he left Benares "forever" in 1953.
Pondicherry
He worked at the new Institute of Indology in Pondicherry with his assistant, the scholar Ramachandra Bhatt, under Jean Filliozat. He also met the Tamil epics; the Ankle Bracelet is mentioned here.
The ashrams
He is scornful of many ashrams, which he sees as feeding Westerners "false spiritual values". He mocks Shivananda's ashram at Rishikesh and treats Anandamayi with more respect.
CRITICAL LENS. His attacks on theosophy and on Western-facing gurus are consistent with his traditionalism, but they are judgments, not evidence. Some of the people he dismisses had large followings and serious defenders.
Return to the West
Exile, a theory of colonized elites, and the discovery of the Labyrinth.
Exile
The chapter opens with an argument: when a people loses independence, its elite must adopt the occupier's culture until "the culture of their motherland, fades". He applies this to anglicized Indians who care more about flawless English than their own language. He reports that the Hindu parties fought partition and that their leaders were jailed after independence.
Rome and Zagarolo
In Rome he describes the Paradiso, a working-class world of characters such as the blind Don Salvatore, and a baker's wife with a pet hen. He writes about "nobility" as a quality of character and type rather than wealth. Searching for a house near Rome, he found a hill at Zagarolo that, he later learned, belonged to an ancient sacred site linked with Praeneste, the Great Goddess and Fortuna Primigenia. This became the Labyrinth.
The title. The postface adds that Colle Labirinto is the official land-registry name of the hill, and that the town cemetery lies there too, so the title can be read as "the way to life, to death, or to eternity."
The Message of India
Back in Paris, he begins the work of transmission.
Publications
In 1960 he left Pondicherry for good and joined the École Française d'Extrême-Orient. He translated Hindu Polytheism, first published in English in the Bollingen Series at Princeton, into French. Louis Renou told him: "You have learned enough; now you must make use of your knowledge." He distinguishes "true Hinduism" from the "mindless ramblings" of fashionable Orientalism.
Recordings
He worked with the International Music Council and UNESCO, praising its director Jack Bornoff while describing UNESCO as having become "a political bureaucracy".
Takeaway. From here on, the memoir explains the purpose behind his books and recordings: to present Hindu thought and Asian music on their own terms to the West.
Sundry Characters
Friends and collaborators in the musical and intellectual world.
At a music conference in Madras he met Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of the novelist, director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, "blessed by the gods with all the possible gifts but that of moderation." The friendship led to festivals and to the Berlin institute.
He praises Yehudi Menuhin, who launched Ravi Shankar's international career and sat on the Berlin institute's board, but thinks Menuhin's duets with Ravi "were a mistake". He tried the Eranos conferences at Ascona at Henry Corbin's invitation and found them "boring and pretentious". For him spirituality is tied to "everyday life, a sense of humor, and the pleasure of being alive."
Takeaway. "My body and soul have never been far apart." The sentence sums up his rejection of disembodied mysticism.
Berlin
The institute for non-European music, and the end of a life's friendship.
The Berlin institute
Nabokov proposed an institute in Berlin for "the study and propagation of non-European musical systems", funded by the Ford Foundation. Daniélou turned down a secure post at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to accept: "As usual, I chose adventure over security." He thought it essential for a divided city and for the status of Asian musicians.
A ghost town
Berlin portraits include a deranged war widow and refugees "who wait hopelessly for news that will never come". Ten years of work "completely transformed the status of Asian musicians," who were now invited to play concerts as artists.
The death of Raymond
Raymond, back in Europe, had met a young Italian, Franco, and later bought the property in Zagarolo. While Daniélou was in Berlin with Nabokov and Balanchine, a call came: Raymond was dead, at fifty-six. "My friend had deserted me." Raymond left most of his fortune to Franco.
Le Farfadet. A younger companion Daniélou calls "le Farfadet" helped him run the institutes and then "disengage" from them. The postface writer, Jacques E. Cloarec, notes that he himself is "almost hidden in the first part of the book".
Music of Many Lands
Recording expeditions across the world.
In 1956 he recorded in Cambodia and Laos. He calls Khmer culture "one of the great original traditions of the world", not derived from India or China, and describes the custodian of Angkor, the architect Marchal, with two wives in two houses facing each other. In 1959 he recorded in Afghanistan as the guest of ambassador Christian Belle. Other trips took him to Iran, Africa, the Soviet Union, Greece and Mount Athos, Mexico and Latin America, and Morocco and Tunisia, where he describes a trance ritual ending in "a blessed silence, like a mysterious presence".
CRITICAL LENS. In this chapter he defends the Shah's Iran and speaks approvingly of "pure races" and their "nobility of character". These views are presented without evidence and reflect a hierarchical, race-based thinking that runs through his work on caste. They need to be read critically.
Venice
A second institute and the festivals.
After six years the Ford Foundation's support ended and Berlin's city government took over, bringing "pernickety" bureaucracy and difficulties with Soviet-aligned Asian countries. So he founded a second, independent institute in Venice, again with Ford help. Pierre and Solange Arnal ran the administration for three years. He met Ezra Pound at a friend's palazzo the day Cartier-Bresson photographed him.
His verdict is cool: Venice was like "a beautiful trip or movie", leaving images "but with no real enrichment."
Takeaway. The institutes were his most public achievement. Elsewhere he says they freed Asian masters from the label of "ethnic music" and produced, with UNESCO, collections totaling one hundred and thirty records.
A Hindu's View of the Western World
The intellectual center of the memoir: the West judged from Hindu principles.
A world adrift
Returning after twenty years in India, his thinking rested not on Western philosophy, "of which I knew nothing", but on Hindu cosmology: theology, metaphysics, ethics and the sciences as applications of common "prototypes" found in atoms, galaxies, societies, languages and the mind.
Knowledge and society
In India "knowledge" is a heritage to be handed on to a worthy disciple (patra), not sold to the ambitious. He argues that revolutions are made by the idle bourgeois classes, not by artisans or peasants, citing Rousseau, Marx, Lenin and Sartre. He presents the Hindu social system as the only one to have built "a tolerant, multiracial, multireligious, multicultural society", and claims that exceptional individuals are "mutations" whom societies too often crucify.
Religion
For Daniélou religion has often been "a means of conquest", and the "tyranny of Christianity" has damaged Western critical thinking. He includes his brother the cardinal among those who could not think freely about the foundations of doctrine.
CRITICAL LENS. The chapter mixes sharp observations with strong generalizations. His idealized picture of caste as a harmonious refuge for minorities ignores the oppression documented by many Indian voices, including the low-caste reformers he rarely cites. His blanket judgments on Christianity, socialism and "the West" are polemics, not analysis.
Balance Sheet
"Who am I?" and a reflection on death.
Who am I?
He estimates he was qualified for "thirty-two different trades": Sanskritist, musicologist, historian, pianist, dancer, singer, vina player, painter, translator in three languages, photographer, architect, sound engineer, carpenter and repairer of broken china. He loves driving a Porsche fast and disappoints visitors who expect a bearded guru. This variety, he says, is why he turned to Hindu cosmology, which looks for "principles common to all forms of life", and why he "discovered Dionysus". A man "who cannot use his hands" cannot understand the universe.
On death
At death the body's elements return to matter, the subtle elements dissolve into "the cosmic intellect", and "what is divine in man melts into divinity". A memoir, he concludes, can only describe the outer journey; "the journey of the inner man" lies beyond words.
The continuity of our experience, the invisible, indefinable thread which, like Ariadne's clew, guides our destiny through a maze of objects, places, and forms, is too subtle to be described.
Alain DaniélouTakeaway. The labyrinth image now becomes explicit: a life is a maze, and the thread is destiny, felt but not described.
New Adventures
Written after the first edition: old age, new work, new loves of learning.
After publishing the memoir he found that "life continues, freed from the past" despite serious illness and long hospital stays in Lausanne. He left the institutes to return to his Indian material: studies of Dhrupad, new books, and a new translation of the Kama Sutra, which he calls "neither an erotic work nor a code of ethics" but a systematic study of the life of Pataliputra, comparable to the Kinsey Report. James Laughlin of New Directions published his memoirs in English.
He exhibited his watercolors, painted Etruscan-style frescoes at the Labyrinth's pool, and built a small Mithraeum. His work on Shiva and Dionysus led him to study Mithraism and Roman religion from a Hindu point of view, as part of a "return to paganism".
Takeaway. In old age Daniélou widens his project from India to a common "pagan" tradition linking Shaivism, Dionysus and Mithras.
Departures
Deaths of family and friends.
Children, he says, believe people and things are permanent; adults keep that sense despite all evidence. What shocks us in death is "the wiping out of a thought". He records the deaths of his sister Christine, the historian Pierre Gaxotte, the composer Henri Sauguet (whose music he contrasts with "someone like Boulez"), the painter Mac Avoy, the writer Matthieu Galey and others. AIDS, a "hecatomb", took younger friends and left "a futureless desert". The postface notes that he censored himself and could not name all those lost.
Takeaway. The tone shifts from polemic to elegy. The chapter is a reminder that the memoir is also a record of a vanished artistic world.
The Choice of Free Will
A short credo written in October 1992, at eighty-five.
He was a rebel from childhood and never read the religious writings of his mother and brother or his father's political works. His real education "began in India". He has "never desired to belong to any sect or religious creed" and never wanted to lose his free will. Questioning every statement is "the only way in which knowledge can evolve"; paradox protects against dogma.
"I am not a guru." He seeks knowledge, "which is the opposite of faith", and distrusts ritual performed for an audience. The only value he has never questioned is the teaching of Shaivite Hinduism, which "rejects all dogmatism". The book ends at the Labyrinth after the grape harvest, with dogs, village boys and birdsong: "I have just completed the eighty-fifth turn in the spiral of my life."
CRITICAL LENS. The claim to reject every creed sits beside an unquestioned loyalty to one tradition. He resolves the tension by defining Shaivism as non-dogmatic; readers may want to ask whether his own Shaivism is free of dogma.
The Whole Book
What the memoir adds to Daniélou's work, and how to read it.
Master takeaways
- Read a life backwards: destiny shows when chance disappears.
- We live several lives that should not be forced into one portrait.
- The sacred is found in nature, not in institutions; the forest altars come first.
- The arts are rites and ways of knowing.
- Raymond Burnier is the memoir's second hero; the Indian work was shared.
- Benares was a second birth, sealed by initiation as Shiva Sharan.
- Orthodox Hinduism is, for him, the true India; reformers and ashrams are not.
- Gandhi and Nehru are judged harshly from that traditionalist position.
- Transmission is a duty: knowledge is a heritage handed to worthy disciples.
- The Berlin and Venice institutes helped bring Asian masters to world stages.
- The West is "adrift", shaped by Christian dogma and bourgeois ideology.
- Body and spirit are one; a thinker should be able to use his hands.
- Free will over creed, with Shaivism as the one teaching he never questioned.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Spiral of life | Time loops; moments touch past and future | Reading the prologue and chapter 20 |
| Several lives | Spiritual, emotional, sensual and intellectual lives are separate | Judging his conduct |
| Ariadne's thread | Destiny guides through a maze of events | Reading the title |
| Colonized elite | Conquered elites adopt the occupier's culture | His view of anglicized India |
| Patra | Knowledge goes only to a worthy receptacle | His view of teaching |
| Common prototypes | Same principles in cosmos, music, society, mind | Linking the memoir to his theory books |
On the whole book. The Way to the Labyrinth is a lively, candid and often funny memoir, valuable for its portraits of Benares, Tagore's circle, the musicians and the twentieth-century art world, and for its open account of a gay life lived without apology. It is also partisan. Its views of his mother, of Gandhi, of caste, race and "the West" are strong opinions offered as facts. Dates and claims about his own uniqueness rest on memory, since, as the postface notes, he had little documentation. Read it as the self-portrait of a brilliant, contrarian witness.
Who's who
| Name | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Raymond Burnier | Swiss photographer, his companion, partner in the temple surveys |
| His mother | Née Clamorgan, founder of a Catholic teaching order |
| Jean Daniélou | His brother, Jesuit and later cardinal |
| Christine Daniélou | His sister, who went to Shantiniketan |
| Rabindranath Tagore | Poet who hosted him at Shantiniketan |
| Uday and Ravi Shankar | Dancer and musician brothers he met in India |
| Swami Karpatri | Orthodox teacher behind Hindu Polytheism and his initiation |
| Vijayanand Tripathi | Benares scholar who taught him |
| Shivendranath Basu | Music teacher (Shantu Babu) |
| Gandhi, Nehru | Political leaders he portrays critically |
| Nicolas Nabokov | Friend behind the Berlin institute |
| Yehudi Menuhin | Violinist and supporter of the institute |
| Jacques E. Cloarec | Author of the postface |
Connect it
- Hindu Polytheism and The Myths and Gods of India grew from the questions he put to Swami Karpatri in Benares.
- Music and the Power of Sound was written in these Benares years.
- Shiva and Dionysus (here, Gods of Love and Ecstasy) is the link he names between Shaivism and paganism.
- India: A Civilization of Differences develops the defense of caste set out in chapter 19.
About This Edition
An independent study guide to The Way to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West by Alain Daniélou (first published as Le chemin du labyrinthe, 1981; English edition New Directions, 1987; expanded edition with the supplement of 1992 to 1993 and a postface by Jacques E. Cloarec).
This edition condenses the memoir chapter by chapter for personal study. In the source file, chapter 5 runs inside chapter 4; it is treated here as its own chapter following the table of contents. The thanks in the postface name Marie-Claire Cournand as translator of the first part and Ken Hurry of the supplement. Quotations are short and attributed. CRITICAL LENS boxes flag claims that are partisan or disputed. Please read the original for its full portraits, letters and photographs.