{"id":3241,"date":"2013-07-13T01:46:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3241"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:46:53","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:46:53","slug":"20-indian-literature-vol-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/02-other-editions\/the-foundations-of-indian-culture\/20-indian-literature-vol-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","title":{"rendered":"-20_Indian Literature.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER X <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nINDIAN LITERATURE <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> arts which appeal to the soul through the eye are able
\nto arrive at a peculiarly concentrated expression of the spirit,
\nthe aesthesis and the creative mind of a people, but it is in its
\nliterature that we must seek for its most flexible and many-sided self-expression, for it is the word used in all its power
\nof clear figure or its threads of suggestion that carries to us
\nmost subtly and variably the shades and turns and teeming
\nsignificances of the inner self in its manifestation. The greatness of a literature lies first in the greatness and worth of its
\nsubstance, the value of its thought and the beauty of its forms,
\nbut also in the degree to which, satisfying the highest conditions of the art of speech, it avails to bring out and raise the
\nsoul and life or the living and the ideal mind of a people, an
\nage, a culture, through the genius of some of its greatest or most
\nsensitive representative spirits. And if we ask what in both
\nthese respects is the achievement of the Indian mind as it
\nhas come down to us in the Sanskrit and other literatures, we
\nmight surely say that here at least there is little room for any
\njust depreciation and denial even by a mind the most disposed to quarrel with the effect on life and the character of
\nthe culture. The ancient and classical creations of the Sanskrit tongue both in quality and in body and abundance of
\nexcellence, in their potent originality and force and beauty,
\nin their substance and art and structure, in grandeur and
\njustice and charm of speech and in the height and width of
\nthe reach of their spirit stand very evidently in the front rank
\namong the world’s great literatures. The language itself, as <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-292<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nhas been universally recognised by those competent to form
\na judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect
\nand wonderfully sufficient literary instruments developed by
\nthe human mind, at once majestic and sweet and flexible, strong
\nand clearly-formed and full and vibrant and subtle, and its
\nquality and character would be of itself a sufficient evidence
\nof the character and quality of the race whose mind it expressed
\nand the culture of which it was the reflecting medium. The
\ngreat and noble use made of it by poet and thinker did not fall
\nbelow the splendour of its capacities. Nor is it in the Sanskrit
\ntongue alone that the Indian mind has done high and beautiful
\nand perfect things, though it couched in that language the
\nlarger part of its most prominent and formative and grandest
\ncreations. It would be necessary for a complete estimate to
\ntake into account as well the Buddhistic literature in Pali
\nand the poetic literatures, here opulent, there more scanty in
\nproduction, of about a dozen Sanskritic and Dravidian tongues.
\nThe whole has almost a continental effect and does not fall
\nso far short in the quantity of its really lasting things and equals
\nin its things of best excellence the work of ancient and mediaeval and modem Europe. The people and the civilisation
\nthat count among their great works and their great names the
\nVeda and the Upanishads, the mighty structures of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti and
\nBhartrihari and Jayadeva and the other rich creations of
\nclassical Indian drama and poetry and romance, the Dhammapada and the Jatakas, the Panchatantra, Tulsidas, Vidyapati
\nand Chandidas and Ramprasad, Ramdas and Tukaram, Tiruvalluvar and Kamban and the songs of Nanak and Kabir and
\nMirabai and the southern Shaiva saints and the Alwars,\u2014to
\nname only the best-known writers and most characteristic
\nproductions, though there is a very large body of other work
\nin the different tongues of both the first and the second excellence,\u2014must surely be counted among the greatest civilisations and the world’s most developed and creative peoples. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-293<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nA mental activity so great and of so fine a quality commencing
\nmore than three thousand years ago and still not exhausted
\nis unique and the best and most undeniable witness to something
\nextraordinarily sound and vital in the culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nA criticism that ignores or belittles the significance of
\nthis unsurpassed record and this splendour of the self-expressing spirit and the creative intelligence, stands convicted at
\nonce of a blind malignity or an invincible prejudice and does
\nnot merit refutation. It would be a sheer waste of time and
\nenergy to review the objections raised by our devil’s advocate :for nothing vital to the greatness of a literature is really in
\ndispute and there is only to the credit of the attack a general
\ndistortion and denunciation and a laborious and exaggerated
\ncavilling at details and idiosyncracies which at most show
\na difference between the idealising mind and abundant
\nimagination of India and the more realistically observant
\nmind and less rich and exuberant imagination of Europe.
\nThe fit parallel to this motive and style of criticism would
\nbe if an Indian critic who had read European literature
\nonly in bad or ineffective. Indian translations, were to
\npass it under a hostile and disparaging review, dismiss
\nthe Iliad as a crude and empty semi-savage and primitive
\nepos, Dante’s great work as the nightmare of a cruel and
\nsuperstitious religious fantasy, Shakespeare as a drunken
\nbarbarian of considerable genius with an epileptic imagination,
\nthe whole drama of Greece and Spain and England as a mass
\nof bad ethics and violent horrors, French poetry as a succession of bald or tawdry rhetorical exercises and French fiction
\nas a tainted and immoral thing, a long sacrifice on the altar
\nof the goddess Lubricity, admit here and there a minor merit,
\nbut make no attempt at all to understand the central spirit or
\naesthetic quality or principle of structure and conclude on
\nthe strength of his own absurd method that the ideals of both
\nPagan and Christian Europe were altogether false and bad and
\nits imagination afflicted with a "habitual and ancestral" earthiness <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-294<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmorbidity, poverty and disorder. No criticism would
\nbe worth making on such a mass of absurdities, and in this
\nequally ridiculous philippic only a stray observation or two
\nless inconsequent and opaque than the others perhaps demands
\na passing notice. But although these futilities do not at all
\nrepresent the genuine view of the general European mind on
\nthe subject of Indian poetry and literature, still one finds a
\nfrequent inability to appreciate the spirit or the form or the
\naesthetic value of Indian writing and especially its perfection
\nand power as an expression of the cultural mind of the people.
\nOne meets such criticisms even from sympathetic critics as an
\nadmission of the vigour, colour and splendour of Indian poetry
\nfollowed by a conclusion that for all that it does not satisfy, and
\nthis means that the intellectual and temperamental misunderstanding extends to some degree even to this field of creation
\nwhere different minds meet more readily than in painting
\nand sculpture, that there is a rift between the two mentalities
\nand what is delightful and packed with meaning and power
\nto the one has no substance, but only a form, of aesthetic or
\nintellectual pleasure for the other. This difficulty is partly due
\nto an inability to enter into the living spirit and feel the vital
\ntouch of the language, but partly to a spiritual difference in
\nsimilarity which is even more baffling than a complete dissimilarity and otherness. Chinese poetry for example is altogether
\nof its own kind and it is more possible for a western mentality,
\nwhen it does not altogether pass it by as an alien world, to
\ndevelop an undisturbed appreciation because the receptivity
\nof the mind is not checked or hampered by any disturbing
\nmemories or comparisons. Indian poetry on the contrary,
\nlike the poetry of Europe, is the creation of an Aryan or Aryanised national mind, starts apparently from similar motives,
\nmoves on the same plane, uses cognate forms, and yet has
\nsomething quite different in its spirit which creates a pronounced and separating divergence in its aesthetic tones,
\ntype of imagination, turn of self-expression, ideative mind, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-295<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmethod, form, structure. The mind accustomed to the European idea and technique expects the same kind of satisfaction here and does not meet it, feels a baffling difference to
\nwhose secret it is a stranger, and the subtly pursuing comparison and vain expectation stand in the way of a full receptivity and intimate understanding. At bottom it is an insufficient comprehension of the quite different spirit behind, the
\ndifferent heart of this culture that produces the mingled
\nattraction and dissatisfaction. The subject is too large to be
\ndealt with adequately in small limits : I shall only attempt
\nto bring out certain points by a consideration of some of the
\nmost representative master works of creative intuition and
\nimagination taken as a record of the soul and mind of the
\nIndian people. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe early mind of India in the magnificent youth of the
\nnation, when a fathomless spiritual insight was at work, a
\nsubtle intuitive vision and a deep, clear and greatly outlined
\nintellectual and ethical thinking and heroic action and creation
\nwhich founded and traced the plan and made the permanent
\nstructure of her unique culture and civilisation, is represented
\nby four of the supreme productions of her genius, the Veda,
\nthe Upanishads and the two vast epics, and each of them is
\nof a kind, a form and an intention not easily parallelled in any
\nother literature. The two first are the visible foundation of
\nher spiritual and religious being, the others a large creative
\ninterpretation of her greatest period of life, of the ideas that
\ninformed and the ideals that governed it and the figures in which
\nshe saw man and Nature and God and the powers of the universe. The Veda gave us the first types and figures of these
\nthings as seen and formed by an imaged spiritual intuition and
\npsychological and religious experience, the Upanishads constantly breaking through and beyond form and symbol and image
\nwithout entirely abandoning them, since always they come in
\nas accompaniment or undertone, reveal in a unique kind of
\npoetry the ultimate and unsurpassable truths of self and God  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-296<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand man and the world and its principles and powers in their
\nmost essential, their profoundest and most intimate and their
\nmost ample realities,\u2014highest mysteries and clarities vividly
\nseen in an irresistible, an unwalled perception that has got
\nthrough the intuitive and psychological to the sheer spiritual
\nvision. And after that we have powerful and beautiful developments of the intellect and the life and of ideal, ethical, aesthetic,
\npsychic, emotional and sensuous and physical knowledge
\nand idea and vision and experience of which the epics are the
\nearly record and the rest of the literature the continuation; but
\nthe foundation remains the same throughout, and whatever
\nnew and often larger types and significant figures replace the
\nold or intervene to add and modify and alter the whole ensemble,
\nare in their essential build and character transmutations and
\nextensions of the original vision and first spiritual experience
\nand never an unconnected departure. There is a persistence,
\na continuity of the Indian mind in its literary creation in spite
\nof great changes as consistent as that which we find in painting
\nand sculpture. . <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Veda is the creation of an early intuitive and symbolical mentality to which the later mind of man, strongly
\nintellectualised and governed on the one side by reasoning
\nidea and abstract conception, on the other hand by the facts
\nof life and matter accepted as they present themselves to the
\nsenses and positive intelligence without seeking in them for
\nany divine or mystic significance, indulging the imagination
\nas a play of the aesthetic fancy rather than as an opener of the
\ndoors of truth and only trusting to its suggestions when they
\nare confirmed by the logical reason or by physical experience,
\naware only of carefully intellectualised intuitions and recalcitrant
\nfor the most part to any others, has grown a total stranger. It
\nis not surprising therefore that the Veda should have become
\nunintelligible to our minds except in its most outward shell
\nof language, and that even very imperfectly known owing to
\nthe obstacle of an antique and ill-understood diction, and that <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-297<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe most inadequate interpretations should be made which
\nreduce this great creation of the young and splendid mind of
\nhumanity to a botched and defaced scrawl, an incoherent hotchpotch of the absurdities of a primitive imagination perplexing
\nwhat would be otherwise the quite plain, flat and common record of a naturalistic religion which mirrored only and could
\nonly minister to the crude and materialistic desires of a barbaric
\nlife-mind. The Veda became to the later scholastic and ritualistic
\nidea of Indian priests and pundits nothing better than a book
\nof mythology and sacrificial ceremonies, European scholars
\nseeking in it for what was alone to them of any rational interest,
\nthe history, myths and popular religious notions of a primitive
\npeople, have done yet worse wrong to the Veda and by insisting
\non a wholly external rendering still farther stripped it of its
\nspiritual interest and its poetic greatness and beauty. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut this was not what it was to the Vedic Rishis themselves
\nor to the great seers and thinkers who came after them and developed out of their pregnant and luminous intuitions their
\nown wonderful structures of thought and speech built upon
\nan unexampled spiritual revelation and experience. The Veda
\nwas to these early seers the Word discovering the Truth and
\nclothing in image and symbol the mystic significances of life.
\nIt was a divine discovery and unveiling of the potencies of the
\nword, of its mysterious revealing and creative capacity, not
\nthe word of the logical and reasoning or the aesthetic intelligence, but the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance, the
\nmantra.<\/i> Image and myth were freely used, not as an imaginative indulgence, but as living parables and symbols of things
\nthat were very real to their speakers and could not otherwise
\nfind their own intimate and native shape in utterance, and the
\nimagination itself was a priest of greater realities than those
\nthat meet and hold the eye and mind limited by the external
\nsuggestions of life and the physical existence. This was their
\nidea of the sacred poet,\u2014a mind visited by some highest
\nlight and its forms of idea and word, a seer and hearer of the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-298<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nTruth kavayah satyaśrutayah.<\/i> The poets of the Vedic verse
\ncertainly did not regard their function as it is represented by
\nmodem scholars, they did not look on themselves as a sort
\nof superior medicine-men and makers of hymn and incantation
\nto a robust and barbarous tribe, but as seers and thinkers,
\nrsi, dhīra.<\/i> These singers believed that they were in possession
\nof a high, mystic and hidden truth, claimed to be the bearers
\nof a speech acceptable to a divine knowledge, and expressly so
\nspeak of their utterances, as secret words which declare their
\nwhole significance only to the seer, kavaye nivacanāni ninyā
\nvacāmsi.<\/i> And to those who came after them the Veda was a
\nbook of knowledge, and even of the supreme knowledge, a
\nrevelation, a great utterance of eternal and impersonal truth
\nas it had been seen and heard in the inner experience of inspired
\nand semi-divine thinkers. The smallest circumstances of the
\nsacrifice around which the hymns were written were intended
\nto carry a symbolic and psychological power of significance,
\nas was well known to the writers of the ancient Brahmanas.
\nThe sacred verses, each by itself held to be full of a divine meaning, were taken by the thinkers of the Upanishads as the profound and pregnant seed-words of the truth they sought,
\nand the highest authority they could give for their own sublime
\nutterances was a supporting citation from their predecessors
\nwith the formula, tad esā rcābhyuktā,<\/i> "This is that word which
\nwas spoken by the Rig Veda." Western scholars choose to
\nimagine that the successors of the Vedic Rishis were in error,
\nthat, except for some later hymns, they put a false and non-existent meaning into the old verses and that they themselves,
\ndivided from the Rishis not only by ages of time but by many
\ngulfs and separating seas of an intellectualised mentality,
\nknow infinitely better. But mere common sense ought to tell
\nus that those who were so much nearer in both ways to the
\noriginal poets had a better chance of holding at least the essential truth of the matter and suggests at least the strong probability that the Veda was really what it professes to be, the seeking <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-299<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfor a mystic knowledge, the first form of the constant attempt
\nof the Indian mind, to which it has always been faithful, to
\nlook beyond the appearances of the physical world and through
\nits own inner experiences to the godheads, powers, self-existence of the One of whom the sages speak variously\u2014the
\nfamous phrase in which the Veda utters its own central secret,
\nekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti.<\/i> <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe real character of the Veda can best be understood by
\ntaking it anywhere and rendering it straightforwardly according to its own phrases and images. A famous German scholar
\nrating from his high pedestal of superior intelligence the
\nsilly persons who find sublimity in the Veda, tells us that it
\nis full of childish, silly, even monstrous conceptions, that it is
\ntedious, low, commonplace, that it represents human nature
\non a low level of selfishness and worldliness and that only
\nhere and there are a few rare sentiments that come from the
\ndepths of the soul. It may be made so if we put our own mental conceptions into the words of the Rishis, but if we read
\nthem as they are without any such false translation into what
\nwe think early barbarians ought to have said and thought,
\nwe shall find instead a sacred poetry sublime and powerful
\nin its words and images, though with another kind of language
\nand imagination than we now prefer and appreciate, deep and
\nsubtle in its psychological experience and stirred by a moved
\nsoul of vision and utterance. Hear rather the word itself on
\nthe Veda : <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"States upon states are born, covering over
\ncovering1 awakens to knowledge : in the lap of
\nthe mother he wholly sees. They have called
\nto him, getting a wide knowledge, they guard
\nsleeplessly the strength, they have entered into
\nthe strong city. The peoples born on earth <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> Or, "the coverer of the coverer." <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-300<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nincrease the luminous (force) of the son of the
\nWhite Mother; he has gold on his neck, he is large
\nof speech, he is as if by (the power of) this honey-wine a seeker of plenty. He is like pleasant and
\ndesirable milk, he is a thing uncompanioned and
\nis with the two who are companions and is as a
\nheat that is the belly of plenty and is invincible
\nand an overcomer of many. Play, 0 Ray, and
\nmanifest thyself."! (Rig Veda V. 19.) <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nOr again in the succeeding hymn,\u2014 <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"Those (flames) of thee, the forceful (godhead), that move not and are increased and puissant, uncling the hostility and crookedness of
\none who has another law. 0 Fire, we choose thee
\nfor our priest and the means of effectuation of
\nour strength and in the sacrifices bringing the
\nfood of thy pleasure we call thee by the word….O
\ngod of perfect works, may we be for the felicity,
\nfor the truth, revelling with the rays, revelling
\nwith the heroes."<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nAnd finally let us take the bulk of the third hymn that follows
\ncouched in the ordinary symbols of the sacrifice,\u2014 <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"As the Manu we set thee in thy place, as the
\nManu we kindle thee : 0 Fire, 0 Angiras, as the
\nManu sacrifice to the gods for him who desires
\nthe godheads. 0 Fire, well pleased thou art kindled
\nin the human being and the ladles go to thee
\ncontinually…. Thee all the gods with one pleasure
\n(in thee) made their messenger and serving thee, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> Literally, "become towards us." <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-301<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n0 seer, (men) in the sacrifices adore the god. Let
\nthe mortal adore the divine Fire with sacrifice
\nto the godheads. Kindled, flame forth, 0 Bright
\nOne. Sit in the seat of Truth, sit in the seat of
\npeace."1<\/sup> <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nThat,<\/b> whatever interpretation we choose to put on its images,
\nis a mystic and symbolic poetry and that is the real Veda. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe character of Vedic poetry apparent from these
\ntypical verses need not surprise or baffle us when we see
\nwhat ,will be evident from a comparative study of Asiatic
\nliterature, that though distinguished by its theory and treatment of the Word, its peculiar system of images and the
\ncomplexity of its thought and symbolised experience, it is
\nin fact the beginning of a form of symbolic or figurative
\nimagery for the poetic expression of spiritual experience
\nwhich reappears constantly in later Indian writing, the figures
\nof the Tantras and Puranas, the figures of the Vaishnava
\npoets,\u2014one might add even a certain element in the modern
\np0\u00a3try of Tagore,\u2014and has its kindred movements in certain
\nChinese poets and in the images of the Sufis. The poet
\nhas to express a spiritual and psychical knowledge and experience and he cannot do it altogether or mainly in the more
\nabstract language of the philosophical thinker, for he has to
\nbring out, not the naked idea of it, but as vividly as possible
\nits very life and most intimate touches. He has to reveal in
\none way or another a whole world within him and the quite
\ninner and spiritual significances of the world around him
\nand also, it may well be, godheads, powers, visions and experiences of planes of consciousness other than the one with
\nwhich our normal minds are familiar. He uses or starts with
\nthe images taken from his own normal and outward life <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> I have translated these passages with as close a literalness as the
\nEnglish language will admit. Let the reader compare the original and judge
\nwhether this is not the sense of the verses. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-302<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand that of humanity and from visible Nature, and though
\nthey do not of themselves actually express, yet obliges them
\nto express by implication or to figure the spiritual and psychic
\nidea and experience. He takes them selecting freely his
\nnotation of images according to his insight or imagination
\nand transmutes them into instruments of another significance and at the same time pours a direct spiritual meaning
\ninto the Nature and life to which they belong, applies outward figures to inner things and brings out their latent and
\ninner spiritual or psychic significance into life’s outward
\nfigures and circumstances. Or an outward figure nearest
\nto the inward experience, its material counterpart, is taken
\nthroughout and used with such realism and consistency that
\nwhile it indicates to those who possess it the spiritual experience, it means only the external thing to others,\u2014just as
\nthe Vaishnava poetry of Bengal makes to the devout mind a
\nphysical and emotional image or suggestion of the love of the
\nhuman soul for God, but to the profane is nothing but a sensuous and passionate love poetry hung conventionally round
\nthe traditional human-divine personalities of Krishna and Radha. The two methods
\nmay meet together, the fixed system of outward images be used as the body of the
\npoetry, while freedom is often taken to pass their first limits, to treat them
\nonly as initial suggestions and transmute subtly or even cast them aside or
\nsubdue into a secondary strain or carry them out of themselves so that the
\ntranslucent veil they offer to our minds lifts from or passes into the open
\nrevelation. The last is the method of the Veda and it varies according to the
\npassion and stress of the sight in the poet or the exaltation of his
\nutterance. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe poets of the Veda had another mentality than ours,
\ntheir use of their images is of a peculiar kind and an antique
\ncast of vision gives a strange outline to their substance. The
\nphysical and the psychical worlds were to their eyes a manifestation and a twofold and diverse and yet connected and similar <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-303<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfigure of cosmic godheads, the inner and outer life of man a
\ndivine commerce with the gods, and behind was the one Spirit
\nor Being of which the gods were names and personalities
\nand powers. These godheads were at once masters of physical
\nNature and its principles and forms, their godheads and their
\nbodies and inward divine powers with their corresponding
\nstates and energies born in our psychic being because they
\nare the soul powers of the cosmos, the guardians of truth and
\nimmortality, the children of the Infinite, and each of them too
\nis in his origin and his last reality the supreme Spirit putting
\nin front one of his aspects. The life of man was to these seers
\na thing of mixed truth and falsehood, a movement from mortality to immortality, from mixed light and darkness to the
\nsplendour of a divine Truth whose home is above in the Infinite but which can be built up here in man’s soul and life,
\na battle between the children of Light and the sons of Night,
\na getting of treasure, of the wealth, the booty given by the
\ngods to the human warrior, and a journey and a sacrifice; and of these things they spoke in a fixed system of images
\ntaken from Nature and from the surrounding life of the warlike, pastoral and agricultural Aryan peoples and centred
\nround the cult of Fire and the worship of the powers of living
\nNature and the institution of sacrifice. The details of outward
\nexistence and of the sacrifice were in their life and practice
\nsymbols, and in their poetry not dead symbols or artificial
\nmetaphors, but living and powerful suggestions and counterparts of inner things. And they used too for their expression
\na fixed and yet variable body of other images and a glowing
\nweb of myth and parable, images that became parables, parables
\nthat became myths and myths that remained always images,
\nand yet all these things were to them, in a way that can only
\nbe understood by those who have entered into a certain order
\nof psychic experience, actual realities. The physical melted
\nits shades into the lustres of the psychic, the psychic deepened
\ninto the light of the spiritual and there was no sharp dividing <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-304<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nline in the transition, but a natural blending and intershading
\nof their suggestions and colours. It is evident that a poetry
\nof this kind, written by men with this kind of vision or imagination, cannot either be interpreted or judged by the standards
\nof a reason and taste observant only of the canons of the physical existence. The invocation "Play, 0 Ray, and become
\ntowards us" is at once a suggestion of the leaping up and radiant play of the potent sacrificial flame on the physical altar
\nand of a similar psychical phenomenon, the manifestation of
\nthe saving flame of a divine power and light within us. The
\nwestern critic sneers at the bold and reckless and to him  monstrous image in which Indra son of earth and heaven is said
\nto create his own father and mother; but if we remember
\nthat Indra is the supreme spirit in one of its eternal and constant aspects, creator of earth and heaven, born as a cosmic godhead between the mental and physical worlds and recreating
\ntheir powers in man, we shall see that the image is not only a
\npowerful but in fact a true and revealing figure, and in the
\nVedic technique it does not matter that it outrages the physical
\nimagination since it expresses a greater actuality as no other
\nfigure could have done with the same awakening aptness
\nand vivid poetical force. The Bull and Cow of the Veda, the
\nshining herds of the Sun lying hidden in the cave are strange
\nenough creatures to the physical mind, but they do not belong
\nto the earth and in their own plane they are at once images
\nand actual things and full of life and significance. It is in this
\nway that throughout we must interpret and receive the Vedic
\npoetry according to its own spirit and vision and the psychically natural, even if to us strange and supranatural, truth of
\nits ideas and figures. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Veda thus understood stands out, apart from its
\ninterest as the world’s first yet extant Scripture, its earliest
\ninterpretation of man and the Divine and the universe, as a
\nremarkable, a sublime and powerful poetic creation. It is in
\nits form and speech no barbaric production. The Vedic poets  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-305<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nare masters of a consummate technique, their rhythms are
\ncarved like chariots of the gods and borne on divine and ample
\nwings of sound, and are at once concentrated and wide-waved,
\ngreat in movement and subtle in modulation, their speech
\nlyric by intensity and epic by elevation an utterance of great
\npower, pure and bold and grand in outline, a speech direct
\nand brief in impact, full to overflowing in sense and suggestion so that each verse exists at once as a strong and sufficient
\nthing in itself and takes its place as a large step between what
\ncame before and what comes after. A sacred and hieratic
\ntradition faithfully followed gave them both their form and
\nsubstance, but this substance consisted of the deepest psychic
\nand spiritual experiences of which the human soul is capable
\nand the forms seldom or never degenerate into a convention,
\nbecause what they are intended to convey was lived in himself
\nby each poet and made new to his own mind in expression by
\nthe subtleties or sublimities of his individual vision. The
\nutterances of the greatest seers, Vishwamitra, Vamadeva, Dirghatamas and many others, touch the most extraordinary
\nheights and amplitudes of a sublime and mystic poetry and
\nthere are poems like the Hymn of Creation that move in a
\npowerful clarity on the summits of thought on which the
\nUpanishads lived constantly with a more sustained breathing.
\nThe mind of ancient India did not err when it traced back
\nall its philosophy, religion and essential things of its culture
\nto these seer-poets, for all the future spirituality of her people
\nis contained there in seed or in first expression. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIt is one great importance of a right understanding of the
\nVedic hymns as a form of sacred literature that it helps us to
\nsee the original shaping not only of the master ideas that
\ngoverned the mind of India, but of its characteristic types of
\nspiritual experience, its turn of imagination, its creative temperament and the kind of significant forms in which it persistently interpreted its sight of self and things and life and the
\nuniverse. It is in a great part of the literature the same turn <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-306<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof inspiration and self-expression that we see in the architecture, painting and sculpture. Its first character is a constant
\nsense of the infinite, the cosmic, and of things as seen in or
\naffected by the cosmic vision, set in or against the amplitude
\nof the one and infinite, its second peculiarity is a tendency to
\nsee and render its spiritual experience in a great richness of
\nimages taken from the inner psychic plane or in physical images
\ntransmuted by the stress of a psychic significance and impression and line and idea colour,-and its third tendency is to image
\nthe terrestrial life often magnified, as in the Mahabharata
\nand Ramayana, or else subtilised in the transparencies of a
\nlarger atmosphere, attended by a greater than the terrestrial
\nmeaning or at any rate presented against the background of the
\nspiritual and psychic worlds and not alone in its own separate
\nfigure. The spiritual, the infinite is near and real and the gods
\nare real and the worlds beyond not so much beyond as immanent
\nin our own existence. That which to the western mind is myth
\nand imagination is here an actuality and a strand of the life of
\nour inner being, what is there beautiful poetic idea and philosophic speculation is here a thing constantly realised and present to the experience. It is this turn of the Indian mind, its
\nspiritual sincerity and psychic positivism, that makes the
\nVeda and Upanishads and the later religious and religio-philosophic poetry so powerful in inspiration and intimate and
\nliving in expression and image, and it has its less absorbing but
\nstill very sensible effect on the working of the poetic idea and
\nimagination even in the more secular literature. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-307<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER XI <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> Upanishads are the supreme work of the Indian mind,
\nand that it should be so, that the highest self-expression of its
\ngenius, its sublimest poetry, its greatest creation of the thought
\nand word should be not a literary or poetical masterpiece of
\nthe ordinary kind, but a large flood of spiritual revelation
\nof this direct and profound character, is a significant fact,
\nevidence of a unique mentality and unusual turn of spirit. The
\nUpanishads are at once profound religious scriptures,\u2014for they
\nare a record of the deepest spiritual experiences,\u2014documents
\nof revelatory and intuitive philosophy of an inexhaustible light,
\npower and largeness and, whether written in verse or cadenced
\nprose, spiritual poems of an absolute, an unfailing inspiration
\ninevitable in phrase, wonderful in rhythm and expression. It
\nis the expression of a mind in which philosophy and religion
\nand poetry are made one, because this religion does not end with
\na cult nor is limited to a religio-ethical aspiration, but rises to an
\ninfinite discovery of God, of Self, of our highest and whole
\nreality of spirit and being and speaks out of an ecstasy of
\nluminous knowledge and an ecstasy of moved and fulfilled
\nexperience, this philosophy is not an abstract intellectual speculation about Truth or a structure of the logical intelligence,
\nbut Truth seen, felt, lived, held by the inmost mind and soul
\nin the joy of utterance of an assured discovery and possession,
\nand this poetry is the work of the aesthetic mind lifted up beyond its ordinary field to express the wonder and beauty of
\nthe rarest spiritual self-vision and the profoundest illumined
\ntruth of self and God and universe. Here the intuitive mind  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-308<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand intimate psychological experience of the Vedic seers passes
\ninto a supreme culmination in which the Spirit, as is said in
\na phrase of the Katha Upanishad, discloses its own very body,
\nreveals the very word of its self-expression and discovers to
\nthe mind the vibration of rhythms which repeating themselves
\nwithin in the spiritual hearing seem to build up the soul and
\nset it satisfied and complete on the heights of self-knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis character of the Upanishads needs to be insisted
\nupon with a strong emphasis, because it is ignored by foreign
\ntranslators who seek to bring out the intellectual sense without
\nfeeling the life of thought-vision and the ecstasy of spiritual
\nexperience which made the ancient verses appear then and
\nstill make them to those who can enter into the element in
\nwhich these utterances move, a revelation not to the intellect
\nalone, but to the soul and the whole being, make of them in the
\nold expressive word not intellectual thought and phrase, but
\nSruti,<\/i> spiritual audience, an inspired Scripture. The philosophical substance of the Upanishads demands at this day no
\nfarther stress of appreciation of its value, for even if the amplest
\nacknowledgement by the greatest minds were wanting, the
\nwhole history of philosophy would be there to offer its evidence.
\nThe Upanishads have been the acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions that flowed from
\nit in India like her great rivers from their Himalayan cradle
\nfertilising the mind and life of the people and kept its soul
\nalive through the long procession of the centuries, constantly
\nreturned to for light, never failing to give fresh illumination,
\na fountain of inexhaustible life-giving waters. Buddhism with
\nall its developments was only a restatement, although from a
\nnew standpoint and with fresh terms of intellectual definition
\nand reasoning, of one side of its experience and it carried it
\nthus changed in form but hardly in substance over all Asia
\nand westward towards Europe. The ideas of the Upanishads
\ncan be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras
\nand Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-Platonism <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-309<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to
\nthe philosophical thinking of the West, and Sufism only repeats
\nthem in another religious language. The larger part of German
\nmetaphysics is little more in substance than an intellectual
\ndevelopment of great realities more spiritually seen in this
\nancient teaching, and modern thought is rapidly absorbing
\nthem with a closer, more living and intense receptiveness
\nwhich promises a revolution both in philosophical and in
\nreligious thinking; here they are filtering in through many
\nindirect influences, there slowly pouring through direct and
\nopen channels. There is hardly a main philosophical idea
\nwhich cannot find an authority or a seed or indication in these
\nantique writings\u2014the speculations, according to a certain
\nview, of thinkers who had no better past or background to
\ntheir thought than a crude, barbaric, naturalistic and animistic
\nignorance. And even the larger generalisations of Science
\nare constantly found to apply to the truth of physical Nature
\nformulas already discovered by the Indian sages in their original, their largest meaning in the deeper truth of the spirit. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nAnd yet these works are not philosophical speculations of
\nthe intellectual kind, a metaphysical analysis which labours to
\ndefine notions, to select ideas and discriminate those that are
\ntrue, to logicise truth or else to support the mind in its intellectual preferences by dialectical reasoning and is content
\nto put forward an exclusive solution of existence in the light
\nof this or that idea of the reason and see all things from that
\nviewpoint, in that focus and determining perspective. The upanishads could not have had so undying a vitality, exercised
\nso unfailing an influence, produced such results or seen now
\ntheir affirmations independently justified in other spheres of
\ninquiry and by quite opposite methods, if they had been of
\nthat character. It is because these seers saw Truth rather
\nthan merely thought it, clothed it indeed with a strong body
\nof intuitive idea and disclosing image, but a body of ideal
\ntransparency through which we look into the illimitable, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-310<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nbecause they fathomed things in the light of self-existence
\nand saw them with the eye of the Infinite, that their words
\nremain always alive and immortal, of an inexhaustible significance, an inevitable authenticity, a satisfying finality that is
\nat the same time an infinite commencement of truth, to which
\nall our lines of investigation when they go through to their
\nend arrive again and to which humanity constantly returns in
\nits minds and its ages of greatest vision. The Upanishads are
\nVedanta, a book of knowledge in a higher degree even than
\nthe Vedas, but knowledge in the profounder Indian sense of
\nthe word, J\u00f1āna.<\/i> Not a mere thinking and considering by the
\nintelligence, the pursuit and grasping of a mental form of truth
\nby the intellectual mind, but a seeing of it with the soul and
\na total living in it with the power of the inner being, a spiritual seizing by a kind of identification with the object of knowledge is
\nJ\u00f1āna.<\/i> And because it is only by an integral knowing
\nof the self that this kind of direct knowledge can be made
\ncomplete, it was the self that the Vedantic sages sought to
\nknow, to live in and to be one with it by identity. And through
\nthis endeavour they came easily to see that the self in us is one
\nwith the universal self of all things and that this self again is
\nthe same as God and Brahman, a transcendent Being or Existence, and they beheld, felt, lived in the inmost truth of all things
\nin the universe and the inmost truth of man’s inner and outer
\nexistence by the light of this one and unifying vision. The
\nUpanishads are epic hymns of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and God-knowledge. The great formulations of
\nphilosophic truth with which they abound are not abstract
\nintellectual generalisations, things that may shine and enlighten
\nthe mind but do not live and move the soul to ascension, but
\nare ardours as well as lights of an intuitive and revelatory illumination, teachings as well as seeings of the one Existence,
\nthe transcendent Godhead, the divine and universal Self and
\ndiscoveries of his relation with things and creatures in this
\ngreat cosmic manifestation. Chants of inspired knowledge, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-311<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthey breathe like all hymns a tone of religious aspiration and
\necstasy, not of the narrowly intense kind proper to a lesser
\nreligious feeling, but raised beyond cult and special forms of
\ndevotion to the universal Ananda of the Divine which comes
\nto us by approach to and oneness with the self-existent and
\nuniversal Spirit. And though mainly concerned with an inner
\nvision and not directly with outward human action, all the
\nhighest ethics of Buddhism and later Hinduism are still emergences of the very life and significance of the truths to which
\nthey give expressive form and force,\u2014and there is something
\ngreater than any ethical precept and mental rule of virtue,
\nthe supreme ideal of a spiritual action founded on oneness
\nwith God and all living beings. Therefore even when the life
\nof the forms of the Vedic cult had passed away, the Upanishads still remained alive and creative and could generate the
\ngreat devotional religions and motive the persistent Indian
\nidea of the Dharma. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Upanishads are the creation of a revelatory and
\nintuitive mind and its illumined experience, and all their
\nsubstance, structure, phrase, imagery, movement are determined by and stamped with this original character. These
\nsupreme and all-embracing truths, these visions of oneness
\nand self and a universal divine being are cast into brief and
\nmonumental phrases which bring them at once before the
\nsoul’s eye and make them real and imperative to its
\naspiration and experience or are couched in poetic sentences
\nfull of revealing power and suggestive thought-colour that
\ndiscover a whole infinite through a finite image. The One
\nis there revealed, but also disclosed the many aspects,
\nand each is given its whole significance by the amplitude
\nof the expression and finds as if in a spontaneous self-discovery its place and its connection by the illumining justness
\nof each word and all the phrase. The largest metaphysical
\ntruths and the subtlest subtleties of psychological experience
\nare taken up into the inspired movement and made at once <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-312<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nprecise to the seeing mind and loaded with unending suggestion to the discovering spirit. There are separate phrases,
\nsingle couplets, brief passages which contain each in itself the
\nsubstance of a vast philosophy and yet each is only thrown out
\nas a side, an aspect, a portion of the infinite self-knowledge.
\nAll here is a packed and pregnant and yet perfectly lucid and
\nluminous brevity and an immeasurable completeness. A
\nthought of this kind cannot follow the tardy, careful and diffuse
\ndevelopment of the logical intelligence. The passage,
\nthe sentence, the couplet, the line, even the half-line follows
\nthe one that precedes with a certain interval full of an unexpressed thought, an echoing silence between them, a thought
\nwhich is carried in the total suggestion and implied in the
\nstep itself, but which the mind is left to work out for its own
\nprofit, and these intervals of pregnant silence are large, the
\nsteps of this thought are like the paces of a Titan striding from
\nrock to distant rock across infinite waters. There is a perfect
\ntotality, a comprehensive connection of harmonious parts in
\nthe structure of each Upanishad, but it is done in the way of
\na mind that sees masses of truth at a time and stops to bring
\nonly the needed word out of a filled silence. The rhythm in
\nverse or cadenced prose corresponds to the sculpture of the
\nthought and the phrase. The metrical forms of the Upanishads are made up of four half-lines each clearly cut, the lines
\nmostly complete in themselves and integral in sense, the half-lines presenting two thoughts or distinct parts of a thought
\nthat are wedded to and complete each other, and the sound
\nmovement follows a corresponding principle, each step brief
\nand marked off by the distinctness of its pause, full of echoing
\ncadences that remain long vibrating in the inner hearing :each is as if a wave of the infinite that carries in it the whole
\nvoice and rumour of the ocean. It is a kind of poetry,\u2014word
\nof vision, rhythm of the spirit,\u2014that has not been written before or after.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThe imagery of the Upanishads is in large part developed <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-313<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfrom the type of imagery of the Veda and though very ordinarily it prefers an unveiled clarity of directly illuminative
\nimage, not unoften also it uses the same symbols in a way that
\nis closely akin to the spirit and to the less technical part of the
\nmethod of the older symbolism. It is to a great extent this
\nelement no longer seizable by our way of thinking that has
\nbaffled certain western scholars and made them cry out that
\nthese scriptures are a mixture of the sublimest philosophical
\nspeculations with the first awkward stammerings of the child
\nmind of humanity. The Upanishads are not a revolutionary
\ndeparture from the Vedic mind and its temperament and fundamental ideas, but a continuation and development and to a
\ncertain extent an enlarging transformation in the sense of
\nbringing out into open expression all that was held covered in
\nthe symbolic Vedic speech as a mystery and a secret. It begins
\nby taking up the imagery and the ritual symbols of the Veda
\nand the Brahmanas and turning them in such a way as to bring
\nout an inner and a mystic sense which will serve as a sort of
\npsychical starting-point for its own more highly evolved
\nand more purely spiritual philosophy. There are a number of
\npassages especially in the prose Upanishads which are entirely
\nof this kind and deal, in a manner recondite, obscure and even
\nunintelligible to the modem understanding, with the psychic
\nsense of ideas then current in the Vedic religious mind, the
\ndistinction between the three kinds of Veda, the three worlds
\nand other similar subjects; but, leading as they do in the
\nthought of the Upanishads to deepest spiritual truths, these
\npassages cannot be dismissed as childish aberrations of the
\nintelligence void of sense or of any discoverable bearing on the
\nhigher thought in which they culminate. On the contrary
\nwe find that they have a deep enough significance once we can
\nget inside their symbolic meaning. That appears in a psychophysical passing upward into a psycho-spiritual knowledge
\nfor which we would now use more intellectual, less concrete
\nand imaged terms, but which is still valid for those who practise<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-314<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nYoga and rediscover the secrets of our psycho-physical and
\npsycho-spiritual being. Typical passages of this kind of peculiar
\nexpression of psychic truths are Ajatashatru’s explanation of
\nsleep and dream or the passages of the Prashna Upanishad on
\nthe vital principle and its motions, or those in which the
\nVedic idea of the struggle between the Gods and the demons is
\ntaken up and given its spiritual significance and the Vedic
\ngodheads more openly than in Rik and Saman characterised
\nand invoked in their inner function and spiritual power. <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nI may cite as an example of this development of Vedic
\nidea and image a passage of the Taittiriya in which Indra
\nplainly appears as the power and godhead of the divine mind : <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"He who is the Bull of the Vedas of the universal
\nform, he who was born in the sacred rhythms from the
\nImmortal,\u2014may Indra satisfy me through the intelligence. 0 God, may I become a vessel of the Immortal.
\nMay my body be full of vision and my tongue of sweetness, may I hear the much and vast with my ears. For
\nthou art the sheath of Brahman covered over and 
\nhidden by the intelligence."<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nAnd a kindred passage may also be cited from the Isha
\n<\/b>in
\n<\/b>which Surya the Sun-God is invoked as the godhead of knowledge whose supreme form of effulgence is the oneness of the
\nSpirit and his rays dispersed here on the mental level are the
\nshining diffusion of the thought mind and conceal his own infinite supramental truth, the body and self of this Sun, the truth of the spirit and the Eternal: <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"The face of the Truth is covered with a golden lid : 0 fostering Sun, that uncover for the law of the truth,
\nfor sight. 0 fosterer, 0 sole Rishi, 0 controlling Yama,
\n0 Surya, 0 son of the Father of creatures, marshal and
\nmass thy rays : the Lustre that is thy most blessed form
\nof all, that I see. He who is this, this Purusha, He am I." <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-315<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe kinship in difference of these passages with the imagery
\nand style of the Veda is evident and the last indeed paraphrases
\nor translates into a later and more open style a Vedic verse of
\nthe Atris : <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"Hidden by your truth is the Truth that is constant for ever where they unyoke the horses of the Sun.
\nThere the ten thousands stand together. That is the
\nOne : I have seen the supreme Godhead of the embodied
\ngods."<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nThis Vedic and Vedantic imagery is foreign to our present
\nmentality which does not believe in the living truth of the
\nsymbol, because the revealing imagination intimidated by the
\nintellect has no longer the courage to accept, identify itself
\nwith and boldly embody a psychic and spiritual vision; but it is
\ncertainly very far from being a childish or a primitive and
\nbarbarous mysticism, this vivid, living, luminously poetic intuitive language is rather the natural expression of a highly evolved
\nspiritual culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe intuitive thought of the Upanishads starts from this
\nconcrete imagery and these symbols, first to the Vedic Rishis
\nsecret seer words wholly expressive to the mind of the seer but
\nveils of their deepest sense to the ordinary intelligence, link
\nthem to a less covertly expressive language and pass beyond
\nthem to another magnificently open and sublime imagery
\nand diction which at once reveals the spiritual truth in all its
\nsplendour. The prose Upanishads show us this process of the
\nearly mind of India at its work using the symbol and then
\npassing beyond it to the overt expression of the spiritual significance. A passage of the Prashna Upanishad on the power
\nand significance of the mystic syllable AUM illustrates the
\nearlier stage of the process :<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n"This syllable OM, 0 Satyakama, it is the supreme and it is the lower Brahman. Therefore the man <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-316<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof knowledge passes by this house of the Brahman to
\nthe one or the other. And if one meditates on the single
\nletter, he gets by it knowledge and soon he attains on
\nthe earth. And him the Riks lead to the world of men
\nand there perfected in Tapas and Brahmacharya and
\nfaith he experiences the greatness of the spirit. Now if
\nby the double letter he is accomplished in the mind,
\nthen is he led up by the Yajus to the middle world, to
\nthe moon-world of Soma. He in the world of Soma
\nexperiences the majesty of the spirit and returns again.
\nAnd he who by the triple letter again, even this syllable
\nOM, shall meditate on the highest Purusha, is perfected
\nin the light that is the Sun. As a snake puts off its skin,
\neven so is he released from sin and evil and is led by the
\nSamans to the world of Brahman. He from this dense of
\nliving souls sees the higher than the highest Purusha
\nwho lies in this mansion. The three letters are afflicted
\nby death, but now they are used undivided and united
\nto each other, then are the inner and the outer and the middle action of the spirit made whole in their
\nperfect using and the spirit knows and is not shaken.
\nThis world by the Riks, the middle world by the Yajus
\nand by the Samans that which the seers make known to
\nus. The man of knowledge passes to Him by OM, his
\nhouse, even to the supreme Spirit that is calm and ageless
\nand fearless and immortal." <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nThe symbols here are still obscure to our intelligence, but
\nindications are given which show beyond doubt that they are
\nrepresentations of a psychical experience leading to different
\nstates of spiritual realisation and we can see that these are three
\noutward, mental and supramental, and as the result of the last a
\nsupreme perfection, a complete and integral action of the whole
\nbeing in the tranquil eternity of the immortal Spirit. And later
\nin the Mandukya Upanishad the other symbols are cast aside <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-317<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand we are admitted to the unveiled significance. Then there
\nemerges a knowledge to which modern thought is returning
\nthrough its own very different intellectual, rational and scientific method, the knowledge that behind the operations of our
\noutward physical consciousness are working the operations
\nof another, subliminal,\u2014another and yet the same,\u2014of which
\nour waking mind is a surface action, and above\u2014perhaps,
\nwe still say\u2014is a spiritual superconscience in which can be found, it may well
\nbe, the highest state and the whole secret of our being. We shall see, when we
\nlook closely at the passage of the Prasna Upanishad, that this knowledge is already there,
\nand I think we can very rationally conclude that these and
\nsimilar utterances of the ancient sages, however perplexing
\ntheir form to the rational mind, cannot be dismissed as a
\nchildish mysticism, but are the imaged expression, natural
\nto the mentality of the time, of what the reason itself by its own
\nprocesses is now showing us to be true and a very profound
\ntruth and real reality of knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe metrical Upanishads continue this highly charged
\nsymbolism but carry it more lightly and in the bulk of their
\nverses pass beyond this kind of image to the overt expression.
\nThe Self, the Spirit, the Godhead in man and creatures and
\nNature and all this world and in other worlds and beyond all
\ncosmos, the Immortal, the One, the Infinite is hymned without
\nveils in the splendour of his eternal transcendence and his
\nmanifold self-revelation. A few passages from the teachings of
\nYama, lord of the Law and of Death, to Nachiketas, will be
\nenough to illustrate something of their character : <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n"Om is this syllable. This syllable is the Brahman,
\nthis syllable is the Supreme. He who knows the imperishable Om, whatso he wills, it is his. This support
\nis the best, this support is the highest, and when a man
\nknows it, he is greatened in the world of Brahman.
\nThe omniscient is not born, nor dies, nor has he <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-317<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ncome into being from anywhere, nor is he anyone. He is
\nunborn, he is constant and eternal, he is the Ancient
\nof Days who is not slain in the slaying of the body…. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nHe is seated and journeys far, and lying still he
\ngoes to every side. Who other than I should know this
\necstatic Godhead ? The wise man comes to know the
\ngreat Lord and Self established and bodiless in these
\nbodies that pass and has grief no longer. This self is not
\nto be won by teaching nor by brain-power nor by much
\nlearning : he whom the Spirit chooses, by him alone it
\ncan be won, and to him this Spirit discloses its own
\nvery body. One who has not ceased from ill-doing,
\none who is not concentrated a.-d calm, one whose mind
\nis not tranquil, shall not get him by the brain’s wisdom.
\nHe of whom warriors and sages are the food and death
\nis the spice of his banquet, who knows where is
\nHe?. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Self-born has cloven his doors outward, therefore man sees outward and not in the inner self: only
\na wise man here and there turns his eyes inward, desiring
\nimmortality, and looks on the Self face to face. The
\nchild-minds follow after surface desires and fall into
\nthe net of death which is spread wide for us; but the
\nwise know of immortality and ask not from things inconstant that which is constant. One knows by this Self
\nform and taste and odour and touch and its pleasures
\nand what then is here left over ? The wise man comes
\nto know the great Lord and Self by whom one sees all
\nthat is in the soul that wakes and all that is in the soul
\nthat dreams and has grief no longer. He who knows the
\nSelf, the eater of sweetness close to the living being,
\nthe lord of what was and what will be, shrinks thereafter
\nfrom nothing that is. He knows him who is that which was
\nborn of old from Tapas and who was born of old from
\nthe waters and has entered in and stands in the secret <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-319<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ncavern of being with all these creatures. He knows her
\nwho is born by the life force, the infinite Mother with
\nall the gods in her, her who has entered in and stands
\nin the secret cavern of being with all these creatures.
\nThis is the Fire that has the knowledge and it is hidden
\nin the two tinders as the embryo is borne in pregnant
\nwomen; this is the Fire that must be adored by men
\n‘ watching sleeplessly and bringing to him the offering.
\nHe is that from which the Sun rises and that in which
\nit sets : and in him all the gods are founded and none
\ncan" pass beyond him. What is here, even that is in other
\nworlds, and what is there, even according to that is all
\nthat is here. He goes from death to death who sees
\nhere only difference. A Purusha no bigger than a thumb
\nstands in man’s central self and is the lord of what
\nwas and what shall be, and knowing him thenceforth one
\nshrinks from nothing that is. A Purusha no bigger
\nthan a man’s thumb and he is like a light without
\nsmoke, he is the Lord of what was and what shall be; it is he that is today and it is he that shall be tomorrow." <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Upanishads abound with passages which are at
\nonce poetry and spiritual philosophy, of an absolute clarity
\nand beauty, but no translation empty of the suggestions and
\nthe grave and subtle and luminous sense echoes of the original
\nwords and rhythms can give any idea of their power and
\nperfection. There are others in which the subtlest psychological and philosophical truths are expressed with an entire
\nsufficiency without falling short of a perfect beauty of poetical
\nexpression and always so as to live to the mind and soul and not
\nmerely be presented to the understanding intelligence. There
\nis in some of the prose Upanishads another element of vivid
\nnarrative and tradition which restores for us though only in
\nbrief glimpses the picture of that extraordinary stir and movement of spiritual enquiry and passion for the highest knowledge <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-320<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwhich made the Upanishads possible. The scenes of the old
\nworld live before us in a few pages, the sages sitting in their
\ngroves ready to test and teach the comer, princes and learned
\nBrahmins and great landed nobles going about in search of
\nknowledge, the king’s son in his chariot and the illegitimate
\nson of the servant-girl, seeking any man who might carry in
\nhimself the thought of light and the word of revelation, the
\ntypical figures and personalities, Janaka and the subtle mind of
\nAjatashatru, Raikwa of the cart, Yajnavalkya militant for
\ntruth, calm and ironic, taking to himself with both hands
\nwithout attachment worldly possessions and spiritual riches
\nand casting at last all his wealth behind to wander forth as a
\nhouseless ascetic, Krishna son of Devaki who heard a single
\nword of the Rishi Ghora and knew at once the Eternal, the
\nAshramas, the courts of kings who were also spiritual discoverers and thinkers, the great sacrificial assemblies where
\nthe sages met and compared their knowledge. And we see
\nhow the soul of India was born and how arose this great birth-song in which it soared from its earth into the supreme empyrean of the spirit. The Vedas and the Upanishads are not only
\nthe sufficient fountain-head of Indian philosophy and religion,
\nbut of all Indian art, poetry and literature. It was the soul,
\nthe temperament, the ideal mind formed and expressed in
\nthem which later carved out the great philosophies, built
\nthe structure of the Dharma, recorded its heroic youth in the
\nMahabharata and Ramayana, intellectualised indefatigably in
\nthe classical times of the ripeness of its manhood, threw out so
\nmany original intuitions in science, created so rich a glow of
\naesthetic and vital and sensuous experience, renewed its spiritual and psychic experience in Tantra and Purana, flung itself
\ninto grandeur and beauty of line and colour, hewed and cast
\nits thought and vision in stone and bronze, poured itself into
\nnew channels of self-expression in the later tongues and now
\nafter eclipse re-emerges always the same in difference and ready
\nfor a new life and a new creation. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-321<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER XII <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> Veda is thus the spiritual and psychological
\nseed of Indian culture and the Upanishads the expression of the truth of highest
\nspiritual knowledge and experience that has always been the supreme idea of that
\nculture and the ultimate objective to which it directed the life of the
\nindividual and the aspiration of the soul of the people : and these two great
\nbodies of sacred writing, its first great efforts of poetic and creative
\nself-expression, coming into being at a time preceding the later strong and
\nample and afterwards rich and curious intellectual development, are conceived
\nand couched in the language of a purely psychic and spiritual mentality. An
\nevolution so begun had to proceed by a sort of enriching descent from the spirit
\nto matter and to pass on first to an intellectual endeavour to see life and the
\nworld and the self in all their relations as they present themselves to the
\nreasoning and the practical intelligence. The earlier movement of this
\nintellectual effort was naturally accompanied by a practical development and
\norganisation of life consciously expressive of the mind and spirit of the
\npeople, the erection of a strong and successful structure of society shaped so
\nas to fulfil the mundane objects of human existence under the control of a
\ncareful religious, ethical and social order and discipline, but also so as to
\nprovide for the evolution of the soul of man through these things to a spiritual
\nfreedom and perfection. It is this stage of which we get a remarkably ample and
\neffective representation in the immediately succeeding period of Indian literary
\ncreation. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-322<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThis movement of the Indian mind is represented in
\nits more critical effort on one side by a strenuous philosophical thinking
\ncrystallised into the great philosophic systems, on the other by an equally
\ninsistent endeavour to formulate in a clear body and with a strict cogency an
\nethical, social and political ideal and practice in a consistent and organised
\nsystem of individual and communal life and that endeavour resulted in the
\nauthoritative social treatises or Shastras of which the greatest and the most
\nauthoritative is the famous Laws of Manu. The work of the philosophers was to
\nsystematise and justify to the reasoning intelligence the truths of the self and
\nman and the world already discovered by intuition, revelation and spiritual
\nexperience and embodied in the Veda and the Upanishads, and at the same time to
\nindicate and systematise methods of discipline founded upon this knowledge by
\nwhich man might effectuate the highest aim of his existence. The characteristic
\nform in which this was done shows the action of the intuitive passing into that
\nof the intellectual mentality and preserves the stamp and form expressive of its
\ntransitional character. The terse and pregnant phrase of the sacred literature
\nabounding in intuitive substance is replaced by a still more compact and crowded
\nbrief expression, no longer intuitive and poetic, but severely intellectual,\u2014the
\nexpression of a principle, a whole development of philosophic thought or a
\nlogical step burdened with considerable consequences in a few words, sometimes
\none or two, a shortest decisive formula often almost enigmatic in its
\nconcentrated fullness. These Sutras or aphorisms became the basis of
\nratiocinative commentaries developing by metaphysical and logical method and
\nwith a considerable variety of interpretation all that was contained at first in
\nthe series of aphoristic formulas. Their concern is solely with original and
\nultimate truth and the method of spiritual liberation, moksa.<\/i> <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe work of the social thinkers and legislators was
\non <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-323<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe contrary concerned with normal action and
\npractice. It attempted to take up the ordinary life of man and of the community
\nand the life of human desire and aim and interest and ordered rule and custom
\nand to interpret and formulate it in the same complete and decisive manner and
\nat the same time to throw the whole into an ordered relation to the ruling ideas
\nof the national culture and frame and perpetuate a social system intelligently
\nfashioned so as to provide a basis, a structure, a gradation by which there
\ncould be a secure evolution of the life from the vital and mental to the
\nspiritual motive. The .leading idea was the government of human interest and
\ndesire by the social and ethical law, the Dharma, so that it might be made,\u2014all
\nvital, economic, aesthetic, hedonistic, intellectual and other needs being
\nsatisfied duly and according to the right law of the nature,\u2014a preparation for
\nthe spiritual existence. Here too we have as an initial form the aphoristic
\nmethod of the Vedic Grihya-Sutras, afterwards the diffuser, fuller method of the
\nDharma Shastras,\u2014the first satisfied with brief indications of simple and
\nessential socio-religious principle and practice, the later work attempting to
\ncover the whole life of the individual, the class and the people. The very
\ncharacter of the effort and its thoroughness and the constant unity of idea that
\nreigns through the whole of it are a remarkable evidence of a very developed
\nintellectual, aesthetic and ethical consciousness and a high turn and capacity
\nfor a noble and ordered civilisation and culture. The intelligence at work, the
\nunderstanding and formative power manifested is not inferior to that of any
\nancient or modern people, and there is a gravity, a unified clarity and nobility
\nof conception which balances at least in any true idea of culture the greater
\nsuppleness, more well-informed experience and science and eager flexibility of
\nexperimental hardihood which are the gains that distinguish our later humanity.
\nAt any rate it was no barbaric mind that was thus intently careful for a fine
\nand well unified order of society, a high and clear thought <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-324<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nto govern it and at the end of life a great
\nspiritual perfection and release. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe pure literature of the period is represented by
\nthe two great epics, the Mahabharata, which gathered into its vast structure the
\ngreater part of the poetic activity of the Indian mind during several centuries,
\nand the Ramayana. These two poems are epical in their motive and spirit, but
\nthey are not like any other two epics in the world, but are entirely of their
\nown kind and subtly different from others in their principle. It is not only
\nthat although they contain an early heroic story and a transmutation of many
\nprimitive elements, their form belongs to a period of highly developed
\nintellectual, ethical and social culture, is enriched with a body of mature
\nthought and uplifted by a ripe nobility and refined gravity of ethical tone and
\ntherefore these poems are quite different from primitive edda and saga and
\ngreater in breadth of view and substance and height of motive\u2014I do not speak now
\nof aesthetic quality and poetic perfection\u2014than the Homeric poems, while at the
\nsame time there is still an early breath, a direct and straightforward vigour, a
\nfreshness and greatness and pulse of life, a simplicity of strength and beauty
\nthat makes of them quite another kind than the elaborately constructed literary
\nepics of Virgil or Milton, Firdausi or Kalidasa. This peculiar blending of the
\nnatural breath of an early, heroic, swift and vigorous force of life with a
\nstrong development and activity of the ethical, the intellectual, even the
\nphilosophic mind is indeed a remarkable feature; these poems are the voice of
\nthe youth of a people, but a youth not only fresh and fine and buoyant, but also
\ngreat and accomplished, wise and noble. This however is only a temperamental
\ndistinction ; there is another that is more far-reaching, a difference in the
\nwhole conception, function and structure. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nOne of the elements of the old Vedic education was
\na knowledge of significant tradition, itihāsa,<\/i> and it is this word that
\nwas used by the ancient critics to distinguish the Mahabharata  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-325<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand the Ramayana from the later literary epics. The
\nItihasa was an ancient historical or legendary tradition turned to creative use
\nas a significant mythus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or
\nethical or ideal meaning and thus formative of the mind of the people. The
\nMahabharata and Ramayana are Itihasas of this kind on a large scale and with a
\nmassive purpose. The poets who wrote and those who added to these great bodies
\nof poetic writing did not intend merely to tell an ancient tale in a beautiful
\nor noble manner or even to fashion a poem pregnant with much richness of
\ninterest and meaning, though they did both these things with a high success;
\nthey wrote with a sense of their function as architects and sculptors of life,
\ncreative exponents, fashioners of significant forms of the national thought and
\nreligion and ethics and culture. A profound stress of thought on life, a large
\nand vital view of religion and society, a certain strain of philosophic idea
\nruns through these poems and the whole ancient culture of India is embodied in
\nthem with a great force of intellectual conception and living presentation. The
\nMahabharata has been spoken of as a fifth Veda, it has been said of both these
\npoems that they are not only great poems but Dharmashastras, the body of a large
\nreligious and ethical and social and political teaching, and their effect and
\nhold on the mind and life of the people have been so great that they have been
\ndescribed as the bible of the Indian people. That is not quite an accurate
\nanalogy, for the bible of the Indian people contains also the Veda and
\nUpanishads, the Purana and Tantras and the Dharmashastras, not to speak of a
\nlarge bulk of the religious poetry in the regional languages. The work of these
\nepics was to popularise high philosophic and ethical idea and cultural practice,
\nit was to throw out prominently and with a seizing relief and effect in a frame
\nof great poetry and on a background of poetic story and around significant
\npersonalities that became to the people abiding national memories and
\nrepresentative figures all that was <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-326<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nbest in the soul and thought or true to the life or
\nreal to the creative imagination and ideal mind or characteristic and
\nilluminative of the social, ethical, political and religious culture of India.
\nAll these things were brought together and disposed with artistic power and a
\ntelling effect in a poetic body given to traditions half legendary, half
\nhistoric but cherished henceforth as deepest and most living truth and as a part
\nof their religion by the people. Thus framed the Mahabharata and Ramayana,
\nwhether in the original Sanskrit or rewritten in the regional tongues, brought
\nto the masses by Kathakas,\u2014rhapsodists, reciters and exegetes,\u2014 became and
\nremained one of the chief instruments of popular education and culture, moulded
\nthe thought, character, aesthetic and religious mind of the people and gave eve
\na to the illiterate some sufficient tincture of philosophy, ethics, social and
\npolitical ideas, aesthetic emotion, poetry, fiction and romance. That which was
\nfor the cultured classes contained in Veda and Upanishad, shut into profound
\nphilosophical aphorism and treatise or inculcated in Dharmashastra and
\nArthashastra, was put here into creative and living figures, associated with
\nfamiliar story and legend, fused into a vivid representation of life and thus
\nmade a near and living power that all could readily assimilate through the
\npoetic word appealing at once to the soul and the imagination and the
\nintelligence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Mahabharata especially is not only the story of
\nthe Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a national tradition
\nbut on a vast scale the epic of the soul and religious and ethical mind and
\nsocial and political ideals and culture and life of India. It is said popularly
\nof it and with a certain measure of truth that whatever is in India is in the
\nMahabharata. The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single
\nindividual mind, but of the mind of a nation, it is the poem of itself written
\nby a whole people. It would be vain to apply to it the canons of a poetical art
\napplicable to an epic poem with a smaller and more restricted <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-327<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\npurpose, but still a great and quite conscious art
\nhas been expended both on its detail and its total structure. The whole poem has
\nbeen built like a vast national temple unrolling slowly its immense and complex
\nidea from chamber to chamber, crowded with significant groups and sculptures and
\ninscriptions, the grouped figures carved in divine or semi-divine proportions, a
\nhumanity aggrandised and half-uplifted to superhumanity and yet always true to
\nthe human motive and idea and feeling, the strain of the real constantly raised
\nby the tones of the ideal, the life of this world amply portrayed ,:but
\nsubjected to the conscious influence and presence of the powers of the worlds
\nbehind it, and the whole unified by the long embodied procession of a consistent
\nidea worked out in the wide steps of the poetic story. As is needed in an epic
\nnarrative, the conduct of the story is the main interest of the poem and it is
\ncarried through with an at once large and minute movement, wide and bold in the
\nmass, striking and effective in detail, always simple, strong and epic in its
\nstyle and pace. At the same time though supremely interesting in substance and
\nvivid in the manner of the telling as a poetic story, it is something more,\u2014a
\nsignificant tale, Itihasa, representative throughout of the central ideas and
\nideals of Indian life and cuture. The leading motive is the Indian idea of the
\nDharma. Here the Vedic notion of the struggle between the godheads of truth and
\nlight and unity and the powers of darkness and division and falsehood is brought
\nout from the spiritual and religious and internal into the outer intellectual,
\nethical and vital plane. It takes there in the figure of the story a double form
\nof a personal and a political struggle, the personal a conflict between typical
\nand representative personalities embodying the greater ethical ideals of the
\nIndian Dharma and others who are embodiments of Asuric egoism and self-will and
\nmisuse of the Dharma, the political a battle in which the personal struggle
\nculminates, an international clash ending in the establishment of a new <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-328<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nrule of righteousness and justice, a kingdom or
\nrather an empire of the Dharma uniting warring races and substituting for the
\nambitious arrogance of kings and aristocratic clans the supremacy, the calm and
\npeace of a just and humane empire. It is the old struggle of Deva and Asura, God
\nand Titan, but represented in the terms of human life. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe way in which this double form is worked out and
\nthe presentation of the movement of individual lives and of the national life
\nfirst as their background and then as coming into the front in a movement of
\nkingdoms and armies and nations show a high architectonic faculty akin in the
\nsphere of poetry to that which laboured in Indian architecture, and the whole
\nhas been conducted with a large poetic art and vision. There is the same power
\nto embrace great spaces in a total view and the same tendency to fill them with
\nan abundance of minute, effective, vivid and significant detail. There is
\nbrought too into the frame of the narrative a very considerable element of other
\ntales, legends, episodes, most of them of a significant character suitable to
\nthe method of Itihasa, and an extraordinary amount of philosophical, religious,
\nethical, social and political thinking sometimes direct, sometimes cast into the
\nform of the legend and episode. The ideas of the Upanishads and of the great
\nphilosophies are brought in continually and sometimes given new developments, as
\nin the Gita, religious myth and tale and idea and teaching are made part of the
\ntissue, the ethical ideals of the race are expressed or are transmuted into the
\nshape of tale and episode as well as embodied in the figures of the story,
\npolitical and social ideals and institutions are similarly developed or
\nillustrated with a high vividness and clearness and space is found too for
\naesthetic and other suggestions connected with the life of the people. All these
\nthings are interwoven into the epic narrative with a remarkable skill and
\ncloseness. The irregularities inevitable in so combined and difficult a plan and
\nin a work to which many poets of an unequal power have contributed fall into
\ntheir place in the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-329<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ngeneral massive complexity of the scheme and assist
\nrather than break the total impression. The whole is a poetic expression unique
\nin its power and fullness of the entire soul and thought and life of a people. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind
\nas the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more
\ndelicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The
\nmain bulk of the poem in spite of much accretion is evidently by a single hand
\nand has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the
\nphilosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the
\nbuilder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and there is no
\ndeviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time there is a like
\nvastness of vision, an even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the
\nconception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail. The
\nstructural power, strong workmanship and method of disposition of the
\nMahabharata remind one of the art of .the Indian builders, the grandeur and
\nboldness of outline and wealth of colour and minute decorative execution of the
\nRamayana suggest rather a transcript into literature of the spirit and style of
\nIndian painting. The epic poet has taken here also as his subject an Itihasa, an
\nancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it in
\nwith detail from myth and folklore, but has exalted all into a scale of
\ngrandiose epic figure that it may bear more worthily the high intention and
\nsignificance. The subject is the same as in the Mahabharata, the strife of the
\ndivine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely
\nideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening
\nof both the good and the evil in human character. On one side is portrayed an
\nideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilisation
\nfounded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is
\npresented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and
\nsweetness; on <\/b>the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-330<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nother are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous
\nforces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two
\nideas and powers of mental nature living and embodied are brought into conflict
\nand led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa.
\nAll shade and complexity are omitted which would diminish the single purity of
\nthe idea, the representative force in the outline of the figures, the
\nsignificance of the temperamental colour and only so much admitted as is
\nsufficient to humanise the appeal and the significance. The poet makes us
\nconscious of the immense forces that are behind our life and sets his action in
\na magnificent epic scenery, the great imperial city, the mountains and the
\nocean, the forest and wilderness, described with such a largeness as to make us
\nfeel as if the whole world were the scene of his poem and its subject the whole
\ndivine and titanic possibility of man imaged in a few great or monstrous
\nfigures. The ethical and the aesthetic mind of India have here fused themselves
\ninto a harmonious unity and reached an unexampled pure wideness and beauty of
\nself-expression. The Ramayana embodied for the Indian imagination its highest
\nand tenderest human ideals of character, made strength and courage and
\ngentleness and purity and fidelity and self-sacrifice familiar to it in the
\nsuavest and most harmonious forms coloured so as to attract the emotion and the
\naesthetic sense, stripped morals of all repellent austerity on one side or on
\nthe other of mere commonness and lent a certain high divineness to the ordinary
\nthings of life, conjugal and filial and maternal and fraternal feeling, the duty
\nof the prince and leader and the loyalty of follower and subject, the greatness
\nof the great and the truth and worth of the simple, toning things ethical to the
\nbeauty of a more psychical meaning by the glow of its ideal hues. The work of
\nValmiki has been an agent of almost incalculable power in the moulding of the
\ncultural mind of India : it has presented to it to be loved and imitated in
\nfigures like Rama and Sita, made so divinely and with such a revelation of
\nreality <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-331<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nas to become objects of enduring cult and worship,
\nor like Hanuman, Lakshmana, Bharata the living human image of its ethical
\nideals; it has fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national
\ncharacter, and it has evoked and fixed in it those finer and exquisite yet firm
\nsoul-tones and that more delicate humanity of temperament which are a more
\nvaluable thing than the formal outsides of virtue and conduct. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe poetical manner of these epics is not inferior
\nto the greatness of their substance. The style and the verse in which they are
\nwritten have always a noble epic quality, a lucid classical simplicity and
\ndirectness rich in expression but stripped of superfluous ornament, a swift,
\nvigorous, flexible and fluid verse constantly sure of the epic cadence. There is
\na difference in the temperament of the language. The characteristic diction of
\nthe Mahabharata is almost austerely masculine, trusting to force of sense and
\ninspired accuracy of turn, almost ascetic in its simplicity and directness and a
\nfrequent fine and happy bareness; it is the speech of a strong and rapid
\npoetical intelligence and a great and straightforward vital force, brief and
\ntelling in phrase but by virtue of a single-minded sincerity and, except in some
\nknotted passages or episodes, without any rhetorical labour of compactness, a
\nstyle like the light and strong body of a runner nude and pure and healthily
\nlustrous and clear without superfluity of flesh or exaggeration of muscle, agile
\nand swift and untired in the race. There is inevitably much in this vast poem
\nthat is in an inferior manner, but little or nothing that falls below a certain
\nsustained level in which there is always something of this virtue. The diction
\nof the Ramayana is shaped in a more attractive mould, a marvel of sweetness and
\nstrength, lucidity and warmth and grace; its phrase has not only poetic truth
\nand epic force and diction but a constant intimate vibration of the feeling of
\nthe idea, emotion or object : there is an element of fine ideal delicacy in its
\nsustained strength and breath of power. In both poems it is a high poetic soul
\nand inspired intelligence that is at work; <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-332<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe directly intuitive mind of the Veda and
\nUpanishads has retired behind the veil of the intellectual and outwardly
\npsychical imagination. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis is the character of the epics and the
\nqualities which have made them immortal, cherished among India’s greatest
\nliterary and cultural treasures, and given them their enduring power over the
\nnational mind. Apart from minor defects and inequalities such as we find in all
\nworks set at this pitch and involving a considerable length of labour, the
\nobjections made by western criticism are simply expressions of a difference of
\nmentality and aesthetic taste. The vastness of the plan and the leisurely
\nminuteness of detail are baffling and tiring to a western mind accustomed to
\nsmaller limits, a more easily fatigued eye and imagination and a hastier pace of
\nlife, but they are congenial to the spaciousness of vision and intent curiosity
\nof circumstances, characteristic of the Indian mind, that spring as I have
\npointed out in relation to architecture from the habit of the cosmic
\nconsciousness and its sight and imagination and activity of experience. Another
\ndifference is that the terrestrial life is not seen realistically just as it is
\nto the physical mind but constantly in relation to the much that is behind it,
\nthe human action is surrounded and influenced by great powers and forces,
\nDaivic, Asuric and Rakshasic, and the greater human figures are a kind of
\nincarnation of these more cosmic personalities and powers. The objection that
\nthe individual thereby loses his individual interest and becomes a puppet of
\nimpersonal forces is not true either in reality or actually in the imaginative
\nfigures of this literature, for there we see that the personages gain by it ii
\ngreatness and force of action and are only ennobled by an impersonality that
\nraises and heightens the play of their personality. The mingling of terrestrial
\nnature and supernature, not as a mere imagination but with an entire sincerity
\nand naturalness, is due to the same conception of a greater reality in life, and
\nit is as significant figures of this greater reality that we must regard much <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-333<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nto which the realistic critic objects with an
\nabsurdly misplaced violence, such as the powers gained by Tapasya, the use of
\ndivine weapons, the frequent indications of psychic action and influence. The
\ncomplaint of exaggeration is equally invalid where the whole action is that of
\nmen raised beyond the usual human level, since we can only ask for proportions
\nconsonant with the truth of the stature of life conceived in the imagination of
\nthe poet and cannot insist on an unimaginative fidelity to the ordinary measures
\nwhich would here be false because wholly out of place. The complaint of
\nlifelessness and want of personality in the epic characters is equally unfounded
\n: Rama and Sita, Arjuna and Yudhisthira, Bhishma and Duryodhana and Kama are
\nintensely real and human and alive to the Indian mind. Only the main insistence,
\nhere as in Indian art, is not on the outward saliences of character, for these
\nare only used secondarily as aids to the presentation, but on the soul-life and
\nthe inner soul-quality presented with as absolute a vividness and strength and
\npurity of outline as possible. The idealism of characters like Rama and Sita is
\nno pale and vapid unreality; they are vivid with the truth of the ideal life, of
\nthe greatness that man may be and does become when he gives his soul a chance
\nand it is no sound objection that there is only a small allowance of the broken
\nlittleness of our ordinary nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThese epics are therefore not a mere mass of
\nuntransmuted legend and folklore, as is ignorantly objected, but a highly
\nartistic representation of intimate significances of life, the living
\npresentment of a strong and noble thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic
\nmind and a high social and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great
\nculture. As rich in freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved
\nin thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but
\nmore vigorous and vital and young in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the
\nIndian epic poems were fashioned to serve a greater and completer national and
\ncultural <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-334<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfunction and that they should have been received
\nand absorbed by both the high and the low, the cultured and the masses and
\nremained through twenty centuries an intimate and formative part of the life of
\nthe whole nation is of itself the strongest possible evidence of the greatness
\nand fineness of this ancient Indian culture. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-335<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER XIII <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE <\/font>classical age of the ancient literature, the best known and
\nappraised of all, covers a period of some ten centuries and
\npossibly more, and it is marked off from the earlier writings
\nby a considerable difference, not so much in substance, as in
\nthe moulding and the colour of its thought, temperament and
\nlanguage. The divine childhood, the heroic youth, the bright
\nand strong early manhood of the people a ad its culture are over
\nand there is instead a long and opulent maturity and as its
\nsequence an equally opulent and richly coloured decline. The
\ndecline is not to death, for it is followed by a certain rejuvenescence, a fresh start and repeated beginning, of which the
\nmedium is no longer Sanskrit but the derived languages, the
\ndaughters of the dialects raised into literary instruments and
\ndeveloping as the grand and ancient tongue loses its last forces
\nand inspiring life. The difference in spirit and mould between
\nthe epics and the speech of Bhartrihari and Kalidasa is already
\nenormous and may possibly be explained by the early centuries
\nof Buddhism when Sanskrit ceased to be the sole literary tongue
\nunderstood and spoken by all educated men and Pali came up as
\nits successful rival and the means of expression for at least a great
\npart of the current of the national thought and life. The language
\nand movement of the epics have all the vigour, freedom, spontaneous force and appeal of a speech that leaps straight from the
\nfounts of life; the speech of Kalidasa is an accomplished art,
\nan intellectual and aesthetic creation consummate, deliberate,
\nfinely ornate, carved like a statue, coloured like a painting, not
\nyet artificial, though there is a masterly artifice and device, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-336<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nbut still a careful work of art laboured by the intelligence.
\nIt is carefully natural, not with the spontaneous ease of a first,
\nbut the accomplished air of ease of a habitual second nature.
\nThe elements of artifice and device increase and predominate
\nin the later writers, their language is a laborious and deliberate
\nthough a powerful and beautiful construction and appeals
\nonly to an erudite audience, a learned elite. The religious
\nwritings, Purana and Tantra, moving from a deeper, still intensely living source, aiming by their simplicity at a wider
\nappeal, prolong for a time the tradition of the epics, but the
\nsimplicity and directness is willed rather than the earlier
\nnatural ease. In the end Sanskrit becomes the language of
\nthe Pundits and except for certain philosophical, religious and
\nlearned purposes no longer a first-hand expression of the life
\nand mind of the people. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe alteration in the literary speech corresponds however, apart from all inducing circumstances, to a great change
\nin the centre of mentality of the culture. It is still and always
\nspiritual, philosophical, religious, ethical, but the inner austerer
\nthings seem to draw back a little and to stand in the background, acknowledged indeed and overshadowing the rest,
\nbut nevertheless a little detaching themselves from them and
\nallowing them to act for their own enlargement and profit.
\nThe exterior powers that stand out in front are the curious
\nintellect, the vital urge, the aesthetic, urbanely active and
\nhedonistic sense life. It is the great period of logical philosophy, of science, of art and the developed crafts, law, politics,
\ntrade, colonisation, the great kingdoms and empires with
\ntheir ordered and elaborate administrations, the minute rule
\nof the Shastras in all departments of thought and life, an
\nenjoyment of all that is brilliant, sensuous, agreeable, a discussion of all that could be thought and known, a fixing and
\nsystemising of all that could be brought into the compass
\nof intelligence and practice,\u2014the most splendid, sumptuous
\nand imposing millennium of Indian culture.  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-337<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe intellectuality that predominates is not in any way
\nrestless, sceptical or negative, but it is enormously inquiring
\nand active, accepting the great lines of spiritual, religious,
\nphilosophical and social truth that had been discovered and
\nlaid down by the past, but eager too to develop, to complete,
\nto know minutely and thoroughly and fix in perfectly established
\nsystem and detail, to work out all possible branches and
\nramifications, to fill the intelligence, the sense and the life.
\nThe grand basic principles and lines of Indian religion, philosophy, society have already been found and built and the
\nsteps of the culture move now in the magnitude and satisfying security of a great tradition, but there is still ample
\nroom for creation and discovery within these fields and a
\nmuch wider province, great beginnings, strong developments
\nof science and art and literature, the freedom of the purely
\nintellectual and aesthetic activities, much scope too for the
\nhedonisms of the vital and the refinements of the emotional
\nbeing, a cultivation of the art and rhythmic practice of life.
\nThere is a highly intellectualised vital stress and a many-sided
\ninterest in living, an indulgence of an at once intellectual and
\nvital and sensuous satisfaction extending even to a frankness
\nof physical and sensual experience, but in the manner of the
\noriental mind with a certain decorousness and order, an
\nelement of aesthetic restraint and the observance of rule
\nand measure even in indulgence that saves always from the
\nunbridled license to which less disciplined races are liable.
\nThe characteristic, the central action is the play of the intellectual mind and everywhere that predominates. In the
\nearlier age the many strands of the Indian mind and life
\nprinciple are unified and inseparable, a single wide movement
\nset to a strong and abundant but simple music, here they
\nseem to stand side by side related and harmonised, curious
\nand complex, multiply one. The spontaneous unity of the
\nintuitive mind is replaced by the artificial unity of the analysing and synthetising intelligence. Art and religion still <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-338<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ncontinue the predominance of the spiritual and intuitive
\nmotive, but it is less to the front in literature. A division
\nhas been settled between religious and secular writing that
\ndid not exist to any appreciable extent in the previous ages.
\nThe great poets and writers are secular creators and their
\nworks have no chance of forming part of the intimate religious
\nand ethical mind of the people as did the Ramayana and
\nMahabharata. The stream of religious poetry flows separately
\nin Purana and Tantra. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe great representative poet of this age is Kalidasa.
\nHe establishes a type which was preparing before and endured after him with more or less of additional decoration,
\nbut substantially unchanged through the centuries. His poems
\nare the perfect and harmoniously designed model of a kind
\nand substance that others cast always into similar forms but
\nwith a genius inferior in power or less rhythmically balanced,
\nfaultless and whole. The art of poetic speech in Kalidasa’s
\nperiod reaches an extraordinary perfection. Poetry itself
\nhad become a high craft, conscious of its means, meticulously
\nconscientious in the use of its instruments, as alert and exact
\nin its technique as architecture, painting and sculpture, vigilant to equate beauty and power of the form with nobility
\nand richness of the conception, aim and spirit and the scrupulous completeness of its execution with fullness of aesthetic
\nvision or of the emotional or sensuous appeal. There was
\nestablished here as in the other arts and indeed during all
\nthis era in all human activities a Shastra, a well recognised
\nand carefully practised science and art of poetics, critical
\nand formulative of all that makes perfection of method and
\nprescriptive of things to be avoided, curious of essentials
\nand possibilities but under a regime of standards and limits
\nconceived with the aim of excluding all fault of excess or of
\ndefect and therefore in practice as unfavourable to any creative
\nlawlessness, even though the poet’s native right of fantasy
\nand freedom is theoretically admitted, as to any least tendency <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-339<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ntowards bad or careless, hasty or irregular workmanship. The poet is expected to be thoroughly conscious of
\nhis art, as minutely acquainted with its conditions and its
\nfixed and certain standard and method as the painter and
\nsculptor and to govern by his critical sense and knowledge
\nthe night of his genius. This careful art of poetry became
\nin the end too much of a rigid tradition, too appreciative of
\nrhetorical device and artifice and even permitted and admired the most extraordinary contortions of the learned
\nintelligence, as in the Alexandrian decline of Greek poetry,
\nbut the earlier work is usually free from these shortcomings
\nor they are only occasional and rare. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe classical Sanskrit is perhaps the most remarkably
\nfinished and capable instrument of thought yet fashioned,
\nat any rate by either the Aryan or the Semitic mind, lucid
\nwith the utmost possible clarity, precise to the farthest limit
\nof precision, always compact and at its best sparing in its
\nformation of phrase, but yet with all this never poor or bare :there is no sacrifice of depth to lucidity, but rather a pregnant
\nopulence of meaning, a capacity of high richness and beauty,
\na natural grandeur of sound and diction inherited from the
\nancient days. The abuse of the faculty of compound structure
\nproved fatal later on to the prose, but in the earlier prose and
\npoetry where it is limited, there is an air of continent abundance strengthened by restraint and all the more capable of
\nmaking the most of its resources. The great and subtle and
\nmusical rhythms of the classical poetry with their imaginative,
\nattractive and beautiful names, manifold in capacity, careful
\nin structure, are of themselves a mould that insists on perfection and hardly admits the possibility of a mean or slovenly
\nworkmanship or a defective movement. The unit of this
\npoetical art is the śloka,<\/i> the sufficient verse of four quarters
\nor pāda,<\/i> and each sloka is expected to be a work of perfect
\nart in itself, a harmonious, vivid and convincing expression
\nof an object, scene, detail, thought, sentiment, state of mind <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-340<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nor emotion that can stand by itself as an independent figure,
\nthe succession of slokas must be a constant development by
\naddition of completeness to completeness and the whole
\npoem or canto of a long poem an artistic and satisfying structure in this manner, the succession of cantos a progression
\nof definite movements building a total harmony. It is this
\ncarefully artistic and highly cultured type of poetic creation that reached its acme of perfection in the poetry of
\nKalidasa. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis pre-eminence proceeds from two qualities possessed in a degree only to be parallelled, in the work. of the
\ngreatest world-poets and not always combined in them in
\nso equable a harmony and with so adequate a combination
\nof execution and substance. Kalidasa ranks among the
\nsupreme poetic artists with Milton and Virgil and he has a
\nmore subtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the
\nEnglish, a greater breath of native power informing and
\nvivifying his execution than the Latin poet. There is no more
\nperfect and harmonious style in literature, no more inspired
\nand careful master of the absolutely harmonious and sufficient
\nphrase combining the minimum of word expenditure with
\nthe fullest sense of an accomplished ease and a divine elegance and not excluding a fine excess that is not excessive,
\nan utmost possible refined opulence of aesthetic value. More
\nperfectly than any other he realises the artistic combination
\nof a harmonious economy of expression, not a word, syllable,
\nsound in superfluity, and a total sense of wise and lavish
\nopulence that was the aim of the earlier classical poets. None
\nso divinely skilful as he in imparting without any overdoing
\nthe richest colour, charm, appeal and value, greatness or
\nnobility or power or suavity and always some kind and the
\nright kind and the fullest degree of beauty to each line and
\neach phrase. The felicity of selection is equalled by the
\nfelicity of combination. One of the most splendidly sensuous of poets in the higher sense of that epithet because he. has a <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-341<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nvivid vision and feeling of his object, his sensuousness is
\nneither lax nor overpowering, but always satisfying and just,
\nbecause it is united with a plenary force of the intelligence,
\na gravity and strength sometimes apparent, sometimes disguised in beauty but appreciable within the broidered and
\ncoloured robe, a royal restraint in the heart of the regal indulgence. And Kalidasa’s sovereign mastery of rhythm is
\nas great as his sovereign mastery of phrase. Here we meet
\nin each metrical kind with the most perfect discoveries of
\nverbal harmony in the Sanskrit language (pure lyrical melody
\ncomes only afterwards at the end in one or two poets like
\nJayadeva), harmonies founded on a constant subtle complexity of the fine assonances of sound and an unobtrusive
\nuse of significant cadence that never breaks the fluent unity
\nof tone of the music. And the other quality of Kalidasa’s
\npoetry is the unfailing adequacy of the substance. Careful
\nalways to get the full aesthetic value of the word and sound
\nclothing his thought and substance, he is equally careful that
\nthe ^thought and the substance itself should be of a high,
\nstrong or rich intellectual, descriptive or emotional value.
\nHis conception is large in its view though it has not the cosmic
\nbreadth of the earlier poets and it is sustained at every step
\nin its execution. The hand of the artist never fails in the
\nmanagement of its material,\u2014exception being made of a
\nfault of composition marring one, the least considerable of
\nhis works,\u2014and his imagination is always as equal to its task
\nas.. his touch is great and subtle. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe work to which these supreme poetic qualities were
\nbrought was very much the same at bottom, though differing
\nin its form and method, as that achieved by the earlier epics,
\nit was to interpret in poetic speech and represent in significant images and figures the mind, the life, the culture of
\nIndia in his age. Kalidasa’s seven extant poems, each in its
\nown way and within its limits and on its level a masterpiece,
\nare a brilliant and delicately ornate roll of pictures and inscriptions <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-342<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwith that as their single real subject. His was a
\nrichly stored mind, the mind at once of a scholar and observer
\npossessed of all the learning of his time, versed in the politics,
\nlaw, social idea, system and detail, religion, mythology, philosophy, art of his time, intimate with the life of courts and
\nfamiliar with the life of the people, widely and very minutely
\nobservant of the life of Nature, of bird and beast, season and
\ntree and flower, all the lore of the mind and all the lore of the
\neye; and this mind was at the same time always that of a
\ngreat poet and artist. There is not in his work the touch of
\npedantry or excessive learning that mars the art of some
\nother Sanskrit poets, he knows how to subdue all his matter
\nto the spirit of his art and to make the scholar and observer no more than a gatherer of materials for the poet, but the
\nrichness of documentation is there ready and available and
\nconstantly brought, in as part of incident and description and
\nsurrounding idea and forms or intervenes in the brilliant series
\nof images that pass before us in the long succession of magnificent couplets and stanzas. India, her great mountains and
\nforests and plains and their peoples, her men and women and
\nthe circumstances of their life, her animals, her cities and
\nvillages, her hermitages, rivers, gardens and tilled lands
\nare the background of narrative and drama and love poem.
\nHe has seen it all and filled his mind with it and never fails
\nto bring it before us vivid with all the wealth of description
\nof which he is capable. Her ethical and domestic ideals, the
\nlife of the ascetic in the forest or engaged in meditation and
\nausterity upon the mountains and the life of the householder,
\nher familiar customs and social standards and observances,
\nher religious notions, cult, symbols give the rest of the surroundings and the atmosphere. The high actions of gods and
\nkings, the nobler or the more delicate human sentiments, the
\ncharm and beauty of women, the sensuous passion of lovers,
\nthe procession of the seasons and the scenes of Nature, these
\nare his favourite subjects. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-343<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nHe is a true son of his age in his dwelling on the artistic,
\nhedonistic, sensuous sides of experience and pre-eminently
\na poet of love and beauty and the joy of life. He represents
\nit also in his intellectual passion for higher things, his intense
\nappreciation of knowledge, culture, the religious idea, the
\nethical ideal, the greatness of ascetic self-mastery, and these
\ntoo he makes a part of the beauty and interest of life and sees
\nas admirable elements of its complete and splendid picture.
\nAll his work is of this tissue. His great literary epic, the "House
\nof Raghu," treats the story of a line of ancient lungs as representative of the highest religious and ethical culture and
\nideals of the race and brings out its significances environed
\nwith a splendid decoration of almost pictorially depicted sentiment and action, noble or beautiful thought and speech and
\nvivid incident and scene and surrounding. Another unfinished epic, a great fragment but by the virtue of his method
\nof work complete in itself so far as the tale proceeds, is in
\nsubject a legend of the gods, the ancient subject of a strife of
\nGods and Titans, the solution prepared here by a union of
\nthe supreme God and the Goddess, but in treatment it is a
\ndescription of Nature and the human life of India raised to
\na divine magnitude on the sacred mountain and in the homes
\nof the high deities. His three dramas move around the passion
\nof love, but with the same insistence on the detail and picture
\nof life. One poem unrolls the hued series of the seasons of
\nthe Indian year. Another leads the messenger cloud across
\nnorthern India viewing as it passes the panorama of her
\nscenes and closes on a vivid and delicately sensuous and emotional portrayal of the passion of love. In these varied settings
\nwe get a singularly complete impression of the mind, the tradition, the sentiment, the rich, beautiful and ordered life of
\nthe India of the times, not in its very deepest things, for these
\nhave to be sought elsewhere, but in what was for the time
\nmost characteristic, the intellectual, vital and artistic turn of
\nthat period of her culture. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-344<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe rest of the poetry of the times is of one fundamental
\ntype with Kalidasa’s, for it has with individual variations the
\nsame thought mind, temperament, general materials, poetic
\nmethod, and much of it has a high genius or an unusual quality
\nand distinction though not the same perfection, beauty and
\nfelicity. The literary epics of Bharavi and Magha reveal the
\nbeginning of the decline marked by the progressive encroachment of a rhetorical and laborious standard of form, method
\nand manner that heavily burdens and is bound eventually to
\nstifle the poetic spirit, an increasing artificiality of tradition and
\nconvention and gross faults of taste that bear evidence of the
\napproaching transmission of the language out of the hands
\nof the literary creator into the control of the Pundit and pedant.
\nMagha’s poem is more constructed by rule of rhetoric than
\ncreated and he displays as merits the very worst puerilities of
\nmelodious jingle, intricate acrostic and laborious double
\nmeaning. Bharavi is less attainted by the decadence, but not
\nimmune, and he suffers himself to be betrayed by its influence
\nto much that is neither suitable to his temperament and genius
\nnor in itself beautiful or true. Nevertheless Bharavi has high
\nqualities of grave poetic thinking and epic sublimity of description and Magha poetic gifts that would have secured for him a
\nmore considerable place in literature if the poet had not been
\ncrossed with a pedant. In this mixture of genius with defect of
\ntaste and manner the later classical poets resemble the Elizabethans, with the difference that in one case the incoherence is
\nthe result of a crude and still unripe, in the other of an overripe and decadent culture. At the same time they bring out
\nvery prominently the character of this age of Sanskrit literature,
\nits qualities but also its limitations that escape the eye in
\nKalidasa and are hidden in the splendour of his genius. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis poetry is pre-eminently a ripe and deliberate poetic
\nrepresentation and criticism of thought and life and the things
\nthat traditionally interested an aristocratic and cultured class
\nin a very advanced and intellectual period of civilisation. The <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-345<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nintellect predominates everywhere and, even when it
\nseems to stand aside and leave room for pure objective presentation, it puts on
\nthat too the stamp of its image. In the earlier epics the thought, religion,
\nethics, life movements are all strongly lived; the poetic intelligence is at work but always absorbed in its
\nwork, self-forgetful and identified with its object, and it is
\nthis that is the secret of their great creative force and living
\npoetic sincerity and power. The later poets are interested in
\nthe same things but with an intensely reflective experience and
\ncritical intelligence that always observes more than it lives with
\nits objects. In the literary epics there is no real movement of
\nlife, but only a close brilliant description of life. The poet makes
\nto pass before us a series of pictured incidents, scenes, details,
\nfigures, attitudes richly coloured, exact, vivid, convincing to
\nthe eye and attractive, but in spite of the charm and interest
\nwe speedily perceive that these are only animated pictures.
\nThings are indeed seen vividly but with the more outer eye of
\nthe imagination, observed by the intellect, reproduced by the
\nsensuous imagination of the poet, but they have not been deeply
\nlived in the spirit. Kalidasa alone is immune from this deficiency of the method because there is in him a great thinking,
\nimaginative, sensuous poetic soul that has lived and creates
\nwhat he pictures and does not merely fabricate brilliant scenes
\nand figures. The rest only occasionally rise above the deficiency
\nand do then great and not only brilliant or effective work. Their
\nordinary work is so well done as to deserve great and unstinted
\npraise for what it possesses, but not the highest praise. It is
\nin the end more decorative than creative. There ensues from
\nthe character of this poetic method a spiritual consequence,
\nthat we see here very vividly the current thought, ethics, aesthetic culture, active and sense life of contemporary India, but not
\nthe deeper soul of these things so much as their outer character
\nand body. There is much ethical and religious thought of a
\nsufficiently high ideal kind, and it is quite sincere but only intellectually sincere, and therefore there is no impression of the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-346<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ndeeper religious feeling or the living ethical power that we get
\nin the Mahabharata and Ramayana and in most of the art
\nand literature of India. The ascetic life is depicted, but only
\nin its ideas and outward figure : the sensuous life is depicted
\nin the same scrupulous manner\u2014it is intensely observed and
\nappreciated and well reproduced to the eye and the intelligence,
\nbut not intensely felt and created in the soul of the poet. The
\nintellect has become too detached and too critically observant
\nto live things with the natural force of the life or with the
\nintuitive identity. This is the quality and also the malady of an
\noverdeveloped intellectualism and it has always bee& the
\nforerunner of a decadence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe predominantly intellectual turn appears in the
\nabundance of another kind of writing, the gnomic verse,
\nsubhāsita.<\/i> This is the use of the independent completeness of
\nthe sloka to be the body in its single sufficiency of the concentrated essence and expression of a thought, an aper\u00c7<\/font>u or significant incident of life, a sentiment so expressed as to convey its
\nessential idea to the intelligence. There is a great plenty of this
\nkind of work admirably done, for it was congenial to the keen
\nintellect and the wide, mature and well-stored experience of the
\nage : but in the work of Bhartrihari it assumes the proportions
\nof genius, because he writes not only with the thought but with
\nemotion, with what might be called a moved intellectuality of
\nthe feeling and an intimate experience that gives great potency
\nand sometimes poignancy to his utterance. There are. three
\ncenturies or śatakas<\/i> of his sentences, the first expressing high
\nethical thought or worldly wisdom or brief criticisms of aspects
\nof life, the second concerned with erotic passion, much less
\neffective because it is the fruit of curiosity and the environment
\nrather than the poet’s own temperament and genius, and the
\nthird proclaiming an ascetic weariness and recoil from the
\nworld. Bhartrihari’s triple work is significant of the three leading motives of the mind of the age, its reflective interest in life
\nand turn for high and strong and minute thinking, its preoccupation <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-347<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nwith the enjoyment of the senses, and its ascetic spiritual
\nturn\u2014the end of the one and the ransom of the other. It is
\nsignificant too by the character of this spirituality, it is no longer
\nthe great natural flight of the spirit to the fullness of its own
\nhigh domain, but rather a turning away of the intellect and
\nthe senses wearied of themselves and life, unable to find there
\nthe satisfaction they sought, to find peace in a spiritual passivity in which the tired thought and sense could find their
\nabsolute rest and cessation. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe drama however is the most attractive though not
\ntherefore the greatest product of the poetical mind of the age.
\nThere its excessive intellectuality was compelled by the necessities of dramatic poetry to be more closely and creatively
\nidentified with the very mould and movement of life. The Sanskrit drama type is a beautiful form and it has been used in most
\nof the plays that have come down to us with an accomplished
\nart and a true creative faculty. At the same time it is true that
\nit does not rise to the greatnesses of the Greek or the Shakespearian drama. This is not due to the elimination of tragedy,
\n\u2014for there can be dramatic creation of the greatest kind without
\na solution in death, sorrow, overwhelming calamity or the tragic
\nreturn of Karma, a note that is yet not altogether absent from
\nthe Indian mind,\u2014for it is there in the Mahabharata and was
\nadded later on to the earlier triumphant and victorious close
\nof the Ramayana, but a closing air of peace and calm was more
\ncongenial to the sattwic turn of the Indian temperament and
\n.imagination. It is due to the absence of any bold dramatic treatment of the great issues and problems of life. These dramas are
\nmostly romantic plays reproducing the images and settled
\npaces of the most cultured life of the time cast into the frame of
\nold myth and legend, but a few are more realistic and represent
\nthe type of the citizen householder or other scenes of the times
\nor a historical subject. The magnificent courts of kings or the
\nbeauty of the surroundings of Nature are their more common
\nscene. <\/b> But whatever their subject or kind, they are only brilliant <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-348<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ntranscripts or imaginative transmutations of life, and something
\nmore is needed for the very greatest or most moving dramatic
\ncreation. But their type still admits of a high or a strong or
\ndelicate poetry and a representation, if not any very profound
\ninterpretation of human action and motive and they do not fall
\nshort in this kind. A great charm of poetic beauty and subtle
\nfeeling and atmosphere,\u2014reaching its most accomplished type
\nin the Shakuntala of Kalidasa, the most perfect and captivating
\nromantic drama in all literature,\u2014or an interesting turn of
\nsentiment and action, a skilful unobtrusive development according to the recognised principle and carefully observed formula
\nof the art, in temperate measure without violent noise of
\nincident or emphatic stress on situation or crowded figures,
\nthe movement subdued to a key of suavity and calm, a delicate
\npsychology, not a strongly marked characterisation such as is
\ncommonly demanded in the dramatic art of Europe, but a
\nsubtle indication by slight touches in the dialogue and action,
\nthese are the usual characteristics. It is an art that was produced by and appealed to a highly cultured class, refined,
\nand intellectual and subtle, loving best a tranquil aesthetic
\ncharm, suavity and beauty, and it has the limitations of the
\nkind but also its qualities. There is a constant grace and fineness of work in the best period, a plainer and more direct but
\nstill fine vigour in Bhasa and the writers who prolong him, a
\nbreath of largeness and power in the dramas of Bhavabhuti,
\na high and consummate beauty in the perfection of Kalidasa. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis drama, this poetry, the prose romances crowded
\nwith descriptive detail, monographs like Bana’s biography of
\nHarsha or Jonaraja’s history of Cashmere, the collections of
\nreligious or romantic or realistic tales, the Jatakas, the Kathasaritsagara with its opulence and inexhaustible abundance of
\nnarrative in verse, the Panchatantra and the more concise
\nHitopadesha which develop the form of the animal fable to
\nmake a piquant setting for a mass of acute worldly wisdom and
\npoliey and statecraft, and a great body of other less known work <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-349<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nare only the surviving remnants of what, as many indications
\nshow, must have been an immense literary activity, but they
\nare sufficiently abundant and representative to create a crowded
\nand splendid impression, a many-toned picture of a high culture, a rich intellectuality, a great and ordered society with an
\nopulent religious, aesthetic, ethical, economic, political and
\nvital activity, a many-sided development, a plentiful life-movement. As completely as the earlier epics they belie the
\nlegend of an India lost in metaphysics and religious dreamings
\nand incapable of the great things of life. The other element
\nwhich has given rise to this conception, an intense strain of
\nphilosophic thinking and religious experience, follows in fact
\nat this time an almost separate movement and develops gradually
\nbehind the pomp and motion of this outward action the thought,
\nthe influences, the temperament and tendencies that were to
\n<\/b>govern another millennium of the life of the Indian people. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-350<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\nCHAPTER XIV <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> dominant note in the Indian mind, the temperament that
\nhas been at the foundation of all its culture and originated and
\nsupported the greater part of its creative action in philosophy,
\nreligion, art and life has been, I have insisted, spiritual, intuitive and
\npsychic : but this fundamental tendency has not excluded but rather powerfully supported a strong and rich
\nintellectual, practical and vital activity. In the secular classical
\nliterature this activity comes very much to the front, is the
\nprominent characteristic and puts the original spirit a little
\nin the background. That does not mean that the spirit is
\nchanged or lost or that there is nothing psychic or intuitive
\nin the secular poetry of the time. On the contrary all the type
\nof the mind reflected there is of the familiar Indian character,
\nconstant through every change, religio-philosophic, religio-ethical, religio-social, with all the past spiritual experience
\nbehind it and supporting it though not prominently in the
\nfront; the imagination is of the same kind that we have found
\nin the art of the time; the frames of significant image, symbol
\nand myth are those which have come down from the past
\nsubjected to the modifications and new developments that
\nget their full body in the Puranas, and they have a strong psychic
\nsuggestion. The difference is that they take in the hands of
\nthese poets more of the form of a tradition well understood
\nand worked upon by the intellect than of an original spiritual
\ncreation, and it is the intelligence that is prominent, accepting
\nand observing established ideas and things in this frame and
\ntype and making its critical or reproductive observation and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-351<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nassent vivid with the strong lines and rich colours of artistic
\npresentation and embellishing image. The original force,
\nthe intuitive vision work most strongly now in the outward,
\nin the sensuous, the objective, the vital aspects of existence,
\nand it is these that in this age are being more fully taken up,
\nbrought out and made in the religious field a support for an
\nextension of spiritual experience. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe sense of this evolution of the culture appears more
\nclearly outside the range of pure literature, in the philosophic
\nwritings of the time and in the religious poetry of the Puranas
\nand Tantras. It was these two strains which mixing together
\nand soon becoming a single whole proved to be the most living
\nand enduring movement of the classical age, had the most
\nabiding result in the mind of the people, were the creating force
\nand made the most conspicuous part of the later popular literatures. It is a remarkable proof of the native disposition, capacity
\nand profound spiritual intelligence and feeling of the national
\nmind that the philosophic thinking of this period should have
\nleft behind it this immense influence; for it was of the highest
\nand severest intellectual character. The tendency that had
\nbegun in earlier times and created Buddhism, Jainism and the
\ngreat schools of philosophy, the labour of the metaphysical
\nintellect to formulate to the reason the truths discovered by
\nthe intuitive spiritual experience, to subject them to the close
\ntest of a logical and severely dialectical ratiocination and to
\nelicit from them all that the thought could discover, reaches
\nits greatest power of elaborate and careful reasoning, minute
\ncriticism and analysis and forceful logical construction and
\nsystematisation in the abundant philosophical writing of the
\nperiod between the sixth and thirteenth centuries marked
\nespecially by the work of the great southern thinkers, Shankara,
\nRamanuja and Madhwa. It did not cease even then, but survived its greatest days and continued even up to our own times,
\nthrowing up sometimes great creative thinking and often new
\nand subtle philosophical ideas in the midst of an incessant <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-352<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nstream of commentary and criticism on established lines.
\nHere there was no decline but a continued vigour of the metaphysical turn in the mind of the race. The work it did was
\nto complete the diffusion of the philosophic intelligence with
\nthe result that even an average Indian mentality, once awakened,
\nresponds with a surprising quickness to the most subtle and
\nprofound ideas. It is notable that no Hindu religion old or
\nnew has been able to come into existence without developing
\nas its support a clear philosophic content and suggestion. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe philosophical writings in prose make no pretension
\nto rank as literature; it is in these that the critical side is prominent, and they have no well-built creative shape, but there
\nare other productions in which a more structural presentation
\nof the complete thought is attempted and here the literary
\nform adopted is ordinarily the philosophical poem. The preference for this form is a direct continuation of the tradition
\nof the Upanishads and the Gita. These works cannot be given
\na very high place as poetry : they are too overweighted with thought and the
\npreoccupation of an intellectual as distinguished from an intuitive adequacy in
\nthe phrase to have the breath of life and impetus of inspiration that are the
\nindispensable attributes of the creative poetic mind. It is the critical and
\naffirmative intelligence that is most active and not the vision seeing and
\ninterpretative. The epic greatness of the soul that sees and chants the
\nself-vision and God-vision and supreme world-vision, the blaze of light that
\nmakes the power of the Upanishads, is absent, and absent too the direct thought
\nspringing straight from the soul’s life and experience, the perfect,
\nstrong and suggestive phrase and the living beauty of the
\nrhythmic pace that make the poetic greatness of the Gita. At
\nthe same time some of these poems are, if certainly not
\ngreat poetry, yet admirable literature combining a supreme
\nphilosophical genius with a remarkable literary talent, not indeed creations, but noble and skilful constructions, embodying
\nthe highest possible thought, using well all the weighty, compact <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-353<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand sparing phrase of the classical Sanskrit speech, achieving the harmony and noble elegance of its rhythms. These
\nmerits are seen at their best in poems like the Vivekacūdāmani
\n<\/i>attributed to Shankara, and there we hear even, in spite of its
\ntoo abstract turn, an intellectual echo of the voice of the Upanishads and the manner of the Gita. These poems, if inferior
\nto the grandeur and beauty of earlier Indian work, are at least
\nequal in poetic style and superior in height of thought to the
\nsame kind anywhere else and deservedly survive to fulfil the
\naim intended by their writers. And one must not omit to
\nmention a few snatches of philosophic song here and there
\nthat are a quintessence at once of philosophic thought and
\npoetic beauty, or the abundant literature of hymns, many of
\nthem consummate in their power and fervour and their charm
\nof rhythm and expression which prepare us for the similar
\nbut larger work in the later regional literature. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe philosophical creations of India differ in this respect
\nfrom the bulk of the metaphysical thinking of Europe that even
\nwhen they most adopt the intellectual form and method, yet
\ntheir real substance is not intellectual, but is rather the result
\nof a subtle and very profound intelligence working on the stuff
\nof sight and spiritual experience. This is the result of the
\nconstant unity India has preserved between philosophy,
\nreligion and Yoga. The philosophy is the intuitive or intellectual presentation of the truth that was sought for first through
\nthe religious mind and its experiences and it is never satisfied
\nby discovering truth to the idea and justifying it to the logical
\nintelligence, although that is admirably done, but has its eye
\nalways turned to realisation in the soul’s life, the object of
\nYoga. The thinking of this age, even in giving so much prominence to the intellectual side, does not depart from this
\nconstant need of the Indian temperament. It works out from
\n.spiritual experience through the exact and laborious inspection
\nand introspection of the intellect and works backward and in
\nagain from the intellectual perceptions to new gains of spiritual <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-354<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nexperience. There is indeed a tendency of fragmentation
\nand exclusiveness; the great integral truth of the Upanishads
\nhas already been broken into divergent schools of thought
\nand these are now farther subdividing into still less comprehensive systems; but still in each of these lessened provinces
\nthere is a gain of minute or intensive searching and on the
\nwhole, if a loss of breadth on the heights, in recompense some
\nextension of assimilable spiritual knowledge. And this rhythm
\nof exchange between the spirit and the intelligence, the spirit
\nillumining, the intelligence searching and arriving and. helping
\nthe lower life to absorb the intuitions of the spirit, did its part
\nin giving Indian spirituality a wonderful intensity, security
\nand persistence not exampled in any other people. It is indeed
\nlargely the work of these philosophers who were at the same
\ntime Yogins that saved the soul of India alive through the
\ngathering night of her decadence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis however could not have been done without the aid
\nof a great body of more easily seizable ideas, forms, images,
\nappealing to the imagination, emotions, ethical and aesthetic
\nsense of the people, that had to be partly an expression of the
\nhigher spiritual truth and partly a bridge of transition between
\nthe normal religious and the spiritual mentality. The need was
\nmet by the Tantras and Puranas. The Puranas are the religious poetry peculiar to this period : for although the form
\nprobably existed in ancient times, it is only now that it was
\nentirely developed and became the characteristic and the
\nprincipal literary expression of the religious spirit, and it is
\nto this period that we must attribute, not indeed all the
\nsubstance, but the main bulk and the existing shape of the
\nPuranic writings. The Puranas have been much discredited
\nand depreciated in recent times, since the coming in of modern
\nideas coloured by western rationalism and the turning of the
\nintelligence under new impulses back towards the earlier
\nfundamental ideas of the ancient culture. Much however
\nof this depreciation is due to an entire misunderstanding of <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-355<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe purpose, method and sense of the mediaeval religious
\nwritings. It is only in an understanding of the turn of the
\nIndian religious imagination and of the place of these writings
\nin the evolution of the culture that we can seize their sense. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIn fact the better comprehension that is now returning
\nto us of our own self and past shows that the Puranic religions
\nare only a new form and extension of the truth of the ancient
\nspirituality and philosophy and socio-religious culture. In
\ntheir avowed intention they are popular summaries of the
\ncosmogony, symbolic myth and image, tradition, cult, social
\nrule of the Indian people continued, as the name Purana
\nsignifies, from ancient times. There is no essential change,
\nbut only a change of forms. The psychic symbols or true images
\nof truth belonging to the Vedic age disappear or are relegated
\nto a subordinate plan with a changed and diminished sense: others take their place more visibly large in aim, cosmic, comprehensive, not starting with conceptions drawn from the
\nphysical universe, but supplied entirely from the psychic universe within us. The Vedic gods and goddesses conceal from
\nthe profane by their physical aspect their psychic and spiritual
\nsignificance. The Puranic trinity and the forms of its female
\nenergies have on the contrary no meaning to the physical
\nmind or imagination, but are philosophic and psychic conceptions and embodiments of the unity and multiplicity of the all-manifesting Godhead. The Puranic cults have been characterised as a degradation of the Vedic religion, but they might
\nconceivably be described, not in the essence, for that remains
\nalways the same, but in the outward movement, as an extension and advance. Image worship and temple cult and profuse
\nceremony, to whatever superstition or externalism their misuse
\nmay lead, are not necessarily a degradation. The Vedic religion
\nhad no need of images, for the physical signs of its godheads
\nwere the forms of physical Nature and the outward universe
\nwas their visible house. The Puranic religion worshipped the
\npsychical forms of the Godhead within us and had to express <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-356<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nit outwardly in symbolic figures and house it in temples that
\nwere an architectural sign of cosmic significances. And the
\nvery inwardness it intended necessitated a profusion of outward
\nsymbol to embody the complexity of these inward things to the
\nphysical imagination and vision. The religious aesthesis has
\nchanged, but the meaning of the religion has been altered only
\nin temperament and fashion, not in essence. The real difference is this that the early religion was made by men of the
\nhighest mystic and spiritual experience living among a mass
\nstill impressed mostly by the life of the physical universe : the
\nUpanishads casting off the physical veil created a free transcendent and cosmic vision and experience and this was expressed by a later age to the mass in images containing a large
\nphilosophical and intellectual meaning of which the Trinity
\nand the Shaktis of Vishnu and Shiva are the central figures :the Puranas carried forward this appeal to the intellect and
\nimagination and made it living to the psychic experience, the
\nemotions, the aesthetic feeling and the senses. A constant attempt to make the
\nspiritual truths discovered by the Yogin
\nand the Rishi integrally expressive, appealing, effective to the
\nwhole nature of man and to provide outward means by which
\nthe ordinary mind, the mind of a whole people might be drawn
\nto a first approach to them is the sense of the religio-philosophic
\nevolution of Indian culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIt is to be observed that the Puranas and Tantras contain
\nin themselves the highest spiritual and philosophical truths,
\nnot broken up and expressed in opposition to each other as
\nin the debates of the thinkers, but synthetised by a fusion,
\nrelation or grouping in the way most congenial to the catholicity
\nof the Indian mind and spirit. This is done sometimes expressly, but most often in a form which might carry something
\nof it to the popular imagination and feeling by legend, tale,
\nsymbol, apologue, miracle and parable. An immense and
\ncomplex body of psycho-spiritual experience is embodied in the
\nTantras, supported by visual images and systematised in <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-357<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nforms of Yogic practice. This element is also found in the
\nPuranas, but more loosely and cast out in a less strenuous
\nsequence. This method is after all simply a prolongation, in
\nanother form and with a temperamental change, of the method
\nof the Vedas. The Puranas construct a system of physical
\nimages and observances each with its psychical significance.
\nThus the sacredness of the confluence of the three rivers, Ganga,
\nYamuna and Saraswati, is a figure of an inner confluence and
\npoints to a crucial experience in a psycho-physical process of
\nYoga and it has too other significances, as is common in the
\neconomy of this kind of symbolism. The so-called fantastic
\ngeography of the Puranas, as we are expressly told in the
\nPuranas themselves, are a rich poetic figure, a symbolic geography of the inner psychical universe. The cosmogony expressed sometimes in terms proper to the physical universe
\nhas, as in the Veda, a spiritual, and psychological meaning and
\nbasis. It is easy to see how in the increasing ignorance of later
\ntimes the more technical parts of the Puranic symbology inevitably lent themselves to much superstition and to crude physical
\nideas about spiritual and psychic things. But that danger
\nattends all attempts to bring them to the comprehension of
\nthe mass of men and this disadvantage should not blind us to
\nthe enormous effect produced in training the mass mind to
\nrespond to a psycho-religious and psycho-spiritual appeal that
\nprepares a capacity for higher things. That effect endures even
\nthough the Puranic system may have to be superseded by a
\nfiner appeal and the awakening to more directly subtle significances, and if such a supersession becomes possible, it will
\nitself be due very largely to the work done by the Puranas. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Puranas are essentially a true religious poetry, an
\nart of aesthetic presentation of religious truth. All the bulk of
\nthe eighteen Puranas does not indeed take a high rank in this
\nkind : there is much waste substance and not a little of dull
\nand dreary matter, but on the whole the poetic method employed is justified by the richness and power of the creation. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-358<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe earliest work is the best\u2014with one exception at the end
\nin a new style which stands by itself and is unique. The Vishnu
\nPurana for instance in spite of one or two desert spaces is a
\nremarkable literary creation of a very considerable quality
\nmaintaining much of the direct force and height of the old epic
\nstyle. There is in it a varied movement, much vigorous and
\nsome sublime epic writing, an occasional lyrical element of a
\nlucid sweetness and beauty, a number of narratives of the
\nfinest verve and skilful simplicity of poetic workmanship. The
\nBhagavat coming at the end and departing to a great extent from
\nthe more popular style and manner, for it is strongly affected
\nby the learned and more ornately literary form of speech, is a
\nstill more remarkable production full of subtlety, rich and deep
\nthought and beauty. It is here that we get the culmination of
\nthe movement which had the most important effects on the
\nfuture, the evolution of the emotional and ecstatic religions of
\nBhakti. The tendency that underlay this development was
\ncontained in the earlier forms of the religious mind of India
\nand was slowly gaining ground, but it had hitherto been overshadowed and kept from its perfect formation by the dominant
\ntendency towards the austerities of knowledge and action and
\nthe seeking of the spiritual ecstasy only on the highest planes
\nof being. The turn of the classical age outward to the exterior
\nlife and the satisfaction of the senses brought in a new inward
\nturn of which the later ecstatic forms of the Vaishnava religion
\nwere the most complete manifestation. Confined to the secular
\nand outward this fathoming of vital and sensuous experience
\nmight have led only to a relaxation of nerve and vigour, and
\nethical degeneracy or license, but the Indian mind is always
\ncompelled by its master impulse to reduce all its experience of
\nlife to the corresponding spiritual term and factor and the result
\nwas a transfiguring of even these most external things into a
\nbasis for new spiritual experience. The emotional, the sensuous,
\neven the sensual motions of the being, before they could draw
\nthe soul farther outward, were taken and transmuted into a <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-359<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\npsychical form and, so changed, they became the elements <\/b> of
\na mystic capture of the Divine through the heart and the senses
\nand a religion of the joy of God’s love, delight and beauty.
\nIn the Tantra the new elements are taken up and assigned
\ntheir place in a complete psycho-spiritual and psycho-physical
\nscience of Yoga. Its popular form in the Vaishnava religion
\ncentres round the mystic apologue of the pastoral life of the
\nchild Krishna. In the Vishnu Purana the tale of Krishna
\nis a heroic saga of the divine Avatar : in later Puranas we
\nsee the aesthetic and erotic symbol developing and in the
\nBhagavat it is given its full power and prepared to manifest
\nits entire spiritual and philosophic as well as its psychic sense
\nand to remould into its own lines by a shifting of the centre of
\nsynthesis from knowledge to spiritual love and delight the earlier
\nsignificance of Vedanta. The perfect outcome of this evolution
\nis to be found in the philosophy and religion of divine love
\npromulgated by Chaitanya. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIt is the later developments of Vedantic philosophy, the
\nPuranic ideas and images and the poetic and aesthetic spirituality of the religions of devotion that inspired from their
\nbirth the regional literatures. The literature of the Sanskrit
\ntongue does not come to any abrupt end. Poetry of the classical
\ntype continues to be written especially in the South down to a
\ncomparatively late period and Sanskrit remains still the language
\nof philosophy and of all kinds of scholarship : all prose work,
\nall the work of the critical mind is written in the ancient tongue.
\nBut the genius rapidly fades out from it, it becomes stiff,
\nheavy and artificial and only a scholastic talent remains to
\nkeep it in continuance. In every province the local tongues
\narise here earlier, there a little later to the dignity of literature
\nand become the vehicle of poetic creation and the instrument
\nof popular culture. Sanskrit, although not devoid of popular
\nelements, is essentially and in the best sense an aristocratic
\nspeech developing and holding to the necessity of a noble aspiration and the great manner a high spiritual, intellectual, ethical <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-360<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand aesthetic culture, then possible in this manner only to the
\nhigher classes, and handing it down by various channels of
\nimpression and transfusion and especially by religion, art and
\nsocial and ethical rule to the mass of the people. Pali in the
\nhands of the Buddhists becomes a direct means of this transmission. The poetry of the regional tongues on the contrary
\ncreates, in every sense of the word, a popular literature. The
\nSanskrit writers were men of the three highest castes, mostly
\nBrahmins and Kshatriyas, and later they were learned men
\nwriting for a highly cultured elite; the Buddhist writers too
\nwere for the most part philosophers, monks, kings, preachers
\nwriting sometimes for themselves, sometimes in a more popular
\nform for the mass of the people; but the poetry of the regional
\ntongues sprang straight from the heart of the people and its
\nwriters came from all classes from the Brahmin to the lowest
\nShudra and the outcaste. It is only in Urdu and to a less degree
\nin the Southern tongues, as in Tamil whose great period is
\ncontemporaneous with the classical Sanskrit, its later production continuing during the survival of independent or semi-independent courts and kingdoms in the South, that there is a
\nstrong influence of the learned or classical temperament and
\nhabit; but even here there is a very considerable popular element as in the songs of the Shaiva saints and Vaishnava Alwars.
\nThe field here is too large to be easily known in its totality or to
\npermit of a rapid survey, but something must be said of the
\ncharacter and value of this later literature that we may see how
\nvital and persistently creative Indian culture remained even
\nin a period which compared with its greater times might be
\nregarded as a period of restriction and decadence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nAs the Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas and
\nUpanishads, these later literatures begin with the inspired
\npoetry of saints and devotees : for in India it is always a spiritual movement that is the source or at least imparts the impulse
\nof formation to new ideas and possibilities and initiates the
\nchanges of the national life. It is this kind that predominated <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-361<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nalmost throughout the creative activity of most of these tongues
\nbefore modem times, because it was always poetry of this
\ntype that was nearest to the heart and mind of the people; and even where the work is of a more secular spirit, the religious turn enters into it and provides the framework, a part of
\nthe tone or the apparent motive. In abundance, in poetic excellence, in the union of spontaneous beauty of motive and
\nlyrical skill this poetry has no parallel in its own field in any
\nother literature. A sincerity of devotional feeling is not enough
\nto produce work of this high turn of beauty, as is shown by the
\nsterility of Christian Europe in this kind; it needs a rich and
\nprofound spiritual culture. Another part of the literature is
\ndevoted to the bringing of something of the essence of the old
\nculture into the popular tongues through new poetic versions
\nof the story of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana or in
\nromantic narrative founded on the ancient legends; and here
\nagain we have work of the very greatest genius as well as much
\nof a lesser but still high order. A third type presents vividly
\nthe; religious beliefs and feelings of the people, the life of court
\nand city and village and hamlet, of landholder and trader and
\nartisan and peasant. The bulk of the work done in the regional
\ntongues falls under one or other of these heads, but there are
\nvariations such as the religio-ethical and political poems of
\nRamdas in Maharashtra or the gnomic poetry, the greatest in
\nplan, conception and force of execution ever written in this
\nkind, of the Tamil saint, Tiruvalluvar. There is too in one or
\ntwo of these languages a later erotic poetry not without considerable lyrical beauty of an entirely mundane inspiration. The
\nsame culture reigns amid many variations of form in all this
\nwork of the regional peoples, but each creates on the lines of its
\nown peculiar character and temperament and this gives a different stamp, the source of a rich variety in the unity, to each
\nof these beautiful and vigorous literatures. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThus under the stress of temperamental variation the
\npoetry of the Vaishnavas puts on very different artistic forms in <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-362<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ndifferent provinces. There is first the use of the psychical symbol created by the Puranas, and this assumes its most complete
\nand artistic shape in Bengal and becomes there a long continued
\ntradition. The desire of the soul for God is there thrown into
\nsymbolic figure in the lyrical love cycle of Radha and Krishna,
\nthe Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine Soul through
\nlove, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his
\nmagical flute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one
\noverpowering passion and in the cadence of its phases passing
\nthrough first desire to the bliss of union, the pangs of separation, the eternal longing and reunion, the līlā<\/i> of the love of the
\nhuman spirit for God. There is a settled frame and sequence,
\na subtly simple lyrical rhythm, a traditional diction of appealing
\ndirectness and often of intense beauty. This accomplished
\nlyrical form springs at once to perfect birth from the genius of
\nthe first two poets who used the Bengali tongue, Bidyapati, a
\nconsummate artist of word and line, and the inspired singer
\nChandidas in whose name stand some of the sweetest and
\nmost poignant and exquisite love-lyrics in any tongue. The
\nsymbol here is sustained in its most external figure of human
\npassion and so consistently that it is now supposed by many
\nto mean nothing else, but this is quite negatived by the use of
\nthe same figures by the devout poets of the religion of Chaitanya.
\nAll the spiritual experience that lay behind the symbol was
\nembodied in that inspired prophet and incarnation of the
\necstasy of divine love and its spiritual philosophy put into clear
\nform in his teaching. His followers continued the poetic tradition of the earlier singers and though they fall below them in
\ngenius, yet left behind a great mass of this kind of poetry always
\nbeautiful in form and often deep and moving in substance.
\nAnother type is created in the perfect lyrics of the Rajput
\nqueen Mirabai, in which the images of the Krishna symbol are
\nmore directly turned into a song of the love and pursuit of the
\ndivine Lover by the soul of the singer. In the Bengal poetry
\nthe expression preferred is the symbolic figure impersonal to <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-363<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe poet: here a personal note gives the peculiar intensity to
\nthe emotion. This is given a still more direct turn by a southern
\npoetess in the image of herself as the bride of Krishna. The
\npeculiar power of this kind of Vaishnava religion and poetry
\nis in the turning of all the human emotions Godward, the
\npassion of love being preferred as the intensest and most absorbing of them all, and though the idea recurs wherever there has
\nbeen a strong development of devotional religion, it has nowhere
\nbeen used with so much power and sincerity as in the work of
\nthe Indian poets. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nOther Vaishnava poetry does not use the Krishna symbol,
\nbut is rather addressed in language of a more direct devotion
\nto Vishnu or centres sometimes around the Rama avatar.
\nThe songs of Tukaram are the best known of this kind. The
\nVaishnava poetry of Bengal avoids except very rarely any
\nelement of intellectualising thought and relies purely on
\nemotional description, a sensuous figure of passion and intensity
\nof feeling : Maratha poetry on the contrary has from the
\nbeginning a strong intellectual strain. The first Marathi poet
\nis at once a devotee, a Yogin and a thinker, the poetry of the
\nsaint Ramdas, associated with the birth and awakening of a 
\nnation, is almost entirely a stream of religious ethical thinking
\nraised to the lyrical pitch, and it is the penetrating truth and
\nfervour of a thought arising from the heart of devotion that
\nmakes the charm and power of Tukaram’s songs. A long strain
\nof devotee poets keeps sounding the note that he struck and
\ntheir work fills the greater space of Marathi poetry. The same
\ntype takes a lighter and more high-pitched turn in the poetry of Kabir. In Bengal again at the end of the Mahomedan period there
\nis the same blending of fervent devotion with many depths
\nand turns of religious thought in the songs of Ramprasad to
\nthe divide Mother, combined here with a vivid play of imagination turning all familiar things into apt and pregnant images
\nand an intense spontaneity of feeling. In the South a profounder
\nphilosophic utterance is often fused into the devotional note, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-364<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nespecially in the Shaiva poets, and, as in the early Sanskrit
\npoetry, vivified by a great power of living phrase and image,
\nand farther north the high Vedantic spirituality renews itself
\nin the Hindi poetry of Surdas and inspires Nanak and the
\nSikh Gurus. The spiritual culture prepared and perfected by
\ntwo millenniums of the ancient civilisation has flooded the mind
\nof all these peoples and given birth to great new literatures
\nand its voice is heard continually through all their course. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe narrative poetry of this age is less striking and original except for a certain number of great or famous works.
\nMost of these tongues have felt the cultural necessity of
\ntransferring into the popular speech the whole central story
\nof the Mahabharata or certain of its episodes and, still more
\nuniversally, the story of the Ramayana. In Bengal there
\nis the Mahabharata of Kashiram, the gist of the old epic
\nsimply retold in a lucid classical style, and the Ramayana
\nof Krittibas, more near to the vigour of the soil, neither of
\nthem attaining to the epic manner but still written with a
\nsimple poetic skill and a swift narrative force. Only two
\nhowever of these later poets arrived at a vividly living recreation of the ancient story and succeeded in producing a
\nsupreme masterpiece, Kamban, the Tamil poet who makes
\nof his subject a great original epic, and Tulsidas whose famed
\nHindi Ramayana combines with a singular mastery lyric
\nintensity, romantic richness and the sublimity of the epic
\nimagination and is at once a story of the divine Avatar and
\na long chant of religious devotion. An English historian of
\nthe literature has even claimed for Tulsidas’s poem superiority
\nto the epic of Valmiki : that is an exaggeration and, whatever
\nthe merits, there cannot be a greater than the greatest, but
\nthat such claims can be made for Tulsidas and Kamban is
\nevidence at least of the power of the poets and a proof that
\nthe creative genius of the Indian mind has not declined even in the narrowing of the range of its culture and knowledge.
\nAll this poetry indeed shows a gain in intensity that compensates <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-365<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nto some extent for the loss of the ancient height
\nand amplitude.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nWhile this kind of narrative writing goes back to the
\nepics, another seems to derive its first shaping and motive
\nfrom the classical poems of Kalidasa, Bharavi and Magha.
\nA certain number take for their subject, like that earlier
\npoetry, episodes of the Mahabharata or other ancient or
\nPuranic legends, but the classical and epic manner has disappeared, the inspiration resembles more that of the Puranas
\nand there is the tone and the looser and easier development
\nof the popular romance. This kind is commoner in. western
\nIndia and excellence in it is the title to fame of Premananda,
\nthe most considerable of the Gujerati poets. In Bengal we
\nfind another type of half-romantic half-realistic narrative
\nwhich develops a poetic picture of the religious mind and life
\nand scenes of contemporary times and has a strong resemblance
\nin its motive to the more outward element in the aim of Rajput
\npainting. The life of Chaitanya written to a simple and naive
\nromance verse, appealing by its directness and sincerity but
\ninadequate in poetic form, is a unique contemporary presentation of the birth and foundation of a religious movement.
\nTwo other poems that have become classics celebrate the
\ngreatness of Durga or Chandi, the goddess who is the Energy
\nof Shiva,\u2014the "Chandi" of Mukundaram, a pure romance
\nof great poetic beauty which presents in its frame of popular
\nlegend a very living picture of the life of the people, and the "Annadamangal" of Bharatchandra repeating in its first
\npart the Puranic tales of the gods as they might be imagined
\nby the Bengali villager in the type of his own human life,
\ntelling in the second a romantic love story and in the third
\na historical incident of the time of Jehangir, all these disparate elements forming the development of the one central
\nmotive and presented without any imaginative elevation but
\nwith an unsurpassable vividness of description and power
\nof vital and convincing phrase. All this poetry, the epic and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-366<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe romance, the didactic poem, of which Ramdas and the
\nfamous Kural of Tiruvalluvar are the chief representatives,
\nand the philosophic and devotional lyrics are not the creation
\nor meant for the appreciation of a cultivated class, but with
\nfew exceptions the expression of a popular culture. The Ramayana of Tulsidas, the songs of Ramprasad and of the Bauls,
\nthe wandering Vaishnava devotees, the poetry of Ramdas
\nand Tukaram, the sentences of Tiruvalluvar and the poetess
\nAvvai and the inspired lyrics of the Southern saints and Alwars
\nwere known to all classes and their thought or their emotion
\nentered deeply into the life of the people. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nI have dwelt at this length on the literature because it is,
\nnot indeed the complete, but still the most varied and ample
\nrecord of the culture of a people. Three millenniums at
\nleast of a creation of this kind and greatness are surely the
\nevidence of a real and very remarkable culture. The last
\nperiod shows no doubt a gradual decline, but one may note
\nthe splendour even of the decline and especially the continued
\nvitality of religious, literary and artistic creation. At the
\nmoment when it seemed to be drawing to a close it has revived
\nat the first chance and begins again another cycle, at first
\nprecisely in the three things that lasted the longest, spiritual
\nand religious activity, literature and painting, but already the
\nrenewal promises to extend itself to all the many activities
\nof life and culture in which India was once a great and leading
\npeople. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-367<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER X   INDIAN LITERATURE   THE arts which appeal to the soul through the eye are able to arrive at a peculiarly concentrated expression…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","wpcat-66-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3241","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=3241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}