{"id":2929,"date":"2013-07-13T01:44:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2929"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:44:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:44:41","slug":"09-a-rationalistic-critic-on-indian-culture-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\/09-a-rationalistic-critic-on-indian-culture-vol-20-the-renaissance-in-india","title":{"rendered":"-09_A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nA Defence of Indian Culture  
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\nA Rationalistic Critic on<\/b><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nIndian Culture <\/b><\/font>
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\nW<\/font>HEN<\/b> we try to appreciate a culture, and when that culture is the one in which we have grown up or from
\nwhich we draw our governing ideals and are likely from overpartiality to minimise its deficiencies or from overfamiliarity to miss aspects or values of it which would strike an unaccustomed eye, it is always useful as well as interesting
\nto know how others see it. It will not move us to change our view-point for theirs; but we can get fresh light from a study
\nof this kind and help our self-introspection. But there are different ways of seeing a foreign civilisation and culture. There
\nis the eye of sympathy and intuition and a close appreciative self-identification: that gives us work like Sister Nivedita’s
\nWeb<\/i>
\nof Indian Life <\/i>or Mr. Fielding’s book on Burma or Sir John Woodroffe’s studies of Tantra. These are attempts to push aside
\nall concealing veils and reveal the soul of a people. It may well be that they do not give us all the hard outward fact, but we are
\nenlightened of something deeper which has its greater reality; we get not the thing as it is in the deficiencies of life, but its
\nideal meaning. The soul, the essential spirit is one thing, the forms taken in this difficult human actuality are another and
\nare often imperfect or perverted; neither can be neglected if we would have a total vision. Then there is the eye of the discerning
\nand dispassionate critic who tries to see the thing as it is in its intention and actuality, apportion the light and shade, get the
\nbalance of merit and defect, success and failure, mark off that which evokes appreciative sympathy from that which calls for
\ncritical censure. We may not always agree; the standpoint is different and by its externality, by failure of intuition and
\nself-identification it may miss things that are essential or may not  
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\nget the whole meaning of that which it praises or condemns: still we profit, we can add to our sense of shade and tone or correct
\nour own previous judgment. Finally there is the eye of the hostile critic, convinced of the inferiority of the culture in question, who
\ngives plainly and honestly without deliberate overcharging what he conceives to be sound reason for his judgment. That too has
\nits use for us; hostile criticism of this kind is good for the soul and the intellect, provided we do not allow ourselves to be afflicted,
\nbeaten down or shaken from the upholding centre of our living faith and action. Most things in our human world are imperfect
\nand it is sometimes well to get a strong view of our imperfections. Or, if nothing else, we can at least learn to appreciate opposite
\nstandpoints and get at the source of the opposition; wisdom, insight and sympathy grow by such comparisons.
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\nBut hostile criticism to be of any sound value must be criticism, not slander and false witness, not vitriol-throwing: it must
\nstate the facts without distortion, preserve consistent standards of judgment, observe a certain effort at justice, sanity, measure. Mr. William Archer’s well-known book on India, which on account of its very demerits I have taken as the type of the
\ncharacteristic Western or anti-Indian regard on our culture, was certainly not of this character. It is not only that here we have a
\nwholesale and unsparing condemnation, a picture all shade and no light: that is a recommendation, for Mr. Archer’s professed
\nobject was to challenge the enthusiastic canonisation of Indian culture by its admirers in the character of a devil’s advocate
\nwhose business is to find out and state in its strongest terms everything that can be said against the claim. And for us too it is
\nuseful to have before us an attack which covers the whole field so that we may see in one comprehensive view the entire enemy
\ncase against our culture. But there are three vitiating elements in his statement. First, it had an ulterior, a political object; it
\nstarted with the underlying idea that India must be proved altogether barbarous in order to destroy or damage her case for
\nself-government. That sort of extraneous motive at once puts his whole pleading out of court; for it means a constant deliberate
\ndistortion in order to serve a material interest, foreign altogether  
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\nto the disinterested intellectual objects of cultural comparison and criticism.
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\nIn fact this book is not criticism; it is literary or rather journalistic pugilism. There too it is of a peculiar kind; it is a
\nfurious sparring at a lay figure of India which is knocked down at pleasure through a long and exuberant dance of misstatement and exaggeration in the hope of convincing an ignorant audience that the performer has prostrated a living adversary.
\nSanity, justice, measure are things altogether at a discount: a show-off of the appearance of staggering and irresistible blows
\nis the object held in view, and for that anything comes in handy, \u2014 the facts are altogether misstated or clumsily caricatured,
\nthe most extraordinary and unfounded suggestions advanced with an air of obviousness, the most illogical inconsistencies
\npermitted if an apparent point can be scored. All this is not the occasional freak of a well-informed critic suffering from a fit of
\nmental biliousness and impelled to work it off by an extravagant intellectual exercise, an irresponsible fantasia or a hostile
\nwar-dance around a subject with which he is not in sympathy. That is a kind of extravagance, which is sometimes permissible
\nand may be interesting and amusing. It is a sweet and pleasant thing, cries the Roman poet, to play the fool in place and right
\nseason, dulce est desipere in loco<\/i>. But Mr. Archer’s constant departures into irrational extravagance are not by any means
\nin loco<\/i>. We discover very soon, \u2014 in addition to his illegitimate motive and his deliberate unfairness this is a third and worst
\ncardinal defect, \u2014 that for the most part he knew absolutely nothing about the things on which he was passing his confident
\ndamnatory judgments. What he has done is to collect together in his mind all the unfavourable comments he had read about India,
\neke them out with casual impressions of his own and advance this unwholesome and unsubstantial compound as his original
\nproduction, although his one genuine and native contribution is the cheery cocksureness of his secondhand opinions. The book
\nis a journalistic fake, not an honest critical production. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe writer was evidently no authority on metaphysics,
\nwhich he despises as a misuse of the human mind; yet he lays   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\ndown the law at length about the values of Indian philosophy. He was a rationalist to whom religion is an error, a psychological
\ndisease, a sin against reason; yet he adjudges here between the comparative claims of religions, assigning a
\nproxime accessit<\/i>
\nto Christianity, mainly, it seems, because Christians do not seriously believe in their own religion,
\n\u2014 let not the reader
\nlaugh, the book advances quite seriously this amazing reason, \u2014 and bestowing the wooden spoon on Hinduism. He admits his
\nincompetence to speak about music, yet that has not prevented him from relegating Indian music to a position of hopeless inferiority. His judgment on art and architecture is of the narrowest kind; but he is generously liberal of his decisive depreciations.
\nIn drama and literature one would expect from him better things; but the astonishing superficiality of his standards and his
\narguments here leaves one wondering how in the world he got his reputation as a dramatic and literary critic: one concludes
\nthat either he must have used a very different method in dealing with European literature or else it is very easy to get a reputation
\nof this kind in England. An ill-informed misrepresentation of facts, a light-hearted temerity of judgment on things he has not
\ncared to study constitute this critic’s title to write on Indian culture and dismiss it authoritatively as a mass of barbarism.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is not then for a well-informed outside view or even an instructive adverse criticism of Indian civilisation that I have
\nturned to Mr. William Archer. In the end it is only those who possess a culture who can judge the intrinsic value of its productions, because they alone can enter entirely into its spirit. To the foreign critic we can only go for help in forming a
\ncomparative judgment, \u2014 which too is indispensable. But if for any reason we had to depend on a foreign judgment for the
\ndefinitive view of these things, it is evident that in each field it is to men who can speak with some authority that we must turn.
\nIt matters very little to me what Mr. Archer or Dr. Gough or Sir John Woodroffe’s unnamed English professor may say about
\nIndian philosophy; it is enough for me to know what Emerson or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, three entirely different minds of
\nthe greatest power in this field, or what thinkers like Cousin  
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\nand Schlegel have to say about it or to mark the increasing influence of some of its conceptions, the great parallel lines of
\nthought in earlier European thinking and the confirmations of ancient Indian metaphysics and psychology which are the results of the most modern research and inquiry. For religion I shall not go to Mr. Harold Begbie or any European atheist or
\nrationalist for a judgment on our spirituality, but see rather what are the impressions of open-minded men of religious feeling and
\nexperience who can alone be judges, a spiritual and religious thinker such as Tolstoy, for instance. Or I may study even, allowing for an inevitable bias, what the more cultured Christian missionary has to say about a religion which he can no longer
\ndismiss as a barbarous superstition. In art I shall not turn to the opinion of the average European who knows nothing of the
\nspirit, meaning or technique of Indian architecture, painting and sculpture. For the first I shall consult some recognised authority
\nlike Fergusson; for the others if critics like Mr. Havell are to be dismissed as partisans, I can at least learn something from
\nOkakura or Mr. Laurence Binyon. In literature I shall be at a loss, for I cannot remember that any Western writer of genius or
\nhigh reputation as a critic has had any first-hand knowledge of Sanskrit literature or of the Prakritic tongues, and a judgment
\nfounded on translations can only deal with the substance, \u2014 and even that in most translations of Indian work is only the
\ndead substance with the whole breath of life gone out of it. Still even here Goethe’s well-known epigram on the Shakuntala will
\nbe enough by itself to show me that all Indian writing is not of a barbarous inferiority to European creation. And perhaps we
\nmay find a scholar here and there with some literary taste and judgment, not a too common combination, who will be of help
\nto us. This sort of excursion will certainly not give us an entirely reliable scheme of values, but at any rate we shall be safer than
\nin a resort to the great lowland clan of Goughs, Archers and Begbies.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIf I still find it necessary or useful to notice these lucubrations, it is for quite another purpose. Even for that purpose
\nall that Mr. Archer writes is not of utility; much of it is so   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nirrational, inconsequent or unscrupulous in suggestion that one can only note and pass on. When for instance he assures his readers that Indian philosophers think that sitting cross-legged and contemplating one’s own navel is the best way of ascertaining
\nthe truths of the universe and that their real object is an indolent immobility and to live upon the alms of the faithful, his object
\nin thus describing one of the postures of abstracted meditation is to stamp the meditation itself in the eyes of ignorant English
\nreaders with the character of a bovine absurdity and a selfish laziness; that is an instance of his unscrupulousness which helps
\nus to observe the kinks of his own rationalistic mind, but is useful for nothing else. When he denies that there is any real
\nmorality in Hinduism or affirms that it has never claimed moral teaching as one of its functions, statements which are the exact
\ncontrary of the facts, when he goes so far as to say that Hinduism is the character of the people and it indicates a melancholy
\nproclivity towards whatever <\/i>is monstrous and unwholesome, one can only conclude that truth-speaking is not one of the
\nethical virtues which Mr. William Archer thought it necessary to practise or at least that it need be no part of a rationalist’s
\ncriticism of religion. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut no, after all Mr. Archer does throw a grudging tribute
\non the altar of truth; for he admits in the same breath that Hinduism talks much of righteousness and allows that there
\nare in the Hindu writings many admirable ethical doctrines. But that only proves that Hindu philosophy is illogical,
\n\u2014 the
\nmorality is there indeed, but it ought not to be; its presence does not suit Mr. Archer’s thesis. Admire the logic, the rational
\nconsistency of this champion of rationalism! Mark that at the same time one of his objections to the Ramayana, admitted
\nto be one of the Bibles of the Hindu people, is that its ideal characters, Rama and Sita, the effective patterns of the highest
\nIndian manhood and womanhood, are much too virtuous for his taste. Rama is too saintly for human nature. I do not know
\nin fact that Rama is more saintly than Christ or St. Francis, yet I had always thought they were within the pale of human
\nnature; but perhaps this critic will reply that, if not beyond that  
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\npale, their excessive virtues are at least like the daily practice of the Hindu cult,
\n\u2014 shall we say for example, scrupulous physical purity and personal cleanliness and the daily turning of the mind to God in worship and meditation,
\n\u2014 “sufficient to
\nplace them beyond the pale of civilisation.” For he tells us that Sita, the type of conjugal fidelity and chastity, is so excessive
\nin her virtue “as to verge on immorality.” Meaningless smart extravagance has reached its highest point when it can thus
\nverge on the idiotic. I am as sorry to use the epithet as Mr. Archer to harp on Indian “barbarism”, but there is really no
\nhelp for it; “it expresses the essence of the situation.” If all were of this character,
\n\u2014 there is too much of it and it is deplorable, \u2014 a contemptuous silence would be the only possible reply. But fortunately Apollo does not always stretch his bow
\nthus to the breaking-point; all Mr. Archer’s shafts are not of this wildgoose flight. There is much in his writing that expresses
\ncrudely, but still with sufficient accuracy the feeling of recoil of the average occidental mind at its first view of the unique
\ncharacteristics of Indian culture and that is a thing worth noting and sounding; it is necessary to understand it and find
\nout its value. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis is the utility I wish to seize on; for it is an utility and
\neven more. It is through the average mind that we get best at the bedrock of the psychological differences which divide from
\neach other great blocks of our common humanity. The cultured mind tends to diminish the force of these prejudices or at least
\neven in difference and opposition to develop points of similarity or of contact. In the average mentality we have a better chance
\nof getting them in their crude strength and can appreciate their full force and bearing. Mr. Archer helps us here admirably. Not
\nthat we have not to clear away much rubbish to get at what we want. I should have preferred to deal with a manual of misunderstanding which had the same thoroughness of scope, but expressed itself with a more straightforward simplicity and less
\nof vicious smartness and of superfluous ill-will; but none such is available. Let us take Mr. Archer then and dissect some of
\nhis prejudices to get at their inner psychology. We shall perhaps   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nfind that through all this unpleasant crudity we can arrive at the essence of a historic misunderstanding of continents. An exact
\nunderstanding of it may even help us towards an approach to some kind of reconciliation.
\n  
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\nII <\/b>
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\nA Rationalistic Critic on
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\nIndian Culture \u00ad 2 <\/font><\/b>
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\nI<\/font>T IS<\/b> best to start with a precise idea of the species of critic from whom we are going to draw our estimate of oppositions. What we have before us are the ideas of an average and typical occidental mind on Indian culture, a man of sufficient
\neducation and wide reading, but no genius or exceptional capacity, rather an ordinary successful talent, no flexibility or broad
\nsympathy of mind, but pronounced and rigid opinions which are backed up and given an appearance of weight by the habit
\nof using to good effect a varied though not always sound information. This is in fact the mind and standpoint of an average
\nEnglishman of some ability formed in the habit of journalism. That is precisely the kind of thing we want in order to seize
\nthe nature of the antagonism which led Mr. Rudyard Kipling, \u2014 himself a super-journalist and “magnified non-natural” average
\nman, the average lifted up, without ceasing to be itself, by the glare of a kind of crude and barbaric genius,
\n\u2014 to affirm the
\neternal incompatibility of the East and the West. Let us see what strikes such a mentality as unique and abhorrent in the Indian
\nmind and its culture: if we can put aside all sensitiveness of personal feeling and look dispassionately at this phenomenon,
\nwe shall find it an interesting and illuminative study. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA certain objection may be advanced against taking a rationalistic critic with a political bias, a mind belonging at best to the today which is already becoming yesterday, in this widely
\nrepresentative capacity. The misunderstanding of continents has been the result of a long-enduring and historic difference, and
\nthis book gives us only one phase of it which is of a very modern character. But it is in modern times, in an age of scientific
\nand rationalistic enlightenment, that the difference has become   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nmost pronounced, the misunderstanding most aggressive and the sense of cultural incompatibility most conscious and
\nself-revealing. An ancient Greek, full of disinterested intellectual curiosity and a flexible aesthetic appreciation, was in spite of his
\nfeeling of racial and cultural superiority to the barbarian much nearer to the Indian mind than a typical modern European. Not
\nonly could a Pythagoras or a philosopher of the Neo-platonist school, an Alexander or a Menander understand with a more
\nready sympathy the root ideas of Asiatic culture, but an average man of ability, a Megasthenes for instance, could be trusted to
\nsee and understand, though not inwardly and perfectly, yet in a sufficient measure. The mediaeval European, for all his militant
\nChristianity and his prejudice against the infidel and paynim, yet resembled his opponent in many characteristic ways of seeing
\nand feeling to an extent which is no longer possible to an average European mind, unless it has been imbued with the new ideas
\nwhich are once more lessening the gulf between the continents. It was the rationalising of the occidental mind, the rationalising
\neven of its religious ideas and sentiments, which made the gulf so wide as to appear unbridgeable. Our critic represents this
\nincreased hostility in an extreme form, a shape given to it by the unthinking free-thinker, the man who has not thought out
\noriginally these difficult problems, but imbibed his views from his cultural environment and the intellectual atmosphere of the
\nperiod. He will exaggerate enormously the points of opposition, but by his very exaggeration he will make them more strikingly
\nclear and intelligible. He will make up for his want of correct information and intelligent study by a certain sureness of instinct
\nin his attack upon things alien to his own mental outlook. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is this sureness of instinct which has led him to direct
\nthe real gravamen of his attack against Indian philosophy and religion. The culture of a people may be roughly described as
\nthe expression of a consciousness of life which formulates itself in three aspects. There is a side of thought, of ideal, of upward
\nwill and the soul’s aspiration; there is a side of creative self-expression and appreciative aesthesis, intelligence and imagination; and there is a side of practical and outward formulation.  
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\nA people’s philosophy and higher thinking give us its mind’s purest, largest and most general formulation of its consciousness
\nof life and its dynamic view of existence. Its religion formulates the most intense form of its upward will and the soul’s aspirations towards the fulfilment of its highest ideal and impulse. Its art, poetry, literature provide for us the creative expression and
\nimpression of its intuition, imagination, vital turn and creative intelligence. Its society and politics provide in their forms an
\noutward frame in which the more external life works out what it can of its inspiring ideal and of its special character and nature
\nunder the difficulties of the environment. We can see how much it has taken of the crude material of living, what it has done
\nwith it, how it has shaped as much of it as possible into some reflection of its guiding consciousness and deeper spirit. None
\nof them express the whole secret spirit behind, but they derive from it their main ideas and their cultural character. Together
\nthey make up its soul, mind and body. In Indian civilisation philosophy and religion, philosophy made dynamic by religion,
\nreligion enlightened by philosophy have led, the rest follow as best they can. This is indeed its first distinctive character, which
\nit shares with the more developed Asiatic peoples, but has carried to an extraordinary degree of thoroughgoing pervasiveness.
\nWhen it is spoken of as a Brahminical civilisation, that is the real significance of the phrase. The phrase cannot truly imply
\nany domination of sacerdotalism, though in some lower aspects of the culture the sacerdotal mind has been only too prominent;
\nfor the priest as such has had no hand in shaping the great lines of the culture. But it is true that its main motives have
\nbeen shaped by philosophic thinkers and religious minds, not by any means all of them of Brahmin birth. The fact that a
\nclass has been developed whose business was to preserve the spiritual traditions,
\nknowledge and sacred law of the race, \u2014
\nfor this and not a mere priest trade was the proper occupation of the Brahmin,
\n\u2014 and that this class could for thousands of
\nyears maintain in the greatest part, but not monopolise, the keeping of the national mind and conscience, and the direction
\nof social principles, forms and manners, is only a characteristic   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nindication. The fact behind is that Indian culture has been from the beginning and has remained a spiritual, an inward-looking
\nreligio-philosophical culture. Everything else in it has derived from that one central and original peculiarity or has been in
\nsome way dependent on it or subordinate to it; even external life has been subjected to the inward look of the spirit.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOur critic has felt the importance of this central point and directed upon it his most unsparing attack; in other quarters he
\nmay make concessions, allow attenuations, here he will make none. All here must be bad and harmful, or if not deleterious,
\nthen ineffective, by the very nature of the central ideas and motives, for any real good. This is a significant attitude. Of
\ncourse there is the polemical motive. That which is claimed for the Indian mind and its civilisation is a high spirituality, high
\non all the summits of thought and religion, permeating art and literature and religious practice and social ideas and affecting
\neven the ordinary man’s attitude to life. If the claim is conceded, as it is conceded by all sympathetic and disinterested inquirers
\neven when they do not accept the Indian view of life, then Indian culture stands, its civilisation has a right to live. More, it has a
\nright even to throw a challenge to rationalistic modernism and say, “Attain first my level of spirituality before you claim to
\ndestroy and supersede me or call on me to modernise myself entirely in your sense. No matter if I have myself latterly fallen
\nfrom my own heights or if my present forms cannot meet all the requirements of the future mind of humanity; I can reascend, the
\npower is there in me. I may even be able to develop a spiritual modernism which will help you in your effort to exceed yourself
\nand arrive at a larger harmony than any you have reached in the past or can dream of in the present.” The hostile critic feels that
\nhe must deny this claim at its roots. He tries to prove Indian philosophy to be unspiritual and Indian religion to be an irrational
\nanimistic cult of monstrosity. In this effort which is an attempt to stand Truth on her head and force her to see facts upside down,
\nhe lands himself in a paradoxical absurdity and inconsistency which destroy his case by sheer overstatement. Still there arise
\neven from this farrago two quite genuine issues. First, we can  
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\nask whether the spiritual and religio-philosophical view of life and the government of civilisation by its ideas and motives or the
\nrationalistic and external view of life and the satisfaction of the vital being governed by the intellectual and practical reason give
\nthe best lead to mankind. And granting the value and power of a spiritual conception of life, we can ask whether the expression
\ngiven to it by Indian culture is the best possible and the most helpful to the growth of humanity towards its highest level.
\nThese are the real questions at issue between this Asiatic or ancient mind and the European or modern intelligence.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe typical occidental mind, which prolongs still the mentality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been almost
\nentirely fashioned by the second view; it has grown into the mould of the vitalistic rational idea. Its attitude to life has never
\nbeen governed by a philosophic conception of existence except during a brief period of Graeco-Roman culture and then only in
\na small class of thinking and highly cultivated minds; always it is dominated by environmental necessity and the practical reason.
\nIt has left behind it too the ages in which spiritual and religious conceptions which invaded it from the East, strove to impose
\nthemselves on the vitalistic and rational tendency; it has largely rejected them or thrust them into a corner. Its religion is the
\nreligion of life, a religion of earth and of terrestrial humanity, an ideal of intellectual growth, vital efficiency, physical health
\nand enjoyment, a rational social order. This mind confronted by Indian culture is at once repelled, first by its unfamiliarity and
\nstrangeness, then by a sense of irrational abnormality and a total difference and often a diametrical opposition of standpoints and
\nfinally by an abundance and plethora of unintelligible forms. These forms appear to its eye to teem with the supranatural
\nand therefore, as it thinks, with the false. Even the unnatural is there, a persistent departure from the common norm, from right
\nmethod and sound device, a frame of things in which everything, to use Mr. Chesterton’s expression, is of the wrong shape. The
\nold orthodox Christian point of view might regard this culture as a thing of hell, an abnormal creation of demons; the modern
\northodox rationalistic standpoint looks at it as a nightmare not   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nonly irrational, but antirational, a monstrosity, an out-of-date anomaly, at best a coloured fantasia of the oriental past. That
\nis no doubt an extreme attitude, \u2014 it is Mr Archer’s, \u2014 but incomprehension and distaste are the rule. One continually finds
\ntraces of these feelings even in minds which try to understand and sympathise; but to the average occidental content with his
\nfirst raw natural impressions all is a repellent confusion. Indian philosophy is an incomprehensible, subtly unsubstantial
\ncloud-weaving; Indian religion meets his eye as a mixture of absurd asceticism and an absurder gross, immoral and superstitious
\npolytheism. He sees in Indian art a riot of crudely distorted or conventional forms and an impossible seeking after suggestions
\nof the infinite \u2014 whereas all true art should be a beautiful and rational reproduction or fine imaginative representation of the
\nnatural and finite. He condemns in Indian society an anachronistic and semi-barbaric survival of old-world and mediaeval ideas
\nand institutions. This view, which has recently undergone some modification and is less loud and confident in expression, but
\nstill subsists, is the whole foundation of Mr. Archer’s philippic. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis is evident from the nature of all the objections he
\nbrings against Indian civilisation. When you strip them of their journalistic rhetoric, you find that they amount simply to this
\nnatural antagonism of the rationalised vital and practical man against a culture which subordinates reason to a supra-rational
\nspirituality and life and action to a feeling after something which is greater than life and action. Philosophy and religion are the
\nsoul of Indian culture, inseparable from each other and interpenetrative. The whole objective of Indian philosophy, its entire
\n <\/i><\/span> raison d’\u00eatre<\/i>,<\/span> is the knowledge of the spirit, the experience of it
\nand the right way to a spiritual existence; its single aim coincides with the highest significance of religion. Indian religion draws
\nall its characteristic value from the spiritual philosophy which illumines its supreme aspiration and colours even most of what
\nis drawn from an inferior range of religious experience. But what are Mr. Archer’s objections, first to Indian philosophy? Well, his
\nfirst objection simply comes to this that it is too philosophical. His second accusation is that even as that worthless thing, meta 
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 110<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nphysical philosophy, it is too metaphysical. His third charge, the most positive and plausible, is that it enervates and kills the
\npersonality and the will-power by false notions of pessimism, asceticism, karma and reincarnation. If we take his criticism
\nunder each of these heads, we shall see that it is really not a dispassionate intellectual criticism, but the exaggerated expression
\nof a mental dislike and a fundamental difference of temperament and standpoint.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nMr. Archer cannot deny, \u2014 the denial would go beyond even his unequalled capacity for affirming absurdities,
\n\u2014 that the Indian mind has displayed an unparalleled activity and fruitfulness in philosophical thinking. He cannot deny that a familiarity
\nwith metaphysical conceptions and the capacity of discussing with some subtlety a metaphysical problem is much more widespread in India than in any other country. Even an ordinary Indian intellect can understand and deal with questions of this
\nkind where an occidental mind of corresponding culture and attainments would be as hopelessly out of its depth as is Mr.
\nArcher in these pages. But he denies that this familiarity and this subtlety are any proof of great mental capacity
\n\u2014 “necessarily”, he adds, I suppose in order to escape the charge of having suggested that Plato, Spinoza or Berkeley did not show
\na great mental capacity. Perhaps it is not “necessarily” such a proof; but it does show in one great order of questions, in one
\nlarge and especially difficult range of the mind’s powers and interests a remarkable and unique general development. The
\nEuropean journalist’s capacity for discussing with some show of acumen questions of economy and politics or, for that matter, art, literature and drama, is not “necessarily” proof of a great mental capacity; but it does show a great development of
\nthe European mind in general, a wide-spread information and normal capacity in these fields of its action. The crudity of his
\nopinions and his treatment of his subjects may sometimes seem a little “barbaric” to an outsider; but the thing itself is a proof
\nthat there is a culture, a civilisation, a great intellectual and civic achievement and a sufficient wide-spread interest in the
\nachievement. Mr. Archer has to avoid a similar conclusion in   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 111<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nanother subtler and more difficult range about India. He does it by denying that philosophy is of any value; this activity of the
\nIndian mind is for him only an unequalled diligence in knowing the unknowable and thinking about the unthinkable. And why
\nso? Well, because philosophy deals with a region where there is no possible “test of values” and in such a region thought itself,
\nsince it is simply unverifiable speculation, can be of little or no value.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere we come to a really interesting and characteristic opposition of standpoints, more, a difference in the very grain of
\nthe mind. As stated, it is the sceptical argument of the atheist and agnostic, but after all that is only the extreme logical statement of
\nan attitude common to the average European turn of thinking which is inherently a positivist attitude. Philosophy has been
\npursued in Europe with great and noble intellectual results by the highest minds, but very much as a pursuit apart from life,
\na thing high and splendid, but ineffective. It is remarkable that while in India and China philosophy has seized hold on life, has
\nhad an enormous practical effect on the civilisation and got into the very bones of current thought and action, it has never at all
\nsucceeded in achieving this importance in Europe. In the days of the Stoics and Epicureans it got a grip, but only among the
\nhighly cultured; at the present day, too, we have some renewed tendency of the kind. Nietzsche has had his influence, certain
\nFrench thinkers also in France, the philosophies of James and Bergson have attracted some amount of public interest; but it
\nis a mere nothing compared with the effective power of Asiatic philosophy. The average European draws his guiding views not
\nfrom the philosophic, but from the positive and practical reason. He does not absolutely disdain philosophy like Mr. Archer, but
\nhe considers it, if not a “man-made illusion”, yet a rather nebulous, remote and ineffective kind of occupation. He honours
\nthe philosophers, but he puts their works on the highest shelf of the library of civilisation, not to be taken down or consulted
\nexcept by a few minds of an exceptional turn. He admires, but he distrusts them. Plato’s idea of philosophers as the right rulers
\nand best directors of society seems to him the most fantastic  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 112<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nand unpractical of notions; the philosopher, precisely because he moves among ideas, must be without any hold on real life. The
\nIndian mind holds on the contrary that the Rishi, the thinker, the seer of spiritual truth is the best guide not only of the religious
\nand moral, but the practical life. The seer, the Rishi is the natural director of society; to the Rishis he attributes the ideals and
\nguiding intuitions of his civilisation. Even today he is very ready to give the name to anyone who can give a spiritual truth which
\nhelps his life or a formative idea and inspiration which influences religion, ethics, society, even politics.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis is because the Indian believes that the ultimate truths are truths of the spirit and that truths of the spirit are the most
\nfundamental and most effective truths of our existence, powerfully creative of the inner, salutarily reformative of the outer life.
\nTo the European the ultimate truths are more often truths of the ideative intellect, the pure reason; but, whether intellectual or
\nspiritual, they belong to a sphere beyond the ordinary action of the mind, life and body where alone there are any daily
\nverifying “tests of values”. These tests can only be given by living experience of outward fact and the positive and practical
\nreason. The rest are speculations and their proper place is in the world of ideas, not in the world of life. That brings us to
\na difference of standpoint which is the essence of Mr. Archer’s second objection. He believes that all philosophy is speculation
\nand guessing; the only verifiable truth, we must suppose, is that of the normal fact, the outward world and our responses to it,
\ntruth of physical science and a psychology founded on physical science. He reproaches Indian philosophy for having taken its
\nspeculations seriously, for presenting speculation in the guise of dogma, for the “unspiritual” habit which mistakes groping for
\nseeing and guessing for knowing, \u2014 in place, I presume, of the very spiritual habit which holds the physically sensible for the
\nonly knowable and takes the knowledge of the body for the knowledge of the soul and spirit. He waxes bitterly sarcastic
\nover the idea that philosophic meditation and Yoga are the best way to ascertain the truth of Nature and the constitution of
\nthe universe. Mr. Archer’s descriptions of Indian philosophy are   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\na grossly ignorant misrepresentation of its idea and spirit, but in their essence they represent the view inevitably taken by the
\nnormal positivist mind of the Occident. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn fact, Indian philosophy abhors mere guessing and speculation. That word is constantly applied by European critics to the thoughts and conclusions of the Upanishads, of the philosophies,
\nof Buddhism; but Indian philosophers would reject it altogether as at all a valid description of their method. If our philosophy admits an ultimate unthinkable and unknowable, it does not concern itself with any positive description or analysis of
\nthat supreme Mystery, \u2014 the absurdity the rationalist ascribes to it; it concerns itself with whatever is thinkable and knowable to us at the highest term as well as on the lower ranges of our experience. If it has been able to make its conclusions
\narticles of religious faith, \u2014 dogmas, as they are here called, \u2014 it is because it has been able to base them on an experience verifiable by any man who will take the necessary means and apply the only possible tests. The Indian mind does not
\nadmit that the only possible test of values or of reality is the outward scientific, the test of a scrutiny of physical Nature
\nor the everyday normal facts of our surface psychology, which is only a small movement upon vast hidden subconscious and
\nsuperconscious heights, depths and ranges. What are the tests of these more ordinary or objective values? Evidently, experience, experimental analysis and synthesis, reason, intuition, \u2014 for I believe the value of intuition is admitted nowadays by
\nmodern philosophy and science. The tests of this other subtler order of truths are the same, experience, experimental analysis
\nand synthesis, reason, intuition. Only, since these things are truths of the soul and spirit, it must necessarily be a psychological and spiritual experience, a psychological and psychophysical experimentation, analysis and synthesis, a larger intuition which looks into higher realms, realities, possibilities of being, a reason which admits something beyond itself, looks
\nupward to the supra-rational, tries to give as far as may be an account of it to the human intelligence. Yoga, which Mr.
\nArcher invites us so pressingly to abandon, is itself nothing  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nbut a well-tested means of opening up these greater realms of experience.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nMr. Archer and minds of his type cannot be expected to know these things; they are beyond the little narrow range of
\nfacts and ideas which is to them the whole arc of knowledge. But even if he knew, it would make no difference to him; he
\nwould reject the very thought with scornful impatience, without any degrading of his immense rationalistic superiority by any
\nsort of examination into the possibility of an unfamiliar truth. In this attitude he would have the average positivist mind on
\nhis side. To that mind such notions seem in their very nature absurd and incomprehensible,
\n\u2014 much worse than Greek and
\nHebrew, languages which have very respectable and creditworthy professors; but these are hieroglyphs which can only be
\nupheld as decipherable signs by Indians and Theosophists and mystical thinkers, a disreputable clan. It can understand dogma
\nand speculation about spiritual truth, a priest, a Bible, whether disbelieving them or giving them a conventional acceptance;
\nbut profoundest verifiable spiritual truth, firmly ascertainable spiritual values! The idea is foreign to this mentality and sounds
\nto it like jargon. It can understand, even when it dismisses, an authoritative religion, an “I believe because it is rationally
\nimpossible”; but a deepest mystery of religion, a highest truth of philosophical thinking, a farthest ultimate discovery of psychological experience, a systematic and ordered experimentation of self-search and self-analysis, a constructive inner possibility
\nof self-perfection, all arriving at the same result, assenting to each other’s conclusions, reconciling spirit and reason and the
\nwhole psychological nature and its deepest needs, \u2014 this great ancient and persistent research and triumph of Indian culture
\nbaffles and offends the average positivist mind of the West. It is bewildered by the possession of a knowledge which the West
\nnever more than fumbled after and ended by missing. Irritated, perplexed, contemptuous, it refuses to recognise the superiority
\nof such a harmony to its own lesser self-divided culture. For it is accustomed only to a religious seeking and experience which is at
\nwar with science and philosophy or oscillates between irrational   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nbelief and a troubled or else a self-confident scepticism. In Europe philosophy has been sometimes the handmaid
\n\u2014 not
\nthe sister \u2014 of religion; but more often it has turned its back on religious belief in hostility or in a disdainful separation.
\nThe war between religion and science has been almost the leading phenomenon of European culture. Even philosophy and
\nscience have been unable to agree; they too have quarrelled and separated. These powers still coexist in Europe, but they are not
\na happy family; civil war is their natural atmosphere. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nNo wonder that the positivist mind to which this seems the
\nnatural order of things, should turn from a way of thinking and knowing in which there is a harmony, a consensus, a union
\nbetween philosophy and religion and a systematised well-tested psychological experience. It is easily moved to escape from the
\nchallenge of this alien form of knowledge by readily dismissing Indian psychology as a jungle of self-hypnotic hallucinations,
\nIndian religion as a rank growth of antirational superstitions, Indian philosophy as a remote cloud-land of unsubstantial speculation. It is unfortunate for the peace of mind which this
\nself-satisfied attitude brings with it and for the effect of Mr. Archer’s
\nfacile and devastating method of criticism that the West too has recently got itself pushed into paths of thinking and discovery which seem dangerously likely to justify all this mass of unpleasant barbarism and to bring Europe herself nearer to so
\nmonstrous a way of thinking. It is becoming more and more clear that Indian philosophy has anticipated in its own way
\nmost of what has been or is being thought out in metaphysical speculation. One finds even scientific thought repeating very
\nancient Indian generalisations from the other end of the scale of research. Indian psychology which Mr. Archer dismisses along
\nwith Indian cosmology and physiology as baseless classification and ingenious guessing,
\n\u2014 it is anything but that, for it is based
\nrigorously on experience, \u2014 is justified more and more by all the latest psychological discoveries. The fundamental ideas of
\nIndian religion look perilously near to a conquest by which they will become the prominent thought and sentiment of a new and
\nuniversal religious mentality and spiritual seeking. Who can say   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 116<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthat the psycho-physiology of Indian Yoga may not be justified if certain lines of “groping and guessing” in the West are pushed
\na little farther? And even perhaps the Indian cosmological idea that there are other planes of being than this easily sensible kingdom of Matter, may be rehabilitated in a not very distant future? But the positivist mind may yet be of good courage: for its hold
\nis still strong and it has still the claim of intellectual orthodoxy and the prestige of the right of possession; many streams must
\nswell and meet together before it is washed under and a tide of uniting thought sweeps humanity towards the hidden shores of
\nthe Spirit.  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nA Rationalistic Critic on
\n<\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian Culture \u00ad 3 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HIS CRITICISM<\/b> so far is not very formidable; its edge, if it has any apart from the edge of trenchant misrepresentation, turns against the assailant. To have put a high value on philosophy, sought by it the highest secrets of our being,
\nturned an effective philosophic thought on life and called in the thinkers, the men of profoundest spiritual experience, highest
\nideas, largest available knowledge, to govern and shape society, to have subjected creed and dogma to the test of the philosophic
\nmind and founded religious belief upon spiritual intuition, philosophical thought and psychological experience, are signs, not of
\nbarbarism or of a mean and ignorant culture, but marks of the highest possible type of civilisation. There is nothing here
\nthat would warrant us in abasing ourselves before the idols of the positivist reason or putting the spirit and aim of Indian
\nculture at all lower than the spirit and aim of Western civilisation whether in its high ancient period of rational enlightenment and
\nthe speculative idea or in its modern period of broad and minute scientific thought and strong applied knowledge. Different it is,
\ninferior it is not, but has rather a distinct element of superiority in the unique height of its motive and the spiritual nobility of its
\nendeavour. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is useful to lay stress on this greatness of spirit and aim, not
\nonly because it is of immense importance and the first test of the value of a culture, but because the assailants take advantage of
\ntwo extraneous circumstances to create a prejudice and confuse the real issues. They have the immense advantage of attacking
\nIndia when she is prostrate and in the dust and, materially, Indian civilisation seems to have ended in a great defeat and downfall.
\nStrong in this temporary advantage they can afford to show a  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nsuperb and generous courage in kicking the surrounding dust and mire with their hooves upon the sick and wounded lioness
\ncaught in the nets of the hunters and try to persuade the world that she had never any strength and virtue in her. It is an easy
\ntask in this age of the noble culture of Reason and Mammon and Science doing the works of Moloch, when the brazen idol of
\nthe great goddess Success is worshipped as she was never before worshipped by cultured human beings. But they have too the yet
\ngreater advantage of representing her to the world in a period of the eclipse of her civilisation when after at least two thousand
\nyears of the most brilliant and many-sided cultural activity she had for a time lost everything except the memory of her past
\nand her long depressed and obscured but always living and now strongly reviving religious spirit.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nI have touched elsewhere on the significance of this failure and this temporary eclipse. I may have to deal with it again
\nat closer quarters, since it has been raised as an objection to the value of Indian culture and Indian spirituality. At present it
\nwill be enough to say that culture cannot be judged by material success; still less can spirituality be brought to that touchstone.
\nPhilosophic, aesthetic, poetic, intellectual Greece failed and fell while drilled and militarist Rome triumphed and conquered,
\nbut no one dreams of crediting for that reason the victorious imperial nation with a greater civilisation and a higher culture.
\nThe religious culture of Judaea is not disproved or lessened by the destruction of the Jewish State, any more than it is proved
\nand given greater value by the commercial capacity shown by the Jewish race in their dispersion. But I admit, as ancient Indian thought admitted, that material and economic capacity and prosperity are a necessary, though not the highest or most
\nessential part of the total effort of human civilisation. In that respect India throughout her long period of cultural activity can
\nclaim equality with any ancient or mediaeval country. No people before modern times reached a higher splendour of wealth, commercial prosperity, material appointment, social organisation. That is the record of history, of ancient documents, of contemporary witnesses; to deny it is to give evidence of a singular  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nprepossession and obfuscation of the view, an imaginative, or is it unimaginative, misreading of present actuality into past actuality. The splendour of Asiatic and not least of Indian prosperity, the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, the “barbaric doors rough with
\ngold”, barbaricae postes squalentes auro<\/i>, were once stigmatised by the less opulent West as a sign of barbarism. Circumstances
\nare now strangely reversed; the opulent barbarism and a much less artistic ostentation of wealth are to be found in London,
\nNew York and Paris, and it is the nakedness of India and the squalor of her poverty which are flung in her face as evidence of
\nthe worthlessness of her culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIndia’s ancient and mediaeval political, administrative, military and economic organisation was no mean achievement; the records stand and can be left to contradict the ignorance of the
\nuninstructed and the rhetoric of the journalistic critic or the interested politician. There was no doubt an element of failure
\nand defect, almost unavoidable in the totality of a problem on so large a scale and in the then conditions. But to exaggerate
\nthat into a count against her civilisation would be a singular severity of criticism which few civilisations watched to their end
\ncould survive. Failure in the end, yes, because of the decline of her culture, but not as a result of its most valuable elements. A
\nlater eclipse of the more essential elements of her civilisation is not a disproof of their original value. Indian civilisation must be
\njudged mainly by the culture and greatness of its millenniums, not by the ignorance and weakness of a few centuries. A culture
\nmust be judged, first by its essential spirit, then by its best accomplishment and, lastly, by its power of survival, renovation
\nand adaptation to new phases of the permanent needs of the race. In the poverty, confusion and disorganisation of a period of
\ntemporary decline, the eye of the hostile witness refuses to see or to recognise the saving soul of good which still keeps this civilisation alive and promises a strong and vivid return to the greatness of its permanent ideal. Its obstinate elastic force of rebound, its
\nold measureless adaptability are again at work; it is no longer even solely on the defence, but boldly aggressive. Not survival
\nalone, but victory and conquest are the promise of its future.  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nBut our critic does not merely deny the lofty aim and greatness of spirit of Indian civilisation, which stand too high to be
\nvulnerable to an assault of this ignorant and prejudiced character. He questions its leading ideas, denies its practical life-value,
\ndisparages its fruits, efficacy, character. Has this disparagement any critical value or is it only a temperamental expression of
\nthe misunderstanding natural to a widely different view of life and to a diametrically opposite estimate of our nature’s highest
\nsignificances and realities? If we consider the character of the attack and its terms, we shall see that it amounts to no more
\nthan a condemnation passed by the positivist mind attached to the normal values of life upon the quite different standards of
\na culture which looks beyond the ordinary life of man, points to something greater behind it and makes it a passage to something eternal, permanent and infinite. India, we are told, has no spirituality,
\n\u2014 a portentous discovery; on the contrary she has
\nsucceeded, it would seem, in killing the germs of all sane and virile spirituality. Mr. Archer evidently puts his own sense, a novel
\nand interesting and very occidental sense, on the word. Spirituality has meant hitherto a recognition of something greater
\nthan mind and life, the aspiration to a consciousness pure, great, divine beyond our normal mental and vital nature, a surge and
\nrising of the soul in man out of the littleness and bondage of our lower parts towards a greater thing secret within him. That
\nat least is the idea, the experience, which is the very core of Indian thinking. But the rationalist does not believe in the spirit
\nin this sense; life, human will-force and reason are his highest godheads. Spirituality then,
\n\u2014 it would have been simpler and
\nmore logical to reject the word when the thing on which it rests is denied, \u2014 has to be given another sense, some high passion
\nand effort of the emotions, will and reason, directed towards the finite, not towards the infinite, towards things temporary,
\nnot towards the eternal, towards perishable life, not towards any greater reality which overpasses and supports the superficial phenomena of life. The thought and suffering which seam and furrow the ideal head of Homer, there, we are told, is the
\nsane and virile spirituality. The calm and compassion of Buddha   
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nvictorious over ignorance and suffering, the meditation of the thinker tranced in communion with the Eternal, lifted above
\nthe seekings of thought into identity with a supreme light, the rapture of the saint made one by love in the pure heart with the
\ntranscendent and universal Love, the will of the Karmayogin raised above egoistic desire and passion into the impersonality
\nof the divine and universal will, these things on which India has set the highest value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very occidental and up to
\ndate idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these,
\nshall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our
\ntypical heroes and exemplars of spirituality. Not Buddha, not Christ, Chaitanya, St. Francis, Ramakrishna; these are either
\nsemi-barbaric Orientals or touched by the feminine insanity of an oriental religion. The impression made on an Indian mind
\nresembles the reaction that a cultured intellectual might feel if he were told that good cooking, good dressing, good engineering, good schoolmastering are the true beauty and their pursuit the right, sane, virile aesthetic cult and literature, architecture,
\nsculpture and painting are only a useless scribbling on paper, an insane hacking of stone and an effeminate daubing of canvas;
\nVauban, Pestalozzi, Dr. Parr, Vatel and Beau Brummell are then the true heroes of artistic creation and not Da Vinci, Angelo,
\nSophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Rodin. Whether Mr. Archer’s epithets and his accusations against Indian spirituality stand
\nin the comparison, let the judicious determine. But meanwhile we see the opposition of the standpoints and begin to understand the inwardness of the difference between the West and India.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis forms the gravamen of the charge against the effective value of Indian philosophy, that it turns away from life, nature,
\nvital will and the effort of man upon earth. It denies all value to life; it leads not towards the study of nature, but away from it. It
\nexpels all volitional individuality; it preaches the unreality of the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nworld, detachment from terrestrial interests, the unimportance of the life of the moment compared with the endless chain of
\npast and future existences. It is an enervating metaphysic tangled up with false notions of pessimism, asceticism, karma and
\nreincarnation, all of them ideas fatal to that supreme spiritual thing, volitional individuality. This is a grotesquely exaggerated
\nand false notion of Indian culture and philosophy, got up by presenting one side only of the Indian mind in colours of a
\nsombre emphasis, after a manner which I suppose Mr. Archer has learned from the modern masters of realism. But in substance
\nand spirit it is a fairly correct statement of the notions which the European mind has formed in the past about the character of
\nIndian thought and culture, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in defiance of the evidence. For a time even it managed to impress
\nsome strong shadow of this error on the mind of educated India. It is best to begin by setting right the tones of the picture; that
\ndone, we can better judge the opposition of mentality which is at the bottom of the criticism.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nTo say that Indian philosophy has led away from the study of nature is to state a gross unfact and to ignore the magnificent
\nhistory of Indian civilisation. If by nature is meant physical Nature, the plain truth is that no nation before the modern epoch
\ncarried scientific research so far and with such signal success as India of ancient times. That is a truth which lies on the face of
\nhistory for all to read; it has been brought forward with great force and much wealth of detail by Indian scholars and scientists
\nof high eminence, but it was already known and acknowledged by European savants who had taken the trouble to make a comparative study in the subject. Not only was India in the first rank in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, surgery, all the
\nbranches of physical knowledge which were practised in ancient times, but she was, along with the Greeks, the teacher of the
\nArabs from whom Europe recovered the lost habit of scientific enquiry and got the basis from which modern science started. In
\nmany directions India had the priority of discovery, \u2014 to take only two striking examples among a multitude, the decimal
\nnotation in mathematics or the perception that the earth is a   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\n  .   <\/i>   <\/i>
\n  <\/i>  moving body in astronomy, \u2014 calā prthvī sthirā bhāti<\/i>, the earth
\nmoves and only appears to be still, said the Indian astronomer many centuries before Galileo. This great development would
\nhardly have been possible in a nation whose thinkers and men of learning were led by its metaphysical tendencies to turn away
\nfrom the study of nature. A remarkable feature of the Indian mind was a close attention to the things of life, a disposition to
\nobserve minutely its salient facts, to systematise and to found in each department of it a science, Shastra, well-founded scheme
\nand rule. That is at least a good beginning of the scientific tendency and not the sign of a culture capable only of unsubstantial
\nmetaphysics. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is perfectly true that Indian science came abruptly to a halt
\nsomewhere about the thirteenth century and a period of darkness and inactivity prevented it from proceeding forward or sharing
\nat once in the vast modern development of scientific knowledge. But this was not due to any increase or intolerance of the metaphysical tendency calling the national mind away from physical nature. It was part of a general cessation of new intellectual
\nactivity, for philosophy too ceased to develop almost at the same time. The last great original attempts at spiritual philosophy are
\ndated only a century or two later than the names of the last great original scientists. It is true also that Indian metaphysics did not
\nattempt, as modern philosophy has attempted without success, to read the truth of existence principally by the light of the truths
\nof physical Nature. This ancient wisdom founded itself rather upon an inner experimental psychology and a profound psychic
\nscience, India’s special strength, \u2014 but study of mind too and of our inner forces is surely study of nature,
\n\u2014 in which her success
\nwas greater than in physical knowledge. This she could not but do, since it was the spiritual truth of existence for which she
\nwas seeking; nor is any really great and enduring philosophy possible except on this basis. It is true also that the harmony
\nshe established in her culture between philosophical truth and truth of psychology and religion was not extended in the same
\ndegree to the truth of physical Nature; physical Science had not then arrived at the great universal generalisations which would
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 124<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nhave made and are now making that synthesis entirely possible. Nevertheless from the beginning, from as early as the thought of
\nthe Vedas, the Indian mind had recognised that the same general laws and powers hold in the spiritual, the psychological and the
\nphysical existence. It discovered too the omnipresence of life, affirmed the evolution of the soul in Nature from the vegetable
\nand the animal to the human form, asserted on the basis of philosophic intuition and spiritual and psychological experience
\nmany of the truths which modern Science is reaffirming from its own side of the approach to knowledge. These things too
\nwere not the results of a barren and empty metaphysics, not the inventions of bovine navel-gazing dreamers.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nEqually is it a misrepresentation to say that Indian culture denies all value to life, detaches from terrestrial interests and
\ninsists on the unimportance of the life of the moment. To read these European comments one would imagine that in all Indian
\nthought there was nothing but the nihilistic school of Buddhism and the monistic illusionism of Shankara and that all Indian art,
\nliterature and social thinking were nothing but the statement of their recoil from the falsehood and vanity of things. It does not
\nfollow that because these things are what the average European has heard about India or what most interests or strikes the European scholar in her thought, therefore they are, however great may have been their influence, the whole of Indian thinking.
\nThe ancient civilisation of India founded itself very expressly upon four human interests; first, desire and enjoyment, next,
\nmaterial, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and body, thirdly, ethical conduct and the right law of individual and
\n <\/i> social life, and, lastly spiritual liberation; kāma<\/i>, artha<\/i>,
\ndharma<\/i>,
\nmoksa<\/i>. The business of culture and social organisation was to
\nlead, to satisfy, to support these things in man and to build some harmony of their forms and motives. Except in very rare cases
\nthe satisfaction of the three mundane objects must run before the other; fullness of life must precede the surpassing of life. The
\ndebt to the family, the community and the gods could not be scamped; earth must have her due and the relative its play, even
\nif beyond it there was the glory of heaven or the peace of the   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 125<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nAbsolute. There was no preaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe symmetric character of ancient Indian life and the vivid variety of its literature were inconsistent with any exclusive
\nother-worldly direction. The great mass of Sanskrit literature is a literature of human life; certain philosophic and religious
\nwritings are devoted to the withdrawal from it, but even these are not as a rule contemptuous of its value. If the Indian mind
\ngave the highest importance to a spiritual release, \u2014 and whatever the positivist mood may say, a spiritual liberation of some
\nkind is the highest possibility of the human spirit, \u2014 it was not interested in that alone. It looked equally at ethics, law, politics, society, the sciences, the arts and crafts, everything that appertains to human life. It thought on these things deeply and
\nscrutinisingly and it wrote of them with power and knowledge. What a fine monument of political and administrative genius is
\nthe Śukra-Nīti<\/i>, to take one example only, and what a mirror of the practical organisation of a great civilised people! Indian
\nart was not always solely hieratic, \u2014 it seemed so only because it is in the temples and cave cathedrals that its greatest work
\nsurvived; as the old literature testifies, as we see from the Rajput and Mogul paintings, it was devoted as much to the court and
\nthe city and to cultural ideas and the life of the people as to the temple and monastery and their motives. Indian education of
\nwomen as well as of men was more rich and comprehensive and many-sided than any system of education before modern times.
\nThe documents which prove these things are now available to anyone who cares to study. It is time that this parrot talk about
\nthe unpractical, metaphysical, quietistic, anti-vital character of Indian civilisation should cease and give place to a true and
\nunderstanding estimate. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut it is perfectly true that Indian culture has always set the
\nhighest value on that in man which rises beyond the terrestrial preoccupation; it has held up the goal of a supreme and arduous
\nself-exceeding as the summit of human endeavour. The spiritual life was to its view a nobler thing than the life of external power
\nand enjoyment, the thinker greater than the man of action, the  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 126<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nspiritual man greater than the thinker. The soul that lives in God is more perfect than the soul that lives only in outward
\nmind or only for the claims and joys of thinking and living matter. It is here that the difference comes in between the typical
\nWestern and the typical Indian mentality. The West has acquired the religious mind rather than possessed it by nature and it
\nhas always worn its acquisition with a certain looseness. India has constantly believed in worlds behind of which the material
\nworld is only the antechamber. Always she has seen a self within us greater than the mental and vital self, greater than the ego.
\nAlways she has bowed her intellect and heart before a near and present Eternal in which the temporal being exists and to which
\nin man it increasingly turns for transcendence. The sentiment of the Bengali poet, the wonderful singer and rapt devotee of the
\nDivine Mother, \u2014
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nHow rich an estate man lies fallow here!
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIf this were tilled, a golden crop would spring, \u2014
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nexpresses the real Indian feeling about human life. But it is most
\nattracted by the greater spiritual possibilities man alone of terrestrial beings possesses. The ancient Aryan culture recognised
\nall human possibilities, but put this highest of all and graded life according to a transitional scale in its system of the four classes
\nand the four orders. Buddhism first gave an exaggerated and enormous extension to the ascetic ideal and the monastic impulse, erased the transition and upset the balance. Its victorious system left only two orders, the householder and the ascetic, the
\nmonk and the layman, an effect which subsists to the present day. It is this upsetting of the Dharma for which we find it fiercely
\nattacked in the Vishnu Purana under the veil of an apologue, for it weakened in the end the life of society by its tense exaggeration
\nand its hard system of opposites. But Buddhism too had another side, a side turned towards action and creation and gave a new
\nlight, a new meaning and a new moral and ideal power to life. Afterwards there came the lofty illusionism of Shankara at the
\nclose of the two greatest known millenniums of Indian culture. Life thenceforward was too much depreciated as an unreality or
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 127<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\na relative phenomenon, in the end not worth living, not worth our assent to it and persistence in its motives. But this dogma
\nwas not universally accepted, nor admitted without a struggle; Shankara was even denounced by his adversaries as a masked
\nBuddhist. The later Indian mind has been powerfully impressed by his idea of Maya; but popular thought and sentiment was
\nnever wholly shaped by it. The religions of devotion which see in life a play or Lila of God and not a half sombre, half glaring illusion defacing the white silence of eternity had a closer growing influence. If they did not counteract, they humanised
\nthe austere ascetic ideal. It is only recently that educated India accepted the ideas of English and German scholars, imagined for
\na time Shankara’s Mayavada to be the one highest thing, if not the whole of our philosophy, and put it in a place of exclusive
\nprominence. But against that tendency too there is now a powerful reaction, not towards replacing the spirit without life by life
\nwithout the spirit, but towards a spiritual possession of mind, life and matter. Still it is true that the ascetic ideal which in the
\nancient vigour of our culture was the fine spire of life mounting into the eternal existence, became latterly its top-heavy dome
\nand tended under the weight of its bare and imposing sublimity to crush the rest of the edifice.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut here also we should get the right view, away from all exaggeration and false stress. Mr. Archer drags in Karma and
\nReincarnation into his list of anti-vital Indian notions. But it is preposterous, it is a stupid misunderstanding to speak of
\nreincarnation as a doctrine which preaches the unimportance of the life of the moment compared with the endless chain of
\npast and future existences. The doctrine of reincarnation and Karma tells us that the soul has a past which shaped its present
\nbirth and existence; it has a future which our present action is shaping; our past has taken and our future will take the form
\nof recurring terrestrial births and Karma, our own action, is the power which by its continuity and development as a subjective
\nand objective force determines the whole nature and eventuality of these repeated existences. There is nothing here to depreciate
\nthe importance of the present life. On the contrary the doctrine  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 128<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ngives it immense vistas and enormously enhances the value of effort and action. The nature of the present act is of an incalculable importance because it determines not only our immediate but our subsequent future. There will be found too insistently
\npervading Indian literature and deeply settled in the mind of the people the idea of a whole-hearted concentrated present action
\nand energy, tapasyā, as a miraculous all-powerful force for the acquisition of our desires, whether the material or the spiritual
\ndesires of the human will. No doubt, our present life loses the exclusive importance which we give to it when we regard it only
\nas an ephemeral moment in Time never to be repeated, our one sole opportunity, without any after-existence beyond it. But a
\nnarrow exaggerated insistence on the present shuts up the human soul in the prison of the moment: it may give a feverish intensity
\nto action, but it is inimical to calm and joy and greatness of the spirit. No doubt, too, the idea that our present sufferings are the
\nresults of our own past action, imparts a calm, a resignation, an acquiescence to the Indian mind which the restless Western
\nintelligence finds it difficult to understand or tolerate. This may degenerate in a time of great national weakness, depression and
\nmisfortune, into a quietistic fatalism that may extinguish the fire of reparative endeavour. But that is not its inevitable turn, nor
\nis it the turn given to it in the records of the more vigorous past of our culture. The note there is of action, of
\ntapasyā. There is
\ntoo another turn given to this belief which increased with time, the Buddhistic dogma of the succession of rebirths as a chain of
\nKarma from which the soul must escape into the eternal silence. This notion has strongly affected Hinduism; but whatever is
\ndepressing in it, belongs not properly to the doctrine of rebirth but to other elements stigmatised as an ascetic pessimism by the
\nvitalistic thought of Europe. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nPessimism is not peculiar to the Indian mind: it has been an
\nelement in the thought of all developed civilisations. It is the sign of a culture already old, the fruit of a mind which has lived much,
\nexperienced much, sounded life and found it full of suffering, sounded joy and achievement and found that all is vanity and
\nvexation of spirit and there is nothing new under the sun or, if   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 129<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthere is, its novelty is but of a day. Pessimism has been as rampant in Europe as in India and it is certainly a singular thing to find
\nthe materialist of all people bringing against Indian spirituality this accusation of lowering the values of existence. For what
\ncan be more depressing than the materialistic view of the quite physical and ephemeral nature of human life? There is nothing
\nin the most ascetic notes of the Indian mind like the black gloom of certain kinds of European pessimism, a city of dreadful night
\nwithout joy here or hope beyond, and nothing like the sad and shrinking attitude before death and the dissolution of the body
\nwhich pervades Western literature. The note of ascetic pessimism often found in Christianity is a distinctly Western note; for it is
\nabsent in Christ’s teachings. This mediaeval religion with its cross, its salvation by suffering, its devil-ridden and flesh-ridden
\nworld and the flames of eternal hell waiting for man beyond the grave has a character of pain and terror alien to the Indian mind,
\nto which indeed religious terror is a stranger. The suffering of the world is there, but it fades into a bliss of spiritual peace or ecstasy
\nbeyond the sorrow line. Buddha’s teaching laid heavy stress on the sorrow and impermanence of things, but the Buddhist Nirvana won by the heroic spirit of moral self-conquest and calm wisdom is a state of ineffable calm and joy, open not only to
\na few like the Christian heavens, but to all, and very different from the blank cessation which is the mechanical release of our
\npain and struggle, the sorry Nirvana of the Western pessimist, the materialist’s brute flat end of all things. Even illusionism
\npreached, not a gospel of sorrow, but the final unreality of joy and grief and the whole world-existence. It admits the practical
\nvalidity of life and allows its values to those who dwell in the Ignorance. And like all Indian asceticism it places before man
\nthe possibility of a great effort, a luminous concentration of knowledge, a mighty urge of the will by which he can rise to
\nan absolute peace or an absolute bliss. A not ignoble pessimism there has been about man’s normal life as it is, a profound sense
\nof its imperfection, a disgust of its futile obscurity, smallness and ignorance; but an unconquerable optimism as regards his
\nspiritual possibility was the other side of this mood. If it did  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 130<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nnot believe in the ideal of an immense material progress of the race or a perfection of the normal man with earth as its field,
\nit believed in a sure spiritual progress for every individual and an ultimate perfection lifted above subjection to the shocks of
\nlife. And this pessimism with regard to life is not the sole note of the Indian religious mind; its most popular forms accept life as
\na game of God and see beyond our present conditions for every human being the eternal nearness to the Divine. A luminous
\nascent into godhead was always held to be a consummation well within man’s grasp. That can hardly be called a depressing
\nor pessimistic theory of existence. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere can be no great and complete culture without some
\nelement of asceticism in it; for asceticism means the self-denial and self-conquest by which man represses his lower impulses and
\nrises to greater heights of his nature. Indian asceticism is not a mournful gospel of sorrow or a painful mortification of the flesh
\nin morbid penance, but a noble effort towards a higher joy and an absolute possession of the spirit. A great joy of self-conquest,
\na still joy of inner peace and the forceful joy of a supreme self-exceeding are at the heart of its experience. It is only a mind
\nbesotted with the flesh or too enamoured of external life and its restless effort and inconstant satisfactions that can deny the
\nnobility or idealistic loftiness of the ascetic endeavour. But there are the exaggerations and deflections that all ideals undergo.
\nThose which are the most difficult to humanity, suffer from them most, and asceticism may become a fanatic self-torture, a
\ncrude repression of the nature, a tired flight from existence or an indolent avoidance of the trouble of life and a weak recoil
\nfrom the effort demanded of our manhood. Practised not by the comparatively few who are called to it, but preached in its
\nextreme form to all and adopted by unfit thousands, its values may be debased, counterfeits may abound and the vital force
\nof the community lose its elasticity and its forward spring. It would be idle to pretend that such defects and untoward results
\nhave been absent in India. I do not accept the ascetic ideal as the final solution of the problem of human existence; but even its
\nexaggerations have a nobler spirit behind them than the vitalistic   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 131<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nexaggerations which are the opposite defect of Western culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAfter all asceticism and illusionism are minor issues. The
\npoint to be pressed is that Indian spirituality in its greatest eras and in its inmost significance has not been a tired quietism or a
\nconventional monasticism, but a high effort of the human spirit to rise beyond the life of desire and vital satisfaction and arrive
\nat an acme of spiritual calm, greatness, strength, illumination, divine realisation, settled peace and bliss. The question between
\nthe culture of India and the vehement secular activism of the modern mind is whether such an endeavour is or is not essential
\nto man’s highest perfection. And if it is, then the other question arises whether it is to be only an exceptional force confined to a
\nfew rare spirits or can be made the main inspiring motive-power of a great and complete human civilisation.
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

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

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nA Rationalistic Critic on
\n<\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian Culture \u00ad 4 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nA<\/font>
\nRIGHT<\/b> judgment of the life-value of Indian philosophy is intimately bound up with a right appreciation of
\nthe life-value of Indian religion; religion and philosophy are too intimately one in this culture to be divided from each
\nother. Indian philosophy is not a purely rational gymnastic of speculative logic in the air, an ultra-subtle process of
\nthought-spinning and word-spinning like the greater part of philosophy in Europe; it is the organised intellectual theory of the intuitive
\nordering perception of all that is the soul, the thought, the dynamic truth, the heart of feeling and power of Indian religion.
\nIndian religion is Indian spiritual philosophy put into action and experience. Whatever in the religious thought and practice of
\nthat vast, rich, thousand-sided, infinitely pliable, yet very firmly structured system we call Hinduism, does not in intention come
\nunder this description, \u2014 whatever its practice, \u2014 is either social framework or projection of ritual buttresses or survival of old
\nsupports and additions. Or else it is an excrescence and growth of corruption, a degradation of its truth and meaning in the vulgar mind, part of the debased mixtures that overtake all religious thinking and practice. Or, in some instances, it is dead habit
\ncontracted in periods of fossilisation or ill-assimilated extraneous matter gathered into this giant body. The inner principle of
\nHinduism, the most tolerant and receptive of religious systems, is not sharply exclusive like the religious spirit of Christianity or
\nIslam; as far as that could be without loss of its own powerful idiosyncrasy and law of being, it has been synthetic, acquisitive,
\ninclusive. Always it has taken in from every side and trusted to the power of assimilation that burns in its spiritual heart and
\nin the white heat of its flaming centre to turn even the most   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 133<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nunpromising material into forms for its spirit. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut before we turn to see what it is that so fiercely irritates
\nand exasperates our hostile Western critic in Indian religious philosophy, it is as well to consider what he has to say about
\nother sides of this ancient, dateless and still vigorously living, growing, all-assimilating Hinduism. For he has a great deal to
\nsay and it is unsparing and without measure. There is not the intemperate drunkenness of denunciation and vomit of false
\nwitness, hatred, uncharitableness and all things degrading and unspiritual and unclean that are the mark of a certain type of
\n“Christian literature” on the subject, \u2014 for example, the superlative specimen of this noxious compound which Sir John
\nWoodroffe has cited from the pages of Mr. Harold Begbie, “virile” perhaps if violence is virile, but certainly not sane. But
\nstill it is a mass of unsparing condemnation, exaggerated where it has any foundation at all and serenely illogical in its blithe joy
\nof deliberate misrepresentation. Still, even from this crude mass it is possible to disengage the salient and typical antipathies that
\nrecommend it to the uncritical and even to many critical minds, and it is these alone that it is useful to discover.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe total irrationality of Hinduism is the main theme of the attack. Mr. Archer does casually admit a philosophical, and
\none might therefore suppose a rational element in the religion of India, but he disparages and dismisses as false and positively
\nharmful the governing ideas of this religious philosophy as he understands or imagines he understands them. He explains the
\npervading irrational character of Hindu religion by the allegation that the Indian people have always gravitated towards the
\nform rather than the substance and towards the letter rather than the spirit. One would have supposed that this kind of
\ngravitation is a fairly universal feature of the human mind, not only in religion, but in society, politics, art, literature, even in
\nscience. In every conceivable human activity a cult of the form and forgetfulness of the spirit, a turn towards convention, externalism, unthinking dogma has been the common drift of the human mind from China to Peru and it does not skip Europe on
\nits way. And Europe where men have constantly fought, killed,  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 134<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nburned, tortured, imprisoned, persecuted in every way imaginable by human stupidity and cruelty for the sake of dogmas,
\nwords, rites and forms of church government, Europe where these things have done duty for spirituality and religion, has
\nhardly a record which would entitle it to cast this reproach in the face of the East. But, we are told, this gravitation afflicts the
\nIndian religion more than any other creed. Higher Hinduism can be scarcely said to exist except in certain small reforming
\nsects and current Hinduism, the popular religion, is the cult of a monstrous folk-lore oppressive and paralysing to the imagination, \u2014 although here again one would think that if anything an excess rather than a paralysis of the creative imagination might
\nbe charged against the Indian mind. Animism and magic are the prevailing characteristics. The Indian people has displayed
\na genius for obfuscating reason and formalising, materialising and degrading religion. If India has possessed great thinkers, she
\nhas not extracted from their thoughts a rational and ennobling religion: the devotion of the Spanish or the Russian peasant
\nis rational and enlightened by comparison. Irrationalism, anti-rationalism, \u2014 that in this laboured and overcharged accusation
\nis the constant cry; it is the keynote of the Archer tune. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe phenomenon that has astonished and disgusted the
\nmind of the critic is the obstinate survival in India of the old religious spirit and large antique religious types unsubmerged
\nby the flood of modernism and its devastating utilitarian free thought. India, he tells us, still clings to what not only the Western world, but China and Japan have outgrown for ages. The religion is a superstition full of performances of piety repulsive
\nto the free enlightened secular mind of the modern man. Its daily practices put it far outside the pale of civilisation. Perhaps, if it
\nhad confined its practice decorously to church attendance on Sundays and to marriage and funeral services and grace before
\nmeat, it might have been admitted as human and tolerable! As it is, it is the great anachronism of the modern world; it has not
\nbeen cleansed for thirty centuries; it is paganism, it is a wholly unfiltered paganism; its tendency towards pollution rather than
\npurification marks out its place as incomparably the lowest in   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 1`35<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthe scale of world religions. An ingenious remedy is proposed. Christianity destroyed Paganism in Europe; therefore, since any
\nimmediate or very rapid triumph of sceptical free-thought would be too happily abrupt a transition to be quite feasible, we unenlightened, polluted, impure Hindus are advised to take up for a time with Christianity, poor irrational thing that it is,
\ndark and deformed though it looks in the ample light of the positivist reason, because Christianity and especially Protestant
\nChristianity will be at least a good preparatory step towards the noble freedom and stainless purities of atheism and agnosticism.
\nBut if even this little cannot be hoped for in spite of numerous famine conversions, at any rate Hinduism must somehow or
\nother get itself filtered, and until that hygienic operation has been executed, India must be denied fellowship on equal terms
\nwith the civilised nations. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIncidentally, to support this charge of irrationalism and its
\ncompanion charge of Paganism, we find a third and more damaging count brought against us and our religious culture, an
\nalleged want of all moral worth and ethical substance. There is now an increasing perception, even in Europe, that reason
\nis not the last word of human mind, not quite the one and only sovereign way to truth and certainly not the sole arbiter
\nof religious and spiritual truth. The accusation of paganism too does not settle the question, since plenty of cultivated minds are
\nwell able to see that there were many great, true and beautiful things in the ancient religions that were lumped together by
\nChristian ignorance under that inappropriate nickname. Nor has the world been entirely a gainer by losing these high ancient
\nforms and motives. But whatever the actual practice of men, \u2014 and in this respect the normal human being is a singular mixture
\nof the sincere but quite ineffective, the just respectable, would-be ethical man and the self-deceiving or semi-hypocritical Pharisee,
\n\u2014 one can always appeal with force to a moralistic prejudice. All religions raise high the flag of morality and, whether religious or
\nsecular-minded, all but the antinomian, the rebel and the cynic, profess to follow or at least to admit that standard in their lives.
\nThis accusation is therefore about the most prejudicial charge  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nthat can be brought against any religion. The self-constituted prosecuting judge whose diatribe we are examining brings it
\nwithout scruple and without measure. He has discovered that Hinduism is not an ennobling or even a morally helpful religion;
\nif it has talked much of righteousness, it has never claimed moral teaching as one of its functions. A religion that can talk much of
\nrighteousness without performing the function of moral teaching, sounds rather like a square which can make no claim to be
\na quadrilateral; but let that pass. If the Hindu is comparatively free from the grosser Western vices,
\n\u2014 as yet only, and only until
\nhe enters “the pale of civilisation” by adopting Christianity or otherwise, \u2014 it is not because there is any ethical strain in his
\ncharacter; it is because these vices do not come his way. His social system founded on the barbarous idea of the Dharma, of
\nthe divine and the human, the universal and the individual, the ethical and the social law, and supported on it at every point,
\nhas stupidly neglected to supply him with the opportunities of departing from it so liberally provided by Western civilisation!
\nAnd yet the whole character of Hinduism, which is the character of the people, indicates, we are calmly told, a melancholy proclivity towards whatever is monstrous and unwholesome! On that highest note of unmeasured denunciation we may leave Mr.
\nArcher’s monstrous and unwholesome dance of disparagement and turn to disengage the temperamental sources of his dislike
\nand anger. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nTwo things especially distinguish the normal European
\nmind, \u2014 for we must leave aside some great souls and some great thinkers or some moments or epochs of abnormal religiosity and
\nlook at the dominant strain. Its two significant characters are the cult of the inquiring, defining, effective, practical reason and the
\ncult of life. The great high tides of European civilisation, Greek culture, the Roman world before Constantine, the Renascence,
\nthe modern age with its two colossal idols, Industrialism and physical Science, have come to the West on the strong ascending
\nurge of this double force. Whenever the tide of these powers has ebbed, the European mind has entered into much confusion, darkness and weakness. Christianity failed to spiritualise  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nEurope, whatever it may have done towards humanising it in certain ethical directions, because it ran counter to these two
\nmaster instincts; it denied the supremacy of the reason and put its anathema on a satisfied or strenuous fullness of life.
\nBut in Asia there has been neither this predominance of reason and the life-cult nor any incompatibility of these two powers
\nwith the religious spirit. The great ages of Asia, the strong culminations of her civilisation and culture,
\n\u2014 in India the high
\nVedic beginning, the grand spiritual stir of the Upanishads, the wide flood of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sankhya, the Puranic and
\nTantric religions, the flowering of Vaishnavism and Shaivism in the southern kingdoms
\n\u2014 have come in on a surge of spiritual
\nlight and a massive or intense climbing of the religious or the religio-philosophic mind to its own heights, its noblest realities,
\nits largest riches of vision and experience. It was in such periods that intellect, thought, poetry, the arts, the material life flowered
\ninto splendour. The ebbing of spirituality brought in always, on the contrary, the weakness of these other powers, periods of
\nfossilisation or at least depression of the power of life, tracts of decline, even beginnings of decay. This is a clue to which we have
\nto hold if we would understand the great lines of divergence between the East and the West.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nTowards the spirit if not all the way to it man must rise or he misses his upward curve of strength; but there are different ways
\nof approach to its secret forces. Europe, it would seem, must go through the life and the reason and find spiritual truth by their
\nmeans as a crown and a revelation; she cannot at once take the kingdom of heaven by violence, as the saying of Christ would
\nhave men do. The attempt confuses and obscures her reason, is combated by her life instincts and leads to revolt, negation,
\na return to her own law of nature. But Asia or at any rate India lives naturally by a spiritual influx from above; that alone
\nbrings with it a spiritual evocation of her higher powers of mind and life. The two continents are two sides of the integral orb
\nof humanity and until they meet and fuse, each must move to whatever progress or culmination the spirit in humanity seeks,
\nby the law of its being, its own proper Dharma. A one-sided  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nworld would have been the poorer for its uniformity and the monotone of a single culture; there is a need of divergent lines
\nof advance until we can raise our heads into that infinity of the spirit in which there is a light broad enough to draw together and
\nreconcile all highest ways of thinking, feeling and living. That is a truth which the violent Indian assailant of a materialistic
\nEurope or the contemptuous enemy or cold disparager of Asiatic or Indian culture agree to ignore. There is here no real question
\nbetween barbarism and civilisation, for all masses of men are barbarians labouring to civilise themselves. There is only one of
\nthe dynamic differences necessary for the completeness of the growing orb of human culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile the divergence unfortunately gives rise to a constant warring opposition of outlooks in religion and in most
\nother matters, and the opposition brings with it more or less of an incapacity for mutual understanding and even a positive
\nenmity or dislike. The emphasis of the Western mind is on life, the outer life above all, the things that are grasped, visible, tangible. The inner life is taken only as an intelligent reflection of the outer world, with the reason for a firm putter of things
\ninto shape, an intelligent critic, builder, refiner of the external materials offered by Nature. The present use of living, to be
\nwholly in this life and for this life, is all the preoccupation of Europe. The present life of the individual and the continuous
\nphysical existence and developing mind and knowledge of humanity make up her one absorbing interest. Even from religion
\nthe West is apt to demand that it shall subordinate its aim or its effect to this utility of the immediate visible world. The Greek
\nand the Roman looked on religious cult as a sanction for the life of the “polis” or a force for the just firmness and stability of the
\nState. The Middle Ages when the Christian idea was at its height were an interregnum; it was a period during which the Western
\nmind was trying to assimilate in its emotion and intelligence an oriental ideal. But it never succeeded in firmly living it and had
\neventually to throw it aside or keep it only for a verbal homage. The present moment is in the same way for Asia an interregnum
\ndominated by an attempt to assimilate in its intellect and life in   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nspite of a rebellious soul and temperament the Western outlook and its earth-bound ideal. And it may be safely predicted that
\nAsia too will not succeed in living out this alien law firmly or for a long time. But in Europe even the Christian idea, marked
\nin its purity by the emphasis of its introspective tendency and an uncompromising other-worldliness, had to compromise with
\nthe demands of the occidental temperament and in doing that it lost its own inner kingdom. The genuine temperament of
\nthe West triumphed and in an increasing degree rationalised, secularised and almost annihilated the religious spirit. Religion
\nbecame more and more a pale and ever thinning shadow pushed aside into a small corner of the life and a still smaller corner of
\nthe nature and awaiting sentence of death or exile, while outside the doors of the vanquished Church marched on their victorious
\nway the triumphant secular pomps of the outward life and the positive reason and materialistic Science.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe tendency to secularism is a necessary consequence of the cult of life and reason divorced from their inmost inlook.
\nAncient Europe did not separate religion and life; but that was because it had no need for the separation. Its religion, once it
\ngot rid of the oriental element of the mysteries, was a secular institution which did not look beyond a certain supraphysical
\nsanction and convenient aid to the government of this life. And even then the tendency was to philosophise and reason away the
\nrelics of the original religious spirit, to exile the little shadow that remained of the brooding wings of a suprarational mystery
\nand to get into the clear sunlight of the logical and practical reason. But modern Europe went farther and to the very end
\nof this way. The more effectually to shake off the obsession of the Christian idea, which like all oriental religious thought
\nclaims to make religion commensurate with life and, against whatever obstacles may be opposed to it by the unregenerate
\nvital nature of the animal man, spiritualise the whole being and its action, modern Europe separated religion from life, from
\nphilosophy, from art and science, from politics, from the greater part of social action and social existence. And it secularised
\nand rationalised too the ethical demand so that it might stand  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nin itself on its own basis and have no need of any aid from religious sanction or mystic insistence. At the end of this turn is
\nan antinomian tendency, constantly recurring in the life-history of Europe and now again in evidence. This force seeks to annul
\nethics also, not by rising above it into the absolute purity of the spirit, as mystic experience claims to do, but by breaking out of
\nits barriers below into an exultant freedom of the vital play. In this evolution religion was left aside, an impoverished system of
\nbelief and ceremony to which one might or might not subscribe with very little difference to the march of the human mind and
\nlife. Its penetrating and colouring power had been reduced to a faint minimum; a superficial pigmentation of dogma, sentiment
\nand emotion was all that survived this drastic process. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nEven the poor little corner that was still conceded to it,
\nintellectualism insisted on flooding as much as possible with the light of reason. The trend has been to reduce, not only the infrarational, but equally the suprarational refuges of the religious spirit. The old pagan polytheistic symbolism had clothed with
\nits beautiful figures the ancient idea of a divine presence and supraphysical life and Power in all Nature and in every particle
\nof life and matter and in all animal existence and in all the mental action of man; but this idea, which to the secularist reason is
\nonly an intellectualised animism, had already been ruthlessly swept aside. The Divinity had abandoned the earth and lived far
\naloof and remote in other worlds, in a celestial heaven of saints and immortal spirits. But why should there be any other worlds?
\nI admit, cried the progressing intellect, only this material world to which our reason and senses bear witness. A vague bleak
\nabstraction of spiritual existence without any living habitation, without any means of dynamic nearness was left to satisfy the
\nwintry remnants of the old spiritual sense or the old fantastic illusion. A blank and tepid Theism remained or a rationalised
\nChristianity without either the name of Christ or his presence. Or why should that even be allowed by the critical light of
\nthe intelligence? A Reason or Power, called God for want of a better name, represented by the moral and physical Law in
\nthe material universe, is quite sufficient for any rational mind,   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\n\u2014 and so we get to Deism, to a vacant intellectual formula. Or why should there be any God at all? The reason and the
\nsenses by themselves give no witness to God; at best they can make of Him only a plausible hypothesis. But there is no need
\nof an unsubstantial hypothesis, since Nature is enough and the sole thing of which we have knowledge. Thus by an inevitable
\nprocess we reach the atheistic or agnostic cult of secularism, the acme of denial, the zenith of the positive intelligence. And
\nthere reason and life may henceforward take their foundation and reign well satisfied over a conquered world,
\n\u2014 if only that
\ninconvenient veiled ambiguous infinite Something behind will leave them alone for the future!
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA temperament, an outlook of this kind must necessarily be impatient of any such thing as an earnest straining after the
\nsuprarational and the infinite. It may tolerate some moderate play of these fine hallucinations as an innocent indulgence of the
\nspeculative mind or the artistic imagination, provided it is not too serious and does not intrude upon life. But asceticism and
\nother-worldliness are abhorrent to its temperament and fatal to its outlook. Life is a thing to be possessed and enjoyed rationally
\nor forcefully according to our power, but this earthly life, the one thing we know, our only province. At most a moderate
\nintellectual and ethical asceticism is permissible, the simple life, plain living, high thinking; but an ecstatic spiritual asceticism
\nis an offence to the reason, almost a crime. Pessimism of the vitalistic kind may be allowed its mood or its hour; for it admits
\nthat life is an evil that has to be lived and does not cut at its roots. But the obvious right standpoint is to take life as it is and
\nmake the most of it, either practically for the best ordering of its mixed good and evil or ideally with some hope of a relative perfection. If spirituality is to have any meaning, it can only signify the aim or the high labour of a lofty intelligence, rational will,
\nlimited beauty and moral good which will try to make the best of this life that is, but not vainly look beyond to some unhuman,
\nunattainable, infinite or absolute satisfaction. If religion is to survive, let its function be to serve this kind of spiritual aim, to
\ngovern conduct, to give beauty and purity to our living, but let it
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nminister only to this sane and virile spirituality; let it keep within
\nthe bounds of the practical reason and an earthly intelligence. This description no doubt isolates the main strands and ignores
\ndepartures to one side or the other; and in all human nature there must be departures, often of an extreme kind. But it would not,
\nI think, be an unfair or exaggerated description of the persistent ground and characteristic turn of the Western temperament and
\nits outlook and the normal poise of its intelligence. This is its self-fulfilled static poise before it proceeds to that deflection or
\nthat self-exceeding to which man is inevitably moved when he reaches the acme of his normal nature. For he harbours a power
\nin Nature that must either grow or else stagnate and cease and disintegrate, and until he has found all himself, there is for him
\nno static abiding and no permanent home for his spirit. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNow when this Western mind is confronted with the still
\nsurviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture, it finds that all its standards are denied, exceeded or belittled; all that it
\nhonours is given a second place, all that it has rejected is still held in honour. Here is a philosophy which founds itself on
\nthe immediate reality of the Infinite, the pressing claim of the Absolute. And this is not as a thing to speculate about, but as
\na real presence and a constant Power which demands the soul of man and calls it. Here is a mentality which sees the Divine
\nin Nature and man and animal and inanimate thing, God at the beginning, God in the middle, God at the end, God everywhere.
\nAnd all this is not a permissible poetical play of the imagination that need not be taken too seriously by life, but is put forward
\nas a thing to be lived, realised, put at the back even of outward action, turned into stuff of thought, feeling and conduct! And
\nwhole disciplines are systematised for this purpose, disciplines which men still practise! And whole lives are given up to this
\npursuit of the supreme Person, the universal Godhead, the One, the Absolute, the Infinite! And to pursue this immaterial aim
\nmen are still content to abandon the outward life and society and home and family and their most cherished pursuits and
\nall that has to a rational mind a substantial and ascertainable value! Here is a country which is still heavily coloured with the
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nochre tint of the garb of the Sannyasin, where the Beyond is still preached as a truth and men have a living belief in other worlds
\nand reincarnation and a whole army of antique ideas whose truth is quite unverifiable by the instruments of physical Science.
\nHere the experiences of Yoga are held to be as true or more true than the experiments of the laboratory. Is this not a thinking of
\nthings evidently unthinkable since the rational Western mind has ceased to think about them? Is it not an attempt to know things
\nevidently unknowable since the modern mind has abandoned all attempt to know them? There is amongst these irrational
\nhalf-savages an endeavour even to make this unreal thing the highest flight of life, its very goal, and a governing force, a shaping
\npower in art and culture and conduct. But art and culture and conduct are things which, this rational mind tells us, Indian
\nspirituality and religion ought logically not to touch at all; for they belong to the realm of the finite and can only be founded
\non the intellectual reason and the practical environment and the truths and suggestions of physical Nature. There in its native
\nform is the apparent gulf between the two mentalities and it looks unbridgeable. Or rather the Indian mind can understand
\nwell enough, even when it does not share, the positivist turn of the occidental intelligence; but it is itself to the latter a thing, if
\nnot damnable, at least abnormal and unintelligible. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe effects of the Indian religio-philosophical standpoint
\non life are to the occidental critic still more intolerable. If his reason was already offended by this suprarational and to him
\nantirational urge, it is the strongest instincts of his temperament that are now violently shocked by their own direct contrasts and
\nopposites. Life, the thing on which he puts an entire and unquestioning value, is questioned here. It is belittled and discouraged
\nby the extremest consequences of one side of the Indian outlook or inlook and is nowhere accepted as it is for its own sake.
\nAsceticism ranges rampant, is at the head of things, casts its shadow on the vital instincts and calls man to exceed the life of
\nthe body and even the life of the mental will and intelligence. The Western mind lays an enormous stress upon force of personality,
\nupon the individual will, upon the apparent man and the desires  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\nand demands of his nature. But here is an opposing stress on a high growth towards impersonality, on the widening of the
\nindividual into the universal will, on an increasing or breaking beyond the apparent man and his limits. The flowering of the
\nmental and vital ego or at most its subservience to the larger ego of the community is the West’s cultural ideal. But here the
\nego is regarded as the chief obstacle to the soul’s perfection and its place is proposed to be taken not by the concrete communal
\nego, but by something inward, abstract, transcendental, something supramental, supraphysical, absolutely real. The Western
\ntemperament is rajasic, kinetic, pragmatic, active; thought for it turns always to action and has little value except for the sake of
\naction or else for a fine satisfaction of the mind’s play and vigour. But here the type proposed for admiration is the self-possessed
\nsattwic man for whom calm thought, spiritual knowledge and the inner life are the things of the greatest importance and action
\nis chiefly of consequence not for its own sake, not for its rewards and fruits, but for its effects on the growth of the inner nature.
\nHere too is a disconcerting quietism which looks forward to the cessation or Nirvana of all thought and action in a perpetual
\nlight and peace. It is not surprising that a critic with an unreleased occidental mind should look upon these contrasts with
\nmuch dissatisfaction, a recoil of antipathy, an almost ferocious repugnance.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut at any rate these things, however remote they may seem to his understanding, contain something that is lofty and noble.
\nHe can disparage them as false, antirational and depressing, but not denounce them as evil and ignoble. Or he can do this only
\non the strength of such misrepresentations as some of those we have noted in Mr. Archer’s more irresponsible strictures.
\nThese things may be signs of an antique or an antiquated mind, but are certainly not the fruits of a barbaric culture. But when
\nhe surveys the forms of the religion which they enlighten and animate, it does look to him as if he was in the presence of a pure
\nbarbarism, a savage ignorant muddle. For here is an abundance of everything of which he has so long been steadily emptying
\nreligion in his own culture, well content to call that emptiness   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\nreformation, enlightenment and the rational truth of things. He sees a gigantic polytheism, a superabundance of what seems to
\nhis intelligence rank superstition, a limitless readiness of belief in things that are to him without significance or incredible. The
\nHindu is popularly credited with thirty crores and more of gods, as many inhabitants for all the many heavens as there are men
\nin this single earthly peninsula India; and he has no objection to adding, if need be, to this mighty multitude. Here are temples,
\nimages, a priesthood, a mass of unintelligible rites and ceremonies, the daily repetition of Sanskrit mantras and prayers,
\nsome of them of a prehistoric creation, a belief in all kinds of supraphysical beings and forces, saints, gurus, holy days, vows,
\nofferings, sacrifice, a constant reference of life to powers and influences of which there can be no physical evidence instead
\nof a rational scientific dependence on the material laws which alone govern the existence of mortal creatures. It is to him an
\nunintelligible chaos; it is animism; it is a monstrous folk-lore. The meaning which Indian thought puts upon these things, their
\nspiritual sense, escapes him altogether or it leaves him incredulous or else strikes his mind as a vain and mad symbolism
\nsubtle, useless, futile. And not only is the cult and belief of this people antiquated and mediaeval in kind, but it is not kept in
\nits proper place. Instead of putting religion into an unobtrusive and ineffective corner, the Indian mind has the pretension, the
\npreposterous pretension which rational man has outgrown for ever, of filling with it the whole of life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt would be difficult to convince the too positive average European intelligence which has “outgrown” the religious mentality or is only struggling back towards it after a not yet liquidated bankruptcy of rationalistic materialism, that there is any
\nprofound truth or meaning in these Indian religious forms. It has been well said that they are rhythms of the spirit; but one
\nwho misses the spirit must necessarily miss too the connection of the spirit and the rhythm. The gods of this worship are,
\nas every Indian knows, potent names, divine forms, dynamic personalities, living aspects of the one Infinite. Each Godhead is
\na form or derivation or dependent power of the supreme Trinity,  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\n

\neach Goddess a form of the universal Energy, Conscious-Force or Shakti. But to the logical European mind monotheism, polytheism, pantheism are irreconcilable warring dogmas; oneness, many-ness, all-ness are not and cannot be different but concordant aspects of the eternal Infinite. A belief in one Divine Being superior to cosmos who is all cosmos and who lives in many
\nforms of godhead, is a hotch-potch, mush, confusion of ideas; for synthesis, intuitive vision, inner experience are not the forte
\nof this strongly external, analytic and logical mind. The image to the Hindu is a physical symbol and support of the supraphysical;
\nit is a basis for the meeting between the embodied mind and sense of man and the supraphysical power, force or presence which
\nhe worships and with which he wishes to communicate. But the average European has small faith in disembodied entities and, if
\nthey are at all, he would put them away into a category apart, another unconnected world, a separate existence. A nexus between the physical and supraphysical is to his view a meaningless subtlety admissible only in imaginative poetry and romance.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe rites, ceremonies, system of cult and worship of Hinduism can only be understood if we remember its fundamental
\ncharacter. It is in the first place a non-dogmatic inclusive religion and would have taken even Islam and Christianity into itself, if
\nthey had tolerated the process. All that it has met on its way it has taken into itself, content if it could put its forms into some
\nvalid relation with the truth of the supraphysical worlds and the truth of the Infinite. Again it has always known in its heart
\nthat religion, if it is to be a reality for the mass of men and not only for a few saints and thinkers, must address its appeal
\nto the whole of our being, not only to the suprarational and the rational parts, but to all the others. The imagination, the
\nemotions, the aesthetic sense, even the very instincts of the half subconscient parts must be taken into the influence. Religion
\nmust lead man towards the suprarational, the spiritual truth and it must take the aid of the illumined reason on the way, but
\nit cannot afford to neglect to call Godwards the rest of our complex nature. And it must take too each man where he stands and
\nspiritualise him through what he can feel and not at once force   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\non him something which he cannot yet grasp as a true and living power. That is the sense and aim of all those parts of Hinduism
\nwhich are specially stigmatised as irrational or antirational by the positivist intelligence. But the European mind has failed to
\nunderstand this plain necessity or has despised it. It insists on “purifying” religion, by the reason and not by the spirit, on
\n“reforming” it, by the reason and not by the spirit. And we have seen what were the results of this kind of purification and
\nreformation in Europe. The infallible outcome of that ignorant doctoring has been first to impoverish and then slowly to kill
\nreligion; the patient has fallen a victim to the treatment, while he might well have survived the disease!
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe accusation of a want of ethical content is almost monstrously false, \u2014 it is the direct opposite of the truth; but we
\nmust look for its explanation in some kind of characteristic misunderstanding; for it is not new. Hindu thought and literature might almost be accused of a tyrannously pervading ethical obsession; everywhere the ethical note recurs. The idea of the
\nDharma is, next to the idea of the Infinite, its major chord; Dharma, next to spirit, is its foundation of life. There is no
\nethical idea which it has not stressed, put in its most ideal and imperative form, enforced by teaching, injunction, parable, artistic creation, formative examples. Truth, honour, loyalty, fidelity, courage, chastity, love, long-suffering, self-sacrifice, harmlessness, forgiveness, compassion, benevolence, beneficence are its common themes, are in its view the very stuff of a right human
\nlife, the essence of man’s dharma. Buddhism with its high and noble ethics, Jainism with its austere ideal of self-conquest, Hinduism with its magnificent examples of all sides of the Dharma are not inferior in ethical teaching and practice to any religion
\nor system, but rather take the highest rank and have had the strongest effective force. For the practice of these virtues in
\nolder times there is abundant internal and foreign evidence. A considerable stamp of them still remains in spite of much
\ndegeneracy even though there has been some depression of the manlier qualities which only flourish in their fullest power on the
\nsoil of freedom. The legend to the contrary began in the minds  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nof English scholars with a Christian bias who were misled by the stress which Indian philosophy lays on knowledge rather
\nthan works as the means of salvation. For they did not note or could not grasp the meaning of the rule well-known to all
\nIndian spiritual seekers that a pure sattwic mind and life are presupposed as the first step towards the divine
\nknowledge \u2014
\nthe doers of evil find me not, says the Gita. And they were unable to realise that knowledge of the truth means for Indian thought,
\nnot intellectual assent or recognition, but a new consciousness and a life according to the truth of the Spirit. Morality is for the
\nWestern mind mostly a thing of outward conduct; but conduct for the Indian mind is only one means of expression and sign of a
\nsoul-state. Hinduism only incidentally strings together a number of commandments for observance, a table of moral laws; more
\ndeeply it enjoins a spiritual or ethical purity of the mind with action as one outward index. It says strongly enough, almost too
\nstrongly, “Thou shouldst not kill,” but insists more firmly on the injunction, “Thou shalt not hate, thou shalt not yield to greed,
\nanger or malice,” for these are the roots of killing. And Hinduism admits relative standards, a wisdom too hard for the European
\nintelligence. Non-injuring is the very highest of its laws,
\nahimsā<\/i>
\nparamo dharmah<\/i>; still it does not lay it down as a physical .<\/i>
\nrule for the warrior, but insistently demands from him mercy, chivalry, respect for the non-belligerent, the weak, the unarmed,
\nthe vanquished, the prisoner, the wounded, the fugitive, and so escapes the unpracticality of a too absolutist rule for all life. A
\nmisunderstanding of this inwardness and this wise relativity is perhaps responsible for much misrepresentation. The Western
\nethicist likes to have a high standard as a counsel of perfection and is not too much concerned if it is honoured more by the
\nbreach than by the observance; Indian ethics puts up an equally high and often higher standard; but less concerned with high
\nprofessions than with truth of life, it admits stages of progress and in the lower stages is satisfied if it can moralise as much
\nas possible those who are not yet capable of the highest ethical concepts and practice.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAll these criticisms of Hinduism are therefore either false in  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nfact or invalid in their very nature. It remains to be considered whether the farther yet more common charge is justified in full or
\nin part, \u2014 the damaging accusation that Indian culture depresses the vital force, paralyses the will, gives no great or vigorous
\npower, no high incentive, no fortifying and ennobling motive to human life.
\n  
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nA Rationalistic Critic on
\n<\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian Culture \u00ad 5 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HE QUESTION<\/b> before us is whether Indian culture has a sufficient power for the fortifying and ennobling of our
\nnormal human existence. Apart from its transcendental aims, has it any pragmatic, non-ascetic, dynamic value, any
\npower for expansion of life and for the right control of life? This is a question of central importance. For if it has nothing of
\nthis kind to give us, then whatever its other cultural greatness, it cannot live. It becomes an abnormal cis-Himalayan hot-house
\nsplendour which could subsist in its peninsular seclusion, but must perish in the keen and arduous air of the modern struggle
\nof life. No anti-vital culture can survive. A too intellectual or too ethereal civilisation void of strong vital stimulus and motive must languish for want of sap and blood. A culture to be permanently and completely serviceable to man must give him
\nsomething more than some kind of rare transcendental uprush towards an exceeding of all earthly life-values. It must do more
\neven than adorn with a great curiosity of knowledge, science and philosophic enquiry or a rich light and blaze of art, poetry
\nand architecture the long stability and orderly well-being of an old, ripe and humane society. All this Indian culture did in the
\npast to a noble purpose. But it must satisfy too the tests of a progressive Life-power. There must be some inspiration for
\nthe terrestrial endeavour of man, an object, a stimulus, a force for development and a will to live. Whether or not our end is
\nsilence and Nirvana, a spiritual cessation or a material death, this is certain that the world itself is a mighty labour of a vast
\nLife-Spirit and man the present doubtful crown on earth and the struggling but still unsuccessful present hero and protagonist of
\nits endeavour or its drama. A great human culture must see this   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\ntruth in some fullness; it must impart some conscious and ideal power of self-effectuation to this upward effort. It is not enough
\nto found a stable base for life, not enough to adorn it, not enough to shoot up sublimely to summits beyond it; the greatness and
\ngrowth of the race on earth must be our equal care. To miss this great intermediate reality is a capital imperfection and in itself a
\nseal of failure. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOur critics will have it that the whole body of Indian culture
\nbears the stamp of just such a failure. The Western impression has been that Hinduism is an entirely metaphysical and otherworldly system dreaming of things beyond, oblivious of the now and here: a depressing sense of the unreality of life or an intoxication of the Infinite turns it away from any nobility, vitality and greatness of human aspiration and the earth’s labour. Its
\nphilosophy may be sublime, its religious spirit fervent, its ancient social system strong, symmetrical and stable, its literature and
\nits art good in their own way, but the salt of life is absent, the breath of will-power, the force of a living endeavour. This
\nnew journalistic Apollo, our Archer who is out to cleave with his arrows the python coils of Indian barbarism, abounds in
\noutcries in this sense. But, if that is so, evidently India can have done nothing great, contributed no invigorating power to human
\nlife, produced no men of mighty will, no potent personalities, no strong significant human lives, no vital human figures in art
\nand poetry, no significant architecture and sculpture. And that is what our devil’s advocate tells us in graphic phrases. He tells us
\nthat there is in this religion and philosophy a general undervaluing of life and endeavour. Life is conceived as a shoreless expanse
\nin which generations rise and fall as helplessly and purposelessly as waves in mid-ocean; the individual is everywhere dwarfed
\nand depreciated; one solitary great character, Gautama Buddha, who “perhaps never existed,” is India’s sole contribution to the
\nworld’s pantheon, or for the rest a pale featureless Asoka. The characters of drama and poetry are lifeless exaggerations or
\npuppets of supernatural powers; the art is empty of reality; the whole history of the civilisation makes a drab, effete, melancholy picture. There is no power of life in this religion and this  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nphilosophy, there is no breath of life in this history, there is no colour of life in this art and poetry; that is the blank result of
\nIndian culture. Whoever has seen at first hand and felt the literature, followed the history, studied the civilisation of India, can
\nsee that this is a bitter misrepresentation, a violent caricature, an absurd falsehood. But it is an extreme and unscrupulous way
\nof putting an impression often given to the European mind and, as before, we must see why different eyes see the same object in
\nsuch different colours. It is the same primary misunderstanding that is at the root. India has lived and lived richly, splendidly,
\ngreatly, but with a different will in life from Europe. The idea and plan of her life have been peculiar to her temperament, original
\nand unique. Her values are not easy to seize for an outsider and her highest things are easily open to hostile misrepresentation by
\nthe ignorant, precisely because they are too high for the normal untrained mind and apt to shoot beyond its limits.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere are three powers that we must grasp in order to judge the life-value of a culture. There is, first, the power of
\nits original conception of life; there is, next, the power of the forms, types and rhythms it has given to life; there is, last, the
\ninspiration, the vigour, the force of vital execution of its motives manifested in the actual lives of men and of the community
\nthat flourished under its influence. The European conception of life is a thing with which we in India are now very familiar,
\nbecause our present thought and effort are obscured with its shadow when they are not filled with its presence. For we have
\nbeen trying hard to assimilate something of it, even to shape ourselves and especially our political, economic and outward
\nconduct into some imitation of its forms and rhythms. The European idea is the conception of a Force that manifests itself in
\nthe material universe and a Life in it of which man is almost the only discoverable meaning. This anthropocentric view of things
\nhas not been altered by the recent stress of Science on the vast blank inanities of an inconscient mechanical Nature. And in
\nman, thus unique in the inert drift of Nature, the whole effort of Life is to arrive at some light and harmony of the understanding
\nand ordering reason, some efficient rational power, adorning   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\nbeauty, strong utility, vital enjoyment, economic welfare. The free power of the individual ego, the organised will of the corporate ego, these are the great needed forces. The development of individual personality and an organised efficient national life
\nare the two things that matter in the European ideal. These two powers have grown, striven, run riot at times, and the restless
\nand often violent vividness of the historic stir and the literary and artistic vivacity of Europe are due to their powerful colours.
\nThe enjoyment of life and force, the gallop of egoistic passion and vital satisfaction are a loud and insistent strain, a constant
\nhigh-voiced motive. Against them is another opposite effort, the endeavour to govern life by reason, science, ethics, art; a
\nrestraining and harmonising utility is here the foremost motive. At different times different powers have taken the lead. Christian religiosity too has come in and added new tones, modified some tendencies, deepened others. Each age and period has increased the wealth of contributory lines and forces and helped the complexity and largeness of the total conception. At present
\nthe sense of the corporate life dominates and it is served by the idea of a great intellectual and material progress, an ameliorated
\npolitical and social state governed by science. There is an ideal of intelligent utility, liberty and equality or else an ideal of stringent
\norganisation and efficiency and a perfectly mobilised, carefully marshalled uniting of forces in a ceaseless pull towards the
\ngeneral welfare. This endeavour of Europe has become terribly outward and mechanical in its appearance; but some renewed
\npower of a more humanistic idea is trying to beat its way in again and man may perhaps before long refuse to be tied on the
\nwheel of his own triumphant machinery and conquered by his apparatus. At any rate we need not lay too much emphasis on
\nwhat may be a passing phase. The broad permanent European conception of life remains and it is in its own limits a great and
\ninvigorating conception, \u2014 imperfect, narrow at the top, shut in under a heavy lid, poor in its horizons, too much of the soil, but
\nstill with a sense in it that is strenuous and noble. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Indian conception of life starts from a deeper centre and
\nmoves on less external lines to a very different objective. The  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\npeculiarity of the Indian eye of thought is that it looks through the form, looks even through the force, and searches for the spirit
\nin things everywhere. The peculiarity of the Indian will in life is that it feels itself to be unfulfilled, not in touch with perfection,
\nnot permanently justified in any intermediate satisfaction if it has not found and does not live in the truth of the spirit. The Indian
\nidea of the world, of Nature and of existence is not physical, but psychological and spiritual. Spirit, soul, consciousness are not
\nonly greater than inert matter and inconscient force, but they precede and originate these lesser things. All force is power or
\nmeans of a secret spirit; the Force that sustains the world is a conscious Will and Nature is its machinery of executive power.
\nMatter is the body or field of a consciousness hidden within it, the material universe a form and movement of the Spirit.
\nMan himself is not a life and mind born of Matter and eternally subject to physical Nature, but a spirit that uses life and body.
\nIt is an understanding faith in this conception of existence, it is the attempt to live it out, it is the science and practice of this
\nhigh endeavour, and it is the aspiration to break out in the end from this mind bound to life and matter into a greater spiritual
\nconsciousness that is the innermost sense of Indian culture. It is this that constitutes the much-talked-of Indian spirituality. It
\nis evidently very remote from the dominant European idea; it is different even from the form given by Europe to the Christian
\nconception of life. But it does not mean at all that Indian culture concedes no reality to life, follows no material or vital aims
\nand satisfactions or cares to do nothing for our actual human existence. It cannot truly be contended that a conception of this
\nkind can give no powerful and inspiring motive to the human effort of man. Certainly, in this view, matter, mind, life, reason,
\nform are only powers of the spirit and valuable not for their
\nown sake, but because of the Spirit within them. Ātmārtham<\/i>, they exist for the sake of the Self, says the Upanishad, and this
\nis certainly the Indian attitude to these things. But that does not depreciate them or deprive them of their value; on the contrary
\nit increases a hundredfold their significance. Form and body immensely increase in importance if they are felt to be instinct
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\nwith the life of the Spirit and are conceived as a support for the rhythm of its workings. And human life was in ancient Indian
\nthought no vile and unworthy existence; it is the greatest thing known to us, it is desired, the Purana boldly says, even by the
\ngods in heaven. The deepening and raising of the richest or the most potent energies of our minds, our hearts, our life-power,
\nour bodies are all means by which the spirit can proceed to self-discovery and the return to its own infinite freedom and power.
\nFor when mind and heart and reason heighten to their greatest lights and powers, they bring embodied life to the point where
\nit can open to a still greater light and power beyond them; the individual mind widens into a vast universal consciousness and
\nlifts towards a high spiritual transcendence. These are at least no sterilising and depressing ideas; they exalt the life of man and
\nmake something like godhead its logical outcome. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe dignity given to human existence by the Vedantic
\nthought and by the thought of the classical ages of Indian culture exceeded anything conceived by the Western idea of humanity.
\nMan in the West has always been only an ephemeral creature of Nature or a soul manufactured at birth by an arbitrary breath
\nof the whimsical Creator and set under impossible conditions to get salvation, but far more likely to be thrown away into the
\nburning refuse-heap of Hell as a hopeless failure. At best he is exalted by a reasoning mind and will and an effort to be better
\nthan God or Nature made him. Far more ennobling, inspiring, filled with the motive-force of a great idea is the conception
\nplaced before us by Indian culture. Man in the Indian idea is a spirit veiled in the works of energy, moving to self-discovery,
\ncapable of Godhead. He is a soul that is growing through Nature to conscious self-hood; he is a divinity and an eternal existence;
\nhe is an ever-flowing wave of the God-ocean, an inextinguishable spark of the supreme Fire. Even, he is in his uttermost reality
\nidentical with the ineffable Transcendence from which he came and greater than the godheads whom he worships. The natural
\nhalf-animal creature that for a while he seems to be is not at all his whole being and is not in any way his real being. His inmost
\nreality is the divine Self or at least one dynamic eternal portion  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\nof it, and to find that and exceed his outward, apparent, natural self is the greatness of which he alone of terrestrial beings is
\ncapable. He has the spiritual capacity to pass to a supreme and extraordinary pitch of manhood and that is the first aim which
\nis proposed to him by Indian culture. Living no more in the first crude type of an undeveloped humanity to which most men
\nstill belong, na yathā prākrto janah<\/i>, he can even become a free
\nperfected semi-divine man, mukta<\/i>, siddha<\/i>. But he can do more;
\nreleased into the cosmic consciousness, his spirit can become one with God, one self with the Spirit of the universe or rise into
\na Light and Vastness that transcends the universe; his nature can become one dynamic power with universal Nature or one Light
\nwith a transcendental Gnosis. To be shut up for ever in his ego is not his ultimate perfection; he can become a universal soul, one
\nwith the supreme Unity, one with others, one with all beings. This is the high sense and power concealed in his humanity that
\nhe can aspire to this perfection and transcendence. And he can arrive at it through any or all of his natural powers if they will
\naccept release, through his mind and reason and thought and their illuminations, through his heart and its unlimited power
\nof love and sympathy, through his will and its dynamic drive towards mastery and right action, through his ethical nature
\nand its hunger for the universal Good, through his aesthetic sense and its seekings after delight and beauty or through his
\ninner soul and its power of absolute spiritual calm, wideness, joy and peace.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis is the sense of that spiritual liberation and perfection of which Indian thought and inner discipline have been full since
\nthe earliest Vedic times. However high and arduous this aim may be, it has always seemed to it possible and even in a way near and
\nnormal, once spiritual realisation has discovered its path. The positivist Western mind finds it difficult to give this conception
\nthe rank of a living and intelligible idea. The status of the siddha<\/i>,
\nbhāgavata<\/i>, mukta <\/i>appears to it a baseless chimera. It seems to its Christian associations a blasphemy against the solitary greatness
\nof God, before whom man is only a grovelling worm, to its fierce attachment to the normal ego a negation of personality
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nand a repellent menace, to its earthbound rationalism a dream, a self-hypnotic hallucination or a deluding mania. And yet in
\nancient Europe the Stoics, Platonists, Pythagoreans had made some approach to this aspiration, and even afterwards, a few
\nrare souls have envisaged or pursued it through occult ways. And now it is again beginning to percolate into the Western
\nimagination, but less as a dynamic life-motive than in poetry and in certain aspects of general thought or through movements
\nlike Theosophy that draw from ancient and oriental sources. Science and philosophy and religion still regard it with scorn as
\nan illusion, with indifference as a dream or with condemnation as a heathen arrogance. It is the distinction of Indian culture to
\nhave seized on this great dynamic hope, to have kept it a living and practicable thing and to have searched out all the possible
\npaths to this spiritual way of perfect existence. Indian thought has made this great thing the common highest aim and universal
\nspiritual destiny of the soul that is in every human creature. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe value of the Indian conception for life must depend on
\nthe relations and gradations by which it connects this difficult and distant perfection with our normal living and present everyday nature. Put over against the latter without any connection or any gradations that lead up to it and make it possible, it
\nwould either be a high unattainable ideal or the detached remote passion of a few exceptional spirits. Or even it would discourage the springs of our natural life by the too great contrast between this spiritual being and our own poor imperfect nature.
\nSomething of the kind has happened in later times; the current Western impression about the exaggerated asceticism and otherworldliness of Indian religion and philosophy is founded on the growing gulf created by a later thought between man’s spiritual
\npossibilities and his terrestrial status. But we must not be misled by extreme tendencies or the overemphasis put upon them in
\na period of decline. If we would get at the real meaning of the Indian idea of life, we must go back to its best times. And we
\nmust not look at this or that school of philosophy or at some side of it as the whole of Indian thought; the totality of the
\nancient philosophical thinking, religion, literature, art, society  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nmust be our ground of enquiry. The Indian conception in its early soundness made no such mistake as to imagine that this great
\nthing can or even ought to be done by some violent, intolerant, immediate leap from one pole of existence to its opposite. Even
\nthe most extreme philosophies do not go so far. The workings of the Spirit in the universe were a reality to one side of the
\nIndian mind, to another only a half reality, a self-descriptive Lila or illusory Maya. To the one the world was an action of the
\nInfinite Energy, Shakti, to the other a figment of some secondary paradoxical consciousness in the Eternal, Maya: but life as an
\nintermediate reality was never denied by any school of Indian thinking. Indian thought recognised that the normal life of man
\nhas to be passed through with a conscientious endeavour to fulfil its purpose: its powers must be developed with knowledge;
\nits forms must be perused, interpreted and fathomed; its values must be worked out, possessed and lived; its enjoyments must
\nbe fully taken on their own level. Only afterwards can we go on to self-existence or a supra-existence. The spiritual perfection
\nwhich opens before man is the crown of a long, patient, millennial outflowering of the spirit in life and nature. This belief
\nin a gradual spiritual progress and evolution here is indeed the secret of the almost universal Indian acceptance of the truth of
\nreincarnation. It is only by millions of lives in inferior forms that the secret soul in the universe, conscious even in the inconscient,
\ncetano acetanesu<\/i>, has arrived at humanity: it is only by hundreds .<\/i>
\nor thousands, perhaps even millions of human lives that man can grow into his divine self-existence. Every life is a step which he
\ncan take backward or forward; his action in life, his will in life, his thought and knowledge by which he governs and directs his
\nlife, determine what he is yet to be from the earliest stages to the  <\/i>
\n \u00b4<\/i> last transcendence. Yathā karma yathā śrutam<\/i>.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis belief in a gradual soul evolution with a final perfection or divine transcendence and human life as its first direct
\nmeans and often repeated opportunity, is the pivot of the Indian conception of existence. This gives to our life the figure of an
\nascent in spirals or circles; and the long period of the ascent has to be filled in with human knowledge and human action
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nand human experience. There is room within it for all terrestrial aims, activities and aspirations; there is place in the ascent for
\nall types of human character and nature. For the spirit in the world assumes hundreds of forms and follows many tendencies
\n  <\/i>  and gives many shapes to his play or līlā<\/i>. All are part of the total
\nmass of our necessary experience; each has its justification, each has its natural or true law and reason of being, each has its utility
\nin the play and the process. The claim of sense satisfaction was not ignored, it was given its just importance. The soul’s need
\nof labour and heroic action was not stifled, it was urged to its fullest action and freest scope. The hundred forms of the pursuit
\nof knowledge were given an absolute freedom of movement; the play of the emotions was allowed, refined, trained till they were
\nfit for the divine levels; the demand of the aesthetic faculties was encouraged in its highest rarest forms and in life’s commonest
\ndetails. Indian culture did not deface nor impoverish the richness of the grand game of human life; it never depressed or mutilated
\nthe activities of our nature. On the contrary, subject to a certain principle of harmony and government, it allowed them their full,
\noften their extreme value. Man was allowed to fathom on his way all experience, to give to his character and action a large rein
\nand heroic proportions, and to fill in life opulently with colour and beauty and enjoyment. This life side of the Indian idea is
\nstamped in strong relief over the epic and the classical literature. It is amazing indeed that anyone with an eye or a brain could
\nhave read the Ramayana, Mahabharata, the dramas, the literary epics, the romances, and the great abundance of gnomic and lyric
\npoetry in Sanskrit and in the later tongues (to say nothing of the massive remains of other cultural work and social and political
\nsystem and speculation), and yet failed to perceive this breadth, wealth and greatness. One must have read without eyes to see
\nor without a mind to understand; most indeed of the adverse critics have not read or studied at all, but only flung about their
\npreconceived notions with a violent or a high-browed ignorant assurance.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut while it is the generous office of culture to enrich, enlarge and encourage human life, it must also give the vital
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nforces a guiding law, subject them to some moral and rational government and lead them beyond their first natural formulations, until it can find for life the clue to a spiritual freedom, perfection and greatness. The preeminent value of the ancient
\nIndian civilisation lay in the power with which it did this work, the profound wisdom and high and subtle skill with which it
\nbased society and ordered the individual life, and encouraged and guided the propensities of human nature and finally turned
\nthem all towards the realisation of its master idea. The mind it was training, while not called away from its immediate aims,
\nwas never allowed to lose sight of the use of life as a discipline for spiritual perfection and a passage to the Infinite.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Indian mind whether in the government of life or in the discipline of spirituality kept always in sight two main truths of
\nour existence. First, our being in its growth has stages through which it must pass: if there are sometimes leaps forward, yet
\nmost of its growth is a developing progression; the swiftest race has its stadia. Then again, life is complex and the nature of
\nman is complex; in each life man has to figure a certain sum of its complexity and put that into some kind of order. But the
\ninitial movement of life is that form of it which develops the powers of the natural ego in man; self-interest and hedonistic
\n <\/i> desire are the original human motives, \u2014 kāma<\/i>, artha<\/i>. Indian
\nculture gave a large recognition to this primary turn of our nature. These powers have to be accepted and put in order; for
\nthe natural ego-life must be lived and the forces it evolves in the human being must be brought to fullness. But this element
\nmust be kept from making any too unbridled claim or heading furiously towards its satisfaction; only so can it get its full results
\nwithout disaster and only so can it be inspired eventually to go beyond itself and turn in the end to a greater spiritual Good
\nand Bliss. An internal or external anarchy cannot be the rule; a life governed in any absolute or excessive degree by self-will,
\npassion, sense-attraction, self-interest and desire cannot be the natural whole of a human or a humane existence. The tempting
\nimagination that it can and that this is the true law is a lure with which the Western mind has played in characteristic leanings
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\nor outbursts; but this turn unjustly called Paganism, \u2014 for the Greek or Pagan intelligence had a noble thought for law and
\nharmony and self-rule, \u2014 is alien to the Indian spirit. India has felt the call of the senses not less than Greece, Rome or modern
\nEurope; she perceived very well the possibility of a materialistic life and its attraction worked on certain minds and gave birth
\nto the philosophy of the Charvakas: but this could not take full hold or establish even for a time any dominant empire. Even if
\nwe can see in it, when lived on a grand scale, a certain perverse greatness, still a colossal egoism indulgent of the sole life of the
\nmind and the senses was regarded by her as the nature of the Asura and Rakshasa. It is the Titanic, gigantic or demoniac type
\nof spirit, permitted in its own plane, but not the proper law for a human life. Another power claims man and overtops desire
\nand self-interest and self-will, the power of the Dharma. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Dharma, at once religious law of action and deepest
\nlaw of our nature, is not, as in the Western idea, a creed, cult or ideal inspiring an ethical and social rule; it is the right law
\nof functioning of our life in all its parts. The tendency of man to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth
\nand its justification in the Dharma. Every thing indeed has its dharma, its law of life imposed on it by its nature; but for man
\nthe dharma is the conscious imposition of a rule of ideal living on all his members. Dharma is fixed in its essence, but still it
\ndevelops in our consciousness and evolves and has its stages; there are gradations of spiritual and ethical ascension in the
\nsearch for the highest law of our nature. All men cannot follow in all things one common and invariable rule. Life is too complex
\nto admit of the arbitrary ideal simplicity which the moralising theorist loves. Natures differ; the position, the work we have to
\ndo has its own claims and standards; the aim and bent, the call of life, the call of the spirit within is not the same for everyone: the
\n <\/i> degree and turn of development and the capacity, adhikara<\/i>, are
\nnot equal. Man lives in society and by society, and every society has its own general dharma, and the individual life must be fitted
\ninto this wider law of movement. But there too the individual’s part in society and his nature and the needs of his capacity and
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\ntemperament vary and have many kinds and degrees: the social law must make some room for this variety and would lose by
\nbeing rigidly one for all. The man of knowledge, the man of power, the productive and acquisitive man, the priest, scholar,
\npoet, artist, ruler, fighter, trader, tiller of the soil, craftsman, labourer, servant cannot usefully have the same training, cannot
\nbe shaped in the same pattern, cannot all follow the same way of living. All ought not to be put under the same tables of the
\nlaw; for that would be a senseless geometric rigidity that would spoil the plastic truth of life. Each has his type of nature and
\nthere must be a rule for the perfection of that type; each has his own proper function and there must be a canon and ideal
\nfor the function. There must be in all things some wise and understanding standard of practice and idea of perfection and
\nliving rule, \u2014 that is the one thing needful for the Dharma. A lawless impulsion of desire and interest and propensity cannot be
\nallowed to lead human conduct; even in the frankest following of desire and interest and propensity there must be a governing and
\nrestraining and directing line, a guidance. There must be an ethic or a science, a restraint as well as a scope arising from the truth
\nof the thing sought, a standard of perfection, an order. Differing with the type of the man and the type of the function these special
\ndharmas would yet rise towards the greater law and truth that contains and overtops the others and is universally effective.
\nThis then was the Dharma, special for the special person, stage of development, pursuit of life or individual field of action, but
\nuniversal too in the broad lines which all ought to pursue. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe universal embracing dharma in the Indian idea is a law
\nof ideal perfection for the developing mind and soul of man; it compels him to grow in the power and force of certain high or
\nlarge universal qualities which in their harmony build a highest type of manhood. In Indian thought and life this was the ideal
\nof the best, the law of the good or noble man, the discipline laid down for the self-perfecting individual,
\nārya<\/i>, śrestha<\/i>,
\nsajjana<\/i>,
\nsādhu<\/i>. This ideal was not a purely moral or ethical conception,
\nalthough that element might predominate; it was also intellectual, religious, social, aesthetic, the flowering of the whole ideal
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 163<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nman, the perfection of the total human nature. The most varied
\nqualities met in the Indian conception of the best, śrestha<\/i>, the  <\/i>
\ngood and noble man, ārya<\/i>. In the heart benevolence, beneficence, love, compassion, altruism, long-suffering, liberality, kindliness,
\npatience; in the character courage, heroism, energy, loyalty, continence, truth, honour, justice, faith, obedience and reverence
\nwhere these were due, but power too to govern and direct, a fine modesty and yet a strong independence and noble pride; in
\nthe mind wisdom and intelligence and love of learning, knowledge of all the best thought, an openness to poetry, art and
\nbeauty, an educated capacity and skill in works; in the inner being a strong religious sense, piety, love of God, seeking after
\nthe Highest, the spiritual turn; in social relations and conduct a strict observance of all the social dharmas, as father, son,
\nhusband, brother, kinsman, friend, ruler or subject, master or servant, priest or warrior or worker, king or sage, member of
\nclan or caste: this was the total ideal of the Arya, the man of high upbringing and noble nature. The ideal is clearly portrayed in
\nthe written records of ancient India during two millenniums and it is the very life-breath of Hindu ethics. It was the creation of an
\nat once ideal and rational mind, spirit-wise and worldly-wise, deeply religious, nobly ethical, firmly yet flexibly intellectual,
\nscientific and aesthetic, patient and tolerant of life’s difficulties and human weakness, but arduous in self-discipline. This was
\nthe mind that was at the base of the Indian civilisation and gave its characteristic stamp to all the culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut even this was only the foundation and preparation for another highest thing which by its presence exalts human life
\nbeyond itself into something spiritual and divine. Indian culture raised the crude animal life of desire, self-interest and satisfied
\npropensity beyond its first intention to a noble self-exceeding and shapeliness by infusing into it the order and high aims of
\nthe Dharma. But its profounder characteristic aim \u2014 and in this it was unique
\n\u2014 was to raise this nobler life too of the self-perfecting human being beyond its own intention to a mightiest self-exceeding and freedom; it laboured to infuse into it the
\ngreat aim of spiritual liberation and perfection, mukti<\/i>, moksa<\/i>.
\n.<\/i>
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 164<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nThe Law and its observance are neither the beginning nor the end of man; there is beyond the field of the Law a larger realm
\nof consciousness in which, climbing, he emerges into a great spiritual freedom. Not a noble but ever death-bound manhood
\nis the highest height of man’s perfection: immortality, freedom, divinity are within his grasp. Ancient Indian culture held this
\nhighest aim constantly before the inner eye of the soul and insistently inspired with its prospect and light the whole conception
\nof existence. The entire life of the individual was ennobled by this aim; the whole ordering of society was cast into a scale of
\ngraduated ascension towards this supreme summit. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA well-governed system of the individual and communal
\nexistence must be always in the first instance an ordering of the three first powers recognised by Indian thought. The claim of
\nthe natural functionings must be recognised in it to the full; the pursuit of personal and communal interest and the satisfaction
\nof human desires as of human needs must be amply admitted and there must be an understanding combination of knowledge and
\nlabour towards these ends. But all must be controlled, uplifted and widened to greater aims by the ideal of the Dharma. And
\nif, as India believes, there is a higher spiritual consciousness towards which man can rise, that ascent must be kept throughout in view as the supreme goal of life. The system of Indian culture at once indulged and controlled man’s nature; it fitted
\nhim for his social role; it stamped on his mind the generous ideal of an accomplished humanity refined, harmonised in all
\nits capacities, ennobled in all its members; but it placed before him too the theory and practice of a highest change, familiarised
\nhim with the conception of a spiritual existence and sowed in him a hunger for the divine and the infinite. The symbols of
\nhis religion were filled with suggestions which led towards it; at every step he was reminded of lives behind and in front
\nand of worlds beyond the material existence; he was brought close to the nearness, even to the call and pressure of the Spirit
\nwho is greater than the life it informs, of the final goal, of a high possible immortality, freedom, God-consciousness, divine
\nNature. Man was not allowed to forget that he had in him a   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 165<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nhighest self beyond his little personal ego and that always he and all things live, move and have their being in God, in the
\nEternal, in the Spirit. There were ways and disciplines provided in number by which he could realise this liberating truth or
\ncould at least turn and follow at a distance this highest aim  <\/i>
\naccording to his capacity and nature, adhikara<\/i>. Around him he saw and revered the powerful practicants and the mighty
\nmasters of these disciplines. These men were in early times the teachers of his youth, the summits of his society, the inspirers
\nand fountain-heads of his civilisation, the great lights of his culture. Spiritual freedom, spiritual perfection were not figured
\nas a far-off intangible ideal, but presented as the highest human aim towards which all must grow in the end, and were made
\nnear and possible to his endeavour from a first practicable basis of life and the Dharma. The spiritual idea governed, enlightened
\nand gathered towards itself all the other life-motives of a great civilised people.
\n  
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 166<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nA Rationalistic Critic on
\n<\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nIndian Culture \u00ad 6 <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nT<\/font>HESE<\/b> are the principal lines upon which the structure of Indian civilisation was founded and they constitute the
\npower of its conception of life. I do not think it can be said that there is here any inferiority to other human cultures or
\nto any established conception of life that has ever held sway over the mind of man in historic times. There is nothing here that can
\nbe said to discourage life and its flowering or to deprive it of impetus and elevation and a great motive. On the contrary there
\nis a full and frank recognition and examination of the whole of human existence in all its variety and range and power, there
\nis a clear and wise and noble idea for its right government and there is an ideal tendency pointing it upward and a magnificent
\ncall to a highest possible perfection and greatness. These are the serious uses of culture, these are the things that raise the life of
\nman above a crude, primitive barbarism. If a civilisation is to be judged by the power of its ideas, their power for these great
\nuses, Indian civilisation was inferior to none. Certainly, it was not perfect or final or complete; for that can be alleged of no past
\nor present cultural idea or system. Man is in his inmost self an infinite being, in his mind and life too he is continually growing,
\nwith whatever stumblings and long relapses, and he cannot be permanently bound in any one system of ideas or frame of living.
\nThe structures in which he lives are incomplete and provisional; even those which seem the most comprehensive lose their force
\nto stand and are convicted by time of insufficiency and must be replaced or change. But this at least can be said of the Indian idea
\nthat it seized with a remarkable depth and comprehensiveness on the main truths and needs of the whole human being, on his
\nmind and life and body, his artistic and ethical and intellectual   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 167<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nparts of nature, his soul and spirit, and gave them a subtle and liberal, a profoundly large and high and wise, a sympathetic and
\nyet nobly arduous direction. More cannot be said for any past or any existing culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut there must be in any culture aiming at completeness, not only great and noble governing and inspiring ideas, but a
\nharmony of forms and rhythms, a mould into which the ideas and the life can run and settle. Here we must be prepared for
\na lesser perfection, a greater incompleteness. And the reason is that just as the spirit is vaster than its ideas, the ideas too
\nare larger than their forms, moulds and rhythms. Form has a certain fixity which limits; no form can exhaust or fully express
\nthe potentialities of the idea or force that gave it birth. Neither can any idea, however great, or any limited play of force or
\nform bind the infinite spirit: that is the secret of earth’s need of mutation and progress. The idea is only a partial expression
\nof the spirit. Even within its own limits, on its own lines it ought always to become more supple, to fill itself out with other
\nviews, to rise and broaden to new applications, and often it has to lose itself in uplifting transformations of its own meaning
\ninto vaster significances or fuse itself into new and richer syntheses. In the history of all great cultures therefore we find a
\npassage through three periods, for this passage is a necessary consequence of this truth of things. There is a first period of
\nlarge and loose formation; there is a second period in which we see a fixing of forms, moulds and rhythms; and there is a closing
\nor a critical period of superannuation, decay and disintegration. This last stage is the supreme crisis in the life of a civilisation;
\nif it cannot transform itself, it enters into a slow lingering decline or else collapses in a death agony brought about by the
\nrapid impact of stronger and more immediately living though not necessarily greater or truer powers or formations. But if
\nit is able to shake itself free of limiting forms, to renovate its ideas and to give a new scope to its spirit, if it is willing to
\nunderstand, master and assimilate novel growths and necessities, then there is a rebirth, a fresh lease of life and expansion, a true
\nrenascence.  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 168<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nIndian civilisation passed in its own large and leisurely manner through all these stages. Its first period was that of a great
\nspiritual outflowering in which the forms were supple, flexible and freely responsive to its essential spirit. That fluid movement
\npassed away into an age of strong intellectuality in which all was fixed into distinct, sufficiently complex, but largely treated and
\nstill supple forms and rhythms. There came as a consequence a period of richly crystallised fixity shaken by crises which were
\npartly met by a change of ideas and a modification of forms. But the hard binding of set forms triumphed at last and there
\nwas a decline of the inspiring spirit, a stagnation of living force, a progressive decay of the outward structure. This decay was
\naccompanied and at once arrested for a moment and hastened in the end by the impact of other cultures. Today we are in the midst
\nof a violent and decisive crisis brought about by the inflooding of the West and of all for which it stands. An upheaval resulted
\nthat began with the threat of a total death and irretrievable destruction of the culture; but its course is now uplifted on the
\ncontrary by the strong hope of a great revival, transmutation and renascence. Each of these three stages has its special significance
\nfor the student of culture. If we would understand the essential spirit of Indian civilisation, we must go back to its first formative period, the early epoch of the Veda and the Upanishads, its heroic creative seed-time. If we would study the fixed forms
\nof its spirit and discern the thing it eventually realised as the basic rhythm of its life, we must look with an observing eye at
\nthe later middle period of the Shastras and the classic writings, the age of philosophy and science, legislation and political and
\nsocial theory and many-sided critical thought, religious fixation, art, sculpture, painting, architecture. If we would discover the
\nlimitations, the points at which it stopped short and failed to develop its whole or its true spirit, we must observe closely the
\nunhappy disclosures of its period of decline. If, finally, we would discover the directions it is likely to follow in its transformation,
\nwe must try to fathom what lies beneath the still confused movements of its crisis of renascence. None of these can indeed be cut
\nclean apart from each other; for what developed in one period   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 169<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nis already forecast and begun in the preceding age: but still on a certain large and imprecise scale we can make these distinctions
\nand they are necessary for a discerning analytic view. But at present we are only concerned with the developed forms and
\nthe principal rhythms which persisted through its greater eras. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe problem which Indian culture had to solve was that of a
\nfirm outward basis on which to found the practical development of its spirit and its idea in life. How are we to take the natural
\nlife of man and, while allowing it sufficient scope and variety and freedom, yet to subject it to a law, canon, dharma, a law
\nof function, a law of type, a law of each actual unideal human tendency and a law too of highest ideal intention? And how
\nagain are we to point that dharma towards its own exceeding by the fulfilment and cessation of its disciplinary purpose in
\nthe secure freedom of the spiritual life? Indian culture from an early stage seized upon a double idea for its own guidance
\nwhich it threw into a basic system of the individual life in the social frame. This was the double system of the four Varnas
\nand the four Asramas, \u2014 four graded classes of society and four successive stages of a developing human life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe ancient Chaturvarnya must not be judged by its later disintegrated degeneration and gross meaningless parody, the
\ncaste system. But neither was it precisely the system of the classes which we find in other civilisations, priesthood, nobility, merchant class and serfs or labourers. It may have had outwardly the same starting-point, but it was given a very different revealing significance. The ancient Indian idea was that man falls by his nature into four types. There are, first and highest, the
\nman of learning and thought and knowledge; next, the man of power and action, ruler, warrior, leader, administrator; third in
\nthe scale, the economic man, producer and wealth-getter, the merchant, artisan, cultivator: these were the twice-born, who
\nreceived the initiation, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya. Last came the more undeveloped human type, not yet fit for these steps of
\nthe scale, unintellectual, without force, incapable of creation or intelligent production, the man fit only for unskilled labour and
\nmenial service, the Shudra. The economic order of society was  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 170<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncast in the form and gradation of these four types. The Brahmin class was called upon to give the community its priests, thinkers,
\nmen of letters, legists, scholars, religious leaders and guides. The Kshatriya class gave it its kings, warriors, governors and administrators. The Vaishya order supplied it with its producers, agriculturists, craftsmen, artisans, merchants and traders. The
\nShudra class ministered to its need of menials and servants. As far as this went, there was nothing peculiar in the system except
\nits extraordinary durability and, perhaps, the supreme position given to religion, thought and learning, not only at the top of
\nthe scale, \u2014 for that can be paralleled from one or two other civilisations, \u2014 but as the dominant power. The Indian idea in
\nits purity fixed the status of a man in this order not by his birth, but by his capacities and his inner nature, and, if this rule
\nhad been strictly observed, that would have been a very clear mark of distinctness, a superiority of a unique kind. But even
\nthe best society is always something of a machine and gravitates towards the material sign and standard, and to found truly the
\nsocial order upon this finer psychological basis would have been in those times a difficult and vain endeavour. In practice we find
\nthat birth became the basis of the Varna. It is elsewhere that we must look for the strong distinguishing mark which has made
\nof this social structure a thing apart and sole in its type. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAt no time indeed was the adherence to the economic rule
\nquite absolute. The early ages show a considerable flexibility which was not quite lost in the process of complex crystallisation into a fixed form. And even in the greater rigidity of the latter-day caste system there has been in practice a confusion
\nof economic functions. The vitality of a vigorous community cannot obey at every point the indications of a pattern and
\ntradition cut by the mechanising mind. Moreover there was always a difference between the ideal theory of the system and
\nits rougher unideal practice. For the material side of an idea or system has always its weaknesses even in its best times, and
\nthe final defect of all systems of this kind is that they stiffen into a fixed hierarchy which cannot maintain permanently its
\npurity or the utility it was meant to serve. It becomes a soulless   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 171<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nform and prolongs itself in a state of corruption, degeneracy or oppressive formalism when the uses that justified it are no
\nlonger in existence. Even when its ways can no longer be made consistent with the developing needs of the growth of humanity,
\nthe formal system persists and corrupts the truth of life and blocks progress. Indian society did not escape this general law;
\nit was overtaken by these deficiencies, lost the true sense of the thing which it set out to embody and degenerated into a chaos of
\ncastes, developing evils which we are now much embarrassed to eliminate. But it was a well-devised and necessary scheme in its
\ntime; it gave the community the firm and nobly built stability it needed for the security of its cultural development,
\n\u2014 a stability
\nhardly paralleled in any other culture. And, as interpreted by the Indian genius, it became a greater thing than a mere outward
\neconomic, political and social mechanism intended to serve the needs and convenience of the collective life.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nFor the real greatness of the Indian system of the four varnas did not lie in its well-ordered division of economic function;
\nits true originality and permanent value was in the ethical and spiritual content which the thinkers and builders of the society
\npoured into these forms. This inner content started with the idea that the intellectual, ethical and spiritual growth of the
\nindividual is the central need of the race. Society itself is only the necessary framework for this growth; it is a system of relations
\nwhich provides it with its needed medium, field and conditions and with a nexus of helpful influences. A secure place had to
\nbe found in the community for the individual man from which he could at once serve these relations, helping to maintain the
\nsociety and pay it his debt of duty and assistance, and proceed to his own self-development with the best possible aid from the
\ncommunal life. Birth was accepted in practice as the first gross and natural indicator; for heredity to the Indian mind has always
\nranked as a factor of the highest importance: it was even taken in later thought as a sign of the nature and as an index to the
\nsurroundings which the individual had prepared for himself by his past soul-development in former existences. But birth is not
\nand cannot be the sole test of Varna. The intellectual capacity  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nof the man, the turn of his temperament, his ethical nature, his spiritual stature, these are the important factors. There was
\nerected therefore a rule of family living, a system of individual observance and self-training, a force of upbringing and education which would bring out and formulate these essential things. The individual man was carefully trained in the capacities, habits
\nand attainments, and habituated to the sense of honour and duty necessary for the discharge of his allotted function in life. He was
\nscrupulously equipped with the science of the thing he had to do, the best way to succeed in it as an interest,
\nartha<\/i>, and to
\nattain to the highest rule, canon and recognised perfection of its activities, economic, political, sacerdotal, literary, scholastic or
\nwhatever else they might be. Even the most despised pursuits had their education, their law and canon, their ambition of success,
\ntheir sense of honour in the discharge and scruple of well-doing, their dignity of a fixed standard of perfection, and it was because
\nthey had these things that even the lowest and least attractive could be in a certain degree a means of self-finding and ordered
\nself-satisfaction. In addition to this special function and training there were the general accomplishments, sciences, arts, graces of
\nlife, those which satisfy the intellectual, aesthetic and hedonistic powers of human nature. These in ancient India were many
\nand various, were taught with minuteness, thoroughness and subtlety and were available to all men of culture.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut while there was provision for all these things and it was made with a vivid liberality of the life-spirit and a noble sense
\nof order, the spirit of Indian culture did not, like other ancient cultures, stop here. It said to the individual: “This is only the
\nsubstructure; it is of a pressing importance indeed, but still not the last and greatest thing. When you have paid your debt to
\nsociety, filled well and admirably your place in its life, helped its maintenance and continuity and taken from it your legitimate
\nand desired satisfactions, there still remains the greatest thing of all. There is still your own self, the inner you, the soul which
\nis a spiritual portion of the Infinite, one in its essence with the Eternal. This self, this soul in you you have to find, you are here
\nfor that, and it is from the place I have provided for you in life   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 173<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nand by this training that you can begin to find it. For to each Varna I have supplied its highest ideal of manhood, the highest
\nideal way of which your nature is capable. By directing your life and nature in its own law of being towards that perfection, you
\ncan not only grow towards the ideal and enter into harmony with universal nature but come also into nearness and contact with
\na greater nature of divinity and move towards transcendence. That is the real object before you. From the life-basis I give you
\nyou can rise to the liberating knowledge which brings a spiritual release,
\nmoksa<\/i>. Then you can grow out of all these limitations in
\n.<\/i> which you are being trained; you can grow through the fulfilled
\nDharma and beyond it into the eternity of your self, into the fullness, freedom, greatness and bliss of the immortal spirit; for
\nthat is what each man is behind the veils of his nature. When you have done that you are free. Then you have gone beyond all the
\ndharmas; you are then a universal soul, one with all existence, and you can either act in that divine liberty for the good of all
\nliving things or else turn to enjoy in solitude the bliss of eternity and transcendence.” The whole system of society, founded on
\nthe four varnas, was made a harmonious means for the elevation and progress of the soul, mind and life from the natural pursuit
\nof interest and desire first to the perfection of the law of our being, Dharma, and at the end to a highest spiritual freedom.
\nFor man’s true end in life must be always this realisation of his own immortal self, this entry in its secret of an infinite and
\neternal existence. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe Indian system did not entirely leave this difficult growth
\nto the individual’s unaided inner initiative. It supplied him with a framework; it gave him a scale and gradation for his life which
\ncould be made into a kind of ladder rising in that sense. This high convenience was the object of the four Asramas. Life was
\ndivided into four natural periods and each of them marked out a stage in the working out of this cultural idea of living. There
\nwas the period of the student, the period of the householder, the period of the recluse or forest-dweller, the period of the
\nfree supersocial man, parivrājaka<\/i>. The student life was framed
\nto lay the groundwork of what the man had to know, do and  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nbe. It gave a thorough training in the necessary arts, sciences, branches of knowledge, but it was still more insistent on the
\ndiscipline of the ethical nature and in earlier days contained as an indispensable factor a grounding in the Vedic formula
\nof spiritual knowledge. In these earlier days this training was given in suitable surroundings far away from the life of cities
\nand the teacher was one who had himself passed through the round of this circle of living and, very usually, even, one who
\nhad arrived at some remarkable realisation of spiritual knowledge. But subsequently education became more intellectual and
\nmundane; it was imparted in cities and universities and aimed less at an inner preparation of character and knowledge and
\nmore at instruction and the training of the intelligence. But in the beginning the Aryan man was really prepared in some degree
\n <\/i> for the four great objects of his life, artha<\/i>, kāma<\/i>, dharma<\/i>,
\nmoksa<\/i>.
\nEntering into the householder stage to live out his knowledge,
\nhe was able to serve there the three first human objects; he satisfied his natural being and its interests and desire to take the
\njoy of life, he paid his debt to the society and its demands and by the way he discharged his life functions he prepared himself
\nfor the last greatest purpose of his existence. In the third stage he retired to the forest and worked out in a certain seclusion
\nthe truth of his spirit. He lived in a broad freedom from the stricter social bonds; but if he so willed, gathering the young
\naround him or receiving the inquirer and seeker, he could leave his knowledge to the new rising generation as an educator or a
\nspiritual teacher. In the last stage of life he was free to throw off every remaining tie and to wander over the world in an extreme
\nspiritual detachment from all the forms of social life, satisfying only the barest necessities, communing with the universal spirit,
\nmaking his soul ready for eternity. This circle was not obligatory on all. The great majority never went beyond the two first stages;
\n <\/i> many passed away in the vānaprastha <\/i>or forest stage. Only the
\nrare few made the last extreme venture and took the life of the wandering recluse. But this profoundly conceived cycle gave a
\nscheme which kept the full course of the human spirit in its view; it could be taken advantage of by all according to their
\n   <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nactual growth and in its fullness by those who were sufficiently developed in their present birth to complete the circle.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOn this first firm and noble basis Indian civilisation grew to its maturity and became a thing rich, splendid and unique. While
\nit filled the view with the last mountain prospect of a supreme spiritual elevation, it did not neglect the life of the levels. It
\nlived between the busy life of the city and village, the freedom and seclusion of the forest and the last overarching illimitable
\nether. Moving firmly between life and death it saw beyond both and cut out a hundred high-roads to immortality. It developed
\nthe external nature and drew it into the inner self; it enriched life to raise it into the spirit. Thus founded, thus trained, the
\nancient Indian race grew to astonishing heights of culture and civilisation; it lived with a noble, well-based, ample and vigorous
\norder and freedom; it developed a great literature, sciences, arts, crafts, industries; it rose to the highest possible ideals and no
\nmean practice of knowledge and culture, of arduous greatness and heroism, of kindness, philanthropy and human sympathy
\nand oneness; it laid the inspired basis of wonderful spiritual philosophies; it examined the secrets of external nature and discovered and lived the boundless and miraculous truths of the inner being; it fathomed self and understood and possessed the
\nworld. As the civilisation grew in richness and complexity, it lost indeed the first grand simplicity of its early order. The intellect
\ntowered and widened, but intuition waned or retreated into the hearts of the saints and adepts and mystics. A greater stress came
\nto be laid on scientific system, accuracy and order, not only in all the things of the life and mind, but even in the things of the
\nspirit; the free flood of intuitive knowledge was forced to run in hewn channels. Society became more artificial and complex, less
\nfree and noble; more of a bond on the individual, it was less a field for the growth of his spiritual faculties. The old fine integral
\nharmony gave place to an exaggerated stress on one or other of
\nits elemental factors. Artha <\/i>and kāma<\/i>, interest and desire were in some directions developed at the expense of the
\ndharma<\/i>. The
\nlines of the dharma were filled and stamped in with so rigid a distinctness as to stand in the way of the freedom of the spirit.
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\nSpiritual liberation was pursued in hostility to life and not as its full-orbed result and high crowning. But still some strong basis
\nof the old knowledge remained to inspire, to harmonise, to keep alive the soul of India. Even when deterioration came and a slow
\ncollapse, even when the life of the community degenerated into an uneasily petrified ignorance and confusion, the old spiritual
\naim and tradition remained to sweeten and humanise and save in its worst days the Indian peoples. For we see that it continually swept back on the race in new waves and high outbursts of life-giving energy or leaped up in intense kindlings of the
\nspiritualised mind or heart, even as it now rises once more in all its strength to give the impulse of a great renascence.
\n  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 177<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Defence of Indian Culture         I   A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture   WHEN we try to appreciate a culture,…<\/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-2929","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\/2929","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=2929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}