{"id":923,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:15","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=923"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:31:15","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:15","slug":"16-indian-literature-vol-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14\/16-indian-literature-vol-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","title":{"rendered":"-16_Indian Literature .htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

\n
\n
\n             Indian Literature<\/font><\/b><\/span>                      <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n                <\/span> <\/span>
\nT<\/span>HE<\/span><\/font>
\narts which appeal to the soul through the eye are able to arrive at a peculiarly
\nconcentrated expression of the spirit, the aesthesis and the creative mind of a
\npeople, but it is in its literature that we must seek for its most flexible and
\nmany-sided self-expression, for it is the word used in all its power of clear
\nfigure or its threads of suggestion that carries to us most subtly and variably
\nthe shades and turns and teeming significances of the inner self in its
\nmanifestation. The greatness of a literature lies first in the greatness and
\nworth of its substance, the value of its thought and the beauty of its forms,
\nbut also in the degree to which, satisfying the highest conditions of the art of
\nspeech, it avails to bring out and raise the soul and life or the <\/font> <\/span>
\nliving and the ideal mind of a people, an age,
\na culture, through<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe genius of some of its greatest or most sensitive
\nrepresentative spirits. And if we ask what in both these respects is the
\nachievement of the Indian mind as it has come down to us in the Sanskrit and
\nother literatures, we might surely say that here at least there is little room
\nfor any just depreciation and denial even by a mind the most disposed to
\nquarrel with the effect on life and the character of the culture. The ancient
\nand classical creations of the Sanskrit tongue both in quality and in body and
\nabundance of excellence, in their potent originality and force and beauty, in
\ntheir substance and art and structure, in grandeur and justice and charm of
\nspeech and in the height and width of the reach of their spirit stand very
\nevidently in the front rank among the world’s great literatures. The language
\nitself, as has been universally recognised by those competent to form a
\njudgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect and wonderfully
\nsufficient literary instruments developed by the human mind, at once majestic
\nand sweet and flexible, strong and clearly-formed and full and vibrant and
\nsubtle, and its quality and character would be of itself a sufficient evidence
\nof the character and quality of the race whose mind it expressed and the
\nculture of which it was<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

P<\/font>age-255<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t<\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n


\n21. Avalokiteshwara, Nepal<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\ngracious imaginations of Bengal, Nepal and Java…<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\n


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


\n22. Nataraja, Kuram<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n


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


\n23. Maheshwara Murti, Elephanta Caves<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The gods
\nof Indian sculpture<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

are
\ncosmic beings,<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n


\nembodiments<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

of some
\ngreat spiritual power,<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

spiritual
\nidea and action,<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

inmost
\npsychic significance…<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

(P.231)<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t<\/p>\n

24.
\nSunder Murti Swami, Colombo Museum<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\nthe reflecting medium. The great and noble use made of it by poet and thinker
\ndid not fall below the splendour of its capacities. Nor is it in the Sanskrit
\ntongue alone that the Indian mind has done high and beautiful and perfect
\nthings, though it couched in that language the larger part of its most
\nprominent and formative and grandest creations. It would be necessary for a
\ncomplete estimate to take into account as well the Buddhistic literature in
\nPali and the poetic literatures, here opulent, there more\u00a0 <\/span>scanty in production, of about a dozen
\nSanskritic and Dravidian tongues. The whole has almost a continental effect and
\ndoes not fall so far short in the quantity of its really lasting things and
\nequals in its things of best excellence the work of ancient and mediaeval and
\nmodern Europe. The people and the civilisation that count among their great
\nworks and their great names the Veda and the Upanishads, the mighty structures
\nof the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti and Bhartrihari
\nand Jayadeva and the other rich creations of classical Indian drama and poetry
\nand romance, the Dhammapada and the Jatakas, the Panchatantra, Tulsidas,
\nVidyapati and Chandidas and Ramprasad, Ramdas and Tukaram, Tiruvalluvar and
\nKamban and the songs of Nanak and Kabir and Mirabai and the southern Shaiva
\nsaints and the Alwars, – to name only the best-known writers and most
\ncharacteristic productions, though there is a very large body of other work in
\nthe different tongues of both the first and the second excellence,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>must surely be counted among
\nthe greatest civilisations and the world’s most developed and creative peoples.
\nA mental activity so great and of so fine a quality commencing more than three
\nthousand years ago and still not exhausted is unique and the best and -most
\nundeniable wit- ness to something extraordinarily sound and vital in the
\nculture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>
\nA
\ncriticism that ignores or belittles the significance of this unsurpassed record
\nand this splendour of the self-expressing spirit and the creative intelligence,
\nstands convicted at once of a blind malignity or an invincible prejudice and
\ndoes not merit refutation. It would be a sheer waste of time and energy to
\nreview the objections raised by our devil’s advocate: for nothing vital to the
\ngreatness of a literature is really in dispute and there is only to the credit
\nof the attack a general distortion and denunciation and<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-256<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\na laborious and exaggerated cavilling at details and idiosyncracies which at
\nmost show a difference between the idealising mind and abundant imagination of
\nIndia and the more realistically observant mind and less rich and exuberant
\nimagination of Europe. ‘The fit parallel to this motive and style of criticism
\nwould be if an Indian critic who had read European literature only in- bad or
\nineffective Indian translations, were to pass it under a hostile and
\ndisparaging review, dismiss the Iliad as a crude and empty semi-savage and
\nprimitive epos, Dante’s great work as the nightmare of a cruel and
\nsuperstitious religious fantasy, Shakespeare as a drunken barbarian of
\nconsiderable genius with an epileptic imagination, the whole drama of Greece
\nand Spain and England as a mass of bad ethics and violent horrors, French
\npoetry as a succession of bald or tawdry rhetorical exercises and French
\nfiction as a tainted and immoral thing, a long sacrifice on the altar of the
\ngoddess Lubricity, admit here and there a minor merit, but make no attempt at
\nall to understand the central spirit or aesthetic quality or principle of
\nstructure and conclude on the strength of his own absurd method that the ideals
\nof both Pagan and Christian Europe were altogether false and bad and its imagination
\nafflicted with a "habitual and ancestral" earthiness, morbidity,
\npoverty and disorder. No criticism would be worth making on such a mass of
\nabsurdities, and in this equally ridiculous philippic only a stray observation
\nor two less inconsequent and opaque than the others perhaps demands a passing
\nnotice. But although these futilities do not at all represent the genuine view
\nof the general European mind on the subject of Indian poetry and literature,
\nstill one finds a frequent inability to appreciate the spirit or the form or
\nthe aesthetic value of Indian writing and especially its perfection and power
\nas an expression of the cultural mind of the people. One meets such criticisms
\neven from sympathetic critics as an admission of the vigour, colour and splendour
\nof Indian poetry followed by a conclusion that for all<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthat it does not
\nsatisfy, and this means that the intellectual and temperamental
\nmisunderstanding extends to some degree even to this field of creation where
\ndifferent minds meet more readily than in painting and sculpture, that there is
\na rift between the two mentalities and what is delightful and packed with
\nmeaning and <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/span><\/font>age-257<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\npower
\nto the one has no substance, but only a form, of aesthetic or intellectual
\npleasure for the other. This difficulty is partly due to an inability to enter
\ninto the living spirit and feel the vital touch of the language, but partly to
\na spiritual difference in similarity which is even more baffling than a
\ncomplete dissimilarity and otherness. Chinese poetry for example is altogether
\nof its own kind and it is more possible for a western mentality, when it does
\nnot altogether pass it by as an alien world, to develop an undisturbed
\nappreciation because the receptivity of the mind is not checked or hampered by any
\ndisturbing memories or comparisons. Indian poetry on the contrary, like the
\npoetry of Europe, is the creation of an Aryan or Aryanised national mind,
\nstarts apparently from similar motives, moves on the same plane, uses cognate
\nforms, and yet has something quite different in its spirit which creates a
\npronounced and separating divergence in its aesthetic tones, type of
\nimagination, turn of self-expression, ideative mind, method, form, structure.
\nThe mind accustomed to the European idea and technique expects the same kind of
\nsatisfaction here and does not meet it, feels a baffling difference to whose
\nsecret it is a stranger, and the subtly pursuing comparison and vain
\nexpectation stand in the way of a full receptivity, and intimate understanding.
\nAt bottom it is an insufficient comprehension of the quite different spirit
\nbehind, the different heart of this culture that produces the mingled
\nattraction and dissatisfaction. The subject is too large to be dealt with
\nadequately in small limits: I shall only attempt to bring out certain points by
\na consideration of some of the most representative master works of creative
\nintuition and imagination taken as a record of the soul and mind of the Indian
\npeople.<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The early mind of India in the
\nmagnificent youth of the nation, when a fathomless spiritual insight was at
\nwork, a subtle intuitive vision and a deep, clear and greatly outlined
\nintellectual and ethical thinking and heroic action and creation which founded
\nand traced the plan and made the permanent structure of her unique culture and
\ncivilisation, is represented by four of the supreme productions of her genius,
\nthe Veda, the Upanishads and the two vast epics, and each of them is of a kind,
\na form and an intention not easily paralleled in any other literature. The two<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

P<\/font>age-258<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nfirst
\nare the visible foundation of her spiritual and religious being, the others a
\nlarge creative interpretation of her greatest period of life, of the ideas that
\ninformed and the ideals that governed it and the figures in which she saw man
\nand Nature and God and the powers of the universe. The Veda gave us the first
\ntypes and figures of these things as seen and formed by an imaged spiritual
\nintuition and psychological and religious experience; the Upanishads constantly
\nbreaking through and beyond form and symbol and image without entirely
\nabandoning them, since always they come in as accompaniment or undertone,
\nreveal in a unique kind of poetry, the ultimate and unsurpassable truths of
\nself and God and man and the world and its principles and powers in their most
\nessential, their profoundest and most intimate and their most ample realities,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>highest mysteries and
\nclarities vividly seen in an irresistible, an unwalled perception that has got
\nthrough the intuitive and psychological to the sheer spiritual vision. And
\nafter that we have powerful and beautiful developments of the intellect and the
\nlife and of ideal, ethical, aesthetic, psychic, emotional and sensuous and
\nphysical knowledge and idea and vision and experience of which the epics are
\nthe early record and the rest of the literature the continuation; but the
\nfoundation remains the same throughout, and whatever new and often larger types
\nand significant figures replace the old or intervene to add and modify and
\nalter the whole ensemble, are in their essential build and character
\ntransmutations and extensions of the original vision and first spiritual
\nexperience and never an unconnected departure. There is a persistence, a
\ncontinuity of the Indian mind in its literary creation in spite of great
\nchanges as consistent as that which we find in painting and sculpture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Veda is the creation of an early
\nintuitive and symbolical mentality to which the later mind of man, strongly
\nintellectualised and governed on the one side by reasoning idea and abstract
\nconception, on the other hand by the facts of life and matter accepted as they
\npresent themselves to the senses and positive intelligence without seeking in
\nthem for any divine or mystic significance, indulging the imagination as a play
\nof the aesthetic fancy\/ rather than as an opener of the doors of truth and only
\ntrusting to its suggestions when they are confirmed by the logical<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-259<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

reason or by physical
\nexperience, aware only of carefully intellectualised intuitions and
\nrecalcitrant for the most part to any others, has grown a total stranger. It is
\nnot surprising therefore that the Veda should have become unintelligible to our
\nminds except in its most outward shell of language, and that even very
\nimperfectly known owing to the obstacle of an antique and ill- understood
\ndiction, and that the most inadequate, interpretations should be made which
\nreduce this great creation of the young and splendid mind of humanity to a
\nbotched and defaced scrawl, an incoherent hotchpotch of the absurdities of a
\nprimitive imagination perplexing what would be otherwise the quite plain, flat
\nand common record of a naturalistic religion which mirrored only and could only
\nminister to the crude and materialistic desires of a barbaric life-mind. The
\nVeda became to the later scholastic and ritualistic idea of Indian priests and
\nPundits nothing better than a book of mythology and sacrificial ceremonies;
\nEuropean scholars seeking in it for what was alone to them of any rational
\ninterest, the history, myths and popular religious notions of a primitive
\npeople, have done yet worse wrong to the Veda and by insisting on a wholly
\nexternal rendering still farther stripped it of its spiritual interest and its
\npoetic greatness and beauty.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>But this was not what it was to the Vedic
\nRishis themselves or to the great seers and thinkers who came after them and
\ndeveloped out of their pregnant and luminous intuitions their own wonderful
\nstructures of thought and speech built upon an unexampled spiritual revelation
\nand experience. The Veda was to these early seers the Word discovering the
\nTruth and clothing in image and symbol the mystic significances of life. It was
\na divine discovery and unveiling of the potencies of the word, of its
\nmysterious revealing and creative capacity, not the word of the logical and
\nreasoning or the aesthetic intelligence, but the intuitive and inspired
\nrhythmic utterance, the mantra. <\/i>Image and myth were freely used, not as
\nan imaginative indulgence, but as living parables and symbols of things that
\nwere very real to their speakers and could not otherwise find their own
\nintimate and native shape in utterance, and the imagination itself was a priest
\nof greater realities than those that meet and hold the eye and mind limited by
\nthe external suggestions of life and the physical<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

P<\/font>age-260<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nexistence. This was their idea of the sacred poet, – a mind visited by some
\nhighest light and its forms of idea and word, a seer and hearer of the Truth, kavayah
\nsatyasrutayalh. <\/i>The poets of the Vedic verse certainly did not regard their
\nfunction as it is represented by modern scholars, they did not look on
\nthemselves as a sort of superior medicine-men and makers of hymn and
\nincantation to a robust and barbarous tribe, but as seers and thinkers rsi,<\/i>
\ndhira. <\/i>These singers believed that they were in possession of a high,
\nmystic and hidden truth, claimed to be the bearers of a speech acceptable to a
\ndivine knowledge, and expressly so speak of their utterances, as secret words
\nwhich declare their whole significance only to the seer, kavaye nivacanani
\nninya vacamsi. <\/i>And to those who came after them the Veda was a book of
\nknowledge, and even of the supreme knowledge, a revelation, a great utterance
\nof eternal and impersonal truth as it had been seen and heard in the inner
\nexperience of inspired and semi-divine thinkers. The smallest circumstances of
\nthe sacrifice around which the hymns were written were intended to carry a
\nsymbolic and psychological power of significance, as was well known to the
\nwriters of the ancient Brahmanas. The sacred verses, each by itself held to be
\nfull of a divine meaning, were taken by the thinkers of the Upanishads as the
\nprofound and pregnant seed- words of the truth they sought, and the highest
\nauthority they could give for their own sublime utterances was a supporting
\ncitation from their predecessors with the formula, tad esa\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>rcabhyuktii, <\/i>"This is that word
\nwhich was spoken by the Rig-veda". Western scholars choose to imagine that
\nthe successors of the Vedic Rishis were in error, that, except for some later
\nhymns, they put a false and non-existent meaning into the old verses and that
\nthey themselves, divided from the Rishis not only by ages of time but by many
\ngulfs and separating seas of an intellectualised mentality, know infinitely
\nbetter. But mere common sense ought to tell us that those who were so much
\nnearer in both ways to the original poets had a better chance of holding at
\nleast the essential truth of the matter and suggests at least the strong
\nprobability that the Veda was really what it professes to be, the seeking for a
\nmystic knowledge, the first form of the constant attempt of the Indian mind, to
\nwhich it has always been faithful, to look beyond<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-261<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nthe appearances of the physical world and through its own inner experiences to
\nthe godheads, powers, self-existence of the One of whom the sages speak
\nvariously – the famous phrase in which the Veda utters its own central secret,
\n<\/font> ekam
\nsad vipra <\/font> <\/i><\/span>
\nbahudha vadanti.<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe real character of the Veda
\ncan best be understood by taking it anywhere and rendering it straightforwardly
\naccording to its own phrases and images. A famous German scholar rating from
\nhis high pedestal of superior intelligence the silly persons who find sublimity
\nin the Veda, tells us that it is full of childish, silly, even monstrous
\nconceptions, that it is tedious, low, common place, that it represents human
\nnature on a low level of selfishness and worldliness and that only here and
\nthere are a few rare sentiments that come from the depths of the soul. It may
\nbe made so if we put our own mental conceptions into the words of the Rishis,
\nbut if we read them as they are without any such false translation into what we
\nthink early barbarians ought to have said and thought, we shall find instead a
\nsacred poetry sublime and powerful in its words and images, though with another
\nkind of language and imagination than we now prefer and appreciate, deep and
\nsubtle in its psychological experience and stirred by a moved soul of vision and
\nutterance. Hear rather the word itself of the Veda:
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>"States upon states are
\nborn, covering over covering<\/font><\/span>\u00b9<\/font><\/span> awakens to knowledge: in the lap of the Mother he
\nwholly sees. They have called to him, getting a wide knowledge, they guard
\nsleeplessly the strength, they have entered into the strong city. The peoples
\nborn on earth increase the luminous (force) of the son of the White Mother; he
\nhas gold on his neck, he is large of speech, he is as if by (the power of) this
\nhoney-wine a seeker of plenty. He is like pleasant and desirable milk, he is a
\nthing uncompanioned and is with the two who are companions and is as a heat
\nthat is the belly of plenty and is invincible and an overcomer of many. Play, O
\nRay, and manifest thyself.<\/font><\/span>\u00b2<\/font><\/span>" (Rig-veda V.19.)<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n       
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n\u00b9<\/span><\/font>Or, "the coverer of the coverer",   
\n<\/font><\/span>\u00b2<\/font><\/span>
\nLiterally, "become towards us",<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-262<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nOr
\nagain in the succeeding hymn,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>"Those
\n(flames) of thee, the forceful (godhead), that move not and are increased and
\npuissant, uncling the hostility and crookedness of one who has another law. O
\nFire, we choose thee for our priest and the means of effectuation of our
\nstrength and in the sacrifices bringing the food of thy pleasure we call thee
\nby the word O god of perfect works, may we be for the felicity, for the truth,
\nrevelling with the rays, revelling with the heroes."<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n
\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>"As the Manu we set thee in thy
\nplace, as the Manu we kindle thee: O Fire, O Angiras, as the Manu sacrifice to
\nthe gods for him who desires the godheads. O Fire, well pleased thou art
\nkindled in the human being and the ladles go to thee continually Thee all the
\ngods with one pleasure (in thee)<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nmade their messenger and serving thee, O seer, (men) in the sacrifices adore the
\ngod. Let the mortal adore the divine Fire with sacrifice to the godheads.
\nKindled, flame forth, 0 Bright One. Sit in the seat of Truth, sit in the seat of
\npeace."<\/font><\/span>\u00b9<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nThat, whatever interpretation we choose to put on its images, is a mystic and
\nsymbolic poetry and that is the real Veda.
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>           
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>The character of
\nVedic poetry apparent from these typical verses need not surprise or baffle us
\nwhen we see what will be evident from a comparative study of Asiatic
\nliterature, that though distinguished by its theory and treatment of the Word,
\nits peculiar system of images and the complexity of its thought and symbolised
\nexperience, it is in fact the beginning of a form of symbolic or figurative
\nimagery for the poetic expression of spiritual experience which reappears
\nconstantly in later Indian writing, the figures of the Tantras and Puranas, the
\nfigures of the Vaishnava<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n    \u00b9<\/font><\/span> <\/font>
\n<\/span>
\nI have translated these passages with as close a
\nliteralness as the English language will admit. Let the reader compare the
\noriginal and judge whether this is not the sense of the verses.<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-263<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\npoets, – one might add even a certain element in the modern poetry of Tagore, –
\nand has its kindred movements in certain Chinese poets and in the images of the
\nSufis., The poet has to ex- press a spiritual and psychical knowledge and
\nexperience and he cannot do it altogether or mainly in the more abstract
\nlanguage of the philosophical thinker, for he has to bring out, not the naked
\nidea of it, but as vividly as possible its very life and most intimate touches.
\nHe has to reveal in one way or another a whole world within him and the quite
\ninner and spiritual significances of the world around him and also, it may well
\nbe, godheads, powers, visions and experiences of planes of consciousness other
\nthan the one with which our normal minds are familiar. He uses or starts with
\nthe images taken from his own normal and outward life and that of humanity and
\nfrom visible Nature, and though they do not of themselves actually express, yet
\nobliges them to express by implication or to figure the spiritual and psychic
\nidea and experience. He takes them selecting freely his notation of images
\naccording to his insight or imagination and transmutes them into instruments of
\nanother significance and at the same time pours a direct spiritual meaning into
\nthe Nature and life to which they belong, applies outward figures to inner
\nthings and brings out their latent and inner spiritual or psychic significance
\ninto life’s outward figures and circumstances. Or an outward figure nearest to
\nthe inward experience, its material counterpart, is taken throughout and used
\nwith such realism and consistency that while it indicates to those who possess
\nit the spiritual experience, it means only the external thing to others,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>just as the Vaishnava poetry
\nof Bengal makes to the devout mind a physical and emotional image or suggestion
\nof the love of the human soul for God, but to the profane is nothing but a
\nsensuous and passionate love poetry hung conventionally round the traditional
\nhuman-divine personalities of Krishna and Radha. The two methods may meet
\ntogether, the fixed system of outward images be used as the body of the poetry,
\nwhile freedom is often taken to pass their first limits, to treat them only as
\ninitial suggestions and transmute subtly or even cast them aside or subdue into
\na secondary strain or carry them out of themselves so that the translucent veil
\nthey offer to our minds lifts from or passes into the open revelation.<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-264<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nThe
\nlast is the method of the Veda and it varies according to the passion and
\nstress of the sight in the poet or the exaltation of his utterance.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The poets of the Veda had another
\nmentality than ours, their<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>use of their images is of a peculiar kind and an antique cast of vision gives a
\nstrange outline to their substance. The physical and the psychical worlds were
\nto their eyes a manifestation and a twofold and diverse and yet connected and
\nsimilar figure of cosmic godheads, the inner and outer life of man a divine
\ncommerce with the gods, and behind was the one Spirit or Being of which the
\ngods were names and personalities and powers. These god- heads were at once
\nmasters of physical Nature and its principles and forms, their godheads and
\ntheir bodies and inward divine powers with their corresponding states and
\nenergies born in our psychic being because they are the soul powers of the
\ncosmos, the guardians of truth and immortality, the children of the Infinite,
\nand each of them too is in his origin and his last reality the supreme Spirit
\nputting in front one of his aspects. The life of man was to these seers a thing
\nof mixed truth and falsehood, a movement from mortality to immortality, from
\nmixed light and dark- ness to the splendour of a divine Truth whose home is
\nabove in the Infinite but which can be built up here in man’s soul and life, a
\nbattle between the children of Light and the sons of Night, a getting of
\ntreasure, of the wealth, the booty given by the gods to the human warrior, and
\na journey and a sacrifice; and of these things they spoke in a fixed system of
\nimages taken from Nature and from the surrounding life of the warlike, pastoral
\nand agricultural Aryan peoples and centred round the cult of Fire and the
\nworship of the powers of living Nature and the institution of sacrifice. The
\ndetails of outward existence and of the sacrifice were in their life and
\npractice symbols, and in their poetry not dead symbols or artificial metaphors,
\nbut living and powerful suggestions and counterparts of inner things. And they
\nused too for their expression a fixed and yet variable body of other images and
\na glowing web of myth and parable, images that became parables, parables that
\nbecame myths and myths that remained always images, and yet all these things
\nwere to them, in a way that can only be understood by those who have entered
\ninto a<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-265<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>certain
\norder of psychic experience, actual realities. The physical melted its shades
\ninto the lustres of the psychic, the psychic deepened into the light of the
\nspiritual and there was no sharp dividing line in the transition, but a natural
\nblending and inter- shading of their suggestions and colours. It is evident
\nthat a poetry of this kind, written by men with this kind of vision or
\nimagination, cannot either be interpreted or judged by the standards of a
\nreason and taste observant only of the canons of the physical existence. The
\ninvocation "Play, O Ray, and become towards us" is at once a
\nsuggestion of the leaping up and radiant play of the potent sacrificial flame
\non the physical altar and of a similar psychical phenomenon, the manifestation
\nof the saving flame of a divine power and light within us. The western critic
\nsneers at the bold and reckless and to him monstrous image in which Indra son
\nof earth and heaven is said to create his own father and mother; but if we
\nremember that Indra is the supreme spirit in one of its eternal and constant
\naspects, creator of earth and heaven, born as a cosmic godhead between the
\nmental and physical worlds and recreating their powers in man, we shall see
\nthat the image is not only a powerful but in fact a true and revealing figure,
\nand in the Vedic technique it does not matter <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthat
\nit outrages the physical imagination since it expresses a <\/font> <\/span>
\n,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\ngreater actuality as no
\nother figure could have done with the same <\/font> <\/span>
\nawakening aptness and vivid
\npoetical force. The Bull and Cow of the Veda, the shining herds of the Sun
\nlying hidden in the cave are strange enough creatures to the physical mind, but
\nthey do not belong to the earth and in their own plane they are at once images
\nand actual things and full of life and significance. It is in this way that
\nthroughout we must interpret and receive the Vedic poetry according to its own
\nspirit and vision and the psychically natural, even if to us strange and
\nsupranatural, truth of its ideas and figures.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Veda thus understood stands out,
\napart from its interest as the world’s first yet extant Scripture, its earliest
\ninterpretation of man and the Divine and the universe, as a remarkable, a sub-
\nlime and powerful poetic creation. It is in its form and speech no barbaric
\nproduction. The Vedic poets are masters of a consummate technique, their
\nrhythms are carved like chariots of the<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-266<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\ngods
\nand borne on divine and ample wings of sound, and are at once concentrated and
\nwide-waved, great in movement, and subtle in modulation, their speech lyric by
\nintensity and epic by elevation, an utterance of great power, pure and bold and
\ngrand in outline, a speech direct and brief in impact, full to overflowing in
\nsense and suggestion so that each verse exists at once as a strong and
\nsufficient thing in itself and takes its place as a large step between what
\ncame before and what comes after. A sacred and hieratic tradition faithfully
\nfollowed gave them both their form and substance, but this substance consisted
\nof the deepest psychic and spiritual experiences of which the human soul is
\ncapable and the forms seldom or never degenerate into a convention, because
\nwhat they are intended to convey was lived in him- self by each poet and made
\nnew to his own mind in expression by the subtleties or sublimities of his
\nindividual vision. The utterances of the greatest seers, Vishwamitra, Vamadeva,
\nDirghatamas and many others, touch the most extraordinary heights and
\namplitudes of a sublime and mystic poetry and there are poems like the Hymn of
\nCreation that move in a powerful clarity on the summits of thought on which the
\nUpanishads lived constantly with a more sustained breathing. The mind of
\nancient India did not err when it traced back all its philosophy, religion and
\nessential things of its culture to these seer-poets, for all the future
\nspirituality of her people is contained there in seed or in first expression.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>It is one great importance of a right
\nunderstanding of the Vedic hymns as a form of sacred literature that it helps
\nus to see the original shaping not only of the master ideas that governed the
\nmind of India, but’ of its characteristic types of spiritual experience, its
\nturn of imagination, its creative temperament and the kind of significant forms
\nin which it persistently interpreted its sight of self and things and life and
\nthe universe. It is in a great part of the literature the same turn of
\ninspiration and self-expression that we see in the architecture, painting and
\nsculpture. Its first character is a constant sense of the infinite, the cosmic,
\nand of things as seen in or affected by the cosmic vision, set in or against
\nthe amplitude of the one and infinite; its second peculiarity is a tendency to
\nsee and render its spiritual experience in<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-267<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\na great richness of images taken from the inner
\npsychic plane or in physical images transmuted by the stress of a psychic
\nsignificance and impression and line and idea colour; and its third tendency to
\nimage the terrestrial life often magnified, as in the Mahabharata and
\nRamayana,or else subtilised in the transparencies of a larger atmosphere,
\nattended by a greater than the terrestrial meaning or at any rate presented against
\nthe background of the spiritual and psychic worlds and not alone in its own
\nseparate figure. The spiritual, the infinite is near and real and the gods are
\nreal and the worlds beyond <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nas immanent in our own
\nexistence. That which to the western mind is myth and imagination is here an
\nactuality and strand of the life of our inner being, what is there beautiful
\npoetic idea and philosophic speculation is here a thing constantly realised and
\npresent to the experience. It is this turn of the Indian mind, its spiritual
\nsincerity and psychic positivism, that makes the Veda and Upanishads and the
\nlater religious and religio-philosophic poetry so powerful in inspiration and
\nintimate and living in expression and image, and it has its less absorbing but
\nstill very sensible effect on the working of the poetic idea and imagination
\neven in the more secular literature.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-268<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n
\n\t\t <\/span>2<\/span><\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\n           
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nT<\/span>HE<\/span><\/font> Upanishads are the supreme
\nwork of the Indian mind, and that it should be so, that the highest self-
\nexpression of its genius, its sublimest poetry, its greatest creation of the
\nthought and word should be not a literary or poetical masterpiece of the
\nordinary kind, but a large flood of spiritual revelation of this direct and
\nprofound character, is a significant fact, evidence of a unique mentality and
\nunusual turn of spirit. The Upanishads are at once profound religious
\nscriptures,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n– for
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>they
\nare a record of the deepest spiritual experiences,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n– docu<\/font><\/span>ments of revelatory and intuitive philosophy of an inexhaustible light,
\npower and largeness and, whether written in verse or cadenced prose, spiritual
\npoems of an absolute, an unfailing inspiration inevitable in phrase, wonderful
\nin rhythm and expression. It is the expression of a mind in which philosophy
\nand religion and poetry are made one, because this religion does not end with a
\ncult nor is limited to a religio-ethical aspiration, but rises to an infinite
\ndiscovery of God, of Self, of our highest and whole reality of spirit and being
\nand speaks out of an ecstasy of luminous knowledge and an ecstasy of moved and
\nfulfilled experience, this philosophy is not an abstract intellectual
\nspeculation about Truth or a structure of the logical intelligence, but Truth
\nseen, felt, lived, held by the inmost mind and soul in the joy of utterance of
\nan assured discovery and possession, and this poetry is the work of the
\naesthetic mind lifted up beyond its ordinary field to express the wonder and
\nbeauty of the rarest spiritual self-vision and the profoundest illumined truth
\nof self and God and universe. Here the intuitive mind and intimate
\n‘psychological experience of the Vedic seers passes into a supreme culmination
\nin which the Spirit, as is said in a phrase of the Katha Upanishad, discloses
\nits own very body, reveals the very word of its self-expression and discovers
\nto the mind the vibration of rhythms which repeating themselves within in the
\nspiritual hearing seem to build up the soul and set it satisfied and complete
\non the heights of self-knowledge.<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage<\/font><\/span>–<\/font><\/span>269<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nThis character of the Upanishads needs to be
\ninsisted upon with a strong emphasis, because it is ignored by foreign
\ntranslators who seek to bring out the intellectual sense without feeling the
\nlife of thought-vision and the ecstasy of spiritual experience which made the
\nancient verses appear then and still make them to those who can enter into the
\nelement in which these utterances move, a revelation not to the intellect
\nalone, but to the soul and the whole being, make of them in the old expressive
\nword not intellectual thought and phrase, but sruti, <\/i>spiritual audience,
\nan inspired Scripture. The philosophical substance of the Upanishads demands at
\nthis day no farther stress of appreciation of its value; for even if the
\namplest acknowledgement by the greatest minds were wanting, the whole history
\nof philosophy would be there to offer its evidence. The Upanishads have been
\nthe acknowledged source of numerous profound philosophies and religions that
\nflowed from it in India like her great rivers from their Himalayan cradle
\nfertilising the mind and life of the people and kept its soul alive through the
\nlong procession of the centuries, constantly returned to for light, never
\nfailing to give fresh illumination, a fountain of inexhaustible life-giving
\nwaters. Buddhism with all its developments was only a restatement, although
\nfrom a new standpoint and with fresh terms of intellectual definition and
\nreasoning, of one side of its experience and it carried it thus changed in form
\nbut hardly in substance over all Asia and westward towards Europe. The ideas of
\nthe Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and
\nPlato and form the profoundest part of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism with all
\ntheir considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West, and
\nSufism only repeats them in another religious language. The larger part of
\nGerman metaphysics is little more in substance than an intellectual development
\nof great realities more spiritually seen in this ancient teaching, and modern
\nthought is rapidly absorbing them with a closer, more living and intense
\nreceptiveness which promises a revolution both in philosophical and in
\nreligious thinking; here they are filtering in through many indirect
\ninfluences, there slowly pouring through direct and open channels. There is
\nhardly a main philosophical idea which cannot find an authority or a seed or
\nindication in<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-270<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>these
\nantique writings<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe speculations,
\naccording to a certain view, of thinkers who had no better past or background
\nto ,their thought than a crude, barbaric, naturalistic and animistic ignorance.
\nAnd even the larger generalisations of Science are constantly found to apply to
\nthe truth of physical Nature formulas already discovered by the Indian sages in
\ntheir original, their largest meaning in the deeper truth of the spirit.<\/font>\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>And yet these works are not
\nphilosophical speculations of the intellectual kind, a metaphysical analysis
\nwhich labours to define notions, to select ideas and discriminate those that
\nare true, to logicise truth or else to support the mind in its intellectual
\npreferences by dialectical reasoning and is content to put forward an exclusive
\nsolution of existence in the light of this or that idea of the reason and see
\nall things from that viewpoint, in that focus and determining perspective. The
\nUpanishads could not have had so ‘undying a vitality, exercised so unfailing an
\ninfluence, produced such results or seen now their affirmations independently
\njustified in other spheres of inquiry and by quite opposite methods, if they
\nhad been of that character. It is be- cause these seers saw Truth rather than
\nmerely thought it, clothed it indeed with a strong body of intuitive idea and
\ndisclosing image, but a body of ideal transparency through which we look into
\nthe i1limitable, because they fathomed things in the light of self-existence
\nand saw them with the eye of the Infinite, that their words remain always alive
\nand immortal, of an inexhaustible significance, an inevitable authenticity, a
\nsatisfying finality that is at the same time an infinite commencement of truth,
\nto which all our lines of investigation when they go through to their end
\narrive again and to which humanity constantly returns in its minds and its ages
\nof greatest vision. The Upanishads are Vedanta, a book of knowledge in a higher
\ndegree even than the Vedas, but know- ledge in the profounder Indian sense of
\nthe word, jnana <\/i>Not a mere thinking and considering by the inte1ligence,
\nthe pursuit and grasping of a mental form of truth by the intellectual mind,
\nbut a seeing of it with the soul and a total living in it with the power of the
\ninner being, a spiritual seizing by a kind of identification with the object of
\nknowledge is jnana. <\/i>And because it is only by an integral knowing of the
\nself that this kind of direct<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-271<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n25.
\nSittanavasal, Pudukottai<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n…there is a liquidity in
\nthe form,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\na fluent grace of subtlety
\nin the line he uses…<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\na more mobile and emotional
\nway of self-expression.<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n(Pp.242-43)<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

\n26.
\nAvalokiteshwara, Ajanta<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n…the peculiar appeal of
\nthe art of Ajanta<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\nsprings from the remarkably
\ninward,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\nspiritual and psychic turn
\nwhich was<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\ngiven to the artistic
\nconception…<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n(P. 244)<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

\n27.
\nApsaras, Sigiriya, Ceylon<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n…the moved and indulgent
\ndwelling on<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\nwhat one might call the
\nmobilities of the soul rather than on its static eternities,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\non the casting out of self
\ninto the grace and movement of psychic and vital life<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\nrather than on the holding
\nback of life in the stabilities of the self<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\nand its eternal qualities
\nand principles…<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n(P.242)<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\n\n
\n


\n\t\tPainting is naturally the most sensuous<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of the arts,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

 and the
\n\t\thighest greatness open to <\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

the painter is
\n\t\t<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

to spiritualise this
\n\t\tsensuous appeal<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

by making the most
\n\t\tvivid outward beauty a revelation<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of subtle spiritual
\n\t\temotion<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

so that the soul and
\n\t\tthe sense are <\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

at harmony<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

in the deepest and
\n\t\tfinest richness<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of both<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

and united in their
\n\t\tsatisfied<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

consonant expression<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of the inner
\n\t\tsignificances<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of things and life.<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

(P. 243)<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…we find that the
\n\t\tspirit and tradition <\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

which reigns through
\n\t\tall changes<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of style and manner
\n\t\tat Ajanta,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

is present too at
\n\t\tBagh and Sigiriya,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

in the Khotan
\n\t\tfrescoes,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

in the illuminations<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of Buddhist
\n\t\tmanuscripts<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

of a much later
\n\t\ttime’<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

and in spite of the
\n\t\tchange of form<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

and manner is still
\n\t\tspiritually the same<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

in the Rajput
\n\t\tpaintings<\/font><\/i><\/td>\n

\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t28. Krishna and Radha, Rajput School<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n\t\t…in Rajput painting,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n\t\tthough there the grandeur of
\n\t\tthe earlier work<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n\t\tis lost in the grace and
\n\t\treplaced by a delicately intense<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n\t\tbut still bold and decisive
\n\t\tpower of vivid and suggestive line.<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n


\n\t\t(P. 250)<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\nknowledge can be made complete, it was the self
\nthat the Vedantic sages sought to know, to live in and to be one with it by
\nidentity. And through this endeavour they came easily to see that the self in
\nus is one with the universal self of all things and that this self again is the
\nsame as God and Brahman, a transcendent Being or Existence, and they beheld,
\nfelt, lived in the inmost truth of all things in the universe and the inmost
\ntruth of man’s inner and outer existence by the light of this one and unifying
\nvisi9n. The Upanishads are epic hymns of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and
\nGod-knowledge. The great formulations of philosophic truth with which they
\nabound are not abstract intellectual generalisations, things that may shine and
\nenlighten the mind but do not live and move the soul to ascension, but are\u00a0 <\/span>ardours as well as lights of an intuitive and
\nrevelatory illumination, reachings as well as seeings of the one Existence, the
\ntranscendent Godhead, the divine and universal Self and discoveries of his
\nrelation with things and creatures in this great cosmic manifestation. Chants
\nof inspired knowledge, they breathe like all hymns a tone of religious
\naspiration and ecstasy, not of the narrowly intense kind proper to a lesser
\nreligious feeling, but raised beyond cult and special forms of devotion to the
\nuniversal Ananda of the Divine which comes to us by approach to and oneness
\nwith the self-existent and universal Spirit. And though mainly concerned with an
\ninner vision and not directly with outward human action, all the highest ethics
\nof Buddhism and later Hinduism are still emergences of the very life and
\nsignificance of the truths to which they give expressive form and force,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> and
\n<\/font> <\/span>there is something
\ngreater than any ethical precept and mental rule of virtue, the supreme ideal
\nof a spiritual action founded on oneness with God and all living beings.
\nTherefore even when the life of the forms of the Vedic cult had passed away,
\nthe Upanishads still remained alive and creative and could generate the great
\ndevotional religions and motive the persistent Indian idea of the Dharma.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Upanishads are the creation of a
\nrevelatory and intuitive mind and its illumined experience, and all their
\nsubstance, structure, phrase, imagery, movement are determined by and stamped
\nwith this original character. These supreme and all-embracing<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-272<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\ntruths, these visions of oneness and self and a
\nuniversal divine being are cast into brief and monumental phrases which bring
\nthem at once before the soul’s eye and make them real and imperative to its
\naspiration and experience or are couched in poetic sentences full of revealing
\npower and suggestive thought-colour that discover a whole infinite through a
\nfinite image. The One is there revealed, but also disclosed the many aspects,
\nand each is given its whole significance by the amplitude of the expression and
\nfinds as if in a spontaneous self-discovery its place and its connection by the
\nillumining justness of each word and all the phrase. The largest metaphysical
\ntruths and the subtlest subtle- ties of psychological experience are taken up
\ninto the inspired movement and made at once precise to the seeing mind and
\nloaded with unending suggestion to the discovering spirit. There are separate
\nphrases, single couplets, brief passages which contain each in itself the
\nsubstance of a vast philosophy and yet each is only thrown out as a side, an
\naspect, a portion of the infinite self-knowledge. All here is a packed and
\npregnant and yet perfectly lucid and luminous brevity and an immeasurable
\ncompleteness. A thought of this kind cannot follow the tardy, careful and
\ndiffuse development of the logical intelligence. The passage;<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>the sentence, the couplet, the line, even the half-line follows the one that
\nprecedes with a certain interval full of an unexpressed thought, an echoing
\nsilence between them, a thought which is carried in the total suggestion and
\nimplied in the step itself, but which the mind is left to work out for its own
\nprofit, and these intervals of pregnant silence are large, the steps of this
\nthought are like the paces of a Titan striding from rock to distant rock across
\ninfinite waters. There is a perfect totality, a comprehensive connection of
\nharmonious parts in the structure of each Upanishad; but it is done in the way
\nof a mind that sees masses of truth at a time and stops to bring only the
\nneeded word out of a filled silence. The rhythm in verse or cadenced prose
\ncorresponds to the sculpture of the thought and the phrase. The metrical forms
\nof the Upanishads are made up of four half-lines each clearly cut, the lines
\nmostly complete in themselves and integral in sense, the half-lines presenting
\ntwo thoughts or distinct parts of a thought that are wedded to and complete each
\nother, and the <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nP<\/span><\/font>age-2 73<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nsound movement follows a corresponding
\nprinciple, each step brief and marked off by the distinctness of its pause,
\nfull of echoing cadences that remain long vibrating in the inner hearing: each
\nis as if a ware of the infinite that carries in it the whole voice and rumour
\nof the ocean. It is a kind of poetry,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nword of vision, rhythm of the spirit,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>that has not been written be-
\nfore or after.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The imagery of the Upanishads is in large
\npart developed from the type of imagery of the Veda and though very ordinarily
\nit prefers an unveiled clarity of directly illuminative image, not unoften also
\nit uses the same symbols in a way that is closely akin to the spirit and to the
\nless technical part of the method of the older symbolism. It is to a great
\nextent this element no longer seizable by our way of thinking that has baffled
\ncertain western scholars and made them cry out that these scriptures are a
\nmixture of the sublimest philosophical speculations with the first awkward stammerings
\nof the child mind of humanity. The Upanishads are not a revolutionary departure
\nfrom the Vedic mind and its temperament and fundamental ideas, but a
\ncontinuation and development and to a certain extent an enlarging
\ntransformation in the sense of bringing out into open expression all that was
\nheld covered in the symbolic Vedic speech as a mystery and a secret. It begins
\nby taking up the imagery and the ritual symbols of the Veda and the Brahmanas
\nand turning them in such a way as to bring out an inner and a mystic sense
\nwhich will serve as a sort of psychical starting-point for its own more highly
\nevolved and more purely spiritual philosophy. There are a number of passages
\nespecially in the prose Upanishads which are entirely of this kind and deal, in
\na manner recondite, obscure and even unintelligible to the modern
\nunderstanding, with the psychic sense of ideas then current in the Vedic
\nreligious mind, the distinction between the three kinds of Veda, the three
\nworlds and other similar subjects; but, leading as they do in the thought of
\nthe Upanishads to deepest spiritual truths, these passages cannot be dismissed
\nas childish aberrations of the intelligence void of sense or of any
\ndiscoverable bearing on the higher thought in which they culminate. On the
\ncontrary we find that they have a deep-enough significance once we can get
\ninside their symbolic<\/font>\u00a0<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-274<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>meaning.
\nThat appears in a psycho-physical passing upward into a psycho-spiritual
\nknowledge for which we would now use more intellectual, less concrete and
\nimaged terms, but which is still valid for those who practise Yoga and
\nrediscover the secrets of our psycho-physical and psycho-spiritual being.
\nTypical passages of this kind of peculiar expression of psychic truths are
\nAjatashatru’s explanation of sleep and dream or the passages of the Prashna
\nUpanishad on the vital principle and its motions, or those in which the Vedie
\nidea of the struggle between the Gods and the demons is taken up and given its
\nspiritual significance and the Vedic godheads more openly than in Rik and Saman
\ncharacterised and invoked in their inner function and spiritual <\/font> <\/span>
\npower.<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n.<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>I may cite as an example of this
\ndevelopment of Vedic idea and image a passage of the Taittiriya in which Indra
\nplainly appears as the power and godhead of the divine mind:
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>"He who is the
\nBull of the Vedas of the universal form, he who was born in the sacred rhythms
\nfrom the Immortal, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>may Indra satisfy me through
\nthe intelligence. O God, may I become a vessel of the Immortal. May my body be
\nfull of vision and my tongue of sweetness, may I hear the much and vast with my
\nears. For thou art the sheath of Brahman covered over and hidden by the
\nintelligence."
\nAnd a kindred passage may also be cited from the Isha in which Surra the
\nSun-God is invoked as the godhead of knowledge whose supreme form of effulgence
\nis the oneness of the Spirit and his rays dispersed here on the mental level
\nare the shining diffusion of the thought mind and conceal his own infinite
\nsupramental truth, the body and self of this Sun, the truth of the spirit and
\nthe Eternal:
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>"The face of the Truth
\nis covered with a golden lid: O fostering Sun, that uncover for the law of the
\ntruth, for sight. O fosterer, O sole Rishi, O controlling Yama, O Surra, O son
\nof the Father of creatures, marshal and mass thy rays: the Lustre that is thy
\nmost blessed form<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nof all,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-2<\/span>7<\/span>5<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nthat I see, He who is this, this Purusha, He am I."<\/p>\n

The kinship in difference of these passages with the imagery and style of the
\nVeda is evident and the last indeed paraphrases or translates into a later and
\nmore open style a Vedic verse of the Atris:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>"Hidden by your
\ntruth is the Truth that is constant for ever where they unyoke the horses of
\nthe Sun. There the ten thousands stand together, That is the One: I have seen
\nthe supreme Godhead of the embodied gods."<\/p>\n

<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span>
\nThis Vedic and Vedantic
\nimagery is foreign to our present mentality which does not believe in the
\nliving truth of the symbol, because the revealing imagination intimidated by
\nthe intellect has no longer the courage to accept, identify itself with and
\nboldly embody a psychic and spiritual vision; but it is certainly very far from
\nbeing a childish or a primitive and barbarous mysticism; this vivid, living,
\nluminously poetic intuitive language is rather the natural expression of a
\n‘highly evolved spiritual culture. The intuitive thought of the Upanishads
\nstarts from this concrete imagery and these symbols, first to the Vedic Rishis
\nsecret seer words wholly expressive to the mind of the seer but veils of their
\ndeepest sense to the ordinary intelligence, link them to a less covertly
\nexpressive language and pass beyond them to another magnificently open and
\nsublime imagery and diction which at once reveals the spiritual truth in all
\nits splendour. The prose Upanishads show us this process of the early mind of
\nIndia at its work using the symbol and then passing beyond it to the overt
\nexpression of the spiritual significance. A passage of the Prashna Upanishad on
\nthe power and significance of the mystic syllable AUM illustrates the earlier
\nstage of the process:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>"This syllable OM, O
\nSatyakama, it is the supreme and it is the lower Brahman. Therefore the man of
\nknowledge passes by this house of the Brahman to the one or the other. And if
\none meditates on the single letter, he gets by it knowledge and soon he attains
\non the earth. And him the<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-276<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nRiks lead to the world of men and there
\nperfected in Tapas and Brahmacharya and faith he experiences the greatness of
\nthe spirit. Now if by the double letter he is accomplished in the mind, then is
\nhe led up by the Yajus to the middle world, to the moon-world of Soma. He in
\nthe world of Soma experiences the majesty of the spirit and returns again. And
\nhe who by the triple letter again, even this syllable OM, shall meditate on the
\nhighest Purusha, is perfected in the light that is the Sun. .As a snake puts
\noff its skin, even so is he released from sin and evil and is led by the Samans
\nto the world of Brahman. He from this dense of living souls sees the higher
\nthan the highest Purusha who lies in this mansion. The three letters are
\naftlicted by death, but now they are used undivided and united to each other,
\nthen are the inner and the outer and the middle action of the spirit made whole
\nin their perfect using and the spirit. knows and is not shaken. This world by
\nthe Riks, the middle world by the Yajus and by the Samans that which the seers
\nmake known to us. The man of knowledge passes to Him by OM, his house, even to
\nthe supreme Spirit that is calm and ageless and fearless and immortal."
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>           
\n<\/font> <\/span>The symbols here are still obscure to our intelligence, but indications, are
\ngiven which show beyond doubt that they are representations of a psychical
\nexperience leading to different ,states of spiritual realisation and we can see
\nthat these are three outward, mental and supramental, and as the result of the
\nlast supreme perfection, a complete and integral action of the whole being in
\nthe tranquil eternity of the immortal Spirit. And later in the Mandukya
\nUpanishad the other symbols are cast aside and we are admitted to the unveiled
\nsignificance. Then there emerges a knowledge to which modem thought is
\nreturning through its own very different intellectual, rational and scientific
\nmethod, the knowledge that behind the operations of our outward physical
\nconsciousness are working the operations of another, subliminal, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nanother and yet the same, – of which our waking mind
\nis a <\/font> <\/span>
\nsurface action, and above <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> perhaps, we still say <\/font> <\/span>
\n– is a spiritual superconscience in which can be
\nfound, it may well be, the high-<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-277<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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


\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span><\/b>est state and the whole secret of our being. We shall see, when we look closely
\nat the passage of the Prashna, Upanishad, that this knowledge is already there,
\nand I think we can very rationally conclude that these and similar utterances
\nof the ancient sages, however perplexing their form to the rational mind,
\ncannot be dismissed as a childish mysticism, but are the imaged expression,
\nnatural to the mentality of the time, of what the reason itself by its own
\nprocesses is now showing us to be true and a very pro- found truth and real
\nreality of knowledge.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The metrical Upanishads continue this
\nhighly charged symbolism but carry it more lightly and in the bulk of their
\nverses pass beyond this kind of image to the overt expression. The Self, the
\nSpirit, the Godhead in man and creatures and Nature and all this world and in
\nother worlds and beyond all cosmos, the Immortal, the One, the Infinite is
\nhymned without veils in the splendour of his eternal transcendence and his
\nmanifold self- revelation. A few passages from the teachings of Yama, lord of
\nthe Law and of Death, to Nachiketas, will be enough to illustrate something of
\ntheir character:
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n
\n
\n
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span>
\n"Om, is this syllable.
\nThis syllable is the Brahman, this syllable is the Supreme. He who knows the
\nimperishable Om, whatso he wills, it is his. This support is the best, this
\nsupport is the highest; and when a man knows it, he is greatened in the world
\nof Brahman. The omniscient is not born, nor dies, nor has he come into being
\nfrom anywhere, nor is he anyone. He is unborn, he is constant and eternal, he
\nis the Ancient of Days who is not slain in the slaying of the body<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n\u2026<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nHe is seated and journeys far,
\nand lying still he goes to every side. Who other than I should know this
\necstatic God- head? The wise man comes to know the great Lord and Self
\nestablished and bodiless in these bodies that pass and has grief no longer.
\nThis Self is not to be won by teaching nor by brain-power nor by much learning:
\nhe whom the Spirit chooses, by him alone it can be won, and to him this Spirit
\ndiscloses its own very body. One who has not ceased from ill- doing, one who is
\nnot concentrated and calm, one whose<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-278<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nmind
\nis not tranquil, shall not get him by the brain’s wisdom. He of whom warriors
\nand sages are the food and death is the spice of his banquet, who knows where
\nis He ?..
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Self-born has cloven his doors
\noutward, therefore man sees outward and not in the inner self: only a wise man
\nhere and there turns his eyes inward, desiring immortality, and looks on the
\nSelf face to face. The child-minds follow after surface desires and fall into
\nthe net of death which is spread wide for us; but the wise know of immortality
\nand ask not from things inconstant that which is constant. One knows by this
\nSelf form and taste and odour and touch and its pleasures and what then is here
\nleft over? The wise man comes to know the great Lord and Self by whom one sees
\nall that is in the soul that wakes and all that is in the soul that dreams and
\nhas grief no longer. He who knows the Self, the eater of sweetness close to the
\nliving being, the lord of what was and what will be, shrinks thereafter from
\nnothing that is. He knows him who is that which was born of old from Tapas and
\nwho was born of old from the waters and has entered in and stands in the secret
\ncavern of being with all these creatures. He knows her who is born by the life
\nforce, the infinite Mother with all the gods in her, her who has entered in and
\nstands in the secret cavern of being with all these creatures. This is the Fire
\nthat has the knowledge and it is,hidden in the two tinders as the embryo is
\nborne in pregnant women; this is the Fire that must be adored by men watching
\nsleeplessly and bringing to him the offering. He is that from which the Sun
\nrises and that in which it sets: and in him all the gods are founded and none
\ncan pass beyond him. What is here, even that is in other worlds, and what is
\nthere, even according to that is all that is here. He goes from death to death
\nwho sees here only difference. A Purusha no bigger than a thumb stands in man’s
\ncentral self and is the lord of what was and what shall be, and knowing him
\nthenceforth one shrinks from nothing that is. A Purusha no bigger than a man’s
\nthumb and he is like a light without smoke; he is the Lord of what<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-279<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nwas and what shall be; it is he that is today and it is he that shall be
\ntomorrow."
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Upanishads abound with
\npassages which are at once poetry and spiritual philosophy, of an absolute
\nclarity and beauty, but no translation empty of the suggestions and the grave
\nand subtle and luminous sense echoes of the original words and rhythms can give
\nany idea of their power and perfection. There are others in which the subtlest
\npsychological and philosophical truths are expressed with an entire sufficiency
\nwithout falling short of a perfect beauty of poetical expression and always so
\nas to live to the mind and soul and not merely be presented to the
\nunderstanding intelligence. There is in some of the prose Upanishads another
\nelement of vivid narrative and tradition which restores for us though only in brief
\nglimpses the picture of that extraordinary stir and movement of spiritual
\nenquiry and passion for the highest knowledge which made the Upanishads
\npossible. The scenes of the old world live before us in a few pages, the sages
\nsitting in their groves ready to test and teach the comer, princes and learned
\nBrahmins and great landed nobles going about in search of knowledge, the king’s
\nson in his chariot and the illegitimate son of the servant-girl, seeking any
\nman who might carry in himself the thought of light and the word of revelation,
\nthe typical figures and personalities, Janaka and the subtle mind of
\nAjatashatru, Raikwa of the cart, Yajnavalkya militant for truth, calm and
\nironic, taking to himself with both hands without attachment worldly possessions
\nand spiritual riches and casting at last all his wealth behind to wander forth
\nas a houseless ascetic, Krishna son of Devaki who heard a single word of the
\nRishi Ghora and knew at once the Eternal, the Ashramas, the courts of kings who
\nwere also spiritual discoverers and thinkers, the great sacrificial assemblies
\nwhere the sages met and compared their knowledge. And we see how the soul of
\nIndia was born and how arose this great birthsong in which it soared from its
\nearth into the supreme empyrean of the spirit. The Vedas and the Upanishads are
\nnot only the sufficient fountainead of Indian philosophy and religion, but of
\nall Indian art, poetry and literature. It was the soul, the temperament, the
\nideal mind formed<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-280<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>and expressed in them which later carved out the great philosophies,
\nbuilt the structure of the Dharma, recorded its heroic youth in the Mahabharata
\nand Ramayana, intellectualised indefatigably in the classical times of the
\nripeness of its man- hood, threw out so many original intuitions in science,
\ncreated so rich a glow of aesthetic and vital and sensuous experience, renewed
\nits spiritual and psychic experience in Tantra and Purana, flung itself into
\ngrandeur and beauty of line and colour, hewed and cast its thought and vision
\nin stone and bronze, poured itself into new channels of self-expression in the
\nlater tongues and now after eclipse re-emerges always the same in difference
\nand ready for a new life and a new creation.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-281<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\t\t3<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nT<\/span><\/font>HE Veda is thus the
\nspiritual and psychological seed of Indian culture and the Upanishads the
\nexpression of the truth of highest spiritual knowledge and experience that has
\nalways been the supreme idea of that culture and the ultimate objective to which
\nit directed the life of the individual and the aspiration of the soul of the
\npeople: and these two great bodies <\/font><\/span>
\nof
\nsacred writing, its first great efforts of poetic and creative<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nself-expression,
\ncoming into being at a time preceding the later strong and ample and afterwards
\nrich and curious intellectual development, are conceived and couched in the
\nlanguage of a purely psychic and spiritual mentality. An evolution so begun had
\nto proceed by a sort of enriching descent from the spirit to matter and to pass
\non first to an intellectual endeavour to see life and the world and the self in
\nall their relations as they present themselves to the reasoning and the
\npractical intelligence. The earlier movement of this intellectual effort was
\nnaturally accompanied by a practical development and organisation of<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>life consciously expressive of the mind and spirit of the people, the erection
\nof a strong and successful structure of society shaped so as to fulfil the
\nmundane objects of human existence under the control of a careful religious,
\nethical and social order and discipline, but also so as to provide for the
\nevolution of the soul of man through these things to a spiritual freedom and
\nperfection. It is this stage of which we get a remarkably ample and effective
\nrepresentation in the immediately succeeding period of Indian literary
\ncreation.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThis movement of the Indian
\nmind is represented in its more critical effort on one side by a strenuous
\nphilosophical thinking crystallised into the great philosophic systems, on the
\nother by an equally insistent endeavour to formulate in a clear body and with a
\nstrict cogency an ethical, social and political ideal and practice <\/font> <\/span>
\n,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nin a consistent and
\norganised system of individual and communal <\/font> <\/span>
\nlife and that endeavour
\nresulted in the authoritative social treatises or Shastras of which the
\ngreatest and the most authori-<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-282<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\ntative is the famous Laws of Manu. The work of the philosophers was to systematise
\nand justify to the reasoning intelligence the truths of the self and man and
\nthe world already discovered by intuition, revelation and spiritual experience
\nand embodied in the Veda and the Upanishads, and at the same time to indicate
\nand systematise methods of discipline founded upon this knowledge by which man
\nmight effectuate the highest aim of his existence. The characteristic form in
\nwhich this was done shows the action of the intuitive passing into that of the
\nintellectual mentality and preserves the stamp and form expressive of its
\ntransitional character. The terse and pregnant phrase of the sacred literature
\nabounding in intuitive substance is replaced by a still more compact and
\ncrowded brief expression, no longer intuitive and poetic, but severely
\nintellectual,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe expression of a
\nprinciple, a whole development of philosophic thought or a logical step
\nburdened with considerable consequences in a few words, sometimes one or two, a
\nshortest decisive formula often almost enigmatic in its concentrated fullness.
\nThese Sutras or aphorisms became the basis of ratiocinative commentaries
\ndeveloping by metaphysical and logical method and with a considerable variety
\nof interpretation all that was contained at first in the series of aphoristic
\nformulas. Their concern is solely with original and ultimate truth and the
\nmethod of spiritual liberation, moksa.<\/i><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe work of the social thinkers
\nand legislators was on the contrary concerned with normal action and practice.
\nIt at- tempted to take up the ordinary life of man and of the community and the
\nlife of human desire and aim and interest and ordered rule and custom and to
\ninterpret and formulate it in the same complete and decisive manner and at the
\nsame time to throw the whole into an ordered relation to the ruling ideas of
\nthe national culture and frame and perpetuate a social system intelligently
\nfashioned so as to provide a basis, a structure, a gradation by which there
\ncould be a secure evolution of the life from the vital and mental to the
\nspiritual motive. The leading idea was the government of human interest and
\ndesire by the social and ethical <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nlaw, the Dharma, so that it
\nmight be made, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> all vital, economic,
\n<\/font> <\/span>aesthetic,
\nhedonistic, intellectual and other needs being satisfied duly and according to
\nthe right law of the nature,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n– a
\nprepara-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-283<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\ntion for the spiritual existence. Here too we
\nhave as an initial form the aphoristic method of the Vedic Grihya Sutras,
\nafter- wards the diffuser, fuller method of the Dharma Shastras, – the first
\nsatisfied with brief indications of simple and essential socio- religious
\nprinciple and practice, the later work attempting to cover the whole life of
\nthe individual, the class and the people. The very character of the effort and
\nits thoroughness and the constant unity of idea that reigns through the whole
\nof it are a remarkable evidence of a very developed intellectual, aesthetic and
\nethical consciousness and a high turn and capacity for a noble and ordered
\ncivilisation and culture. The intelligence at work, the understanding and
\nformative power manifested is not inferior to that of any ancient or modern
\npeople, and there is a gravity, a unified clarity and nobility of conception’
\nwhich balances at least in any true idea of culture the greater supple- ness,
\nmore well-informed experience and science and eager flexi- bility of
\nexperimental hardihood which are the gains that distinguish our later humanity.
\nAt any rate it was no barbaric mind that was thus intently careful for a fine
\nand well unified order of society, a high and clear thought to govern it and at
\nthe end of life a great spiritual perfection and release.<\/font>\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe pure literature of the period
\nis represented by the two great epics, the Mahabharata, which gathered into its
\nvast structure the greater part of the poetic activity of the Indian mind
\nduring several centuries, and the Ramayana. These two poems are epical in their
\nmotive and spirit, but they are not like any other two epics in the world, but
\nare entirely of their own kind and subtly different from others in their
\nprinciple. It is not only that although they contain an early heroic story and
\na transmutation of many primitive elements, their form belongs to a period of
\nhighly developed intellectual, ethical and social culture, is enriched with a
\nbody of mature thought and uplifted by a ripe nobility and refined gravity of
\nethical tone and therefore these poems are quite different from primitive edda
\nand saga and greater in breadth of view and substance and height of motive<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nI do not speak now of aesthetic quality and
\npoetic perfection<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nthan the Homeric poems, while
\nat the same time there is still an early breath, a direct and straightforward
\nvigour, a freshness<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-284<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

and greatness and pulse of
\nlife, a simplicity of strength and beauty that makes of them quite another kind
\nthan the elaborately constructed literary epics of Virgil or Milton, Firdausi
\nor Kalidasa. This peculiar blending of the natural breath of an early, heroic,
\nswift and vigorous force of life with a strong development and activity of the
\nethical, the intellectual, even the philosophic mind is indeed a remarkable
\nfeature; these poems are the voice of the youth of a people, but a youth not
\nonly fresh and fine and buoyant, but also great and accomplished, wise and
\nnoble. This how- ever is only a temperamental distinction: there is another
\nthat is more far-reaching, a difference in the whole conception, function and
\nstructure.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n       
\n<\/font> <\/span>One of the elements
\nof the old Vedic education was a knowledge of significant tradition, itihasa,
\n<\/i>and it is this word that was used by the ancient critics to distinguish the
\nMahabharata and the Ramayana from the later literary epics. The Itihasa was an
\nancient historical or legendary tradition turned to creative use as a
\nsignificant my thus or tale expressive of some spiritual or religious or
\nethical or ideal meaning and thus formative of the mind of the people. The
\nMahabharata and Ramayana are Itihasas of this
\nkind on a large scale and with a massive purpose. The poets who wrote and those
\nwho added to these great bodies of poetic writing did not intend merely to tell
\nan ancient tale in a beautiful or noble manner or even to fashion a poem
\npregnant with much richness of interest and meaning, though they did both these
\nthings with a high success; they wrote with a sense of their function as
\narchitects and sculptors of life, creative exponents, fashioners of significant
\nforms of the national thought and religion and ethics and culture. A profound
\nstress of thought on life, a large and vital view of religion and society, a
\ncertain strain of philosophic idea runs through these poems and the whole
\nancient culture of India is embodied in them with a great force of intellectual
\nconception and living presentation. The Mahabharata has been spoken of as a
\nfifth Veda, it has been said of both these poems that they are not only great
\npoems but Dharmashastras, the body of a large religious and ethical and social
\nand political <\/font> <\/span>
\n,<\/font><\/span> teaching, and their effect
\nand hold on the mind and life of the <\/font> <\/span>
\npeople have been so great that they have been
\ndescribed as the<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-285<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nbible of the Indian people. That is not quite
\nan accurate analogy, for the bible of the Indian people contains also the Veda
\nand Upanishads, the Purana and Tantras and the Dharmashastras, not to speak of
\na large bulk of the religious poetry in the regional languages. The work of
\nthese epics was to popularise high philosophic and ethical idea and cultural
\npractice; it was to throw out prominently and with a seizing relief and effect
\nin a frame of great poetry and on a background of poetic story and around
\nsignificant personalities that became to the people abiding national memories
\nand representative figures all that was best in the soul and thought or true to
\nthe life or real to the creative imagination and ideal mind or characteristic
\nand illuminative of the social, ethical, political and religious culture of
\nIndia. All these things were brought together and disposed with artistic power
\nand a telling effect in a poetic body given to traditions half legendary, half
\nhistoric but cherished henceforth as deepest and most living truth and as a
\npart of their religion by the people. Thus framed the Mahabharata and Ramayana,
\nwhether in the original Sanskrit or rewritten in the regional tongues, brought
\nto the masses by Kathakas, – rhapsodists, reciters and exegetes, – became and
\nremained one of the chief instruments of popular education and culture, moulded
\nthe thought, character, aesthetic and religious mind of the people and gave
\neven to the illiterate some sufficient tincture of philosophy, ethics, social
\nand political ideas, aesthetic emotion, poetry, fiction and romance. That which
\nwas for the cultured classes contained in Veda and Upanishad, shut into
\nprofound philosophical aphorism and treatise or inculcated in Dharmashastra and
\nArthashastra, was put here into creative and living figures, associated with
\nfamiliar story and legend, fused into a vivid representation of life and thus
\nmade a near and living power that all could readily assimilate through the
\npoetic word appealing at once to the soul and the imagination and the
\nintelligence.
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe Mahabharata especially is not
\nonly the story of the Bharatas, the epic of an early event which had become a
\nnational tradition but on a vast scale the epic of the soul aI1d religious and
\nethical mind and social and political ideals and culture and life of India. It
\nis said popularly of it and with a certain measure of<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nP<\/span><\/font>age-286<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\ntruth that whatever is in India is in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the
\ncreation and expression not of a single individual mind, but of the mind of a
\nnation; it is the poem of itself written by a whole people. It would be vain to
\napply to it the canons of a poetical art applicable to an epic poem with a
\nsmaller and more restricted purpose, but still a great and quite conscious art
\nhas been expended both on its detail and its total structure. The whole poem
\nhas been built like a vast national temple unrolling slowly its immense and
\ncomplex idea from chamber to chamber, crowded with significant groups and
\nsculptures and inscriptions, the grouped figures carved in divine or
\nsemi-divine proportions, a humanity aggrandised and half-uplifted to super-
\nhumanity and yet always true to the human motive and idea and feeling, the
\nstrain of the real constantly raised by the tones of the ideal, the life of
\nthis world amply portrayed but subjected to the conscious influence and
\npresence of the powers of the worlds behind it, and the whole unified by the
\nlong embodied procession\u00a0 <\/span>of a consistent
\nidea worked out in the wide steps of the poetic story. As is needed in an epic
\nnarrative, the conduct of the story is the main interest of the poem and it is
\ncarried through with an at once large and minute movement, wide and bold in the
\nmass, striking and effective in detail, always simple, strong and epic in its
\nstyle and pace. At the same time though supremely interesting in substance and
\nvivid in the manner of the telling as a poetic story, it is something more, – a
\nsignificant tale, Itihasa, representative throughout of the central ideas and
\nideals of Indian life and culture. The leading motive is the Indian idea of the
\nDharma. Here the Vedic notion of the struggle between the godheads of truth and
\nlight and unity and the powers of darkness and division and falsehood is
\nbrought out from the spiritual and religious and internal into the outer
\nintellectual, ethical and vital plane. It takes there in the figure of the
\nstory a double form of a personal and a political struggle, the personal a
\nconflict between typical and representative personalities embodying the greater
\nethical ideals of the Indian Dharma and others who are embodiments of Asuric
\negoism and self-will and misuse of the Dharma, the political a battle in which
\nthe personal struggle culminates, an international clash ending in the
\nestablishment of<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

P<\/font>age-287<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\na new rule of righteousness and justice, a kingdom or rather an empire of the
\nDharma uniting warring races and substituting for<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>the ambitious arrogance of kings and aristocratic clans the supremacy, the calm
\nand peace of a just and humane empire. It is the old struggle of Deva and
\nAsura, God and Titan, but represented in the terms of human life.<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe way in which this double
\nform is worked out and the presentation of the movement of individual lives and
\nof the<\/font><\/span>,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nnational
\nlife first as their background and then as coming into <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe front in a movement of
\nkingdoms and armies and nations show a high architectonic faculty akin in the
\nsphere of poetry to that which laboured in Indian architecture, and the whole
\nhas been conducted with a large poetic art and vision. There is the same power
\nto embrace great spaces in a total view and the same <\/font> <\/span>
\ntendency
\nto fill them with an abundance of minute, effective,<\/font><\/span>vivid and significant detail.
\nThere is brought too into the frame of the narrative a very considerable
\nelement of other tales, legends, episodes, most of them of a significant
\ncharacter suitable to the method of\u00a0 <\/span>Itihasa,
\nand an extraordinary amount of philosophical, religious, ethical, social and
\npolitical thinking sometimes direct, sometimes cast into the form of the legend
\nand episode. The ideas of the Upanishads and of the great philosophies are
\nbrought in continually and sometimes given new developments, as in the Gita;
\nreligious myth and tale and idea and teaching are made part of the tissue; the
\nethical ideals of the race are expressed or are transmuted into the shape of
\ntale and episode as well as embodied in the figures of the story, political and
\nsocial ideals and institutions are similarly developed or illustrated with a
\nhigh vividness and clearness and space is found too for aesthetic and other
\nsuggestions connected with the life of the people. All these things are interwoven
\ninto the epic narrative with a remarkable skill and closeness. The
\nirregularities inevitable in so combined and difficult a plan and in a work to
\nwhich many poets of an unequal power have contributed fall into their place in
\nthe general massive complexity of the scheme and assist rather than break the
\ntotal impression. The whole is a poetic expression unique in its power and
\nfullness of the entire soul and thought and life of a people.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-288<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n29. The Adoration
\nGroup, Ajanta<\/font><\/p>\n

\n…the adoration
\ngroup of the mother and child before the Buddha,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\none of the most
\nprofound, tender and noble of the Ajanta masterpieces… (P. 250)<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The Ramayana is a work of the same
\nessential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of
\nplan, ,a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and
\ncolour. The main bulk of the poem in spite of much accretion is evidently by a
\nsingle hand and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There
\nis less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist,
\nless of the builder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and
\nthere is no deviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time there
\nis a like vastness of vision, an even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity
\nin the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail. The
\nstructural power, strong workmanship and method of disposition of the
\nMahabharata remind one of the art of the Indian builders, the grandeur and
\nboldness of outline and wealth of colour and minute decorative execution of the
\nRamayana suggest rather a transcript into literature of the spirit and style of
\nIndian painting. The epic poet has taken here also as his subject an Itihasa,
\nan ancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it
\nin with detail from myth and folklore, but has exalted all into a scale of
\ngrandiose epic figure that it may bear more worthily the high intention and
\nsignificance. The subject is the same as in the Mahabharata, the strife of the
\ndivine wit!! the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely
\nideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening
\nof both the good and the evil in human character. On one side is portrayed an
\nideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilization
\nfounded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is
\npresented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and
\nsweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of
\nsuperhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and
\npowers of mental nature living and embodied are brought into conflict and led
\nto a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa. All
\nshade and complexity are omitted which would diminish the single purity of the
\nidea, the representative force in the outline of the figures, the significance
\nof the temperamental colour and only so much<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-289<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

admitted as is sufficient to
\nhumanise the appeal and the significance. The poet makes us conscious of the
\nimmense forces that are behind our life and sets his action in a magnificent
\nepic scenery, the great imperial city, the mountains and the ocean, the forest
\nand wilderness, described with such a largeness as to make us feel as if the
\nwhole world were the scene of his poem and its subject the whole divine and
\ntitanic possibility of man imaged in a few great or monstrous figures. The
\nethical and the aesthetic mind of India have here fused themselves into a
\nharmonious unity and reached an unexampled pure wideness and beauty of
\nself-expression. The Ramayana embodied for the Indian imagination its highest
\nand tenderest human ideals of character, made strength and courage and
\ngentleness and purity and fidelity and self-sacrifice familiar to it in the
\nsuavest and most harmonious forms coloured so as to attract the emotion and the
\naesthetic sense, stripped morals of all repellent austerity on one side or on
\nthe other of mere commonness and lent a certain high divineness to the ordinary
\nthings of life, conjugal and filial and maternal and fraternal feeling, the
\nduty of the prince and leader and the loyalty of follower and subject, the
\ngreatness of the great and the truth and worth of the simple, toning things
\nethical to the beauty of a more psychical meaning by the glow of its ideal
\nhues. The work of Valmiki has been an agent of almost incalculable power in the
\nmoulding of the cultural mind of India: it has presented to it to be loved and
\nimitated in figures like Rama and Sita, made so divinely and with such a
\nrevelation of reality as to become objects of enduring cult and worship, or
\nlike Hanuman, Lakshmana, Bharata the living human image of its ethical ideals;
\nit has fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character,
\nand it has evoked and fixed in it those finer and exquisite yet firm soul-tones
\nand that more delicate humanity of temperament which are a more valuable thing
\nthan the formal outsides of virtue and conduct.
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe poetical manner of these
\nepics is not inferior to the greatness of their substance. The style and the
\nverse in which they are written have always a noble epic quality, a lucid
\nclassical simplicity and directness rich in expression but stripped of
\nsuperfluous ornament, a swift, vigorous, flexible and fluid verse con-<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-290 <\/font><\/span> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nstantly
\nsure of the epic cadence. There is a difference in the temperament of the
\nlanguage. The characteristic diction of the Mahabharata is almost austerely
\nmasculine, trusting to force of sense and inspired accuracy of turn, almost
\nascetic in its simplicity and directness and a frequent fine and happy
\nbareness; it is the speech of a strong and rapid poetical intelligence and a
\ngreat and straightforward vital force, brief and telling in phrase but by
\nvirtue of a single-minded sincerity and, except in some knotted passages or
\nepisodes, without any rhetorical labour of compactness, a style like the light
\nand strong body of a runner nude and pure and healthily lustrous and clear
\nwithout superfluity of flesh or exaggeration of muscle, agile and swift and
\nuntired in the race. There is inevitably much in this vast poem that is in an
\ninferior manner, but little or nothing that falls below a certain sustained
\nlevel in which there is always something of this virtue. The diction of the
\nRamayana is shaped in a more attractive mould, a marvel of sweetness and
\nstrength, lucidity and warmth and grace; its phrase has not only poetic truth
\nand epic force and diction but a constant intimate vibration of the feeling of
\nthe idea, emotion or object: there is an element of fine ideal delicacy in its
\nsustained strength and breath of power. In both poems it is a high poetic soul
\nand inspired intelligence that is at work; the directly intuitive mind of the
\nVeda and Upanishads has retired behind the veil of the intellectual and
\noutwardly\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>psychical imagination.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This is the character of the
\nepics and the qualities which have made them immortal, cherished among India’s
\ngreatest literary and cultural treasures, and given them their enduring power
\nover the national mind. Apart from minor defects and inequalities such as we
\nfind in all works set at this pitch and involving a considerable length of
\nlabour, the objections made by western criticism are simply expressions of a
\ndifference of mentality and aesthetic taste. The vastness of the plan and the
\nleisurely minute- ness of detail are baflling and tiring to a western mind
\naccustomed to smaller limits, a more easily fatigued eye and imagination and a
\nhastier pace of life, but they are congenial to the spaciousness of vision and
\nintent curiosity of circumstances, characteristic of the Indian mind, that
\nspring, as I have pointed out in relation to<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-291<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\narchitecture, from the habit
\nof the cosmic consciousness and its sight and imagination and activity of
\nexperience. Another difference is that the terrestrial life is not seen realistically
\njust as it is to the physical mind but constantly in relation to the much that
\nis behind it, the human action is surrounded and influenced by great powers and
\nforces, Daivic, Asuric and Rakshasic, and the greater human figures are a kind
\nof incarnation of these more cosmic personalities and powers. The objection
\nthat the individual thereby loses his individual interest and becomes a puppet
\nof impersonal forces is not true either in reality or actually in the
\nimaginative figures of this literature, for there we see that the personages
\ngain by it in greatness and force of action and are only ennobled by an
\nimpersonality that raises and heightens the play of their personality. The
\nmingling of terrestrial nature and supernature, not as a mere imagination but
\nwith an entire sincerity and naturalness, is due to the same conception of a
\ngreater reality in life, and it is as significant figures of this greater
\nreality that we must regard much to which the realistic critic objects with an
\nabsurdly misplaced violence, such as the powers gained by Tapasya, the use of
\ndivine weapons, the frequent indications of psychic action and influence. The
\ncomplaint of exaggeration is equally invalid where the whole action is that of
\nmen raised beyond the usual human level, since we can only ask for proportions
\nconsonant with the truth of the stature of life conceived in the imagination of
\nthe poet and cannot insist on an unimaginative fidelity to the ordinary
\nmeasures which would here be false because wholly out of place. The complaint
\nof lifelessness and want of personality in the epic characters is equally
\nunfounded: Rama and Sita, Arjuna and Yudhishthira, Bhishma and Duryodhana and
\nKarna are intensely real and human and alive to the Indian mind. Only the main
\ninsistence, here as in Indian art, is not on the outward saliences of
\ncharacter, for these are only used secondarily as aids to the presentation, but
\non the soul-life and the inner soul-quality presented with as absolute a
\nvividness and, strength and purity of outline as possible. The idealism of
\ncharacters like Rama and Sita is no pale and vapid unreality; they are vivid
\nwith the truth of the ideal life, of the greatness that man may be and does
\nbecome when he gives his<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

P<\/font>age-292<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nsoul a chance and it is no sound objection that
\nthere is only a small allowance of the broken littleness of our ordinary
\nnature. These epics are therefore not a mere mass of untransmuted legend and
\nfolklore, as is ignorantly objected, but a highly artistic representation of
\nintimate significances of life, the living presentment of a strong and noble
\nthinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social and
\npolitical ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in freshness of
\nlife but im- measurably more profound and evolved in thought and substance than
\nthe Greek, as advanced in maturity of culture but more vigorous and vital and
\nyoung in strength than the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were
\nfashioned to serve a greater and completer national and cultural function and
\nthat they should have been received and absorbed by both the high and the low,
\nthe cultured and the masses and remained through twenty centuries an -intimate
\nand formative part of the life of the whole nation is of itself the strongest
\npossible evidence of the greatness and fineness of this ancient Indian culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nP<\/font>age-293<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t4<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 \n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nT<\/font><\/span>HE<\/span><\/font>
\nclassical age of the ancient literature, the best known and appraised of all,
\ncovers a period of some ten centuries and possibly more, and it is marked off
\nfrom the earlier writings by a considerable difference, not so much in
\nsubstance, as in the moulding and the colour of its thought, temperament and
\nlanguage. The divine childhood, the heroic youth, the bright and strong early
\nmanhood of the people and its culture are over and there is instead a long and
\nopulent maturity and as its sequence an equally opulent and richly coloured
\ndecline. The decline is not to death, for it is followed by a certain rejuvenescence, a fresh start and repeated beginning, of which the medium is no
\nlonger Sanskrit but the derived languages, the daughters of the dialects raised
\ninto literary instruments and developing as the grand and ancient tongue loses
\nits last forces and inspiring life. The difference in spirit and mould between
\nthe epics and the speech of Bhartrihari and Kalidasa is already enormous and
\nmay possibly be explained by the early centuries of Buddhism when Sanskrit
\nceased to be the sole literary tongue understood and spoken by all educated men
\nand Pali came up as its successful rival and the means of expression for at
\nleast a great part of the current of the national thought and life. The
\nlanguage and movement of the epics have all the vigour, freedom, spontaneous
\nforce and appeal of a speech that leaps straight from the founts of life; the
\nspeech of Kalidasa is an accomplished art, an intellectual and aesthetic
\ncreation consummate, deliberate, finely ornate, carved like a statue, coloured
\nlike a painting, not yet artificial, though there is a masterly artifice and
\ndevice, but still a careful work of art laboured by the intelligence. It is
\ncarefully natural, not with the spontaneous ease of a first, but the
\naccomplished air of ease of a habitual second nature. The elements of artifice
\nand device increase and predominate in the later writers, their language is a laborious
\nand deliberate though a powerful and beautiful construction and appeals only to
\nan erudite audience, a learned elite. The religious writings, Purana and
\nTantra, moving from a deeper,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>still
\nintensely living source, aiming by their simplicity at a wider appeal, prolong
\nfor a time the tradition of the epics, but, the simplicity and directness is
\nwilled rather than the earlier natural ease. In the end Sanskrit becomes the
\nlanguage of the Pundits and except for certain philosophical, religious and
\nlearned purposes no longer a first-hand expression of the life and mind of the
\npeople.<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe alteration in the literary
\nspeech corresponds however, apart from all inducing circumstances, to a great
\nchange in the centre of mentality of the culture. It is still and always
\nspiritual, philosophical, religious, ethical, but the inner austerer things
\nseem to draw back a little and to stand in the background, acknowledged indeed
\nand overshadowing the rest, but nevertheless a little detaching themselves from
\nthem and allowing them to act for their own enlargement and profit. The
\nexterior powers that stand out in front are the curious intellect, the vital
\nurge, the aesthetic, urbanely active and hedonistic sense life. It is the great
\nperiod of logical philosophy, of science, of art and the developed crafts, law,
\npolitics, trade, colonisation, the great kingdoms and empires with their
\nordered and elaborate administrations, the minute rule of the Shastras in all
\ndepartments of thought and life, an enjoyment of all that is brilliant,
\nsensuous, agreeable, a discussion of all that could be thought and known, a
\nfixing and systemising of all that could be brought into the compass of
\nintelligence and practice,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe
\nmost splendid, sumpuous and imposing millennium of Indian culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The intellectuality that predominates is
\nnot in any way restless, sceptical or negative, but it is enormously inquiring
\nand active, accepting the great lines of spiritual, religious, philosophical
\nand social truth that had been discovered and laid down by the past, but eager
\ntoo to develop, to complete, to know minutely and thoroughly and fix in
\nperfectly established system and detail, to work out all possible branches and
\nramifications, to fill the intelligence, the sense and the life. The grand
\nbasic principles and lines of Indian religion, philosophy, society have already
\nbeen found and built and the steps of the culture move now in the magnitude and
\nsatisfying security of a great tradition; but there is still ample room for
\ncreation and discovery within<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nthese fields and a much wider province, great
\nbeginnings, strong developments of science and art and literature, the freedom
\nof the purely intellectual and aesthetic activities, much scope too for the hedonisms
\nof the vital and the refinements of the emotional being, a cultivation of the
\nart and rhythmic practice of life. There is a highly intellectualised vital
\nstress and a many-sided interest in living, an indulgence of an at once
\nintellectual and vital and sensuous satisfaction extending even to a frankness
\nof physical and sensual experience, but in the manner of the oriental mind with
\na certain decorousness and order, an element of aesthetic restraint and the
\nobservance of rule and measure even in indulgence that saves always from the
\nunbridled license to which less disciplined races are liable. The
\ncharacteristic, the central action is the play of the intellectual mind and
\neverywhere that predominates. In the earlier age the many strands of the Indian
\nmind and life principle are unified and inseparable, a single wide movement set
\nto a strong and abundant but simple music; here they seem to stand side by side
\nrelated and harmonised, curious and complex, multiply one. The spontaneous
\nunity of the intuitive mind is replaced by the artificial unity of the
\nanalysing and synthetising intelligence. Art and religion still continue the
\npre- dominance of the spiritual and intuitive motive, but it is less to the
\nfront in literature. A division has been settled between religious and secular
\nwriting that did not exist to any appreciable extent in the previous ages. The
\ngreat poets and writers are secular creators and their works have no chance of
\nforming part of the intimate religious and ethical mind of the people as did
\nthe Ramayana and Mahabharata. The stream of religious poetry flows separately
\nin Purana and Tantra.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>The great representative poet of this age is Kalidasa. He establishes a
\ntype which was preparing before and endured after him with more or less of
\nadditional decoration, but substantially unchanged through the centuries. His
\npoems are the perfect and harmoniously designed model of a kind and substance
\nthat others cast always into similar forms but with a genius inferior in power
\nor less rhythmically balanced, faultless and whole. The art of poetic speech in
\nKalidasa’s period reaches an extraordinary perfection. Poetry itself had become
\na high craft, conscious<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>of<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>its
\nmeans, meticulously conscientious in the use of its instruments, as alert and
\nexact in its technique as architecture, painting and sculpture, vigilant to
\nequate beauty and power of the form with nobility and richness of the
\nconception, aim and spirit and the scrupulous completeness of its execution
\nwith fullness of aesthetic vision or of the emotional or sensuous appeal. There
\nwas established here as in the other arts and indeed during all this era in all
\nhuman activities a Shastra, a well recognised and carefully practised science
\nand art of poetics, critical and formulative of all that makes perfection of
\nmethod and prescriptive of things to be avoided, curious of essentials and
\npossibilities but under a regime of standards and limits conceived with the aim
\nof excluding all fault of excess or of defect and therefore in practice as
\nunfavourable to any creative lawlessness, even though the poet’s native right
\nof fantasy and freedom is theoretically admitted, as to any least tendency
\ntowards bad or careless, hasty or irregular workmanship. The poet is expected
\nto be thoroughly conscious of his art, as minutely acquainted with its
\nconditions and its fixed and certain standard and method as the painter and
\nsculptor and to govern by his critical sense and knowledge the flight of his
\ngenius. This careful art of poetry became in the end too much of a rigid
\ntradition, too appreciative of rhetorical device and artifice and even
\npermitted and admired the most extraordinary contortions of the learned
\nintelligence, as in the Alexandrian decline of Greek poetry, but the earlier
\nwork is usually free from these shortcomings or they are only occasional <\/font> <\/span>
\nand rare.<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe classical
\nSanskrit is perhaps the most remarkably finished and capable instrument of
\nthought yet fashioned, at any rate by either the Aryan or the Semitic mind,
\nlucid with the utmost possible clarity, precise to the farthest limit of
\nprecision, always compact and at its best sparing in its formation of phrase,
\nbut yet with all this never poor or bare: there is no sacrifice of depth to
\nlucidity, but rather a pregnant opulence of meaning, a capacity of high
\nrichness and beauty, a natural grandeur of sound and diction inherited from the
\nancient days. The abuse of the faculty of compound structure proved fatal later
\non to the prose; but in the earlier prose and poetry where it is limited, there<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nis
\nan<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nair of continent abundance strengthened by
\nrestraint and all the more capable of making the most of its resources. The
\ngreat and subtle and musical rhythms of the classical poetry with their
\nimaginative, attractive and beautiful names, manifold in capacity, careful in
\nstructure, are of themselves a mould that insists on perfection and hardly
\nadmits the possibility of a mean or slovenly workmanship or a defective
\nmovement. The unit of this poetical art is the <\/font> <\/span>
\ns<\/font><\/span>loka,
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/i>the sufficient verse of four
\nquarters or <\/font> p<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>da <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nand each Sloka is expected to be a work of perfect art in itself, a
\nharmonious, vivid and convincing expression of an object, scene, detail,
\nthought, sentiment, state of mind or emotion that can stand by itself as an independent
\nfigure; the succession of Slokas must be a constant development by addition of
\ncompleteness to completeness and the whole poem or canto of a long poem an
\nartistic and satisfying structure in this manner, the succession of cantos a
\nprogression of definite movements building a total harmony. It is this
\ncarefully artistic and highly cultured type of poetic creation that reached
\nits acme of perfection in the poetry of Kalidasa.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThis pre-eminence proceeds from
\ntwo qualities possessed in a degree only to be paralleled in the work of the
\ngreatest world- poets and not always combined in them in so equable a harmony
\nand with so adequate a combination of execution and substance. Kalidasa ranks
\namong the supreme poetic artists with Milton and Virgil and he has a" more
\nsubtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the English, a greater
\nbreath of native power informing and vivifying his execution than the Latin
\npoet. There is no more perfect and harmonious style in literature, no more inspired
\nand careful master of the absolutely harmonious and sufficient phrase combining
\nthe minimum of word expenditure with the fullest sense of an accomplished ease
\nand a divine elegance and not excluding a fine excess that is not excessive, an
\nutmost possible refined opulence of aesthetic value. More perfectly than any
\nother he realises the artistic combination of a harmonious economy of
\nexpression, not a word, syllable, sound in superfluity,"<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>and a total sense of wise and lavish opulence that was the aim of the earlier
\nclassical poets. None so divinely skilful as he in imparting without any
\noverdoing the richest colour, charm, appeal<\/font><\/span> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nand value, greatness or nobility or power or
\nsuavity and always some kind and the right kind and the fullest degree of
\nbeauty to each line and each phrase. The felicity of selection is equalled by
\nthe felicity of combination. One of the most splendidly sensuous of poets in
\nthe higher sense of that epithet because he has a vivid vision and feeling of
\nhis object, his sensuousness is neither lax nor overpowering, but always
\nsatisfying and just, because it is united with a plenary force of the
\nintelligence, a gravity and strength sometimes apparent, sometimes disguised in
\nbeauty but appreciable within the broidered and coloured robe, a royal
\nrestraint in the heart of the regal indulgence. And Kalidasa’s sovereign
\nmastery of rhythm is as great as his sovereign mastery of phrase. Here we meet
\nin each metrical kind with the most perfect discoveries of verbal harmony in
\nthe Sanskrit language (pure lyrical melody comes only afterwards at the end in
\none or two poets like Jayadeva), harmonies founded on a constant subtle
\ncomplexity of the fine assonances of sound and .an unobtrusive use of
\nsignificant cadence that never breaks the fluent unity of tone of the music.
\nAnd the other quality of Kalidasa’s poetry is the unfailing adequacy of the
\nsubstance. Careful always to get the full aesthetic value of the word and sound
\nclothing his thought and substance, he is equally careful that the thought and
\nthe substance itself should be of a high, strong or rich intellectual,
\ndescriptive or emotional value. His conception is large in its view though it
\nhas not the cosmic breadth of the earlier poets and it is sustained at every
\nstep in its execution. The hand of the artist never fails in the management of
\nits material,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nexception being
\nmade of a fault of composition marring one, the least considerable of his
\nworks,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nand his imagination
\nis always as equal to its task as his touch is great and subtle.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe work to which these supreme
\npoetic qualities were brought was very much the same at bottom, though
\ndiffering in its form and method, as that achieved by the earlier epics; it was
\nto interpret in poetic speech and represent in significant images and figures
\nthe mind, the life, the culture of India in his age. Kalidasa’s seven extant
\npoems, each in its own way and within its limits and on its level a
\nmasterpiece, are a brilliant and delicately ornate roll of pictures and
\ninscriptions with that as their<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

single real subject. His was a
\nrichly stored mind, the mind at once of a scholar and observer possessed of all
\nthe learning of his time, versed in the politics, law, social idea, system and
\ndetail, religion, mythology, philosophy, art of his time, intimate with the
\nlife of courts and familiar with the life of the people, widely and very
\nminutely observant of the life of Nature, of bird and beast, season and tree and
\nflower, all the lore of the mind and all the lore of the eye; and this mind was
\n.at the same time always that of a great poet and artist. There is not in his
\nwork the touch of pedantry or excessive learning that mars the art of some
\nother Sanskrit poets, he knows how to subdue all his matter to the spirit of
\nhis art and to make the scholar and observer no more than a gatherer of
\nmaterials for the poet, but the richness of documentation is there ready and
\navailable and constantly brought in as part of incident and description and
\nsurrounding idea and forms or intervenes in the brilliant series of images that
\npass before us in the long succession of magnificent couplets and stanzas.
\nIndia, her great mountains and forests and plains and their peoples, her men
\nand women and the circumstances of their life, her animals, her cities and
\nvillages, her hermitages, rivers, gardens and tilled lands are the background
\nof narrative and drama and love poem. He has seen it all and filled his mind
\nwith it and never fails to bring it before us vivid with all the wealth of
\ndescription of which he is capable. Her ethical and domestic ideals, the life
\nof the ascetic in the forest or engaged in meditation and austerity upon the
\nmountains and the life of the house- holder, her familiar customs and social
\nstandards and observances, her religious notions, cult, symbols give the rest
\nof the surroundings and the atmosphere. The high actions of gods and kings, the
\nnobler or the more delicate human sentiments, the charm and beauty of women,
\nthe sensuous passion of lovers, the procession of the seasons and the scenes of
\nNature, these are his favourite subjects.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>He is a true son of his age in his
\ndwelling on the artistic, hedonistic, sensuous sides of experience and
\npre-eminently a poet of love and beauty and the joy of life. He represents it
\nalso in his intellectual passion for higher things, his intense appreciation of
\nknowledge, culture" the religious idea, the ethical ideal,<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nthe
\ngreatness of ascetic self-mastery, and these too he makes a part of the beauty
\nand interest of life and sees as admirable elements of its complete and
\nsplendid picture. All his work is of this tissue. His great literary, epic, the
\n"House of Raghu", treats the story of a line of ancient kings as representative
\nof the highest religious and ethical culture and ideals of the race and brings
\nout its significances environed with a splendid decoration of almost
\npictorially depicted sentiment and action, noble or beautiful thought and
\nspeech and vivid incident and scene and surrounding. Another unfinished epic, a
\ngreat fragment but by the virtue of his method of work complete in itself so
\nfar as the tale proceeds, is in subject a legend of the gods, the ancient
\nsubject of a strife of Gods and Titans, the solution prepared here by a union
\nof the supreme God and the Goddess, but in treatment it is a description of
\nNature and the human life of India raised to a divine magnitude on the sacred
\nmountain and in the homes of the high deities. His three dramas move around the
\npassion of love, but with the same insistence on the detail and picture of
\nlife. One poem unrolls the hued series of the seasons of the Indian year.
\nAnother leads the messenger cloud across northern India viewing as it passes
\nthe panorama of her scenes and closes on a vivid and delicately sensuous and
\nemotional portrayal of the passion of love. In these varied settings we get a
\nsingularly complete impression of the mind, the tradition, the sentiment, the
\nrich, beautiful and ordered life of the India of the times, not in its very
\ndeepest things, for these have to be sought elsewhere, but in what was for the
\ntime most characteristic, the intellectual, vital and artistic turn of that
\nperiod of her culture.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The rest of the poetry of the times is of
\none fundamental type with Kalidasa’s; for it has with individual variations the
\nsame thought-mind, temperament, general materials, poetic method, and much of
\nit has a high genius or an unusual quality and distinction though not the same
\nperfection, beauty and felicity. The literary epics of Bharavi and Magha reveal
\nthe beginning of the decline marked by the progressive encroachment of a
\nrhetorical and laborious standard of form, method and manner that heavily
\nburdens and is bound eventually to stifle the poetic spirit, an increasing
\nartificiality of tradition and convention and<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

gross faults of taste that bear
\nevidence of the approaching transmission of the language out of the hands of
\nthe literary creator into the control of the Pundit and pendant. Magha\u2019s poem
\nis more constructed by rule of rhetoric than created and he displays as merits
\nthe very worst puerilities of melodious jingle, intricate acrostic and
\nlaborious double meaning. Bharavi is less attainted by the decadence, but not
\nimmune, and he suffers himself to be betrayed by its influence to much that is
\nneither suitable to his temperament and genius nor in itself beautiful or true.
\nNevertheless Bharavi has high qualities of grave poetic thinking and epic
\nsublimity of description and Magha poetic gifts that would have secured for him
\na more considerable place in literature if the poet had not been crossed with a
\npedant. In this mixture of genius with defect of taste and manner the later
\nclassical poets resemble the Elizabethans, with the difference that in one case
\nthe incoherence is the result of a crude and still unripe, in the other of an
\noverripe and decadent culture. At the same time they bring out very prominently
\nthe character of this age of Sanskrit literature, its qualities but also its
\nlimitations that escape the eye in Kalidasa and are hidden in the splendour of
\nhis genius.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThis poetry is
\npre-eminently a ripe and deliberate poetic <\/font> <\/span>
\nrepresentation
\nand criticism of thought and life and the things<\/font><\/span>
\nthat<\/font><\/span>
\ntraditionally interested an aristocratic and cultured class in a very advanced
\nand intellectual period of civilisation. The intellect predominates everywhere
\nand, even when it seems to stand aside and leave room <\/i>for pure objective
\npresentation, it puts on that too the stamp of its image. In the earlier epics
\nthe thought, religion, ethics, life movements are all strongly lived; the
\npoetic intelligence is at work but always absorbed in its work, self- forgetful
\nand identified with its object, and it is this -that is the secret of their
\ngreat creative force and living poetic sincerity and power. The later poets are
\ninterested in the same things but with an intensely reflective experience and
\ncritical intelligence that always observes more than it lives with its objects.
\nIn the literary epics there is no real movement of life, but only a close
\nbrilliant description of life. The poet makes to pass before us a series of
\npictured incidents, scenes, details, figures, attitudes richly coloured, exact,
\nvivid, convincing to the eye and attractive,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

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\n

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

\nbut in spite of the charm and interest we
\nspeedily perceive that these are only animated pictures. Things are indeed seen
\nvividly but with the more outer eye of the imagination, observed by the
\nintellect, reproduced by the sensuous imagination of the poet, but they have
\nnot been deeply lived in the spirit. Kalidasa alone is immune from this
\ndeficiency of the method because there is in him a great thinking, imaginative,
\nsensuous poetic soul that has lived and creates what he pictures and does not
\nmerely fabricate brilliant scenes and figures. The rest only occasionally rise
\nabove the deficiency and do then great and not only brilliant or effective
\nwork. Their ordinary work is so well done as to deserve great and unstinted
\npraise for what it possesses, but not the highest praise. It is in the end more
\ndecorative than creative. There ensues from the character of this poetic method
\na spiritual consequence, that we see here very vividly the current thought,
\nethics, aesthetic culture, active and sense life of contemporary India, but not
\nthe deeper soul of these things so much as their outer character and body.
\nThere is much ethical and religious thought of a sufficiently high ideal kind,
\nand it is quite sincere but only intellectually sincere, and therefore there is
\nno impression of the deeper religious feeling or the living ethical power that
\nwe get in the Mahabharata and Ramayana and in most of the art and literature of
\nIndia. The ascetic life is depicted, but only in its ideas and outward figure;
\nthe sensuous life is depicted in the same scrupulous manner<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>it is intensely observed and
\nappreciated and well reproduced to the eye and the intelligence, but not
\nintensely felt and created in the soul of the poet. The intellect has become
\ntoo detached and too critically observant to live things with the natural force
\nof the life or with the intuitive identity. This is the quality and also the
\nmalady of an over developed intellectualism and it has always been the
\nforerunner of a decadence.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/font><\/span>The predominantly intellectual turn appears in
\nthe abundance of another kind of writing, the gnomic verse, subhasita. <\/i>This
\nis the use of the independent completeness of the Sloka to be the body in its
\nsingle sufficiency of the concentrated essence and expression of a thought, an apercu
\n<\/i>or significant incident of life, a sentiment so expressed as to convey\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>its essential idea to the <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

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

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\n

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

\nintelligence. There is a great plenty of this
\nkind of work admirably done; for it was congenial to the keen intellect and the
\nwide, mature and well-stored experience of the age: but in the work of
\nBhartrihari it assumes the proportions of genius, because<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>he writes not only with the thought but with emotion, with what might be called
\na moved intellectuality of the feeling and an intimate experience that gives
\ngreat potency and sometimes poignancy to his utterance. There are three
\ncenturies or satakas <\/i>of his sentences, the first expressing high ethical
\nthought or worldly wisdom or brief criticisms of aspects of life, the second
\nconcerned with erotic passion, much less effective because it is the fruit of
\ncuriosity and the environment rather than the poet’s own temperament and
\ngenius, and the third proclaiming an ascetic weariness and recoil from the
\nworld. Bhartrihari’s triple work is significant of the three leading motives of
\nthe mind of the age, its reflective interest in life and turn for high and
\nstrong and minute thinking, its preoccupation with the enjoyment of the senses,
\nand its ascetic spiritual turn – the end of the one and the ransom of the
\nother. It is significant too by the character of this spirituality; it is no
\nlonger the great natural flight of the spirit to<\/font><\/span>,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe
\nfullness of its own high domain, but rather a turning away of the intellect and
\nthe senses wearied of themselves and life, unable to find there the
\nsatisfaction they sought, to find peace in a spiritual passivity in which the
\ntired thought and sense could find their absolute rest and cessation.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe drama however is the most
\nattractive though not therefore the greatest product of the poetical mind of
\nthe age. There its excessive intellectuality was compelled by the necessities
\nof dramatic poetry to be more closely and creatively identified with the very
\nmould and movement of life. The Sanskrit drama type is a beautiful form and it
\nhas been used in most of the plays that have come down to us with an
\naccomplished art and a true creative faculty. At the same time it is true that
\nit does not rise to the greatnesses of the Greek or the Shakespearian drama.
\nThis is not due to the elimination of tragedy, – for there can be dramatic
\ncreation of the greatest kind without a solution in death, sorrow, overwhelming
\ncalamity or the tragic return of Karma, a note that is yet <\/i>not
\naltogether absent from the Indian mind,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

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\n

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

\n  <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>for it is there in
\nthe Mahabharata and was added later on to the earlier triumphant and victorious
\nclose of the Ramayana; but a closing air of peace and calm was more congenial to
\nthe sattwic turn of the Indian temperament and imagination. It is due to the
\nabsence of any bold dramatic treatment of the great issues and problems of life.
\nThese dramas are mostly romantic plays reproducing the images and settled paces
\nof the most cultured life of the time cast into the frame of old myth and
\nlegend, but a few are more realistic and represent the type of the citizen
\nhouse- holder or other scenes of the times or a historical subject. The
\nmagnificent courts of kings or the beauty of the surroundings of Nature are
\ntheir more common scene. But whatever their subject or kind, they are only
\nbrilliant transcripts or imaginative transmutations of life, and something more
\nis needed for the very greatest or most moving dramatic creation. But their type
\nstill admits of a high or a strong or delicate poetry and a representation, if
\nnot any very profound interpretation of human action and motive and they do not
\nfall short in this kind. A great charm of <\/font> <\/span>
\npoetic
\nbeauty and subtle feeling and atmosphere,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nreaching its most accomplished type in the Shakuntala
\nof Kalidasa, the most perfect and captivating romantic drama in all literature,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>or an interesting turn of
\nsentiment and action, a skilful unobtrusive development acd6rding to the
\nrecognised\u00a0 <\/span>principle and carefully
\nobserved formula of the art, in temperate measure without violent noise of
\nincident or emphatic stress on situation or crowded figures, the movement subdued
\nto a key of suavity and calm, a delicate psychology, not a strongly marked
\ncharacterisation such as is commonly demanded in the dramatic art of Europe,
\nbut a <\/font> <\/span>
\nsubtle indication by slight touches in the dialogue
\nand action,<\/font><\/span> t<\/font><\/span>hese are the usual characteristics. It is an
\nart that was produced by and appealed to a highly cultured class, refined, and
\nintellectual and subtle, loving best a tranquil aesthetic charm, suavity and
\nbeauty, and it has the limitations of the kind but also its qualities. There is
\na constant grace and fineness of work in the best period, a plainer and more
\ndirect but still fine vigour in Bhasa and the writers who prolong him, a breath
\nof largeness and power in the dramas of Bhavabhuti, a high and consummate
\nbeauty in the perfection of Kalidasa.<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n       
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nT<\/font><\/span>his drama, this poetry,
\nthe prose romances crowded with descriptive detail, monographs like Bana’s
\nbiography of Harsha or Jonaraja’s history of Cashmere, the collections of
\nreligious or romantic or realistic tales, the Jatakas, the Kathasaritsagara
\nwith its opulence and inexhaustible abundance of narrative in verse, the
\nPanchatantra and the more concise Hitopadesha which develop the form of the
\nanimal fable to make, a piquant setting for a mass of acute worldly wisdom and
\npolicy and statecraft, and a great body of other less known work are only the
\nsurviving remnants of what, as ‘many indications show, must have been an
\nimmense literary activity, but they are sufficiently abundant and
\nrepresentative to create a crowded and splendid impression, a many-toned
\npicture of a high culture, a rich intellectuality, a great and ordered society
\nwith an opulent religious, aesthetic, ethical, economic, political and vital
\nactivity, a many-sided development, a plentiful life-movement. As completely as
\nthe earlier epics they belie the legend of an India lost in metaphysics and
\nreligious dreamings and incapable of the great things of life. The other
\nelement which has given rise to this conception, an intense strain of
\nphilosophic thinking and religious experience, follows in fact at this time ail
\nalmost separate movement and develops gradually behind the pomp and motion of
\nthis outward action the thought, the influences, the temperament and tendencies
\nthat were to govern another millennium of the life of the Indian people.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\n\t\t
\n\t\t
\n\t\t5<\/font><\/b><\/span>  <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/font><\/span>       
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nT<\/font><\/span>HE<\/span><\/font> dominant note in
\nthe Indian mind, the temperament that has been at the foundation of all its
\nculture and originated and supported the greater part of its creative action in
\nphilosophy, religion, art and life has been, I have insisted, spiritual,
\nintuitive and psychic: but this fundamental tendency has not excluded but rather
\npowerfully supported a strong and rich intellectual, practical and vital
\nactivity. In the secular classical literature this activity comes very much to
\nthe front, is the prominent characteristic and puts the original spirit a little
\nin the background. That does not mean that the spirit is changed or lost or that
\nthere is nothing psychic or intuitive in the secular poetry of the time. On the
\ncontrary all the type of the mind reflected there is of the familiar Indian
\ncharacter, constant through every change, religio-philosophic,
\nreligio-ethical, religio-social, with all the past spiritual experience behind
\nit and supporting it though not prominently in the front; the imagination is of
\nthe same kind that we have found in the art of the time; the frames of
\nsignificant image, symbol and myth are those which have come down from the past
\nsubjected to the modifications and new developments that get their full body in
\nthe Puranas, and they have a strong psychic suggestion. The difference is that
\nthey take in the hands of these poets more of the form of a tradition well
\nunderstood and worked upon by the intellect than of an original spiritual
\ncreation, and it is the intelligence that is prominent, accepting and observing
\nestablished ideas and things in this frame and type and making its critical or
\nreproductive observation and assent vivid with the strong lines and rich
\ncolours of artistic presentation and embellishing image. The original force,
\nthe intuitive vision work most strongly now in the outward, in the sensuous,
\nthe objective, the vital aspects of existence, and it is these that in this age
\nare being more fully taken up, brought out and made in the religious field a
\nsupport for an extension of spiritual experience.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n       
\n<\/font>The sense of this evolution of
\nthe culture appears more clear-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nly outside the range of pure literature, in the
\nphilosophic writings of the time and in the religious poetry of the Puranas and
\nTantras. It was these two strains which mixing together and soon becoming a
\nsingle whole proved to be the most living and enduring movement of the
\nclassical age, had the most abiding result in the mind of the people, were the
\ncreating force and made the most conspicuous part of the later popular
\nliteratures. It is a remarkable proof of the native disposition, capacity and
\nprofound spiritual intelligence and feeling of the national mind that the
\nphilosophic thinking of this period should have left behind it this immense
\ninfluence; for it was of the highest and severest intellectual character. The
\ntendency that had begun in earlier times and created Buddhism, laicism and the
\ngreat schools of philosophy, the labour of the metaphysical intellect to
\nformulate to the reason the truths discovered by the intuitive spiritual
\nexperience, to subject them to the close test of a logical and severely
\ndialectical ratiocination and to elicit from them all that the thought could
\ndiscover, reaches its greatest power of elaborate and. careful reasoning,
\nminute criticism and analysis and forceful logical construction and
\nsystematisation in the abundant philosophical writing of the period between the
\nsixth and thirteenth centuries marked especially by the work of the great
\nsouthern thinkers, Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhwa. 1t did not cease even then,
\nbut survived its greatest days and continued even up to our own times, throwing
\nup sometimes great creative thinking and often new and subtle philosophical
\nideas in the midst of an incessant stream of commentary and criticism on
\nestablished lines. Here there was no decline but a continued vigour of the
\nmetaphysical turn in the mind of the race. The work it did was to complete the
\ndiffusion of the philosophic intelligence with the result that even an average
\nIndian mentality, once awakened, responds with a surprising quickness to the
\nmost subtle and profound ideas. It is notable that no Hindu religion old or new
\nhas been able to come into existence without developing as its support a clear
\nphilosophic content and suggestion.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The philosophical writings in prose make
\nno pretension to rank as literature; it is in these that the critical side is
\nprominent, and they have no well-built creative shape, but there are other<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nproductions in
\nwhich a more structural presentation of the complete thought is attempted and
\nhere the literary form adopted is ordinarily the philosophical poem. The
\npreference for this form is a direct continuation of the tradition of the
\nUpanishads and the Gita. These works cannot be given a very high place as
\npoetry: they are too overweighted with thought and the preoccupation of an
\nintellectual as distinguished from an intuitive adequacy in the phrase to have
\nthe breath of life and impetus of inspiration that are the indispensable
\nattributes of the creative poetic mind. It is the critical and affirmative
\nintelligence that is most active and not the vision seeing and interpretative.
\nThe epic greatness of the soul that sees and chants the self-vision and
\nGod-vision and supreme world-vision, the blaze of light that makes the power of
\nthe Upanishads, is absent, and absent too the direct thought springing straight
\nfrom the soul’s life and experience, the perfect, strong and suggestive phrase
\nand the living beauty of the rhythmic pace that make the poetic greatness of
\nthe Gita. At the same time some of these poems are, if certainly not great
\npoetry, yet admirable literature combining a supreme philosophical genius with
\na remarkable literary talent, not indeed creations, but noble and skilful
\nconstructions, embodying the highest possible thought, using well all the
\nweighty, compact and sparing phrase of the classical Sanskrit speech, achieving
\nthe harmony and noble elegance of its rhythms. These merits are seen at their
\nbest in poems like the <\/font> Vivekac<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00fc<\/font><\/span>d<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>mani <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nattributed to Shankara, and there we hear even, in spite of its too
\nabstract turn, an intellectual echo of the voice of the Upanishads and the
\nmanner of the Gita. These poems, if inferior to the grandeur and beauty of
\nearlier Indian work, are at least equal in poetic style and superior in height
\nof thought to the same kind anywhere else and deservedly survive to fulfil the
\naim intended by their writers. And one must not omit to mention a few snatches
\nof philosophic song here and there that are a quintessence at once of
\nphilosophic thought and poetic beauty, or the abundant literature of hymns,
\nmany of them consummate in their power and fervour and their charm of rhythm
\nand expression which prepare us for the similar but larger work in the later
\nregional literature.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The philosophical creations of India
\ndiffer in this respect<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/i>P<\/span><\/font><\/span>age-309<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

from the bulk of the
\nmetaphysical thinking of Europe that even when they most adopt the intellectual
\nform and method, yet their real substance is not intellectual, but is rather
\nthe result of a subtle and very profound intelligence working on the stuff of
\nsight and spiritual experience. This is the result of the constant unity India
\nhas preserved between philosophy, religion and Yoga. The philosophy is the
\nintuitive or intellectual presentation of the truth that was sought for first
\nthrough the religious mind and its experiences and it is never satisfied by
\ndiscovering truth to the idea and justifying it to the logical intelligence,
\nalthough that is admirably done, but has its eye always turned to realisation
\nin the soul’s life, the object of Yoga. The thinking of this age, even in
\ngiving so much prominence to the intellectual side~ does not depart from this
\nconstant need of the Indian temperament. It works out from spiritual experience
\nthrough the exact and laborious inspection and introspection of the intellect
\nand works backward and in again from the intellectual perceptions to new gains
\nof spiritual experience. There is indeed a tendency of fragmentation and
\nexclusiveness; the great integral truth of the Upanishads has already been
\nbroken into divergent schools of thought and these are now farther subdividing
\ninto still less comprehensive systems; but still in each of these lessened
\nprovinces there is a gain of minute or intensive searching and on the whole, if
\na loss of breadth on the heights, in recompense some extension of assimilable
\nspiritual knowledge. And this rhythm of exchange between the spirit and the
\nintelligence, the spirit illumining, the intelligence searching and arriving
\nand helping the lower life to absorb the intuitions of the spirit, did its part
\nin giving Indian spirituality a wonderful intensity, security and persistence not
\nexampled in any other people. It is indeed largely the work of these
\nphilosophers who were at the same time Yogins that saved the soul of India
\nalive through the gathering night of her decadence<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>This however could not have been done
\nwithout the aid of a great body of more easily seizable ideas, forms, images,
\nappealing to the imagination, emotions, ethical and aesthetic sense of the
\npeople, that had to be partly an expression of the higher spiritual truth and
\npartly a bridge of transition between the normal reli-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

gious and the spiritual
\nmentality. The need was met by the Tantras and Puranas. The Puranas are the
\nreligious poetry, peculiar to this period: for although the form probably
\nexisted in ancient times, it is only now that it was entirely developed and
\nbecame the characteristic and the principal literary expression of the
\nreligious spirit, and it is to this period that we must attribute, not indeed
\nall the substance, but the main bulk and the existing shape of the Puranic
\nwritings. The Puranas have been much discredited and depreciated in recent
\ntimes, since the coming in of modern ideas coloured by western rationalism and
\nthe turning of the intelligence under new impulses back towards the earlier
\nfundamental ideas of the ancient culture. Much however of this depreciation is
\ndue to an entire misunderstanding of the purpose, method and sense of the
\nmediaeval religious writings. It is only in an understanding of the turn of the
\nIndian religious imagination and of the place of these writings in the
\nevolution of the culture that we can seize their sense.<\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>In fact the
\nbetter comprehension that is now returning to us of our own self and past shows
\nthat the Puranic religions are only a new form and extension of the truth of
\nthe ancient spirituality and philosophy and socio-religious culture. In their
\navowed intention they are popular summaries of the cosmogony, symbolic myth and
\nimage, tradition, cult, social rule of the Indian people continued, as the name
\nPurana signifies, from ancient times. There is no essential change, but only a
\nchange of forms. The psychic symbols or true images of truth belonging to the
\nVedic age disappear or are relegated to a subordinate plan with a changed and
\ndiminished sense: others take their place more visibly large in aim, cosmic,
\ncomprehensive, not starting with conceptions drawn from the physical universe,
\nbut supplied entirely from the psychic universe within us. The Vedic gods and
\ngoddesses conceal from the profane by their physical aspect their psychic and
\nspiritual significance. The Puranic trinity and the forms of its female
\nenergies have on the contrary no meaning to the physical mind or imagination,
\nbut are philosophic and psychic conceptions and embodiments of the unity and
\nmultiplicity of the all-manifesting Godhead. The Puranic cults have been
\ncharacterised as a degradation of the Vedic religion, but<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

they might conceivably be
\ndescribed, not in the essence, for that remains always the same, but in the
\noutward movement, as an extension and advance. Image worship and temple cult
\nand profuse ceremony, to whatever superstition or externalism their misuse may
\nlead, are not necessarily a degradation. The Vedic religion had no need of
\nimages, for the physical signs of its godheads were the forms of physical
\nNature and the outward universe was their visible house. The Puranic religion
\nworshipped the psychical forms of the Godhead within us and had to express it
\noutwardly in symbolic figures and house it in temples that were an
\narchitectural sign of cosmic significances. And the very inwardness it intended
\nnecessitated a profusion of outward symbol to embody the complexity of these
\ninward things to the physical imagination and vision. The religious aesthesis
\nhas changed, but the meaning of the religion has been altered only in
\ntemperament and fashion, not in essence. The real difference is this that the
\nearly religion was made by men of the highest mystic and spiritual experience
\nliving among a mass still impressed mostly by the life of the physical
\nuniverse: the Upanishads casting off the physical veil created a free
\ntranscendent and cosmic vision and experience and this was expressed by a later
\nage to the mass in images containing a large philosophical and intellectual
\nmeaning of which the Trinity and the Shaktis of Vishnu and Shiva are the
\ncentral figures; the Puranas carried forward this appeal to the intellect ,<\/span> and imagination and made it living to
\nthe psychic experience, the emotions, the aesthetic feeling and the senses. A
\nconstant attempt to make the spiritual truths discovered by the Yogin and the
\nRishi integrally expressive, appealing, effective to the whole nature of man
\nand to provide outward means by which the ordinary mind, the mind of a whole
\npeople might be drawn to a first approach to them is the sense of the
\nreligio-philosophic evolution of Indian culture.<\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>It is to be observed that the Puranas and Tantras contain in themselves
\nthe highest spiritual and philosophical truths, not broken up and expressed in
\nopposition to each other as in the debates of the thinkers, but synthetised by
\na fusion, relation or grouping in the way most congenial to the catholicity of
\nthe Indian mind and spirit. This is done sometimes expressly, but<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

most often in a form which might
\ncarry-something of it to the popular imagination and feeling by legend, tale,
\nsymbol, apologue, miracle and parable. An immense and complex body of psycho-
\nspiritual experience is embodied in the Tantras, supported by visual images and
\nsystematised in forms of Yogic practice. This element is also found in the
\nPuranas, but more loosely and cast out in a less strenuous sequence. This
\nmethod is after all simply a prolongation, in another form and with a
\ntemperamental change, of the method of the Vedas. The Puranas construct a
\nsystem of physical images and observances each with its psychical significance.
\nThus the sacredness of the confluence of the three rivers, Ganga, Yamuna and
\nSaraswati, is a figure of an inner confluence and points to a crucial experience
\nin a psycho-physical process of Yoga and it has too other significances, as is
\ncommon in the economy of this kind of symbolism. The so-called fantastic
\ngeography of the Puranas, as we are expressly told in the Puranas themselves,
\nis a rich poetic figure, a symbolic geography of the inner psychical universe.
\nThe cosmogony expressed sometimes in terms proper to the physical universe has,
\nas in the Veda, a spiritual and psychological meaning and basis. It is easy to
\nsee how in the increasing ignorance of later times the more technical parts of
\nthe Puranic symbology inevitably lent themselves to much superstition and to
\ncrude physical ideas about spiritual and psychic things. But that danger
\nattends all attempts to bring them to the comprehension of the mass of men and
\nthis disadvantage should not blind us to the enormous effect produced in
\ntraining the mass mind to respond to a psycho-religious and psycho-spiritual
\nappeal that prepares a capacity for higher things. That effect endures even
\nthough the Puranic system may have to be superseded by a finer appeal and the
\nawakening to more directly subtle significances, and if such a supersession
\nbecomes possible, it will itself be due very largely to the work done by the
\nPuranas.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Puranas are essentially a true
\nreligious poetry, an art of aesthetic presentation of religious truth. All the
\nbulk of the eighteen Puranas does not indeed take a high rank in this kind:
\nthere is much waste substance and not a little of dull and dreary matter, but
\non the whole the poetic method employed is justified<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

by the richness and power of
\nthe creation. The earliest work is the best –<\/span> with one exception at the end in a new style which stands by
\nitself and is unique. The Vishnu Purana for instance in spite of one or two
\ndesert spaces is a remarkable literary creation of a very considerable quality
\nmaintaining much of the direct force and height of the old epic style. There is
\nin it a varied movement, much vigorous and some sublime epic writing, an
\noccasional lyrical element of a lucid sweetness and beauty, a number of
\nnarratives of the finest verve and skilful simplicity of poetic workmanship.
\nThe Bhagavat coming at the end and departing to a great extent from the more
\npopular style and manner, for it is strongly affected by the learned and more
\nornately literary form of speech, is a still more remarkable production full of
\nsubtlety, rich and deep thought and beauty. It is here that we get the
\nculmination of the movement which had the most important effects on the future,
\nthe evolution of the emotional and ecstatic religions of Bhakti. The tendency
\nthat underlay this development was contained in the earlier forms of the
\nreligious mind of India and was slowly gaining ground, but it had hitherto been
\novershadowed and kept from its perfect formation by the dominant tendency
\ntowards the austerities of knowledge and action and the seeking of the
\nspiritual ecstasy only on the highest planes of being. The turn of the
\nclassical age outward to the exterior life and the satisfaction of the senses
\nbrought in a new inward turn of which the later ecstatic forms of the Vaishnava
\nreligion were the most complete manifestation. Confined to the secular and
\noutward this fathoming of vital and sensuous experience might have led only to a
\nrelaxation of nerve and vigour, and ethical degeneracy or licence; but the
\nIndian mind is always compelled by its
\nmaster impulse to reduce all its experience of <\/span>life to the corresponding
\nspiritual term and factor and the result was a transfiguring of even these most
\nexternal things into a basis for new spiritual experience. The emotional, the
\nsensuous, even the sensual motions of the being, before they could draw the
\nsoul farther outward, were taken and
\ntransmuted into a psychical <\/span>form and, so changed, they became the
\nelements of a mystic capture of the Divine through the heart and the senses and
\na religion of the joy of God’s love, delight and beauty. In the Tantra the<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

new elements are taken up and
\nassigned their place in a complete psycho-spiritual and psycho-physical science
\nof Yoga. Its popular form in the Vaishnava religion centres round the mystic
\napologue of the pastoral life of the child Krishna. In the Vishnu Purana the
\ntale of Krishna is a heroic saga of the divine Avatar; in later Puranas we see
\nthe aesthetic and erotic symbol developing and in the Bhagavat it is given its
\nfull power and prepared to manifest its entire spiritual and philosophic as
\nwell as its psychic sense and to remould into its own lines by a shifting of
\nthe centre of synthesis from knowledge to spiritual love and delight the
\nearlier significance of Vedanta. The perfect outcome of this evolution is to be
\nfound in the philosophy and religion of divine love promulgated by Chaitanya.<\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>It is the later developments of Vedantic philosophy, the Puranic ideas
\nand images and the poetic and aesthetic spirituality of the religions of
\ndevotion that inspired from their birth the regional literatures. The
\nliterature of the Sanskrit tongue does not come to any abrupt end. Poetry of
\nthe classical type continues to be written especially in the South down to a
\ncomparatively late period and Sanskrit remains still the language of philosophy
\nand of all kinds of scholarship: all prose work, all the work of the critical
\nmind is written in the ancient tongue. But the genius rapidly fades out from
\nit, it becomes stiff, heavy and artificial and only a scholastic talent remains
\nto keep it in continuance. In every province the local tongues arise here
\nearlier, there a little later to the dignity of literature and become the
\nvehicle of poetic creation and the instrument of popular culture. Sanskrit,
\nalthough not devoid of popular elements, is essentially and in the best sense
\nan aristocratic speech developing and holding to the necessity of a noble
\naspiration and the great manner a high spiritual, intellectual, ethical and
\naesthetic culture, then possible in this manner only to the higher classes, and
\nhanding it down by various channels of impression and transfusion and
\nespecially by religion, art and social and ethical rule to the mass of the
\npeople. Pali in the hands of the Buddhists becomes a direct means of this
\ntransmission. The poetry of the regional tongues on the contrary creates, in
\nevery sense of the word, a popular literature. The Sanskrit writers were men of
\nthe three highest<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

\n

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

castes, mostly Brahmins and
\nKshatriyas, and later they were learned men writing for a highly cultured elite
\nthe Buddhist writers too were for the most part philosophers, monks, kings,
\npreachers writing sometimes for themselves, sometimes in a more popular form
\nfor the mass of the people; but the poetry of the regional tongues sprang
\nstraight from the heart of the people and its writers came from all classes
\nfrom the Brahmin to the lowest Shudra and the outcaste. It is only in Urdu and
\nto a less degree in the Southern tongues, as in Tamil whose great period is
\ncontemporaneous with the classical Sanskrit, its later production continuing
\nduring the survival of independent or semi- independent courts and kingdoms in
\nthe South, that there is a strong influence of the learned or classical
\ntemperament and habit; but even here there is a very considerable popular
\nelement as in the songs of the Shaiva saints and Vaishnava Alwars. The field
\nhere is too large to be easily known in its totality or to permit of a rapid
\nsurvey, but something must be said of the character and value of this later
\nliterature that we may see how vital and persistently creative Indian culture
\nremained even in a period which compared with its greater times might be
\nregarded as a period of restriction and decadence.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>As the Sanskrit literature begins with
\nthe Vedas and Upanishads, these later literatures begin with the inspired
\npoetry of saints and devotees: for in India it is always a spiritual movement
\nthat is the source or at least imparts the impulse of formation to new ideas
\nand possibilities and initiates the changes of the national life. It is this
\nkind that predominated almost through- out the creative activity of most of
\nthese tongues before modern times, because it was always poetry of this type
\nthat was nearest to the heart and mind of the people; and even where the work
\nis of a more secular spirit, the religious turn enters into it and provides the
\nframework, a part of the tone or the apparent motive. In abundance, in poetic
\nexcellence, in the union of spontaneous beauty of motive and lyrical skill this
\npoetry has no parallel in its own field in any other literature. A sincerity of
\ndevotional feeling is not enough to produce work of this high turn of beauty,
\nas is shown by the sterility of Christian Europe in this kind; it needs a rich
\nand profound spiritual culture. Another part of the<\/font><\/p>\n

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\n

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literature is devoted to the bringing of something of the
\nessence of the old culture into the popular tongues through new poetic versions
\nof the story of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana or in romantic narrative
\nfounded on the ancient legends; and here again we have work of the very
\ngreatest genius as well as much of a lesser but still high order. A third type
\npresents vividly the religious beliefs and feelings of the people, the life of
\ncourt and city and village and hamlet, of landholder and trader and artisan and
\npeasant. The bulk of the work done in the regional tongues falls under one or
\nother of these heads, but there are variations such as the religio-ethical and
\npolitical poems of Ramdas in Maharashtra or the gnomic poetry, the greatest in
\nplan, conception and force of execution ever written in this kind, of the Tamil
\nsaint, Tiruvalluvar. There is too in one or two of these languages a later
\nerotic poetry not without considerable lyrical beauty of an entirely mundane
\ninspiration. The same culture reigns amid many variations of form in all this
\nwork of the regional peoples, but each creates on the lines of its own peculiar
\ncharacter and temperament and this gives a different stamp, the source of a
\nrich variety in the unity, to each of these beautiful and vigorous literatures.<\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Thus under
\nthe stress of temperamental variation the poetry of the Vaishnavas puts on very
\ndifferent artistic forms in different provinces. There is first the use of the
\npsychical symbol created by the Puranas, and this assumes its most complete and
\nartistic shape in Bengal and becomes there a long continued tradition. The
\ndesire of the soul for God is there thrown into symbolic figure in the lyrical
\nlove cycle of Radha and Krishna, the Nature soul in man seeking for the Divine
\nSoul through love, seized and mastered by his beauty, attracted by his magical
\nflute, abandoning human cares and duties for this one overpowering passion and
\nin the cadence of its phases passing through first desire to the bliss of
\nunion, the pangs of separation, the eternal longing and reunion, the lila <\/i>of
\nthe love of the human spirit for God. There is a settled frame and sequence, a
\nsubtly simple lyrical rhythm, a traditional diction of appealing directness and
\noften of intense beauty. This accomplished lyrical form springs at once to
\nperfect birth from the genius of the first two poets who used the<\/font><\/p>\n

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

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\n

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Bengali tongue, Bidyapati, a
\nconsummate artist of word and line, and the inspired singer Chandidas in whose
\nname stand some of the sweetest and most poignant and exquisite love-lyrics in
\nany tongue. The symbol here is sustained in its most external figure of human
\npassion and so consistently that it is now supposed by many to mean nothing
\nelse, but this is quite negatived by the use of the same figures by the devout
\npoets of the religion of Chaitanya. All the spiritual experience that lay
\nbehind the symbol was embodied in that inspired prophet and incarnation of the
\necstasy of divine love and its spiritual philosophy put into clear form in his
\nteaching. His followers continued the poetic tradition of the earlier singers
\nand though they fall below them in genius, yet left behind a great mass of this
\nkind of poetry always beautiful in form and often deep and moving in substance.
\nAnother type is created in the perfect lyrics of the Rajput queen Mirabai, in
\nwhich the images of the Krishna symbol are more directly turned into a song of
\nthe love and pursuit of the divine Lover by the soul of the singer. In the
\nBengal poetry the expression preferred is the symbolic figure impersonal to the
\npoet: here a personal note gives the peculiar intensity to the emotion. This is
\ngiven a still more direct turn by a southern poetess in the image of herself as
\nthe bride of Krishna. The peculiar power of this kind of Vaishnava religion and
\npoetry is in the turning of all the human emotions Godward, the passion of love
\nbeing preferred as the intensest and most absorbing of them all, and though the
\nidea recurs wherever there has been a strong development of devotional
\nreligion, it has nowhere been used with so much power and sincerity as in the
\nwork of the Indian poets.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Other Vaishnava poetry does not use the
\nKrishna symbol, but is rather addressed in language of a more direct devotion
\nto Vishnu or centres sometimes around the Rama Avatar. The songs of Tukaram are
\nthe best known of this kind. The Vaishnava poetry of Bengal avoids except very
\nrarely any element of intellectualising thought and relies purely on emotional
\ndescription, a sensuous figure of passion and intensity of feeling: Maratha
\npoetry on the contrary has from the beginning a strong intellectual strain. The
\nfirst Marathi poet is at once a devotee, a Yogin and a thinker; the poetry of
\nthe saint Ramdas, associated<\/font><\/p>\n

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\n

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with the birth and awakening of
\na nation, is almost entirely a stream of religious ethical thinking raised to
\nthe lyrical pitch and it is the penetrating truth and fervour of a thought
\narising from the heart of devotion that makes the charm and power of Tukaram’s
\nsongs. A long strain of devotee poets keeps sounding the note that he struck
\nand their work fills the greater space of Marathi poetry. The same type takes a
\nlighter and more high-pitched turn in the poetry of Kabir. In Bengal again at
\nthe end of the Mahomedan period there is the same blending of fervent devotion
\nwith many depths and turns of religious thought in the songs of Ramprasad to
\nthe Divine Mother, combined here with a vivid play of imagination turning all
\nfamiliar things into apt and pregnant images and an intense spontaneity of feeling.
\nIn the South a profounder philosophic utterance is often fused into the
\ndevotional note, especially in the Shaiva poets, and, as in the early Sanskrit
\npoetry, vivified by a. great power of living phrase and image, and farther
\nnorth the high Vedantic spirituality renews itself in the Hindi poetry of
\nSurdas and inspires Nanak and the Sikh Gurus. The spiritual culture prepared
\nand perfected by two millenniums of the ancient civilisation has flooded the
\nmind of all these peoples and given birth to great new literatures and its
\nvoice is heard continually through all their course.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span>The narrative poetry of
\nthis age is less striking and original except for a certain number of great or
\nfamous works. Most of these tongues have felt the cultural necessity of
\ntransferring into the popular speech the whole central story of the Mahabharata
\nor certain of its episodes and, still more universally, the story of the
\nRamayana. In Bengal there is the Mahabharata of Kashiram, the gist of the old
\nepic simply retold in a lucid classical style, and the Ramayana of Krittibas,
\nmore near to the vigour of the soil, neither of them attaining to the epic
\nmanner but still written with a simple poetic skill and a swift narrative
\nforce. Only two however of these later poets arrived at a vividly living
\nrecreation of the ancient story and succeeded in producing a supreme
\nmasterpiece, Kamban, the Tamil poet who makes of his subject a great original
\nepic, and Tulsidas whose famed Hindi Ramayana combines with a singular mastery
\nlyric intensity, romantic richness and the sublimity of the epic imagination
\nand is at once<\/font><\/p>\n

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\n

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a story of the divine Avatar
\nand a long chant of, religious devotion. An English historian of the literature
\nhas even claimed for Tulsidas’ poem superiority to the epic of Valmiki: that is
\nan exaggeration and, whatever the merits, there cannot be a greater than the
\ngreatest, but that such claims can be made for Tulsidas and Kamban is evidence
\nat least of the power of the poets and a proof that the creative genius of the
\nIndian mind has not declined even in the narrowing of the range of its culture
\nand knowledge. All this poetry indeed shows a gain in intensity that
\ncompensates to some extent for the loss of the ancient height and amplitude.<\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nWhile this kind of narrative
\nwriting goes back to the epics, another seems to derive its first shaping and
\nmotive from the classical poems of Kalidasa, Bharavi and Magha. A certain
\nnumber take for their subject, like that earlier poetry, episodes of the Mahabharata
\nor other ancient or Puranic legends, but the classical and epic manner has
\ndisappeared, the inspiration resembles more that of the Puranas and there is
\nthe tone and the looser and easier development of the popular romance. This
\nkind is commoner in western India and excellence in it is the title to fame of
\nPremananda, the most considerable of the Gujerati poets. In Bengal we find
\nanother type of half-romantic half- realistic narrative which develops a poetic
\npicture of the religious mind and life and scenes of contemporary times and has
\na strong resemblance in its motive to the more outward element in the aim of
\nRajput painting. The life of Chaitanya written in a simple and naive romance
\nverse, appealing by its directness and sincerity but inadequate in poetic form,
\nis a unique contemporary presentation of the birth and foundation of a
\nreligious movement. Two other poems that have become classics celebrate the
\ngreatness of Durga or Chandi, the goddess who is the Energy of Shiva, the
\nChandi of Mukundaram, a pure romance of great poetic beauty which presents in
\nits frame of popular legend a very living picture of the life of the people,
\nand the Annadamangal of Bharatchandra repeating in its first part the Puranic
\ntales of the gods as they might be imagined by the Bengali villager in the type
\nof his own human life, telling in the second a romantic love story and in the
\nthird a historical incident of the time of Jehangir, all these disparate
\nelements forming the development<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>of the one<\/font><\/span> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

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\n

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\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>central motive and presented without any imaginative
\nelevation but with an unsurpassable vividness of description and power of vital
\nand convincing phrase. All this poetry, the epic and the romance, the didactic
\npoem, of which Ramdas, and the famous Kural of Tiruvalluvar are the chief
\nrepresentatives, and the philosophic and devotional lyrics are not the creation
\nor meant for the appreciation of a cultivated class, but with few exceptions
\nthe expression of a popular culture. The Ramayana of Tulsidas, the songs of
\nRamprasad and of the Bauls, the wandering Vaishnava devotees, the poetry of
\nRamdas and Tukaram, the sentences of Tiruvalluvar and the poetess Avvai and the
\ninspired lyrics of the Southern saints and Alwars were known to all classes and
\ntheir thought or their emotion entered deeply into the life of the people.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nI have dwelt at this length
\non the literature because it is, not indeed the complete, but still the most
\nvaried and ample record of the culture of a people. Three millenniums at least
\nof a creation of this kind and greatness are surely the evidence of a real and
\nvery remarkable culture. The last period shows no doubt a gradual decline, but
\none may note the splendour even of the decline and especially the continued
\nvitality of religious, literary and artistic creation. At the moment when it
\nseemed to be drawing to a close it has revived at the first chance and begins
\nagain another cycle, at first precisely in the three things that lasted the
\nlongest, spiritual and religious activity, literature and painting, but already
\nthe renewal promises to extend itself to all the many activities of life and
\nculture in which India was once a, great and leading people<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-321<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

             Indian Literature                                          THE arts which appeal to the soul through the eye are able to arrive at a peculiarly concentrated expression of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","wpcat-18-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","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=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}