{"id":2924,"date":"2013-07-13T01:44:38","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2924"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:44:38","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:38","slug":"15-indian-spirituality-and-life-vol-20-the-renaissance-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/20-the-renaissance-in-india\/15-indian-spirituality-and-life-vol-20-the-renaissance-in-india","title":{"rendered":"-15_Indian Spirituality and Life.html"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n<\/p>\n

\n
\nVII <\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian Spirituality and Life <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nI<\/font> HAVE<\/b> described the framework of the Indian idea from
\nthe outlook of an intellectual criticism, because that is the standpoint of the critics who affect to disparage its value.
\nI have shown that Indian culture must be adjudged even from this alien outlook to have been the creation of a wide and noble
\nspirit. Inspired in the heart of its being by a lofty principle, illumined with a striking and uplifting idea of individual manhood
\nand its powers and its possible perfection, aligned to a spacious plan of social architecture, it was enriched not only by a strong
\nphilosophic, intellectual and artistic creativeness but by a great and vivifying and fruitful life-power. But this by itself does not
\ngive an adequate account of its spirit or its greatness. One might describe Greek or Roman civilisation from this outlook and miss
\nlittle that was of importance; but Indian civilisation was not only a great cultural system, but an immense religious effort of the
\nhuman spirit. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe whole root of difference between Indian and European
\nculture springs from the spiritual aim of Indian civilisation. 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
\ngets from that turn a stamp of striking originality and solitary greatness. A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of this
\nculture, its core of thought, its ruling passion. Not only did it make spirituality the highest aim of life, but it even tried, as far
\nas 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
\nthe human mind the first native, if imperfect form of the spiritual impulse, the predominance of the spiritual idea, its endeavour to
\ntake hold of life, necessitated a casting of thought and action into the religious mould and a persistent filling of every circumstance
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 178<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nof life with the religious sense; it demanded a pervadingly
\nreligio-philosophic culture. The highest spirituality indeed moves in a
\nfree and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious form and dogma; it does not easily
\nbear their limitations and, even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal religious
\nmind is unintelligible. But man does not arrive immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him
\nat once, he would never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of ascent; he asks for some scaffolding of
\ndogma, worship, image, sign, form, symbol, some indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he can
\nstand while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is completed, can the supports be removed,
\nthe scaffolding disappear. The religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled this purpose, but,
\nunlike certain credal religions, it knew its purpose. It gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no
\nuniversal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or
\ncult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided
\nmany-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
\n <\/i> eternal religion, sanātana dharma<\/i>. It is only if we have a just and
\nright appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of
\nIndian culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nNow just here is the first baffling difficulty over which the
\nEuropean mind stumbles; for it finds itself unable to make out what Hindu religion is. Where, it asks, is its soul? where is its
\nmind and fixed thought? where is the form of its body? How can there be a religion which has no rigid dogmas demanding belief
\non pain of eternal damnation, no theological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo distinguishing it from antagonistic
\nor rival religions? How can there be a religion which has no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 179<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nor 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 officiants without any ecclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and
\nthe Pundits are mere interpreters of the Shastra, not the lawgivers of the religion or its rulers. How again can Hinduism be called
\na religion when it admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible
\nspiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures? The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that
\nvaries in different castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for
\nhis beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader. If it excommunicates
\nChristian or Muslim, it is not for religious belief or practice, but because they break with the social rule and order. It has been
\nasserted in consequence that there is no such thing as a Hindu religion, but only a Hindu social system with a bundle of the
\nmost disparate religious beliefs and institutions. The precious dictum that Hinduism is a mass of folk-lore with an ineffective
\ncoat of metaphysical daubing is perhaps the final judgment of the superficial occidental mind on this matter.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis misunderstanding springs from the total difference of outlook on religion that divides the Indian mind and the normal
\nWestern intelligence. The difference is so great that it could only be bridged by a supple philosophical training or a wide
\nspiritual culture; but the established forms of religion and the rigid methods of philosophical thought practised in the West
\nmake no provision and even allow no opportunity for either. To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its
\ndogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the contrary to the Western mind a fixed intellectual belief is
\nthe 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
\nbeliefs 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
\nnotion, however foolish and shallow, is a necessary consequence  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 180<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nof the Western idea which falsely supposes that intellectual truth is the highest verity and, even, that there is no other. The Indian
\nreligious thinker knows that all the highest eternal verities are truths of the spirit. The supreme truths are neither the rigid
\nconclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul’s inner experience. Intellectual
\ntruth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite
\nmust be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because
\nthey mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances
\nwhich admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are
\ntrue in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndian 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
\nknowing it and of which all must one day grow aware, returning towards that which is perfect, eternal and infinite. Next, it laid
\nupon the individual life the need of self-preparation by development and experience till man is ready for an effort to grow
\nconsciously into the truth of this greater existence. Thirdly, it provided it with a well-founded, well-explored, many-branching
\nand always enlarging way of knowledge and of spiritual or religious discipline. Lastly, for those not yet ready for these higher
\nsteps it provided an organisation of the individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social discipline and conduct,
\nof mental and moral and vital development by which they could move each in his own limits and according to his own nature
\nin such a way as to become eventually ready for the greater existence. The first three of these elements are the most essential
\nto 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
\nsecular and foreign to the religious and spiritual life. Still the   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 181<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nIndian religious tradition is not merely the form of a
\nreligio-social system, as the ignorant critic vainly imagines. However
\ngreatly that may count at the moment of a social departure, however stubbornly the conservative religious mind may oppose
\nall pronounced or drastic change, still the core of Hinduism is a spiritual, not a social discipline. Actually we find religions like
\nSikhism counted in the Vedic family although they broke down the old social tradition and invented a novel form, while the
\nJains and Buddhists were traditionally considered to be outside the religious fold although they observed Hindu social custom
\nand intermarried with Hindus, because their spiritual system and teaching figured in its origin as a denial of the truth of Veda
\nand a departure from the continuity of the Vedic line. In all these four elements that constitute Hinduism there are major
\nand minor differences between Hindus of various sects, schools, communities and races; but nevertheless there is also a general
\nunity of spirit, of fundamental type and form and of spiritual temperament which creates in this vast fluidity an immense force
\nof cohesion and a strong principle of oneness. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common
\nto the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and
\nphysical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and
\ninfinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient, a one Eternal. A
\none transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal Divinity or divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount
\nand continent and inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware
\nEternity 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
\nhis study, but otherwise void of practical bearing on life. It was not a mystic sublimation which could be ignored in the dealings
\nof man with the world and Nature. It was a living spiritual  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 182<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nTruth, an Entity, a Power, a Presence that could be sought by all according to their degree of capacity and seized in a thousand
\nways through life and beyond life. This Truth was to be lived and even to be made the governing idea of thought and life and
\naction. This recognition and pursuit of something or someone Supreme is behind all forms the one universal credo of Indian
\nreligion, and if it has taken a hundred shapes, it was precisely because it was so much alive. The Infinite alone justifies the
\nexistence of the finite and the finite by itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence. Life, if it is not an
\nillusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. Or it is a means by which the soul growing in Nature
\nthrough countless forms and many lives can approach, touch, feel and unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and
\nadoration and a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this infinite Existence. This Self or this self-existent
\nBeing is the one supreme reality, and all things else are either only appearances or only true by dependence upon it. It follows
\nthat self-realisation and God-realisation are the great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and thought
\nare in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndian religion never considered intellectual or theological conceptions about the supreme Truth to be the one thing of
\ncentral importance. To pursue that Truth under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain to it by inner experience,
\nto 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
\nto be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in essence but
\ndifferent from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and the individual soul in man to be three eternally different
\npowers of being. But for all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even to the Indian dualist God is the supreme self
\nand reality in whom and by whom Nature and man live, move and have their being and, if you eliminate God from his view
\nof things, Nature and man would lose for him all their meaning   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 183<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nand importance. The Spirit, universal Nature (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Jiva,
\nare the three truths which are universally admitted by all the many religious sects and conflicting religious philosophies of
\nIndia. Universal also is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self in man, the divine soul in him, and some
\nkind of living and uniting contact or absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal Brahman is the
\ncondition of spiritual perfection. It is open to us to conceive and have experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and
\nInfinite or to approach and know and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal Person: but whatever be our way of
\nreaching him, the one important truth of spiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and all existence
\nis in him and to find him is the great self-finding. Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various
\nways 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
\nInfinite, to seek after and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and aim of religion, that
\nis the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest
\nspiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian religion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one
\ncommon essence. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIf there were nothing else to be said in favour of the spiritual
\ngenius of the Indian people or the claim of Indian civilisation to stand in the front rank as a spiritual culture, it would be
\nsufficiently substantiated by this single fact that not only was this greatest and widest spiritual truth seen in India with the
\nboldest largeness, felt and expressed with a unique intensity, and approached from all possible sides, but it was made consciously
\nthe grand uplifting idea of life, the core of all thinking, the foundation of all religion, the secret sense and declared ultimate
\naim of human existence. The truth announced is not peculiar to Indian thinking; it has been seen and followed by the highest minds and souls everywhere. But elsewhere it has been the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 184<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nliving guide only of a few thinkers, or of some rare mystics or exceptionally gifted spiritual natures. The mass of men have
\nhad no understanding, no distant perception, not even a reflected glimpse of this something Beyond; they have lived only in the
\nlower sectarian side of religion, in inferior ideas of the Deity or in the outward mundane aspects of life. But Indian culture did
\nsucceed by the strenuousness of its vision, the universality of its approach, the intensity of its seeking in doing what has been
\ndone by no other culture. It succeeded in stamping religion with the essential ideal of a real spirituality; it brought some living
\nreflection of the very highest spiritual truth and some breath of its influence into every part of the religious field. Nothing can
\nbe 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
\nonly of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the contrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their broad
\nidea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas
\nof Maya, Lila, divine Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the temple as to the philosopher
\nin his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and the saint in his hermitage. The spiritual reality which they reflect, the profound
\nexperience to which they point, has permeated the religion, the literature, the art, even the popular religious songs of a whole
\npeople. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is true that these things are realised by the mass of men
\nmore readily through the fervour of devotion than by a strenuous effort of thinking; but that is as it must and should be since the
\nheart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence. It is true, too, that the tendency to put too much stress on externals has
\nalways been there and worked to overcloud the deeper spiritual motive; but that is not peculiar to India, it is a common failing of
\nhuman nature, not less but rather more evident in Europe than in Asia. It has needed a constant stream of saints and religious
\nthinkers and the teaching of illuminated Sannyasins to keep the   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 185<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nreality vivid and resist the deadening weight of form and ceremony and ritual. But the fact remains that these messengers of
\nthe spirit have never been wanting. And the still more significant fact remains that there has never been wanting either a happy
\nreadiness in the common mind to listen to the message. The ordinary materialised souls, the external minds are the majority
\nin India as everywhere. How easy it is for the superior European critic to forget this common fact of our humanity and treat this
\nturn as a peculiar sin of the Indian mentality! But at least the people of India, even the “ignorant masses” have this distinction
\nthat they are by centuries of training nearer to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of the universal
\nignorance 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
\ncultured elite anywhere else. Where else could the lofty, austere and difficult teaching of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on
\nthe popular mind? Where else could the songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir, the Sikh gurus and the chants of the Tamil
\nsaints with their fervid devotion but also their profound spiritual thinking have found so speedy an echo and formed a popular
\nreligious literature? This strong permeation or close nearness of the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to
\nturn to the highest realities is the sign and fruit of an age-long, a real and a still living and supremely spiritual culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe endless variety of Indian philosophy and religion seems to the European mind interminable, bewildering, wearisome,
\nuseless; it is unable to see the forest because of the richness and luxuriance of its vegetation; it misses the common spiritual life
\nin the multitude of its forms. But this infinite variety is itself, as Vivekananda pertinently pointed out, a sign of a superior
\nreligious culture. The Indian mind has always realised that the Supreme is the Infinite; it has perceived, right from its Vedic
\nbeginnings, that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an endless variety of aspects. The mentality of
\nthe West has long cherished the aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal
\nby the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 186<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncult, one system of ceremonies, one array of prohibitions and injunctions, one ecclesiastical ordinance. That narrow absurdity
\nprances about as the one true religion which all must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or
\nfierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. This grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance,
\ncruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the free and supple mind of India.
\nMen everywhere have common human failings, and intolerance and narrowness especially in the matter of observances there has
\nbeen and is in India. There has been much violence of theological disputation, there have been querulous bickerings of sects with
\ntheir pretensions to spiritual superiority and greater knowledge, and sometimes, at one time especially in southern India in a
\nperiod of acute religious differences, there have been brief local outbreaks of active mutual tyranny and persecution even unto
\ndeath. But these things have never taken the proportions which they assumed in Europe. Intolerance has been confined for the
\nmost part to the minor forms of polemical attack or to social obstruction or ostracism; very seldom have they transgressed
\nacross the line to the major forms of barbaric persecution which draw a long, red and hideous stain across the religious history of
\nEurope. There has played ever in India the saving perception of a higher and purer spiritual intelligence, which has had its effect
\non the mass mentality. Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments, the intellectual affinities of men
\nare unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to
\nthe Infinite. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndia recognised authority of spiritual experience and
\nknowledge, but she recognised still more the need of variety of spiritual experience and knowledge. Even in the days of decline
\nwhen the claim of authority became in too many directions rigorous and excessive, she still kept the saving perception that
\nthere could not be one but must be many authorities. An alert readiness to acknowledge new light capable of enlarging the
\nold tradition has always been characteristic of the religious   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 187<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nmind in India. Indian civilisation did not develop to a last logical conclusion its earlier political and social liberties,
\n\u2014
\nthat greatness of freedom or boldness of experiment belongs to the West; but liberty of religious practice and a complete
\nfreedom of thought in religion as in every other matter have always counted among its constant traditions. The atheist and
\nthe agnostic were free from persecution in India. Buddhism and Jainism might be disparaged as unorthodox religions, but they
\nwere allowed to live freely side by side with the orthodox creeds and philosophies; in her eager thirst for truth she gave them their
\nfull chance, tested all their values, and as much of their truth as was assimilable was taken into the stock of the common and
\nalways enlarging continuity of her spiritual experience. That ageless continuity was carefully conserved, but it admitted light
\nfrom all quarters. In latter times the saints who reached some fusion of the Hindu and the Islamic teaching were freely and
\nimmediately recognised as leaders of Hindu religion, \u2014 even, in some cases, when they started with a Mussulman birth and
\nfrom the Mussulman standpoint. The Yogin who developed a new path of Yoga, the religious teacher who founded a new
\norder, the thinker who built up a novel statement of the manysided truth of spiritual existence, found no serious obstacle to
\ntheir practice or their propaganda. At most they had to meet the opposition of the priest and pundit instinctively adverse to any
\nchange; but this had only to be lived down for the new element to be received into the free and pliant body of the national
\nreligion and its ever plastic order. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe necessity of a firm spiritual order as well as an untrammelled spiritual freedom was always perceived; but it was provided for in various ways and not in any one formal, external or artificial manner. It was founded in the first place on the recognition of an ever enlarging number of authorised scriptures.
\nOf these scriptures some like the Gita possessed a common and widespread authority, others were peculiar to sects or schools:
\nsome like the Vedas were supposed to have an absolute, others a relative binding force. But the very largest freedom of interpretation was allowed, and this prevented any of these authoritative  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 188<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nbooks from being turned into an instrument of ecclesiastical tyranny or a denial of freedom to the human mind and spirit.
\nAnother instrument of order was the power of family and communal tradition,
\nkuladharma<\/i>, persistent but not immutable. A
\nthird was the religious authority of the Brahmins; as priests they officiated as the custodians of observance, as scholars, acting in
\na much more important and respected role than the officiating priesthood could claim,
\n\u2014 for to the priesthood no great consideration was given in India, \u2014 they stood as the exponents of religious tradition and were a strong conservative power. Finally,
\nand most characteristically, most powerfully, order was secured  <\/i>
\nby the succession of Gurus or spiritual teachers, paramparā<\/i>, who
\npreserved the continuity of each spiritual system and handed it down from
\ngeneration to generation but were empowered also, unlike the priest and the
\nPundit, to enrich freely its significance and develop its practice. A living and
\nmoving, not a rigid continuity, was the characteristic turn of the inner
\nreligious mind of India. The evolution of the Vaishnava religion from very early
\ntimes, its succession of saints and teachers, the striking developments given to
\nit successively by Ramanuja, Madhwa, Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and its recent stirrings of survival
\nafter a period of languor and of some fossilisation form one notable example of this firm combination of agelong continuity
\nand fixed tradition with latitude of powerful and vivid change. A more striking instance was the founding of the Sikh religion,
\nits long line of Gurus and the novel direction and form given to it by Guru Govind Singh in the democratic institution of the
\nKhalsa. The Buddhist Sangha and its councils, the creation of a sort of divided pontifical authority by
\nShankaracharya, an authority transmitted from generation to generation for more than a thousand years and even now not altogether effete, the Sikh
\nKhalsa, the adoption of the congregational form called Samaj by the modern reforming sects indicate an attempt towards a
\ncompact and stringent order. But it is noteworthy that even in these attempts the freedom and plasticity and living sincerity of
\nthe religious mind of India always prevented it from initiating anything like the overblown ecclesiastical orders and despotic
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 189<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nhierarchies which in the West have striven to impose the tyranny of their obscurantist yoke on the spiritual liberty of the human
\nrace. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe instinct for order and freedom at once in any field of
\nhuman activity is always a sign of a high natural capacity in that field, and a people which could devise such a union of unlimited
\nreligious liberty with an always orderly religious evolution, must be credited with a high religious capacity, even as they cannot be
\ndenied its inevitable fruit, a great, ancient and still living spiritual culture. It is this absolute freedom of thought and experience and
\nthis provision of a framework sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet sufficiently sure and firm to be the means
\nof a stable and powerful evolution that have given to Indian civilisation this wonderful and seemingly eternal religion with
\nits marvellous wealth of many-sided philosophies, of great scriptures, of profound religious works, of religions that approach the
\nEternal from every side of his infinite Truth, of Yoga-systems of psycho-spiritual discipline and self-finding, of suggestive forms,
\nsymbols and ceremonies which are strong to train the mind at all stages of development towards the Godward endeavour. Its
\nfirm structure capable of supporting without peril a large tolerance and assimilative spirit, its vivacity, intensity, profundity and
\nmultitudinousness of experience, its freedom from the unnatural European divorce between mundane knowledge and science on
\nthe 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.
\nThe nineteenth century has thrown on it its tremendous shock of negation and scepticism but has not been able to destroy its
\nassured roots of spiritual knowledge. A little disturbed for a brief moment, surprised and temporarily shaken by this attack in a
\nperiod of greatest depression of the nation’s vital force, India revived almost at once and responded by a fresh outburst of
\nspiritual activity, seeking, assimilation, formative effort. A great new life is visibly preparing in her, a mighty transformation and
\nfarther dynamic evolution and potent march forward into the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 190<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ninexhaustible infinities of spiritual experience. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe many-sided plasticity of Indian cult and spiritual experience is the native sign of its truth, its living reality, the unfettered sincerity of its search and finding; but this plasticity is a constant
\nstumbling block to the European mind. The religious thinking of Europe is accustomed to rigid impoverishing definitions, to
\nstrict exclusions, to a constant preoccupation with the outward idea, the organisation, the form. A precise creed framed by the
\nlogical or theological intellect, a strict and definite moral code to fix the conduct, a bundle of observances and ceremonies, a firm
\necclesiastical or congregational organisation, that is Western religion. Once the spirit is safely imprisoned and chained up in
\nthese things, some emotional fervours and even a certain amount of mystic seeking can be tolerated
\n\u2014 within rational limits; but,
\nafter all, it is perhaps safest to do without these dangerous spices. Trained in these conceptions, the European critic comes to India
\nand is struck by the immense mass and intricacy of a polytheistic cult crowned at its summit by a belief in the one Infinite. This
\nbelief he erroneously supposes to be identical with the barren and abstract intellectual pantheism of the West. He applies with
\nan obstinate prejudgment the ideas and definitions of his own thinking, and this illegitimate importation has fixed many false
\nvalues on Indian spiritual conceptions, \u2014 unhappily, even in the mind of “educated” India. But where our religion eludes his
\nfixed standards, misunderstanding, denunciation and supercilious condemnation come at once to his rescue. The Indian mind
\non the contrary is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of intuition and inner experience had given it from
\nthe beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty,
\n\u2014 the cosmic
\nconsciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the One without a second, it still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature;
\nit leaves room for his many trinities and million aspects. Even when it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of the Divinity
\nand seems to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at the back of its consciousness the sense of the All and the
\nidea of the One. Even when it distributes its worship among   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 191<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nmany objects, it looks at the same time through the objects of its worship and sees beyond the multitude of godheads the
\nunity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar to the mystics or to a small literate class or to philosophic thinkers
\nnourished on the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta. It permeates the popular mind nourished on the thoughts, images,
\ntraditions and cultural symbols of the Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living figures
\nof the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarianism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndian religion founded itself on the conception of a timeless, nameless and formless Supreme, but it did not feel called
\nupon, like the narrower and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger races, to deny or abolish all intermediary forms and
\nnames and powers and personalities of the Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague transcendental Theism was
\nnot 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
\nof 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
\nknows that all his divinities are forms, names, personalities and powers of the One; his gods proceed from the one Purusha, his
\ngoddesses are energies of the one divine Force. Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still
\nsomething more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. Indian image-worship is not the idolatry of a
\nbarbaric or undeveloped mind; for even the most ignorant know that the image is a symbol and support and can throw it away
\nwhen its use is over. The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak’s worship of the timeless
\nOne, Akala, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of
\nWestern or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta.
\nThe divine Personality of God and his human relations with
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 192<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nman are strongly stressed by Vaishnavism and Shaivism as the
\nmost dynamic Truth; but that is not the whole of these religions, and this divine Personality is not the limited magnified-human
\npersonal God of the West. Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known to the occidental intelligence.
\nIn its totality it has been a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experience. Observing the one Truth from
\nall its many sides, it shut out none. It gave itself no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing separative
\ndesignations for its constituting cults and divisions, it remained itself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman
\nof its agelong seeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other creeds by its traditional scriptures, cults and symbols, it
\nis not in its essential character a credal religion at all but a vast and many-sided, an always unifying and always progressive and
\nself-enlarging system of spiritual culture.1<\/font><\/sup>
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is necessary to emphasise this synthetic character and
\nembracing unity of the Indian religious mind, because otherwise we miss the whole meaning of Indian life and the whole sense
\nof Indian culture. It is only by recognising this broad and plastic character that we can understand its total effect on the life of
\nthe community and the life of the individual. And if we are asked, “But after all what is Hinduism, what does it teach,
\nwhat does it practise, what are its common factors?” we can answer that Indian religion is founded upon three basic ideas
\nor rather three fundamentals of a highest and widest spiritual experience. First comes the idea of the One Existence of the Veda
\nto whom sages give different names, the One without a second of the Upanishads who is all that is and beyond all that is, the
\nPermanent of the Buddhists, the Absolute of the Illusionists, the supreme God or Purusha of the Theists who holds in his power
\nthe soul and Nature, \u2014 in a word the Eternal, the Infinite. This <\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n1
\nThe 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
\nits 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
\nShankaracharya or another, but by the invading force of Islam.   <\/font>
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 193<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nis the first common foundation; but it can be and is expressed in an endless variety of formulas by the human intelligence. To
\ndiscover and closely approach and enter into whatever kind or degree of unity with this Permanent, this Infinite, this Eternal, is
\nthe highest height and last effort of its spiritual experience. That is the first universal
\ncredo <\/i>of the religious mind of India.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAdmit in whatever formula this foundation, follow this great spiritual aim by one of the thousand paths recognised
\nin India or even any new path which branches off from them and you are at the core of the religion. For its second basic
\nidea is the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite. The Infinite is full of many infinities and each of these
\ninfinities is itself the very Eternal. And here in the limitations of the cosmos God manifests himself and fulfils himself in the
\nworld in many ways, but each is the way of the Eternal. For in each finite we can discover and through all things as his
\nforms and symbols we can approach the Infinite; all cosmic powers are manifestations, all forces are forces of the One. The
\ngods behind the workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as powers, names and personalities of the one Godhead. An
\ninfinite Conscious-Force, executive Energy, Will or Law, Maya, Prakriti, Shakti or Karma, is behind all happenings, whether to
\nus they seem good or bad, acceptable or inacceptable, fortunate or adverse. The Infinite creates and is Brahma; it preserves and is
\nVishnu; it destroys or takes to itself and is Rudra or Shiva. The supreme Energy beneficent in upholding and protection is or else
\nformulates itself as the Mother of the worlds, Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the mask of destruction, it is Chandi or it
\nis Kali, the dark Mother. The One Godhead manifests himself in the form of his qualities in various names and godheads. The
\nGod of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of the Shakta appear as two different godheads; but in truth
\nthey are the one infinite Deity in different figures.2<\/font><\/sup> One may
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n2
\nThis 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
\nsense 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.
\n  
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 194<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\napproach the Supreme through any of these names and forms, with knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond
\nthem we can proceed at last to the supreme experience. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOne thing however has to be noted that while many modernised Indian religionists tend, by way of an intellectual compromise
\n\twith modern materialistic rationalism, to explain away these things as
\n\tsymbols, the ancient Indian religious mentality saw them not only as symbols
\n\tbut as world-realities, \u2014 even if to the Illusionist realities only of the
\n\tworld of Maya. For between the highest unimaginable Existence and our
\n\tmaterial way of being the spiritual and psychic knowledge of India did not
\n\tfix a gulf as between two unrelated opposites. It was aware of other
\n\tpsychological planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of these
\n\tsupraphysical planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of the
\n\tmaterial universe. Man approaches God at first according to his
\n\tpsychological nature and his capacity for deeper experience, svabhāva<\/i>,
\nadhikāra<\/i>. The level of Truth, the plane of consciousness he can reach is determined
\nby his 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
\nand the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe third idea of strongest consequence at the base of Indian
\nreligion is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that while the Supreme or the Divine can be approached through a
\nuniversal consciousness and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can be met by each individual soul
\nin itself, in its own spiritual part, because there is something in it that is intimately one or at least intimately related with
\nthe one divine Existence. The essence of Indian religion is to aim at so growing and so living that we can grow out of the
\nIgnorance which veils this self-knowledge from our mind and life and become aware of the Divinity within us. These three
\nthings put together are the whole of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo.
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 195<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nVIII <\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE TASK<\/b> 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
\nTruth-consciousness not expressed or not yet expressed here and the Mind’s ignorance. But nothing is more difficult than to
\nbring home the greatness and uplifting power of the spiritual consciousness to the natural man forming the vast majority of
\nthe race; for his mind and senses are turned outward towards the external calls of life and its objects and never inwards to
\nthe Truth which lies behind them. This external vision and attraction are the essence of the universal blinding force which is
\ndesignated in Indian philosophy the Ignorance. Ancient Indian spirituality recognised that man lives in the Ignorance and has
\nto be led through its imperfect indications to a highest inmost knowledge. Our life moves between two worlds, the depths upon
\ndepths of our inward being and the surface field of our outward nature. The majority of men put the whole emphasis of life on the
\noutward and live very strongly in their surface consciousness and very little in the inward existence. Even the choice spirits raised
\nfrom the grossness of the common vital and physical mould by the stress of thought and culture do not usually get farther than
\na strong dwelling on the things of the mind. The highest flight they reach \u2014 and it is this that the West persistently mistakes for
\nspirituality \u2014 is a preference for living in the mind and emotions more than in the gross outward life or else an attempt to subject
\nthis rebellious life-stuff to the law of intellectual truth or ethical reason and will or aesthetic beauty or of all three together. But
\nspiritual knowledge perceives that there is a greater thing in us; our inmost self, our real being is not the intellect, not the
\naesthetic, ethical or thinking mind, but the divinity within, the Spirit, and these other things are only the instruments of the
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 196<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nSpirit. A mere intellectual, ethical and aesthetic culture does not go back to the inmost truth of the spirit; it is still an Ignorance, an
\nincomplete, outward and superficial knowledge. To have made the discovery of our deepest being and hidden spiritual nature
\nis the first necessity and to have erected the living of an inmost spiritual life into the aim of existence is the characteristic sign
\nof a spiritual culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis endeavour takes in certain religions the form of a spiritual exclusiveness which revolts from the outward existence rather than seeks to transform it. The main tendency of the
\nChristian discipline was not only to despise the physical and vital way of living, but to disparage and imprison the intellectual
\nand distrust and discourage the aesthetic thirsts of our nature. It emphasised against them a limited spiritual emotionalism and
\nits intense experiences as the one thing needful; the development of the ethical sense was the sole mental necessity, its translation
\ninto act the sole indispensable condition or result of the spiritual life. Indian spirituality reposed on too wide and many-sided a
\nculture to admit as its base this narrow movement; but on its more solitary summits, at least in its later period, it tended to a
\nspiritual exclusiveness loftier in vision, but even more imperative and excessive. A spirituality of this intolerant high-pointed kind,
\nto whatever elevation it may rise, however it may help to purify life or lead to a certain kind of individual salvation, cannot be
\na complete thing. For its exclusiveness imposes on it a certain impotence to deal effectively with the problems of human existence; it cannot lead it to its integral perfection or combine its highest heights with its broadest broadness. A wider spiritual
\nculture must recognise that the Spirit is not only the highest and inmost thing, but all is manifestation and creation of the
\nSpirit. It must have a wider outlook, a more embracing range of applicability and, even, a more aspiring and ambitious aim of
\nits endeavour. Its aim must be not only to raise to inaccessible heights the few elect, but to draw all men and all life and the
\nwhole human being upward, to spiritualise life and in the end to divinise human nature. Not only must it be able to lay hold
\non his deepest individual being but to inspire too his communal   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 197<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nexistence. It must turn by a spiritual change all the members of his ignorance into members of the knowledge; it must transmute
\nall the instruments of the human into instruments of a divine living. The total movement of Indian spirituality is towards this
\naim; in spite of all the difficulties, imperfections and fluctuations of its evolution, it had this character. But like other cultures it
\nwas not at all times and in all its parts and movements consciously aware of its own total significance. This large sense
\nsometimes emerged into something like a conscious synthetic clarity, but was more often kept in the depths and on the surface
\ndispersed in a multitude of subordinate and special stand-points. Still, it is only by an intelligence of the total drift that its manifold
\nsides and rich variations of effort and teaching and discipline can receive their full reconciling unity and be understood in the light
\nof its own most intrinsic purpose. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nNow the spirit of Indian religion and spiritual culture
\nhas been persistently and immovably the same throughout the long time of its vigour, but its form has undergone remarkable
\nchanges. Yet if we look into them from the right centre it will be apparent that these changes are the results of a logical and
\ninevitable evolution inherent in the very process of man’s growth towards the heights. In its earliest form, its first Vedic system,
\nit took its outward foundation on the mind of the physical man whose natural faith is in things physical, in the sensible
\nand visible objects, presences, representations and the external pursuits and aims of this material world. The means, symbols,
\nrites, figures, by which it sought to mediate between the spirit and the normal human mentality were drawn from these most
\nexternal physical things. Man’s first and primitive idea of the Divine can only come through his vision of external Nature
\nand the sense of a superior Power or Powers concealed behind her phenomena, veiled in the heaven and earth, father and
\nmother of our being, in the sun and moon and stars, its lights and regulators, in dawn and day and night and rain and wind
\nand storm, the oceans and the rivers and the forests, all the circumstances and forces of her scene of action, all that vast
\nand mysterious surrounding life of which we are a part and   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 198<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nin which the natural heart and mind of the human creature feel instinctively through whatever bright or dark or confused
\nfigures that there is here some divine Multitude or else mighty Infinite, one, manifold and mysterious, which takes these forms
\nand manifests itself in these motions. The Vedic religion took this natural sense and feeling of the physical man; it used the
\nconceptions to which they gave birth, and it sought to lead him through them to the psychic and spiritual truths of his
\nown being and the being of the cosmos. It recognised that he was right when he saw behind the manifestations of Nature
\ngreat living powers and godheads, even though he knew not their inner truth, and right too in offering to them worship
\nand propitiation and atonement. For that inevitably must be the initial way in which his active physical, vital and mental
\nnature is allowed to approach the Godhead. He approaches it through its visible outward manifestations as something greater
\nthan his own natural self, something single or multiple that guides, sustains and directs his life, and he calls to it for help
\nand support in the desires and difficulties and distresses and struggles of his human existence.1<\/font><\/sup> The Vedic religion accepted
\nalso the form in which early man everywhere expressed his sense of the relation between himself and the godheads of Nature; it
\nadopted as its central symbol the act and ritual of a physical sacrifice. However crude the notions attached to it, this idea
\nof the necessity of sacrifice did express obscurely a first law of being. For it was founded on that secret of constant interchange
\nbetween the individual and the universal powers of the cosmos which covertly supports all the process of life and develops the
\naction of Nature. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut even in its external or exoteric side the Vedic religion
\ndid not limit itself to this acceptance and regulation of the first
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n1
\nThe Gita recognises four kinds or degrees of worshippers and God-seekers. There are
\nfirst the arthārthī <\/i>and ārta<\/i>, those who seek him for the fulfilment of desire and those who
\nturn for divine help in the sorrow and suffering of existence; there is next the
\njij\u00f1āsu<\/i>, the
\nseeker of knowledge, the questioner who is moved to seek the Divine in his truth and in
\nthat to meet him; last and highest, there is the j\u00f1ānī <\/i>who has already contact with the truth and is able to live in unity with the Spirit.
\n  
\n<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 199<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nreligious notions of the natural physical mind of man. The Vedic Rishis gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by
\nthe people; they spoke to them of a higher Truth, Right, Law of which the gods were the guardians, of the necessity of a truer
\nknowledge and a larger inner living according to this Truth and Right and of a home of Immortality to which the soul of man
\ncould ascend by the power of Truth and of right doing. The people no doubt took these ideas in their most external sense;
\nbut they were trained by them to develop their ethical nature, to turn towards some initial development of their psychic being,
\nto conceive the idea of a knowledge and truth other than that of the physical life and to admit even a first conception of some
\ngreater spiritual Reality which was the ultimate object of human worship or aspiration. This religious and moral force was the
\nhighest reach of the external cult and the most that could be understood or followed by the mass of the people.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe deeper truth of these things was reserved for the initiates, for those who were ready to understand and practise the
\ninner sense, the esoteric meaning hidden in the Vedic scripture. For the Veda is full of words which, as the Rishis themselves
\nexpress it, are secret words that give their inner meaning only  <\/i>to the seer,
\nkavaye nivacanā ninyā vacāmsi<\/i>. This is a feature of
\nthe ancient sacred hymns which grew obscure to later ages; it became a dead tradition and has been entirely ignored by modern scholarship in its laborious attempt to read the hieroglyph of the Vedic symbols. Yet its recognition is essential to a right
\nunderstanding of almost all the ancient religions; for mostly they started on their upward curve through an esoteric element
\nof which the key was not given to all. In all or most there was a surface cult for the common physical man who was held yet
\nunfit for the psychic and spiritual life and an inner secret of the Mysteries carefully disguised by symbols whose sense was
\nopened only to the initiates. This was the origin of the later distinction between the Shudra, the undeveloped physical-minded
\nman, and the twice-born, those who were capable of entering into the second birth by initiation and to whom alone the Vedic
\neducation could be given without danger. This too actuated the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 200<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nlater prohibition of any reading or teaching of the Veda by the Shudra. It was this inner meaning, it was the higher psychic
\nand spiritual truths concealed by the outer sense, that gave to these hymns the name by which they are still known, the Veda,
\nthe Book of Knowledge. Only by penetrating into the esoteric sense of this worship can we understand the full flowering of the
\nVedic religion in the Upanishads and in the long later evolution of Indian spiritual seeking and experience. For it is all there in
\nits luminous seed, preshadowed or even prefigured in the verses of the early seers. The persistent notion which through every
\nchange ascribed the foundation of all our culture to the Rishis, whatever its fabulous forms and mythical ascriptions, contains a
\nreal truth and veils a sound historic tradition. It reflects the fact of a true initiation and an unbroken continuity between this
\ngreat primitive past and the riper but hardly greater spiritual development of our historic culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis inner Vedic religion started with an extension of the psychic significance of the godheads in the Cosmos. Its primary
\nnotion was that of a hierarchy of worlds, an ascending stair of planes of being in the universe. It saw a mounting scale of
\nthe worlds corresponding to a similar mounting scale of planes or degrees or levels of consciousness in the nature of man. A
\nTruth, Right and Law sustains and governs all these levels of Nature; one in essence, it takes in them different but cognate
\nforms. There is for instance the series of the outer physical light, another higher and inner light which is the vehicle of the mental,
\nvital and psychic consciousness and a highest inmost light of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun-God, was the lord of the
\nphysical Sun; but he is at the same time to the Vedic seer-poet the giver of the rays of knowledge which illumine the mind and he
\nis too the soul and energy and body of the spiritual illumination. And in all these powers he is a luminous form of the one and
\ninfinite Godhead. All the Vedic godheads have this outer and this inner and inmost function, their known and their secret
\nNames. All are in their external character powers of physical Nature; all have in their inner meaning a psychic function and
\npsychological ascriptions; all too are various powers of some one   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 201<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nhighest Reality, ekam sat<\/i>, the one infinite Existence. This hardly
\nknowable Supreme is called often in the Veda “That Truth” or “That One”, tat satyam<\/i>,
\ntad ekam<\/i>. This complex character
\nof the Vedic godheads assumes forms which have been wholly misunderstood by those who ascribe to them only their outward
\nphysical significance. Each of these gods is in himself a complete and separate cosmic personality of the one Existence and in their
\ncombination of powers they form the complete universal power,
\nthe cosmic whole, vaiśvadevyam<\/i>. Each again, apart from his special function, is one godhead with the others; each holds in
\nhimself the universal divinity, each god is all the other gods. 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,
\nhas given the sounding misnomer, henotheism. Beyond, in the triple Infinite, these godheads put on their highest nature and
\nare names of the one nameless Ineffable. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut the greatest power of the Vedic teaching, that which
\nmade it the source of all later Indian philosophies, religions, systems of Yoga, lay in its application to the inner life of man.
\nMan lives in the physical cosmos subject to death and the “much falsehood” of the mortal existence. To rise beyond this death, to
\nbecome one of the immortals, he has to turn from the falsehood to the Truth; he has to turn to the Light and to battle with
\nand to conquer the powers of the Darkness. This he does by communion with the divine Powers and their aid; the way to call
\ndown this aid was the secret of the Vedic mystics. The symbols of the outer sacrifice are given for this purpose in the manner
\nof the Mysteries all over the world an inner meaning; they represent a calling of the gods into the human being, a connecting
\nsacrifice, an intimate interchange, a mutual aid, a communion. There is a building of the powers of the godheads within man
\nand a formation in him of the universality of the divine nature. For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the
\npowers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the
\nTruth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 202<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nlaw of the Truth, rtasya panthāh<\/i>. Man arrives at immortality by
\n.<\/i> breaking beyond the limitations not only of his physical self, but
\nof his mental and his ordinary psychic nature into the highest plane and supreme ether of the Truth: for there is the foundation
\nof immortality and the native seat of the triple Infinite. On these ideas the Vedic sages built up a profound psychological and
\npsychic discipline which led beyond itself to a highest spirituality and contained the nucleus of later Indian Yoga. Already
\nwe find in their seed, though not in their full expansion, the most characteristic ideas of Indian spirituality. There is the one
\n˙<\/i> Existence, ekam sat<\/i>, supracosmic beyond the individual and the
\nuniverse. There is the one God who presents to us the many forms, names, powers, personalities of his Godhead. There is
\nthe distinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance,2<\/font><\/sup> the greater truth of an immortal life opposed to the much falsehood
\nor mixed truth and falsehood of mortal existence. There is the discipline of an inward growth of man from the physical through
\nthe psychic to the spiritual existence. There is the conquest of death, the secret of immortality, the perception of a realisable
\ndivinity of the human spirit. In an age to which in the insolence of our external knowledge we are accustomed to look back as the
\nchildhood of humanity or at best a period of vigorous barbarism, this was the inspired and intuitive psychic and spiritual teaching
\nby which the ancient human fathers, pūrve pitarah manusyāh<\/i>,
\nfounded a great and profound civilisation in India. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis high beginning was secured in its results by a larger
\nsublime efflorescence. The Upanishads have always been recognised in India as the crown and end of Veda; that is indicated
\nin their general name, Vedanta. And they are in fact a large crowning outcome of the Vedic discipline and experience. The
\ntime in which the Vedantic truth was wholly seen and the Upanishads took shape, was, as we can discern from such records
\nas the Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka, an epoch of immense and strenuous seeking, an intense and ardent seed-time of the
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n2 ˙<\/i>
\n <\/i> Cittim acittim cinavad vi vidvān<\/i>. “Let the knower distinguish the Knowledge and
\nthe Ignorance.”  
\n<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 203<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nSpirit. In the stress of that seeking the truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary men broke their barriers, swept
\nthrough the higher mind of the nation and fertilised the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever increasing growth of
\nspiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. This turn was not as yet universal; it was chiefly men of the higher classes,
\nKshatriyas and Brahmins trained in the Vedic system of education, no longer content with an external truth and the works of
\nthe outer sacrifice, who began everywhere to seek for the highest word of revealing experience from the sages who possessed
\nthe knowledge of the One. But we find too among those who attained to the knowledge and became great teachers men of
\ninferior or doubtful birth like Janashruti, the wealthy Shudra, or Satyakama Jabali, son of a servant-girl who knew not who
\nwas his father. The work that was done in this period became the firm bedrock of Indian spirituality in later ages and from it
\ngush still the life-giving waters of a perennial and never failing inspiration. This period, this activity, this grand achievement
\ncreated the whole difference between the evolution of Indian civilisation and the quite different curve of other cultures.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nFor a time had come when the original Vedic symbols must lose their significance and pass into an obscurity that became
\nimpenetrable, as did the inner teaching of the Mysteries in other countries. The old poise of culture between two extremes with a
\nbridge of religious cult and symbolism to unite them, the crude or half-trained naturalness of the outer physical man on one
\nside of the line, and on the other an inner and secret psychic and spiritual life for the initiates could no longer suffice as the
\nbasis of our spiritual progress. The human race in its cycle of civilisation needed a large-lined advance; it called for a more and
\nmore generalised intellectual, ethical and aesthetic evolution to help it to grow into the light. This turn had to come in India
\nas in other lands. But the danger was that the greater spiritual truth already gained might be lost in the lesser confident
\nhalf-light of the acute but unillumined intellect or stifled within the narrow limits of the self-sufficient logical reason. That was what
\nactually happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The old   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 204<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nknowledge was prolonged in a less inspired, less dynamic and more intellectual form by the Pythagoreans, by the Stoics, by
\nPlato and the Neo-Platonists; but still in spite of them and in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual wave which swept over
\nEurope from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity, the whole real trend of Western civilisation has been intellectual, rational,
\nsecular and even materialistic, and it keeps this character to the present day. Its general aim has been a strong or a fine culture
\nof the vital and physical man by the power of an intellectualised ethics, aesthesis and reason, not the leading up of our lower
\nmembers into the supreme light and power of the spirit. The ancient spiritual knowledge and the spiritual tendency it had
\ncreated were saved in India from this collapse by the immense effort of the age of the Upanishads. The Vedantic seers renewed
\nthe Vedic truth by extricating it from its cryptic symbols and casting it into a highest and most direct and powerful language
\nof intuition and inner experience. It was not the language of the intellect, but still it wore a form which the intellect could
\ntake hold of, translate into its own more abstract terms and convert into 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
\nthe West a great upbuilding of a high, wide and complex intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and social culture. But left in Europe
\nto its own resources, combated rather than helped by obscure religious emotion and dogma, here it was guided, uplifted and
\nmore and more penetrated and suffused by a great saving power of spirituality and a vast stimulating and tolerant light of wisdom
\nfrom a highest ether of knowledge. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe second or post-Vedic age of Indian civilisation was
\ndistinguished by the rise of the great philosophies, by a copious, vivid, many-thoughted, many-sided epic literature, by the
\nbeginnings of art and science, by the evolution of a vigorous and complex society, by the formation of large kingdoms and
\nempires, by manifold formative activities of all kinds and great systems of living and thinking. Here as elsewhere, in Greece,
\nRome, Persia, China, this was the age of a high outburst of the   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 205<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nintelligence working upon life and the things of the mind to discover their reason and their right way and bring out a broad
\nand noble fullness of human existence. But in India this effort never lost sight of the spiritual motive, never missed the touch of
\nthe religious sense. It was a birth time and youth of the seeking intellect and, as in Greece, philosophy was the main instrument
\nby which it laboured to solve the problems of life and the world. Science too developed, but it came second only as an auxiliary
\npower. It was through profound and subtle philosophies that the intellect of India attempted to analyse by the reason and
\nlogical faculty what had formerly been approached with a much more living force through intuition and the soul’s experience.
\nBut the philosophic mind started from the data these mightier powers had discovered and was faithful to its parent Light;
\nit went back always in one form or another to the profound truths of the Upanishads which kept their place as the highest
\nauthority in these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more
\nincalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe same governing force kept its hold on all the other
\nactivities of the Indian mind and Indian life. The epic literature is full almost to excess of a strong and free intellectual and ethical
\nthinking; there is an incessant criticism of life by the intelligence and the ethical reason, an arresting curiosity and desire to fix the
\nnorm of truth in all possible fields. But in the background and coming constantly to the front there is too a constant religious
\nsense and an implicit or avowed assent to the spiritual truths which remained the unshakable basis of the culture. These truths
\nsuffused with their higher light secular thought and action or stood above to remind them that they were only steps towards
\na goal. Art in India, contrary to a common idea, dwelt much upon life; but still its highest achievement was always in the
\nfield of the interpretation of the religio-philosophical mind and its whole tone was coloured by a suggestion of the spiritual
\nand the infinite. Indian society developed with an unsurpassed organising ability, stable effectiveness, practical insight its communal coordination of the mundane life of interest and desire,  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 206<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nkāma<\/i>, artha<\/i>; it governed always its action by a reference at
\nevery point to the moral and religious law, the Dharma: but it never lost sight of spiritual liberation as our highest point and
\nthe ultimate aim of the effort of Life. In later times when there was a still stronger secular tendency of intellectual culture, there
\ncame in an immense development of the mundane intelligence, an opulent political and social evolution, an emphatic stressing
\nof aesthetic, sensuous and hedonistic experience. But this effort too always strove to keep itself within the ancient frame and not
\nto lose the special stamp of the Indian cultural idea. The enlarged secular turn was compensated by a deepening of the intensities
\nof psycho-religious experience. New religious or mystic forms and disciplines attempted to seize not only the soul and the
\nintellect, but the emotions, the senses, the vital and the aesthetic nature of man and turn them into stuff of the spiritual life.
\nAnd every excess of emphasis on the splendour and richness and power and pleasures of life had its recoil and was balanced
\nby a corresponding potent stress on spiritual asceticism as the higher way. The two trends, on one side an extreme of the
\nrichness of life experience, on the other an extreme and pure rigorous intensity of the spiritual life, accompanied each other;
\ntheir interaction, whatever loss there might be of the earlier deep harmony and large synthesis, yet by their double pull preserved
\nsomething still of the balance of Indian culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndian religion followed this line of evolution and kept its inner continuity with its Vedic and Vedantic origins; but it changed entirely its mental contents and colour and its outward basis. It
\ndid not effectuate this change through any protestant revolt or revolution or with any idea of an iconoclastic reformation. A
\ncontinuous development of its organic life took place, a natural transformation brought out latent motives or else gave to
\nalready established motive-ideas a more predominant place or effective form. At one time indeed it seemed as if a discontinuity
\nand a sharp new beginning were needed and would take place. Buddhism seemed to reject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic
\nreligion. But this was after all less in reality than in appearance. The Buddhist ideal of Nirvana was no more than a sharply
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 207<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nnegative and exclusive statement of the highest Vedantic spiritual experience. The ethical system of the eightfold path taken as the
\nway to release was an austere sublimation of the Vedic notion of the Right, Truth and Law followed as the way to immortality,
\nrtasya panthāh<\/i>. The strongest note of Mahayana Buddhism, its
\nstress on universal compassion and fellow-feeling, was an ethical
\napplication of the spiritual unity which is the essential idea of Vedanta.3<\/font><\/sup> The most characteristic tenets of the new discipline,
\nNirvana and Karma, could have been supported from the utterances of the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Buddhism could
\neasily have claimed for itself a Vedic origin and the claim would have been no less valid than the Vedic ascription of the Sankhya
\nphilosophy and discipline with which it had some points of intimate alliance. But what hurt Buddhism and determined in
\nthe end its rejection, was not its denial of a Vedic origin or authority, but the exclusive trenchancy of its intellectual, ethical
\nand spiritual positions. A result of an intense stress of the union of logical reason with the spiritualised mind
\n\u2014 for it was by an
\nintense spiritual search supported on a clear and hard rational thinking that it was born as a separate religion,
\n\u2014 its trenchant
\naffirmations and still more exclusive negations could not be made sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility, manysided susceptibility and rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but not plastic enough to hold
\nthe heart of the people. Indian religion absorbed all that it could of Buddhism, but rejected its exclusive positions and preserved
\nthe full line of its own continuity, casting back to the ancient Vedanta.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis 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
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n3 Buddha himself does not seem to have preached his tenets as a novel revolutionary
\ncreed, but as the old Aryan way, the true form of the eternal religion.  
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 208<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nfrom 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
\novershadowed by the great Trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, and afterwards faded altogether. A new pantheon appeared which
\nin its outward symbolic aspects expressed a deeper truth and larger range of religious experience, an intenser feeling, a vaster
\nidea. The Vedic sacrifice persisted only in broken and lessening fragments. The house of Fire was replaced by the temple; the
\nkarmic ritual of sacrifice was transformed into the devotional temple ritual; the vague and shifting mental images of the Vedic
\ngods figured in the mantras yielded to more precise conceptual forms of the two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and of their
\nShaktis and their offshoots. These new concepts stabilised in physical images which were made the basis both for internal
\nadoration and for the external worship which replaced sacrifice. The psychic and spiritual mystic endeavour which was the inner
\nsense of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into the less intensely luminous but more wide and rich and complex psycho-spiritual
\ninner life of Puranic and Tantric religion and Yoga. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Purano-Tantric stage of the religion was once decried
\nby European critics and Indian reformers as a base and ignorant degradation of an earlier and purer religion. It was rather an
\neffort, successful in a great measure, to open the general mind of the people to a higher and deeper range of inner truth and
\nexperience and feeling. Much of the adverse criticism once heard proceeded from a total ignorance of the sense and intention of
\nthis worship. Much of this criticism has been uselessly concentrated on side-paths and aberrations which could hardly be
\navoided in this immensely audacious experimental widening of the basis of the culture. For there was a catholic attempt to draw
\ntowards the spiritual truth minds of all qualities and people of all classes. Much was lost of the profound psychic knowledge of
\nthe Vedic seers, but much also of new knowledge was developed, untrodden ways were opened and a hundred gates discovered
\ninto the Infinite. If we try to see the essential sense and aim of this  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 209<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ndevelopment and the intrinsic value of its forms and means and symbols, we shall find that this evolution followed upon the early
\nVedic form very much for the same reason as Catholic Christianity replaced the mysteries and sacrifices of the early Pagan
\nreligions. For in both cases the outward basis of the early religion spoke to the outward physical mind of the people and took that
\nas the starting-point of its appeal. But the new evolution tried to awaken a more inner mind even in the common man, to lay
\nhold on his inner vital and emotional nature, to support all by an awakening of the soul and to lead him through these things
\ntowards a highest spiritual truth. It attempted in fact to bring the mass into the temple of the spirit rather than leave them
\nin the outer precincts. The outward physical sense was satisfied through its aesthetic turn by a picturesque temple worship, by
\nnumerous ceremonies, by the use of physical images; but these were given a psycho-emotional sense and direction that was
\nopen to the heart and imagination of the ordinary man and not reserved for the deeper sight of the elect or the strenuous
\ntapasyā
\nof the initiates. The secret initiation remained but was now a condition for the passage from the surface psycho-emotional and
\nreligious to a profounder psychic-spiritual truth and experience. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nNothing 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
\nmore external significances, for instance the functions of cosmic creation, preservation and destruction, were only a dependent
\nfringe of these profundities that alone touched the heart of its mystery. The central spiritual truth remained in both systems the
\nsame, the truth of the One in many aspects. The Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and Brahman; the Shaktis are
\nenergies of the one Energy of the highest divine Being. But this greatest religious truth was no longer reserved for the initiated
\nfew; it was now more and more brought powerfully, widely and  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 210<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nintensely home to the general mind and feeling of the people. Even the so-called henotheism of the Vedic idea was prolonged
\nand heightened in the larger and simpler worship of Vishnu or Shiva as the one universal and highest Godhead of whom all
\nothers 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
\nthe heart of every creature. The systems of Yoga developed themselves on the same common basis. All led or hoped to lead
\nthrough many kinds of psycho-physical, inner vital, inner mental and psycho-spiritual methods to the common aim of all Indian
\nspirituality, a greater consciousness and a more or less complete union with the One and Divine or else an immergence of the
\nindividual soul in the Absolute. The Purano-Tantric system was a wide, assured and many-sided endeavour, unparalleled in its
\npower, insight, amplitude, to provide the race with a basis of generalised psycho-religious experience from which man could
\nrise through knowledge, works or love or through any other fundamental power of his nature to some established supreme
\nexperience and highest absolute status. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis great effort and achievement which covered all the time
\nbetween the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism, was still not the last possibility of religious evolution open to Indian culture.
\nThe Vedic training of the physically-minded man made the development possible. But in its turn this raising of the basis of religion
\nto the inner mind and life and psychic nature, this training and bringing out of the psychic man ought to make possible a still
\nlarger development and support a greater spiritual movement as the leading power of life. The first stage makes possible the
\npreparation of the natural external man for spirituality; the second takes up his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical
\nliving and brings him more directly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him; the third should render him capable of
\ntaking up his whole mental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual life. This endeavour
\nhas manifested itself in the evolution of Indian spirituality and   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 211<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nis the significance of the latest philosophies, the great spiritual movements of the saints and bhaktas and an increasing resort to
\nthe various paths of Yoga. But unhappily it synchronised with a decline of Indian culture and an increasing collapse of its general
\npower and knowledge, and in these surroundings it could not bear its natural fruit; but at the same time it has done much to
\nprepare such a possibility in the future. If Indian culture is to survive and keep its spiritual basis and innate character, it is in
\nthis direction, and not in a mere revival or prolongation of the Puranic system, that its evolution must turn, rising so towards
\nthe 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
\ninto the clear and immortal forms of their luminous revelation. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nEven the psychic-emotional part of man’s nature is not
\nthe inmost door to religious feeling, nor is his inner mind the highest witness to spiritual experience. There is behind the first
\nthe inmost soul of man, in that deepest secret heart, hrdaye<\/i> guhāyām<\/i>, in which the ancient seers saw the very tabernacle
\nof the indwelling Godhead and there is above the second a luminous highest mind directly open to a truth of the Spirit
\nto which man’s normal nature has as yet only an occasional and momentary access. Religious evolution, spiritual experience can
\nfind their true native road only when they open to these hidden powers and make them their support for a lasting change, a
\ndivinisation of human life and nature. An effort of this kind was the very force behind the most luminous and vivid of the later
\nmovements of India’s vast religious cycle. It is the secret of the most powerful forms of Vaishnavism and Tantra and Yoga. The
\nlabour of ascent from our half-animal human nature into the fresh purity of the spiritual consciousness needed to be followed
\nand supplemented by a descent of the light and force of the spirit into man’s members and the attempt to transform human into
\ndivine nature. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut it could not find its complete way or its fruit because
\nit synchronised with a decline of the life force in India and a lowering of power and knowledge in her general civilisation and
\nculture. Nevertheless here lies the destined force of her survival   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 212<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nand renewal, this is the dynamic meaning of her future. A widest and highest spiritualising of life on earth is the last vision of all
\nthat vast and unexampled seeking and experiment in a thousand ways of the soul’s outermost and innermost experience which is
\nthe unique character of her past; this in the end is the mission for which she was born and the meaning of her existence.
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 213<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nIX <\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nI<\/font>T IS<\/b> 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
\naccidents and details. This is a precaution which the critics of our culture steadily refuse to take. A civilisation, a culture must
\nbe looked at first in its initiating, supporting, durable central motives, in its heart of abiding principle; otherwise we shall be
\nlikely to find ourselves, like these critics, in a maze without a clue and we shall stumble about among false and partial conclusions
\nand miss entirely the true truth of the matter. The importance of avoiding this error is evident when we are seeking for the
\nessential significance of Indian religious culture. But the same method must be held to when we proceed to observe its dynamic
\nformulation and the effect of its spiritual ideal on life. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndian culture recognises the spirit as the truth of our being
\nand 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
\nhighest 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
\nin Nature. The progressive growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards God, towards the universal,
\nthe eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness, by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural
\nbeing into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existence. To this
\ndeeper and more spiritual idea of Nature and of existence a great deal of what is strongest and most potential of fruitful
\nconsequences in recent European thinking already turns with a growing impetus. This turn may be a relapse to “barbarism”
\nor it may be the high natural outcome of her own increasing and ripened culture; that is a question for Europe to decide. But
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 214<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nalways to India this ideal inspiration or rather this spiritual vision of Self, God, Spirit, this nearness to a cosmic consciousness,
\na cosmic sense and feeling, a cosmic idea, will, love, delight into which we can release the limited, ignorant, suffering ego, this
\ndrive towards the transcendental, eternal and infinite, and the moulding of man into a conscious soul and power of that greater
\nExistence have been the engrossing motive of her philosophy, the sustaining force of her religion, the fundamental idea of her
\ncivilisation and culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nI have suggested that the formal turn, the rhythmic lines of
\neffort of this culture must be regarded as having passed through two complete external stages; while a third has taken its initial
\nsteps and is the destiny of her future. The early Vedic was the first stage: then religion took its outward formal stand on the
\nnatural approach of the physical mind of man to the Godhead in the universe, but the initiates guarded the sacrificial fire of a
\ngreater spiritual truth behind the form. The Purano-Tantric was the second stage: then religion took its outward formal stand on
\nthe first deeper approaches of man’s inner mind and life to the Divine in the universe, but a greater initiation opened the way
\nto a far more intimate truth and pushed towards an inner living of the spiritual life in all its profundity and in all the infinite
\npossibilities of an uttermost sublime experience. There has been long in preparation a third stage which belongs to the future. Its
\ninspiring idea has been often cast out in limited or large, veiled and quiet or bold and striking spiritual movements and potent
\nnew disciplines and religions, but it has not yet been successful in finding its way or imposing new lines on human life. The
\ncircumstances were adverse, the hour not yet come. This greatest movement of the Indian spiritual mind has a double impulse. Its
\nwill is to call the community of men and all men each according to his power to live in the greatest light of all and found their
\nwhole life on some fully revealed power and grand uplifting truth of the Spirit. But it has had too at times a highest vision which
\nsees the possibility not only of an ascent towards the Eternal but of a descent of the Divine Consciousness and a change of
\nhuman into divine nature. A perception of the divinity hidden   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nin man has been its crowning force. This is a turn that cannot be rightly understood in the ideas or language of the European
\nreligious reformer or his imitators. It is not what the purist of the reason or the purist of the spirit imagines it to be and by
\nthat too hasty imagination falls short in his endeavour. Its index vision is pointed to a truth that exceeds the human mind and,
\nif at all realised in his members, would turn human life into a divine superlife. And not until this third largest sweep of the
\nspiritual evolution has come into its own, can Indian civilisation be said to have discharged its mission, to have spoken its last
\nword and be functus officio<\/i>, crowned and complete in its office of mediation between the life of man and the spirit.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe past dealings of Indian religion with life must be judged according to the stages of its progress; each age of its movement must be considered on its own basis. But throughout it consistently held to two perceptions that showed great practical
\nwisdom and a fine spiritual tact. First, it saw that the approach to the spirit cannot be sudden, simple and immediate for all
\nindividuals or for the community of men; it must come ordinarily or at least at first through a gradual culture, training, progress.
\nThere must be an enlarging of the natural life accompanied by an uplifting of all its motives; a growing hold upon it of the higher
\nrational, psychic and ethical powers must prepare and lead it towards a higher spiritual law. But the Indian religious mind saw
\ntoo at the same time that if its greater aim was to be fruitful and the character of its culture imperative, there must be throughout
\nand at every moment some kind of insistence on the spiritual motive. And for the mass of men this means always some kind
\nof religious influence. That pervasive insistence was necessary in order that from the beginning some power of the universal inner
\ntruth, some ray from the real reality of our existence might cast its light or at least its sensible if subtle influence on the natural
\nlife of man. Human life must be induced to flower, naturally in a way, but at the same time with a wise nurturing and cultivation
\ninto its own profounder spiritual significance. Indian culture has worked by two coordinated, mutually stimulating and always interblended operations of which these perceptions are the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nprinciple. First, it has laboured to lead upward and enlarge the life of the individual in the community through a natural series
\nof life-stages till it was ready for the spiritual levels. But also it has striven to keep that highest aim before the mind at every
\nstage and throw its influence on each circumstance and action both of man’s inner and his outer existence.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn the plan of its first aim it came nearer to the highest ancient culture of mankind in other regions, but in a type and
\nwith a motive all its own. The frame of its system was constituted by a triple quartette. Its first circle was the synthesis
\nand gradation of the fourfold object of life, vital desire and hedonistic enjoyment, personal and communal interest, moral
\nright and law, and spiritual liberation. Its second circle was the fourfold order of society, carefully graded and equipped with
\nits fixed economic functions and its deeper cultural, ethical and spiritual significances. Its third, the most original and indeed
\nunique of its englobing life-patterns, was the fourfold scale of the successive stages of life, student, householder, forest recluse and
\nfree supersocial man. This frame, these lines of a large and noble life-training subsisted in their purity, their grand natural balance
\nof austerity and accommodation, their fine effectiveness during the later Vedic and heroic age of the civilisation: afterwards
\nthey crumbled slowly or lost their completeness and order. But the tradition, the idea with some large effect of its force and
\nsome figure of its lines endured throughout the whole period of cultural vigour. However deflected it might have been from
\nits true form and spirit, however mutilated and complicated for the worse, there was always left some presence of its inspiration
\nand power. Only in the decline do we get the slow collapse, the degraded and confused mass of conventions which still labours
\nto represent the ancient and noble Aryan system, but in spite of relics of glamour and beauty, in spite of survivals of spiritual
\nsuggestion and in spite of a residue of the old high training, is little better than a detritus or a mass of confused relics. Still
\neven in this degradation enough of the original virtue has remained to ensure a remarkable remnant of the ancient beauty,
\nattractiveness and power of survival.   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nBut the turn given to the other and more direct spiritual operation of this culture is of a still greater importance. For it
\nis that which, always surviving, has coloured permanently the Indian mind and life. It has remained the same behind every
\nchange of forms and throughout all the ages of the civilisation it has renewed its effectiveness and held its field. This second
\nside of the cultural effort took the form of an endeavour to cast the whole of life into a religious mould; it multiplied means and
\ndevices which by their insistent suggestion and opportunity and their mass of effect would help to stamp a Godward tendency on
\nthe entire existence. Indian culture was founded on a religious conception of life and both the individual and the community
\ndrank 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
\ncharacter of the culture. Always was felt the near idea of the spiritual existence and its supremacy as the ideal, highest over
\nall others; everywhere there was the pervading pressure of the notion of the universe as a manifestation of divine Powers and
\na movement full of the presence of the Divine. Man himself was not a mere reasoning animal, but a soul in constant relation with
\nGod and with the divine cosmic Powers. The soul’s continued existence was a cyclic or upward progress from birth to birth;
\nhuman life was the summit of an evolution which terminated in the conscious Spirit, every stage of that life a step in a pilgrimage.
\nEvery single action of man had its importance of fruit whether in future lives or in the worlds beyond the material existence.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut Indian religion was not content with the general pressure of these conceptions, the training, the atmosphere, the stamp on
\nthe culture. Its persistent effort was to impress the mind at every moment and in each particular with the religious influence. And
\nto do this more effectively by a living and practical adaptation, not asking from anyone what was too much for him or too little,
\nit took as a guiding idea its perception of the varying natural  <\/i>
\ncapacity of man, adhikāra<\/i>. It provided in its system means by which each man high or low, wise or ignorant, exceptional or
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\naverage might feel in the way suitable to his nature and evolutionary stage the call, the pressure, the influence. Avoiding
\nthe error of the religions that impose a single dogmatic and inflexible rule on every man regardless of the possibilities of
\nhis nature, it tried rather to draw him gently upward and help him to grow steadily in religious and spiritual experience. Every
\npart of human nature, every characteristic turn of its action was given a place in the system; each was suitably surrounded with
\nthe spiritual idea and a religious influence, each provided with steps by which it might rise towards its own spiritual possibility
\nand significance. The highest spiritual meaning of life was set on the summits of each evolving power of the human nature. The
\nintelligence was called to a supreme knowledge, the dynamic active and creative powers pointed to openness and unity with
\nan infinite and universal Will, the heart and sense put in contact with a divine love and joy and beauty. But this highest meaning
\nwas also put everywhere indicatively or in symbols behind the whole system of living, even in its details, so that its impression
\nmight 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
\nwe consider the imperfections of our nature and the difficulty of the endeavour, we can say that it achieved an unusual measure of
\nsuccess. 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
\nto 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
\nhis being reminded of a spiritual existence. Everywhere he felt the closeness or at least saw the sign of something beyond his
\nnatural life, beyond the moment in time, beyond his individual ego, something other than the needs and interests of his vital
\nand 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 distinguishing marks of
\nthe Indian temperament. It is that readiness, that sensitiveness which justifies us when we speak of the characteristic spirituality
\nof the Indian people.   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nThe ancient idea of the adhikāra <\/i>has to be taken into careful
\naccount if we would understand the peculiar character of Indian religion. In most other religious systems we find a high-pitched
\nspiritual call and a difficult and rigid ethical standard far beyond the possibilities of man’s half-evolved, defective and imperfect
\nnature. This standard, this call are announced as if imperative on all; but it is evident that only a few can give an adequate
\nresponse. There is presented to our view for all our picture of life the sharp division of two extremes; the saint and the worldling,
\nthe religious and the irreligious, the good and the bad, the pious and the impious, souls accepted and souls rejected, the sheep and
\nthe goats, the saved and the damned, the believer and the infidel, are the two categories set constantly before us. All between is
\na confusion, a tug of war, an uncertain balance. This crude and summary classification is the foundation of the Christian
\nsystem of an eternal heaven and hell; at best, the Catholic religion humanely interposes a precarious chance hung between
\nthat happy and this dread alternative, the chance of a painful purgatory for more than nine tenths of the human race. Indian
\nreligion set up on its summits a still more high-pitched spiritual call, a standard of conduct still more perfect and absolute; but
\nit did not go about its work with this summary and unreflecting ignorance. All beings are to the Indian mind portions of the
\nDivine, evolving souls, and sure of an eventual salvation and release into the spirit. All must feel, as the good in them grows
\nor, more truly, the godhead in them finds itself and becomes conscious, the ultimate touch and call of their highest self and
\nthrough that call the attraction to the Eternal and Divine. But actually in life there are infinite differences between man and
\nman; some are more inwardly evolved, others are less mature, many if not most are infant souls incapable of great steps and
\ndifficult efforts. Each needs to be dealt with according to his nature and his soul stature. But a general distinction can be
\ndrawn between three principal types varying in their openness to the spiritual appeal or to the religious influence or impulse. This
\ndistinction amounts to a gradation of three stages in the growing human consciousness. One crude, ill-formed, still outward, still
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 220<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nvitally and physically minded can be led only by devices suited to its ignorance. Another, more developed and capable of a much
\nstronger and deeper psycho-spiritual experience, offers a riper make of manhood gifted with a more conscious intelligence, a
\nlarger vital or aesthetic opening, a stronger ethical power of the nature. A third, the ripest and most developed of all, is ready
\nfor the spiritual heights, fit to receive or to climb towards the loftiest ultimate truth of God and of its own being and to tread
\nthe summits of divine experience.1<\/font><\/sup> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt was to meet the need of the first type or level that Indian
\nreligion created that mass of suggestive ceremony and effective ritual and strict outward rule and injunction and all that pageant
\nof attracting and compelling symbol with which the cult is so richly equipped or profusely decorated. These are for the most
\npart forming and indicative things which work upon the mind consciently and subconsciently and prepare it for an entry into
\nthe significance of the greater permanent things that lie behind them. And for this type too, for its vital mind and will, is intended
\nall 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,
\njust because subject to the right and the law, the Dharma. In the Vedic times the outward ritual sacrifice and at a later period
\nall the religious forms and notions that clustered visibly around the rites and imagery of temple worship, constant festival and
\nceremony and daily act of outward devotion were intended to serve this type or this soul-stage. Many of these things may
\nseem to the developed mind to belong to an ignorant or half awakened religionism; but they have their concealed truth and
\ntheir psychic value and are indispensable in this stage for the development and difficult awakening of the soul shrouded in
\nthe ignorance of material Nature.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n1
\nThe Tantric distinction is between the animal man, the hero man and the divine man,
\npaśu<\/i>, vīra<\/i>, deva<\/i>. Or we may grade the difference according to the three gunas,
\n\u2014 first,
\nthe 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
\nwill 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.
\n  
\n<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 221<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nThe middle stage, the second type starts from these things, but gets behind them; it is capable of understanding more clearly
\nand consciently the psychic truths, the conceptions of the intelligence, the aesthetic indications, the ethical values and all the
\nother mediating directions which Indian religion took care to place behind its symbols. These intermediate truths vivify the
\noutward forms of the system and those who can grasp them can go through these mental indices towards things that are
\nbeyond the mind and approach the profounder truths of the spirit. For at this stage there is already something awake that
\ncan go 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
\nthe rational, aesthetic and ethical nature and lead them upward towards their own highest heights; one can begin to train
\nmind and soul towards a spiritual consciousness and the opening of a spiritual existence. This ascending type of humanity
\nclaims for its use all that large and opulent middle region of philosophic, psycho-spiritual, ethical, aesthetic and emotional
\nreligious seeking which is the larger and more significant portion of the wealth of Indian culture. At this stage intervene
\nthe 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
\nsuggestions and first definite urgings of the eternal and infinite which draw men by their appeal and promise towards the
\npractice of Yoga. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut these things, great as they were, were not final or
\nsupreme: they were openings, steps of ascension towards the luminous grandeurs of spiritual truth and its practice was kept
\nready and its means of attainment provided for the third and greatest type of human being, the third loftiest stage of the
\nspiritual evolution. The complete light of spiritual knowledge when it emerges from veil and compromise and goes beyond
\nall symbols and middle significances, the absolute and universal  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 222<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ndivine love, the beauty of the All-beautiful, the noblest dharma of unity with all beings, universal compassion and benevolence
\ncalm and sweet in the perfect purity of the spirit, the upsurge of the psychical being into the spiritual unity or the spiritual
\necstasy, these divinest things were the heritage of the human being ready for divinity and their way and call were the supreme
\nsignificances of Indian religion and Yoga. He reached by them the fruits of his perfect spiritual evolution, an identity with the
\nSelf and Spirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of his being, a spiritual universality, communion, transcendence.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut distinctions are lines that can always be overpassed in the infinite complexity of man’s nature and there was no sharp
\nand unbridgeable division, only a gradation, since the actuality or potentiality of the three powers coexist in all men. Both the
\nmiddle and the highest significances were near and present and pervaded the whole system, and the approaches to the highest
\nstatus were not absolutely denied to any man, in spite of certain prohibitions: but these prohibitions broke down in practice or
\nleft 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
\n <\/i> guide. But even in the direct approach the principle of
\nadhikāra<\/i>,
\n <\/i> differing capacity and varying nature, svabhāva<\/i>, was recognised
\nin subtle ways, which it would be beyond my present purpose to enumerate. One may note as an example the significant Indian
\n <\/i> idea of the ista-devatā<\/i>, the special name, form, idea of the Divinity which each man may choose for worship and communion
\nand follow after according to the attraction in his nature and his capacity of spiritual intelligence. And each of the forms has
\nits outer initial associations and suggestions for the worshipper, its appeal to the intelligence, psychical, aesthetic, emotional
\npower in the nature and its highest spiritual significance which leads through some one truth of the Godhead into the essence
\nof spirituality. One may note too that in the practice of Yoga the disciple has to be led through his nature and according to
\nhis capacity and the spiritual teacher and guide is expected to perceive and take account of the necessary gradations and the
\nindividual need and power in his giving of help and guidance.   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 223<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nMany things may be objected to in the actual working of this large and flexible system and I shall take some note of them when
\nI have to deal with the weak points or the pejorative side of the culture against which the hostile critic directs with a misleading
\nexaggeration 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
\nhas considered deeply and flexibly these difficult matters or had any close experience of the obstacles and potentialities of our
\nnature in its approach to the concealed spiritual reality. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis carefully graded and complex system of religious development and spiritual evolution was linked on by a process of pervading intimate connection to that general culture of the life
\nof 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.
\nNo ancient culture of which we have knowledge, not even the Greek, attached more importance to it or spent more effort on
\nits 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
\nknowledge to a thing well understood and mastered with which the reason and will of man could deal on assured lines and on a
\nsafe basis of wise method and order. The ripe result of this effort was the Shastra. When we speak of the Shastra nowadays, we
\nmean too often only the religio-social system of injunctions of the middle age made sacrosanct by their mythical attribution
\nto Manu, Parashara 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 knowledge had its science or Shastra. The attempt was to reduce each to
\na theoretical and practical order founded on detailed observation, just generalisation, full experience, intuitive, logical and
\nexperimental analysis and synthesis, in order to enable man to know always with a just fruitfulness for life and to act with
\nthe security of right knowledge. The smallest and the greatest   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nthings were examined with equal care and attention and each provided with its art and science. The name was given even to
\nthe highest spiritual knowledge whenever it was stated not in a mass of intuitive experience and revelatory knowledge as in the
\nUpanishads, but for intellectual comprehension in system and order, \u2014 and in that sense the Gita is able to call its profound
\n <\/i> spiritual teaching the most secret science, guhyatamam śāstram<\/i>.
\nThis high scientific and philosophical spirit was carried by the ancient Indian culture into all its activities. No Indian religion is
\ncomplete without its outward form of preparatory practice, its supporting philosophy and its Yoga or system of inward practice
\nor art of spiritual living: most even of what seems irrational in it to a first glance, has its philosophical turn and significance. It is
\nthis complete understanding and philosophical character which has given religion in India its durable security and immense
\nvitality and enabled it to resist the acid dissolvent power of modern sceptical inquiry; whatever is ill-founded in experience
\nand reason, that power can dissolve, but not the heart and mind of these great teachings. But what we have more especially to
\nobserve is that while Indian culture made a distinction between the lower and the higher learning, the knowledge of things and
\nthe knowledge of self, it did not put a gulf between them like some religions, but considered the knowledge of the world and
\nthings as a preparatory and a leading up to the knowledge of Self and God. All Shastra was put under the sanction of the
\nnames of the Rishis, who were in the beginning the teachers not only of spiritual truth and philosophy,
\n\u2014 and we may note that
\nall Indian philosophy, even the logic of Nyaya and the atomic theory of the Vaisheshikas, has for its highest crowning note and
\neventual object spiritual knowledge and liberation, \u2014 but of the arts, the social, political and military, the physical and psychic
\nsciences, and every instructor was in his degree respected as a
\nguru <\/i>or ācārya<\/i>, a guide or preceptor of the human spirit. All knowledge was woven into one and led up by degrees to the one
\nhighest knowledge. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe whole right practice of life founded on this knowledge
\nwas in the view of Indian culture a Dharma, a living according   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 225<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nto a just understanding and right view of self-culture, of the knowledge of things and life and of action in that knowledge.
\nThus each man and class and kind and species and each activity of soul, mind, life, body has its dharma. But the largest or at least
\nmost vitally important part of the Dharma was held to be the culture and ordering of the ethical nature of man. The ethical
\naspect of life, contrary to the amazingly ignorant observation of a certain type of critics, attracted a quite enormous amount
\nof attention, occupied the greater part of Indian thought and writing not devoted to the things of pure knowledge and of the
\nspirit and was so far pushed that there is no ethical formation or ideal which does not reach in it its highest conception and a
\ncertain divine absolutism of ideal practice. Indian thought took for granted,
\n\u2014 though there are some remarkable speculations
\nto the contrary, \u2014 the ethical nature of man and the ethical law of the world. It considered that man was justified in satisfying his
\ndesires, since that is necessary for the satisfaction and expansion of life, but not in obeying the dictates of desire as the law of his
\nbeing; 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,
\nsatisfaction, expansion, regulation. The Dharma, then, fixed by the wise in the Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true rule
\nof action. First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for man’s life is only initially for his vital, personal, individual self,
\nbut much more imperatively for the community, though most imperatively of all for the greatest Self one in himself and in
\nall beings, for God, for the Spirit. Therefore first the individual must subordinate himself to the communal self, though by no
\nmeans bound altogether to efface himself in it as the extremists of the communal idea imagine. He must live according to the
\nlaw of his nature harmonised with the law of his social type and class, for the nation and in a higher reach of his
\nbeing \u2014
\nthis was greatly stressed by the Buddhists \u2014 for humanity. Thus living and acting he could learn to transcend the social scale of
\nthe Dharma, practise without injuring the basis of life the ideal scale and finally grow into the liberty of the spirit, when rule
\nand duty were not binding because he would then move and  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 226<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nact in a highest free and immortal dharma of the divine nature. All these aspects of the Dharma were closely linked up together
\nin a progressive unity. Thus, for an example, each of the four orders had its own social function and ethics, but also an ideal
\nrule for the growth of the pure ethical being, and every man by observing his dharma and turning his action Godwards could
\ngrow 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
\nreligious sanction, a reminder of the continuity of life and of man’s long pilgrimage through many births, a reminder of the
\nGods and planes beyond and of the Divine, and above it all the vision of a last stage of perfect comprehension and unity and of
\ndivine transcendence. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tThe system of Indian ethics liberalised by the catholicity of the ancient
\n\tmind did not ban or violently discourage the aesthetic or even the
\n\thedonistic being of man in spite of a growing ascetic tendency and a certain
\n\thigh austerity of the summits. The aesthetic satisfactions of all kinds and
\n\tall grades were an important part of the culture. Poetry, the drama, song,
\n\tdance, music, the greater and lesser arts were placed under the sanction of
\n\tthe Rishis and were made instruments of the spirit's culture. A just theory
\n\theld them to be initially the means of a pure aesthetic satisfaction and
\n\teach was founded on its own basic rule and law, but on that basis and with a
\n\tperfect fidelity to it still raised up to minister to the intellectual,
\n\tethical and religious development of the being. It is notable that the two
\n\tvast Indian epics have been considered as much as Dharma <\/i>
\n shastras as great historico-mythic epic narratives, itihāsas<\/i>. They are, that is to say, noble, vivid and puissant pictures of life,
\nbut they utter and breathe throughout their course the law and ideal of a great and high ethical and religious spirit in life and
\naim in their highest intention at the idea of the Divine and the way of the mounting soul in the action of the world. Indian
\npainting, sculpture and architecture did not refuse service to the aesthetic satisfaction and interpretation of the social, civic and
\nindividual life of the human being; these things, as all evidences show, played a great part in their motives of creation, but still
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\ntheir highest work was reserved for the greatest spiritual side of the culture, and throughout we see them seized and suffused
\nwith the brooding stress of the Indian mind on the soul, the Godhead, the spiritual, the Infinite. And we have to note too that
\nthe aesthetic and hedonistic being was made not only an aid to religion and spirituality and liberally used for that purpose, but
\neven one of the main gates of man’s approach to the Spirit. The Vaishnava religion especially is a religion of love and beauty and
\nof the satisfaction of the whole delight-soul of man in God and even the desires and images of the sensuous life were turned by
\nits vision into figures of a divine soul-experience. Few religions have gone so far as this immense catholicity or carried the whole
\nnature so high in its large, puissant and many-sided approach to the spiritual and the infinite.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nFinally, there is the most outwardly vital life of man, his ordinary dynamic, political, economical and social being. This
\ntoo Indian culture took strenuously in hand and subjected its whole body to the pressure of its own ideals and conceptions.
\nIts method was to build up great shastras of social living, duty 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
\nstringent social and ethical ideal and rule \u2014 thus the whole life of the king as the head of power and responsibility was regulated by
\nit in its every hour and function, \u2014 and the constant reminder of religious duty. In latter times a Machiavellian principle of
\nstatecraft, that which has been always and is still pursued by governments and diplomats, encroached on this nobler system,
\nbut in the best age of Indian thought this depravation was condemned as a temporarily effective, but lesser, ignoble and inferior
\nway 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
\nand influence of his acts and example, the greater should be the call on him of the Dharma. The whole law and custom of
\nsociety was placed under the sanction of the Rishis and the gods,   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nprotected from the violence of the great and powerful, given a socio-religious character and the king himself charged to live
\nand rule as the guardian and servant of the Dharma with only an executive power over the community which was valid so long
\nas he observed with fidelity the Law. And as this vital aspect of life is the one which most easily draws us outward and away
\nfrom 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
\nway the vital man can best understand, in the Vedic times by the constant reminder of the sacrifice behind every social and civic
\nact, at a later period by religious rites, ceremonies, worship, the calling in of the gods, the insistence on the subsequent results or
\na supraterrestrial aim of works. So great was this preoccupation, that while in the spiritual and intellectual and other spheres a
\nconsiderable or a complete liberty was allowed to speculation, action, creation, here the tendency was to impose a rigorous
\nlaw and authority, a tendency which in the end became greatly exaggerated and prevented the expansion of the society into
\nnew forms more suitable for the need of the spirit of the age, the Yugadharma. A door of liberty was opened to the community
\nby the provision of an automatic permission to change custom and to the individual in the adoption of the religious life with
\nits own higher discipline or freedom outside the ordinary social weft of binding rule and injunction. A rigid observation and
\ndiscipline of the social law, a larger nobler discipline and freer self-culture of the ideal side of the Dharma, a wide freedom
\nof the religious and spiritual life became the three powers of the system. The steps of the expanding human spirit mounted
\nthrough these powers to its perfection. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThus the whole general character of the application of Indian ideals to life became throughout of this one texture, the constant, subtly graded, subtly harmonised preparation of the
\nsoul of man for its spiritual being. First, the regulated satisfaction of the primary natural being of man subjected to the
\nlaw of the Dharma and the ethical idea and besieged at every moment by the suggestions of religion, a religion at first appealing to his more outward undeveloped mind, but in each of  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nits outward symbols and circumstances opening to a profounder significance, armed with the indication of a profoundest spiritual
\nand ideal meaning as its justification. Then, the higher steps of the developed reason and psychical, ethical and aesthetic powers closely interwoven and raised by a similar opening beyond themselves to their own heights of spiritual direction and potentiality. Finally, each of these growing powers in man was made on its own line of approach a gateway into his divine and
\nspiritual being. Thus we may observe that there was created a Yoga of knowledge for the self-exceeding of the thinking intellectual man, a Yoga of works for the self-exceeding of the active, dynamic and ethical man, a Yoga of love and bhakti for the
\nself-exceeding of the emotional, aesthetic, hedonistic man, by which each arrived to perfection through a self-ward, spiritual,
\nGod-ward direction of his own special power, as too a Yoga of self-exceeding through the power of the psychical being and even
\nthrough the power of the life in the body, \u2014 Yogas which could be practised in separation or with some kind of synthesis. But all
\nthese ways of self-exceeding led to a highest self-becoming. To become one with universal being and all existences, one with the
\nself and spirit, united with God completed the human evolution, built the final step of man’s self-culture.
\n  
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\n
\nX <\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nI<\/font> HAVE<\/b> dwelt at some length, though still very inadequately,
\non 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.
\nThose too have their importance because they are part of the practical execution, the working out of the culture in life; but
\nthey cannot be rightly valued unless we seize hold of the intention which was behind the execution. And the first thing we see
\nis that the principle, the essential intention of Indian culture was extraordinarily high, ambitious and noble, the highest indeed
\nthat the human spirit can conceive. For what can be a greater idea of life than that which makes it a development of the spirit
\nin man to its most vast, secret and high possibilities, \u2014 a culture that conceives of life as a movement of the Eternal in time,
\nof the universal in the individual, of the infinite in the finite, of the Divine in man, or holds that man can become not only
\nconscious of the eternal and the infinite, but live in its power and universalise, spiritualise and divinise himself by self-knowledge?
\nWhat greater aim can be for the life of man than to grow by an inner and outer experience till he can live in God, realise his
\nspirit, become divine in knowledge, in will and in the joy of his highest existence? And that is the whole sense of the striving of
\nIndian culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is easy to say that these ideas are fantastic, chimerical
\nand impracticable, that there is no spirit and no eternal and nothing divine, and man would do much better not to dabble
\nin religion and philosophy, but rather make the best he can of the ephemeral littleness of his life and body. That is a negation
\nnatural enough to the vital and physical mind, but it rests on the assumption that man can only be what he is at the moment, and
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nthere is nothing greater in him which it is his business to evolve; such a negation has no enduring value. The whole aim of a great
\nculture is to lift man up to something which at first he is not, to lead him to knowledge though he starts from an unfathomable
\nignorance, to teach him to live by his reason, though actually he lives much more by his unreason, by the law of good and unity,
\nthough 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
\nand jarring barbarisms, by some high law of his spirit, though at present he is egoistic, material, unspiritual, engrossed by the
\nneeds 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
\nand 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
\nbecause it includes and surpasses all the others. To have made this attempt is to have ennobled the life of the race; to have
\nfailed 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
\nthe future possibilities of the human being. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe system of Indian culture is another thing. A system is
\nin its very nature at once an effectuation and a limitation of the spirit; and yet we must have a science and art of life, a system
\nof living. All that is needed is that the lines laid down should be large and noble, capable of evolution so that the spirit may
\nmore and more express itself in life, flexible even in its firmness so that it may absorb and harmonise new material and enlarge
\nits variety and richness without losing its unity. The system of Indian culture was all these things in its principle and up to a
\ncertain point and a certain period in its practice. That a decline came upon it in the end and a kind of arrest of growth, not
\nabsolute, but still very serious and dangerous to its life and future, is perfectly true, and we shall have to ask whether that
\nwas due to the inherent character of the culture, to a deformation or to a temporary exhaustion of the force of living, and, if the
\nlast, how that exhaustion came. At present, I will only note in passing one point which has its importance. Our critic is never
\ntired of harping on India’s misfortunes and he attributes them   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nall to the incurable badness of our civilisation, the total absence of a true and sound culture. Now misfortune is not a proof of
\nabsence of culture, nor good fortune the sign of salvation. Greece was unfortunate; she was as much torn by internal dissensions
\nand civil wars as India, she was finally unable to arrive at unity or preserve independence; yet Europe owes half its civilisation
\nto those squabbling inconsequent petty peoples of Greece. Italy was unfortunate enough in all conscience, yet few nations have
\ncontributed more to European culture than incompetent and unfortunate Italy. The misfortunes of India have been considerably
\nexaggerated, at least in their incidence, but take them at their worst, admit that no nation has suffered more. If all that is due
\nto the badness of our civilisation, to what is due then the remarkable fact of the obstinate survival of India, her culture and her
\ncivilisation under this load of misfortunes, or the power which enables her still to assert herself and her spirit at this moment,
\nto the great wrath of her critics, against the tremendous shock of the flood from Europe which has almost submerged other
\npeoples? If her misfortunes are due to her cultural deficiencies, must not by a parity of reasoning this extraordinary vitality be
\ndue to some great force in her, some enduring virtue of truth in her spirit? A mere lie and insanity cannot live; its persistence
\nis a disease which must before long lead to death; it cannot be the source of an unslayable life. There must be some heart of
\nsoundness, some saving truth which has kept this people alive and still enables it to raise its head and affirm its will to be and
\nits faith in its mission. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut, finally, we have to see not only the spirit and principle
\nof the culture, not only the ideal idea and scope of intention in its system, but its actual working and effect in the values of
\nlife. Here we must admit great limitations, great imperfections. There is no culture, no civilisation ancient or modern which in
\nits system has been entirely satisfactory to the need of perfection in man; there is none in which the working has not been marred
\nby considerable limitations and imperfections. And the greater the aim of the culture, the larger the body of the civilisation, the
\nmore are these flaws likely to overbear the eye. In the first place  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nevery culture suffers by the limitations or defects of its qualities and, an almost infallible consequence, by the exaggerations too
\nof its qualities. It tends to concentrate on certain leading ideas and to lose sight of others or unduly depress them; this want of
\nbalance gives rise to one-sided tendencies which are not properly checked, not kept in their due place, and bring about unhealthy
\nexaggerations. But so long as the vigour of the civilisation lasts, life accommodates itself, makes the most of compensating forces
\nand 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.
\nAgain, the ideal may be great, may have even, as Indian culture had in its best times, a certain kind of provisional completeness,
\na first attempt at comprehensive harmony, but there is always a great gulf between the ideal and the actual practice of life. To
\nbridge that gulf or at least to make it as narrow as possible is the most difficult part of human endeavour. Finally, the evolution
\nof our race, surprising enough if we look across the ages, is still, when all is said, a slow and embarrassed progress. Each age,
\neach civilisation carries the heavy burden of our deficiencies, each succeeding age throws off something of the load, but loses
\nsome virtue of the past, creates other gaps and embarrasses itself with new aberrations. We have to strike a balance, to see
\nthings in the whole, to observe whither we are tending and use a large secular vision; otherwise it would be difficult to keep an
\nunfailing faith in the destinies of the race. For, after all, what we have accomplished so far in the main at the best of times
\nis to bring in a modicum of reason and culture and spirituality to leaven a great mass of barbarism. Mankind is still no more
\nthan semi-civilised and it was never anything else in the recorded history of its present cycle.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAnd therefore every civilisation presents a mixed and anomalous appearance and can be turned by a hostile or unsympathetic observation which notes and exaggerates its defects, ignores its true spirit and its qualities, masses the shades, leaves
\nout the lights, into a mass of barbarism, a picture of almost  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nunrelieved gloom and failure, to the legitimate surprise and indignation of those to whom its motives appear to have a
\ngreat and just value. For each has achieved something of special value for humanity in the midst of its general work of culture,
\nbrought out in a high degree some potentiality of our nature and given a first large standing-ground for its future perfection.
\nGreece developed to a high degree the intellectual reason and the sense of form and harmonious beauty, Rome founded firmly
\nstrength and power and patriotism and law and order, modern Europe has raised to enormous proportions practical reason,
\nscience and efficiency and economic capacity, India developed the spiritual mind working on the other powers of man and
\nexceeding them, the intuitive reason, the philosophical harmony of the Dharma informed by the religious spirit, the sense of the
\neternal and the infinite. The future has to go on to a greater and more perfect comprehensive development of these things and to
\nevolve fresh powers, but we shall not do this rightly by damning the past or damning other cultures than our own in a spirit of
\narrogant intolerance. We need not only a spirit of calm criticism, but an eye of sympathetic intuition to extract the good from the
\npast and present effort of humanity and make the most of it for our future progress.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis being so, if our critic insists that the past culture of India was of the nature of a semi-barbarism, I shall not object,
\nso long as I have the liberty of passing the same criticism, equally valid or invalid, on the type of European culture which he wishes
\nto foist on us in its place. Mr. Archer feels the openings which European civilisation gives to this kind of retort and he pleads
\nplaintively that it ought not to be made; he takes refuge in the old tag that a
\ntu quoque <\/i>is no argument. Certainly the retort would
\nbe irrelevant if this were only a question of the dispassionate criticism of Indian culture without arrogant comparisons and
\noffensive pretensions. But it becomes a perfectly valid and effective argument when the critic turns into a partisan and tries
\nto trample underfoot all the claims of the Indian spirit and its civilisation in the name of the superiority of Europe. When he
\ninsists on our renouncing our own natural being and culture   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nin order to follow and imitate the West as docile pupils on the ground of India’s failure to achieve cultural perfection or the
\nideal of a sound civilisation, we have a right to point out that Europe has to its credit at least as ugly a failure, and for the same
\nfundamental reasons. We have a right to ask whether science, practical reason and efficiency and an unbridled economic production which makes man a slave of his life and body, a wheel, spring or cog in a huge mechanism or a cell of an economic
\norganism and translates into human terms the ideal of the anthill and the bee-hive, is really the whole truth of our being and a
\nsound or complete ideal of civilisation. The ideal of this culture, though it has its obstacles and difficulties, is at any rate not
\nan unduly exalted aim and ought to be more easy of accomplishment than the arduous spiritual ideal of ancient India. But
\nhow much of the European mind and life is really governed by reason and what does this practical reason and efficiency come
\nto in the end? To what perfection has it brought the human mind and soul and life? The aggressive ugliness of modern European
\nlife, its paucity of philosophic reason and aesthetic beauty and religious aspiration, its constant unrest, its harsh and oppressive
\nmechanical burden, its lack of inner freedom, its recent huge catastrophe, the fierce struggle of classes are things of which we
\nhave 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
\nmodern ideals would certainly be an injustice. There was a time indeed many years ago, when, while admiring the past cultural
\nachievement of Europe, the present industrial form of it seemed to me an intellectualised Titanic barbarism with Germany as its
\ntoo admired type and successful protagonist. A wider view of the ways of the Spirit in the world corrects the one-sidedness of
\nthis notion, but still it contains a truth which Europe recognised in the hour of her agony, though now she seems to be forgetting
\ntoo easily her momentary illumination. Mr. Archer argues that at least the West is trying to struggle out of its barbarism while
\nIndia has been content to stagnate in her deficiencies. That may be a truth of the immediate past; but what then? The question
\nstill remains whether Europe is taking the only, the complete or   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\n

\nthe best way open to human endeavour and whether it is not the right thing for India, not to imitate Europe, though she well may
\nlearn from Western experience, but to get out of her stagnation by developing what is best and most essential in her own spirit
\nand culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe right, the natural path for India lies so obviously in this
\ndirection 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
\nand labour hard and vainly to reestablish the spell of hypnotic suggestion, now broken for good, which led most of us for a long
\nspace to condemn wholesale ourselves and our past and imagine that the Indian’s whole duty in life was to turn an imitative ape
\nin leading-strings and dance to the mechanic barrel-organ tunes of the British civiliser. The claim of Indian culture to survival
\ncan be met first and most radically by challenging the value of its fundamental ideas and the high things which are most
\nnative to its ideal, its temperament, its way of looking at the world. To deny the truth or the value of spirituality, of the sense
\nof the eternal and infinite, the inner spiritual experience, the philosophic mind and spirit, the religious aim and feeling, the
\nintuitive reason, the idea of universality and spiritual unity is one resource, and this is the real attitude of our critic which
\nemerges constantly in his vehement philippic. But he cannot carry it through consistently, because it brings him into conflict
\nwith ideas and perceptions which are ineradicable in the human mind and which even in Europe are now after a temporary
\nobscuration beginning to come back into favour. Therefore he hedges and tries rather to prove that we find in India, even in
\nher magnificent past, even at her best, no spirituality, no real philosophy, no true or high religious feeling, no light of intuitive
\nreason, 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
\nauthoritative opinion on these matters. He therefore establishes a third line of attack combined of two inconsistent and opposite
\nassertions, first, that the higher Hinduism which is made up of   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nthese greater things has had no effect on India and, secondly, that it has had on the contrary a most all-pervading, a most
\ndisastrous and paralysing, a soul-killing, life-killing effect. He attempts to make his indictment effective by massing together
\nall these inconsistent lines of attack and leading them all to the one conclusion, that the culture of India is both in theory and
\npractice wrong, worthless, deleterious to the true aim of human living.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe last position taken is the only one which we need now consider, since the value of the essential ideas of Indian culture cannot be destroyed and to deny them is futile. The things they stand for are there, in whatever form, vaguely or distinctly
\nseeking for themselves in the highest and deepest movements of human being and its nature. The peculiarity of Indian culture
\nlies only in this distinction that what is vague or confused or imperfectly brought out in most other cultures, it has laboured
\nrather to make distinct, to sound all its possibilities, to fix its aspects and lines and hold it up as a true, precise, large and
\npracticable ideal for the race. The formulation may not be entirely complete; it may have to be still more enlarged, bettered,
\nput otherwise, things missed brought out, the lines and forms modified, errors of stress and direction corrected; but a firm, a
\nlarge foundation has been laid down not only in theory, but in solid practice. If there has been an actual complete failure in
\nlife, \u2014 and that is the one point left, \u2014 it must be due to one of two causes; either there has been some essential bungling in the
\napplication 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,
\nthen, there has been, to put it otherwise, an insistence on what we may be at some hardly attainable height of our being without
\nhaving first made the most of what we are. The infinite can only be reached after we have grown in the finite, the eternal grasped
\nonly by man growing in time, the spiritual perfected only by man accomplished first in body, life and mind. If that necessity has
\nbeen ignored, then one may fairly contend that there has been a gross, impracticable and inexcusable error in the governing idea
\nof Indian culture. But as a matter of fact there has been no such  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nerror. We have seen what were the aim and idea and method of Indian culture and it will be perfectly clear that the value
\nof life and its training were amply recognised in its system and given their proper place. Even the most extreme philosophies
\nand religions, Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an impermanence or ignorance that must be transcended and
\ncast away, yet did not lose sight of the truth that man must develop himself under the conditions of this present ignorance
\nor impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to that Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism
\nwas not solely a cloudy sublimation of Nirvana, nothingness, extinction and the tyrannous futility of Karma; it gave us a
\ngreat and powerful discipline for the life of man on earth. The enormous positive effects it had on society and ethics and the
\ncreative impulse it imparted to art and thought and in a less degree to literature, are a sufficient proof of the strong vitality of
\nits method. If this positive turn was present in the most extreme philosophy of denial, it was still more largely present in the
\ntotality of Indian culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere has been indeed from early times in the Indian mind
\na certain strain, a tendency towards a lofty and austere exaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Mayavada.
\nThis excess was inevitable, the human mind being what it is; it had even its necessity and value. Our mind does not arrive
\nat the totality of truth easily and by one embracing effort; an arduous search is the condition of its finding. The mind opposes different sides of the truth to each other, follows each to its extreme possibility, treats it even for a time as the sole
\ntruth, makes imperfect compromises, arrives by various adjustments and gropings nearer to the true relations. The Indian
\nmind followed this method; it covered, as far as it could, the whole field, tried every position, looked at the truth from every
\nangle, attempted many extremes and many syntheses. But the European critic very ordinarily labours under the idea that this
\nexaggeration in the direction of negating life was actually the whole of Indian thought and sentiment or the one undisputed
\ngoverning idea of the culture. Nothing could be more false and   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\n

\ninaccurate. The early Vedic religion did not deny, but laid a full emphasis on life. The Upanishads did not deny life, but held that
\nthe world is a manifestation of the Eternal, of Brahman, all here is Brahman, all is in the Spirit and the Spirit is in all, the
\nself-existent Spirit has become all these things and creatures; life too is Brahman, the life-force is the very basis of our existence, the
\n. ˙<\/i> life-spirit Vayu is the manifest and evident Eternal,
\npratyaksam<\/i>
\nbrahma<\/i>. But it affirmed that the present way of existence of man is not the highest or the whole; his outward mind and life are
\nnot all his being; to be fulfilled and perfect he has to grow out of his physical and mental ignorance into spiritual self-knowledge.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBuddhism arrived at a later stage and seized on one side of these ancient teachings to make a sharp spiritual and intellectual opposition between the impermanence of life and the permanence of the Eternal which brought to a head and made a
\ngospel of the ascetic exaggeration. But the synthetic Hindu mind struggled against this negation and finally threw out Buddhism,
\nthough not without contracting an increased bias in this direction. That bias came to its height in the philosophy of Shankara,
\nhis theory of Maya, which put its powerful imprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a progressive decline in the full vitality
\nof the race, did tend for a time to fix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort the larger Indian ideal. But
\nhis theory is not at all a necessary deduction from the great Vedantic authorities, the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Gita,
\nand was always combated by other Vedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them and from spiritual experience
\nvery different conclusions. At the present time, in spite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara’s philosophy, the most vital
\nmovements 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
\nand action has been done in spite of the governing ideas of her culture, since logically she ought to have abandoned life
\nand creation and action, is as unsound as it is unnatural and grotesque. To develop to the full the intellectual, the dynamic
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n

\nand volitional, the ethical, the aesthetic, the social and economic being of man was an important element of Indian civilisation,
\n\u2014 if for nothing else, at least as an indispensable preliminary to spiritual perfection and freedom. India’s best achievements in
\nthought, art, literature, society were the logical outcome of her religio-philosophical culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut still it may be argued that whatever may have been the theory, the exaggeration was there and in practice it discouraged
\nlife and action. That, when its other falsities have been eliminated, is what Mr. Archer’s criticism comes to in the end; the
\nemphasis on the Self, the eternal, the universal, the impersonal, the infinite discouraged, he thinks, life, will, personality, human
\naction and led to a false and life-killing asceticism. India achieved nothing of importance, produced no great personalities, was
\nimpotent in will and endeavour, her literature and art are a barbaric and monstrous nullity not equal even to the
\nthird-rate work of Europe, her life story a long and dismal record of incompetence and failure. An inconsistency more or less is
\nnothing to this critic and in the same breath he affirms that this very India, described by him elsewhere as always effete, sterile or
\na mother of monstrous abortions, is one of the most interesting countries in the world, that her art casts a potent and attractive
\nspell and has numberless beauties, that her very barbarisms are magnificent and that, most wonderful of all, in presence of some
\nof her personalities in the abodes of her ancient fine-spun aristocratic culture a European is apt to feel like a semi-barbarian
\nintruder! But let us leave aside these signs of grace which are only an occasional glimmering of light across the darkness and
\ngloom of Mr. Archer’s mood. We must see how far there is any foundation for the substance of this criticism. What was the
\nreal value of Indian life, will, personality, achievement, creation, those things that she regards as her glories, but her critic tells her
\nshe should shudder at as her disgrace? That is the one remaining vital question.
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\n
\nXI <\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE MOST<\/b> general charge against Indian culture in its
\npractical effects can be dismissed without any serious difficulty. The critic with whom I have to deal has, in fact,
\nspoiled his case by the spirit of frantic exaggeration in which he writes. To say that there has been no great or vivid activity
\nof life in India, that she has had no great personalities with the mythical exception of Buddha and the other pale exception
\nof Asoka, that she has never shown any will-power and never done any great thing, is so contrary to all the facts of history
\nthat 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
\nand lived greatly, whatever judgment one may pass on her ideas and institutions. What is meant after all by life and when is it
\nthat we most fully and greatly live? Life is surely nothing but the creation and active self-expression of man’s spirit, powers,
\ncapacities, his will to be and think and create and love and do and achieve. When that is wanting or, since it cannot be
\nabsolutely wanting, depressed, held under, discouraged or inert, whether by internal or external causes, then we may say that
\nthere 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
\nKarma; it is religion and philosophy and thought and science and poetry and art, drama and song and dance and play, politics and
\nsociety, industry, commerce and trade, adventure and travel, war and peace, conflict and unity, victory and defeat and aspirations
\nand vicissitudes, the thoughts, emotions, words, deeds, joys and sorrows which make up the existence of man. In a narrower
\nsense life is sometimes spoken of as the more obvious and external vital action, a thing which can be depressed by a top-heavy
\nintellectuality or ascetic spirituality, sicklied over with the pale cast of thought or the paler cast of world-weariness or made
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\n

\nflat, stale and uninteresting by a formalised, conventional or too
\n\t\t\tstrait-laced system of society. Again, life may be very active and
\n\t\t\tfull of colour for a small and privileged part of the community, but
\n\t\t\tthe life of the mass dull, void and miserable. Or, finally, there
\n\t\t\tmay be all the ordinary materials and circumstances of mere living,
\n\t\t\tbut if life is not uplifted by great hopes, aspirations and ideals,
\n\t\t\tthen we may well say that the community does not really live; it is
\n\t\t\tdefective in the characteristic greatness of the human spirit.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe ancient and mediaeval life of India was not wanting in any of the things
\nthat make up the vivid interesting activity of human existence. On the contrary,
\nit was extraordinarily full of colour and interest. Mr. Archer's criticism on
\nthis point, a criticism packed full of ignorance and built up by a purely
\nfictitious construction of what things logically ought to have been on the
\ntheory of a dominating asceticism and belief in the illusionary character of the
\nworld, is not and cannot be borne out by anyone who has come close to the facts.
\nIt is true that while many European writers who have studied the history of the
\nland and the people, have expressed strongly their appreciation of the vividness
\nand interesting fullness, colour and beauty of life in India before the present
\nperiod, \u2014 that unhappily exists no longer except in the pages of history and
\nliterature and the broken or crumbling fragments of the past, \u2014 those who see
\nonly from a distance or fix their eyes only on one aspect, speak of it often as
\na land of metaphysics, philosophies, dreams and brooding imaginations, and
\ncertain artists and writers are apt to write in a strain as if it were a country
\nof the Arabian Nights, a mere glitter of strange hues and fancies and marvels.
\nBut on the contrary India has been as much a home of serious and solid
\nrealities, of a firm grappling with the problems of thought and life, of
\nmeasured and wise organisation and great action as any other considerable centre
\nof civilisation. The widely different view these perceptions express simply show
\nthe many-sided brilliance and fullness of her life. The colour and magnificence
\nhave been its aesthetic side; she has had great dreams and high and splendid
\nimaginations, for that too is wanted for the completeness of our  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 243<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nliving; but also deep philosophical and religious thinking, a wide and searching
\ncriticism of life, a great political and social order, a strong ethical tone and
\na persistent vigour of individual and communal living. That is a combination
\nwhich means life in all its fullness, though deficient, it may be, except in
\nextraordinary cases, in the more violent egoistic perversities and exaggerations
\nwhich some minds seem to take for a proof of the highest vigour of existence.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn what field indeed has not India attempted, achieved, created, and in all on a
\nlarge scale and yet with much attention to completeness of detail? Of her
\nspiritual and philosophic achievement there can be no real question. They stand
\nthere as the Himalayas stand upon the earth in the phrase of Kalidasa,
\nprthivyā<\/i> iva mānadandah<\/i>, "as if earth's measuring rod," mediating still
\nbetween earth and heaven, measuring the finite, casting their plummet far into
\nthe infinite, plunging their extremities into the upper and lower seas of the
\nsuperconscient and the subliminal, the spiritual and the natural being. But if
\nher philosophies, her religious disciplines, her long list of great spiritual
\npersonalities, thinkers, founders, saints are her greatest glory, as was natural
\nto her temperament and governing idea, they are by no means her sole glories,
\nnor are the others dwarfed by their eminence. It is now proved that in science
\nshe went farther than any country before the modern era, and even Europe owes
\nthe beginning of her physical science to India as much as to Greece, although
\nnot directly but through the medium of the Arabs. And, even if she had only gone
\nas far, that would have been sufficient proof of a strong intellectual life in
\nan ancient culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry, the
\nchief elements of ancient science, she discovered and formulated much and well
\nand anticipated by force of reasoning or experiment some of the scientific ideas
\nand discoveries which Europe first arrived at much later, but was able to base
\nmore firmly by her new and completer method. She was well-equipped in surgery
\nand her system of medicine survives to this day and has still its value, though
\nit declined intermediately in knowledge and is only now recovering its vitality.  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nIn literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly. Not only
\nhas she the Vedas, Upanishads and Gita, not to speak of less supreme but still
\npowerful or beautiful work in that field, unequalled monuments of religious and
\nphilosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe has never been able to do anything
\nmuch of any great value, but that vast national structure, the Mahabharata,
\ngathering into its cycle the poetic literature and expressing so completely the
\nlife of a long formative age, that it is said of it in a popular saying which
\nhas the justice if also the exaggeration of a too apt epigram, "What is not in
\nthis Bharata, is not in Bharatavarsha (India)," and the Ramayana, the greatest
\nand most remarkable poem of its kind, that most sublime and beautiful epic of
\nethical idealism and a heroic semi-divine human life, and the marvellous
\nrichness, fullness and colour of the poetry and romance of highly cultured
\nthought, sensuous enjoyment, imagination, action and adventure which makes up
\nthe romantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor did this long continuous
\nvigour of creation cease with the loss of vitality by the Sanskrit tongue, but
\nwas paralleled and carried on in a mass of great or of beautiful work in her
\nother languages, in Pali first and Prakrit, much unfortunately lost,1<\/font><\/sup> and Tamil,
\nafterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues. The long tradition of
\nher architecture, sculpture and painting speaks for itself, even in what
\nsurvives after all the ruin of stormy centuries: whatever judgment may be formed
\nof it by the narrower school of Western aesthetics, \u2014 and at least its fineness
\nof execution and workmanship cannot be denied, nor the power with which it
\nrenders the Indian mind, \u2014 it testifies at least to a continuous creative
\nactivity. And creation is proof of life and great creation of greatness of life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut these things are, it may be said, the things of the mind, and
\n\t\t\tthe intellect, imagination and aesthetic mind of India may have been
\n\t\t\tcreatively active, but yet her outward life depressed, dull, poor,
\n\t\t\tgloomy with the hues of asceticism, void of willpower and
\n\t\t\tpersonality, ineffective, null. That would be a hard
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n
\n1  <\/i>
\n <\/i> E.g. the once famous work in Paisachi of which the
\nKathāsaritsāgara
\n<\/i>is an inferior version.  
\n<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 245<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nproposition to swallow; for literature, art and science do
\nnot flourish in a void of life. But here too what are the facts? India has not
\nonly had the long roll of her great saints, sages, thinkers, religious founders,
\npoets, creators, scientists, scholars, legists; she has had her great rulers,
\nadministrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes, men with the strong active will,
\nthe mind that plans and the seeing force that builds. She has warred and ruled,
\ntraded and colonised and spread her civilisation, built polities and organised
\ncommunities and societies, done all that makes the outward activity of great
\npeoples. A nation tends to throw out its most vivid types in that line of action
\nwhich is most congenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading idea,
\nand it is the great saints and religious personalities that stand at the head in
\nIndia and present the most striking and continuous roll-call of greatness, just
\nas Rome lived most in her warriors and statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in
\nancient India was the outstanding figure with the hero just behind, while in
\nlater times the most striking feature is the long uninterrupted chain from
\nBuddha and Mahavira
\nto Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and beyond them to Ramakrishna
\nand Vivekananda and Dayananda. But there have been also the remarkable
\nachievements of statesmen and rulers, from the first dawn of ascertainable
\nhistory which comes in with the striking figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya,
\nAsoka, the Gupta emperors and goes down through the multitude of famous Hindu
\nand Mahomedan figures of the middle age to quite modern times. In ancient India
\nthere was the life of republics, oligarchies, democracies, small kingdoms of
\nwhich no detail of history now survives, afterwards the long effort at
\nempire-building, the colonisation of Ceylon and the Archipelago, the vivid
\nstruggles that attended the rise and decline of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties,
\nthe Hindu struggle for survival in the south, the wonderful record of Rajput
\nheroism and the great upheaval of national life in Maharashtra penetrating to
\nthe lowest strata of society, the remarkable episode of the Sikh Khalsa. An
\nadequate picture of that outward life still remains to be given; once given it
\nwould be the end of many fictions. All this   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nmass of action was not accomplished by men without mind and will and vital
\nforce, by pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood had been crushed
\nout under the burden of a gloomy and all-effacing asceticism, nor does it look
\nlike the sign of a metaphysically minded people of dreamers averse to life and
\naction. It was not men of straw or lifeless and will-less dummies or
\nthin-blooded dreamers who thus acted, planned, conquered, built great systems of
\nadministration, founded kingdoms and empires, figured as great patrons of poetry
\nand art and architecture or, later, resisted heroically imperial power and
\nfought for the freedom of clan or people. Nor was it a nation devoid of life
\nwhich maintained its existence and culture and still lived on and broke out
\nconstantly into new revivals under the ever increasing stress of continuously
\nadverse circumstances. The modern Indian revival, religious, cultural,
\npolitical, called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles and grieves the
\nminds of her critics, is only a repetition under altered circumstances, in an
\nadapted form, in a greater though as yet less vivid mass of movement, of a
\nphenomenon which has constantly repeated itself throughout a millennium of
\nIndian history.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAnd it must be remembered that by virtue of its culture and its system the whole
\nnation shared in the common life. In all countries in the past the mass has
\nindeed lived with a less active and vivid force than the few, \u2014 sometimes with
\nthe mere elements of life, not with even any beginning of finished richness, \u2014
\nnor has modern civilisation yet got rid of this disparity, though it has opened
\nthe advantages or at least the initial opportunities of a first-hand life and
\nthought and knowledge to a greater number. But in ancient India, though the
\nhigher classes led and had the lion's share of the force and wealth of life, the
\npeople too lived and until much later times intensely though on a lesser scale
\nand with a more diffused and less concentrated force. Their religious life was
\nmore intense than that of any other country; they drank in with remarkable
\nfacility the thoughts of the philosophers and the influence of the saints; they
\nheard and followed Buddha and the many who came after him; they were taught by
\nthe Sannyasins and sang the songs of the Bhaktas and   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 247<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nBauls and thus possessed some of the most delicate and beautiful poetical
\nliterature ever produced; they contributed many of the greatest names in our
\nreligion, and from the outcastes themselves came saints revered by the whole
\ncommunity. In ancient Hindu times they had their share of political life and
\npower; they were
\nthe people, the viśah <\/i>of the Veda, of whom the kings were the leaders and
\nfrom them as well as from the sacred or princely families were born the Rishis;
\nthey held their villages as little self-administered republics; in the time of
\nthe great kingdoms and empires they sat in the municipalities and urban councils
\nand the bulk of the typical royal Council described in the books of political
\nscience was composed of commoners, Vaishyas, and not of Brahmin Pundits and
\nKshatriya nobles; for a long time they could impose their will on their kings,
\nwithout the need of a long struggle, by a single demonstration of their
\ndispleasure. So long as Hindu kingdoms existed, something of all this survived,
\nand even the entrance into India of central Asian forms of absolutist despotism,
\nnever an indigenous Indian growth, left some remnant of the old edifice still in
\nbeing. The people had their share too in art and poetry, their means by which
\nthe essence of Indian culture was disseminated through the mass, a system of
\nelementary education in addition to the great universities of ancient times, a
\ntype of popular dramatic representation which was in some parts of the country
\nalive even yesterday; they gave India her artists and architects and many of the
\nfamous poets in the popular tongues; they preserved by the force of their long
\npast culture an innate aesthetic sense and faculty of which the work of Indian
\ncraftsmen remained a constant and striking evidence until it was destroyed or
\ndegraded by the vulgarisation and loss of aesthetic sense and beauty which has
\nbeen one of the results of modern civilisation. Nor was the life of India
\nascetic, gloomy or sad, as the too logical mind of the critic would have it be.
\nThe outward form is more quiet than in other countries, there is a certain
\ngravity and reserve before strangers which deceives the foreign observer, and in
\nrecent times asceticism and poverty and an increase of puritanic tendency had
\ntheir effect, but the life portrayed in the literature of the country is glad
\nand   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 248<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nvivid, and even now despite certain varieties of temperament and many forces
\nmaking for depression laughter, humour, an unobtrusive elasticity and equanimity
\nin the vicissitudes of life are very marked features of the Indian character.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe whole theory of a want of life and will and activity in the Indian people as
\na result of their culture is then a myth. The circumstances which have given
\nsome colour to it in later times will be noted in their proper place; but they
\nare a feature of the decline and even then must be taken with considerable
\nqualification, and the much longer history of its past greatness tells quite
\nanother story. That history has not been recorded in the European fashion; for
\nthe art of history and biography, though not entirely neglected, was never
\nbrought to perfection in India, never sufficiently practised, nor does any
\nsustained record of the doings of kings and great men and peoples before the
\nMussulman dynasties survive except in the one solitary instance of Cashmere.
\nThis is certainly a defect and leaves a very serious gap. India has lived much,
\nbut has not sat down to record the history of her life. Her soul and mind have
\nleft their great monuments, but so much as we know \u2014 and after all it is not
\nlittle \u2014 of the rest, the more outward things, remains or has emerged recently
\nin spite of her neglect; such exact records as she had, she has allowed to rust
\nforgotten or disappear. Perhaps what Mr. Archer really means when he tells us
\nthat we have had no personalities in our history, is that they do not come home
\nto his mind because their doings and sayings are not minutely recorded in the
\nWestern manner; their personality, will-power and creative force emerge only in
\ntheir work or in indicative tradition and anecdote or in incomplete records. And
\nvery curiously, very fancifully this defect has been set down to an ascetic want
\nof interest in life; it is supposed that India was so much absorbed in the
\neternal that she deliberately despised and neglected time, so profoundly
\nconcentrated on the pursuit of ascetic brooding and quietistic peace that she
\nlooked down on and took no interest in the memory of action. That is another
\nmyth. The same phenomenon of a lack of sustained and deliberate record appears
\nin other ancient cultures, but nobody   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 249<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nsuggests that Egypt, Assyria or Persia have to be reconstructed for us by the
\narchaeologists for an analogous reason. The genius of Greece developed the art
\nof history, though only in the later period of her activity, and Europe has
\ncherished and preserved the art; India and other ancient civilisations did not
\narrive at it or neglected its full development. It is a defect, but there is no
\nreason why we should go out of our way in this one case to attribute it to a
\ndeliberate motive or to any lack of interest in life. And in spite of the defect
\nthe greatness and activity of the past life of India reveals itself and comes
\nout in bolder relief the more the inquiry into her past unearths the vast amount
\nof material still available.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut our critic will still have it that India lived as it were in spite of
\nherself and that in all this teeming action there is ample evidence of the
\ndwarfing of individual will and the absence of any great individual personality.
\nHe arrives at that result by methods which savour of the skill of the journalist
\nor pamphleteer rather than the disinterested mind of the critic. He tells us for
\ninstance that India has contributed only one or at most two great names to the
\nworld's Pantheon. By that, of course, he means Europe's Pantheon, or the world's
\nPantheon as constructed by the mind of Europe, crammed with the figures of
\nWestern history and achievement which are near and familiar to it and admitting
\nonly a very few of the more gigantic names from the distant East, those which it
\nfinds it most difficult to ignore. One remembers the list made by a great French
\npoet in the field of literature in which a sounding string of French names
\nequals or outnumbers the whole contribution of the rest of Europe! If an Indian
\nwere to set about the same task in the same spirit, he would no doubt similarly
\npour out an interminable list of Indian names with some great men of Europe and
\nAmerica, Arabia, Persia, China, Japan forming a brief tail to this large
\npeninsular body. These exercises of the partial mentality have no value. And it
\nis difficult to find out what measure of values Mr. Archer is using when he
\nrelegates other great Indian names, allowing for three or four only, to the
\nsecond plan and even there belittles them in comparison with corresponding
\nEuropean immortals. In what  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 250<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nis Shivaji with his vivid and interesting life and character, who not only
\nfounded a kingdom but organised a nation, inferior to Cromwell, or Shankara
\nwhose great spirit in the few years of its mortal life swept triumphant through
\nIndia and reconstituted the whole religious life of her peoples, inferior as a
\npersonality to Luther? Why are Chanakya and Chandragupta who laid down the form
\nof empire-building in India and whose great administrative system survived with
\nchanges often for the worse down to modern times, lesser men than the rulers and
\nstatesmen of European history? India may not present any recorded moment of her
\nlife so crowded as the few years of Athens to which Mr. Archer makes appeal; she
\nmay have no parallel to the swarm of interesting but often disturbing,
\nquestionable or even dark and revolting figures which illuminate and stain the
\nstory of the Italian cities during the Renaissance, although she has had too her
\ncrowded moments thronged by figures of a different kind. But she has had many
\nrulers, statesmen and encouragers of art as great in their own way as Pericles
\nor Lorenzo di Medici; the personalities of her famed poets emerge more dimly
\nthrough the mist of time, but with indications which point to a lofty spirit or
\na humanity as great as that of Aeschylus or Euripides or a life-story as human
\nand interesting as that of the famous Italian poets. And if, comparing this one
\ncountry with all Europe as Mr. Archer insists, \u2014 mainly on the ground that
\nIndians themselves make the comparison when they speak of the size of the
\ncountry, its many races and the difficulty so long experienced in organising
\nIndian unity, \u2014 it may be that in the field of political and military action
\nEurope has a long lead, but what of the unparalleled profusion of great
\nspiritual personalities in which India is preeminent? Again Mr. Archer speaks
\nwith arrogant depreciation of the significant figures born of the creative
\nIndian mind which people its literature and its drama. Here too it is difficult
\nto follow him or to accept his measure of values. To an oriental mind at least
\nRama and Ravana are as vivid and great and real characters as the personalities
\nof Homer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi certainly not less living than Helen
\nor Cleopatra, Damayanti and Shakuntala and other feminine types not less  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 251<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nsweet, gracious and alive than Alcestis or Desdemona. I am not here affirming
\nany superiority, but the bottomless inequality and inferiority which this critic
\naffirms exists, not in truth, but only in his imagination or his way of seeing.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThat perhaps is the one thing of significance, the one thing which is really
\nworth noting, the difference of mentality which is at the bottom of these
\ncomparisons. There is not any inferiority of life or force or active and
\nreactive will but, as far as the sameness of human nature allows, a difference
\nof type, character, personality, let us say, an emphasis in different and almost
\nopposite directions. Will-power and personality have not been wanting in India,
\nbut the direction preferably given to them and the type most admired are of a
\ndifferent kind. The average European mind is prone to value or at least to be
\nmore interested in the egoistic or self-asserting will which insists upon itself
\nwith a strong or a bold, an aggressive, sometimes a fierce insistence; the
\nIndian mind not only prizes more from the ethical standpoint, \u2014 that is found
\neverywhere, \u2014 but is more vividly interested in the calm, self-controlling or
\neven the self-effacing personality; for the effacement of egoism seems to it to
\nbe not an effacement, but an enhancement of value and power of the true person
\nand its greatness. Mr. Archer finds Asoka pale and featureless; to an Indian
\nmind he is supremely vivid and attractive. Why is Asoka to be called pale in
\ncomparison with Charlemagne or, let us say, with Constantine? Is it because he
\nonly mentions his sanguinary conquest of Kalinga in order to speak of his
\nremorse and the turning of his spirit, a sentiment which Charlemagne massacring
\nthe Saxons in order to make good Christians of them could not in the least have
\nunderstood, nor any more perhaps the Pope who anointed him? Constantine gave the
\nvictory to the Christian religion, but there is nothing Christian in his
\npersonality; Asoka not only enthroned Buddhism, but strove though not with a
\nperfect success to follow the path laid down by Buddha. And the Indian mind
\nwould account him not only a nobler will, but a greater and more attracting
\npersonality than Constantine or Charlemagne. It is interested in Chanakya, but
\nmuch more interested in Chaitanya.  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 252<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nAnd in literature also just as in actual life it has the same turn. This
\nEuropean mind finds Rama and Sita uninteresting and unreal, because they are too
\nvirtuous, too ideal, too white in colour; but to the Indian mind even apart from
\nall religious sentiment they are figures of an absorbing reality which appeal to
\nthe inmost fibres of our being. A European scholar criticising the Mahabharata
\nfinds the strong and violent Bhima the only real character in that great poem;
\nthe Indian mind on the contrary finds greater character and a more moving
\ninterest in the calm and collected heroism of Arjuna, in the fine ethical
\ntemperament of Yudhisthira, in the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra who works
\nnot for his own hand but for the founding of the kingdom of right and justice.
\nThose vehement or self-asserting characters or those driven by the storm of
\ntheir passions which make the chief interest of European epic and drama, would
\neither be relegated by it to the second plan or else, if set in large
\nproportions, so brought in in order to bring into relief the greatness of the
\nhigher type of personality, as Ravana contrasts with and sets off Rama. The
\nadmiration of the one kind of mentality in the aesthetics of life goes to the
\ncoloured, that of the other to the luminous personality. Or, to put it in the
\nform of the distinction made by the Indian mind itself, the interest of the one
\ncentres more in the rajasic, that of the other in the sattwic will and
\ncharacter. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWhether this difference imposes an inferiority on the aesthetics of Indian life
\nand creation, each must judge for himself, but surely the Indian is the more
\nevolved and spiritual conception. The Indian mind believes that the will and
\npersonality are not diminished but heightened by moving from the rajasic or more
\ncoloured egoistic to the sattwic and more luminous level of our being. Are not
\nafter all calm, self-mastery, a high balance signs of a greater and more real
\nforce of character than mere self-assertion of strength of will or the furious
\ndriving of the passions? Their possession does not mean that one must act with
\nan inferior or less puissant, but only with a more right, collected and balanced
\nwill. And it is a mistake to think that asceticism itself rightly understood and
\npractised implies an effacement   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 253<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nof will; it brings much rather its greater concentration. That is the Indian
\nview and experience and the meaning of the old legends in the epics \u2014 to which
\nMr. Archer, misunderstanding the idea behind them, violently objects, \u2014
\nattributing so enormous a force, even when it was misused, to the power gained
\nby ascetic self-mastery, Tapasya. The Indian mind believed and still believes
\nthat soul power is a greater thing, works from a mightier centre of will and has
\ngreater results than a more outwardly and materially active will-force. But it
\nwill be said that India has valued most the impersonal and that must obviously
\ndiscourage personality. But this too, \u2014 except for the negative ideal of losing
\noneself in the trance or the silence of the Eternal, which is not the true
\nessence of the matter, \u2014 involves a misconception. However paradoxical it may
\nsound, one finds actually that the acceptance of the eternal and impersonal
\nbehind one's being and action and the attempt at unity with it is precisely the
\nthing that carries the person to his largest greatness and power. For this
\nimpersonality is not a nullity, but an oceanic totality of the being. The
\nperfect man, the Siddha or the Buddha, becomes universal, embraces all being in
\nsympathy and oneness, finds himself in others as in himself and by so doing
\ndraws into himself at the same time something of the infinite power of a
\nuniversal energy. That is the positive ideal of Indian culture. And when this
\nhostile critic finds himself forced to do homage to the superiority of certain
\npersonalities who have sprung from this "fine-spun aristocratic" culture, he is
\nreally paying a tribute to some results of this preference of the sattwic to the
\nrajasic, the universal to the limited and egoistic man. Not to be as the common
\nman, that is to say, as the crude natural or half-baked human being, was indeed
\nthe sense of this ancient endeavour and in that sense it may be called an
\naristocratic culture. But it was not a vulgar outward but a spiritual nobility
\nwhich was the aim of its self-discipline. Indian life, personality, art,
\nliterature must be judged in this light and appreciated or depreciated after
\nbeing seen in the real sense and with the right understanding of Indian culture.  
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 254<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VII   Indian Spirituality and Life   I HAVE described the framework of the Indian idea from the outlook of an intellectual criticism, because that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-20-the-renaissance-in-india","wpcat-55-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}