{"id":3245,"date":"2013-07-13T01:46:55","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3245"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:46:55","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:46:55","slug":"11-religion-and-spirituality-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\/11-religion-and-spirituality-vol-the-foundations-of-indian-culture","title":{"rendered":"-11_Religion and Spirituality.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nIII<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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\nA DEFENCE OF INDIAN CULTURE<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

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

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\nThe whole root of difference between Indian and European culture springs from the spiritual aim of Indian civilisation.
\nIt is the turn which this aim imposes on all the rich and luxuriant variety of
\nits forms and rhythms that gives to it its unique character. For even what it
\nhas in common with other cultures gets from that turn a stamp of striking
\noriginality and solitary greatness. A spiritual aspiration was the governing
\nforce of this culture, its core of thought, its ruling passion. Not only did it
\nmake spirituality the highest aim of life, but it even tried, as far as that
\ncould be done in the past conditions of the human race, to turn the whole of
\nlife towards spirituality. <\/font>
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\nBut since religion is in the human mind the first native, if imperfect form of the spiritual impulse, the predominance of the spiritual idea, its endeavour to take hold of life, necessitated a casting of thought and action into the religious mould and a persistent filling of every circumstance of life with the religious sense, it demanded a pervading religio-philosophic culture. The highest spirituality indeed moves in a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations and, even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal religious mind is unintelligible. But man does not arrive immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him at once, he would never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of ascent; he asks for some scaffolding of dogma, worship, image, sign, form, symbol, some indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he can stand while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is completed can the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear. The religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled this purpose, but, unlike certain other credal religions, it knew its purpose. It gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits, it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided and many-staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, sanātana dharma.
\n<\/i>It is only if we have a just and right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of Indian culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nNow just here is the first baffling difficulty over which the European mind stumbles; for it finds itself unable to make <\/font>
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out what Hindu religion is. Where, it asks, is its soul ? Where is its mind and fixed thought ? Where is the form of its body ?
\nHow can there be a religion which has no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no theological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo, distinguishing it from antagonistic or rival religions ? How can there be a religion which has no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or congregational system, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory on all its adherents, no one administration and discipline ? For the Hindu priests are mere ceremonial officiants without any ecclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere interpreters of the Shastra, not the lawgivers of the religion or its rulers. How again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures ? The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that varies in different castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader. If it excommunicates the Christian or the Muslim, it is not for religious belief or practice, but because they break with the social rule and order. It has been asserted in consequence that there is no such thing as a Hindu religion, but only a Hindu social system with a bundle of the most disparate religious beliefs and institutions. The precious dictum that Hinduism is a mass of folklore with an ineffective coat of metaphysical daubing is perhaps the final judgment of the superficial occidental mind on this matter.
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\nThis misunderstanding springs from the total difference of outlook on religion that divides the Indian mind and the normal western intelligence. The difference is so great that it could only be bridged by a supple philosophical training or a wide spiritual culture; but the established forms of religion and <\/font>
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\nthe rigid methods of philosophical thought practised in the West make no provision and even allow no opportunity for either. To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the contrary to the western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the most important part of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes it from others. For it is its formulated beliefs that make it either a true or a false religion, according as it agrees or does not agree with the credo of its critic. This notion, however foolish and shallow, is a necessary consequence of the western idea which falsely supposes that intellectual truth is the highest verity and, even, that there is no other. The Indian religious thinker knows that all the highest eternal verities are truths of the spirit. The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul’s inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nIndian religion placed four necessities before human life. First, it imposed upon the mind a belief in a highest conscious ness or state of existence universal and transcendent of the universe, from which all comes, in which all lives and moves without knowing it and of which all must one day grow aware, returning towards that which is perfect, eternal and infinite. Next, it laid upon the individual life the need of self-preparation by development and experience till man is ready for an effort <\/font>
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\nto grow consciously into the truth of this greater existence. Thirdly, it provided it with a well-founded, well-explored, many-branching and always enlarging way of knowledge and of spiritual or religious discipline. Lastly, for those not yet ready for these higher steps it provided an organisation of the individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social discipline and conduct, of mental and moral and vital development by which they could move each in his own limits and according to his own nature in such a way as to become eventually ready for the greater existence. The first three of these elements are the most essential to any religion, but Hinduism has always attached to the last also a great importance; it has left out no part of life as a thing secular and foreign to the religious and spiritual life. Still the Indian religious tradition is not merely the form of a religio-social system, as the ignorant critic vainly imagines. However greatly that may count at the moment of a social departure, however stubbornly the conservative religious mind may oppose all pronounced or drastic change, still the core of Hinduism is a spiritual,
\nnot social discipline. Actually we find religions like Sikhism counted in the Vedic family although they broke down the old social tradition and invented a novel form, while the Jains and Buddhists were traditionally considered to be outside the religious fold although they observed Hindu social custom and intermarried with Hindus, because their spiritual system and teaching figured in its origin as a denial of the truth of the Veda and a departure from the continuity of the Vedic line. In all these four elements that constitute Hinduism there are major and minor differences between Hindus of various sects, schools, communities and races; but nevertheless there is also a general unity of spirit, of fundamental type and form and of spiritual temperament which creates in this vast fluidity an immense force of cohesion and a strong principle of oneness. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nThe fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common
\nto the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth <\/font>
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\nof all that is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient, a one Eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal Divinity or divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount and continent and inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal. But this Truth of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical speculation, a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the intelligence. It was not an idea to be indulged by the thinker in his study, but otherwise void of practical bearing on life. It was not a mystic sublimation which could be ignored in the dealings of man with the world and Nature. It was a living spiritual Truth, an Entity, a Power, a Presence that could be sought by all according to their degree of capacity and seized in a thousand ways through life and beyond life. This Truth was to be lived and even to be made the governing idea of thought and life and action. This recognition and pursuit of something or someone Supreme behind all forms is the one universal credo of Indian religion, and if it has taken a hundred shapes, it was precisely because it was so much alive. The Infinite alone justifies the existence of the finite and the finite by itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence. Life, if it is not an illusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. Or it is a means by which the soul growing in Nature through countless forms and many lives can approach, touch, feel and unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and adoration and a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this infinite Existence. This Self or this self-existent Being is the one supreme reality, and all things else are either only appearances or only true by dependence upon it. It follows that self-realisation
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\nand God-realisation are the great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nIndian religion never considered intellectual or theological conceptions about the supreme Truth to be the one thing of central importance. To pursue that Truth under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain to it by inner experience, to live in it in consciousness, this it held to be the sole thing needful. One school or sect might consider the real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and the individual soul in man to be three eternally different powers of being. But for all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even to the Indian dualist. God is the supreme self and reality in whom and by whom Nature and man live, move and have their being and, if you eliminate God from his view of things. Nature and man would lose for him all their meaning and importance. The Spirit, universal Nature (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Jiva, are the three truths which are universally admitted by all the many religious sects and conflicting religious philosophies of India. Universal also is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self in man, the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting contact or absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal Brahman is the condition of spiritual perfection. It is open to us to conceive and have experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to approach and know and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal Person : but whatever be our way of reaching him, the one important truth of spiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and all existence is in him and to find him is the great self-finding. Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing  
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\nthe one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing needful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest spiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian religion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nIf there were nothing else to be said in favour of the spiritual genius of the Indian people or the claim of Indian civilisation to stand in the front rank as a spiritual culture, it would be sufficiently substantiated by this single fact that not only was this greatest and widest spiritual truth seen in India with the boldest largeness, felt and expressed with a unique intensity, and approached from all possible sides, but it was made consciously the grand uplifting idea of life, the core of all thinking, the foundation of all religion, the secret sense and declared ultimate aim of human existence. The truth announced is not peculiar to Indian thinking; it has been seen and followed by the highest minds and souls everywhere. But elsewhere it has been the living guide only of a few thinkers or of some rare mystics or exceptionally gifted spiritual natures. The mass of men have had no understanding, no distinct perception, not even a reflected glimpse of this something Beyond; they have lived only in the lower sectarian side of religion, in inferior ideas of the Deity or in the outward mundane aspects of life. But Indian culture did succeed by the strenuousness of its vision, the universality of its approach, the intensity of its seeking, in doing what has been done by no other culture. It succeeded in stamping religion with the essential ideal of a real spirituality; it brought some living reflection of the very highest spiritual truth and some breath of its influence into every part of the religious field. Nothing can be more untrue than to pretend that the general religious <\/font>
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\nmind of India has not at all grasped the higher spiritual or meta physical truths of Indian religion. It is a sheer falsehood or a wilful misunderstanding to say that it has lived always in the externals only of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the con
\ncontrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their broad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya, Lila, divine Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the temple as to the philosopher in his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and the saint in his hermitage. The spiritual reality which they reflect, the profound experience to which they point has permeated the religion, the literature, the art, even the popular religious songs of a whole people. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nIt is true that these things are realised by the mass of men more readily through the fervour of devotion than by a strenuous effort of thinking, but that is as it must and should be, since the heart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence. It is true, too, that the tendency to put too much stress on externals has always been there and worked to over cloud the deeper spiritual motive; but that is not peculiar to India, it is a common failing of human nature, not less but rather more evident in Europe than
\nin Asia. It has needed a constant stream of saints and religious thinkers and the teaching of illuminated Sannyasins to keep the reality vivid and resist the deadening weight of form and ceremony and ritual. But the fact remains that these messengers of the spirit have never been wanting. And the still more significant fact remains that there has never been wanting either a happy readiness in the com mon mind to listen to the message. The ordinary materialised souls, the external minds are the majority in India as every where. How easy it is for the superior European critic to forget this common fact of our humanity and treat this turn as a peculiar sign of the Indian mentality ! But at least the people of India, even the "ignorant masses" have this distinction that <\/font>
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\nthey are by centuries of training nearer to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of the universal ignorance and are more easily led back to a vital glimpse of God and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass of men or even the cultured elite anywhere else. Where else could the lofty, austere and difficult teaching of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the popular mind ? Where else could the songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir, the Sikh Gurus and the chants of the Tamil saints with their fervid devotion but also their profound spiritual thinking have found so speedy an echo and formed a popular religious literature ? This strong permeation or close nearness of the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to the highest realities is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still living and supremely spiritual culture. <\/font>
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\nThe endless variety of Indian philosophy and religion seems to the European mind interminable, bewildering, wearisome, useless; it is unable to see the forest because of the richness and luxuriance of its vegetation; it misses the common spiritual life in the multitude of its forms. But this infinite variety is itself, as Vivekananda pertinently pointed out, a sign of a superior religious culture. The Indian mind has always realised that the Supreme is the Infinite; it has perceived, right from its Vedic beginnings, that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an endless variety of aspects. The mentality of the West has long cherished the aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one array of prohibitions and injunctions, one ecclesiastical ordinance. That narrow absurdity prances about as the one true religion which all must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or fierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. This grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty, obscurantism  <\/font>
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\nand aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the free and supple mind of India. Men everywhere have common human failings, and intolerance and narrowness especially in the matter of observances there has been and is in India. There has been much violence of theological disputation, there have been querulous bickerings of sects with their pretensions to spiritual superiority and greater knowledge, and sometimes, at one time especially in southern India in a period of acute religious differences, there have been brief local outbreaks of active mutual tyranny and persecution even unto death. But these things have never taken the proportions which they assumed in Europe. Intolerance has been confined for the most part to the minor forms of polemical attack or to social obstruction or ostracism; very seldom have they transgressed across the line to the major forms of barbaric persecution which draw a long, red and hideous stain across the religious history of Europe. There has played ever in India the saving perception of a higher and purer spiritual intelligence, which has had its effect on the mass mentality. Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments, the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nIndia recognised the authority of spiritual experience and knowledge, but she recognised still more the need of variety of spiritual experience and knowledge. Even in the days of decline when the claim of authority became in too many directions rigorous and excessive, she still kept the saving perception that there could not be one but must be many authorities. An alert readiness to acknowledge new light capable of enlarging the old tradition has always been characteristic of the religious mind in India. Indian civilisation did not develop to a last logical conclusion its earlier political and social liberties, \u2014that greatness of freedom or boldness of experiment belongs to the West; but liberty of religious practice and a complete <\/font>
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\nfreedom of thought in religion as in every other
\nmatter have always counted among its constant traditions. The atheist and the
\nagnostic were free from persecution in India. Buddhism and Jainism might be
\ndisparaged as unorthodox religions, but they were allowed to live freely side by
\nside with the orthodox creeds and philosophies; in her eager thirst for truth
\nshe gave them their full chance, tested all their values, and as much of their
\ntruth as was assimilable was taken into the stock of the common and always
\nenlarging continuity of her spiritual experience. That ageless continuity was
\ncarefully conserved, but it admitted light from all quarters. In latter times
\nthe saints who reached some fusion of the Hindu and the Islamic teaching were
\nfreely and immediately recognised as leaders of Hindu religion,\u2014even, in some
\ncases, when they started with a Mussulman birth and from the Mussulman
\nstandpoint. The Yogin who developed a new path of Yoga, the religious teacher
\nwho founded a new order, the thinker who built up a novel statement of the
\nmany-sided truth of spiritual existence, found no serious obstacle to their
\npractice or their propaganda. At most they had to meet the opposition of the
\npriest and Pundit instinctively adverse to any change; but this had only to be lived down for the new element to be received into the free and pliant body of the national religion and its ever plastic order. <\/font>
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\nThe necessity of a firm spiritual order as well as an untrammelled spiritual freedom was always perceived, but it was pro
\nprovided for in various ways and not in any one formal, external or artificial manner. It was founded in the first place on the recognition of an ever enlarging number of authorised scriptures. Of these scriptures some like the Gita possessed a common and widespread authority, others were peculiar to sects or schools : some like the Vedas were supposed to have an absolute, others a relative binding force. But the very largest freedom of interpretation was allowed, and this prevented any of these authoritative books from being turned into an <\/font>
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\ninstrument of ecclesiastical tyranny or a denial of freedom to the human mind and spirit. Another instrument of order was the power of family and communal tradition, kuladharma,
\n<\/i>persistent but not immutable. A third was the religious authority of the Brahmins; as priests they officiated as the custodians of observance, as scholars, acting in a much more important and respected role than the officiating priesthood could claim,\u2014for to the priesthood no great consideration was given in India,\u2014they stood as the exponents of religious tradition and were a strong conservative power. Finally, and most characteristically, most powerfully, order was "secured by the succession of Gurus or spiritual teachers, paramparā,
\n<\/i>who preserved the continuity of each spiritual system and handed it down from generation to generation but were empowered also, unlike the priest and the Pundit, to enrich freely its significance and develop its practice. A living and moving, not a rigid continuity, was the characteristic turn of the inner religious mind of India. The evolution of the Vaishnava religion from very early times, its succession of saints and teachers, the striking developments given to it successively by Ramanuja, Madhwa, Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and its recent stirrings of survival after a period of languor and of some fossilisation form one notable example of this firm combination of agelong continuity and fixed tradition with latitude of powerful and vivid change. A more striking instance was the founding of the Sikh religion, its long line of Gurus and the novel direction and form given to it by Guru Govind Singh in the democratic institution of the Khalsa. The Buddhist Sangha and its councils, the creation of a sort of divided pontifical authority by Shankaracharya, an authority transmitted from generation to generation for more than a thousand years and even now not altogether effete, the Sikh Khalsa, the adoption of the congregational form called Samaj by the modern reforming sects indicate an attempt towards a compact and stringent order. <\/font>
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\nBut it is noteworthy that even in these attempts the freedom and plasticity and living sincerity of the religious mind of India always prevented it from initiating anything like the overblown ecclesiastical orders and despotic hierarchies which in the West have striven to impose the tyranny of their obscurantist yoke on the spiritual liberty of the human race. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\nThe instinct for order and freedom at once in any field of human activity is always a sign of a high natural capacity in that field, and a people which could devise such a union of unlimited religious liberty with an always orderly religious evolution, must be credited with a high religious capacity, even as they cannot be denied its inevitable fruit, a great, ancient and still living spiritual culture. It is this absolute freedom of thought and experience and this provision of a framework sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet sufficiently sure and firm to be the means of a stable and powerful evolution that have given to Indian civilisation this wonderful and seemingly eternal religion with its marvellous wealth of many-sided philosophies, of great scriptures, of profound religious works, of religions that approach the Eternal from every side of his infinite Truth, of Yoga-systems of psycho-spiritual discipline and self-finding, of suggestive forms, symbols and ceremonies, which are strong to train the mind at all stages of development towards the Godward endeavour. Its firm structure capable of supporting without peril a large tolerance and assimilative spirit, its vivacity, intensity, profundity and multitudinousness of experience, its freedom from the unnatural European divorce between mundane knowledge and science on the one side and religion on the other, its reconciliation of the claims of the intellect with the claims of the spirit, its long endurance and infinite capacity of revival make it stand out today as the most remarkable, rich and living of all religious systems. The nineteenth century has thrown on it its tremendous shock of negation and scepticism but has not been able to destroy its <\/font>
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\nassured roots of spiritual knowledge. A little disturbed for a brief moment, surprised and temporarily shaken by this attack in a period of greatest depression of the nation’s vital force, India revived almost at once and responded by a fresh outburst of spiritual activity, seeking, assimilation, formative effort. A great new life is visibly preparing in her, a mighty transformation and farther dynamic evolution and potent march forward into the inexhaustible infinites of spiritual experience. <\/font>
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\nThe many-sided plasticity of Indian cult and spiritual experience is the native sign of its truth, its living reality, the unfettered sincerity of its search and finding; but this plasticity is a constant stumbling-block to the European mind. The religious thinking of Europe is accustomed to rigid impoverishing definitions, to strict exclusions, to a constant preoccupation with the outward idea, the organisation, the form. A precise creed framed by the logical or theological intellect, a strict and definite moral code to fix the conduct, a bundle of observances and ceremonies, a firm ecclesiastical or congregational organisation, that is western religion. Once the spirit is safely imprisoned and chained up in these things, some emotional fervours and even a certain amount of mystic seeking can be tolerated\u2014within rational limits, but, after all, it is perhaps safest to do without these dangerous spices. Trained in these conceptions, the European critic comes to India and is struck by the immense mass and intricacy of a polytheistic cult crowned at its summit by a belief in the one Infinite. This belief he erroneously supposes to be identical with the barren and abstract intellectual pantheism of the West. He applies with an obstinate prejudgment the ideas and definitions of his own thinking, and this illegitimate importation has fixed many false values on Indian spiritual conceptions,\u2014unhappily, even in the mind of "educated" India. But where our religion eludes his fixed standards, misunderstanding, denunciation and supercilious condemnation come <\/font>
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\n
\nat once to his rescue. The Indian mind on the contrary is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of intuition and inner experience had given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty,\u2014the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the One without a second, it still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature; it leaves room for his many trinities and million aspects. Even when it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of the Divinity and seems to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at the back of its consciousness the sense of the All and the idea of the One. Even when it distributes its worship among many objects, it looks at the same time through the objects of its worship and sees beyond the multitude of godheads the unity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar to the mystics or to a small literate class or to philosophic thinkers nourished on the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta. It permeates the popular mind nourished on the thoughts, images, traditions and cultural symbols of the Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarianism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIndian religion founded itself on the conception of a timeless, nameless and formless Supreme, but it did not feel called upon like the narrower and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger races, to deny or abolish all intermediary forms and names and powers and personalities of the Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague transcendental Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one Godhead is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is he or made out of his being or his nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism; for beyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal. Indian polytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for here the worshipper <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013154<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof many gods still knows that all his divinities are forms, names, personalities and powers of the One, his gods proceed from the one Purusha, his goddesses are energies of the one divine Force. Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. Indian
\nimage worship is not the idolatry of a barbaric or undeveloped mind, for even the most ignorant know that the image is a symbol and support and can throw it away when its use is over. The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak’s worship of the timeless One, Akala, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta. The divine Personality of God and his human relations with man are strongly stressed by Vaishnavism and Shaivism as the most dynamic Truth; but that is not the whole of these religions, and this divine Personality
\nis not the limited magnified-human personal God of the West. Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has been a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experience. Observing the one Truth from all its many sides, it shut out none. It gave itself no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing separative designations for its constituting cults and divisions, it remained itself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman of its agelong seeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other creeds by its traditional scriptures, cults and symbols, it is not in its essential character a credal religion at all but a vast and many-sided, an always unifying and always progressive and self-enlarging system of spiritual culture.1
\n<\/font><\/sup> <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> The only religion that India has apparently rejected in the end is Buddhism; but in fact this appearance is a historical error. Buddhism lost <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013155<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nIt is necessary to emphasise this synthetic character and embracing unity of the Indian religious mind, because otherwise we miss the whole meaning of Indian life and the whole sense of Indian culture. It is only by recognising this broad and plastic character that we can understand its total effect on the life of the community and the life of the individual. And if we are asked, ‘But after all what is Hinduism, what does it teach, what does it practise, what are its common factors?’, we can answer that Indian religion is founded upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals of a highest and widest spiritual experience. First comes the idea of the One Existence of the Veda to whom sages give different names, the One without a second of the Upanishads who is All that is, and beyond all that is, the Permanent of the Buddhists, the Absolute of the Illusionists, the supreme God or Purusha of the Theists who holds in his power the soul and Nature,\u2014in a word the Eternal, the Infinite. This is the first common
\nfoundation; but it can be and is expressed in an endless variety of formulas by’ the human intelligence. To discover and closely approach and enter into whatever kind or degree of unity with this Permanent, this Infinite, this Eternal, is the highest height and last effort of its spiritual experience. That is the first universal credo of the religious mind of India. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nAdmit in whatever formula this foundation, follow this great spiritual aim by one of the thousand paths recognised in India or even any new path which branches off from them and you are at the core of the religion. For its second basic idea is the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite. The Infinite is full of many infinities and each of these infinities is itself the very Eternal. And here in the limitations <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n________________<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nits separative force, because its spiritual substance, as opposed to its credal parts, was absorbed by the religious mind of Hindu India. Even so, it survived in the North and was exterminated not by Shankaracharya or another, but by the invading force of Islam. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013156<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof the cosmos God manifests himself and fulfils himself in the world in many ways, but each is the way of the Eternal. For in each finite we can discover and through all things as his forms and symbols we can approach the Infinite; all cosmic powers are manifestations, all forces are forces of the One. The gods behind the workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as powers, names and personalities of the one Godhead. An infinite Conscious-Force, executive Energy, Will or Law, Maya, Prakriti, Shakti or Karma, is behind all happenings, whether to us they seem good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, fortunate or adverse. The Infinite creates and is
\nBrahma; it preserves and is Vishnu; it destroys or takes to itself and is Rudra or Shiva. The supreme Energy beneficent in upholding and protection is or else formulates itself as the Mother of the worlds, Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the mask of destruction it is Chandi or it is Kali, the dark Mother. The One Godhead manifests himself in the form of his qualities in various names and godheads. The God of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of the Shakta appear as two different godheads; but in truth they are the one infinite Deity in different figures.1<\/sup> One may approach the Supreme through any of these names and forms, with knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the supreme experience. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nOne thing however has to be noted that while many modernised Indian religionists tend, by way of an intellectual compromise with modem materialistic rationalism, to explain away these things as symbols, the ancient Indian religious mentality saw them not only as symbols but as world-realities,\u2014 even if to the Illusionist realities only of the world of Maya.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/font><\/sup> This explanation of Indian polytheism is not a modem invention created to meet western reproaches; it is to be found explicitly stated in the Gita; it is, still earlier, the sense of the Upanishads; it was clearly stated in so many words in the first ancient days by the "primitive" poets (in truth the profound mystics) of the Veda.
\n<\/font> <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013157<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nFor between the highest unimaginable Existence and our material way of being the spiritual and psychic knowledge of India did not fix a gulf as between two unrelated opposites. It was aware of other psychological planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of these supraphysical planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of the material universe. Man approaches God at first according to his psychological nature and his capacity for deeper experience,
\nsvabhava, adhikāra.<\/i> The level of Truth, the plane of consciousness he can reach is determined by the inner evolutionary stage. Thence comes the variety of religious cult, but its data are not imaginary structures, inventions of priests or poets, but truths of a supraphysical existence intermediate between the consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of the Absolute. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

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

\n
\nPage\u2013158<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> task of religion and spirituality is to mediate Between
\nGod and man, between the Eternal and Infinite and this
\ntransient, yet persistent finite, between a luminous Truth-consciousness not expressed or not yet expressed here and
\nthe Mind’s ignorance. But nothing is more difficult than to
\nbring home the greatness and uplifting power of the spiritual
\nconsciousness to the natural man forming the vast majority
\nof the race, for his mind and senses are turned outward towards the external calls of life and its objects and never inwards to the Truth which lies behind them. This external
\nvision and attraction are the essence of the universal blinding
\nforce which is designated in Indian philosophy the Ignorance.
\nAncient Indian spirituality recognised that man lives in the
\nIgnorance and has to be led through its imperfect indications
\nto a highest inmost knowledge. Our life moves between two
\nworlds, the depths upon depths of our inward being and the
\nsurface field of our outward nature. The majority of men
\nput the whole emphasis of life on the outward and live very
\nstrongly in their surface consciousness and very little in the
\ninward existence. Even the choice spirits raised from the
\ngrossness of the common vital and physical mould by the
\nstress of thought and culture do not usually get farther than
\na strong dwelling on the things of the mind. The highest
\nflight they reach\u2014and it is this that the West persistently
\nmistakes for spirituality\u2014is a preference for living in the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013159<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmind and’ emotions more than in the gross outward life or
\nelse an attempt to subject this rebellious life-stuff to the
\nlaw of intellectual truth or ethical reason and will or aesthetic
\nbeauty or of all three together. But spiritual knowledge
\nperceives that there is a greater thing in us; our inmost self,
\nour real being is not the intellect, not the aesthetic, ethical
\nor thinking mind, but the divinity within, the Spirit, and
\nthese other things are only the instruments of the Spirit. A
\nmere intellectual, ethical and aesthetic culture does not go
\nback to the inmost truth of the spirit; it is still an Ignorance,
\nan incomplete, outward and superficial knowledge. To have
\nmade the discovery of our deepest being and hidden spiritual
\nnature is the first necessity and to have erected the living
\n<\/b>of an inmost spiritual life into the aim of existence is the characteristic sign of a spiritual culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis endeavour takes in certain religions the form of a
\nspiritual exclusiveness which revolts from the outward existence rather than seeks to transform it. The main tendency of the Christian discipline was not only to despise the physical
\nand vital way of living, but to disparage and imprison the
\nintellectual and distrust and discourage the aesthetic thirsts
\nof our nature. It emphasised against them a limited spiritual
\nemotionalism and its intense experiences as the one thing
\nneedful; the development of the ethical sense was the sole
\nmental necessity, its translation into act the sole indispensable
\ncondition or result of the spiritual life. Indian spirituality
\nreposed on too wide and many-sided a culture to admit as its
\nbase this narrow movement; but on its more solitary summits,
\nat least in its later period, it tended to a spiritual exclusiveness
\nloftier in vision, but even more imperative and excessive.
\nA spirituality of this intolerant high-pointed kind, to whatever
\nelevation it may rise, however it may help to purify life or
\nlead to a certain kind of individual salvation, cannot be a
\ncomplete thing. For its exclusiveness imposes on it a certain
\nimpotence to deal effectively with the problems of human <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013160<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nexistence; it cannot lead it to its integral perfection or combine its highest heights with its broadest broadness. A wider
\nspiritual culture must recognize that the Spirit is not only
\nthe highest and inmost thing, but all is manifestation and
\ncreation of the Spirit. It must have a wider outlook, a more
\nembracing range of applicability and, even, a more aspiring
\nand ambitious aim of its endeavour. Its aim must be not
\nonly to raise to inaccessible heights the few elect, but to draw
\nall men and all life and the whole human being upward, to
\nspiritualise life and in the end to divinise human nature.
\nNot only must it be able to lay hold on his deepest individual
\nbeing but to inspire too his communal existence. It must
\nturn, by a spiritual change, all the members of his ignorance
\ninto members of the knowledge; it must transmute all the
\ninstruments of the human into instruments of a divine living.
\nThe total movement of Indian spirituality is towards this
\naim; in spite of all the difficulties, imperfections and fluctuations of its evolution, it had this character. But like other
\ncultures it was not at all times and in all its parts and movements consciously aware of its own total significance. This
\nlarge sense sometimes emerged into something like a conscious synthetic clarity, but was more often kept in the depths
\nand on the surface dispersed in a multitude of subordinate
\nand special stand-points. Still, it is only by an intelligence
\nof the total drift that its manifold sides and rich variations
\nof effort and teaching and discipline can receive their full
\nreconciling unity and be understood in the light of its own
\nmost intrinsic purpose. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nNow the spirit of Indian religion and spiritual culture
\nhas been persistently and immovably the same throughout
\nthe long time of its vigour, but its form has undergone remarkable changes. Yet if we look into them from the right
\ncentre it will be apparent that these changes are the results
\nof a logical and inevitable evolution inherent in the very
\nprocess of man’s growth towards the heights. In its earliest <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013161<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nform, its first Vedic system, it took its outward foundation
\non the mind of the physical man whose natural faith is in
\nthings physical, in the sensible and visible objects, presences,
\nrepresentations and the external pursuits and aims of the
\nmaterial world. The means, symbols, rites, figures, by which
\nit sought to mediate between the spirit and the normal human
\nmentality were drawn from these most external physical
\nthings. Man’s first and primitive idea of the Divine can only
\ncome through his vision of external Nature and the sense of
\na superior Power or Powers concealed behind her phenomena
\nveiled id the heaven and earth, father and mother of our being,
\nin the sun and moon and stars, its lights and regulators, in
\ndawn and day and night and rain and wind and storm, the
\noceans and the rivers and the forests, all the circumstances
\nand forces of her scene of action, all that vast and mysterious
\nsurrounding life of which we are a part and in which the
\nnatural heart and mind of the human creature feel instinctively
\nthrough whatever bright or dark or confused figures that
\nthere is here some divine Multitude or else mighty Infinite,
\none, manifold and mysterious, which takes these forms and
\nmanifests itself in these motions. The Vedic religion took
\nthis natural sense and feeling of the physical man; it used the
\nconceptions to which they gave birth, and it sought to lead
\nhim through them to the psychic and spiritual truths of his
\nown being and the being of the cosmos. It recognised that
\nhe was right when he saw behind the manifestations of Nature great living powers and godheads, even though he knew
\nnot their inner truth, and right too in offering to them worship
\nand propitiation and atonement. For that inevitably must
\nbe the initial way in which his active physical, vital and mental
\nnature is allowed to approach the Godhead. He approaches
\nit through its visible outward manifestations as something
\ngreater than his own natural self, something single or multiple that guides, sustains and directs his life, and he calls to
\nit for help and support in the desires and difficulties and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013162<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ndistresses and struggles of his human existence.1 The Vedic
\nreligion accepted also the form in which early man everywhere expressed his sense of the relation between himself
\nand the godheads of Nature; it adopted as its central symbol
\nthe act and ritual of a physical sacrifice. However crude the
\nnotions attached to it, this idea of the necessity of sacrifice
\ndid express obscurely a first law of being. For it was founded
\non that secret of constant interchange between the individual
\nand the universal powers of the cosmos which covertly supports all the process of life and develops the action of. Nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut even in its external and exoteric side the Vedic religion did not limit itself to this acceptance and regulation of
\nthe first religious notions of the natural physical mind of
\nman. The Vedic Rishis gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the people; they spoke to them of a
\nhigher Truth, Right, Law of which the gods were the guardians, of the necessity of a truer knowledge and a larger inner
\nliving according to this Truth and Right and of a home of
\nImmortality to which the soul of man could ascend by the
\npower of Truth and of right doing. The people no doubt
\ntook these ideas in their most external sense; but they were
\ntrained by them to develop their ethical nature, to turn towards some initial development of their psychic being, to
\nconceive the idea of a knowledge and truth other than that
\nof the physical life and to admit even a first conception of
\nsome greater spiritual Reality which was the ultimate object
\nof human worship or aspiration. This religious and moral
\nforce was the highest reach of the external cult and the most
\nthat could be understood or followed by the mass of the people. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> The Gita recognises four kinds or degrees of worshippers and God-seekers. There are first the arthārthī<\/i> and
\nārta,<\/i> those who seek him for the
\nfulfilment of desire and those who turn for divine help in the sorrow and
\nsuffering of existence, there is next the jij\u00f1āsu,<\/i> the seeker of knowledge, the
\nquestioner who is moved to seek the Divine in his truth and in that to meet
\nhim; last and highest, there is the jnānī<\/i> who has already contact with the truth
\nand is able to live in unity with the Spirit. <\/font>
\n    <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nPage\u2013163<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThe deeper truth of these things was reserved for the
\ninitiates, for those who were ready to understand and practise
\nthe inner sense, the esoteric meaning hidden in the Vedic
\nscripture. For the Veda is full of words which, as the Rishis
\nthemselves express it, are secret words that give their inner
\nmeaning only to the seer, kavaye nivacanāni ninyāni vacāmsi.
\n<\/i>This is a feature of the ancient sacred hymns which grew
\nobscure to later ages, it became a dead tradition and has
\nbeen entirely ignored by modem scholarship in its laborious
\nattempt to read the hieroglyph of the Vedic symbols. Yet its
\nrecognition is essential to a right understanding of almost all
\nthe ancient religions; for mostly they started on their upward
\ncurve through an esoteric element of which the key was not
\ngiven to all. In all or most there was a surface cult for the
\ncommon physical man who was held yet unfit for the psychic
\nand spiritual life and an inner secret of the Mysteries carefully
\ndisguised by symbols whose sense was opened only to the initiates. This was the origin of the later distinction between
\nthe Shudra, the undeveloped physical-minded man and the
\ntwice-born, those who were capable of entering into the
\nsecond birth by initiation and to whom alone the Vedic education could be given without danger. This too actuated the later
\nprohibition of any reading or teaching of the Veda by the
\nShudra. It was this inner meaning, it was the higher psychic
\nand spiritual truths concealed by the outer sense, that gave
\nto these hymns the name by which they are still known, the
\n‘Veda, the Book of Knowledge. Only by penetrating into the
\nesoteric sense of this worship can we understand the full
\nflowering of the Vedic religion in the Upanishads and in the
\nlong later evolution of Indian spiritual seeking and experience.
\n‘ For it is all there in its luminous seed, preshadowed or even
\nprefigured in the verses of the early seers. The persistent notion
\nwhich through every change ascribed the foundation of all
\nour culture to the Rishis, whatever its fabulous forms and
\nmythical ascriptions, contains a real truth and veils a sound <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013164<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nhistoric tradition. It reflects the fact of a true initiation and
\nan unbroken continuity between this great primitive past
\nand the riper but hardly greater spiritual development of our
\nhistoric culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis inner Vedic religion started with an extension of the
\npsychic significance of the godheads in the Cosmos. Its primary notion was that of a hierarchy of worlds, an ascending
\nstair of planes of being in the universe. It saw a mounting scale
\nof the worlds corresponding to a similar mounting scale of
\nplanes or degrees or levels of consciousness in the nature of
\nman. A Truth, Right and Law sustains and governs "all these
\nlevels of Nature; one in essence, it takes in them different but
\ncognate forms. There is for instance the series of the outer
\nphysical light, another higher and inner light which is the vehicle
\nof the mental, vital and psychic consciousness and a highest
\ninmost light of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun-God,
\nwas the lord of the physical Sun; but he is at the same time to
\nthe Vedic seer-poet the giver of the rays of knowledge which
\nillumine the mind and he is too the soul and energy and body
\nof the spiritual illumination. And in all these powers he is a
\nluminous form of the one and infinite Godhead. All the
\nVedic godheads have this outer and this inner and inmost
\nfunction, their known and their secret Names. All are in their
\nexternal character powers of physical Nature; all have in
\ntheir inner meaning a psychic function and psychological ascriptions; all too are various powers of some one highest
\nReality, ekam sat,<\/i> the one infinite Existence. This hardly
\nknowable Supreme is called often in the Veda "That Truth"
\nor "That One," tat satyam, tad ekam.<\/i> This complex character
\nof the Vedic godheads assumes forms which have been wholly
\nmisunderstood by those who ascribe to them only their outward physical significance. Each of these gods is in himself a
\ncomplete and separate cosmic personality of the one Existence
\nand in their combination of powers they form the complete
\nuniversal power, the cosmic whole, vaisvadevyam.<\/i> Each <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013165<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nagain, apart from his special function, is one godhead with the
\nothers; each holds in himself the universal divinity, each god
\nis all the other gods. This is the aspect of the Vedic teaching
\nand worship to which a European scholar, mistaking entirely
\nits significance because he read it in the dim and poor light of
\nEuropean religious experience, has given the sounding misnomer, henotheism. Beyond, in the triple Infinite, these godheads put on their highest nature and are names of the one
\nnameless Ineffable. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut the greatest power of the Vedic teaching, that which
\nmade it the source of all later Indian philosophies, religions,
\nsystems of Yoga, lay in its application to the inner life of man.
\nMan lives in the physical cosmos subject to death and the
\n"much falsehood" of the mortal existence. To rise beyond
\nthis death, to become one of the immortals, he has to turn
\nfrom the falsehood to the Truth; he has to turn to the Light
\nand to battle with and to conquer the powers of the Darkness.
\nThis he does by communion with the divine Powers and
\ntheir aid; the way to call down this aid was the secret of the
\nVedic mystics. The symbols of the outer sacrifice are given
\nfor this purpose in the manner of the Mysteries all over the
\nworld an inner meaning; they represent calling of the gods into
\nthe human being, a connecting sacrifice, an intimate interchange, a mutual aid, a communion. There is a building
\nof the powers of the godheads within man and a formation
\nin him of the universality of the divine nature. For the gods
\nare the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of
\nthe Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to
\nimmortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the
\nTruth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the
\nlaw of the Truth, rtasya panthā.<\/i> Man arrives at immortality
\nby breaking beyond the limitations not only of his physical
\nself, but of his mental and his ordinary psychic nature into the
\nhighest plane and supreme ether of the Truth: for there is the
\nfoundation of immortality and the native seat of the triple <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013166<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nInfinite. On these ideas the Vedic sages built up a profound
\npsychological and psychic discipline which led beyond itself
\nto a highest spirituality and contained the nucleus of later
\nIndian Yoga. Already we find in their seed, though not in
\ntheir full expansion, the most characteristic ideas of Indian
\nspirituality. There is the one Existence, ekam sat,<\/i> supracosmic beyond the individual and the universe. There is the one
\nGod who presents to us the many forms, names, powers, personalities of his Godhead. There is the distinction between
\nthe Knowledge and the Ignorance,1 the greater truth of an
\nimmortal life opposed to the much falsehood or mixed truth
\nand falsehood of mortal existence. There is the discipline of
\nan inward growth of man from the physical through the psychic
\nto the spiritual existence. There is the conquest of death,
\nthe secret of immortality, the perception of a realisable divinity
\nof the human spirit. In an age to which in the insolence of our
\nexternal knowledge we are accustomed to look back as the childhood of humanity or at best a period of vigorous barbarism, this
\nwas the inspired and intuitive psychic and spiritual teaching
\nby which the ancient human fathers, pūrve pitarah manusyāh,
\n<\/i>founded a great and profound civilisation in India. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis high beginning was secured in its results by a larger
\nsublime efflorescence. The Upanishads have always been recognised in India as the crown and end of the Veda; that is
\nindicated in their general name, Vedanta. And they are in
\nfact a large crowning outcome of the Vedic discipline and
\nexperience. The time in which the Vedantic truth was wholly
\nseen and the Upanishads took shape, was, as we can discern
\nfrom such records as the Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka,
\nan epoch of immense and strenuous seeking, an intense and
\nardent seed-time of the Spirit. In the stress of that seeking
\nthe truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> Cittim acittim cinavad vi vidvān:<\/i> "Let the knower distinguish the
\nKnowledge and the Ignorance." <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013167<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmen broke their barriers, swept through the higher mind of
\nthe nation and fertilised the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever increasing growth of spiritual consciousness
\nand spiritual experience. This turn was not as yet universal; it was chiefly men of the higher classes, Kshatriyas and Brahmins trained in the Vedic system of education, no longer
\ncontent with an external truth and the works of the outer
\nsacrifice, who began everywhere to seek for the highest word
\nof revealing experience from the sages who possessed the
\nknowledge of the One. But we find too among those who
\nattained to the knowledge and became great teachers men of
\ninferior or doubtful birth like Janashruti, the wealthy Shudra,
\nor Satyakama Jabali, son of a servant-girl who knew not who
\nwas his father. The work that was done in this period became
\nthe firm bedrock of Indian spirituality in later ages and from
\nit gush still the life-giving waters of a perennial never failing
\ninspiration. This period, this activity, this grand achievement
\ncreated the whole difference between the evolution of Indian
\ncivilisation and the quite different curve of other cultures. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nFor a time had come when the original Vedic symbols
\nmust lose their significance and pass into an obscurity that
\nbecame impenetrable, as did the inner teaching of the Mysteries in other countries. The old poise of culture between
\ntwo extremes with a bridge of religious cult and symbolism
\nto unite them, the crude or half-trained naturalness of the
\nouter physical man on one side of the line, and on the other an
\ninner and secret psychic and spiritual life for the initiates
\ncould no longer suffice as the basis of our spiritual progress.
\nThe human race in its cycle of civilisation needed a large-lined advance; it called for a more and more generalised intellectual, ethical and aesthetic evolution to help it to grow into
\nthe light. This turn had to come in India as in other lands.
\nBut the danger was that the greater spiritual truth already
\ngained might be lost in the lesser confident half-light of
\n<\/b>the
\n<\/b>acute but unillumined intellect or stifled within the narrow <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013168<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nlimits of the self-sufficient logical reason. That was what
\nactually happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The
\nold knowledge was prolonged in a less inspired, less dynamic
\nand more intellectual form by the Pythagoreans, by the Stoics,
\nby Plato and the Neo-Platonists; but still in spite of them
\nand in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual wave which
\nswept over Europe from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity,
\nthe whole real trend of Western civilisation has been intellectual, rational, secular and even materialistic, and it keeps
\nthis character to the present day. Its general aim has been a
\nstrong or a fine culture of the vital and physical man by the
\npower of an intellectualised ethics, aesthesis and reason, not
\nthe leading up of our lower members into the supreme light
\nand power of the spirit. The ancient spiritual knowledge and
\nthe spiritual tendency it had created were saved in India from
\nthis collapse by the immense effort of the age of the Upanishads.
\nThe Vedantic seers renewed the Vedic truth by extricating
\nit from its cryptic symbols and casting it into a highest and
\nmost direct and powerful language of intuition and inner
\nexperience. It was not the language of the intellect, but still
\nit wore a form which the intellect could take hold of, translate
\ninto its own more abstract terms and convert into a starting-point for an ever widening and deepening philosophic speculation and the reason’s long search after a Truth original,
\nsupreme and ultimate. There was in India as in the West a
\ngreat upbuilding of a high, wide and complex intellectual,
\naesthetic, ethical and social culture. But left in Europe to its
\nown resources, combated rather than helped by an obscure
\nreligious emotion and dogma, here it was guided, uplifted
\nand more and more penetrated and suffused by a great saving
\npower of spirituality and a vast stimulating and tolerant light
\nof wisdom from a highest ether of knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe second or post-Vedic age of Indian civilisation was
\ndistinguished by the rise of the great philosophies, by a
\ncopious, vivid, many-thoughted, many-sided epic literature, by <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013169<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe beginnings of art and science, by the evolution of vigorous
\nand complex society, by the formation of large kingdoms and
\nempires, by manifold formative activities of all kinds and great
\nsystems of living and thinking. Here as elsewhere, in Greece,
\nRome, Persia, China, this was the age of a high outburst of the
\nintelligence working upon life and the things of the mind to
\ndiscover their reason and their right way and bring out a broad
\nand noble fullness of human existence. But in India this
\neffort never lost sight of the spiritual motive, never missed
\nthe touch of the religious sense. It was a birth time and youth
\nof the seeking intellect and, as in Greece, philosophy was the
\nmain instrument by which it laboured to solve the problems
\nof life and the world. Science too developed but it came second
\nonly as an auxiliary power. It was through profound and
\nsubtle philosophies that the intellect of India attempted to
\nanalyse by the reason and logical faculty what had formerly
\nbeen approached with a much more living force through
\nintuition and the soul’s experience. But the philosophic
\nmind started from the data these mightier powers had discovered and was faithful to its parent Light; it went back
\nalways in one form or another to the profound truths of the
\nUpanishads which kept their place as the highest authority
\nin these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more
\nincalculable guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe same governing force kept its hold on all the other activities of the Indian mind and Indian life. The epic literature is full almost to excess of a strong and free intellectual
\nand ethical thinking; there is an incessant criticism of life by
\nthe intelligence and the ethical reason, an arresting curiosity
\nand desire to fix the norm of truth in all possible fields. But
\nin the background and coming constantly to the front there is
\ntoo a constant religious sense and an implicit or avowed assent
\nto the spiritual truths which remained the unshakable basis <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013170<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof the culture. These truths suffused with their higher light
\nsecular thought and action or stood above to remind them
\nthat they were only steps towards a goal. Art in India, contrary to a common idea, dwelt much upon life; but still its
\nhighest achievement was always in the field of the interpretation of the religio-philosophical mind and its whole tone
\nwas coloured by a suggestion of the spiritual and the infinite.
\nIndian society developed with an unsurpassed organising
\nability, stable effectiveness, practical insight its communal
\nco-ordination of the mundane life of interest and desire, kāma,
\nartha;<\/i> it governed always its action by a reference at’ every
\npoint to the moral and religious law, the Dharma : but it never
\nlost sight of spiritual liberation as our highest point and the
\nultimate aim of the effort of Life. In later times when there
\nwas a still stronger secular tendency of intellectual culture,
\nthere came in an immense development of the mundane intelligence, an opulent political and social evolution, an
\nemphatic stressing of aesthetic, sensuous and hedonistic experience. But this effort too always strove to keep itself within
\nthe ancient frame and not to lose the special stamp of the
\nIndian cultural idea. The enlarged secular turn was compensated by a deepening of the intensities of psycho-religious
\nexperience. New religions or mystic forms and disciplines
\nattempted to seize not only the soul and the intellect, but the
\nemotions, the senses, the vital and the aesthetic nature of man
\nand turn them into stuff of the spiritual life. And every excess
\nof emphasis on the splendour and richness and power and
\npleasures of life had its recoil and was balanced by a corresponding potent stress on spiritual asceticism as the higher
\nway. The two trends, on one side an extreme of the richness
\nof life experience, on the other an extreme and pure rigorous
\nintensity of the spiritual life, accompanied each other; their
\ninteraction, whatever loss there might be of the earlier deep
\nharmony and large synthesis, yet by their double pull preserved something still of the balance of Indian culture. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013171<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nIndian religion followed this line of evolution and kept its
\ninner continuity with its Vedic and Vedantic origins; but it
\nchanged entirely its mental contents and colour and its outward basis. It did not effectuate this change through any
\nprotestant revolt or revolution, or with any idea of an iconoclastic reformation. A continuous development of its organic
\nlife took place, a natural transformation brought out latent
\nmotives or else gave to already established motive-ideas a
\nmore predominant place or effective form. At one time indeed
\nit seemed as if a discontinuity and a sharp new beginning
\nwere heeded and would take place. Buddhism seemed to
\nreject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic religion. But this
\nwas after all less in reality than in appearance. The Buddhist
\nideal of Nirvana was no more than a sharply negative and
\nexclusive statement of the highest Vedantic spiritual experience.
\nThe ethical system of the eightfold path taken as the way to
\nrelease was an austere sublimation of the Vedic notion of the
\nRight, Truth and Law followed as the way to immortality,
\nrtasya panthā.<\/i> The strongest note of Mahayana Buddhism,
\nits stress on universal compassion and fellow-feeling was an
\nethical application of the spiritual unity which is the essential
\nidea of Vedanta.1<\/sup> The most characteristic tenets of the new
\ndiscipline. Nirvana and Karma, could have been supported
\nfrom the utterances of the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Buddhism could easily have claimed for itself a Vedic origin and
\nthe claim would have been no less valid than the Vedic ascription of the Sankhya philosophy and discipline with which it
\nhad some points of intimate alliance. But what hurt Buddhism
\nand determined in the end its rejection, was not its denial of a
\nVedic origin or authority, but the exclusive trenchancy of
\nits intellectual, ethical and spiritual positions. A result of an <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> Buddha himself does not seem to have preached his tenets as a
\nnovel revolutionary creed, but as the old Aryan way, the true form of the
\neternal religion. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013172<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nintense stress of the union of logical reason with the spiritualised
\nmind,\u2014for it was by an intense spiritual seeking supported on
\na clear and hard rational thinking that it was born as a separate
\nreligion,\u2014its trenchant affirmations and still more exclusive
\nnegations could not be made sufficiently compatible with
\nthe native flexibility, many-sided susceptibility and rich
\nsynthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness, it was a
\nhigh creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the
\npeople. Indian religion absorbed all that it could of Buddhism,
\nbut rejected its exclusive positions and preserved the
\nfull line of its own continuity, casting back to the ancient
\nVedanta. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis lasting line of change moved forward not by any
\ndestruction of principle, but by a gradual fading out of the
\nprominent Vedic forms and the substitution of others. There
\nwas a transformation of symbol and ritual and ceremony or a
\nsubstitution of new kindred figures, an emergence of things
\nthat are only hints in the original system, a development of
\nnovel idea-forms from the seed of the original thinking. And
\nespecially there was a farther widening and fathoming of
\npsychic and spiritual experience. The Vedic gods rapidly lost
\ntheir deep original significance. At first they kept their hold
\nby their outer cosmic sense but were overshadowed by the
\ngreat Trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, and afterwards faded
\naltogether. A new pantheon appeared which in its outward
\nsymbolic aspects expressed a deeper truth and larger range of
\nreligious experience, an intenser feeling, a vaster idea. The
\nVedic sacrifice persisted only in broken and lessening fragments.
\nThe house of Fire was replaced by the temple; the karmic ritual
\nof sacrifice was transformed into the devotional temple ritual; the vague and shifting mental images of the Vedic gods figured
\nin the mantras yielded to more precise conceptual forms of
\nthe two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and of their
\nShaktis and their offshoots. These new concepts stabilised in
\nphysical images were made the basis both for internal adoration <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013173<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nand for the external worship which replaced sacrifice.
\nThe psychic and spiritual mystic endeavour which was
\nthe inner sense of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into the less
\nintensely luminous but more wide and rich and complex
\npsycho-spiritual inner life of Puranic and Tantric religion
\nand Yoga. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe Purano-Tantric stage of the religion was once decried
\nby European critics and Indian reformers as a base and ignorant
\ndegradation of an earlier and purer religion. It was rather
\nan effort, successful in a great measure, to open the general
\nmind of the people to a higher and deeper range of inner truth
\nand experience and feeling. Much of the adverse criticism once
\nheard proceeded from a total ignorance of the sense and intention of this worship. Much of this criticism has been uselessly
\nconcentrated on side-paths and aberrations which could
\nhardly be avoided in this immensely audacious experimental
\nwidening of the basis of the culture. For there was a catholic
\nattempt to draw towards the spiritual truth minds of all qualities and people of all classes. Much was lost of the profound
\npsychic knowledge of the Vedic seers, but much also of new
\nknowledge was developed, untrodden ways were opened and
\na hundred gates discovered into the Infinite. If we try to see
\nthe essential sense and aim of this development and the intrinsic
\nvalue of its forms and means and symbols, we shall find that
\nthis evolution followed upon the early Vedic form very much
\nfor the same reason as Catholic Christianity replaced the mysteries and sacrifices of the early Pagan religions. For in both
\ncases the outward basis of the early religion spoke to the outward physical mind of the people and took that as the starting-point of its appeal. But the new evolution tried to awaken a
\nmore inner mind even in the common man, to lay hold on his
\ninner vital and emotional nature, to support all by an awakening
\nof the soul and to lead him through these things towards a
\nhighest spiritual truth. It attempted in fact to bring the mass
\ninto the temple of the spirit rather than leave them in the outer <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013174<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nprecincts. The outward physical sense was satisfied through
\nits aesthetic turn by a picturesque temple worship, by numerous
\nceremonies, by the use of physical images, but these were given
\na psychic-emotional sense and direction that was open to the
\nheart and imagination of the ordinary man and not reserved
\nfor the deeper sight of the elect or the strenuous tapasyā<\/i> of the
\ninitiates. The secret initiation remained but was now a condition for the passage from the surface psycho-emotional
\nand religious to a profounder psychic-spiritual truth and
\nexperience. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nNothing essential was touched in its core by this new
\norientation; but the instruments, atmosphere, field of religious
\nexperience underwent a considerable change. The Vedic
\ngodheads were to the mass of their worshippers divine powers
\nwho presided over the workings of the outward life of the
\nphysical cosmos; the Puranic Trinity had even for the multitude a predominant psycho-religious and spiritual significance.
\nIts more external significance, for instance the functions of
\ncosmic creation, preservation and destruction, were only" a
\ndependent fringe of these profundities that alone touched the
\nheart of its mystery. The central spiritual truth remained in
\nboth systems the same, the truth of the One in many aspects.
\nThe Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and
\nBrahman; the Shaktis are energies of the one Energy of the
\nhighest divine Being. But this greatest religious truth was no
\nlonger reserved for the initiated few; it was now more and more
\nbrought powerfully, widely and intensely home to the general
\nmind and feeling of the people. Even the so-called henotheism
\nof the Vedic idea was prolonged and heightened in the larger
\nand simpler worship of Vishnu or Shiva as the one universal
\nand highest Godhead of whom all others are living forms and
\npowers. The idea of the Divinity in man was popularised to an
\nextraordinary extent, not only the occasional manifestation
\nof the Divine in humanity which founded the worship
\nof the Avataras, but the Presence discoverable in the heart <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013175<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof every creature. The systems of Yoga developed themselves
\non the same common basis. All led or hoped to lead through
\nmany kinds of psycho-physical, inner vital, inner mental
\nand psycho-spiritual methods to the common aim of all Indian
\nspirituality, a greater consciousness and a more or less complete union with the One and Divine or else an immergence
\nof the individual soul in the Absolute. The Purano-Tantric
\nsystem was a wide, assured and many-sided endeavour, unparallelled in its power, insight, amplitude, to provide the
\nrace with a basis of generalised psycho-religious experience
\nfrom which man could rise through knowledge, works or love
\nor through any other fundamental power of his nature to
\nsome established supreme experience and highest absolute
\nstatus. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis great effort and achievement which covered all the
\ntime between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism,
\nwas still not the last possibility of religous evolution open to
\nIndian culture. The Vedic training of the physically-minded
\nman made the development possible. But in its turn this raising
\nof the basis of religion to the inner mind and life and psychic
\nnature, this training and bringing out of the psychic man
\nought to make possible a still larger development and support a
\ngreater spiritual movement as the leading power of life. The
\nfirst stage makes possible the preparation of the natural external
\nman for spirituality; the second takes up his outward life into a
\ndeeper mental and psychical living and brings him more
\ndirectly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him; the third should render him capable of taking up his whole
\nmental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning at
\nleast of a generalised spiritual life. This endeavour has manifested itself in the evolution of Indian spirituality and is the
\nsignificance of the latest philosophies, the great spiritual movements of the saints and bhaktas and an increasing resort to
\nvarious paths of Yoga. But unhappily it synchronised with a
\ndecline of Indian culture and an increasing collapse of its <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013176<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ngeneral power and knowledge, and in these surroundings it
\ncould not bear its natural fruit; but at the same time it has
\ndone much to prepare such a possibility in the future. If
\nIndian culture is to survive and keep its spiritual basis and innate
\ncharacter, it is in this direction, and not in a mere revival or
\na prolongation of the Puranic system, that its evolution must
\nturn, rising so towards the fulfilment of that which the Vedic
\nseers saw as the aim of man and his life thousands of years
\nago and the Vedantic sages cast into the clear and immortal
\nforms of their luminous revelation. Even the psychic-emotional
\npart of man’s nature is not the inmost door to religious feeling,
\nnor is his inner mind the highest witness to spiritual experience. There is behind the first the inmost soul of man, in
\nthat deepest secret heart, hrdaye guhāyām,<\/i> in which the ancient
\nseers saw the very tabernacle of the indwelling Godhead, and
\nthere is above the second a luminous highest mind directly
\nopen to a truth of the Spirit to which man’s normal nature
\nhas as yet only an occasional and momentary access. Religious
\nevolution, spiritual experience can find their true native road
\nonly when they open to these hidden powers and make them
\ntheir support for a lasting change, a divinisation of human life
\nand nature. An effort of this kind was the very force behind
\nthe most luminous and vivid of the later movements of India’s
\nvast religious cycles. It is the secret of the most powerful
\nforms of Vaishnavism and Tantra and Yoga. The labour of
\nascent from our half-animal human nature into the fresh purity
\nof the spiritual consciousness needed to be followed and
\nsupplemented by a descent of the light and force of the spirit
\ninto man’s members and the attempt to transform human into
\ndivine nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut it could not find its complete way or its fruit because
\nit synchronised with a decline of the life-force in India and a
\nlowering of power and knowledge in her general civilisation
\nand culture. Nevertheless here lies the destined force of her
\nsurvival and renewal, this is the dynamic meaning of her  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013177<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nfuture. A widest and highest spiritualising of life on earth is
\nthe last vision of all that vast and unexampled seeking and experiment in a thousand ways of the soul’s outermost and innermost experience which is the unique character of her
\npast; this in the end is the mission for which she was born and the
\nmeaning of her existence. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013178<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nIT<\/font> is essential, if we are to get a right view of Indian civilisation or of any civilisation, to keep to the central,
\nliving, governing things and not to be led away by the confusion of accidents
\nand details. This is a precaution which the critics of our culture
\nsteadily refuse to take. A civilisation, a culture must be looked
\nat first in its initiating, supporting, durable central motives,
\nin its heart of abiding principle; otherwise we shall be likely
\nto find ourselves, like these critics, in a maze without a clue
\nand we shall stumble about among false and partial conclusions
\nand miss entirely the true truth of the matter. The importance
\nof avoiding this error is evident when we are seeking for the
\nessential significance of Indian religious culture. But the
\nsame method must be held to when we proceed to observe its
\ndynamic formulation and the effect of its spiritual ideal on life. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIndian culture recognises the spirit as the truth of our
\nbeing and our life as a growth and evolution of the spirit. It
\nsees the Eternal, the Infinite, the Supreme, the All; it sees
\nthis as the secret highest Self of all, this is what it calls God,
\nthe Permanent, the Real, and it sees man as a soul and power
\nof this being of God in Nature. The progressive growth of the
\nfinite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards God,
\ntowards the universal, the eternal, the infinite, in a word his
\ngrowth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his
\nordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine
\nnature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life
\nand the aim of human existence. To this deeper and more spiritual idea of Nature and of existence a great deal of what is  <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013179<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nstrongest and most potential of fruitful consequences in recent
\nEuropean thinking already turns with a growing impetus. This
\nturn may be a relapse to "barbarism" or it may be the high
\nnatural outcome of her own increasing and ripened culture; that is a question for Europe to decide. But always to India
\nthis ideal inspiration or rather this spiritual vision of Self,
\nGod, Spirit, this nearness to a cosmic consciousness, a cosmic
\nsense and feeling, a cosmic idea, will, love, delight into which
\nwe can release the limited, ignorant suffering ego, this drive
\ntowards the transcendental, eternal and infinite, and the
\nmoulding of man into a conscious soul and power of that
\ngreater Existence have been the engrossing motive of her
\nphilosophy, the sustaining force of her religion, the fundamental idea of her civilisation and culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nI have suggested that the formal turn, the rhythmic lines
\nof effort of this culture must be regarded as having passed
\nthrough two complete external stages, while a third has taken
\nits initial steps and is the destiny of her future. The early
\nVedic was the first stage : then religion took its outward formal
\nstand on the natural approach of the physical mind of man to
\nthe Godhead in the universe, but the initiates guarded the sacrificial fire of a greater spiritual truth behind the form. The
\nPurano-Tantric was the second stage : then religion took its
\noutward formal stand on the first deeper approaches of man’s
\ninner mind and life to the Divine in the universe, but a greater
\ninitiation opened the way to a far more intimate truth and
\npushed towards an inner living of the spiritual life in all its
\nprofundity and la all the infinite possibilities of an uttermost
\nsublime experience. There has been long in preparation a
\nthird stage which belongs to the future. Its inspiring idea
\nhas been often cast out in limited or large, veiled and quiet or
\nbold and striking spiritual movements and potent new disciplines and religions, but it has not yet been successful in
\nfinding its way or imposing new lines on human life. The circumstances were adverse, the hour not yet come. This greatest <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013180<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nmovement of the Indian spiritual mind has a double impulse.
\nIts will is to call the community of men and all men each according to his power to live in the greatest light of all and found their
\nwhole life on some fully revealed power and grand uplifting
\ntruth of the Spirit. But it has had too at times a highest vision
\nwhich sees the possibility not only of an ascent towards the
\nEternal but of a descent of the Divine Consciousness and a
\nchange of human into divine nature. A perception of the divinity hidden in man has been its crowning force. This is a turn
\nthat cannot be rightly understood in the ideas or language of the
\nEuropean religious reformer or his imitators. It is not "what the
\npurist of the reason or the purist of the spirit imagines it to be
\nand by that too hasty imagination falls short in his endeavour.
\nIts index vision is pointed to a truth that exceeds the human
\nmind and, if at all realised in his members, would turn human
\nlife into a divine superlife. And not until this third largest
\nsweep of the spiritual evolution has come into its own, can
\nIndian civilisation be said to have discharged its mission, to
\nhave spoken its last word and be functus officio,<\/i> crowned and
\ncomplete in its office of mediation between the life of man and
\nthe spirit. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe past dealings of Indian religion with life must be
\njudged according to the stages of its progress; each age of its
\nmovement must be considered on its own basis. But throughout
\nit consistently held to two perceptions that showed great practical wisdom and a fine spiritual tact. First, it saw that the
\napproach to the spirit cannot be sudden, simple and immediate
\nfor all individuals or for the community of men; it must come
\nordinarily or at least at first through a gradual culture, training,
\nprogress. There must be an enlarging of the natural life
\naccompanied by an uplifting of all its motives; a growing
\nhold upon it of the higher rational, psychic and ethical powers
\nmust prepare and lead it towards a higher spiritual law. But
\nthe Indian religious mind saw too at the same time that if its
\ngreater aim was to be fruitful and the character of its culture <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013181<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nimperative, there must <\/b> be throughout and at every moment
\nsome kind of insistence on the spiritual motive. And for
\nthe mass of men this means always some kind of religious
\ninfluence. That pervasive insistence was necessary in order
\nthat from the beginning some power of the universal inner
\ntruth, some ray from the real reality of our existence might
\ncast its light or at least its sensible if subtle influence on the
\nnatural life of man. Human life must be induced to flower,
\nnaturally in a way, but at the same time with a wise nurturing
\nand cultivation into its own profounder spiritual significance.
\nIndian culture has worked by two coordinated, mutually
\nstimulating and always interblended operations of which these
\nperceptions are the principle. First, it has laboured to lead
\nupward and enlarge the life of the individual in the community
\nthrough a natural series of life-stages till it was ready for the
\nspiritual levels. But also it has striven to keep that highest
\naim before the mind at every stage and throw its influence on
\neach circumstance and action both of man’s inner and his
\nouter existence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIn the plan of its first aim it came nearer to the highest
\nancient culture of mankind in other regions, but in a type and
\nwith a motive all its own. The frame of its system was constituted by a triple quartette. Its first circle was the synthesis and
\ngradation of the fourfold object of life, vital desire and hedonistic
\nenjoyment, personal and communal interest, moral right and
\nlaw, and spiritual liberation. Its second circle was the fourfold
\norder of society, carefully graded and equipped with its fixed
\neconomic functions and its deeper cultural, ethical and spiritual
\nsignificances. Its third, the most original and indeed unique
\nof its englobing life-patterns was the fourfold scale and succession of the successive stages of life, student, householder,
\nforest recluse and free supersocial man. This frame, these lines
\nof a large and noble life-training subsisted in their purity,
\ntheir grand natural balance of austerity and accommodation,
\ntheir fine effectiveness during the later Vedic and heroic age <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013182<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof the civilisation : afterwards they crumbled slowly or lost
\ntheir completeness and order. But the tradition, the idea, with
\nsome large effect of its force and some figure of its lines endured
\nthroughout the whole period of cultural vigour. However
\ndeflected it might have been from its true form and spirit, however mutilated and complicated for the worse, there was always
\nleft some presence of its inspiration and power. Only in the
\ndecline do we get the slow collapse, the degraded and confused mass of conventions which still labours to represent the
\nancient and noble Aryan system, but in spite of relics of glamour
\nand beauty, in spite of survivals of spiritual suggestion" and in
\nspite of a residue of the old high training, is little better than a
\ndetritus or a mass of confused relics. Still, even in this degradation enough of the original virtue has remained to ensure a
\nremarkable remnant of the ancient beauty, attractiveness and
\npower of survival. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut the turn given to the other and more direct spiritual
\noperation of this culture is of a still greater importance. For it
\nis that which, always surviving, has coloured permanently the
\nIndian mind and life. It has remained the same behind every
\nchange of forms and throughout all the ages of the civilisation
\nit has renewed its effectiveness and held its field. This second
\nside of the cultural effort took the form of an endeavour to cast
\nthe whole of life into a religious mould; it multiplied means
\nand devices which by their insistent suggestion and opportunity
\nand their mass of effect would help to stamp a Godward tendency on the entire existence. Indian culture was founded on a
\nreligious conception of life and both the individual and the
\ncommunity drank in at every moment its influence. It was
\nstamped on them by the training and turn of the education,
\nthe entire life atmosphere, all the social surroundings were
\nsuffused with it; it breathed its power through the whole original form and hieratic character of the culture. Always was
\nfelt the near idea of the spiritual existence and its supremacy
\nas the ideal, highest over all others; everywhere there was <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013183<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe pervading pressure of the notion of the universe as a
\nmanifestation of divine Powers and a movement full of the
\npresence of the Divine. Man himself was not a mere reasoning
\nanimal, but a soul in constant relation with God and with the
\ndivine cosmic Powers. The soul’s continued existence was a
\ncyclic or upward progress from birth to birth; human life
\nwas the summit of an evolution which terminated in the
\nconscious Spirit, every stage of that life a step in a pilgrimage.
\nEvery single action of man had its importance of fruit
\nwhether in future lives or in the worlds beyond the material
\nexistence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut Indian religion was not content with the general
\npressure of these conceptions, the training, the atmosphere,
\nthe stamp on the culture. Its persistent effort was to impress
\nthe mind at every moment and in each particular with the
\nreligious influence. And to do this more effectively by a living
\nand practical adaptation, not asking from anyone what was
\ntoo much for him or too little, it took as a guiding idea its perception of the varying natural capacity of man, adhikāra.<\/i> It
\nprovided in its system means by which each man high or low,
\nwise or ignorant, exceptional or average might feel in the way
\nsuitable to his nature and evolutionary stage the call, the pressure, the influence. Avoiding the error of the religions that
\nimpose a single dogmatic and inflexible rule on every man
\nregardless of the possibilities of his nature, it tried rather to
\ndraw him gently upward and help him to grow steadily in
\nreligious and spiritual experience. Every part of human
\nnature, every characteristic turn of its action was given a place
\nin the system; each was suitably surrounded with the spiritual
\nidea and a religious influence, each provided with steps by
\nwhich it might rise towards its own spiritual possibility and
\nsignificance. The highest spiritual meaning of life was set
\non the summits of each evolving power of the human nature.
\nThe intelligence was called to a supreme knowledge, the dynamic active and creative powers pointed to openness and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013184<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nunity with an infinite and universal Will, the heart and sense
\nput in contact with a divine love and joy and beauty. But this
\nhighest meaning was also put everywhere indicatively or in
\nsymbols behind the whole system of living, even in its details,
\nso that its impression might fall in whatever degree on the life,
\nincrease in pervasion and in the end take up the entire control.
\nThis was the aim and, if we consider the imperfections of
\nour nature and the difficulty of the endeavour, we can say that
\nit achieved an unusual measure of success. It has been said
\nwith some truth that for the Indian the whole of life is a religion. True of the ideal of Indian life, it is true to a certain
\ndegree and in a certain sense in its fact and practice. No step
\ncould be taken in the Indian’s inner or outer life without his
\nbeing reminded of a spiritual existence. Everywhere he felt
\nthe closeness or at least saw the sign of something beyond his
\nnatural life, beyond the moment in time, beyond his individual
\nego, something other than the needs and interests of his vital
\nand physical nature. That insistence gave its tone and turn
\nto his thought and action and feeling; it produced that subtler
\nsensitiveness to the spiritual appeal, that greater readiness
\nto turn to the spiritual effort which are even now distinguishing
\nmarks of the Indian temperament. It is that readiness, that
\nsensitiveness which justifies us when we speak of the characteristic spirituality of the Indian people. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe ancient idea of the adhikāra<\/i> has to be taken into
\ncareful account if we would understand the peculiar character
\nof Indian religion. In most other religious systems we find
\na high-pitched spiritual call and a difficult and rigid ethical
\nstandard far beyond the possibilities of man’s half-evolved,
\ndefective and imperfect nature. This standard, this call are
\nannounced as if imperative on all; but it is evident that only a
\nfew can give an adequate response. There is presented to
\nour view for all our picture of life the sharp division of two
\nextremes; the saint and the worldling, the religious and the
\nirreligious, the good and the bad, the pious and the impious, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013185<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nsouls accepted and souls rejected, the sheep and the goats, the
\nsaved and the damned, the believer and the infidel, are the
\ntwo categories set constantly before us. All between is a
\nconfusion, a tug of war, an uncertain balance. This crude
\nand summary classification is the foundation of the Christian
\nsystem of an eternal heaven and hell; at best, the Catholic
\nreligion humanely interposes a precarious chance hung between
\nthat happy and this dread alternative, the chance of a painful
\npurgatory for more than nine-tenths of the human race. Indian
\nreligion set up on its summits a still more high-pitched spiritual call, a standard of conduct still more perfect and absolute; but it did not go about its work with this summary aid unreflecting ignorance. All beings are to the Indian mind portions of the Divine, evolving souls, and sure of an eventual
\nsalvation and release into the spirit. All must feel, as the good
\nin them grows or, more truly, the godhead in them finds itself
\nand becomes conscious, the ultimate touch and call of their
\nhighest self and through that call the attraction to the Eternal
\nand the Divine. But actually in life there are infinite differences
\nbetween man and man; some are more inwardly evolved, others
\nare less mature, many if not most are infant souls incapable
\nof great steps and difficult efforts. Each needs to be dealt
\nwith according to his nature and his soul stature. But a general
\ndistinction can be drawn between three principal types varying
\nin their openness to the spiritual appeal or to the religious
\ninfluence or impulse. This distinction amounts to a gradation
\nof three stages in the growing human consciousness. One
\ncrude, ill-formed, still outward, still vitally and physically
\nminded can be led only by devices suited to its ignorance.
\nAnother, more developed and capable of a much stronger
\nand deeper psycho-spiritual experience, offers a riper make
\nof manhood gifted with a more conscious intelligence, a larger
\nvital or aesthetic opening, a stronger ethical power of the
\nnature. A third, the ripest and most developed of all, is ready
\nfor the spiritual heights, fit to receive or to climb towards the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013186<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nloftiest ultimate truth of God and of its own being and to tread
\nthe summits of divine experience.1<\/sup> <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIt was to meet the need of the first type or level that
\nIndian religion created that mass of suggestive ceremony
\nand effective ritual and strict outward rule and injunction
\nand all that pageant of attracting and compelling symbol with
\nwhich the cult is so richly equipped or profusely decorated.
\nThese are for the most part forming and indicative things which
\nwork upon the mind consciently and subconsciently and prepare it for an entry into the significance of the greater permanent things that lie behind them. And for this type too,
\nfor its vital mind and will, is intended all in the religion that
\ncalls on man to turn to a divine Power or powers for the just
\nsatisfaction of his desires and his interests, just because subject
\nto the right and the law, the Dharma. In the Vedic times
\nthe outward ritual sacrifice and at a later period all the religious
\nforms and notions that clustered visibly around the rites and
\nimagery of temple worship, constant festival and ceremony
\nand daily act of outward devotion were intended to serve this
\ntype or this soul-stage. Many of these things may seem to the
\ndeveloped mind to belong to an ignorant or half-awakened
\nreligionism; but they have their concealed truth and their
\npsychic value and are indispensable in this stage for the development and difficult awakening of the soul shrouded in the
\nignorance of material Nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe middle stage, the second type starts from these things,
\nbut gets behind them; it is capable of understanding more
\ndearly and consciently the psychic truths, the conceptions of <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1<\/sup> The Tantric distinction is between the animal man, the hero man
\nand the divine man, paśu, vīra, deva.<\/i> Or we may grade die difference according to the three gunas,\u2014first, the tamasic or rajaso-tamasic man ignorant,
\ninert or moved only in a little light by small motive forces, the rajasic or
\nsattwo-rajasic man struggling with an awakened mind and will towards
\nself-development or self-affirmation, and the sattwic man open in mind
\nand heart and will to the Light, standing at the top of the scale and ready to
\ntranscend it. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013187<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthe intelligence, the aesthetic indications, the ethical values and
\nall the other mediating directions which Indian religion took
\ncare to place behind its symbols. These intermediate truths
\nvivify the outward forms of the system and those who can
\ngrasp them can go through these mental indices towards things
\nthat are beyond the mind and approach the profounder truths
\nof the spirit. For at this stage there is already something
\nawake that can go inward to a more deeply psycho-religious
\nexperience. Already the mind, heart and will have some
\nstrength to grapple with the difficulties of the relations between
\nthe spirit and life, some urge to satisfy more luminously or
\nmore inwardly the rational, aesthetic and ethical nature and
\nlead them upward towards their own highest heights; one can
\nbegin to train mind and soul towards a spiritual consciousness
\nand the opening of a spiritual existence. This ascending
\ntype of humanity claims for its use all that large and opulent
\nmiddle region of philosophic, psycho-spiritual, ethical, aesthetic
\nand emotional religious seeking which is the larger and more
\nsignificant portion of the wealth of Indian culture. At this
\nstage intervene the philosophical systems, the subtle illumining
\ndebates and inquiries of the thinkers; here are the nobler or
\nmore passionate reaches of devotion, here are held up the
\nhigher, ampler or austerer ideals of the Dharma; here break
\nin the psychical suggestions and first definite urgings of the
\neternal and infinite which draw men by their appeal and
\npromise towards the practice of Yoga. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut these things, great as they were, were not final or
\nsupreme : they were openings, steps of ascension towards the
\nluminous grandeurs of spiritual truth and its practice was
\nkept ready and its means of attainment provided for the third
\nand greatest type of human being, the third loftiest stage of the
\nspiritual evolution. The complete light of spiritual knowledge
\nwhen it emerges from veil and compromise and goes beyond
\nall symbols and middle significances, the absolute and universal
\ndivine love, the beauty of the All-beautiful, the noblest dharma <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013188<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nof unity with all beings, universal compassion and benevolence
\ncalm and sweet in the perfect purity of the spirit, the upsurge
\nof the psychical being into the spiritual ecstasy, these divinest
\nthings were the heritage of the human being ready for divinity
\nand their way and call were the supreme significances of
\nIndian religion and Yoga. He reached by them the fruits of
\nhis perfect spiritual evolution, an identity with the Self and
\nSpirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of his being,
\na spiritual universality, communion, transcendence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut distinctions are lines that can always be overpassed in
\nthe infinite complexity of man’s nature and there was no sharp
\nand unbridgeable division, only a gradation, since the actuality
\nor potentiality of the three powers coexist in all men. Both the
\nmiddle and the highest significances were near and present and
\npervaded the whole system, and the approaches to the highest
\nstatus were not absolutely denied to any man, in spite of
\ncertain prohibitions : but these prohibitions broke down in
\npractice or left a way of escape to the man who felt the call; the call itself was a sign of election. He had only to find the
\nway and the guide. But even in the direct approach the principle
\nof adhikāra,<\/i> differing capacity and varying nature, svabhāva,
\n<\/i>was recognised in subtle ways, which it would be beyond
\nmy present purpose to enumerate. One may note as an example
\nthe significant Indian idea of the ista-devatā,<\/i> the special name,
\nform, idea of the Divinity which each man may choose for
\nworship and communion and follow after according to the
\nattraction in his nature and his capacity of spiritual intelligence.
\nAnd each of the forms has its outer initial associations and
\nsuggestions for the worshipper, its appeal to the intelligence,
\npsychical, aesthetic, emotional power in the nature and its
\nhighest spiritual significance which leads through some one
\ntruth of the Godhead into the essence of spirituality. One may
\nnote too that in the practice of Yoga the disciple has to be
\nled through his nature and according to his capacity and the
\nspiritual teacher and guide is expected to perceive and take <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nPage\u2013189<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\naccount of the necessary gradations and the individual need
\nand power in his giving of help and guidance. Many things
\nmay be objected to in the actual working of this large and
\nflexible system and I shall take some note of them when I
\nhave to deal with the weak points or the pejorative side of
\nthe culture against which the hostile critic directs with a
\nmisleading exaggeration his missiles. But the principle of
\nit and the main lines of the application embody a remarkable
\nwisdom, knowledge and careful observation of human nature
\nand an assured insight into the things of the spirit which
\nnone can question who has considered deeply and flexibly
\nthese difficult matters or had any close experience of the
\nobstacles and potentialities of our nature in its approach to
\nthe concealed spiritual reality. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis carefully graded and complex system of religious
\ndevelopment and spiritual evolution was linked on by a process of pervading intimate connection to that general culture
\nof the life of the human being and his powers which must
\nbe the first care of every civilisation worth the name. The
\nmost delicate and difficult part of this task of human development is concerned with the thinking being of man, his mind
\nof reason and knowledge. No ancient culture of which we
\nhave knowledge, not even the Greek, attached more importance to it or spent more effort on its cultivation. The business of the ancient Rishi was not only to know God, but
\nto know the world and life and to reduce it by knowledge to
\na thing well understood and mastered with which the reason
\nand will of man could deal on assured lines and on a safe
\nbasis of wise method and order. The ripe result of this effort
\nwas the Shastra. When we speak of the Shastra nowadays,
\nwe mean too often only the religio-social system of injunctions of the middle age made sacrosanct by their mythical
\nattribution to Manu, Parasara and other Vedic sages. But in
\nolder India Shastra meant any systematised teaching and
\nscience, each department of life, each line of activity, each <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013190<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nsubject of knowledge had its science or Shastra. The attempt was to reduce each to a theoretical and practical order
\nfounded on detailed observation, just generalisation, full
\nexperience, intuitive, logical and experimental analysis and
\nsynthesis, in order to enable man to know always with a just
\nfruitfulness for life and to act with the security of right knowledge. The smallest and the greatest things were examined
\nwith equal care and attention and each provided with its art
\nand science. The name was given even to the highest spiritual knowledge whenever it was stated not in a mass of intuitive experience and revelatory knowledge as in the Upanishads,
\nbut for intellectual comprehension in system and order,
\n\u2014and in that sense the Gita is able to call its profound spiritual teaching the most secret science, guhyatamam
\nśāstram.
\n<\/i>This high scientific and philosophical spirit was carried by
\nthe ancient Indian culture into all its activities. No Indian
\nreligion is complete without its outward form of preparatory
\npractice, its supporting philosophy and its Yoga or system of
\ninward practice or art of spiritual living : most even of what
\nseems irrational in it to a first glance, has its philosophical
\nturn and significance. It is this complete understanding and
\nphilosophical character which has given religion in India
\nits durable security and immense vitality and enabled it to
\nresist the acid dissolvent power of modern sceptical inquiry; whatever is ill-founded in experience and reason, that power
\ncan dissolve, but not the heart and mind of these great teachings.
\nBut what we have more especially to observe is that while
\nIndian culture made a distinction between the lower and the
\nhigher learning, the knowledge of things and the knowledge
\nof self, it did not put a gulf between them like some religions,
\nbut considered the knowledge of the world and things as a
\npreparatory and a leading up to the knowledge of Self and
\nGod. All Shastra was put under the sanction of the names
\nof the Rishis, who were in the beginning the teachers not
\nonly of spiritual truth and philosophy,\u2014and we may note <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013191<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthat all Indian philosophy, even the logic of Nyaya and the
\natomic theory of the Vaisheshikas, has for its highest crowning
\nnote and eventual object spiritual knowledge and liberation,
\n\u2014but of the arts, the social, political and military, the physical and psychic sciences, and every instructor was in his degree respected as a guru<\/i> or
\nācārya,<\/i> a guide or preceptor of
\nthe human spirit. All knowledge was woven into one and led
\nup by degrees to the one highest knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe whole right practice of life founded on this knowledge was in the view of Indian culture a Dharma, a living
\naccording to a just, understanding and right view of self-culture, of the knowledge of things and life and of action in
\nthat knowledge. Thus each man and class and kind and
\nspecies and each activity of soul, mind, life, body has its
\ndharma. But the largest or at least most vitally important
\npart of the Dharma was held to be the culture and ordering
\nof the ethical nature of man. The ethical aspect of life, contrary to the amazingly ignorant observation of a certain type
\nof critics, attracted a quite enormous amount of attention,
\noccupied the greater part of Indian thought and writing not
\ndevoted to the things of pure knowledge and of the spirit
\nand was so far pushed that there is no ethical formation or
\nideal which does not reach in it its highest conception and a
\ncertain divine absolutism of ideal practice. Indian thought
\ntook for granted,\u2014though there are some remarkable speculations to the contrary,\u2014the ethical nature of man and the
\nethical law of the world. It considered that man was justified
\nin satisfying his desires, since that is necessary for the satisfaction and expansion of life, but not in obeying the dictates
\nof desire as the law of his being; for in all things there is a
\ngreater law, each has not only its side of interest and desire,
\nbut its dharma or rule of right practice, satisfaction, expansion, regulation. The Dharma, then, fixed by the wise in
\nthe Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true rule of action. First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013192<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nman’s life is only initially for his vital, personal, individual
\nself, but much more imperatively for the community, though
\nmost imperatively of all for the greatest Self one in himself
\nand in all beings, for God, for the Spirit. Therefore first
\nthe individual must subordinate himself to the communal
\nself, though by no means bound altogether to efface himself
\nin it as the extremists of the communal idea imagine. He
\nmust live according to the law of his nature harmonised with
\nthe law of his social type and class, for the nation and in a
\nhigher reach of his being\u2014this was greatly stressed by the
\nBuddhists\u2014for humanity. Thus living and acting he could
\nlearn to transcend the social scale of the Dharma, practise
\nwithout injuring the basis of life the ideal scale and finally
\ngrow into the liberty of the spirit, when rule and duty were
\nnot binding because he would then move and act in a highest
\nfree and immortal dharma of the divine nature. All these
\naspects of the Dharma were closely linked up together in a
\nprogressive unity. Thus, for an example, each of the four
\norders had its own social function and ethics, but also an
\nideal rule for the growth of the pure ethical being, and every
\nman by observing his dharma and turning his action Godwards could grow out of it into the spiritual freedom. But
\nbehind all dharma and ethics was put, not only as a safeguard
\nbut as a light, a religious sanction, a reminder of the continuity of life and of man’s long pilgrimage through many
\nbirths, a reminder of the Gods and planes beyond and of the
\nDivine, and above it all the vision of a last stage of perfect
\ncomprehension and unity and of divine transcendence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe system of Indian ethics liberalised by the catholicity
\nof the ancient mind did not ban or violently discourage the
\naesthetic or even the hedonistic being of man in spite of a
\ngrowing ascetic tendency and a certain high austerity of the
\nsummits. The aesthetic satisfactions of all kinds and all
\ngrades were an important part of the culture. Poetry, the
\ndrama, song, dance, music, the greater and lesser arts were <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013193<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nplaced under the sanction of the Rishis and were made instruments of the spirit’s culture. A just theory held them to be
\ninitially the means of a pure aesthetic satisfaction and each
\nwas founded on its own basic rule and law, but on that basis
\nand with a perfect fidelity to it still raised up to minister to
\nthe intellectual, ethical and religious development of the
\nbeing. It is notable that the two vast Indian epics have been
\nconsidered as much as Dharma-shastras as great historico-mythic epic narratives, itihāsas.<\/i> They are, that is to say,
\nnoble, vivid and puissant pictures of life, but they utter and
\nbreathe throughout their course the law and ideal of a great
\nand high ethical and religious spirit in life and aim in their
\nhighest intention at the idea of the Divine and the way of the
\nmounting soul in the action of the world. Indian painting,
\nsculpture and architecture did not refuse service to the aesthetic satisfaction and interpretation of the social, civic and
\nindividual life of the human being; these things, as all evidences show, played a great part in their motives of creation,
\nbut still their highest work was reserved for the greatest
\nspiritual side of the culture, and throughout we see them
\nseized and suffused with the brooding stress of the Indian
\nmind on the soul, the Godhead, the spiritual, the Infinite.
\nAnd we have to note too that the aesthetic and hedonistic
\nbeing was made not only an aid to religion and spirituality
\nand liberally used for that purpose, but even one of the main
\ngates of man’s approach to the Spirit. The Vaishnava religion especially is a religion of love and beauty and of the
\nsatisfaction of the whole delight-soul of man in God and even
\nthe desires and images of the sensuous life were turned by its
\nvision into figures of a divine soul-experience. Few religions
\nhave gone so far as this immense catholicity or carried the
\nwhole nature so high in its large, puissant and many-sided
\napproach to the spiritual and the infinite. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nFinally, there is the most outwardly vital life of man, his
\nordinary dynamic, political, economical and social being. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013194<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nThis too Indian culture took strenuously in hand and subjected
\nits whole body to the pressure of its own ideals and conceptions.
\nIts method was to build up great Shastras of social living,
\nduty and enjoyment, military and political rule and conduct
\nand economical well-being. These were directed on one
\nside to success, expansion, opulence and the right art and
\nrelation of these activities, but on those motives, demanded
\nby the very nature of the vital man and his action, was imposed the law of the Dharma, a stringent social and ethical
\nideal and rule\u2014thus the whole life of the king as the head
\nof power and responsibility was regulated by it in its every
\nhour and function,\u2014and the constant reminder of religious
\nduty. In latter times a Machiavellian principle of statecraft,
\nthat which has been always and is still pursued by governments and diplomats, encroached on this nobler system, but
\nin the best age of Indian thought this depravation was condemned as a temporarily effective, but lesser, ignoble and
\ninferior way of policy. The great rule of the culture was
\nthat the higher a man’s position and power, the larger the
\nscope of his function and influence of his acts and example,
\nthe greater should be the call on him of the Dharma. The
\nwhole law and custom of society was placed under the sanction of the Rishis and the gods, protected from the violence
\nof the great and powerful, given a socio-religious character
\nand the king himself charged to live and rule as the guardian
\nand servant of the Dharma with only an executive power
\nover the community which was valid so long as he observed
\nwith fidelity the Law. And as this vital aspect of life is the
\none which most easily draws us outward and away from the
\ninner self and the diviner aim of living, it was the most strenuously linked up at every point with the religious idea in the
\nway the vital man can best understand, in the Vedic times
\nby the constant reminder of the sacrifice behind every social
\nand civic act, at a later period by religious rites, ceremonies,
\nworship, the calling in of the gods, the insistence on the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013195<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nsubsequent results or a supraterrestrial aim of works. So
\ngreat was this preoccupation, that while in the spiritual and
\nintellectual and other spheres a considerable or a complete
\nliberty was allowed to speculation, action, creation, here the
\ntendency was to impose a rigorous law and authority, a tendency which in the end became greatly exaggerated and prevented the expansion of the society into new forms more
\nsuitable for the need of the spirit of the age, the Yugadharma.
\nA door of liberty was opened to the community by the provision of an automatic permission to changed custom and
\nto the individual in the adoption of the religious life with its
\nown higher discipline or freedom outside the ordinary social
\nweft of binding rule and injunction. A rigid observation and
\ndiscipline of the social law, a larger nobler discipline and freer
\nself-culture of the ideal side of the Dharma, a wide freedom
\nof the religious and spiritual life became the three powers of
\nthe system. The steps of the expanding human spirit mounted
\nthrough these powers to its perfection. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n Thus the whole general character of the application of
\nIndian ideals to life became throughout of this one texture,
\nthe constant, subtly graded, subtly harmonised preparation
\nof the soul of man for its spiritual being. First, the regulated
\nsatisfaction of the primary natural being of man subjected to
\nthe law of the Dharma and the ethical idea and besieged at
\nevery moment by the suggestions of religion, a religion at
\nfirst appealing to his more outward undeveloped mind, but
\nin each of its outward symbols and circumstances opening to
\na profounder significance, armed with the indication of a profoundest spiritual and ideal meaning as its justification. Then,
\nthe higher steps of the developed reason and psychical, ethical
\nand aesthetic powers closely interwoven and raised by a similar
\nopening beyond themselves to their own heights of spiritual
\ndirection and potentiality. Finally, each of these growing
\npowers in man was made on its own line of approach a gateway into his divine and spiritual being. Thus we may observe<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013196<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nthat there was created a Yoga of knowledge for the self-exceeding of the thinking intellectual man, a Yoga of works for the
\nself-exceeding of the active, dynamic and ethical man, a
\nYoga of love and bhakti for the self-exceeding of the emotional,
\naesthetic, hedonistic man, by which each arrived to perfection
\nthrough a self-ward, spiritual. God-ward direction of his own
\nspecial power, as too a Yoga of self-exceeding through the
\npower of the psychical being and even through the power of
\nthe life in the body,\u2014Yogas which could be practised in
\nseparation or with some kind of synthesis. But all these
\nways of self-exceeding led to a highest self-becoming. To
\nbecome one with universal being and all existences, one with
\nthe self and spirit, united with God, completed the human
\nevolution, built the final step of man’s self-culture. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage\u2013197<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nI HAVE<\/font> dwelt at some length, though still very inadequately,
\non the principles of Indian religion, the sense of its evolution
\nand the intention of its system, because these things are
\nbeing constantly ignored and battle delivered by its defenders
\nand assailants on details, particular consequences and side-issues. Those too have their importance because they are
\npart of the practical execution, the working out of the culture in life; but they cannot be rightly valued unless we
\nseize hold of the intention which was behind the execution.
\nAnd the first thing we see is that the principle, the essential
\nintention of Indian culture was extraordinarily high, ambitious and noble, the
\nhighest indeed that the human spirit can conceive. For what can be a greater idea of life than that which
\nmakes it a development of the spirit in man to its most vast,
\nsecret and high possibilities,\u2014a culture that conceives of
\nlife as a movement of the Eternal in time, of the universal
\nin the individual, of the infinite in the finite, of the Divine
\nin man, or holds that man can become not only conscious of
\nthe eternal and the infinite, but live in its power and universalise, spiritualise and divinise himself by self-knowledge ?
\nWhat greater aims can be for the life of man than to grow
\nby an inner and outer experience till he can live in God,
\nrealise his spirit, become divine in knowledge, in will and
\nin the joy of his highest existence ? And that is the whole
\nsense of the striving of Indian culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIt is easy to say that these ideas are fantastic, chimerical
\nand impracticable, that there is no spirit and no eternal and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nnothing divine, and man would do much better not to dabble
\nin religion and philosophy, but rather make the best he can
\nof the ephemeral littleness of his life and body. That is a
\nnegation natural enough to the vital and physical mind, but
\nit rests on the assumption that man can only be what he is
\nat the moment, and there is nothing greater in him which it
\nis his business to evolve; such a negation has no enduring
\nvalue. The whole aim of a great culture is to lift man up to
\nsomething which at first he is not, to lead him to knowledge
\nthough he starts from an unfathomable ignorance, to teach
\nhim to live by his reason, though actually he lives much more
\nby his unreason, by the law of good and unity, though he
\nis now full of evil and discord, by a law of beauty and harmony, though his actual life is a repulsive muddle of ugliness
\nand jarring barbarisms, by some high law of his spirit, though
\nat present he is egoistic, material, unspiritual, engrossed by the
\nneeds and desires of his physical being. If a civilisation has
\nnot any of these aims, it can hardly at all be said to have a
\nculture and certainly in no sense a great and noble culture.
\nBut the last of these aims, as conceived by ancient India,
\nis the highest of all because it includes and surpasses all the
\nothers. To have made this attempt is to have ennobled the
\nlife of the race; to have failed in it is better than if it had
\nnever at all been attempted, to have achieved even a partial
\nsuccess is a great contribution to the future possibilities of
\nthe human being. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe system of Indian culture is another thing. A system
\nis in its very nature at once an effectuation and a limitation
\nof the spirit; and yet we must have a science and art of life,
\na system of living. All that is needed is that the lines laid down
\nshould be large and noble, capable of evolution so that the
\nspirit may more and more express itself in life, flexible even
\nin its firmness so that it may absorb and harmonise new
\nmaterial and enlarge its variety and richness without losing
\nits unity. The system of Indian culture was all these things <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nin its principle and up to a certain point and a certain period
\nin its practice. That a decline came upon it in the end and
\na kind of arrest of growth, not absolute, but still very serious
\nand dangerous to its life and future, is perfectly true, and
\nwe shall have to ask whether that was due to the inherent
\ncharacter of the culture, to a deformation or to a temporary
\nexhaustion of the force of living, and, if the last, how that
\nexhaustion came. At present, I will only note in passing one
\npoint which has its importance. Our critic is never tired of
\nharping on India’s misfortunes and he attributes them all
\nto the incurable badness of our civilisation, the total absence
\nof a true and sound culture. Now misfortune is not a proof
\nof absence of culture, nor good fortune the sign of salvation.
\nGreece was unfortunate; she was as much torn by internal
\ndissensions and civil wars as India, she was finally unable to
\narrive at unity or preserve independence; yet Europe owes half
\nits civilisation to those squabbling inconsequent petty peoples
\nof Greece. Italy was unfortunate enough in all conscience,
\nyet few nations have contributed more to European culture
\nthan incompetent and unfortunate Italy. The misfortunes
\nof India have been considerably exaggerated, at least in their
\nincidence, but take them at their worst, admit that no nation
\nhas suffered more. If all that is due to the badness of our
\ncivilisation, to what is due then the remarkable fact of the
\nobstinate survival of India, her culture and her civilisation
\nunder this load of misfortunes, or the power which enables her
\nstill to assert herself and her spirit at this moment, to the great
\nwrath of her critics, against the tremendous shock of the
\nflood from Europe which has almost submerged other peoples ?
\nIf her misfortunes are due to her cultural deficiencies, must not
\nby a parity of reasoning this extraordinary vitality be due to
\nsome great force in her, some enduring virtue of truth in her
\nspirit ? A mere lie and insanity cannot live, its persistence is a
\ndisease which must before long lead to death; it cannot be the
\nsource of an unslayable life. There must be some heart of <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nsoundness, some saving truth which has kept this people alive
\nand still enables it to raise its head and affirm its will to be and
\nits faith in its mission. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut, finally, we have to see not only the spirit and principle
\nof the culture, not only the ideal idea and scope of intention
\nin its system, but its actual working and effect in the values of
\nlife. Here we must admit great limitations, great imperfections.
\nThere is no culture, no civilisation ancient or modern which
\nin its system has been entirely satisfactory to the need of
\nperfection in man; there is none in which the working has not
\nbeen marred by considerable limitations and imperfections.
\nAnd the greater the aim of the culture, the larger the body of
\nthe civilisation, the more are these flaws likely to overbear the
\neye. In the first place every culture suffers by the limitations
\nor defects of its qualities and, an almost infallible consequence,
\nby the exaggerations too of its qualities. It tends to concentrate
\non certain leading ideas and to lose sight of others or unduly
\ndepress them; this want of balance gives rise to one-sided
\ntendencies which are not properly checked, not kept in their due
\nplace, and bring about unhealthy exaggerations. But so long
\nas the vigour of the civilisation lasts, life accommodates itself,
\nmakes the most of compensating forces and in spite of all
\nstumblings, evils, disasters, some great thing is done; but in a
\ntime of decline the defect or the excess of particular quality
\ngets the upper hand, becomes a disease, makes a general ravage
\nand, if not arrested, may lead to decay and death. Again, the
\nideal may be great, may have even, as Indian culture had in its
\nbest times, a certain kind of provisional completeness, a first
\nattempt at comprehensive harmony, but there is always a great
\ngulf between the ideal and the actual practice of life. To bridge
\nthat gulf or at least to make it as narrow as possible is the
\nmost difficult part of human endeavour. Finally, the evolution
\nof our race, surprising enough if we look across the ages, is still,
\nwhen all is said, a slow and embarrassed progress. Each age,
\neach civilisation carries the heavy burden of our deficiencies, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\neach succeeding age throws off something of the load, but loses
\nsome virtue of the past, creates other gaps and embarrasses
\nitself with new aberrations. We have to strike a balance, to
\nsee things in the whole, to observe whither we are tending
\nand use a large secular vision; otherwise it would be difficult
\nto keep an unfailing faith in the destinies of the race. For,
\nafter all, what we have accomplished so far in the main at the
\nbest of times is to bring in a modicum of reason and culture
\nand spirituality to leaven a great mass of barbarism. Mankind
\nis still no more than semi-civilised and it was never anything
\nelse in the recorded history of its present cycle. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nAnd therefore every civilisation presents a mixed and
\nanomalous appearance and can be turned by a hostile or unsympathetic observation which notes and exaggerates its defects,
\nignores its true spirit and its qualities, masses the shades, leaves
\nout the lights, into a mass of barbarism, a picture of almost
\nunrelieved gloom and failure, to the legitimate surprise and
\nindignation of those to whom its motives appear to have a great
\nand just value. For each has achieved something of special
\nvalue for humanity in the midst of its general work of culture,
\nbrought out in a high degree some potentiality of our nature
\nand given a first large standing-ground for its future perfection.
\nGreece developed to a high degree the intellectual reason
\nand the sense of form and harmonious beauty, Rome founded
\nfirmly strength and power and patriotism and law and order,
\nmodern Europe has raised to enormous proportions practical
\nreason, science and efficiency and economic capacity, India
\ndeveloped the spiritual mind working on the other powers of
\nman and exceeding them, the intuitive reason, the philosophical
\nharmony of the Dharma informed by the religious spirit, the
\nsense of the eternal and the infinite. The future has to go on
\nto a greater and more perfect comprehensive development
\nof these things and to evolve fresh powers, but we shall not
\ndo this rightly by damning the past or damning other cultures
\nthan our own in a spirit of arrogant intolerance. We need not <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nonly a spirit of calm criticism, but an eye of sympathetic intuition to extract the good from the past and present effort of
\nhumanity and make the most of it for our future progress. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThis being so, if our critic insists that the past culture of
\nIndia was of the nature of a semi-barbarism, I shall not object,
\nso long as I have the liberty of passing the same criticism,
\nequally valid or invalid, on the type of European culture
\nwhich he wishes to foist on us in its place. Mr. Archer feels
\nthe openings which European civilisation gives to this kind of
\nretort and he pleads plaintively that it ought not to be made; he takes refuge in the old tag that a tu quoque<\/i> is no argument.
\nCertainly the retort would be irrelevant if this were only a question of the dispassionate criticism of Indian culture without
\narrogant comparisons and offensive pretensions. But it becomes a perfectly valid and effective argument when the critic
\nturns into a partisan and tries to trample underfoot all the
\nclaims of the Indian spirit and its civilisation in the name of
\nthe superiority of Europe. When he insists on<\/i> our renouncing
\nour own natural being and culture in order to follow and
\nimitate the West as docile pupils on the ground of India’s
\nfailure to achieve cultural perfection or the ideal of a sound
\ncivilisation, we have a right to point out that Europe has to its
\ncredit at least as ugly a failure, and for the same fundamental
\nreasons. We have a right to ask whether science, practical
\nreason and efficiency and an unbridled economic production
\nwhich makes man a slave of his life and body, a wheel, spring
\nor cog in a huge mechanism or a cell of an economic organism
\nand translates into human terms the ideal of the ant-hill and
\nthe bee-hive, is really the whole truth of our being and a sound
\nor complete ideal of civilisation. The ideal of this culture,
\nthough it has its obstacles and difficulties, is at any rate not an
\nunduly exalted aim and ought to be more easy of accomplishment than the arduous spiritual ideal of ancient India. But
\nhow much of the European mind and life is really governed
\nby reason and what does this practical reason and efficiency <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\ncome to in the end ? To what perfection has it brought the
\nhuman mind and soul and life ? The aggressive ugliness of
\nmodem European life, its paucity of philosophic reason and
\naesthetic beauty and religious aspiration, its constant unrest,
\nits harsh and oppressive mechanical burden, its lack of inner
\nfreedom, its recent huge catastrophe, the fierce struggle of
\nclasses are things of which we have a right to take note. To
\nharp in the style of the Archerian lyre on these aspects alone and
\nto ignore the brighter side of modern ideals would certainly
\nbe an injustice. There was a time indeed many years ago,
\nwhen, while admiring the past cultural achievement of Europe,
\nthe present industrial form of it seemed to me an intellectualised
\ntitanic barbarism with Germany as its too admired type and
\nsuccessful protagonist. A wider view of the ways of the Spirit
\nin the world corrects the one-sidedness of this notion, but still
\nit contains a truth which Europe recognised in the hour of her
\nagony, though now she seems to be forgetting too easily her
\nmomentary illumination. Mr. Archer argues that at least the
\nWest is trying to struggle out of its barbarism while India
\nhas been content to stagnate in her deficiencies. That may be
\na truth of the immediate past; but what then ? The question
\nstill remains whether Europe is taking the only, the complete
\nor the best way open to human endeavour and whether it is
\nnot the right thing for India, not to imitate Europe, though
\nshe well may learn from western experience, but to get out of
\nher stagnation by developing what is best and most essential
\nin her own spirit and culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe right, the natural path for India lies so obviously
\nin this direction that in order to destroy it Mr. Archer in his
\nchosen role as devil’s advocate has to juggle with the truth
\nat every step and labour hard and vainly to re-establish the
\nspell of hypnotic suggestion, now broken for good, which led
\nmost of us for a long space to condemn wholesale ourselves
\nand our past and imagine that the Indian’s whole duty in life
\nwas to turn an imitative ape in leading-strings and dance to the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nmechanic barrel-organ tunes of the British civiliser. The claim
\nof Indian culture to survival can be met first and most radically
\nby challenging the value of its fundamental ideas and the
\nhigh things which are most native to its ideal, its temperament,
\nits way of looking at the world. To deny the truth or the
\nvalue of spirituality, of the sense of the eternal and infinite,
\nthe inner spiritual experience, the philosophic mind and spirit,
\nthe religious aim and feeling, the intuitive reason, the idea
\nof universality and spiritual unity is one resource, and this is
\nthe real attitude of our critic which emerges constantly in his
\nvehement philippic. But he cannot carry it through consistently, because it brings him into conflict with ideas and
\nperceptions which are ineradicable in the human mind and
\nwhich even in Europe are now after a temporary obscuration
\nbeginning to come back into favour. Therefore he hedges and
\ntries rather to prove that we find in India, even in her magnificent past, even at her best, no spirituality, no real philosophy,
\nno true or high religious feeling, no light of intuitive reason,
\nnothing at all of the great things to which she has directed her
\nmost strenuous aspiration. This assertion is sufficiently absurd,
\nself-contradictory and opposed to the express testimony of those
\nwho are eminently fitted and entitled to express an authoritative
\nopinion on these matters. He therefore establishes a third
\nline of attack combined of two inconsistent and opposite assertions, first, that the higher Hinduism which is made up of these
\ngreater things has had no effect on India and, secondly, that it
\nhas had on the contrary a most all-pervading, a most disastrous
\nand paralysing, a soul-killing, life-killing effect. He attempts
\nto make his indictment effective by massing together all these
\ninconsistent lines of attack and leading them all to the one
\nconclusion, that the culture of India is both in theory and practice wrong, worthless, deleterious to the true aim of human
\nliving. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe last position taken is the only one which we need now
\nconsider, since the value of the essential ideas of Indian culture <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\ncannot be destroyed and to deny them is futile. The things
\nthey stand for are there, in whatever form, vaguely or distinctly
\nseeking for themselves in the highest and deepest movements
\nof human being and its nature. The peculiarity of Indian culture lies only in this distinction that what is vague or confused or imperfectly brought out in most other cultures, it has
\nlaboured rather to make distinct, to sound all its possibilities, to fix its aspects and lines and hold it up as a true, precise, large
\nand practicable ideal for the race. The formulation may not be
\nentirely complete; it may have to be still more enlarged,
\nbettered, put otherwise, things missed brought out, the lines
\nand forms modified, errors of stress and direction corrected; but a firm, a large foundation has been laid down not only
\nin theory, but in solid practice. If there has been an actual
\ncomplete failure in life\u2014and that is the one point left,\u2014it must
\nbe due to-one of two causes; either there has been some essential
\nbungling in the application of the ideal to the facts of life
\nas it is, or else there has been a refusal to recognise the facts
\nof life at all. Perhaps, then, there has been, to put it otherwise,
\nan insistence on what we may be at some hardly attainable height
\nof our being without having first made the most of what we are.
\nThe infinite can only be reached after we have grown in the
\nfinite, the eternal grasped only by man growing in time, the
\nspiritual perfected only by man accomplished first in body,
\nlife and mind. If that necessity has been ignored, then one may
\nfairly contend that there has been a gross, impracticable and
\ninexcusable error in the governing idea of Indian culture.
\nBut as a matter of fact there has been no such error. We
\nhave seen what were the aim and idea and method of Indian
\nculture and it will be perfectly clear that the value of life and
\nits training were amply recognised in its system and given
\ntheir proper place. Even the most extreme philosophies and
\nreligions. Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an
\nimpermanence or ignorance that must be transcended and
\ncast away, yet did not lose sight of the truth that man must <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\ndevelop himself under the conditions of this present ignorance
\nor impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to
\nthat Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism was not solely a cloudy sublimation of Nirvana, nothingness, extinction and the tyrannous futility of Karma; it gave
\nus a great and powerful discipline for the life of man on earth.
\nThe enormous positive effects it had on society and ethics
\nand the creative impulse it imparted to art and thought and
\nin a less degree to literature, are a sufficient proof of the strong
\nvitality of its method. If this positive turn was present in
\nthe most extreme philosophy of denial, it was still more largely
\npresent in the totality of Indian culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThere has been indeed from early times in the Indian
\nmind a certain strain, a tendency towards a lofty and austere
\nexaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Mayavada. This excess was inevitable, the human mind being what
\nit is; it had even its necessity and value. Our mind does not
\narrive at the totality of truth easily and by one embracing
\neffort; an arduous search is the condition of its finding. The
\nmind opposes different sides of the truth to each other, follows
\neach to its extreme possibility, treats it even for a time as the
\nsole truth, makes imperfect compromises, arrives by various
\nadjustments and, gropings nearer to the true relations. The
\nIndian mind followed this method; it covered, as far as it
\ncould, the whole field, tried every position, looked at the truth
\nfrom every angle, attempted many extremes and many syntheses. But the European critic very ordinarily labours under
\nthe idea that this exaggeration in the direction of negating
\nlife was actually the whole of Indian thought and sentiment
\nor the one undisputed governing idea of the culture. Nothing
\ncould be more false and inaccurate. The early Vedic religion
\ndid not deny, but laid a full emphasis on life. The Upanishads
\ndid not deny life, but held that the world is a manifestation
\nof the Eternal, of Brahman, all here is Brahman, all is in the
\nSpirit and the Spirit is in all, the self-existent Spirit has become <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nall these things and creatures; life too is Brahman, the life-force is the very basis of our existence, the life-spirit, Vayu,
\nis the manifest and evident Eternal, pratyaksam brahma.
\n<\/i>But it affirmed that the present way of existence of man is not
\nthe highest or the whole; his outward mind and life are not all
\nhis being; to be fulfilled and perfect he has to grow out of his
\nphysical and mental ignorance into spiritual self-knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBuddhism arrived at a later stage and seized on one side
\nof these ancient teachings to make a sharp spiritual and intellectual opposition between the impermanence of life and the permanence of the Eternal which brought to a head and made a
\ngospel of the ascetic exaggeration. But the synthetic Hindu
\nmind struggled against this negation and finally threw out
\nBuddhism, though not without contracting an increased bias
\nin this direction. That bias came to its height in the philosophy
\nof Shankara, his theory of Maya, which put its powerful
\nimprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a progressive
\ndecline in the full vitality of the race, did tend for a time to
\nfix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort
\nthe larger Indian ideal. But his theory is not at all a necessary
\ndeduction from the great Vedantic authorities, the Upanishads,
\nBrahmasutras and Gita, and was always combated by other
\nVedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them
\nand from spiritual experience very different conclusions. At
\nthe present time, in spite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara’s
\nphilosophy, the most vital movements of Indian thought
\nand religion are moving again towards the synthesis of spirituality and life which was an essential part of the ancient
\nIndian ideal. Therefore Mr. Archer’s contention that whatever
\nIndia has achieved in life and creation and action has been
\ndone in spite of the governing ideas of her culture, since logically she ought to have abandoned life and creation and action,
\nis as unsound as it is unnatural and grotesque. To develop to
\nthe full the intellectual, the dynamic and volitional, the ethical,
\nthe aesthetic, the social and economic being of man was an <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nimportant element of Indian civilisation,\u2014if for nothing else,
\nat least as an indispensable preliminary to spiritual perfection
\nand freedom. India’s best achievements in thought, art,
\nliterature, society were the logical outcome of her religio-philosophical culture. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut still it may be argued that whatever may have been
\nthe theory, the exaggeration was there and in practice it discouraged life and action. That, when its other falsities have
\nbeen eliminated, is what Mr. Archer’s criticism comes to in
\nthe end; the emphasis on the Self, the eternal, the universal,
\nthe impersonal, the infinite discouraged, he thinks, life, will,
\npersonality, human action and led to a false and life-killing
\nasceticism. India achieved nothing of importance, produced
\nno great personalities, was impotent in will and endeavour,
\nher literature and art are a barbaric and monstrous nullity not
\nequal even to the third-rate work of Europe, her life story a
\nlong and dismal record of incompetence and failure. An inconsistency more or less is nothing to this critic and in the same
\nbreath he affirms that this very India, described by him
\nelsewhere as always effete, sterile or a mother of monstrous
\nabortions, is one of the most interesting countries in the world,
\nthat her art casts a potent and attractive spell and has numberless beauties, that her very barbarisms are magnificent and
\nthat, most wonderful of all, in presence of some of her personalities in the abodes of her ancient fine-spun aristocratic culture a European is apt to feel like a semi-barbarian intruder !
\nBut let us leave aside these signs of grace which are only an
\noccasional glimmering of light across the darkness and gloom
\nof Mr. Archer’s mood. We must see how far there is any
\nfoundation for the substance of this criticism. What was the
\nreal value of Indian life, will, personality, achievement, creation, those things that she regards as her glories, but her critic
\ntells her she should shudder at as her disgrace ? That is the
\none remaining vital question, <\/font><\/p>\n

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

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

\n

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

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHE<\/font> most general charge against Indian culture in its practical
\neffects can be dismissed without any serious difficulty. The
\ncritic with whom I have to deal has, in fact, spoiled his case
\nby the spirit of frantic exaggeration in which he writes. To say
\nthat there has been no great or vivid activity of life in India,
\nthat she has had no great personalities, with the mythical
\nexception of Buddha and the other pale exception of Asoka,
\nthat she has never shown any will-power and never done any
\ngreat thing, is so contrary to all the facts of history that only a
\ndevil’s advocate in search of a case could advance it at all or put
\nit with that crude vehemence. India has lived and lived greatly,
\nwhatever judgment one may pass on her ideas and institutions.
\nWhat is meant after all by life and when is it that we most
\nfully and greatly live ? Life is surely nothing but the creation
\nand active self-expression of man’s spirit, powers, capacities,
\nhis will to be and think and create and love and do and. achieve.
\nWhen that is wanting or, since it cannot be absolutely wanting,
\ndepressed, held under, discouraged or inert, whether by
\ninternal or external causes, then we may say that there is a
\nlack of life. Life in its largest sense is the great web of our
\ninternal and external action, the play of Shakti, the play of
\nKarma ; it is religion and philosophy and thought and science
\nand poetry and art, drama and song and dance and play,
\npolitics and society, industry, commerce and trade, adventure
\nand travel, war and peace, conflict and unity, victory and
\ndefeat and aspirations and vicissitudes, the thoughts, emotions, words, deeds, joys and sorrows which make up the <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nexistence of man. In a narrower sense life is sometimes
\nspoken of as the more obvious and external vital action, a
\nthing which can be depressed by a top-heavy intellectuality
\nor ascetic spirituality, sicklied over with the pale cast of thought
\nor the paler cast of world-weariness or made flat, stale and
\nuninteresting by a formalised, conventional or too strait-laced
\nsystem of society. Again, life may be very active and full of
\ncolour for a small and privileged part of the community, but
\nthe life of the mass dull, void and miserable. Or, finally, there
\nmay be all the ordinary materials and circumstances of mere
\n.living, but if life is not uplifted by great hopes, aspirations
\nand ideals, then we may well say that the community does
\nnot really live; it is defective in the characteristic greatness
\nof the human spirit. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe ancient and mediaeval life of India was not wanting
\nin any of the things that make up the vivid interesting activity
\nof human existence. On the contrary, it was extraordinarily
\nfull of colour and interest. Mr. Archer’s criticism on this
\npoint, a criticism packed full of ignorance and built up by a
\npurely fictitious construction of what things logically ought
\nto have been on the theory of a dominating asceticism and
\nbelief in the illusionary character of the world, is not and
\ncannot be borne out by anyone who has come close to the
\nfacts. It is true that while many European writers who have
\nstudied the history of the land and the people, have expressed
\nstrongly their appreciation of the vividness and interesting
\nfullness, colour and beauty of life in India before the present
\nperiod,\u2014that unhappily exists no longer except in the pages
\nof history and literature and the broken or crumbling fragments of the past,\u2014those who see only from a distance or
\nfix their eyes only on one aspect, speak of it often as a land
\nof metaphysics, philosophies, dreams and brooding imaginations, and certain artists and writers are apt to write in a strain
\nas if it were a country of the Arabian Nights, a mere glitter
\nof strange hues and fancies and marvels. But on the contrary <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nIndia has been as much a home of serious and solid realities,
\nof a firm grappling with the problems of thought and life,
\nof measured and wise organisation and great action as any
\nother considerable centre of civilisation. The widely different
\nview these perceptions express simply show the many-sided
\nbrilliance and fullness of her life. The colour and magnificence have been its aesthetic side; she has had great dreams
\nand high and splendid imaginations, for that too is wanted
\nfor the completeness of our living ; but also deep philosophical
\nand religious thinking, a wide and searching criticism of life,
\na great political and social order, a strong ethical tone and a ‘
\npersistent vigour of individual and communal living. That
\nis a combination which means life in all its fullness, though
\ndeficient, it may be, except in extraordinary cases, in the more
\nviolent egoistic perversities and exaggerations which some minds
\nseem to take for a proof of the highest vigour of existence. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIn what field indeed has not India attempted, achieved,
\ncreated, and in all on a large scale and yet with much attention
\nto completeness of detail ? Of her spiritual and philosophic
\nachievement there can be no real question. They stand there
\nas the Himalayas stand upon the earth, in the phrase of Kalidasa, prthivyā iva mānadandah,<\/i> "as if earth’s measuring rod,"
\nmediating still between earth and heaven, measuring the
\nfinite, casting their plummet far into the infinite, plunging
\ntheir extremities into the upper and lower seas of the superconscient and the subliminal, the spiritual and the natural
\nbeing. But if her philosophies, her religious disciplines, her
\nlong list of great spiritual personalities, thinkers, founders,
\nsaints are her greatest glory, as was natural to her temperament and governing idea, they are by no means her sole
\nglories, nor are the others dwarfed by their eminence. It is
\nnow proved that in science she went farther than any country
\nbefore the modern era, and even Europe owes the beginning
\nof her physical science to India as much as to Greece, although not directly but through the medium of the Arabs, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nAnd even if she had only gone as far, that would have been
\nsufficient proof of a strong intellectual life in an ancient culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry,
\nthe chief elements of ancient science, she discovered and
\nformulated much and well and anticipated by force of reasoning
\nor experiment some of the scientific ideas and discoveries
\nwhich Europe first arrived at much later, but was able to base
\nmore firmly by her new and completer method. She was
\nwell-equipped in surgery and her system of medicine survives
\nto this day and has still its value, though it declined intermediately in knowledge and is only now recovering its vitality. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nIn literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built
\ngreatly. Not only has she the Vedas, Upaaishads and Gita,
\nnot to speak of less supreme but still powerful or beautiful
\nwork in that field, unequalled monuments of religious and
\nphilosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe has never been
\nable to do anything much of any great value, but that vast
\nnational structure, the Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle
\nthe poetic literature and expressing so completely the life of
\na long formative age, that it is said of it in a popular saying
\nwhich has the justice if also the exaggeration of a too apt
\nepigram, "What is not in this Bharata, is not in Bharatavarsha (India)," and the Ramayana, the greatest and most
\nremarkable poem of its kind, that most sublime and beautiful
\nepic of ethical idealism and a heroic semidivine human life,
\nand the marvellous richness, fullness and colour of the poetry
\nand romance of highly cultured thought, sensuous enjoyment,
\nimagination, action and adventure which makes up the romantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor did this long
\ncontinuous vigour of creation cease with the loss of vitality
\nby the Sanskrit tongue, but was parallelled and carried on
\nm a mass of great or of beautiful work in her other languages,
\nin Pali first and Prakrit, much unfortunately lost,1<\/sup> and Tamil, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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

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

\n

\n
\nafterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues.
\nThe long tradition of her architecture, sculpture and painting
\nspeaks for itself, even in what survives after all the ruin of
\nstormy centuries : whatever judgment may be formed of it
\nby the narrower school of western aesthetics,\u2014and at least
\nits fineness of execution and workmanship cannot be denied,
\nnor the power with which it renders the Indian mind,\u2014it
\ntestifies at least to a continuous creative activity. And creation
\nis proof of life and great creation of greatness of life. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut these things are, it may be said, the things of the
\nmind, and the intellect, imagination and aesthetic mind of
\nIndia may have been creatively active, but yet her outward
\nlife depressed, dull, poor, gloomy with the hues of asceticism,
\nvoid of will-power and personality, ineffective, null. That
\nwould be a hard proposition to swallow; for literature, art
\nand science do not flourish in a void of life. But here too
\nwhat are the facts ? India has not only had the long roll of
\nher great saints, sages, thinkers, religious founders, poets,
\ncreators, scientists, scholars, legists ; she has had her great
\nrulers, administrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes, men with
\nthe strong active will, the mind that plans and the seeing
\nforce that builds. She has warred and ruled, traded and
\ncolonised and spread her civilisation, built polities and organised communities and societies, done all that makes the
\noutward activity of great peoples. A nation tends to throw
\nout its most vivid types in that line of action which is most
\ncongenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading
\nidea, and it is the great saints and religious personalities that
\nstand at the head in India and present the most striking and
\ncontinuous roll-call of greatness, just as Rome lived most in
\nher warriors and statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in ancient
\nIndia was the outstanding figure with the hero just behind,
\nwhile in later times the most striking feature is the long uninterrupted chain from Buddha and Mahavira to Ramanuja,
\nChaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and beyond them <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nto Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and Dayananda. But there
\nhave been also the remarkable achievements of statesmen and
\nrulers from the first dawn of ascertainable history which
\ncomes in with the striking figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya,
\nAsoka, the Gupta emperors and goes down through the multitude of famous Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the middle
\nage to quite modern times. In ancient India there was the
\nlife of republics, oligarchies, democracies, small kingdoms
\nof which no detail of. history now survives, afterwards the
\nlong effort at empire-building, the colonisation of Ceylon and
\nthe Archipelago, the vivid struggles that attended the rise and
\ndecline of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties, the Hindu struggle
\nfor survival in the south, the wonderful record of Rajput
\nheroism and the great upheaval of national life in Maharashtra
\npenetrating to the lowest strata of society, the remarkable
\nepisode of the Sikh Khalsa. An adequate picture of that
\noutward life still remains to be given; once given it would
\nbe the end of many fictions. All this mass of action was not
\naccomplished by men without mind and will and vital force,
\nby pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood
\nhad been crushed out under the burden of a gloomy and
\nall-effacing asceticism, nor does it look like the sign of a
\nmetaphysically minded people of dreamers averse to life and
\naction. It was not men of straw or lifeless and will-less dummies or thin-blooded dreamers who thus acted, planned,
\nconquered, built great systems of administration, founded
\nkingdoms and empires, figured as great patrons of poetry
\nand art and architecture or, later, resisted heroically imperial power and fought for the freedom of clan or people.
\nNor was it a nation devoid of life which maintained its existence and culture and still lived on and broke out constantly
\ninto new revivals under the ever increasing stress of continuously adverse circumstances. The modern Indian revival,
\nreligious, cultural, political, called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles and grieves the minds of her critics, <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-215<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nis only a repetition under altered circumstances, in an adapted
\nform, in a greater though as yet less vivid mass of movement,
\nof a phenomenon which has constantly repeated itself throughout a millennium of Indian history. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nAnd it must be remembered that by virtue of its culture
\nand its system the whole nation shared in the common life.
\nIn all countries in the past the mass has indeed lived with
\na less active and vivid force than the few,\u2014sometimes with
\nthe mere elements of life, not with even any beginning of
\nfinished richness,\u2014nor has modern civilisation yet got rid
\nof this disparity, though it has opened the advantages or at
\nleast the initial opportunities of a first-hand life and thought
\nand knowledge to a greater number. But in ancient India,
\nthough the higher classes led and had the lion’s share of the
\nforce and wealth of life, the people too lived and until much
\nlater times intensely though on a lesser scale and with a more
\ndiffused and less concentrated force. Their religious life was
\nmore intense than that of any other country, they drank in
\nwith remarkable facility the thoughts of the philosophers and
\nthe influence of the saints; they heard and followed Buddha
\nand the many who came after him; they were taught by the Sannyasins and sang the songs of the Bhaktas and Bauls and
\nthus possessed some of the most delicate and beautiful poetical
\nliterature ever produced ; they contributed many of the greatest
\nnames in our religion, and from the outcastes themselves came
\nsaints revered by the whole community. In ancient Hindu
\ntimes they had their share of political life and power; they
\nwere the people, the viśah<\/i> of the Veda, of whom the kings
\nwere the leaders and from them as well as from the sacred or
\nprincely families were born the Rishis; they held their villages as little self-administered republics; in the time of
\nthe great kingdoms and empires they sat in the municipalities
\nand urban councils and the bulk of the typical royal Council
\ndescribed in the books of political science was composed of
\ncommoners, Vaishyas, and not of Brahmin Pundits and <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-216<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nKshatriya nobles; for a long time they could impose their
\nwill on their kings, without the need of a long struggle, by
\na single demonstration of their displeasure. So long as Hindu
\nkingdoms existed, something of all this survived, and even
\nthe entrance into India of Central Asian forms of absolutist
\ndespotism, never an indigenous Indian growth, left some
\nremnant of the old edifice still in being. The people had
\ntheir share too in art and poetry, their means by which the
\nessence of Indian culture was disseminated through the mass,
\na system of elementary education in addition to the great
\nuniversities of ancient times, a type of popular dramatic representation which was in some parts of the country alive
\neven yesterday, they gave India her artists and architects
\nand many of the famous poets in the popular tongues; they
\npreserved by the force of their long past culture an innate
\naesthetic sense and faculty of which the work of Indian craftsmen remained a constant and striking evidence until it was
\ndestroyed or degraded by the vulgarisation and loss of aesthetic sense and beauty which has been one of the results of
\nmodern civilisation. Nor was the life of India ascetic, gloomy
\nor sad, as the too logical mind of the critic would have it be.
\nThe outward form is more quiet than in other countries, there
\nis a certain gravity and reserve before strangers which deceives
\nthe foreign observer, and in recent times asceticism and
\npoverty and an increase of puritanic tendency had their effect; but the life portrayed in the literature of the country is glad
\nand vivid, and even now despite certain varieties of temperament and many forces making for depression, laughter, humour,
\nan unobtrusive elasticity and equanimity in the vicissitudes
\nof life are very marked features of the Indian character. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThe whole theory of a want of life and will and activity in
\nthe Indian people as a result of their culture is then a myth.
\nThe circumstances which have given some colour to it in
\nlater times will be noted in their proper place; but they are
\na feature of the decline and even then must be taken with <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-217<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nconsiderable qualification, and the much longer history of
\nits past greatness tells quite another story. That history has
\nnot been recorded in the European fashion; for the art of
\nhistory and biography, though not entirely neglected, was
\nnever brought to perfection in India, never sufficiently practised, nor does any sustained record of the doings of kings
\nand great men and peoples before this Mussulman dynasties
\nsurvive except in the one solitary instance of Cashmere. This
\nis certainly a defect and leaves a very serious gap. India has
\nlived much, but has not sat down to record the history of her
\nlife. Her soul and mind have left their great monuments,
\nbut so much as we know\u2014and after all it is not little\u2014of the
\nrest, the more outward things, remains or has emerged recently
\nin spite of her neglect; such exact records as she had, she
\nhas allowed to rust forgotten or disappear. Perhaps what
\nMr. Archer really means when he tells us that we have had
\nno personalities in our history, is that they do not come home
\nto his mind because their doings and sayings are not minutely
\nrecorded in the western manner; their personality, will-power
\nand creative force emerge only in their work or in indicative
\ntradition and anecdote or in incomplete records. And very
\ncuriously, very fancifully this defect has been set down to an
\nascetic want of interest in life, it is supposed that India was
\nso much absorbed in the eternal that she deliberately despised
\nand neglected time, so profoundly concentrated on the pursuit
\nof ascetic brooding and quietistic peace that she looked down
\non and took no interest in the memory of action. That is
\nanother myth. The same phenomenon of a lack of sustained
\nand deliberate record appears in other ancient cultures, but
\nnobody suggests that Egypt, Assyria or Persia have to be
\nreconstructed for us by the archaeologists for an analogous
\nreason. The genius of Greece developed the art of history,
\nthough only in the later period of her activity, and Europe
\nhas cherished and preserved the art, India and other ancient
\ncivilisations did not arrive at it or neglected its full development<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-218<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nIt is a defect, but there is no reason why we should
\ngo out of our way in this one case to attribute it to a deliberate
\nmotive or to any lack of interest in life. And in spite of the
\ndefect the greatness and activity of the past life of India reveals itself and comes out in bolder relief the more the inquiry
\ninto her past unearths the vast amount of material still available. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nBut our critic will still have it that India lived as it were
\nin spite of herself and that in all this teeming action there
\nis ample evidence of the dwarfing of individual will and the
\nabsence of any great individual personality. He arrives at
\nthat result by methods which savour of the skill of the journalist or pamphleteer rather than the disinterested mind of
\nthe critic. He tells us for instance that India has contributed
\nonly one or at most two great names to the world’s Pantheon.
\nBy that, of course, he means Europe’s Pantheon, or the world’s
\nPantheon as constructed by the mind of Europe, crammed
\nwith the figures of western history and achievement which
\nare near and familiar to it and admitting only a very few of
\nthe more gigantic names from the distant East, those which
\nit finds it most difficult to ignore. One remembers the list
\nmade by a great French poet in the field of literature in which
\na sounding string of French names equals or outnumbers the
\nwhole contribution of the rest of Europe! If an Indian were
\nto set about the same task in the same spirit, he would no doubt
\nsimilarly pour out an interminable list of Indian names with
\nsome great men of Europe and America, Arabia, Persia,
\nChina, Japan forming a brief tail to this large peninsular body.
\nThese exercises of the partial mentality have no value. And
\nit is difficult to find out what measure of values Mr. Archer
\nis using when he relegates other great Indian names, allowing
\nfor three or four only, to the second plan and even there
\nbelittles them in comparison with corresponding European
\nimmortals. In what is Shivaji with his vivid and interesting
\nlife and character, who not only founded a kingdom but
\norganised a nation, inferior to Cromwell, or Shankara whose <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-219<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\ngreat spirit in the few years of its mortal life swept triumphant
\nthrough India and reconstituted the whole religious life of
\nher peoples, inferior as a personality to Luther ? Why are Chanakya and Chandragupta who laid down the form of
\nempire-building in India and whose great administrative system
\nsurvived with changes often for the worse down to modem
\ntimes, lesser men than the rulers and statesmen of European
\nhistory ? India may not present any recorded moment of her
\nlife so crowded as the few years of Athens to which Mr. Archer
\nmakes appeal, she may have no parallel to the swarm of
\ninteresting but often disturbing, questionable or even dark
\nand revolting figures which illuminate and stain the story of
\nthe Italian cities during the Renaissance, although she has
\nhad too her crowded moments thronged by figures of a
\ndifferent kind. But she has had many rulers, statesmen and
\nencouragers of art as great in their own way as Pericles or
\nLorenzo di Medici; the personalities of her famed poets
\nemerge more dimly through the mist of time, but with indications which point to a lofty spirit or a humanity as great
\nas that of Aeschylus or Euripides or a life-story as human
\nand interesting as that of the famous Italian poets. And if,
\ncomparing this one country with all Europe as Mr. Archer
\ninsists,\u2014mainly on the ground that Indians themselves make
\nthe comparison when they speak of the size of the country,
\nits many races and the difficulty so long experienced in organising Indian unity,\u2014it may be that in the field of political
\nand military action Europe has a long lead, but what of the
\nunparallelled profusion of great spiritual personalities in which
\nIndia is pre-eminent ? Again, Mr. Archer speaks with arrogant
\ndepreciation of the significant figures born of the creative
\nIndian mind which people its literature and its drama. Here
\ntoo it is difficult to follow him or to accept his measure of
\nvalues. To an oriental mind at least Rama and Ravana are
\nas vivid and great and real characters as the personalities of
\nHomer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi certainly not <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nless living than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti and Shakuntala
\nand other feminine types not less sweet, gracious and alive
\nthan Alcestis or Desdemona. I am not here affirming any
\nsuperiority, but the bottomless inequality and inferiority
\nwhich this critic affirms exists, not in truth, but only in his
\nimagination or his way of seeing. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nThat perhaps is the one thing of significance, the one
\nthing which is really worth noting, the difference of mentality
\nwhich is at the bottom of these comparisons. There is not
\nany inferiority of life or force or active and reactive will but,
\nas far as the sameness of human nature allows, a difference of
\ntype, character, personality, let us say, an emphasis in different
\nand almost opposite directions. Will-power and personality
\nhave not been wanting in India, but the direction preferably
\ngiven to them and the type most admired are of a different
\nkind. The average European mind is prone to value or at
\nleast to be more interested in the egoistic or self-asserting will
\nwhich insists upon itself with a strong or a bold, an aggressive,
\nsometimes a fierce insistence; the Indian mind not only
\nprizes more from the ethical standpoint,\u2014that is found everywhere,\u2014but is more vividly interested in the calm, self-controlling or even the self-effacing personality; for the
\neffacement of egoism seems to it to be not an effacement, but
\nan enhancement of value and power of the true person and its
\ngreatness. Mr. Archer finds Asoka pale and featureless; to an Indian mind he is supremely vivid and attractive. Why
\nis Asoka to be called pale in comparison with Charlemagne
\nor, let us say, with Constantine ? Is it because he only mentions his sanguinary conquest of Kalinga in order to speak of
\nhis remorse and the turning of his spirit, a sentiment which
\nCharlemagne massacring the Saxons in order to make good
\nChristians of them could not in the least have understood,
\nnor any more perhaps the Pope who anointed him ? Constantine gave the victory to the Christian religion, but there
\nis nothing Christian in his personality; Asoka not only enthroned<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nBuddhism, but strove though not with a perfect
\nsuccess to follow the path laid down by Buddha. And the
\nIndian mind would account him not only a nobler will, but a
\ngreater and more attracting personality than Constantine or
\nCharlemagne. It is interested in Chanakya, but much more
\ninterested in Chaitanya. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nAnd in literature also just as in actual life it has the same
\nturn. This European mind finds Rama and Sita uninteresting
\nand unreal, because they are too virtuous, too ideal, too white
\nin colour; but to the Indian mind, even apart from all religious
\nsentiment, they are figures of an absorbing reality which
\nappeal to the inmost fibres of our being. A European scholar
\ncriticising the Mahabharata finds the strong and violent
\nBhima the only real character in that great poem; the Indian
\nmind on the contrary finds greater character and a more
\nmoving interest in the calm and collected heroism of Arjuna,
\nin the fine ethical temperament of Yudhisthira, in the divine
\ncharioteer of Kurukshetra who works not for his own hand
\nbut for the founding of the kingdom of right and justice.
\nThose vehement or self-asserting characters or those driven
\nby the storm of their passions which make the chief interest
\nof European epic and drama, would either be relegated by it
\nto the second plan or else, if set in large proportions, so brought
\nin in order to bring into relief the greatness of the higher type
\nof personality, as Ravana contrasts with and sets off Rama.
\nThe admiration of the one kind of mentality in the aesthetics of
\nlife goes to the coloured, that of the other to the luminous
\npersonality. Or, to put it in the form of the distinction made
\nby the Indian mind itself, the interest of the one centres more
\nin the rajasic, that of the other in the sattwic will and character. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\n
\nWhether this difference imposes an inferiority on the
\naesthetics of Indian life and creation, each must judge for
\nhimself, but surely the Indian is the more evolved and spiritual conception. The Indian mind believes that the will and
\npersonality are not diminished but heightened by moving <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nfrom the rajasic or more coloured egoistic to the sattwic and
\nmore luminous level of our being. Are not after all calm, self-mastery, a high balance signs of a greater and more real force
\nof character than mere self-assertion of strength of will or
\nthe furious driving of the passions ? Their possession does
\nnot mean that one must act with an inferior or less puissant,
\nbut only with a more right, collected and balanced will. And
\nit is a mistake to think that asceticism itself rightly understood
\nand practised implies an effacement of will; it brings much
\nrather its greater concentration. That is the Indian view and
\nexperience and the meaning of the old legends in the epics,
\n\u2014to which Mr. Archer, misunderstanding the idea behind
\nthem, violently objects,\u2014attributing so enormous a force,
\neven when it v\/as misused, to the power gained by ascetic self-mastery, Tapasya. The Indian mind believed and still believes
\nthat soul power is a greater thing, works from a mightier
\ncentre of will and has greater results than a more outwardly
\nand materially active will-force. But it will be said that India
\nhas valued most the impersonal and that must obviously discourage personality. But this too,\u2014except for the negative
\nideal of losing oneself in the trance or the silence of the Eternal,
\nwhich is not the true essence of the matter,\u2014involves a misconception. However paradoxical it may sound, one finds
\nactually that the acceptance of the eternal and impersonal
\nbehind one’s being and action and the attempt at unity with
\nit is precisely the thing that carries the person to his largest
\ngreatness and power. For this impersonality is not a nullity,
\nbut an oceanic totality of the being. The perfect man, the
\nSiddha or the Buddha, becomes universal, embraces all being
\nin sympathy and oneness, finds himself in others as in himself
\nand by so doing draws into himself at the same time something
\nof the infinite power of a universal energy. That is the positive
\nideal of Indian culture. And when this hostile critic finds
\nhimself forced to do homage to the superiority of certain personalities who have sprung from this "fine-spun aristocratic" <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n
\nculture, he is really paying a tribute to some results of this
\npreference of the sattwic to the rajasic, the universal to the
\nlimited and egoistic man. Not to be as the common man, that
\nis to say, as the crude natural or half-baked human being,
\nwas indeed the sense of this ancient endeavour and in that
\nsense it may be called an aristocratic culture. But it was not a
\nvulgar outward but a spiritual nobility which was the aim of
\nits self-discipline. Indian life, personality, art, literature must
\nbe judged in this light and appreciated or depreciated after
\nbeing seen in the real sense and with the right understanding
\nof Indian culture. <\/font>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-224<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

III   A DEFENCE OF INDIAN CULTURE   CHAPTER I   RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY   I HAVE described the framework of the Indian idea from…<\/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-3245","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\/3245","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=3245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}