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THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN CULTURE
SRI AUROBINDO
Contents
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Religion and Spirituality
I HAVE described the framework of the Indian idea from the outlook of an intellectual criticism, because that is the standpoint of the critics who affect to disparage its value. I have shown that Indian culture must be adjudged even from this alien outlook to have been the creation of a wide and noble spirit. Inspired in the heart of its being by a lofty principle, illumined with a striking and uplifting idea of individual man- hood and its powers and its possible perfection, aligned to a spacious plan of social architecture, it was enriched not only by a strong philosophic, intellectual and artistic creativeness but by a great and vivifying and fruitful life-power. But this by itself does not give an adequate account of its spirit or its greatness. One might describe Greek or Roman civilisation from this outlook and miss little that was of importance; but Indian civilisation was not only a great cultural system, but an immense religious effort of the human spirit. The whole root of difference between Indian and European culture springs from the spiritual aim of Indian civilization. It is the turn which this aim imposes on all the rich and luxuriant variety of its forms and rhythms that gives to it its unique character. For even what it has in common with other cultures gets from that turn a stamp of striking originality and solitary greatness. A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of this culture, its core of thought, its ruling passion: Not only did it make spirituality the highest aim of life, but it even tried, as far as that could be done in the past conditions of the human race, to turn the whole of life towards spirituality. But since religion is in the human mind the first native, if imperfect form of the spiritual impulse, the predominance of the spiritual idea, its endeavour to take hold of life, necessitated a casting of thought and action into the religious mould and a persistent filling of every circumstance of life with the religious sense; it demanded a pervading religio-philosophic culture. The highest spirituality Page-121 indeed moves in a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations and, even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal religious mind is unintelligible. But man does not arrive immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him at once, he would never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of ascent; he asks for some scaffolding of dogma, worship, image, sign, form, symbol, some indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he can stand while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is completed can the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear. The religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled this purpose, but, unlike certain other credal religions, it knew its purpose. It gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavourof the human spirit. An immense many-sided and many- staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, sanätana dharma. It is only if we have a just and right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of Indian culture. Now just here is the first baffling difficulty over which the European mind stumbles; for it finds itself unable to make out what Hindu religion is. Where, it asks, is its soul? Where is its mind and fixed thought? Where is the form of its body? How can there be a religion which has no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no theological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo, distinguishing it from antagonistic or rival religions? How can there be a religion which has no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or congregational system, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory on all its adherents, no one administration and discipline'? For the Hindu priests are mere ceremonial Page-122 officiants without any ecclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere interpreters of the Shastra, not the law-givers of the religion or its rulers. How again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures? The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that varies in different castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader. If it ex- communicates the Christian or the Muslim, it is not for religious belief or practice, but because they break with the social rule and order. It has been asserted in consequence that there is no such thing as a Hindu religion, but only a Hindu social system with a bundle of the most disparate religious beliefs and institutions. The precious dictum that Hinduism is a mass of folk- lore with an ineffective coat of metaphysical daubing is perhaps the final judgment of the superficial occidental mind on this matter. This misunderstanding springs from the total difference of outlook on religion that divides the Indian mind and the normal western intelligence. The difference is so great that it could only be bridged by a supple philosophical training or a wide spiritual culture; but the established forms of religion and the rigid methods of philosophical thought practised in the West make no provision and even allow no opportunity for either. To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the contrary, to the western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the-most important part of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes it from others. For it is its formulated beliefs that make it either a true or a false religion, according as it agrees or does not agree with the credo of its critic. This notion, however foolish and shallow, is a necessary consequence of the western idea which falsely supposes that intellectual truth is the highest verity and, even, that there is no other. The Indian religious thinker knows that all the highest eternal verities are truths of the Page-123 spirit. The supreme truths are neither the rigid conc1~sions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple; And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal. Indian religion placed four necessities before human life. First, it imposed upon the mind a belief in a highest consciousness or state of existence universal-and transcendent of the universe, from which all comes, in which all lives and moves without knowing it and of which all must one day grow aware, returning to- wards that which is perfect, eternal and infinite. Next, it laid upon the individual life the need of self-preparation by development and experience till man is ready for an effort to grow consciously into the truth of this greater existence. Thirdly, it provided it with a well-founded, well-explored, many-branching and always enlarging way of knowledge and of spiritual or religious discipline. Lastly, for those not yet ready for these higher steps it provided an organisation of the individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social discipline and conduct, of mental and moral and vital development by which they could move each in his own limits and according to his own nature in such a way as to become eventually ready for the greater existence. The first three of these elements are the most essential to any religion, but Hinduism has always attached to the last also a great importance; it has left out no part of life as a thing secular and foreign to the religious and spiritual life. Still the Indian religious tradition is not merely the form of a religio social system, as the ignorant critic vainly imagines. However greatly that may count at the moment of a social departure, however stubbornly the conservative religious mind may oppose all pronounced or drastic change, still the core of Hinduism is a Page-124 spiritual, not social discipline. Actually we find religions like Sikhism counted in the Vedic family although they broke -down the old social tradition and invented a novel form, while the Jains and Buddhists were traditionally considered to be outside the religious fold although they observed Hindu social custom and intermarried with Hindus, because their spiritual system and teaching figured in its origin as a denial of the truth of the Veda and a departure from the continuity of the Vedic line. In all these four elements that constitute Hinduism there are major and minor differences between Hindus of various sects, schools, communities and races; but nevertheless there is also a general' unity of spirit, of fundamental type and form and of, spiritual temperament which creates in this vast fluidity an immense force of cohesion and a strong principle of oneness. The fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient, a one Eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal Divinity or divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount and continent and inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal. But this Truth of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical speculation, a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the intelligence. It was not an idea to be indulged by the thinker in his study, but otherwise void of practical bearing on life. It was not a mystic sublimation which could be ignored in the dealings of man with the world and Nature. It was a living spiritual Truth, an Entity, a Power, a Presence that could be sought by all according to their degree of capacity and seized in a thousand ways through life and beyond life. This Truth was to be lived and even to be made the governing idea of thought and life and action. This recognition and pursuit of something or someone Supreme behind all forms is the one universal credo of Indian religion, and if it has taken a Page-125 hundred shapes, it was precisely because it was so much alive. The Infinite alone justifies the existence of the finite and the finite by itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence. Life, if it is not an illusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. Or it is a means by which the soul growing - in Nature through countless forms and many lives can approach, touch, feel and unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and adoration and a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this infinite Existence. This Self or this self- existent Being is the one supreme reality, and an things else are either only appearances or only true by dependence upon it. It follows that self-realisation and God-realisation are the great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation. Indian religion never considered intellectual or theological conceptions about the supreme Truth to be the one thing of central importance. To pursue that Truth under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain to it by inner experience, to live in it in consciousness, this it held to be the sole thing needful. One school or sect might consider the real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and the individual soul in man to be three eternally different powers of being. But for all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even to the Indian dualist, God is the supreme self and reality in whom and by whom Nature and man live, move and have their being and, if you eliminate God from his view of things, Nature and man would lose for him all their meaning and importance. The Spirit, universal Nature (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Jiva, are the three truths which are universally admitted by all the many religious sects and conflicting religious philosophies of India. Universal also is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self in man, the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting con- tact or absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal Brahman is the condition of spiritual perfection. Page-126
It is open to us to conceive
and have experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to
approach and know and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal
Person: but whatever be our way of reaching him, the one important truth of
spiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and
all existence is in him and to find him is the great self-finding. Differences
of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of
seeing the one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing
needful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after
and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and
aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living
Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest
spiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian
religion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence. Page-127
very highest spiritual truth
and some breath of its influence into every part of the religious field.
Nothing can be more untrue than to pretend that the general religious mind of
India has not at all grasped the higher spiritual or metaphysical truths of Indian
religion. It is a sheer falsehood or a wilful misunderstanding to say that it
has lived always in the externals only of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the
contrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their
broad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have
been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya, Lila, divine
Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the
temple as to the philosopher in his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and
the saint in his hermitage. The spiritual reality which they reflect, the
profound experience to which they point has permeated the religion, the
literature, the art, even the popular religious songs of a whole people. Page-128
inner realities, are divided
from them by a less thick veil of the universal ignorance and are more easily
led back to a ,vital glimpse of God and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass
of men or even the cultured elite anywhere else. Where else could the
lofty, austere and difficult teaching of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the
popular mind? Where else could the songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir,
the Sikh Gurus and the chants of the Tamil saints with their fervid devotion
but also their pro- found spiritual thinking have found so speedy an echo and
formed a popular religious literature? This strong permeation or close nearness
of the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to
the highest realities is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still
living and supremely spiritual culture. Page-129
have been querulous bickerings
of sects with their pretensions to spiritual superiority and greater knowledge,
and sometimes, at one time especially in southern India in a period of acute
religious differences, there have been brief local outbreaks of active mutual
tyranny and persecution even unto death. But these things have never taken the
proportions which they assumed in Europe. Intolerance has been confined for the
most part to the minor forms of polemical attack or to social obstruction or
ostracism; very seldom have they transgressed across the line to the major
forms of barbaric persecution which draw a long, red and hideous stain across
the religious history of Europe. There has played ever in India the saving
perception of a higher and purer spiritual intelligence, which has had its
effect on the mass mentality. Indian religion has always felt that since the
minds, the temperaments, the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in
their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to
the individual in his approach to the Infinite. Page-130
enlarging continuity of her
spiritual experience. That ageless continuity was carefully conserved, but it
admitted light from all quarters. In later times the saints who reached some
fusion of the Hindu and the Islamic teaching were freely and immediately
recognised as leaders of Hindu religion,
― even,
in some cases, when they started with a Mussulman birth and from the Mussulman
standpoint. The Yogin who developed a new path of Yoga, the religious teacher
who founded a new order, the thinker who built up a novel statement of the
many-sided truth of spiritual existence, found no serious obstacle to their
practice or their propaganda. At most they had to meet the opposition of the
priest and Pundit instinctively adverse to any change; but this had only to be
lived down for the new element to be received into the free and pliant body of
the national religion and its ever plastic order. Page-131
handed it down from generation
to generation but were empowered also, unlike the priest and the Pundit, to
enrich freely its significance and develop its practice. A living and moving,
not a rigid continuity, was the characteristic turn of the inner religious mind
of India. The evolution of the Vaishnava religion from very early times, its
succession of saints and teachers, the striking developments given to it
successively by Ramanuja, Madhwa, Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and its recent
stirrings of survival after a period of languor and of some fossilisation form
one notable example of this firm combination of agelong continuity and fixed
tradition with latitude of powerful and vivid change. A more striking instance
was the founding of the Sikh religion, its long line of Gurus and the novel
direction and form given to it by Guru Govind Singh in the democratic
institution of the Khalsa. The Buddhist Sangha
and its councils, the creation of a sort of divided pontifical authority by
Shankaracharya, an authority transmitted from generation to generation for more
than a thousand years and even now not altogether effete, the Sikh Khalsa, the
adoption of the congregational form called Samaj by the modern reforming sects
indicate an attempt towards a compact and stringent order. But it is noteworthy
that even in these attempts the freedom and plasticity and living sincerity of
the religious mind of India always prevented it from initiating anything like
the overblown ecclesiastical orders and despotic hierarchies which in the West
have striven to impose the tyranny of their obscurantist yoke on the spiritual
liberty of the human race. Page-132
with its marvellous wealth of
many-sided philosophies, of great scriptures, of profound religious works, of
religions that approach the Eternal from every side of his infinite Truth, of
Yoga- systems of psycho-spiritual discipline and self-finding, of suggestive
forms, symbols and ceremonies, which are strong to train the mind at all stages
of development towards the Godward endeavour. Its firm structure capable of
supporting without peril a large tolerance and assimilative spirit, its
vivacity, intensity, profundity and multitudinousness of experience, its
freedom from the unnatural European divorce between mundane know- ledge and
science on the one side and religion on the other, its reconciliation of the
claims of the intellect with the claims of the spirit, its long endurance and
infinite capacity of revival make it stand out today as the most remarkable,
rich and living of all religious systems. The nineteenth century has thrown on
it its tremendous shock of negation and scepticism but has not been able to destroy
its assured roots of spiritual knowledge. A little disturbed for a brief
moment, surprised and temporarily shaken by this attack in a period of greatest
depression of the nation's vital force, India revived almost at once and
responded by a fresh outburst of spiritual activity, seeking, assimilation,
formative effort. A great new life is visibly preparing in her, a mighty
transformation and farther dynamic evolution and potent march forward into the
inexhaustible infinities of spiritual experience. Page-133
limits; but, after all, it is
perhaps safest to do without these dangerous spices. Trained in these
conceptions, the European critic comes to India and is struck by the immense
mass and intricacy of a polytheistic cult crowned at its summit by a belief in
the one Infinite. This belief he erroneously supposes to be identical with the
barren and abstract intellectual pantheism of the West. He applies with an
obstinate prejudgment the ideas and definitions of his own thinking, and this
illegitimate importation has fixed many false values on Indian spiritual
conceptions, ―
unhappily, even in the mind of "educated" India. But
where our religion eludes his fixed standards, misunderstanding, denunciation
and supercilious condemnation come. at once to his rescue. The Indian mind, on
the contrary, is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of
intuition and inner
experience had given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the
West is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty,
― the cosmic
consciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the One without a second,
it still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature; it leaves room for his many trinities
and million aspects. Even when it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of
the Divinity and seems to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at
the back of its conscious- ness the sense of the All and the idea of the One.
Even when it distributes its worship among many objects, it looks at the same
time through the objects of its worship and sees beyond the multitude of
godheads the unity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar to the
mystics or to a small literate class or to philosophic thinkers nourished on
the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta. It permeates the popular mind
nourished on the thoughts, images, traditions, and cultural symbols of the
Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living
figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarianism, the large cosmic
universalism of the Vedic scriptures. Page-134 names and powers and personalities of the Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague transcendental Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one Godhead is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is he or made out of his being or his nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism; for beyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal. Indian polytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for here the worshipper of many gods still knows that all his divinities are forms, names, personalities and powers of the One; his gods proceed from the one Purusha, his goddesses are energies of the one divine Force. Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. Indian image-worship is not the idolatry of a barbaric or undeveloped mind, for even the most ignorant know that the image is a symbol and support and can throw it away when its use is over. The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak's worship of the timeless One, Akala, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta. The divine Personality of God and his human relations with man are strongly stressed by Vaishnavism and Shaivism as the most dynamic Truth; but that is not the whole of these religions, and this divine Personality is not the limited magnified- human personal God of the. West. Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has been a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experience. Observing the one Truth from all its many sides, it shut out none. It gave itself no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing separative designations for its constituting cults and divisions, it remained itself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman of its agelong seeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other creeds by its traditional scriptures, cults and symbols, it is not in its essential character a credal religion at all but a vast and many-sided, an always unifying and always pro- Page-135
gressive and self-enlarging
system of spiritual culture.1
1 The only religion that India has apparently rejected in the end is Buddhism; but in fact this appearance is a historical error. Buddhism lost its separative force, because its spiritual substance, as opposed to its credal parts, was absorbed by the religious mind of Hindu India. Even so, it survived in the North and was exterminated not by Shankaracharya or another, but by the invading force of Islam Page-136
approach the Infinite; all cosmic
powers are manifestations, all forces are forces of the One. The gods behind
the workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as powers, names and
personalities of the one Godhead. An infinite Conscicous-Force, executive
Energy, Will or Law, Maya, Prakriti, Shakti or Karma, is behind all happenings,
whether to us they seem good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, fortunate or
adverse. The Infinite creates and is Brahma; it preserves and is Vishnu; it
destroys or takes to itself and is Rudra or Shiva. The supreme Energy
beneficent in upholding and protection is or else formulates itself as the
Mother of the worlds, Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the mask of
destruction it is Chandi or it is Kali, the dark Mother. The One Godhead
manifests himself in the form of his qualities in various names and godheads.
The God of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of the Shakta
appear as two different godheads; but in truth they are the one infinite Deity
in different figures.1 One may approach
the Supreme through any of these names and forms, with knowledge or in
ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the
supreme experience.
1 This explanation of Indian polytheism is not a modern invention created to meet western reproaches; it is to be found explicitly stated in the Gita; it is, still earlier, the sense of the Upanishads; it was clearly stated in so many words in the first ancient days by the "primitive" poets (in truth the profound mystics) of the Veda. Page-137 plane of consciousness he can reach is determined by, the inner evolutionary stage. Thence comes the variety of religious cult, but its data are not imaginary structures, inventions of priests or poets, but truths of a supraphysical existence intermediate between the consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute. The idea of strongest consequence at the base of Indian religion is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that while the Supreme or the Divine can be approached through a universal consciousness and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can be met by each individual soul in itself, in its own spiritual part, because there is something in it that is intimately one or at least intimately related with the one divine Existence. The essence of Indian religion is to aim at so growing and so living that we can grow out of the Ignorance which veils this self-knowledge from our mind and life and be- come aware of the Divinity within us. These three things put together are the whole of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo. Page-138 2
THE task of religion and spirituality is to mediate between God and man, between the Eternal and Infinite and this transient, yet persistent finite, between a luminous Truth-Consciousness not expressed or not yet expressed here and the Mind's ignorance. But nothing is more difficult than to bring home the greatness and uplifting power of the spiritual consciousness to the natural man forming the vast majority of the race; for his mind and senses, are turned outward towards the external calls of life and its objects and never inwards to the Truth which lies behind them. This external vision and attraction are the essence of the universal blinding force which is designated in Indian philosophy the Ignorance. Ancient Indian spirituality recognised that man lives in the Ignorance and has to be led through its imperfect indications to a highest inmost knowledge. Our life moves between two worlds, the depths upon depths of our inward being and the surface field of our outward nature. The majority of men put the whole emphasis of life on the outward and live very strongly in their surface consciousness and very little in the inward existence. Even the choice spirits raised from the grossness of the common vital and physical mould by the stress of thought and culture do not usually get farther than a strong dwelling on the things of the mind. The highest flight they reach ― and it is this that the West persistently mistakes for spirituality ― is a preference for living in the mind and emotions more than in the gross outward life or else an attempt to subject this rebellious life-stuff to the law of intellectual truth or ethical reason and will or aesthetic beauty or of all three together. But spiritual knowledge perceives that there is a greater thing in us; our inmost self, our real being is not the intellect, not the aesthetic, ethical or thinking mind, but the divinity within, the Spirit, and these other things are only the instruments of the Spirit. A mere intellectual, ethical and aesthetic culture does not go back to the inmost truth of the spirit; it is still an Ignorance, an incomplete, outward and super- Page-139
ficial knowledge. To have made
the discovery of our deepest being and hidden spiritual nature is the first
necessity and to have erected the living of an inmost spiritual life into the
aim of existence is the characteristic sign of a spiritual culture. Page-140 towards this aim; in spite of all the difficulties, imperfections and fluctuations of its evolution, it had this character. But like other cultures it was not at all times and in all its parts and movements consciously aware of its own total significance. This large sense sometimes emerged into something like a conscious synthetic clarity, but was more often kept in the depths and on the surface dispersed in a multitude of subordinate and special standpoints. Still, it is only by an intelligence of the total drift that its manifold sides and rich variations of effort and teaching and discipline can receive their full reconciling unity and be understood in the light of its own most intrinsic purpose. Now the spirit of Indian religion and spiritual culture has been persistently and immovably the same throughout the long time of its vigour, but its form has undergone remarkable changes. Yet if we look into them from the right centre it will be apparent that these changes are the results of a logical and inevitable evolution inherent in the very process of man's growth towards the heights. In its earliest form, its first Vedic system, it took its outward foundation on the mind of the physical man whose natural faith is in things physical, in the sensible and visible objects, presences, representations and the external pursuits and aims of the material world. The means, symbols, rites, figures, by which it sought to mediate between the spirit and the normal human mentality were drawn from these most external physical things. Man's first and primitive idea of the Divine can only come through his vision of external Nature and the sense of a superior Power or Powers concealed behind her phenomena veiled in the heaven and earth, father and mother of our being, in the sun and moon and stars, its lights and regulators, in dawn and day and night and rain and wind and storm, the oceans and the rivers and the forests, all the circumstances and forces of her scene of action, all that vast and mysterious surrounding life of which we are a part and in which the natural heart and mind of the human creature feel instinctively through whatever bright or dark or confused figures that there is here some divine Multitude or else mighty Infinite, one, manifold and mysterious, which takes these forms and manifests itself in these motions. The Vedic religion took this natural sense and feeling of the physical man; Page-141 it used the conceptions to which they gave birth, and it sought to lead him through them to the psychic and spiritual truths of his own being and the being of the cosmos. It recognised that he was right when he saw behind the manifestations of Nature great living powers and godheads, even though he knew not their inner truth, and right too in offering to them worship and propitiation and atonement. For that inevitably must be the initial way in which his active physical, vital and mental nature is allowed to approach the Godhead. He approaches it through its visible outward manifestations as something greater than his own natural self, something single or multiple that guides, sustains and directs his life, and he calls to it for help and support in the desires and difficulties and distresses and struggles of his human existence.1 () The Vedic religion accepted also the form in which early man everywhere expressed his sense of the relation between himself and the godheads of Nature; it adopted as its central symbol the act and ritual of a physical sacrifice. However crude the notions attached to it, this idea of the necessity of sacrifice did express obscurely a first law of being. For it was founded on that secret of constant interchange between the individual and the universal powers of the cosmos which covertly supports all the process of life and develops the action of Nature. But even in its external and exoteric side the Vedic religion did not limit itself to this acceptance and regulation of the first religious notions of the natural physical mind of man. The Vedic Rishis gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the people; they spoke to them of a higher Truth, Right, Law of which the gods were the guardians, of the necessity of a truer knowledge and a larger inner living according to this Truth and Right, and of a home of Immortality to which the soul of man could ascend by the power of Truth and of right doing. The people no doubt took these ideas in their most external sense; but they were trained by them to develop their ethical
1 The Gita recognises four kinds of degrees of worshippers and God-seekers: There are first the artharthi and ārta, those who seek him for the fulfilment of desire and those who turn for divine help in the sorrow and suffering of existence; there is next the jijñāsu, the seeker of knowledge, the questioner who is moved to seek the Divine in his truth and in that to meet him; last and highest, there is the jñāni who has already contact with the truth and is able to live in unity with the Spirit. Page-142
nature, to turn towards some initial development of their psychic being, to
conceive the idea of a knowledge and truth other than that of the physical life
and to admit even a first conception of some greater spiritual Reality which
was the ultimate object of human worship or aspiration. This religious and
moral force was the highest reach of the external cult and the most that could
be understood or followed by the mass of the people. Page-143 foundation of all our culture to the Rishis, whatever its fabulous forms
and mythical ascriptions, contains a real truth and veils a sound historic
tradition. It reflects the fact of a true initiation and an unbroken continuity
between this great primitive past and the riper but hardly greater spiritual
development of our historic culture. Page-144 This is the aspect of the Vedic teaching and worship to which a European
scholar, mistaking entirely its significance because he read it in the dim and
poor light of European religious experience, has given the sounding misnomer,
henotheism. Beyond, in the triple Infinite, these godheads put on their highest
nature and are names of the one nameless Ineffable. Page-145 forms, names, powers, personalities of his Godhead. There is the distinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance,1 () the greater truth of an immortal life opposed to the much falsehood or mixed truth and falsehood of mortal existence. There is the discipline of an inward growth of man from the physical through the psychic to the spiritual existence. There is the conquest of death, the secret of immortality, the perception of a realisable divinity of the human spirit. In an age to which in the insolence of our external knowledge we are accustomed to look back as the childhood of humanity or at best a period of vigorous barbarism, this was the inspired and intuitive psychic and spiritual teaching by which the ancient human fathers, purve pitarah manuŞyāh, founded a great and profound civilisation in India. This high beginning was secured in its results by a larger sublime efflorescence. The Upanishads have always been recognised in India as the crown and end of the Veda; that is indicated in their general name, Vedanta. And they are in fact a large crowning outcome of the Vedic discipline and experience. The time in which the Vedantic truth was wholly seen and the Upanishads took shape, was, as we can discern from such records as the Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka, an epoch of immense and strenuous seeking, an intense and ardent seed-time of the Spirit. In the stress of that seeking the truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary men broke their barriers, swept through the higher mind of the nation and fertilised the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever-increasing growth of spiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. This turn was not as yet universal; it was chiefly men of the higher classes, Kshatriyas and Brahmins trained in the Vedic system of education, no longer content with an external truth and the works of the outer sacrifice, who began everywhere to seek for the highest word of revealing experience from the sages who possessed the knowledge of the One. But we find too among those who attained to the knowledge and became great teachers men of inferior or doubtful birth like Janashruti, the wealthy Shudra, or Satyakama Jabali, son of a servant-girl who knew not who was his father. The work
1 Cittim acittim cinavad vi vidvān: "Let the knower distinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance." Page-146 that was done in this period became the firm bedrock of Indian
spirituality in later ages and from it gush still the life-giving waters of a
perennial never-failing inspiration. This period, this activity, this grand
achievement created the whole difference between the evolution of Indian civilisation
and the quite different curve of other cultures. Page-147 a highest and most direct and powerful language of intuition and inner
experience. It was not the language of the intellect, but still it wore a form
which the intellect could take hold of, translate into its own more abstract
terms and convert into a a starting-point for an ever-widening and deepening
philosophic speculation and the reason's long search after a Truth original,
supreme and ultimate. There was in India as in the West a great upbuilding of a
high, wide and complex intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and social culture. But
left in Europe to its own resources, combated rather than helped by an obscure
religious emotion and dogma, here it was guided, uplifted and more and more
penetrated and suffused by a great saving power of spirituality and a vast
stimulating and tolerant light of wisdom from a highest ether of knowledge. Page-148 these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience
is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the
clarities of the reasoning intelligence. Page-149 ponding potent stress on spiritual asceticism as the higher way. The two
trends, on one side an extreme of the richness of life experience, on the other
an extreme and pure rigorous intensity of the spiritual life, accompanied each
other; their interaction, whatever loss there might be of the earlier deep
harmony and large synthesis, yet by their double pull preserved something still
of the balance of Indian culture.
1 Buddha himself does not seem to have preached his tenets as a novel revolutionary creed, but as the old Aryan way, the true form of the eternal religion. Page-150 and spiritual positions. A result of an intense stress of the union of logical reason with the spiritualised mind, ― for it was by an intense spiritual seeking supported on a clear and hard rational thinking that it was born as a separate religion, ― its trenchant affirmations and still more exclusive negations could not be made sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility, many- sided susceptibility and rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people. Indian religion absorbed all that it could of Buddhism, but rejected its exclusive positions and preserved the full line of its own continuity, casting back to the ancient Vedanta. This lasting line of change moved forward not by any destruction of principle, but by a gradual fading out of the prominent Vedic forms and the substitution of others. There was a transformation of symbol and ritual and ceremony or a substitution of new kindred figures, an emergence of things that are only hints in the original system, a development of novel idea forms from the seed of the original thinking. And especially there was a farther widening and fathoming of psychic and spiritual experience. The Vedic gods rapidly lost their deep original significance. At first they kept their hold by their outer cosmic sense but were overshadowed by the great Trinity, Brahma- Vishnu-Shiva, and afterwards faded altogether. A new pantheon appeared which in its outward symbolic aspects expressed a deeper truth and larger range of religious experience, an intenser feeling, a vaster idea. The Vedic sacrifice persisted only in broken and lessening fragments. The house of Fire was replaced by the temple; the karmic ritual of sacrifice was transformed into the devotional temple ritual; the vague and shifting mental images of the Vedic gods figured in the Mantras yielded to more precise conceptual forms of the two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and of their Shaktis and their offshoots. These new concepts stabilised in physical images were made the basis both for internal adoration and for the external worship which replaced sacrifice. The psychic and spiritual mystic endeavour which was the inner sense of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into the less intensely luminous but more wide and rich and complex Page-151
psycho-spiritual inner life of
Puranic and Tantric religion and Yoga. Page-152 religious to a profounder psychic-spiritual truth and experience. Nothing essential was touched in its core by this new orientation; but the instruments, atmosphere, field of religious experience underwent a considerable change. The Vedic godheads were to the mass of their worshippers divine powers who presided over the workings of the outward life of the physical cosmos; the Puranic Trinity had even for the multitude a predominant psycho-religious and spiritual significance. Its more external significance, for instance, the functions of cosmic creation, preservation and destruction, were only a dependent fringe of these profundities that alone touched the heart of its mystery. The central spiritual truth remained in both systems the same, the truth of the One in many aspects. The Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and Brahman; the Shaktis are energies of the one Energy of the highest divine Being. But this greatest religious truth was no longer reserved for the initiated few; it was now more and more brought powerfully, widely and intensely home to the general mind and feeling of the people. Even the so-called henotheism of the Vedic idea was prolonged and heightened in the larger and simpler worship of Vishnu or Shiva as the one universal and highest Godhead of whom all others are living forms and powers. The idea of the Divinity in man was popularised to an extraordinary extent, not only the occasional manifestation of the Divine in humanity which founded the worship of the Avataras, but the Presence discoverable in the heart of every creature. The systems of Yoga developed themselves on the same common basis. All led or hoped to lead through many kinds of psycho-physical, inner vital, inner mental and psycho-spiritual methods to the common aim of all Indian spirituality, a greater consciousness and a more or less complete union with the One and Divine or else an immergence of the individual soul in the Absolute. The Purano-Tantric system was a wide, assured and many-sided endeavour, unparalleled in its power, insight, amplitude, to provide the race with a basis of generalised psycho-religious experience from which man could rise through knowledge, works or love or through any other fundamental power of his nature to some established supreme experience and highest absolute status. Page-153 This great effort and achievement which covered all the time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism, was still not the last possibility of religious evolution open to Indian culture. The Vedic training of the physically-minded man made the development possible. But in its turn this raising of the basis of religion to the inner mind and life and psychic nature, this training and bringing out of the psychic man ought to make possible a still larger development and support a greater spiritual movement as the leading power of life. The first stage makes possible the preparation of the natural external man for spirituality; the second takes up his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical living and brings him more directly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him; the third should render him capable of taking up his whole mental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual life. This endeavour has manifested itself in the evolution of Indian spirituality and is the significance of the latest philosophies, the great spiritual movements of the saints and Bhaktas and an increasing resort to various paths of Yoga. But unhappily it synchronised with a decline of Indian culture and an increasing collapse of its general power and knowledge, and in these surroundings, it could not bear its natural fruit; but at the same time it has done much to prepare such a possibility in the future. If Indian culture is to survive and keep its spiritual basis and innate character, it is in this direction, and not in a mere revival or a prolongation of the Puranic system, that its evolution must turn, rising so towards the fulfilment of that which the Vedic seers saw as the aim of man and his life thousands of years ago and the Vedantic sages cast into the clear and immortal forms of their luminous revelation. Even the psychic-emotional part of man's nature is not the inmost door to religious feeling nor is his inner mind the highest witness to spiritual experience. There is behind the first the inmost soul of man, in that deepest secret heart, hrdaye guhãyãm, in which the ancient seers saw the very tabernacle of the indwelling Godhead, and there is above the second a luminous highest mind directly open to a truth of the Spirit to which man's normal nature has as yet only an occasional and momentary access. Religious evolution, spiritual experience can find their true native road only when Page-154
they open to these hidden
powers and make them their support for a lasting change, a divinisation of
human life and nature. An effort of this kind was the very force behind the
most luminous and vivid of the later movements of India's vast religious
cycles. It is the secret of the most powerful forms of Vaishnavism and Tantra
and Yoga. The labour of ascent from our half animal human nature into the
fresh purity of the spiritual consciousness needed to be followed and
supplemented by a descent of the light and force of the spirit into man's
members and the attempt to transform human into divine nature. Page-155 3
IT IS essential, if we are to get a right view of Indian civilisation or of any civilisation, to keep to the central, living, governing things and not to be led away by the confusion of accidents and details. This is a precaution which the critics of our culture steadily refuse to take. A civilisation, a culture must be looked at first in its initiating, supporting, durable central motives, in its heart of abiding principle; otherwise we shall be likely to find ourselves, like these critics, in a maze without a clue and we shall stumble about among false and partial conclusions and miss entirely the true truth of the matter. The importance of avoiding this error is evident when we are seeking for the essential significance of Indian religious culture. But the same method must be held to when we proceed to observe its dynamic formulation and the effect of its spiritual ideal on life. Indian culture recognises the spirit as the truth of our being and our life as a growth and evolution of the spirit. It sees the Eternal, the Infinite, the Supreme, the All; it sees this as the secret highest Self of all, this is what it calls God, the Permanent, the Real, and it sees man as a soul and power of this being of God in Nature. The progressive growth of the finite conscious- ness of man towards this Self, towards God, towards the universal, the eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existence. To this deeper and more spiritual idea of Nature and of existence a great deal of what is strongest and most potential of fruitful consequences in recent European thinking already turns with a growing impetus. This turn may be a relapse to "barbarism" or it may be the high natural outcome of her own increasing and ripened culture; that is a question for Europe to decide. But always to India this ideal inspiration or rather this spiritual vision of Self, God, Spirit, this nearness to a cosmic consciousness, a cosmic sense and feeling, a cosmic idea, will, love, delight into Page-156
which we can release the
limited, ignorant suffering ego, this drive towards the transcendental,
eternal and infinite, and the moulding of man into a conscious soul and power
of that greater Existence have been the engrossing motive of her philosophy,
the sustaining force of her religion, the fundamental idea of her civilisation
and culture. Page-157
and by that too hasty
imagination falls short in his endeavour. Its index vision is pointed to a
truth that exceeds the human mind and, if at all realised in his members, would
turn human life into a divine super-life. And not until this third largest
sweep of the spiritual evolution has come into its own, can Indian civilisation
be said to have discharged its mission, to have spoken ... its last word and be functus officio, crowned
and complete in its office of mediation between the life of man and the spirit. Page-158
both of man's inner and his
outer existence. Page-159
side of the cultural effort
took the form of an endeavour to cast the whole of life into a religious mould;
it multiplied means and devices which by their insistent suggestion and
opportunity and their mass of effect would help to stamp a Godward tendency on
the entire existence. Indian culture was founded on a religious conception of
life and both the individual and the community drank in at every moment its
influence. It was stamped on them by the training and turn of the education;
the entire life
atmosphere, all the social surroundings were
suffused with it; it
breathed its power through the whole original form and
hieratic character of the culture. Always was felt the near idea of the
spiritual existence and its supremacy as the ideal, highest over all others;
everywhere there was the pervading pressure of the notion of the universe as a
manifestation of divine Powers and a movement full of the presence of the
Divine. Man himself was not a mere reasoning animal, but a soul in constant
relation with God and with the divine cosmic Powers. The soul's continued
existence was a cyclic or upward progress from birth to birth; human life was
the summit of an evolution which terminated in the conscious Spirit, every
stage of that life a step in a pilgrimage. Every single action of man had its
importance of fruit whether in future lives or in the worlds beyond the
material existence. Page-160
of
human nature, every characteristic turn of its action was given a place in the
system; each was suitably surrounded with' the spiritual idea and a religious
influence, each provided with steps by which it might rise towards its own
spiritual possibility and significance. The highest spiritual meaning of life
was set on the summits of each evolving power of the human nature. The
intelligence was called to a supreme knowledge, the dynamic active and creative
powers pointed to openness and unity with an infinite and universal Will, the
heart and sense put in contact with a divine love and joy and beauty. But
this-highest meaning was also put everywhere indicatively or in symbols behind
the whole system of living, even in its details, so that its impression might
fall in whatever degree on the life, increase in pervasion and in the end take
up the entire control. This was the aim and, if we consider the imperfections
of our nature and the difficulty of the endeavour, we can say that it achieved
an unusual measure of success. It has been said with some truth that for the
Indian the whole of life is a religion. True of the ideal of Indian life, it is
true to a certain degree and in a certain sense in its fact and practice. No
step could be taken in the Indian's inner or outer life without his being
reminded of a spiritual existence. Everywhere he felt the closeness or at least
saw the sign of something beyond his natural life, beyond the moment in time,
beyond his individual ego, something other than the needs and interests of his
vital and physical nature. That insistence gave its tone and turn to his
thought and action and feeling; it produced that subtler sensitiveness to the
spiritual appeal, that greater readiness to turn to the spiritual effort which
are even now the distinguishing marks of the Indian temperament. It is that
readiness, that sensitiveness which justifies us when we speak of the
characteristic spirituality of the Indian people. Page-161 response. There is presented to our view for all our picture of life the sharp division of two extremes; the saint and the worldling, the religious and the irreligious, the good and the bad, the pious and the impious, souls accepted and souls rejected, the sheep and the goats, the saved and the damned, the believer and the infidel, are the two categories set constantly before us. All between is a confusion, a tug of war, an uncertain balance. This crude and summary classification is the foundation of the Christian system of an eternal heaven and hell; at best, the Catholic religion humanely interposes a precarious chance hung between that happy and this dread alternative, the chance of a painful purgatory for more than nine-tenths of the human race. Indian religion set up on its summits a still more high-pitched spiritual call, a standard of conduct still more perfect and absolute; but it did not go about its work with this summary and unreflecting ignorance. All beings are to the Indian mind portions of the Divine, evolving souls, and sure of an eventual salvation and release into the spirit. All must feel, as the good in them grows or, more truly, the godhead in them finds itself and becomes conscious, the ultimate touch and call of their highest self and through that call the attraction to the Eternal and the Divine. But actually in life there are infinite differences between man and man; some are more inwardly evolved, others are less mature, many if not most are infant souls incapable of great steps and difficult efforts. Each needs to be dealt with according to his nature and his soul stature. But a general distinction can be drawn between three principal types varying in their openness to the spiritual appeal or to the religious influence or impulse. This distinction amounts to a gradation of three stages in the growing human consciousness. One crude, ill-formed, still outward, still vitally and physically minded can be led only by devices suited to its ignorance. Another, more developed and capable of a much stronger and deeper psycho-spiritual experience, offers a riper make of man-hood gifted with a more conscious intelligence, a larger vital or aesthetic opening, a stronger ethical power of the nature. A third, the ripest and most developed of all, is ready for the spiritual heights, fit to receive or to climb towards the loftiest ultimate truth of God and of its own being and to tread the summits of Page-162 divine experience.1
It was to meet the need of the first type or
level that 'Indian religion created that mass of suggestive ceremony and
effective ritual and strict outward rule and injunction and all that pageant of
attracting and compelling symbol with which the cult is so richly equipped or
profusely decorated. These are for the most part forming and indicative things
which work upon the mind consciently and subconsciently and prepare it for an
entry into the significance of the greater permanent things that lie behind
them. And for this type too, for its vital mind and will, is in- tended all in
the religion that calls on man to turn to a divine Power or powers for the just
satisfaction of his desires and his interests, just because subject to the
right and the law, the Dharma. In the Vedic times the outward ritual sacrifice
and at a later period all the religious forms and notions that clustered
visibly around the rites and imagery of temple worship, constant festival and
ceremony and daily act of outward devotion were intended to serve this type or
this soul-stage. Many of these things may seem to the developed mind to belong
to an ignorant or half-awakened religionism; but they have their concealed
truth and their psychic value and are indispensable in this stage for the
development and difficult awakening of the soul shrouded in the ignorance of
material Nature.
1 The Tantric distinction is between the animal man, the hero man and the divine man, pasu, vira, deva. Or we may grade the difference according to the three Gunas, - first, the tamasic or rajaso-tamasic man ignorant, inert or moved only in a little light by small motive forces, the rajasic or sattwo-rajasic man struggling with an awakened mind and will towards self-development or self-affirmation, and the sattwic man open in mind and heart and will to the Light, standing at the top of the scale and ready to transcend it. Page-163
inward to a more deeply
psycho-religious experience. Already the mind, heart and will have some
strength to grapple with the difficulties of the relations between the spirit
and life, some urge to satisfy more luminously or more inwardly the rational,
aesthetic and ethical nature and lead them upward towards their own highest
heights; one can begin to train mind and soul towards a spiritual consciousness
and the opening of a spiritual existence. This ascending type of humanity
claims for its use all that large and opulent middle region of philosophic,
psycho-spiritual, ethical, aesthetic and emotional religious seeking which is
the larger and more significant portion of the wealth of Indian culture. At
this stage intervene the philosophical systems, the subtle illumining debates
and inquiries of the thinkers; here are the nobler or more passionate reaches
of devotion, here are held up the higher, ampler or austerer ideals of the
Dharma; here break in the psychical suggestions and first definite urgings of
the eternal and infinite which draw men by their appeal and promise towards the
practice of Yoga. But distinctions are lines that can always be overpassed in the infinite complexity of man's nature and there was no sharp Page-164
and unbridgeable division,
only a gradation, since the actuality or potentiality of the three powers
coexist in all men. Both the middle and the highest significances were near and
present and pervaded the whole system, and the approaches to the highest status
were not absolutely denied to any man, in spite of certain prohibitions: but
these prohibitions broke down in practice or left a way of escape to the man
who felt the call; the call itself was a sign of election. He had only to find
the way and the guide. But even in the direct approach, the principle of
adhikãra,
differing capacity and varying nature,
svabhãva,
was recognised in subtle ways, which it would be beyond my present
purpose to enumerate. One may note as an example the significant Indian, idea
of the iSta-devatã,
the special name,
form, idea of the Divinity which each man may choose for worship and communion
and follow after according to the attraction in his nature and his capacity of
spiritual intelligence. And each of the forms has its outer initial associations
and suggestions for the worshipper, its appeal to the intelligence, psychical,
aesthetic, emotional power in the nature and its highest spiritual significance
which leads through some one truth of the Godhead into the essence of
spirituality. One may note too that in the practice of Yoga the disciple has to
be led through his nature and according to his capacity and the spiritual
teacher and guide is expected to perceive and take account of the necessary
gradations and the individual need and power in his giving of help and
guidance. Many things may be objected to in the actual working of this large
and flexible system and I shall take some note of them when I have to deal with
the weak points or the pejorative side of the culture against which the hostile
critic directs with a misleading exaggeration his missiles. But the principle
of it and the main lines of the application embody a remarkable wisdom,
knowledge and careful observation of human nature and an assured insight into
the things of the spirit which none can question who has considered deeply and
flexibly these difficult matters or had any close experience of the obstacles
and potentialities of our nature in its approach to the concealed spiritual
reality. Page-165 vading intimate connection to that general culture of the life of the human being and his powers which must be the first care of every civilisation worth the name. The most delicate and difficult part of this task of human development is concerned with the thinking being of man, his mind of reason and knowledge. No ancient culture of which we have knowledge, not even the Greek, attached more importance to it or spent more effort on its cultivation. The business of the ancient Rishi was not only to know God, but to know the world and life and to reduce it by knowledge to a thing well understood and mastered with which the reason and will of man could deal on assured lines and on a safe basis of wise method and order. The ripe result of this effort was the Shastra. When we speak of the Shastra nowadays, we mean too often only the religio-social system of injunctions of the middle age made sacrosanct by their mythical attribution to Manu, Parasara and other Vedic sages. But in older India Shastra meant any systematised teaching and science; each department of life, each line of activity, each subject of know- ledge had its science or Shastra. The attempt was to reduce each to a theoretical and practical order founded on detailed observation, just generalisation, full experience, intuitive, logical and experimental analysis and synthesis, in order to enable man to know always with a just fruitfulness for life and to act with the security of right knowledge. The smallest and the greatest things were examined with equal care and attention and each provided with its art and science. The name was given even to the highest spiritual knowledge whenever it was stated not in a mass of intuitive experience and revelatory knowledge as in the Upanishads, but for intellectual comprehension in system and order, - and in that sense the Gita is able to call its profound spiritual teaching the most secret science, guhyatamam sãstram. This high scientific and philosophical spirit was carried by the ancient Indian culture into all its activities. No Indian religion is complete without its outward form of preparatory practice, its supporting philosophy and its Yoga or system of inward practice or art of spiritual living: most even of what seems irrational in it to a first glance, has its philosophical turn and significance. It is this complete under- standing and philosophical character which has given religion in Page-166
India its durable security and
immense vitality and enabled it to resist the acid dissolvent power of modem
sceptical inquiry; whatever is ill-founded in experience and reason, that power
can dissolve, but not the heart and mind of these great teachings. But what we
have more especially to observe is that while Indian culture made a distinction
between the lower and the higher learning, the knowledge of things and the
knowledge of self, it did not put a gulf between them like some religions, but
considered the knowledge of the world and things as a preparatory and a leading
up to the knowledge of Self and God. All Shastra was put under the sanction of
the names of the Rishis, who were in the beginning the teachers not only of
spiritual truth and philosophy,
― and we may note that all Indian philosophy,
even the logic of Nyaya and the atomic theory of the Vaisheshikas, has for its
highest crowning note and eventual object spiritual knowledge and liberation, -
but of the arts, the social, political and military, the physical and psychic
sciences, and every instructor was in his degree respected as a guru or
ãcãrya,
a guide or preceptor of the
human spirit. All knowledge was woven into one and led up by degrees to the one
highest knowledge. Page-167
desires, since that is
necessary for the satisfaction and expansion of life, but not in obeying the
dictates of desire as the law of his being; for in all things there is a
greater law, each has not only its side of interest and desire, but its Dharma
or rule of right practice, satisfaction, expansion, regulation. The Dharma,
then, fixed by the wise in the Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true
rule of action. First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for man's life
is only initially for his vital, personal, individual self, but much more
imperatively for the community, though most imperatively of all for the
greatest Self one in him- self and in all beings, for God, for the Spirit.
Therefore first the individual must subordinate himself to the communal self,
though by no means bound altogether to efface himself in it as the extremists
of the communal idea imagine. He must Jive according to the law of his nature
harmonised with the law of his social type and class, for the nation and in a
higher reach of his being ― this was greatly stressed by
the Buddhists – for humanity. Thus Jiving and acting he could learn to
transcend the social scale of the Dharma, practise without injuring the basis
of life, the ideal scale and finally grow into the liberty of the spirit, when
rule and duty were not binding because he would then move and act in a highest
free and immortal Dharma of the divine nature.
All these aspects of the Dharma were closely linked up
together in a
progressive unity. Thus, for an example, each of the four orders had its own
social function and ethics, but also an ideal rule for the growth of the pure
ethical being, and every man by observing his Dharma and turning his action
Godwards could grow out of it into the spiritual freedom. But behind all Dharma
and ethics was put, not only as a safeguard but as a light, a religious
sanction, a reminder of the continuity of life and of man's long pilgrimage
through many births, a reminder of the Gods and planes beyond and of the
Divine, and above it all the vision of a last stage of perfect comprehension
and unity and of divine transcendence. Page-168
aesthetic satisfactions of all
kinds and all grades were an important part of the culture. Poetry, the drama,
song, dance, music, the greater and lesser arts were placed under the sanction
of the Rishis and were made instruments of the spirit's culture. A just theory
held them to be initially the means of a pure aesthetic satisfaction and each
was founded on its own basic rule and law, but on that basis and with a perfect
fidelity to it still-raised up to minister to the intellectual, ethical and
religious development of the being. It is notable that the two vast Indian
epics have been considered as much as Dharma-shastras as great historico-mythic
epic narratives, itihãsas.
They are, that is
to say, noble, vivid and puissant pictures of life, but they utter and breathe
throughout their course the law and ideal of a great and high ethical and
religious spirit in life and aim in their highest intention at the idea of the
Divine and the way of the mounting soul in the action of the world. Indian
painting, sculpture and architecture did not refuse service to the aesthetic
satisfaction and interpretation of the social, civic and individual life of the
human being; these things, as all evidences show, played a great part in their
motives of creation, but still their highest work was reserved for the greatest
spiritual side of the culture, and throughout we see them seized and suffused
with the brooding stress of the Indian mind on the soul, the Godhead, the
spiritual, the Infinite. And we have to note too that the aesthetic and
hedonistic being was made not only an aid to religion and spirituality and
liberally used for that purpose, but even one of the main gates of man's
approach to the Spirit. The Vaishnava religion especially is a religion of love
and beauty and of the satisfaction of the whole delight-soul of man in God and
even the desires and images of the sensuous life were turned by its vision into
figures of a divine soul-experience. Few religions have gone so far as this
immense catholicity or carried' the whole nature so high in its large, puissant
and many-sided approach to the spiritual and the infinite. Page-169 and enjoyment, military and political rule and conduct and economical well-being. These were directed on one side to success, expansion, opulence and the right art and relation of these activities, but on those motives, demanded by the very nature of the vital man and his action, was imposed the law of the Dharma, a stringent social and ethical ideal and rule, ― thus the whole life of the king as the head of power and responsibility was regulated by it in its every hour and function, - and the constant reminder of religious duty. In later times a Machiavellian principle of statecraft, that which has been always and is still pursued by governments and diplomats, encroached on this nobler system, but in the best age of Indian thought this depravation was condemned as a temporarily effective, but lesser, ignoble and inferior way of policy. The great rule of the culture was that the higher a man's position and power, the larger the scope of his function and influence of his acts and example, the greater should be the call on him of the Dharma. The whole law and custom of society was placed under the sanction of the Rishis and the gods, protected from the violence of the great and powerful, given a socio-religious character and the king himself charged to live and rule as the guardian and servant of the Dharma with only an executive power over the community which was valid so long as he observed with fidelity the Law. And as this vital aspect of life is the one which most easily draws us outward and away from the inner self and the diviner aim of living, it was the most strenuously linked up at every point with the religious idea in the way the vital man can best understand, in the Vedic times by the constant reminder of the sacrifice behind every social and civic act, at a later period by religious rites, ceremonies, worship, the calling in of the gods, the insistence on the subsequent results or a supraterrestrial aim of works. So great was this preoccupation, that while in the spiritual and intellectual and other spheres a considerable or a complete liberty was allowed to speculation, action, creation, here the tendency was to impose a rigorous law and authority, a tendency which in- the end became greatly exaggerated and prevented the expansion of the society into new forms more suitable for the need of the spirit of the age, the Yuga-dharma. A door of liberty was opened to the community Page-170
by the provision of an
automatic permission to change custom and to the individual in the adoption of
the religious life with its own higher discipline or freedom outside the
ordinary social weft of binding rule and injunction. A rigid observation and
discipline of the social law, a larger nobler discipline and freer self-culture
of the ideal side of the Dharma, a wide freedom' of the religious and spiritual
life became the three powers of the system. The steps of the expanding human
spirit mounted through these powers to its perfection. Page-171 4
I
HAVE dwelt at some length, though
still very inadequately, on the principles of Indian religion, the sense of its
evolution and the intention of its system, because these things are being
constantly ignored and battle delivered by its defenders and assailants on
details, particular consequences and side-issues. Those too have their
importance because they are part of the practical execution, the working out of
the culture in life; but they cannot be rightly valued unless we seize hold of
the intention which was behind the execution. And the first thing we see is that
the principle, the essential intention of Indian culture was extraordinarily
high, ambitious and noble, the highest indeed that the human spirit can
conceive. For what can be a greater idea of life tl1an that which makes it a
development of the spirit in man to its most vast, secret and high
possibilities,
―
a culture that
conceives of life as a movement of the Eternal in time, of the universal in the
individual, of the infinite in the finite, of the Divine in man, or holds that
man can become not only conscious of the eternal and the infinite, but live in
its power and universalise, spiritualise and divinise himself by
self-knowledge?
What greater aims can be for the
life of man than to grow by an inner and outer experience till he can live in
God, realise his spirit, become divine in knowledge, in. will and in the joy of
his highest existence? And that is the whole sense of the striving of Indian
culture. Page-172
he is not, to lead him to
knowledge though he starts from an unfathomable ignorance, to teach him to live
by his reason, though actually he lives much more by his unreason, by the law
of good and unity, though he is now full of evil and discord, by a law of
beauty and harmony, though his actual life is a repulsive muddle of ugliness
and jarring barbarisms, by some high law of his spirit, though at present he is
egoistic, material, unspiritual, engrossed by the needs and desires of his
physical being. If a civilisation has not any of these aims, it can hardly at
all be said to have a culture and certainly in no sense a great and noble
culture. But the last of these aims, as conceived by ancient India, is the
highest of all because it includes and surpasses all the others. To have made
this attempt is to have ennobled the life of the race; to have failed in it is
better than if it had never at all been attempted; to have achieved even a
partial success is a great contribution to the future possibilities of the
human being. Page-173
was finally unable to arrive
at unity or preserve independence yet Europe owes half its civilisation to
those squabbling inconsequent petty peoples of Greece. Italy was unfortunate
enough in all conscience, yet few nations have contributed more to European
culture than incompetent and unfortunate Italy. The misfortunes of India have
been considerably exaggerated, at least in their incidence, but take them at
their worst, admit that no nation has suffered more. If all that is due to the
badness of our civilisation, to what is due then the remarkable fact of the
obstinate survival of India, her culture and her civilisation under this load
of misfortunes, or the power which enables her still to assert herself and her
spirit at this moment, to the great wrath of her critics, against the
tremendous shock of the flood from Europe which has almost submerged other
peoples? If her misfortunes are due to her cultural deficiencies, must not by a
parity of reasoning this extraordinary vitality be due to some great force in
her, some enduring virtue of truth in her spirit? A mere lie and insanity
cannot live; its persistence is a disease which must before long lead to death;
it cannot be the source of an unslayable life. There must be some heart of
soundness, some saving truth which has kept this people alive and still enables
it to raise its head and affirm its will to be and its faith in its mission. Page-174
exaggerations. But so long as
the vigour of the civilisation lasts, life accommodates itself, makes the most
of compensating forces and in spite of all stumblings, evils, disasters, some
great thing is done; but in a time of decline the defect or the excess of a
particular quality gets the upper hand, becomes a disease, makes a general
ravage and, if not arrested, may lead to decay and death. Again, the ideal may
be great, may have even, as Indian culture had in its best times, a certain
kind of provisional completeness, a first attempt at comprehensive harmony, but
there is always a great gulf between the ideal and the actual practice of life.
To bridge that gulf or at least to make it as narrow as possible is the most
difficult part of human endeavour. Finally, the evolution of our race, surprising
enough if we look across the ages, is still, when all is said, a slow and
embarrassed progress. Each age, each civilisation carries the heavy burden of
our deficiencies, each succeeding age 'throws off something of the load, but
loses some virtue of the past, creates other gaps and embarrasses itself with
new aberrations. We have to strike a balance, to see things in the whole, to
observe whither we are tending and use a large secular vision; otherwise it
would be difficult to keep an unfailing faith in the destinies of the race.
For, after all, what we have accomplished so far in the main at the best of
times is to bring in a modicum of reason and culture and spirituality to leaven
a great mass of barbarism. Mankind is still no more than semi- civilised and it
was never anything else in the recorded history of its present cycle. Page-175
and harmonious beauty, Rome
founded firmly strength and power and patriotism and law and order, modem
Europe has raised to enormous proportions practical reason, science and
efficiency and economic capacity, India developed the spiritual mind working on
the other powers of man and exceeding them, the intuitive reason, the
philosophical harmony of the Dharma in- formed by the religious spirit, the
sense of the eternal and the infinite. The future has to go on to a greater and
more perfect comprehensive development of these things and to evolve fresh
powers, but we shall not do this rightly by damning the past or damning other
cultures than our own in a spirit of arrogant in- tolerance. We need not only a
spirit of calm criticism, but an eye of sympathetic intuition to extract the
good from the past and present effort of humanity and' make the most of it for
our future progress. Page-176 nism and translates into human terms the ideal of the ant-hill and the bee-hive, is really the whole truth of our being and a sound or complete ideal of civilisation. The ideal of this culture, though it has its obstacles and difficulties, is at any rate not an unduly exalted aim and ought to be more easy of accomplishment than the arduous spiritual ideal of ancient India. But how much of the European mind and life is really governed by reason and what does this practical reason and efficiency come to in the end? To what perfection has it brought the human mind and soul and life? The aggressive ugliness of modern European life, its paucity of philosophic reason and aesthetic beauty and religious aspiration, its constant unrest, its harsh and oppressive mechanical burden, its lack of inner freedom, its recent huge catastrophe, the fierce struggle of classes are things of which we have a right to take note. To harp in the style of the Archerian lyre on these aspects alone and to ignore the brighter side of modem ideals would certainly be an injustice. There was a time indeed many years ago, when, while admiring the past cultural achievement of Europe, the present industrial form of it seemed to me an intellectualised titanic barbarism with Germany as its too admired type and successful protagonist. A wider view of the ways of the Spirit in the world corrects the one-sidedness of this notion, but still it contains a truth which Europe recognised in the hour of her agony, though now she seems to be forgetting too easily her momentary illumination. Mr. Archer argues that at least the West is trying to struggle out of its barbarism while India has been content to stagnate in her deficiencies. That may be a truth of the immediate past; but what then? The question still remains whether Europe is taking the only, the complete or the best way open to human endeavour and whether it is not the right thing for India, not to imitate Europe, though she well may learn from western experience, but to get out of her stagnation by developing what is best and most essential in her own spirit and culture. The right, the natural path for India lies so obviously in this direction that in order to destroy it Mr. Archer in his chosen role as devil's advocate has to juggle with the truth at every step and labour hard and vainly to re-establish the spell of hypnotic suggestion, now broken for good, which led most of us for a long Page-177
space to condemn wholesale
ourselves and our past and imagine that the Indian's whole duty in life was to
turn an imitative ape in leading-strings and dance to the mechanic barrel-organ
tunes of the British civiliser. The claim of Indian culture to survival can be
met first and most radically by challenging the value of its fundamental ideas
and the high things which are most native to its ideal, its temperament, its
way of looking at the world. To deny the truth or the value of spirituality, of
the sense of the eternal and infinite, the inner spiritual experience, the
philosophic mind and spirit, the religious aim and feeling, the intuitive
reason, the idea of universality and spiritual unity is one resource, and this
is the real attitude of our critic which emerges constantly in his vehement
philippic. But he cannot carry it through consistently, because it brings him
into conflict with ideas and perceptions which are ineradicable in the human
mind and which even in Europe are now after a temporary obscuration beginning
to come back into favour. Therefore he hedges and tries rather to prove that we
find in India, even in her magnificent past, even at her best, no spirituality,
no real philosophy, no true or high religious feeling, no light of intuitive
reason, nothing at all of the great things to which she has directed her most
strenuous aspiration. This assertion is sufficiently absurd, self-contradictory
and opposed to the express testimony of those who are eminently fitted and
entitled to express an authoritative opinion on these matters. He therefore
establishes a third line of attack combined of two inconsistent and opposite
assertions, first, that the higher Hinduism which is made up of these greater
things has had no effect on India and, secondly, that it has had on the
contrary a most all-pervading, a most disastrous and paralysing, a
soul-killing, life-killing effect. He attempts to make his indictment effective
by massing together all these inconsistent lines of attack and leading them all
to the one conclusion, that the culture of India is both in theory and practice
wrong, worthless, deleterious to the true aim of human living. Page-178 ing for themselves in the highest and deepest movements of human being and its nature. The peculiarity of Indian culture lies only in this distinction that what is vague or confused or imperfectly brought out in most other cultures, it has laboured rather to make distinct, to sound all its possibilities, to fix its aspects and lines and hold it up as a true, precise, large and practicable ideal for the race. The formulation may not be entirely complete; it may have to be still more enlarged, bettered, put otherwise, things missed brought out, the lines and forms modified, errors of stress and direction corrected; but a firm, a large foundation has been laid down not only in theory, but in solid practice. If there has been an actual complete failure in life, ― and that is the one point left, ― it must be due to one of two causes; either there has been some essential bungling in the application of the ideal to the facts of life as it is, or else there has been a refusal to recognise the facts of life at all. Perhaps, then, there has been, to put it otherwise, an insistence on what we may be at some hardly attainable height of our being without having first made the most of what we are. The infinite can only be reached after we have grown in the finite, the eternal grasped only by man growing in time, the spiritual perfected only by man accomplished first in body, life and mind. If that necessity has been ignored, then one may fairly contend that there has been a gross, impracticable and inexcusable error in the governing idea of Indian culture. But as a matter of fact there has been no such error. We have seen what were the aim and idea and method of Indian culture and it will be perfectly clear that the value of life and its training were amply recognised in its system and given their proper place. Even the most extreme philosophies and religions, Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an impermanence or ignorance that must be transcended and cast away, yet did not lose sight of the truth that man must develop himself under the conditions of this present ignorance or impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to that Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism was not solely a cloudy sublimation of Nirvana, nothingness, extinction and the tyrannous futility of Karma; it gave us a great and powerful discipline for the life of man on earth. The enormous positive Page-179
effects it had on society and
ethics and the creative impulse it imparted to art and thought and in a less
degree to literature, are a sufficient proof of the strong vitality of its
method. If this positive turn was present in the most extreme philosophy of
denial, it was still more largely present in the totality of Indian culture. Page-180
nence of the Eternal which
brought to a head and made a gospel of the ascetic exaggeration. But the
synthetic Hindu mind struggled against this negation and finally threw out
Buddhism, though not without contracting an increased bias in this direction.
That bias came to its height in the philosophy of Shankara, his theory of Maya,
which put its powerful imprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a
progressive decline in the full vitality of the race, did tend for a time to
fix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort the larger
Indian ideal. But his theory is not at all a necessary deduction from the great
Vedantic authorities, the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Gita, and was always
combated by other Vedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them and
from spiritual experience very different conclusions. At the present time, in
spite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara's philosophy, the most vital
movements of Indian thought and religion are moving again towards the synthesis
of spirituality and life which was an essential part of the ancient Indian
ideal. Therefore Mr. Archer's contention that whatever India has achieved in
life and creation and action has been done in spite of the governing ideas of
her culture, since logically she ought to have abandoned life and creation and
action, is as unsound as it is unnatural and grotesque. To develop to the full
the intellectual, the dynamic and volitional, the ethical, the aesthetic, the
social and economic being of man was
an important element
of Indian civilisation,
―
if
for nothing else, at least as an indispensable preliminary to spiritual perfection
and freedom. India's best achievements in thought, art, literature, society
were the logical outcome of her religiophilosophical culture. Page-181 are a barbaric and monstrous nullity not equal even to the third-rate work of Europe, her life story a long and dismal record of incompetence and failure. An inconsistency more or less is nothing to this critic and in the same breath he affirms that this very India, described by him elsewhere as always effete, sterile or a mother of monstrous abortions, is one of the most interesting countries in the world, that her art casts a potent and attractive spell and has numberless beauties, that her very barbarisms are magnificent and that, most wonderful of all, in presence of some of her personalities in the abodes of her ancient fine-spun aristocratic culture a European is apt to feel like a semi- barbarian intruder! But let us leave aside these signs of grace which are only an oocasional glimmering of light across the darkness and gloom of Mr. Archer's mood. We must see how far there is any foundation for the substance of this criticism. What was the real value of Indian life, will, personality, achievement, creation, those things that she regards as her glories, but her critic tells her she should shudder at as her disgrace? That is the one remaining vital question. Page-182 5
THE most general charge against Indian culture in its practical effects can be dismissed without any serious difficulty. The critic with whom I have to deal has, in fact, spoiled his case by the spirit of frantic exaggeration in which he writes. To say that there has been no great or vivid activity of life in India, that she has had no great personalities, with the mythical exception of Buddha and the other pale exception of Asoka, that she has never shown any will-power and never done any great thing, is so contrary to all the facts of history that only, a devil's advocate in search of a case could advance it at all or put it with that crude vehemence. India has lived and lived greatly, whatever judgment one may pass on her ideas and institutions. What is meant after all by life and when is it that we most fully and greatly live? Life is surely nothing but the creation and active self-expression of man's spirit, powers, capacities, his will to be and think and create and love and do and achieve. When that is wanting or, since it cannot be absolutely wanting, de- pressed, held under, discouraged or inert, whether by internal or external causes, then we may say that there is a lack of life. Life in its largest sense is the great web of our internal and external action, the play of Shakti, the play of Karma; it is religion and philosophy and thought and science and poetry and art, drama and song and dance and play, politics and society, industry, commerce and trade, adventure and travel, War and peace, conflict and unity, victory and defeat and aspirations and vicissitudes, the thoughts, emotions, words, deeds, joys and sorrows which make up the existence of man. In a narrower sense life is sometimes spoken of as the more obvious and external vital action, a thing which can be depressed by a top-heavy intellectuality or ascetic spirituality, sicklied over with the pale cast of thought or the paler cast of world-weariness or made flat, stale and uninteresting by a formalised, conventional or too straitlaced system of society. Again, life may be very active and full of colour for a small and privileged part of the community, but Page-183 the life of the mass dull, void and miserable. Or, finally, there may be all the ordinary materials and circumstances of mere living, but if life is not uplifted by great hopes, aspirations and ideals, then we may well say that the community does not really live; it is defective in the characteristic greatness of the human spirit. The ancient and mediaeval life of India was not wanting in any of the things that make up the vivid interesting activity of human existence. On the contrary, it was extraordinarily full of colour and interest. Mr. Archer's criticism on this point, a criticism packed full of ignorance and built up by a purely fictitious construction of what things logically ought to have been on the theory of a dominating asceticism and belief in the illusionary character of the world, is not and cannot be borne out by anyone who has come close to the facts. It is true that while many European writers who have studied the history of the land and the people, have expressed strongly their appreciation of the vividness and interesting fullness, colour and beauty of life in India before the present period, - that unhappily exists no longer except in the pages of history and literature and the broken or crumbling fragments of the past, - those who see only from a distance or fix their eyes only on one aspect, speak of it often as a land of metaphysics, philosophies, dreams and brooding imaginations, and certain artists and writers are apt to write in a strain as if it were a country of the Arabian Nights, a mere glitter of strange hues and fancies and marvels. But on the contrary India has been as much a home of serious and solid realities, of a firm grappling with the problems of thought and life, of measured and wise organisation and great action as any other considerable centre of civilisation. The widely different view these perceptions express simply show the many-sided brilliance and fullness of her life. The colour and magnificence have been its aesthetic side; she has had great dreams and high and splendid imaginations, for that too is wanted for the complete- ness of our living; but also deep philosophical and religious thinking, a wide and searching criticism of life, a great political and social order, a strong ethical tone and a persistent vigour of individual and communal living. That is a combination Page-184 which means life in all its fullness, though deficient, it may be, except in extraordinary cases, in the more violent egoistic perversities and exaggerations which some minds seem to take for a proof of the highest vigour of existence. In what field indeed has not India attempted, achieved, created, and in all on a large scale and yet with much attention to completeness of detail? Of her spiritual and philosophic achievement there can be no real question. They stand there as the Himalayas stand upon the earth, in the phrase of Kalidasa, prthivyã iva mãnadandah, "as if earth's measuring rod", mediating still between earth and heaven, measuring the finite, casting their plummet far into the infinite, plunging their extremities into the upper and lower seas of the superconscient and the subliminal, the spiritual and the natural being. But if her philosophies, her religious disciplines, her long list of great spiritual personalities, thinkers, founders, saints are her greatest glory, as was natural to her temperament and governing idea, they are by no means her sole glories, nor are the others dwarfed by their eminence. It is now proved that in science she went farther than any country before the modern era, and even Europe owes the beginning of her physical science to India as much as to Greece, although not directly but through the medium of the Arabs. And, even if she had only gone as far, that would have been sufficient proof of a strong intellectual life in an ancient culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry, the chief elements of ancient science, she discovered and formulated much and well and anticipated by force of reasoning or experiment some of the scientific ideas and discoveries which Europe first arrived at much later, but was able to base more firmly by her new and completer method. She was well-equipped in surgery and her system of medicine survives to this day and has still its value, though it declined intermediately in knowledge and is only now recovering its vitality. In literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly. Not only has she the Vedas, Upanishads and Gita, not to speak of less supreme but still powerful or beautiful work in that field, unequalled monuments of religious and philosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe has never been able to do any- Page-185
thing much of any great value,
but that vast national structure, the Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the
poetic literature and expressing so completely the life of a long formative
age, that it is said of it in a popular saying which has the justice if also
the exaggeration of a too apt epigram, "What is not in this Bharata, is
not in Bharatavarsha (India)", and the Ramayana, the greatest and most
remarkable poem of its kind, that most sublime and beautiful epic of ethical
idealism and a heroic semi- divine human life, and the marvellous richness,
fullness and colour of the poetry and romance of highly cultured thought,
sensuous enjoyment, imagination, action and adventure which makes up the
romantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor did this long continuous vigour
of creation cease with the loss of vitality by the Sanskrit tongue, but was
paralleled and carried on in a mass of great or of beautiful work in her other
languages, in Pali first and Prakrit, much unfortunately lost,1
and
Tamil, afterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues. The long
tradition of her architecture, sculpture and painting speaks for itself, even
in what survives after all the ruin of stormy centuries: whatever judgment may
be formed of it by the narrower school of western aesthetics,
― and at least
its fineness of execution and workmanship cannot be denied, nor the power with
which it renders the Indian mind,
― it
testifies at least to a
continuous creative activity. And creation is proof of
life and great creation of greatness of life.
1 E.g., the once famous work in Paisachi of which the Kathãsaritsãgara is an inferior version. Page-186 the seeing force that builds. She has warred and ruled, traded and colonised and spread her civilisation, built polities and orga- nised communities and societies, done all that makes the outward activity of great peoples. A nation tends to throw out its most vivid types in that line of action which is most congenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading idea, and it is the great saints and religious personalities that stand at the head in India, and present the most striking and continuous roll-call of greatness, just as Rome lived most in her warriors and statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in ancient India was the outstanding figure with the hero just behind, while in later times the most striking feature is the long uninterrupted chain from Buddha and Mahavira to Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and beyond them to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and Dayananda. But there have been also the remarkable achievements of statesmen and rulers, from the first dawn of ascertainable history which comes in with the striking figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya, Asoka, the Gupta emperors and goes down through the multitude of famous Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the middle age to quite modern times. In ancient India there was the life of republics, oligarchies, democracies, small kingdoms of which no detail of history now survives, afterwards the long effort at empire-building, the colonisation of Ceylon and the Archipelago, the vivid struggles that attended the rise and decline of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties, the Hindu struggle for survival in the south, the wonderful record of Rajput heroism and the great upheaval of national life in Maharashtra penetrating to the lowest strata of society, the remarkable episode of the Sikh Khalsa. An adequate picture of that outward life still remains to be given; once given it would be the end of many fictions. All this mass of action was not accomplished by men without mind and will and vital force, by pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood had been crushed out under the burden of a gloomy and all-effacing asceticism, nor does it look like the sign of a metaphysically minded people or dreamers averse to life and action. It was not men of straw or lifeless and will-less dummies or thin-blooded dreamers who thus acted, planned, conquered, built great systems of administration, founded kingdoms and Page-187 empires, figured as great patrons of poetry and art and architecture or, later, resisted heroically imperial power and fought for the freedom of clan or people. Nor was it a nation devoid of life which maintained its existence and culture and still lived on and broke out constantly into new revivals under the ever-increasing stress of continuously adverse circumstances. The modem Indian revival, religious, cultural, political, called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles and grieves the minds of her critics, is only a repetition under altered circumstances, in an adapted form, in a greater though as yet less vivid mass of movement, of a phenomenon which has constantly repeated itself throughout a millennium of Indian history. And it must be remembered that by virtue of its culture and its system the whole nation shared in the common life. In all countries in the past the mass has indeed lived with a less active and vivid force than the few, ― sometimes with the mere elements of life, not with even any beginning of finished richness, ― nor has modern civilisation yet got rid of this disparity, though it has opened the advantages or at least the initial opportunities of a first-hand life and thought and knowledge to a greater number. But in ancient India, though the higher classes led and had the lion's share of the force and wealth of life, the people too lived and until much later times intensely though on a lesser scale and with a more diffused and less concentrated force. Their religious life was more intense than that of any other country; they drank in with remarkable facility the thoughts of the philosophers and the influence of the saints; they heard and followed Buddha and the many who came after him; they were taught by the Sannyasins and sang the songs of the Bhaktas and Bauls and thus possessed some of the most delicate and beautiful poetical literature ever produced; they contributed many of the greatest names in our religion, and from the outcasts themselves came saints revered by the whole community. In ancient Hindu times they had their share of political life and power; they were the people, the visah of the Veda, of whom the kings were the leaders and from them as well as from the sacred or princely families were born the Rishis; they held their villages as little self- administered republics; in the time of the great kingdoms and Page-188 empires they sat in the municipalities and urban councils and the bulk of the typical royal Council described in the books of political science was composed of commoners, Vaishyas, and not of Brahmin Pundits and Kshatriya nobles; for a long time they could impose their will on their kings, without the need of a long struggle, by a single demonstration of their displeasure. So long as Hindu kingdoms existed, something of all this survived, and even the entrance into India of Central Asian forms of absolutist despotism, never an indigenous Indian growth, left some remnant of the old edifice still in being. The people had their share too in art and poetry, their means by which the essence of Indian culture was disseminated through the mass, a system of elementary edu- cation in addition to the great universities of ancient times, a type of popular dramatic representation which was in some parts of the country alive even yesterday; they gave India her artists and architects and many of the famous poets in the popular tongues; they preserved by the force of their long past culture an innate aesthetic sense and faculty of which the work of Indian craftsmen remained a constant and striking evidence until it was destroyed or degraded by the vulgarisation and loss of aesthetic sense and beauty which has been one of the results of modern civilisation. Nor was the life of India ascetic, gloomy or .sad, as the too logical mind of the critic would have it be. The outward form is more quiet than in other countries, there is a certain gravity and reserve before strangers which deceives the foreign observer, and in recent times asceticism and poverty and an increase of puritanic tendency had their effect; but the life portrayed in the literature of the country is glad and vivid, and even now despite certain varieties of temperament and many forces making for depression, laughter, humour, an unobtrusive elasticity and equanimity in the vicissitudes of life are very marked features of the Indian character. The whole theory of a want of life and will and activity in the Indian people as a result of their culture is then a myth. The circumstances which have given some colour to it in later times will be noted in their proper place; but they are a feature of the decline and even then must be taken with considerable qualification, and the much longer history of its past greatness tells quite Page-189 another story. That history has not been recorded in the European fashion; for the art of history and biography, though not entirely neglected, was never brought to perfection in India, never sufficiently practised, nor does any sustained record of the doings of kings and great men and peoples before the Mussulman dynasties survive except in the one solitary instance of Cashmere. This is certainly a defect and leaves a very serious gap. India has lived much, but has not sat down to record the history of her life. Her soul and mind have left their great monuments, but so much as we know ― and after all it is not little ― of the rest, the more outward things, remains or has emerged recently in spite of her neglect; such exact records as she had, she has allowed to rust forgotten or disappear. Perhaps what Mr. Archer really means when he tells us that we have had no personalities in our history, is that they do not come home to his mind because their doings and sayings are not minutely recorded in the western manner; their personality, will-power and creative force emerge only in their work or in indicative tradition and anecdote or in incomplete records. And very curiously, very fancifully this de- fect has been set down to an ascetic want of interest in life; it is supposed that India was so much absorbed in the eternal that she deliberately despised and neglected time, so profoundly concentrated on the pursuit of ascetic brooding and quietistic peace that she looked down on and took no interest in the memory of action. That is another myth. The same phenomenon of a lack of sustained and deliberate record appears in other ancient cultures, but nobody suggests that Egypt, Assyria or Persia have to be reconstructed for us by the archaeologists for an analogous reason. The genius of Greece developed the art of history, though only in the later period of her activity, and Europe has cherished and preserved the art; India and other ancient civilisations did not arrive at it or neglected its full development. It is a defect, but there is no reason why we should go out of our way in this one case to attribute it to a deliberate motive or to any lack of interest in life. And in spite of the defect the greatness and activity of the past life of India reveals itself and comes out in bolder relief the more the inquiry into her past unearths the vast amount of material still available. Page-190 But our critic will still have it that India lived as it were in spite of herself and that in all this teeming action there is ample evidence of the dwarfing of individual will and the absence of any great individual personality. He arrives at that result by methods which savour of the skill of the journalist or pamphleteer rather than the disinterested mind of the critic. He tells us, for instance, that India has contributed only one or at most two great names to the world's Pantheon. By that, of course, he means Europe's Pantheon, or the world's Pantheon as constructed by the mind of Europe, crammed with the figures of western history and achievement which are near and familiar to it and admitting only a very few of the more gigantic names from the distant East, those which it finds it most difficult to ignore. One remembers the list made by a great French poet in the field of literature in which a sounding string of French names equals or outnumbers the whole contribution of the rest of Europe! If an Indian were to set about the same task in the same spirit, he would no doubt similarly pour out an interminable list of Indian names with some great men of Europe and America, Arabia, Persia, China, Japan forming a brief tail to this large peninsular body. These exercises of the partial mentality have no value. And it is difficult to find out what measure of values Mr. Archer is using when he relegates other great Indian names, allowing for three or four only, to the second plan and even there belittles them in comparison with corresponding European immortals. In what is Shivaji with his vivid and interesting life and character, who not only founded a kingdom but organised a nation, inferior to Cromwell, or Shankara whose great spirit in the few years of its mortal life swept triumphant through India and reconstituted the whole religious life of her peoples, inferior as a personality to Luther? Why are Chanakya and Chandragupta who laid down the form of empire-building in India and whose great administrative system survived with changes often for the worse down to modern times, lesser men than the rulers and statesmen of European history? India may not present any recorded moment of her life so crowded as the few years of Athens to which Mr. Archer makes appeal; she may have no parallel to the swarm of interesting but often disturbing, questionable or even dark and revolting Page-191 figures which illuminate and stain the story of the Italian cities during the Renaissance, although she has had too her crowded moments thronged by figures of a different kind. But she has had many rulers, statesmen and encouragers of art as great in their own way as Pericles or Lorenzo di Medici; the personalities of her famed poets emerge more dimly through the mist of time, but with indications which point to a lofty spirit or a humanity as great as that of Aeschylus or Euripides or a life-story as human and interesting as that of the famous Italian poets. And if, comparing this one country with all Europe as Mr. Archer insists, ― mainly on the ground that Indians themselves make the comparison when they speak of the size of the country, its many races, and the difficulty so long experienced in organising Indian unity, ― it may be that in the field of political and military action Europe has a long lead, but what of the unparalleled profusion of great spiritual personalities in which India is pre-eminent? Again, Mr. Archer speaks with arrogant depreciation of the significant figures born of the creative Indian mind which people its literature and its drama. Here too it is difficult to follow him or to accept his measure of values. To an oriental mind at least Rama and Ravana are as vivid and great and real characters as the personalities of Homer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi certainly not less living than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti and Shakuntala and other feminine types not less sweet, gracious and alive than Alcestis or Desdemona. I am not here affirming any superiority, but the bottomless inequality and inferiority which this critic affirms exists, not in truth, but only in his imagination or his way of seeing. That perhaps is the one thing of significance, the one thing which is really worth noting; the difference of mentality which is at the bottom of these comparisons. There is not any inferiority of life or force or active and reactive will but, as far as the sameness of human nature allows, difference of type, character, personality, let us say, an emphasis in different and almost opposite directions. Will-power and personality have not been wanting in India, but the direction preferably given to them and the type most admired are of a different kind. The average European mind is prone to value or at least to be more interested in Page-192
1.Ajanta Cave No.16
...the magnificent statues of the cave-cathedrals
2. Nataraja, Mathura
the egoistic or self-asserting will which insists upon itself with a strong or a bold, an aggressive, sometimes a fierce insistence; the Indian mind not only prizes more from the ethical standpoint, ― that is found everywhere, ― but is more vividly interested in the calm, self-controlling or even the self-effacing personality; for the effacement of egoism seems to it to be not an effacement, but an enhancement of value and power of the true person and its greatness. Mr. Archer finds Asoka pale and featureless; to an Indian mind he is supremely vivid and attractive. Why is Asoka to be called pale in comparison with Charlemagne or, let us say, with Constantine? Is it because he only mentions his sanguinary conquest of Kalinga in order to speak of his remorse and the turning of his spirit, a sentiment which Charlemagne massacring the Saxons in order to make good Christians of them could not in the least have understood, nor any more perhaps the Pope who anointed him? Constantine gave the victory to the Christian religion, but there is nothing Christian in his personality; Asoka not only enthroned Buddhism, but strove though not with a perfect success to follow the path laid down by Buddha. And the Indian mind would account him not only a nobler will, but a greater and more attracting personality than Constantine or Charlemagne. It is interested in Chanakya, but much more interested in Chaitanya. And in literature also just as in actual life it has the same turn. This European mind finds Rama and Sita uninteresting and unreal, because they are too virtuous, too ideal, too white in colour; but to the Indian mind, even apart from all religious sentiment, they are figures of an absorbing reality which appeal to the inmost fibres of our being. A European scholar criticising the Mahabharata finds the strong and violent Bhima the only real character in that great poem; the Indian mind on the contrary finds greater character and a more moving interest in the calm and collected heroism of Arjuna, in the fine ethical temperament of Yudhishthira, in the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra who works not for his own hand but for the founding of the kingdom of right and justice. Those vehement or self-asserting characters or those driven by the storm of their passions which make the chief interest of European epic and drama, would either Page-193 be relegated by it to the second plan or else, if set in large proportions, so brought in in order to bring into relief the greatness of the higher type of personality, as Ravana contrasts with and sets off Rama. The admiration of the one kind of mentality in the aesthetics of life goes to the coloured, that of the other to the luminous personality. Or, to put it in the form of the distinction made by the Indian mind itself, the interest of the one centres more in the rajasic, that of the other in the sattwic will and character. Whether this difference imposes an inferiority on the aesthetics of Indian life and creation, each must judge for himself, but surely the Indian is the more evolved and spiritual conception. The Indian mind believes that the will and personality are not diminished but heightened by moving from the rajasic or more coloured egoistic to the sattwic and more luminous level of our being. Are not after all calm, self-mastery, a high balance signs of a greater and more real force of character than mere self- assertion of strength of will or the furious driving of the passions? Their possession does not mean that one must act with an inferior or less puissant, but only with a more right, collected and balanced will. And it is a mistake to think that asceticism itself rightly understood and practised implies an effacement of will; it brings much rather its greater concentration. That is the Indian view and experience and the meaning of the old legends in the epics, ― to which Mr. Archer, misunderstanding the idea behind them, violently objects, ― attributing so enormous a force, even when it was misused, to the power gained by ascetic self-mastery, Tapasya. The Indian mind believed and still believes that soul power is a greater thing, works from a mightier centre of will and has greater results than a more outwardly and materially active will-force. But it will be said that India has valued most the impersonal and that must obviously discourage personality. But this too, ― except for the negative ideal of losing oneself in the trance or the silence of the Eternal, which is not the true essence of the matter, ― involves a misconception. However paradoxical it may sound, one finds actually that the acceptance of the eternal and impersonal behind one's being and action and the attempt at unity with it is precisely the thing that carries Page-194 the person to his largest greatness and power. For this impersonality is not a nullity, but an oceanic totality of the being. The perfect man, the Siddha or the Buddha, becomes universal, embraces all being in sympathy and oneness, finds himself in others as in himself and by so doing draws into himself at the same time something of the infinite power of a universal energy. That is the positive ideal of Indian culture. And when this hostile critic finds himself forced to do homage to the superiority of certain personalities who have sprung from this "fine-spun aristocratic" culture, he is really paying a tribute to some results of this preference of the sattwic to the rajasic, the universal to the limited and egoistic man. Not to be as the common man, that is to say, as the crude natural or half-baked human being, was indeed the sense of this ancient endeavour and in that sense it may be called an aristocratic culture. But it was not a vulgar outward but a spiritual nobility which was the aim of its self-discipline. Indian life, personality, art, literature must be judged in this light and appreciated or depreciated after being seen in the real sense and with the right understanding of Indian culture. Page-195 |
