A pundit guide was indispensable for study. It would be quite useless for me or even for the average educated Indian to approach India's literary heirloom and search for her subtlest traditional wisdom without the help of one of these scholarly exponents. Yet it would have been equally useless to place myself in the hands of the average conservative pundit, for he generally followed a cramped religious line or at best a scholastic approach to the question of truth, whereas I had now lost most of my interest in such an approach--although I readily granted its usefulness to others--and could only view things honestly from a rational and scientific angle. Both the selection of suitable texts and the quality of his interpretations would be coloured by the nature of his belief: he would expect me to swallow his whole pantheon of untenable superstitions, as well as many other matters that offered affronts to reason. The verbal protest of disbelief on my part would immediately certify me as unfit and unworthy to profit by his assistance and place me with the outcastes beyond the sacred shrine of his learning. Nor would I care to hurt the man's conscientiously held religious feelings in such a way. How then could I hope to find the books I cared for when he would disdain them for those that suited his personal taste?
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 2 : Philosophy and Contemporary Culture > # 173
