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© UnknownLeo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy, as a famous French writer Anatole France put it, "saw with his spiritual eyes the horizons that are still invisible to us. I can compare Tolstoy with Homer. He will be studied in the millennia to come. His alleged utopias have already partly found confirmation. The old world is falling apart ... Tolstoy is a prophet of new humanity."

One hundred years ago, in November 1910, at an unknown railway station in Astapovo, Russia, there ended, as Ivan Bunin wrote, "not only the life of one of the most extraordinary men, who had ever lived in this world, there ended a unique in its force, length and difficulty heroic act, an extraordinary fight for 'liberation.'" Yet one hundred years following his death, Tolstoy's spiritual voice, shaped by his obsession with Eastern philosophy, lives on through his words.

On the Religion of the Future

Albert Einstein said, "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism."

Tolstoy became interested in Eastern philosophy when at the age of 19, he spent some time in a hospital next to a Buddhist lama who was wounded by robbers. As it turned out, this lama had not tried to protect himself but only silently prayed. This episode left a deep impression on Tolstoy and served as an impetus for a thorough study of the spiritual heritage of the East.

Tolstoy noticed that "the study of Buddhism and stoicism as well as Jewish prophets, in particular Isaiah, and also Chinese studies of Confucius, Lao-Tzu ... emerged almost simultaneously, about the 6th century B.C." Tolstoy was impressed that all of them equally recognized spiritual nature to be an essence of a human being.

Leonid Andreev, a famous Russian playwright, recalled that Tolstoy often emphasized his connection with Chinese and Hindus: "A continual correspondence and meetings with the best representatives of these nations strengthened his conviction that ex oriente-lux." [Latin; "light comes from the East"] Tolstoy wrote: "I was always greatly interested in the life of the Chinese people and I tried my best to find anything I could about the life of the Chinese, mostly Chinese religious wisdom - books by Confucius, Lao-tzu ..."

As a famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky recollected, in their conversation about Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy once said: "He would greatly benefit from learning the teachings of Confucius or Buddhists, this would calm him down. This is the most important thing that everyone should know."

On Reincarnation

"We have no doubt existed before this life, although we have lost the recollection of it," wrote young Tolstoy in his novel Boyhood. He echoed this early sentiment 50 years later: "Tender emotions and elation, which we experience while contemplating nature, are recollections about the time, when we were animals, trees, flowers, the earth ..."

Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev recalled how Tolstoy, after seeing a pitiful old gelding, started patting him, repeating that in his opinion, it does have feelings and a thinking mind. "I told him: 'Listen, Leo Nikolayevich, you should have been a horse at some point in time. Could you depict an internal state of a horse?' Tolstoy look up the challenge and produced Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse. After reading the novel, Turgenev exclaimed, 'Now I am completely convinced that you were a horse!'"

In his First Memories, Tolstoy wrote the following:

"There is only one step from a five-year-old child to me. From a newborn to a five-year old there lies a terrifying distance. From an embryo to a newborn there is an abyss. But from nonexistence to the embryo the distance is no longer an abyss, but inconceivability."

Tolstoy's thinking becomes even more profound: "Not only space, and time, and reason are the forms of thinking, and the essence of life lies beyond these forms, but our entire life unfolds as a conformity to these forms and then again liberation from them ..."

The cycle of life and death as a theme fascinated him throughout his career. In the diaries of his last year of life, he wrote:
"While walking, I so clearly felt the life of calves, sheep, moles, trees, and how the new sheep, moles, people stem from them. And all of this has been happening for an infinite number of years, and it will continue to take place for infinite time in the future, and it will happen in Africa, and in India, and in Australia, and in every region of the planet Earth. But there are thousands, millions of these kinds of planets. And when you clearly grasp it, all the speculations about the magnificence of anything human ... become so ridiculous."
To Tolstoy, mankind is diminutive, humble. He further reasons that no matter that a man seems to be "higher than others, but as downward from the man there is an infinite number of lower creatures, whom we hardly know, so above us there should be infinity of higher beings, whom we do not know."