Book Review 2025.16: The Quest After Perfection, (1952), Paperback 146 pages, October 15, 2025
I don’t know what made me pick up this thin book during my book browsing haunts, but I am delighted to have picked it. With most books, I feel happy as I near completion, however this book left me with a tinge of sadness as I neared completion as I realized my session with Prof. Hiriyanna is ending. How I wish I had been his student sitting in a classroom in Mysore listening to him despite knowing that his clarity of thought will leave me with no doubt to ask.
Prof. Hiriyanna’s lectures stands out for its simplicity and the precision with which he communicates abstract ideas by dissecting them to make it concrete. Equating kama as hunger, he defines it as an individual’s immediate need. This definition helps us see its two parts, an immediate need requiring satisfaction and the need of an individual. Left unrestrained, it is selfishness, an evil that can harm the individual by ignoring their longer-term needs and also harm the ecosystem in which the individual exists. Morality he explains is the means to curb this evil of selfishness while satisfying our hunger thereby protecting our longer-term needs and the ecosystem.
This book is a collection of eight lectures that lucidly introduce the reader to Indian philosophy, the concept of value, morality, and the role of beauty, goodness and truth in pursuit of moksha among other such ideas. It contains many nuggets that get deeply embedded in the mind like the word adhikara having two meanings: one as fitness for a role and the other as performing the role; the discussion on the role of altruism as a means or an end, the relationship between knowledge and values to highlight the role of knowledge as a means and not the end, art as a layman’s yoga that gives them a momentary feel of the infinite bliss, the idea of love transforming duties into rights, are only a few to enumerate.
Reading this book kindled in me the desire to read more on the subject and to find all other books of this author to feast on. I recommend this book to every person interested in philosophy in general and Indian philosophy in particular. For novices like me this is a great book to devour at the start of our journey that will engage us to keep going ahead in this journey.
Blissful reading as we pursue a meaningful life and a more amicable world to live in.
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