{"id":925,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=925"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:31:16","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:16","slug":"04-a-rationalistic-critic-on-indian-culture-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\/04-a-rationalistic-critic-on-indian-culture-vol-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","title":{"rendered":"-04_A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture .htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n


\n A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture<\/span> <\/span><\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n


\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/b>W<\/span>HEN<\/span><\/font>
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>we try to appreciate a culture, and <\/font>
\nwhen that culture is the one in
\nwhich we have grown up or from <\/font> <\/span>which we draw our
\ngoverning ideals and are likely from over-\u00ad partiality to minimise its
\ndeficiences or from overfamiliarity to miss aspects or values of it which would
\nstrike an unaccustomed eye, it is always useful as well as interesting to know
\nhow others see it. It will not move us to change our viewpoint for theirs; but
\nwe can get fresh light from a study of this kind and help our
\nself-introspection. But there are different ways of seeing a foreign
\ncivilisation and culture. There is the eye of sympathy and intui\u00adtion and a
\nclose appreciative self-identification: that gives us work like Sister
\nNivedita’s Web of Indian Life <\/i>or Mr. Fielding’s book on Burma or Sir John
\nWoodroffe’s studies of Tantra. These are attempts to push aside all concealing
\nveils and reveal the soul of a people. It may well be that they do not give us
\nall the hard outward fact, but we are enlightened of something deeper which has
\nits greater reality; we get not the thing as it is in the deficiencies of life,
\nbut its ideal meaning. The soul, the essential spirit is one thing, the forms
\ntaken in this difficult hu\u00adman actuality are another and are often imperfect or
\nperverted; neither can be neglected if we would have a total vision. Then there
\nis the eye of the discerning and dispassionate critic who tries to see the thing
\nas it is in its intention and actuality, appor\u00adtion the light and shade, get the
\nbalance of merit and defect, success and failure, mark off that which evokes
\nappreciative sympathy from that which calls for critical censure. We may <\/font>not always agree; the standpoint is different and by its
\nexternal<\/font><\/span>\u00ad<\/font><\/span>ity,
\nby failure of intuition and self-identification it may miss things that are
\nessential or may not get the whole meaning of that which it praises or condemns:
\nstill we profit, we can add to our sense of shade and tone or correct our own
\nprevious judg\u00adment. Finally there is the eye of the hostile’ critic, convinced
\nof the inferiority of the culture in question, who gives plainly and <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Page-43<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

honestly without deliberate
\novercharging what he conceives to be sound reason for his judgment. That too has
\nits use for us; hostile criticism of this kind is good for the soul and the
\nintellect, provided we do not allow ourselves to be afflicted, beaten down or
\nshaken from the upholding centre of our living faith and action. Most things in
\nour human world are imperfect and it is sometimes well to get a strong view of
\nour imperfections. Or, if nothing else, we can at least learn to appreciate
\nopposite stand\u00adpoints and get at the source of the opposition; wisdom, insight
\nand sympathy grow by such comparisons. <\/font><\/p>\n

But hostile
\ncriticism to be of any sound value must be criticism, not slander and false
\nwitness, not vitriol-throwing: it must state the facts without distortion,
\npreserve consistent standards of judgment, observe a certain effort at justice,
\nsanity, measure. Mr. William Archer’s well-known book on India, which on account
\nof its very demerits I have taken as the type of the characteristic Western or
\nanti-Indian regard on our culture, was certainly not of this character. It is
\nnot only that here we have a wholesale and unsparing condemnation, a picture all
\nshade and no light: that is a recommendation, for Mr. Archer’s professed object
\nwas to challenge the enthusiastic canonisation of Indian culture by its admirers
\nin the character of a devil’s advocate whose business is to find out and state
\nin its strongest terms everything that can be said against the claim. And for us
\ntoo it is useful to have before us an attack which covers the whole field so
\nthat we may see in one comprehensive view the entire enemy case against our
\nculture. But there are three vitia\u00adting elements in his statement. First, it had
\nan ulterior, a poli\u00adtical object; it started with the underlying idea that India
\nmust be proved altogether barbarous in order to destroy or damage her case for
\nself-government. That sort of extraneous motive at once puts his whole pleading
\nout of court; for it means a cons\u00adtant deliberate distortion in order to serve a
\nmaterial interest, foreign altogether to the disinterested intellectual objects
\nof cultural comparison and criticism. <\/font><\/p>\n

In fact this book
\nis not criticism; it is literary or rather jour\u00adnalistic pugilism. There too it
\nis of a peculiar kind; it is a furious sparring at a lay-figure of India which
\nis knocked down at <\/font><\/p>\n

Page-44<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

pleasure through a long and exuberant
\ndance of misstatement and exaggeration in the hope of convincing an ignorant
\naudience that the performer has prostrated a living adversary. Sanity, justice,
\nmeasure are things altogether at a discount: a show-off of the appearance of
\nstaggering and irresistible blows is the object <\/font>
\nheld in view, and for that
\nanything comes in handy, <\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span>
\nthe facts are altogether misstated or clumsily caricatured, the most
\nextra\u00adordinary and unfounded suggestions advanced with an air of obviousness,
\nthe most illogical inconsistencies permitted if an apparent point can be scored.
\nAll this is not the occasional freak of a well-informed critic suffering from a
\nfit of mental biliousness and impelled to work it off by an extravagant
\nintellectual exercise, an irresponsible fantasia or a hostile war-dance around a
\nsubject with which he is not in sympathy. That is a kind of extravagance, which
\nis sometimes permissible and may be interesting and amusing. It is a sweet and
\npleasant thing, cries the Roman poet, to play the fool in place and right
\nseason, dulce est desipere in loco. <\/i>But Mr. Archer’s constant departures
\ninto irrational extra\u00advagance are not by any means in loco. <\/i>We discover
\nvery soon, <\/font>― <\/font> <\/span>
\nin addition to his illegitimate motive and his deliber3;te
\nunfair\u00adness this is a third and worst cardinal defect, <\/font>
\n―<\/font><\/span>
\nthat for the most part he knew absolutely nothing about the things on which he
\nwas passing his confident damnatory judgments. What he has done is to collect
\ntogether in his mind all the unfavourable comments he had read about India, eke
\nthem out with casual impressions of his own and advance this unwholesome and
\nun\u00adsubstantial compound as his original production, although his one genuine and
\nnative contribution is the cheery cocksureness of his second-hand opinions. The
\nbook is a journalistic fake, not an honest critical production. <\/font><\/p>\n

The writer was
\nevidently no authority on metaphysics, which he despises as a misuse of the
\nhuman mind; yet he lays down the law at length about the values of Indian
\nphilosophy. He was a rationalist to whom religion is an error, a psychological
\ndisease, a sin against reason; yet he adjudges here between the comparative
\nclaims of religions, assigning a proxime accessit <\/i>to Christianity,
\nmainly, it seems, because Christians do not seriously <\/font>
\nbelieve in their own religion, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–
\n<\/font> <\/span>let not the reader laugh, the book <\/font><\/p>\n

Page-45<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

advances quite seriously this amazing
\nreason, – and bestowing the wooden spoon on Hinduism. He admits his incompetence
\nto speak about music, yet that has not prevented him from rele\u00adgating Indian
\nmusic to a position of hopeless inferiority. His judgment on art and
\narchitecture is of the narrowest kind; but he is generously liberal of his
\ndecisive depreciations. In drama and literature one would expect from him better
\nthings; but the astonishing superficiality of his standards and his arguments
\nhere leaves one wondering how in the world he got his reputation as a dramatic
\nand literary critic: one concludes that either he must have used a very
\ndifferent method in dealing with European literature or else it is very easy to
\nget a reputation of this kind in England. An ill-informed misrepresentation of
\nfacts, a light\u00adhearted temerity of judgment on things he has not cared to study
\nconstitute this critic’s title to write on Indian culture and dismiss it
\nauthoritatively asa mass of barbarism. <\/font><\/p>\n

It is not then
\nfor a well-informed outside view or even an instructive adverse criticism of
\nIndian civilisation that I have turned to Mr. William Archer. In the end it is
\nonly those who possess a culture who can judge the intrinsic value of its
\nproduc\u00adtions, because they alone can enter entirely into its spirit. To the
\nforeign critic we can only go for help in forming a comparative judgment, –
\nwhich too is indispensable. But if for any reason we had to depend on a foreign
\njudgment for the definitive view of these things, it is evident that in each
\nfield it is to men who can speak with some authority that we must turn. It
\nmatters very little to me what Mr. Archer or Dr. Gough or Sir John Woodroffe’s
\nunnamed English professor may say about Indian philosophy; it is enough for me
\nto know what Emerson or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, three entirely different
\nminds of the greatest power in this field, or what thinkers like Cousins and
\nSchlegel have to say about it or to mark the increasing influence of some of its
\nconceptions, the great parallel lines of thought in earlier European thinking
\nand the confirmations of ancient Indian metaphysics and psychology which are the
\nresults of the most moden1 research and inquiry. For religion I shall not go to
\nMr. Harold Begbie or any European atheist or rationalist for a judgment on our
\nspirituality, but see rather what are the impres-<\/font><\/p>\n

Page-46  <\/font><\/p>\n

\n


\nsions of open-minded men of religious feeling and experience who can alone be
\njudges, a spiritual and-religious thinker such as Tolstoi, for instance. Or I
\nmay study even, allowing for an inevit\u00adable bias, what the more cultured
\nChristian missionary has to say about a religion which he can no longer dismiss
\nas a barbarous superstition. In art I shall not turn to the opinion of the
\naverage European who knows nothing of the spirit, meaning or technique of Indian
\narchitecture, painting and sculpture. For the first I shall consult some
\nrecognised authority like Ferguson; for the others if critics like Mr. Havell
\nare to be dismissed as partisans, I can at least learn something from Okakura or
\nMr. Laurence Binyon. In literature I shall be at a loss, for I cannot remember
\nthat any Western writer of genius or high reputation as a critic has had any
\nfirst-hand knowledge of Sanskrit literature or of the Prakritic tongues, and a
\njudgment founded on translations can only deal with the substance, – and even
\nthat in most transla\u00adtions of Indian work is only the dead substance with the
\nwhole breath of life gone out of it. Still even here Goethe’s well-known epigram
\non the Shakuntala will be enough by itself to show me that all Indian writing is
\nnot of a barbarous inferiority to Euro\u00adpean creation. And perhaps we may find a
\nscholar here and there with some literary taste and judgment, not a too common
\ncom\u00adbination, who will be of help to us. This sort of excursion will certainly
\nnot give us an entirely reliable scheme of values, but at any rate we shall be
\nsafer than in a resort to the great lowland clan of Goughs, Archers and Begbies.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nIf I still find it
\nnecessary or useful to notice these lucubra\u00adtions, it is for quite another
\npurpose. Even for that purpose all that Mr. Archer writes is not of utility;
\nmuch of it is so irra\u00adtional, inconsequent or unscrupulous in suggestion that
\none can only note and pass on. When for instance he assures his readers that
\nIndian philosophers think that sitting cross-legged and contemplating one’s own
\nnavel is the best way of ascertain\u00ading the truths of the universe and that their
\nreal object is an indo\u00adlent immobility and to live upon the alms of the
\nfaithful, his object in thus describing one of the postures of abstracted
\nmeditation is to stamp the meditation itself in the eyes of ignorant English
\nreaders with the character of a bovine absurdity and a<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-47<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

selfish laziness; that is an instance
\nof his unscrupulousness which helps us to observe the kinks of his own
\nrationalistic mind, but is useful for nothing else. When he denies that there is
\nany real morality in Hinduism or affirms that it has never claimed moral
\nteaching as one of its functions, statements which are the exact contrary of the
\nfacts, when he goes so far as to say that Hinduism is the character of the
\npeople and it indicates a melancholy proc\u00adlivity towards whatever <\/i>is
\nmonstrous and unwholesome, one can only conclude that truth-speaking is not one
\nof the ethical virtues which Mr. William Archer thought it necessary to practise
\nor at least that it need be no part of a rationalist’s criticism of religion. <\/font><\/p>\n

But no, after all
\nMr. Archer does throw a grudging tribute on the altar of truth; for he admits in
\nthe same breath that Hinduism talks much of righteousness and allows that there
\nare in the Hindu writings many admirable ethical doctrines. But that <\/font>
\nonly proves that Hindu philosophy is illogical, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe morality <\/font> <\/span>is there
\nindeed, but it ought not to be; its presence does not suit Mr. Archer’s thesis.
\nAdmire the logic, the rational consistency of this champion of rationalism! Mark
\nthat at the same time one of his objections to the Ramayana, admitted to be one
\nof the Bibles of the Hindu people, is that its ideal characters, Rama and Sita,
\nthe effective patterns of the highest Indian manhood and womanhood, are much too
\nvirtuous for his taste. Rama is too saintly for human nature. I do not know in
\nfact that Rama is more saintly than Christ or St. Francis, yet I had always
\nthought they were within the pale of human nature; but perhaps this critic will
\nreply that, if not beyond that pale, their excessive <\/font>
\nvirtues are at least like the
\ndaily practice of the Hindu cult,<\/font><\/span> shall we say for
\nexample, scrupulous physical purity and personal cleanliness and the daily
\nturning of the mind to God in worship <\/font>
\nand meditation, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>"sufficient to place them beyond the pale of <\/font> <\/span>
\ncivilisation". For he tells us that Sita, the type of conjugal
\nfide\u00adlity and chastity, is so excessive in her virtue "as to verge on
\nim\u00admorality". Meaningless smart extravagance has reached its highest point when
\nit can thus verge on the idiotic. I am as sorry to use the epithet as Mr. Archer
\nto harp on Indian "barbarism", but there is really no help for it; "it expresses
\nthe essence of the <\/font>
\nsituation". If all were of this
\ncharacter, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthere is too much of it<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-48<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

and it is
\ndeplorable, <\/font>
\n―<\/font><\/span> a
\ncontemptuous silence would be the only possible reply. But fortunately Apollo,
\ndoes not always stretch his bow thus to the breaking-point; all Mr. Archer’s
\nshafts are not of this wildgoose flight. There is much in his writing that
\nex\u00adpresses crudely, but still with sufficient accuracy the feeling of recoil of
\nthe average Occidental mind at its first view of the unique characteristics of
\nIndian culture and that is a thing worth noting and sounding; it is necessary to
\nunderstand it and find <\/font>
\nout its value.<\/font><\/span>        <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nThis is the utility I wish to seize on; for it is an utility and even more. It
\nis through the average mind that we get best at the bedrock of the psychological
\ndifferences which divide from each other great blocks of our common humanity.
\nThe cultured mind tends to diminish the force of these prejudices or at least
\neven in difference and opposition to develop points of similarity or of contact.
\nIn the average mentality we have a better chance of, getting them in their crude
\nstrength and can appreciate their full force<\/font><\/span> <\/span>
\n<\/font>and bearing. Mr. Archer helps us here admirably. Not<\/font><\/span> that we have not to clear away much rubbish to get at
\nwhat we want. I should have preferred to deal with a manual of mis\u00adunderstanding
\nwhich had the same thoroughness of scope, but expressed itself with a more
\nstraightforward simplicity and less of vicious smartness and of superfluous
\nill-will; but none such is available. Let us take Mr. Archer then and dissect
\nsome of his prejudices to get at their inner psychology. We shall perhaps find
\nthat through all this unpleasant crudity we can arrive at the essence of a
\nhistoric misunderstanding of continents. An exact understanding of it may even
\nhelp us towards an approach to some kind of reconciliation.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-49<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t2<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n

\nI<\/font><\/span>T IS best to start
\nwith a precise idea of the species of critic from whom we are going to draw our
\nestimate of oppositions. What we have before us are the ideas of an average and
\ntypical Occidental mind on Indian culture, a man of sufficient education and
\nwide reading, but no genius or exceptional capa\u00adcity, rather an ordinary
\nsuccessful talent, no flexibility or broad sympathy of mind, but pronounced and
\nrigid opinions which are backed up and given an appearance of weight by the
\nhabit of using to good effect a varied though not always sound informa\u00adtion.
\nThis is in fact the mind and standpoint of an average Englishman of some ability
\nformed in the habit of journalism. That is precisely the kind of thing we want
\nin order to seize the nature of the antagonism which led Mr. Rudyard Kipling,
\n<\/font> <\/span>\u2014 <\/span>
\nhimself a
\nsuper-journalist and "magnified non-natural" average man, the average lifted up,
\nwithout ceasing to be itself, by the glare of a kind of crude and barbaric
\ngenius, <\/font> <\/span>\u2014<\/span> to affirm the eternal
\nincompatibility of the East and the West. Let us see what strikes such a
\nmentality as unique and abhorrent in the Indian mind and its culture: if we can
\nput aside all sensitiveness of per\u00adsonal feeling and look dispassionately at
\nthis phenomenon, we shall find it an interesting and illuminative study.
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nA certain objection may be
\nadvanced against taking a ratio\u00adnalistic critic with a political bias, a mind
\nbelonging at best to the today which is already becoming yesterday, in this
\nwidely repre\u00adsentative capacity. The misunderstanding of continents has been the
\nresult of a long-enduring and historic difference, and this book gives us only
\none phase of it which is of a very modem character. But it is in modern times,
\nin an age of scientific and rationalistic enlightenment, that the difference has
\nbecome most pronounced, the misunderstanding most aggressive and the sense of
\ncultural incompatibility most conscious and self-revealing. An ancient Greek,
\nfull of disinterested intellectual curiosity and a flexible aesthetic
\nappreciation, was in spite of his feeling of racial and cultural superiority to
\nthe barbarian much nearer to the <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-50<\/font><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n
\n

Indian mind than a typical modern European. Not only could
\na Pythagoras or a philosopher of the Neo-platonist school, an Alexander or a
\nMenander understand with a more ready sympa\u00adthy the root ideas of Asiatic
\nculture, but an average man of ability, a Megasthenes for instance, could be
\ntrusted to see and understand, though not inwardly and perfectly, yet in a
\nsufficient measure. The mediaeval European, for all his militant Chris\u00adtianity
\nand his prejudice against the infidel and paynim, yet re\u00adsembled his opponent in
\nmany characteristic ways of seeing and feeling to an extent which is no longer
\npossible to an average European mind, unless it has been imbued with the new
\nideas <\/font> <\/span>
\nwhich <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nare once more lessening the gulf between the continents.<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nIt<\/font><\/span> was the rationalising
\nof the Occidental mind, the rationalising even of its religious ideas and
\nsentiments, which made the gulf so wide as to appear unbridgeable. Our critic
\nrepresents this incr\u00adeased hostility in an extreme form, a shape given to it by
\nthe unthinking freethinker, the man who has not thought out ori\u00adginally these
\ndifficult problems, but imbibed his views from his cultural environment and the
\nintellectual atmosphere of the period. He will exaggerate enormously the points
\nof opposition, but by his very exaggeration he will make them more strik\u00adingly
\nclear and intelligible. He will make up for his want of correct information and
\nintelligent study by a certain sureness of instinct in his attack upon things
\nalien to his own mental out\u00adlook. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nIt is this sureness of
\ninstinct which has led him to direct the real gravamen of his attack against
\nIndian philosophy and reli\u00adgion. The culture of a people may be roughly
\ndescribed as the expression of a consciousness of life which formulates itself
\nin three aspects. There is a side of thought, of ideal, of upward will and the
\nsoul’s aspiration; there is a side of creative self-expres\u00adsion and appreciative
\naesthesis, intelligence and imagination; and there is a side of practical and
\noutward formulation. A people’s philosophy and higher thinking give us its
\nmind’s purest, largest and most general formulation of its consciousness of life
\nand its dynamic view of existence. Its religion formulates the most in\u00adtense
\nform of its upward will and the soul’s aspirations towards the fulfilment of its
\nhighest ideal and impulse. Its art, poetry, <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-51<\/span><\/font>
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

literature provide for us the creative expression
\nand impression of its intuition, imagination, vital turn and creative
\nintelligence. Its society and politics provide in their forms an outward frame
\nin which the more external life works out what it can of its in\u00adspiring ideal
\nand of its special character and nature under the difficulties of the
\nenvironment. We can see how much it has taken of the crude material of living,
\nwhat it has done with it, how it has shaped as much of it as possible into some
\nreflection of its guiding consciousness and deeper spirit. None of them express
\nthe whole secret spirit behind, but they derive from it their main ideas and
\ntheir cultural character. Together they make up its soul, mind and body. In
\nIndian civilisation philosophy and re\u00adligion, philosophy made dynamic by
\nreligion, religion enlightened by philosophy have led, the rest follow as best
\nthey can. This is indeed its first distinctive character, which it shares with
\nthe more developed Asiatic peoples, but has carried to an extraordinary degree
\nof thoroughgoing pervasiveness. When it is spoken of as a Brahminical
\ncivilisation, that is the real significance of the phrase. The phrase cannot
\ntruly imply any domination of sacerdotalism, though in some lower aspects of the
\nculture the sacerdotal mind has been only too prominent; for the priest as such
\nhas had no hand in shaping the great lines of the culture. But it is true that
\nits main motives have been shaped by philosophic thinkers and religious minds,
\nnot by any means all of them of Brahmin birth. The fact that a class has been
\ndeve\u00adloped whose business was to preserve the spiritual traditions, knowledge
\nand sacred law of the race,
\n<\/font>
\n―<\/font><\/span>
\nfor this and not a mere priest trade was the proper occupation of the Brahmin,
\n<\/font>
\n―<\/font><\/span>
\nand that this class could for thousands of years maintain in the greatest part,
\nbut not monopolise, the keeping of the national mind and conscience, and the
\ndirection of social principles, forms and manners, is only a characteristic
\nindication. The fact behind is that Indian culture has been from the beginning
\nand has re\u00admained a spiritual, an inward-looking religio-philosophical cul\u00adture.
\nEverything else in it has derived from that one central and original peculiarity
\nor has been in some way dependent on it or subordinate to it; even external life
\nhas been subjected to the inward look of the spirit. <\/font> <\/p>\n


\nPage-52<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n
\n

\nOur critic has felt the
\nimportance of this central point and directed upon it his most unsparing attack;
\nin other quarters he may make concessions, allow attenuations, here he will make
\nnone. All here must be bad and harmful, or if not deleterious, then ineffective,
\nby the very nature of the central ideas and mo\u00adtives, for any real good. This is
\na significant attitude. Of course there is the polemical motive. That which is
\nclaimed for the Indian mind and its civilisation is a high spirituality, high on
\nall the summits of thought and religion, permeating art and litera\u00adture and
\nreligious practice and social ideas and affecting even the ordinary man’s
\nattitude to life. If the claim is conceded, as it is conceded by all sympathetic
\nand disinterested inquirers even when they do not accept the Indian view of
\nlife, then Indian cul\u00adture stands, its civilisation has a right to live. More,
\nit has a right even to throw a challenge to rationalistic modernism and say,
\n"Attain first my level of spirituality before you claim to destroy and supersede
\nme or call on me to modernise myself entirely in your sense. No matter if I have
\nmyself latterly fallen from my own heights or if my present forms cannot meet
\nall the require\u00adments of the future mind of humanity; I can reascend, the power
\nis there in me. I may even be able to develop a spiritual modern\u00adism which will
\nhelp you in your effort to exceed yourself and arrive at a larger harmony than
\nany you have reached in the past or can dream of in the present." The hostile
\ncritic feels that he must deny this claim at its roots. He tries to prove Indian
\nphilo\u00adsophy to be unspiritual and Indian religion to be an irrational animistic
\ncult of monstrosity. In this effort which is an attempt to stand Truth on her
\nhead and force her to see facts upside down, he lands himself in a paradoxical
\nabsurdity and incon\u00adsistency which destroy his case by sheer overstatement.
\nStill there arise even from this farrago two quite genuine issues. First, we can
\nask whether the spiritual and religio-philosophical view of life and the
\ngovernment of civilisation by its ideas and motives or the rationalistic and
\nexternal view of life and the satisfaction of the vital being governed by the
\nintellectual and practical reason give the best lead to mankind. And granting
\nthe value and power of a spiritual conception of life, we can ask whether the
\nexpres\u00adsion given to it by Indian culture is the best possible and the most <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-53<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

helpful
\nto the growth of humanity towards its highest level. These are the real
\nquestions at issue between this Asiatic or an\u00adcient mind and the European or
\nmodern intelligence.
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe typical Occidental mind,
\nwhich prolongs still the men\u00adtality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
\nhas been almost entirely fashioned by the second view; it has grown into the
\nmould of the vitalistic rational idea. Its attitude to life has never been
\ngoverned by a philosophic conception of existence, except during a brief period
\nof Graeco-Roman culture and then only in a small class of thinking and highly
\ncultivated minds; always it is dominated by environmental necessity and the
\npractical reason. It has left behind it too the ages in which spiritual and
\nreligious conceptions which invaded it from the East, strove to impose
\nthemselves on the vitalistic and rational tendency; it has largely rejected them
\nor thrust them into a corner. Its religion is the religion of life, a religion
\nof earth and of terrestrial humanity, an ideal of intellectual growth, vital
\nefficiency, physical health and enjoyment, a rational social order. This mind
\nconfronted by Indian culture is at once repelled, first by its unfamiliarity and
\nstrangeness, then by a sense of irrational abnormality and a total difference
\nand often a diametrical opposition of standpoints and finally by an abundance
\nand plethora of unintelligible forms. These forms appear to its eye to teem with
\nthe supranatural and therefore, as it thinks, with the false. Even the unnatural
\nis there, a persistent departure from the common norm; from right method and
\nsound device, a frame of things in which everything, to use Mr. Chesterton’s
\nexpression, is of the wrong shape. The old orthodox Christian point of view
\nmight regard this culture as a thing of hell, an abnormal creation of demons;
\nthe modern orthodox rationalistic standpoint looks at it as a nightmare not only
\nirrational, but antirational, a monstrosity, an out-of-date anomaly, at best a
\ncoloured fantasia of the oriental past. That is no doubt an extreme attitude, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span>
\nit is Mr Archer’s,
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span>
\nbut in\u00adcomprehension and distaste are the rule. One continually finds traces of
\nthese feelings even in minds which try to understand and sympathise; but to the
\naverage Occidental content with his first raw natural impressions all is a
\nrepellent confusion. Indian philosophy is an incomprehensible, subtly
\nunsubstantial cloud\u00ad <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-54<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\nweaving; Indian religion meets
\nhis eye as a mixture of absurd asceticism and an absurder gross, immoral and
\nsuperstitious polytheism, He sees in Indian art a riot of crudely distorted or
\nconventional forms and an impossible seeking after suggestions of the infinite –
\nwhereas all true art should be a beautiful and rational reproduction or fine
\nimaginative representation of the natural and finite. He condemns in Indian
\nsociety an anachronist<\/font><\/span>ic and semi-barbaric survival of old-world and mediaeval
\nideas<\/font><\/span> and institutions. This view, which has recently undergone
\nsome modification and is less loud and confident in expression, but still
\nsubsists, is the whole foundation of Mr. Archer’s philippic.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n          <\/font> <\/span>
\nThis is evident from the nature of all the objections he brings against Indian
\ncivilisation. When you strip them of their journalistic rhetoric, you find that
\nthey amount simply to this natural
\n<\/font> <\/span>antagonism of the
\nrationalised vital and practical man against a cul<\/font><\/span>ture
\nwhich subordinates reason to a suprarational spirituality and life and action to
\na feeling after something which is greater than life and action. Philosophy and
\nreligion are the soul of Indian culture, inseparable from each other and
\ninterpenetrative. The whole objective of Indian philosophy, its entire raison
\nd’ <\/i>\u00e9tre, <\/i>knowledge of the spirit, the experience of it and the right
\nway a spiritual existence; its single aim coincides with the highest
\nsignificance of religion. Indian religion draws all its characteristic value
\nfrom the spiritual philosophy which illumines its supreme aspiration and colours
\neven most of what is drawn from an<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\ninferior range of
\nreligious experience. But what are Mr. Ar<\/font><\/span>cher’s
\nobjections, first to Indian philosophy? Well, his first objection simply comes
\nto this that it is too philosophical. His second accusation is that even as that
\nworthless thing, metaphysi\u00adcal philosophy, it is too metaphysical. His third
\ncharge, the most positive and plausible, is that it enervates and kills the
\npersonality and the will-power by false notions of pessimism, asceticism, Karma
\nand reincarnation. If we take his criticism under each of these heads, we shall
\nsee that it is really not a dispassionate intel\u00adlectual criticism, but the
\nexaggerated expression of a mental dislike and a fundamental difference of
\ntemperament and stand\u00adpoint.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-55<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nMr. Archer cannot deny, – the
\ndenial would go beyond even his unequalled capacity for affirming absurdities,
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n– that <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe Indian mind has displayed an unparalleled activity and
\nfruit\u00adfulness in philosophical thinking. He cannot deny that a fami\u00adliarity with
\nmetaphysical conceptions and the capacity of discus\u00adsing with some subtlety a
\nmetaphysical problem is much more wide-spread in India than in any other
\ncountry. Even an ordi\u00adnary Indian intellect can understand and deal with
\nquestions of this kind where an Occidental mind of corresponding culture and
\nattainments would be as hopelessly out of its depth as is Mr. Archer in these
\npages. But he denies that this familiarity and this subtlety are any proof of
\ngreat mental capacity <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\n"necessarily," he adds, I suppose in order to escape the
\ncharge of having sug\u00adgested that Plato, Spinoza or Berkeley did not show a great
\nmental capacity. Perhaps it is not "necessarily" such a proof; but it does show
\nin one great order of questions, in one large and especially difficult range of
\nthe mind’s powers and interests a remarkable and unique general development. The
\nEuropean journalist’s capacity for discussing with some show of acumen questions
\nof economy and politics or, for that matter, art, lite\u00adrature and drama, is not
\n"necessarily" proof of a great mental capacity; but it does show a great
\ndevelopment of the European mind in general, a wide-spread information and
\nnormal capacity in these fields of its action. The crudity of his opinions and
\nhis treatment of his subjects may sometimes seem a little "barbaric" to an
\noutsider; but the thing itself is a proof that there is a cul\u00adture, a
\ncivilisation, a great intellectual and civic achievement and a sufficient
\nwide-spread interest in the achievement. Mr. Archer has to avoid a similar
\nconclusion in another subtler and more difficult range about India. He does it
\nby denying that philo\u00adsophy is of any value; this activity of the Indian mind is
\nfor him only an unequalled diligence in knowing the unknowable and thinking
\nabout the unthinkable. And why so? Well, because philosophy deals with a region
\nwhere there is no possible "test of values" and in such a region thought itself,
\nsince it is simply unverifiable speculation, can be of little or no value. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThere we come to a really
\ninteresting and characteristic opposition of standpoints, more, a difference in
\nthe very grain <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-56<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n


\n\t\t\tof the mind. As stated, it is the sceptical argument of the atheist
\n\t\t\tand agnostic, but after all that is only the extreme logical
\n\t\t\tstate\u00adment of an attitude common to the average European turn of
\n\t\t\tthinking which is inherently a positivist attitude. Philosophy has
\n\t\t\tbeen pursued in Europe with great and noble intellectual results by
\n\t\t\tthe highest minds, but very much as a pursuit apart from life, a
\n\t\t\tthing high and splendid, but ineffective. It is remark\u00adable that
\n\t\t\twhile in India and China philosophy has seized hold on life, has had
\n\t\t\tan enormous practical effect on the civilisation and got into the
\n\t\t\tvery bones of current thought and action, it has never at all
\n\t\t\tsucceeded in achieving this importance in Europe. In the days of the
\n\t\t\tStoics and Epicureans it got a grip, but only among the highly
\n\t\t\tcultured; at the present day, too, we have some renewed tendency of
\n\t\t\tthe kind. Nietzsche has had his influence, certain French thinkers
\n\t\t\talso in France, the philosophies of James and Bergson have attracted
\n\t\t\tsome amount of public interest; but it is a mere nothing compared
\n\t\t\twith the effective power of Asiatic philosophy. The average European
\n\t\t\tdraws his guiding views not from the philosophic, but from the
\n\t\t\tpositive and prac\u00adtical reason. He does not absolutely disdain
\n\t\t\tphilosophy like Mr. Archer, but he considers it, if not a "man-made
\n\t\t\tillusion," yet a rather nebulous, remote and ineffective kind of
\n\t\t\toccupation. He honours the philosophers, but he puts their works on
\n\t\t\tthe highest shelf of the library of civilisation, not to be taken
\n\t\t\tdown or consulted except by a few minds of an exceptional turn. He
\n\t\t\tadmires, but he distrusts them. Plato’s idea of philosophers as the
\n\t\t\tright rulers and best directors of society seems to him the most
\n\t\t\tfantastic and unpractical of notions; the philosopher, precisely
\n\t\t\tbecause he moves among ideas, must be without any hold on real life.
\n\t\t\tThe Indian mind holds on the contrary that the Rishi, the thinker,
\n\t\t\tthe seer of spiritual truth is the best guide not only of the
\n\t\t\treligious and moral, but the practical life. The seer, the Rishi is
\n\t\t\tthe natural director of society; to the Rishis he attributes the
\n\t\t\tideals and guiding intuitions of his civilisation. Even today he is
\n\t\t\tvery ready to give the name to anyone who can give a spiritual truth
\n\t\t\twhich helps his life or a formative idea and inspiration which
\n\t\t\tinfluences religion, ethics, society, even politics.
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis is because the Indian believes that the ultimate
\n\t\t\ttruths
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-57<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

are truths of the spirit and that truths of the spirit are
\nthe most fundamental and most effective truths of our existence, power\u00adfully
\ncreative of the inner, salutarily reformative of the outer life. To the European
\nthe ultimate truths are more often truths of the ideative intellect, the pure
\nreason; but, whether intellec\u00adtual or spiritual, they belong to a sphere beyond
\nthe ordinary action of the mind, life and body where alone there are any daily
\nverifying "tests of values". These tests can only be given by living experience
\nof outward fact and the positive and practical reason. The rest are speculations
\nand their proper place is in the world of ideas, not in the world of life. That
\nbrings us to a difference of standpoint which is the essence of Mr. Archer’s
\nsecond objec\u00adtion. He believes that all philosophy is speculation and guessing;
\nthe only verifiable truth, we must suppose, is that of the normal fact, the
\noutward world and our response to it, truth of physical science and a psychology
\nfounded on physical science. He re\u00adproaches Indian philosophy for having taken
\nits speculations seriously, for presenting speculation in the guise of dogma,
\nfor the "unspiritual" habit which mistakes groping for seeing and guessing for
\nknowing, <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nin place, I presume,
\nof the very spiritual habit which holds the physically sensible for the only
\nknowable and takes the knowledge of the body for the knowledge of the soul and
\nspirit. He waxes bitterly sarcastic over the idea that phi\u00adlosophic meditation
\nand Yoga are the best way to ascertain the truth of Nature and the constitution
\nof the universe. Mr. Archer’s descriptions of Indian philosophy are a grossly
\nignorant misrepresentation of its idea and spirit, but in their essence they
\nrepresent the view inevitably taken by the normal positivist mind of the
\nOccident. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nIn fact, Indian philosophy abhors
\nmere guessing and specu\u00adlation., That word is constantly applied by European
\ncritics to the thoughts arid conclusions of the Upanishads, of the
\nphilo\u00adsophies, of Buddhism; but Indian philosophers would reject it altogether
\nas at all a valid description of their method. If our philosophy admits an
\nultimate unthinkable and unknowable, it does not concern itself with any
\npositive description or analysis <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nof that supreme Mystery, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe absurdity the rationalist ascribes to it; it concerns
\nitself with whatever is thinkable and knowable<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-58<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

to us at the highest term as well as on the lower ranges
\nof our experience. If it has been able to make its conclusions articles of
\nreligious faith, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– dogmas, as they are here called,
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nit is be\u00ad<\/font><\/span>cause it has been able to base
\nthem on an experience verifiable by any man who will take the necessary means
\nand apply the only possible tests. The Indian mind does not admit that the only
\npossible test of values or of reality is the outward scientific, the test of a
\nscrutiny of physical Nature or the everyday normal facts of our surface
\npsychology, which is only a small movement upon vast hidden subconscious and
\nsuperconscious heights, depths and ranges. What are the tests of these more
\nordinary or objective values? Evidently, experience, experimental analysis and
\nsynthesis, reason, intuition, – for I believe the value of intuition is admitted
\nnowadays by modern philosophy and science. The tests of this other subtler order
\nof truths are the same, experience, experimental analysis and synthesis, reason,
\nintuition. Only, since these things are truths of the soul and spirit, it must
\nnecessarily be a psychological and spiritual experience, a psychological and
\npsychophysical experimenta\u00adtion, analysis and synthesis, a larger intuition
\nwhich looks into higher realms, realities, possibilities of being, a reason
\nwhich admits something beyond itself, looks upward to the suprarational, tries
\nto give as far as may be an account of it to the human intelligence. Yoga, which
\nMr. Archer invites us so press\u00adingly to abandon, is itself nothing but a
\nwell-tested means of opening up these greater realms of experience. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nMr. Archer and minds of his type cannot be expected to know these things; they
\nare beyond the little narrow range of facts and ideas which is to them the whole
\narc of knowledge. But even if he knew; it would make no difference to him; he
\nwould reject the very thought with scornful impatience, without any degrading of
\nhis immense rationalistic superiority by any sort of examination into the
\npossibility of an unfamiliar truth. In this attitude he would have the average
\npositivist mind on his side. To that mind such notions seem in their very nature
\nabsurd and incomprehensible, – much worse than Greek and Hebrew, languages which
\nhave very respectable and credit\u00adworthy professors; but these are hieroglyphs
\nwhich can only be<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 59<\/p>\n

\n


\n\t\t\tupheld as decipherable signs by Indians and
\n\t\t\tTheosophists and mystical thinkers, a disreputable clan. It can
\n\t\t\tunderstand dogma and speculation about spiritual truth, a priest, a
\n\t\t\tBible, whether <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\ndisbelieving them or giving them a <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nconventional acceptance; <\/font> <\/span>but profoundest verifiable spiritual truth, firmly
\n\t\t\tascertainable spiritual values! The idea is foreign to this
\n\t\t\tmentality and sounds to it like jargon. It can understand, even when
\n\t\t\tit dismisses, an authoritative religion, an "I believe because it is
\n\t\t\trationally im\u00adpossible"; but a deepest mystery of religion, a
\n\t\t\thighest truth of philosophical thinking, a farthest ultimate
\n\t\t\tdiscovery of psycho\u00adlogical experience, a systematic and ordered
\n\t\t\texperimentation of self-search and self-analysis, a constructive
\n\t\t\tinner possibility of <\/font> <\/span>
\nself-perfection, all arriving at
\n\t\t\tthe same result, assenting to each <\/font> <\/span>
\nother’s
\n\t\t\tconclusions, reconciling spirit and reason and the whole
\n\t\t\tpsychological nature and its deepest needs, <\/font> <\/span>
\n–
\n<\/font> <\/span>this great ancient and
\n\t\t\tpersistent research and triumph of Indian culture baffles and
\n\t\t\toffends the average positivist mind of the West. It is bewil\u00addered
\n\t\t\tby the possession of a knowledge which the West never more than
\n\t\t\tfumbled after and ended by missing. Irritated, per\u00adplexed,
\n\t\t\tcontemptuous, it refuses to recognise the superiority of such a
\n\t\t\tharmony to its own lesser self-divided culture. For it is accustomed
\n\t\t\tonly to a religious seeking and experience which is at war with
\n\t\t\tscience and philosophy or oscillates between irra\u00adtional belief and
\n\t\t\ta troubled or else a self-confident scepticism. In Europe philosophy
\n\t\t\thas been sometimes the handmaid
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n– not <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe sister – of
\n\t\t\treligion; but more often it has turned its back on religious belief
\n\t\t\tin hostility or in a disdainful separation. The war between religion
\n\t\t\tand science has been almost the leading phe\u00adnomenon of European
\n\t\t\tculture. Even philosophy and science have been unable to agree; they
\n\t\t\ttoo have quarrelled and separated. These powers still coexist in
\n\t\t\tEurope, but they are not a happy family; civil war is their natural
\n\t\t\tatmosphere. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nNo wonder that the positivist
\nmind to which this seems the natural order of things, should turn from a way of
\nthinking and knowing in which there is a harmony, a consensus, a union between
\nphilosophy and religion and a systematised well-tested psychological experience.
\nIt is easily moved to escape from the challenge of this alien form of knowledge
\nby readily dismissing <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 60<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Indian psychology as a jungle of self-hypnotic
\n\t\t\thallucinations, Indian religion as a rank growth of anti-rational
\n\t\t\tsuperstitions, Indian philosophy as a remote cloud-land of
\n\t\t\tunsubstantial specu\u00adlation. It is unfortunate for the peace of mind
\n\t\t\twhich this self-satisfied attitude brings with it and for the effect
\n\t\t\tof Mr. Archer’s facile and devastating method of criticism that the
\n\t\t\tWest too has recently got itself pushed into paths of thinking and
\n\t\t\tdiscovery which seem dangerously likely to justify all this mass of
\n\t\t\tunpleasant barbarism and to bring Europe herself nearer to so
\n\t\t\tmonstrous a way of thinking. It is becoming more and more clear that
\n\t\t\tIndian philosophy has anticipated in its own way most of what has
\n\t\t\tbeen or is being thought out in metaphysical specula\u00adtion. One finds
\n\t\t\teven scientific thought repeating very ancient Indian generaisations
\n\t\t\tfrom the other end of the scale of research. Indian psychology which
\n\t\t\tMr. Archer dismisses along with Indian cosmology and physiology as
\n\t\t\tbaseless classification and ingenious guessing, <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nit is
\n\t\t\tanything but that, for it is based rigo\u00ad<\/font><\/span>rously on experience, – is
\n\t\t\tjustified more and more by all the latest psychological discoveries.
\n\t\t\tThe fundamental ideas of Indian religion look perilously near to a
\n\t\t\tconquest by which they will become the prominent thought and
\n\t\t\tsentiment of a new and universal religious mentality and spiritual
\n\t\t\tseeking. Who can say that the psycho-physiology of Indian Yoga may
\n\t\t\tnot be justified if certain lines of "groping and guessing" in the
\n\t\t\tWest are pushed a little farther? And even perhaps the Indian
\n\t\t\tcosmological idea that there are other planes of being than this
\n\t\t\teasily sensible kingdom of Matter, may be rehabilitated in a not
\n\t\t\tvery distant future? But the positivist mind may yet be of good
\n\t\t\tcourage: for its hold is still strong and it has still the claim of
\n\t\t\tintellectual orthodoxy and the prestige of the right of possession;
\n\t\t\tmany streams must swell and meet together before it is washed under
\n\t\t\tand a tide of uniting thought sweeps humanity towards the hidden
\n\t\t\tshores of the Spirit.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 61<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n3<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nTHIS<\/span><\/font> <\/font>criticism so far is not very formidable; its edge, if it has any apart
\nfrom the edge of trenchant misrepre\u00adsentation, turns against the assailant. To
\nhave put a high value on philosophy, sought by it the highest secrets of our
\nbeing, turned an effective philosophic thought on life and called in the
\nthinkers, the men of profoundest spiritual experience, highest ideas, largest
\navailable knowledge to govern and shape society, to have subjected creed and
\ndogma to the test of the philosophic mind and founded religious belief upon
\nspiritual intuition, phi\u00adlosophical thought and psychological experience, are
\nsigns, not of barbarism or of a mean and ignorant culture, but marks of the
\nhighest possible type of civilisation. There is nothing here that would warrant
\nus in abasing ourselves before the idols of the positivist reason or putting the
\nspirit and aim of Indian culture at all lower than the spirit and aim of Western
\ncivilisation whether in its high ancient period of rational enlightenment and
\nthe speculative idea or in its modern period of broad and minute scientific
\nthought and strong applied knowledge. Different it is, inferior it is not, but
\nhas rather a distinct element of superiority in the unique height of its motive
\nand the spiritual nobility of its endeavour. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

It is useful to lay stress on this greatness of
\nspirit and aim, not only because it is of immense importance and the first test
\nof the value of a culture, but because the assailants take advantage of two
\nextraneous circumstances to create a prejudice and con\u00adfuse the real issues.
\nThey have the immense advantage of attack\u00ading India when she is prostrate and
\nin the dust and, materially, Indian civilisation seems to have ended in a great
\ndefeat and downfall. Strong in this temporary advantage they can afford to show
\na superb and generous courage in kicking the surround\u00ading dust and mire with
\ntheir hooves upon the sick and wounded lioness caught in the nets of the
\nhunters and try to persuade the world that she had never any strength and
\nvirtue in her. It is an easy task in this age of the noble culture of Reason
\nand Mammon<\/font><\/p>\n

Page – 62<\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tand
\n\t\t\tScience doing the works of Moloch, when the brazen idol of the great
\n\t\t\tgoddess Success is worshipped as she was never before worshipped by
\n\t\t\tcultured human beings. But they have too the yet <\/i>greater
\n\t\t\tadvantage of representing her to the world in a period of the
\n\t\t\teclipse of her civilisation when after at least two thousand years
\n\t\t\tof the most brilliant and many-sided cultural activity she had for a
\n\t\t\ttime lost everything except the memory of her past and her long
\n\t\t\tdepressed and obscured but always living and now strongly reviving
\n\t\t\treligious spirit. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have touched elsewhere on the significance of this
\nfailure and this temporary eclipse. I may have to deal with it again at closer
\nquarters, since it has been raised as an objection to the value of Indian
\nculture and Indian spirituality. At present it will be enough to say that
\nculture cannot be judged by material suc\u00adcess; still less can spirituality be
\nbrought to that touchstone. Philosophic, aesthetic, poetic, intellectual Greece
\nfailed and fell while drilled and militarist Rome triumphed and conquered, but
\nno one dreams of crediting for that reason the victorious imperial nation with a
\ngreater civilisation and a higher culture. The reli\u00adgious culture of Judea is
\nnot disproved or lessened by the destruc\u00adtion of the Jewish State, any more than
\nit is proved and given greater value by the commercial capacity shown by the
\nJewish race in their dispersion. But I admit, as ancient Indian thought
\nadmitted, that material and economic capacity and prosperity are a necessary,
\nthough not the highest or most essential part of the total effort of human
\ncivilisation. In that respect India throughout her long period of cultural
\nactivity can claim equality with any ancient or mediaeval country. No people
\nbefore modern times reached a higher splendour of wealth, commercial prosperity,
\nmaterial appointment, social organisation. That is the record of history, of
\nancient documents, of contemporary witnesses; to deny it is to give evidence of
\na singular prepossession and obfuscation of the view, an imaginative, or is it
\nunimaginative, misreading of present actuality into past actuality. The
\nsplendour of Asiatic and not least of Indian prosperity, the wealth of Ormuz and
\nof Ind, the "barbaric doors rough with gold," barbaricae postes squalentes
\nauro, <\/i>were once stigmatised by the less opulent West as a sign of barbarism.
\nCircumstances <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-63<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

are
\nnow strangely reversed; the opulent barbarism and a much less artistic
\nostentation of wealth are to be found in London, New York and Paris, and it is
\nthe nakedness of India and the squalor of her poverty which are flung in her
\nface as evidence of the worthlessness of her culture. <\/font> <\/p>\n


\nIndia’s ancient and mediaeval political, administrative, military and economic
\norganisation was no mean achievement; the records stand and can be left to
\ncontradict the ignorance of the uninstructed and the rhetoric of the
\njournalistic critic or the interested politician. There was no doubt an element
\nof failure and defect, almost unavoidable in the totality of a problem on so
\nlarge a scale and in the then conditions. But to exaggerate that into a count
\nagainst her civilisation would be a singular severity of criticism which few
\ncivilizations watched to their end could sur\u00advive. Failure in the end, yes,
\nbecause of the decline of her culture, but not as a result of its most valuable
\nelements. A later eclipse of the more essential elements of her civilisation is
\nnot a disproof of their original value. Indian civilisation must be judged
\nmainly by the culture and greatness of its millenniums, not by the igno\u00adrance
\nand weakness of a few centuries. A culture must be judged, first by its
\nessential spirit, then by its best accomplishment and, lastly, by its power of
\nsurvival, renovation and adaptation to new phases of the permanent needs of the
\nrace. In the poverty, confusion and disorganisation of a period of temporary
\ndecline, the eye of the hostile witness refuses to see or to recognise the
\nsaving soul of good which still keeps this civilisation alive and promises a
\nstrong and vivid return to the greatness of its perma\u00adnent ideal. Its obstinate
\nelastic force of rebound, its old measure\u00adless adaptability are again at work;
\nit is no longer even solely on the defence, but boldly aggressive. Not survival
\nalone, but victory and conquest are the promise of its future. <\/font> <\/p>\n

\nBut our critic does not merely
\ndeny the lofty aim and great\u00adness of spirit of Indian civilisation, which stand
\ntoo high to be vulnerable to an assault of this ignorant and prejudiced
\ncharac\u00adter. He questions its leading ideas, denies its practical life-value,
\ndisparages its fruits, efficacy, character. Has this disparagement any critical
\nvalue or is it only a temperamental expression of the misunderstanding natural
\nto a widely different view of life and<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-64<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nto a diametrically opposite
\n\t\t\testimate of our nature’s highest significances and realities? If we
\n\t\t\tconsider the character of the attack and its terms, we shall see
\n\t\t\tthat it amounts to no more than a condemnation passed by the
\n\t\t\tpositivist mind attached to the normal values of life upon the quite
\n\t\t\tdifferent standards of a culture which" looks beyond the ordinary
\n\t\t\tlife of man, points to something greater behind it and makes it a
\n\t\t\tpassage to something eternal, permanent and infinite. India, we are
\n\t\t\ttold, has no spiri\u00adtuality, <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n– a portentous discovery; on the contrary she has suc\u00ad<\/font><\/span>ceeded,
\n\t\t\tit would seem, in killing the germs of all sane and virile
\n\t\t\tspirituality. Mr. Archer evidently puts his own sense, a novel and
\n\t\t\tinteresting and very Occidental sense, on the word. Spiri\u00adtuality
\n\t\t\thas meant hitherto a recognition of something greater than mind and
\n\t\t\tlife, the aspiration to a consciousness pure, great, divine beyond
\n\t\t\tour normal mental and vital nature, a surge and rising of the soul
\n\t\t\tin man out of the littleness and bondage of our lower parts towards
\n\t\t\ta greater thing secret within him. That at least is the idea, the
\n\t\t\texperience, which is the very core of Indian thinking. But the
\n\t\t\trationalist does not believe in the spirit in this sense; life,
\n\t\t\thuman will-force and reason are his highest godheads. Spirituality
\n\t\t\tthen, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nit would have been simpler and
\n\t\t\tmore logical
\n<\/font> <\/span>to reject the word
\n\t\t\twhen the thing on which it rests is denied, <\/font> <\/span>
\n\u00ad-
\n<\/font> <\/span>has to be given
\n\t\t\tanother sense, some high passion and effort of the emotions, will
\n\t\t\tand reason, directed towards the finite, not towards the infinite,
\n\t\t\ttowards things temporary, not towards the eternal, towards
\n\t\t\tperishable life, not towards any greater reality which overpasses
\n\t\t\tand supports the superficial phenomena of life. The thought and
\n\t\t\tsuffering which seam and furrow the ideal head of Homer, there, we
\n\t\t\tare told, is the sane and virile spirituality. The calm and
\n\t\t\tcompassion of Buddha victorious over ignorance and suffering, the
\n\t\t\tmeditation of the thinker tranced in communion with the Eternal,
\n\t\t\tlifted above the seekings of thought into identity with a supreme
\n\t\t\tLight, the rapture of the saint made one by love in the pure heart
\n\t\t\twith the transcendent and universal Love, the will of the Karmayogin
\n\t\t\traised above egoistic desire and passion into the impersonality of
\n\t\t\tthe divine and universal Will, these things on which India has set
\n\t\t\tthe highest value and which have been the supreme endeavour of her
\n\t\t\tgreatest<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 65<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nspirits, are not sane, not
\nvirile, This, one may be allowed to say, is a very Occidental and up-to-date
\nidea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne,
\nAbraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure
\nhenceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action,
\nbut as our typical heroes and exemplars of spirituality. Not Buddha, not Christ,
\nChaitanya, St. Francis, Ramakrishna; these are either semi-barbaric Orientals or
\ntouched by the feminine insanity of an Oriental religion. The impression made on
\nan Indian mind resembles the reaction that a cultured intellectual might feel if
\nhe were told that good cooking, good dressing, good engineering, good
\nschoolmastering are the true beauty and their pursuit the right, sane, virile
\naesthetic cult, and literature, architecture, sculpture and painting are only a
\nuseless scribbling on paper, an insane hacking of stone and an effeminate
\ndaubing of canvas; Vauban, Pestalozzi, Dr. Parr, Vatal and Beau Brummel are then
\nthe true heroes of artistic creation and not da Vinci, Angelo, Sophocles, Dante,
\nShakespeare or Rodin. Whether Mr. Archer’s epithets and his accusations against
\nIndian spirituality stand in the comparison, let the judicious determine. But
\nmeanwhile we see the opposition of the standpoints and begin to understand the
\ninwardness of the difference between the West <\/font> <\/span>
\nand India.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n           
\n<\/font> <\/span>This forms the gravamen of the
\ncharge against the effective <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nvalue of Indian philosophy, that it turns <\/font> <\/span>
\naway <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nfrom life, nature, <\/font> <\/span>
\nvital wilI and the
\neffort of man upon earth. It denies all value to life; it leads not towards the
\nstudy of nature, but away from it. It expels all volitional individuality; it
\npreaches the unreality of the world, detachment from terrestrial interests, the
\nunimpor\u00adtance of the life of the moment compared with the endless chain of past
\nand future existences. It is an enervating metaphysics tangled up with false
\nnotions of pessimism, asceticism, Karma and reincarnation, – all of them ideas
\nfatal to that supreme spiritual thing, volitional individuality. This is a
\ngrotesquely exaggerated and false notion of Indian culture and philosophy, got
\nup by presenting one side only of the Indian mind in colours of a sombre
\nemphasis, after a manner which I suppose Mr. Archer has learned from the modern
\nmasters of realism. But in<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 66<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tsubstance and spirit
\nit is a fairly correct statement of the notions which the European mind has
\nformed in the past about the character of Indian thought and culture, sometimes
\nin igno\u00adrance, sometimes in defiance of the evidence. For a time even it
\nmanaged to impress some strong shadow of this error on the mind of educated
\nIndia. It is best to begin by setting right the tones of the picture; that
\ndone, we can better judge the opposition of mentality which is at the bottom of
\nthe criticism. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

To say that Indian philosophy has led away from the study of nature is
\nto state a gross unfact and to ignore the magnificent history of Indian
\ncivilisation. If by nature is meant physical Nature, the plain truth is that no
\nnation before the modem epoch carried scientific research so far and with such
\nsignal success as India of ancient times. That is a truth which lies on 1he face
\nof history for all to read; it has been brought forward with great force and
\nmuch wealth of detail by Indian scholars and scientists of high eminence, but it
\nwas already known and acknowledged by European savants who had taken the trouble
\nto make a com\u00adparative study in the subject. Not only was India in the first
\nrank in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, surgery, all the branches
\nof physical knowledge which were practised in ancient times, but she was, along
\nwith the Greeks, the teacher of the Arabs from whom Europe recovered the lost
\nhabit of scientific enquiry and got the basis from which modern science started.
\nIn many directions India had the priority of discovery, – to take only two
\nstriking examples among a multitude, the decimal no\u00adtation in mathematics or the
\nperception that the earth is a moving body in astronomy, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> cal<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span> prthvi sthir<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span> bh<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>ti, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nthe earth moves and only appears to be still, said the Indian astronomer
\nmany centuries before Galileo. This great development would hardly have been
\npossible in a nation whose thinkers and men of learn\u00ading were led by its
\nmetaphysical tendencies to turn away from the study of nature. A remarkable
\nfeature of the Indian mind was a close attention to the things of life, a
\ndisposition to observe minutely its salient facts, to systematise and to found
\nin each department of it a science, Shastra, well-founded scheme and rule. That
\nis at least a good beginning of the scientific tendency<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Page
\n\t\t\t– 67<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nand not the sign of a culture capable only of
\nunsubstantial meta\u00adphysics. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nIt is perfectly true that
\nIndian science came abruptly to a halt somewhere about the thirteenth century
\nand a period of darkness and inactivity prevented it from proceeding forward or
\nsharing at once in the vast modern development of scientific knowledge. But
\nthis was not due to any increase or intolerance of the metaphysical tendency
\ncalling the national mind away from physical nature. It was part of a general
\ncessation of new intellectual activity, for philosophy too ceased to develop
\nalmost at the same time. The last great original attempts at spiritual
\nphilosophy are dated only a century or two later than the names of the last
\ngreat original scientists. It is true also that Indian metaphysics did not
\nattempt, as modern philosophy has at\u00adtempted without success, to read the truth
\nof existence princi\u00ad<\/font><\/span>pally by the light of the truths of physical
\nNature. This ancient <\/font> <\/span>
\nwisdom founded itself rather upon an inner experimental
\npsycho\u00adlogy and a profound psychic science, India’s special strength, – but
\nstudy of mind too and of our inner forces is surely study of nature, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nin which her success was greater than in physical knowledge. This she
\ncould not but do, since it was the spiritual truth of existence for which she
\nwas seeking; nor is any really great and enduring philosophy possible except on
\nthis basis. It is true also that the harmony she established in her culture be\u00adtween
\nphilosophical truth and truth of psychology and religion was not extended in
\nthe same degree to the truth of physical Nature; physical Science had not then
\narrived at the great uni\u00adversal generalisations which would have made and are
\nnow making that synthesis entirely possible. Nevertheless from the beginning,
\nfrom as early as the thought of the Vedas, the Indian mind had recognised that
\nthe same general laws and powers hold in the spiritual, the psychological and
\nthe physical existence. It discovered too the omnipresence of life, affirmed
\nthe evolution of the soul in Nature from the vegetable and the animal to the
\nhuman form, asserted on the basis of philosophic intuition and spiritual and
\npsychological experience many of the truths which modern science is reaffirming
\nfrom its own side of the approach to knowledge. These things too were not the
\nresults of a barren<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 68<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and empty metaphysics, not the inventions of bovine
\nnavelgazing dreamers. <\/font> <\/p>\n

\nEqually is it a
\nmisrepresentation to say that Indian culture denies all value to life, detaches
\nfrom terrestrial interests and insists on the unimportance of the life of the
\nmoment. To read these European comments one would imagine that in all Indian
\nthought there was nothing but the nihilistic school of Buddhism and the
\nmonistic illusionism of Shankara and that all Indian art, literature and social
\nthinking were nothing but the statement of their recoil from the falsehood and
\nvanity of things. It does not follow that because these things are what the
\naverage European has heard about India or what most interests or strikes the
\nEuro\u00adpean scholar in her thought, therefore they are, however great may have
\nbeen their influence, the whole of Indian thinking. The ancient civilisation of
\nIndia founded itself very expressly upon four human interests; first, desire and
\nenjoyment, next, material, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and
\nbody, thirdly, ethical conduct and the right law of individual and social life,
\nand, lastly spiritual liberation; <\/font> k<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>ma, artha, dharma,
\nmoksa. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>The business of culture and social organisation was to lead, to satisfy,
\nto support these things in man and to build some harmony of the forms and
\nmotives. Except in very rare cases the satisfaction of the three mundane
\nobjects must run before the other; fullness of life must precede the surpassing
\nof life. The debt to the family, the community and the gods could not be
\nscamped; earth must have her due and the relative its play, even if beyond it
\nthere was the glory of heaven or the peace of the Absolute. There was no
\npreaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe symmetric character of
\nancient Indian life and the vivid variety of its literature were inconsistent
\nwith any exclusive other-worldly direction. The great mass of Sanskrit
\nliterature is a literature of human life; certain philosophic and religious
\nwritings are devoted to the withdrawal from it, but even these are not as a
\nrule contemptuous of its value. If the Indian mind gave the highest importance
\nto a spiritual release, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> and what\u00adever the positivist mood may say, a
\nspiritual liberation of some kind is the highest possibility of the human
\nspirit,  <\/font> <\/span>― <\/font> <\/span>
\nit was not<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 69<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tinterested in that alone. It looked equally at ethics, law, politics,
\nsociety, the sciences, the arts and crafts, everything that apper\u00adtains to human
\nlife. It thought on these things deeply and scrutinisingly and it wrote of
\nthem with power and knowledge. What a fine monument of political and
\nadministrative genius is the <\/font> sukra-n<\/font><\/i><\/span>ī<\/font><\/span>ti,
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/i>to take one example only, and
\nwhat a mirror of the practical organisation of a great civilised people! Indian
\nart <\/font> <\/span>
\nwas not always solely hieratic, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nit seemed so only because it is
\n<\/font> <\/span>in the temples and
\ncave cathedrals that its greatest work survived; as the old literature
\ntestifies, as we see from the Rajput and Mogul paintings, it was devoted as
\nmuch to the court and the city and to cultural ideas and the life of the people
\nas to the temple and monastery and their motives. Indian education of women as
\nwell as of men was more rich and comprehensive and many-sided than any system
\nof education before modern times. The documents which prove these things are
\nnow available to anyone who cares to study. It is time that this parrot talk
\nabout the unpractical, metaphysical, quietistic, anti-vital character of Indian
\ncivilisation should cease and give place to a true and understanding estimate.
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut it is perfectly true that
\nIndian culture has always set the highest value on that in man which rises
\nbeyond the terrestrial preoccupation; it has held up the goal of a supreme and
\narduous self-exceeding as the summit of human endeavour. The spiritual life was
\nto its view a nobler thing than the life of external power and enjoyment, the
\nthinker greater than the man of action, the spiritual man greater than the
\nthinker. The soul that lives in God is more perfect than the soul that lives
\nonly in outward mind or only for the claims and joys of thinking and living
\nmatter. It is here that the difference comes in between the typical Western and
\nthe typical Indian mentality. The West has acquired the re\u00adligious mind rather
\nthan possessed it by nature and it has always worn its acquisition with a
\ncertain looseness. India has cons\u00adtantly believed in worlds behind of which the
\nmaterial world is only the ante-chamber. Always she has seen a self within us
\ngreater than the mental and vital self, greater than the ego. Always she has
\nbowed her intellect and heart before a near and present Eternal in which the
\ntemporal being exists and to which in man it increasingly turns for
\ntranscendence. The sentiment<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 70<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tof the Bengali poet, the wonderful singer and rapt devotee of the Divine
\nMother,<\/font><\/span>―<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

How rich an
\nestate man lies fallow here!
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>If this were tilled, a golden crop
\nwould spring, <\/font> <\/p>\n

\n―<\/font><\/span> expresses the real Indian feeling about human life. But it is most
\nattracted by the greater spiritual possibilities man alone of terrestrial
\nbeings possesses. The ancient Aryan culture recog\u00adnised all human
\npossibilities, but put this highest of all and graded life according to a
\ntransitional scale in its system of the four classes and the four orders.
\nBuddhism first gave an exag\u00adgerated and enormous extension to the ascetic ideal
\nand the monastic impulse, erased the transition and upset the balance. Its
\nvictorious system left only two orders, the householder and the ascetic, the
\nmonk and the layman, an effect which subsists to the present day. It is this
\nupsetting of the Dharma for which we find it fiercely attacked in the Vishnu
\nPurana under the veil of an apologue, for it weakened in the end the life of
\nsociety by its tense exaggeration and its hard system of opposites. But
\nBuddhism too had another side, a side turned towards action and creation, and
\ngave a new light, a new meaning and a new moral and ideal power to life. Afterwards
\nthere came the lofty illu\u00adsionism of Shankara at the close of the two greatest
\nknown millenniums of Indian culture. Life thenceforward was too much
\ndepreciated as an unreality or a relative phenomenon, in the end not worth
\nliving, not worth our assent to it and persistence in its motives. But this
\ndogma was not universally accepted, nor admitted without a struggle; Shankara
\nwas even denounced by his adversaries as a masked Buddhist. The later Indian
\nmind has been powerfully impressed by his idea of Maya; but popular thought and
\nsentiment was never wholly shaped by it. The re\u00adligions of devotion which see
\nin life a play or Lila of God and not a half-sombre, half-glaring illusion
\ndefacing the white silence of eternity had a closer growing influence. If they
\ndid not counter\u00adact, they humanised the austere ideal. It is only recently that
\neducated India accepted the ideas of English and German scholars, imagined for
\na time Shankara’s Mayavada to be the one<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 71<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\thighest thing, if not the whole of our philosophy, and put it in a place
\nof exclusive, prominence. But against that tendency too there is now a powerful
\nreaction, not towards replacing the spirit without life by life without the
\nspirit, but towards a spiritual possession of mind, life and matter. Still it
\nis true that the ascetic ideal which in the ancient vigour of our culture was
\nthe fine spire of life mounting into the eternal existence, became latterly its
\ntop-heavy dome and tended under the weight of its bare and imposing sublimity
\nto crush the rest of the edifice. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut here also we should get
\nthe right view, away from all exaggeration and false stress. Mr. Archer drags
\nin Karma and Reincarnation into his list of anti-vital Indian notions. But it
\nis preposterous, it is a stupid misunderstanding to speak of re\u00adincarnation as
\na doctrine which preaches the unimportance of the life of the moment compared
\nwith the endless chain of past and future existences. The doctrine of
\nreincarnation and Karma tells us that the soul has a past which shaped its present
\nbirth and existence; it has a future which our present action is sha\u00adping; our
\npast has taken and our future will take the form of re\u00adcurring terrestrial.
\nbirths and Karma, our own action, is the power which by its continuity and
\ndevelopment as a subjective and objective force determines the whole nature and
\neventuality of these repeated existences. There is nothing here to depreciate
\nthe importance of the present life. On the contrary the doctrine gives it
\nimmense vistas and enormously enhances the value of effort and action. The
\nnature of the present act is of an incal\u00adculable importance because it
\ndetermines not only our imme\u00addiate but our subsequent future. There will be
\nfound too insis\u00adtently pervading Indian literature and deeply settled in the
\nmind of the people the idea of a whole-hearted concentrated present action and
\nenergy, <\/font> tapasy<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nas a miraculous all-powerful
\nforce for the acquisition of our desires, whether the material or the spiritual
\ndesires of the human will. No doubt, our present life loses the exclusive
\nimportance which we give to it when we re\u00adgard it only as an ephemeral moment
\nin Time never to be re\u00adpeated, our one sole opportunity, without any
\nafter-existence beyond it. But a narrow exaggerated insistence on the present
\nshuts up the human soul in the prison of the moment: it may<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 72<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ngive <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\na feverish intensity
\nto action, but it is inimical to calm and <\/font> <\/span>
\njoy and greatness of the
\nspirit. No doubt, too, the idea that our present sufferings are the results of
\nour own past action, imparts a calm, a resignation, an acquiescence to the
\nIndian mind which the restless Western intelligence finds it difficult to
\nunderstand or tolerate. This may degenerate in a time of great national weak\u00adness,
\ndepression and misfortune, into a quietistic fatalism that may extinguish the
\nfire of the reparative endeavour. But that is not its inevitable turn, nor is
\nit the turn given to it in the records of the more vigorous past of our culture.
\nThe note there is of action, of <\/font> tapasy<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nThere is too
\nanother turn given to this belief which increased with time, the Buddhistic
\ndogma of the suc\u00adcession of rebirths as a chain of Karma from which the soul
\nmust escape into the eternal silence. The notion has strongly affected
\nHinduism; but whatever is depressing in it, belongs not properly to the
\ndoctrine of rebirth but to the other elements stigmatised as an ascetic
\npessimism by the vitalistic thought of Europe. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPessimism is not peculiar to
\nthe Indian mind: it has been an element in the thought of all developed
\ncivilisations. It is the sign of a culture already old, the fruit of a mind
\nwhich has lived much, experienced much, sounded life and found it full of
\nsuffering, sounded joy and achievement and found, that all is vanity and
\nvexation of spirit and there is nothing new under the sun or, if there is, its
\nnovelty is but of a day. Pessimism has been as ram\u00adpant in Europe as in India
\nand it is certainly a singular thing to find the materialist of all people
\nbringing against Indian spiri\u00adtuality this accusation of lowering the values of
\nexistence. For what can be more depressing than the materialistic view of the
\nquite physical and ephemeral nature of human life? There is nothing in the most
\nascetic notes of the Indian mind like the black gloom of certain kinds of
\nEuropean pessimism, a city of dreadful night without joy here or hope beyond,
\nand nothing like the sad and shrinking attitude before death and the
\ndissolution of the body which pervades Western literature. The note of asce\u00adtic
\npessimism often found in Christianity is a distinctly Western note; for it is
\nabsent in Christ’s teachings. The mediaeval religion with its cross, its
\nsalvation by suffering, its devil-ridden and flesh-ridden world and the flames
\nof eternal hell waiting for man<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 73<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nbeyond the grave has a character of pain and terror alien to <\/i>the
\nIndian mind, to which indeed religious terror is a stranger. The suffering of
\nthe world is there, but it fades into a bliss of spiritual peace or ecstasy
\nbeyond the sorrow line. Buddha’s teaching laid heavy stress on the sorrow and
\nimpermanence of things, but the Buddhist Nirvana won by the heroic spirit of
\nmoral self-conquest and calm wisdom is a state of ineffable calm and joy, open
\nnot only to a few like the Christian heavens, but to all, and very diffe\u00adrent
\nfrom the blank cessation which is the mechanical release of our pain and
\nstruggle, the sorry Nirvana of the western pessi\u00admist, the materialist’s brute
\nflat end of all things. Even illusion\u00adism preached, not a gospel of sorrow, but
\nthe final unreality of joy and grief and the whole world-existence. It admits
\nthe prac\u00adtical validity of life and allows its values to those who dwell in the
\nIgnorance. And like all Indian asceticism it places before man the possibility
\nof a great effort, a luminous concentration of knowledge, a mighty urge of the
\nwill by which he can rise to an absolute peace or an absolute bliss. A not
\nignoble pessimism there has been about man’s normal life as it is, a profound
\nsense of its imperfection, a disgust of its futile obscurity, smallness and
\nignorance; but an unconquerable optimism as regards his spiri\u00adtual possibility
\nwas the other side of this mood. If it did not be\u00adlieve in the ideal of an
\nimmense material progress of the race or a perfection of the normal man with
\nearth as its field, it believed in a sure spiritual progress for every
\nindividual and an ultimate perfection lifted above subjection to the shocks of
\nlife. And this pessimism with regard to life is not the sole note of the Indian
\nreligious mind; its most popular forms accept life as a game of God and see
\nbeyond our present conditions for every human being the eternal nearness to the
\nDivine. A luminous ascent into, godhead was always held to be a consummation
\nwell within man’s grasp. That can hardly be called a depressing or pessi\u00admistic
\ntheory of existence. <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThere can be no great and
\ncomplete culture without some element of asceticism in it; for asceticism means
\nthe self-denial and self-conquest by which man represses his lower impulses and
\nrises to greater heights of his nature. Indian asceticism is not mournful
\ngospel of sorrow or a painful mortification of the<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 74<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tflesh in morbid penance, but a noble effort towards a
\n\t\t\thigher joy and an absolute possession of the spirit. A great joy of
\n\t\t\tself conquest, a still joy of inner peace and the forceful joy of a
\n\t\t\tsupreme self-exceeding are at the heart of its experience. It is
\n\t\t\tonly a mind besotted with the flesh or too enamoured of external
\n\t\t\tlife and its restless effort and inconstant satisfactions that can
\n\t\t\tdeny the nobility or idealistic loftiness of the ascetic endeavour.
\n\t\t\tBut there are the exaggerations and deflections that all ideals
\n\t\t\tundergo. Those which are the most difficult to humanity suffer from
\n\t\t\tthem most, and asceticism may become a fanatic self-torture, a crude
\n\t\t\trepression of the nature, a tired flight from existence or an
\n\t\t\tindo\u00adlent avoidance of the trouble of life and a weak recoil from
\n\t\t\tthe effort demanded of our manhood. Practised not by the
\n\t\t\tcompa\u00adratively few who are called to it, but preached in its extreme
\n\t\t\tform to all and adopted by unfit thousands, its values may be
\n\t\t\tde\u00adbased, counterfeits may abound and the vital force of the
\n\t\t\tcom\u00admunity lose its elasticity and its forward spring. It would be
\n\t\t\tidle to pretend that such defects and untoward results have been
\n\t\t\tabsent in India. I do not accept the ascetic ideal as the final
\n\t\t\tsolution of the problem of human existence; but even its
\n\t\t\texag\u00adgerations have a nobler spirit behind them than the vitalistic
\n\t\t\texaggerations which are the opposite defect of Western culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAfter all, asceticism and illusionism are minor
\n\t\t\tissues. The point to be pressed is that Indian spirituality in its
\n\t\t\tgreatest eras and in its inmost significance has not been a tired
\n\t\t\tquietism or a conventional monasticism, but a high effort of the
\n\t\t\thuman spirit to rise beyond the life of desire and vital
\n\t\t\tsatisfaction and arrive at an acme of spiritual calm, greatness,
\n\t\t\tstrength, illumination, divine realisation, settled peace and bliss.
\n\t\t\tThe question between the culture of India and the vehement secular
\n\t\t\tactivism of the modern mind is whether such an endeavour is or is
\n\t\t\tnot essential to man’s highest perfection. And if it is, then the
\n\t\t\tother question arises whether it is to be only an exceptional force
\n\t\t\tconfined to a few rare spirits or can be made the main inspiring
\n\t\t\tmotive-power of a great and complete human civilisation<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 75<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\n\t\t 4<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\nA<\/font>
\nRIGHT<\/font> <\/span>
\njudgment of the
\nlife-value of Indian philosophy is intimately bound up with a right apprecia\u00adtion
\nof the life-value of Indian religion; religion and philosophy are too intimately
\none in this culture to be divided from each other. Indian philosophy is not a
\npurely rational gymnastic of speculative logic in the air, an ultra-subtle
\nprocess of thought-spinning and word-spinning like the greater part of
\nphilosophy in Europe; it is the organised intellectual theory of the intuitive
\nordering perception of all that is the soul, the thought, the dynamic truth,
\nthe heart of feeling and power of Indian religion. Indian religion is Indian
\nspiritual philosophy put into action and experience. Whatever in the religious
\nthought and practice of that vast, rich, thousand-sided, infinitely pliable,
\nyet very firmly structured system we call Hinduism, does not in intention come
\nunder this description, ―<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>whatever its practice, ―<\/font><\/span> is either social <\/font> <\/span>
\nframework or projection of ritual buttresses or
\nsurvival of old supports and additions. Or else it is an excrescence and growth
\nof corruption, a degradation of its truth and meaning in the vulgar mind, part
\nof the debased mixtures that overtake all reli\u00adgious thinking and practice. Or,
\nin some instances, it is dead habit contracted in periods of fossilisation or
\nill-assimilated extra\u00adneous matter gathered into this giant body. The inner
\nprinciple of Hinduism, the most tolerant and receptive of religious sys\u00adtems,
\nis not sharply exclusive like the religious spirit of Chris\u00adtianity or Islam;
\nas far as that could be without loss of its own powerful idiosyncrasy and law
\nof being, it has been synthetic, acquisitive, inclusive. Always it has taken in
\nfrom every side and trusted to the power of assimilation that burns in its
\nspiritual heart and in the white heat of its flaming centre to turn even the
\nmost unpromising material into forms for its spirit. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut before we turn to see what
\nit is that so fiercely irritates and exasperates our hostile Western critic in
\nIndian religious philosophy, it is as well to consider what he has to say about
\nother sides of this ancient, dateless and still vigorously living,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Page – 76<\/p>\n

\n

growing, all-assimilating Hinduism. For he has a great deal to say and
\nit is unsparing and without measure. There is not the intemperate drunkenness
\nof denunciation and vomit of false witness, hatred, uncharitableness<\/span>
\nand all things degrading and unspiritual<\/span> and unclean
\nthat are the mark of a certain type of "Christian literature" on the
\nsubject, ― for example the super\u00adlative specimen of this noxious compound
\nwhich Sir John Wood\u00adroffe<\/span> has cited from the pages of
\nMr. Harold Begbie<\/span>, "virile" perhaps if
\nviolence is virile, but certainly not sane. But still it is a mass of unsparing
\ncondemnation, exaggerated where it has any foundation at all and serenely
\nillogical in its blithe joy of deli\u00adberate misrepresentation. Still, even from
\nthis crude mass it is possible to disengage the salient and typical antipathies
\nthat re\u00adcommend it to the uncritical and even to many critical minds, and it is
\nthese alone that it is useful to discover. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe total irrationality of
\nHinduism is the main theme of the attack. Mr. Archer does casually admit a
\nphilosophical, and one might therefore suppose a rational element in the
\nreligion of India, but he disparages and dismisses as false and positively
\nharmful the governing ideas of this religious philosophy as he understands or
\nimagines he understands them. He explains the pervading irrational character of
\nHindu religion by the allegation that the Indian people have always gravitated
\ntowards the form rather than the substance and towards the letter rather than
\nthe spirit. One would have supposed that this kind of gravitation is a fairly
\nuniversal feature of the human mind, not only in religion, but in society,
\npolitics, art, literature, even in science. In every conceivable human activity
\na cult of the form and forgetfulness of the spirit, a turn towards convention,
\nexternalism, unthinking dogma has been the common drift of the human mind from
\nChina to Peru and it does not skip Europe on its way. And Eu\u00adrope where men
\nhave constantly fought, killed, burned, tortured, imprisoned, persecuted in
\nevery way imaginable by human stupi\u00addity and cruelty for the sake of dogmas,
\nwords, rites and forms of church government, Europe where these things have
\ndone duty for spirituality and religion, has hardly a record which would
\nentitle it to cast this reproach in the face of the East. But, we are told,
\nthis gravitation afflicts the Indian religion more than <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-77<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

any other creed. Higher Hinduism can be scarcely said to exist except in
\ncertain small reforming sects and current Hinduism, the popular religion, is
\nthe cult of a monstrous folk-lore oppres\u00adsive and paralysing to the
\nimagination, ― although here again one would think that if anything an
\nexcess rather than a para\u00adlysis of the creative imagination might be charged
\nagainst the Indian mind. Animism and magic are the prevailing charac\u00adteristics.
\nThe Indian people has displayed a genius for obfusca\u00adting reason and
\nformalising, materialising and degrading reli\u00adgion. If India has possessed
\ngreat thinkers, she has not extracted from their thoughts a rational and
\nennobling religion: the devo\u00adtion of the Spanish or the Russian peasant is
\nrational and en\u00adlightened by comparison. Irrationlism<\/span>,
\nantirationalism<\/span>, ― that in this laboured and
\novercharged accusation is the constant cry; it is the keynote of the Archer
\ntune. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe phenomenon that has astonished
\nand disgusted the mind of the critic is the obstinate survival in India of the
\nold religious spirit and large antique religious types unsubmerged<\/span>
\nby the flood of modernism and its devastating utilitarian free thought. India,
\nhe tells us, still clings to what not only the Western world, but China and
\nJapan have outgrown for ages. The religion is a superstition full of
\nperformances of piety repul\u00adsive to the free enlightened secular mind of the
\nmodern man. Its daily practices put it far outside the pale of civilisation.
\nPer\u00adhaps, if it had confined its practice decorously to church attend\u00adance on
\nSundays and to marriage and funeral services and grace before meat, it might
\nhave been admitted as human and tolerable! As it is, it is the great anachronism
\nof the modern world; it has not been cleansed for thirty centuries; it is
\npaganism, it is a wholly unfiltered paganism; its tendency towards pollution ra\u00adther
\nthan purification marks out its place as incomparably the lowest in the scale
\nof world religions. An ingenious remedy is proposed. Christianity destroyed
\nPaganism in Europe; there\u00adfore, since any immediate or very rapid triumph of
\nsceptical free-thought would be too happily abrupt a transition to be quite
\nfeasible, we unenlightened, polluted, impure Hindus are advised to take up for
\na time with Christianity, poor irrational thing that it is, dark and deformed
\nthough it looks in the ample <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 78<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nlight of the positivist reason, because
\nChristianity and especially Protestant Christianity will be at least a good
\npreparatory step towards the noble freedom and stainless purities of atheism
\nand agnosticism. But if even this little cannot be hoped for in spite of
\nnumerous famine conversions, at any rate Hinduism must somehow or other get
\nitself filtered, and until that hygienic opera\u00adtion has been executed, India
\nmust be denied fellowship on equal terms with the civilised nations.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nIncidentally,
\nto support this charge of irrationalism and its companion charge of Paganism,
\nwe find a third and more dama\u00adging count brought against us and our religious
\nculture, an alleged want of all moral worth and ethical substance. There is now
\nan increasing perception, even in Europe, that reason is not the last word of
\nhuman mind, not quite the one and only sovereign way to truth and certainly not
\nthe sole arbiter of reli\u00adgious and spiritual truth. The accusation of paganism
\ntoo does not settle the question, since plenty of cultivated minds are well
\nable to see that there were many great, true and beautiful things in the ancient
\nreligions that were lumped together by Christian ignorance under that
\ninappropriate nickname. Nor has the world been entirely a gainer by losing
\nthese high ancient forms and motives. But whatever the actual practice of men,
\n<\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span> and in this respect the normal human being is a singular mixture of the
\nsin\u00adcere but quite ineffective, the just respectable, would-be ethical man and
\nthe self-deceiving or semi-hypocritical Pharisee, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> one can always appeal with force to a moralistic prejudice. All reli\u00adgions
\nraise high the flag of morality and, whether religious or secular-minded, all
\nbut the antinomian, the rebel and the cynic, profess to follow or at least to
\nadmit that standard in their lives. This accusation is therefore about the most
\nprejudicial charge that can be brought against any religion. The
\nself-constituted prosecuting judge whose diatribe we are examining brings it
\nwithout scruple and without measure. He has discovered that Hinduism is not an
\nennobling or even a morally helpful religion; if it has talked much of
\nrighteousness, it has never claimed moral teaching as one of its functions. A
\nreligion that can talk much of righteousness without performing the function of
\nmoral teach\u00ading, sounds rather like a square which can make no claim to be<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 79<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

a quadrilateral; but let that pass. If the Hindu is comparatively free
\nfrom the grosser Western vices, ― as yet, only and only un\u00adtil he enters
\n"the pale of civilisation" by adopting Christianity or otherwise,
\n― it is not because there is any ethical strain in his character; it is
\nbecause these vices do not come in his way. His social system founded on the
\nbarbarous idea of the Dharma, of the divine and the human, the universal and
\nthe individual, the ethical and the social law, and supported on it at every
\npoint, has stupidly neglected to supply him with the opportunities of departing
\nfrom it so liberally provided by Western civilisation! And yet the whole
\ncharacter of Hinduism, which is the character of the people, indicates, we are
\ncalmly told, a melancholy procli\u00advity towards whatever is monstrous and
\nunwholesome! On that highest note of unmeasured denunciation we may leave Mr.
\nArcher’s monstrous and unwholesome dance of disparagement and turn to disengage
\nthe temperamental sources of his dislike and anger. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nTwo things especially
\ndistinguish the normal European mind, ―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nfor we must leave
\naside some great souls and some great thinkers or some moments or epochs of
\nabnormal religiosity and look at the dominant strain. Its two significant
\ncharacters are the cult of the inquiring, defining, effective, practical reason
\nand the cult of life. The great high tides of European civilisation, Greek
\nculture, the Roman world before Constantine, the Renaissance, the modern age
\nwith its two colossal idols, Indus\u00adtrialism and physical Science, have come to
\nthe West on the strong ascending urge of this double force. Whenever the tide
\nof these powers has ebbed, the European mind has entered into much confusion,
\ndarkness and weakness. Christianity failed to spiritualise Europe, whatever it
\nmay have done towards huma\u00adnising it in certain ethical directions, because it
\nran counter to these two master instincts; it denied the supremacy of the
\nreason and put its anathema on a satisfied or strenuous fullness of life. But
\nin Asia there has been neither this predominance of reason and the life-cult
\nnor any incompatibility of these two powers with the religious spirit. The
\ngreat ages of Asia, the strong culmina\u00adtions of her civilisation and culture,
\n― in India the high Vedic beginning, the grand spiritual stir of the
\nUpanishads, the wide<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 80<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nflood <\/font> <\/span>
\nof Buddhism, Vedanta, Sankhya, the Puranic<\/span> and Tantric religi<\/font><\/span>ons,
\nthe flowering of Vaishnavism<\/span> and Shaivism<\/span>
\nin the Jnern<\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nkingdoms
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>―
\nhave come in on a surge of spiritual light and<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nmassive or intense
\nclimbing of the religious or the <\/font> religio\u00adphi<\/font>losophic<\/font><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nmind
\nto its own heights, its noblest realities, its largest<\/font><\/span>
\nriches of vision and experience. It was in such periods that intellect,
\nthought, poetry, the arts, the material life flowered into <\/font> <\/span>
\nsplendour. The
\nebbing of spirituality brought in, always on the c<\/font><\/span>ontrary,
\nthe weakness of these other powers, periods of fossi\u00adlisation or at least
\ndepression of the power of life, tracts of decline, even beginnings of decay.
\nThis is a clue to which we have to hold if we would understand the great lines
\nof divergence between the East and the West.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span>Towards
\nthe spirit if not all the way to it man must rise or he misses his upward curve
\nof strength; but there are different ways of approach to its secret forces.
\nEurope, it would seem, must go through the life and the reason and find
\nspiritual truth by their means as a crown and a revelation; she cannot at once
\ntake the kingdom of heaven by violence, as the saying of Christ would have men
\ndo. The attempt confuses and obscures her reason, is combated by her life
\ninstincts and leads to revolt, nega\u00adtion, a return to her own law of nature.
\nBut Asia, or at any rate, India lives naturally by a spiritual influx from
\nabove; that alone brings with it a spiritual evocation of her higher powers of
\nmind and <\/font> <\/span>life. The two continents are two sides of the integral orb of hum<\/font><\/span>anity and until they meet and fuse, each must move to what\u00adever progress
\nor culmination the spirit in humanity seeks, by the law of its being, its own
\nproper Dharma. A one-sided world would have been <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe poorer for its uniformity
\nand the monotone of <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\na single culture; there is a
\nneed of divergent lines of advance until we can raise our heads into that
\ninfinity of the spirit in which there is a light broad enough to draw together
\nand recon\u00adcile all, highest ways of thinking, feeling and living. That is a
\n<\/font> <\/span>truth which the
\nviolent Indian assailant of a materialistic Europe or the contemptuous enemy or
\ncold disparager of Asiatic or Indian culture agree to ignore. There is here no
\nreal question between barbarism and civilisation, for all masses of men are
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nbarbarians labouring to civilise themselves. There is only
\none<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 81<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of the
\ndynamic differences necessary for the completeness of the growing orb of human
\nculture. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile the divergence
\nunfortunately gives rise to a cons\u00adtant warring opposition of outlooks in
\nreligion and in most other matters, and the opposition brings with it more or less
\nof an in\u00adcapacity for mutual understanding and even a positive enmity or
\ndislike. The emphasis of the Western mind is on life, the outer life above all,
\nthe things that are grasped, visible, tangible. The inner life is taken only as
\nan intelligent reflection of the outer world, with the reason for a firm putter
\nof things into shape, an intelligent critic, builder, refiner of the external
\nmaterials offered by Nature. The present use of living, to be wholly in this
\nlife and for this life, is all the preoccupation of Europe. The present life of
\nthe individual and the continuous physical existence and developing mind and
\nknowledge of humanity make up her one absorbing interest. Even from religion
\nthe West is apt to demand that it shall subordinate its aim or its effect to
\nthis utility of the immediate visible world. The Greek and the Roman looked on
\nreligious cult as a sanction for the life of the "polis" or a force
\nfor the just firmness and stability of the State. The Middle Ages when the
\nChristian idea was at its height were an interregnum; it was a period during
\nwhich the Western mind was trying to assimilate in its emotion and intelligence
\nan Oriental ideal. But it never succeeded in firmly living it and had
\neventually to throw it aside or keep it only for a verbal homage. The present
\nmoment is in the same way for Asia an interregnum dominated by an at\u00adtempt to
\nassimilate in its intellect and life in spite of a rebellious soul and
\ntemperament the Western outlook and its earth-bound ideal. And it may be safely
\npredicted that Asia too will not suc\u00adceed in living out this alien law firmly
\nor for a long time. But in Europe even the Christian idea, marked in its purity
\nby the em\u00adphasis of its introspective tendency and an uncompromising
\nother-worldliness, had to compromise with the demands of the Occidental
\ntemperament and in doing that it lost its own inner kingdom. The genuine
\ntemperament of the West triumphed and in an increasing degree rationalised,
\nsecularised and almost annihilated the religious spirit. Religion became more
\nand more a pale and ever thinning shadow pushed aside into a small<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 82<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ncorner <\/font> <\/span>
\nof
\nthe life and a still smaller corner of the nature and <\/font> <\/span>
\nawaiting sentence of death or
\nexile, while outside the doors of the vanquished Church marched on their
\nvictorious way the triumphant secular pomps<\/span> of the
\noutward life and the positive reason and materialistic science. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe tendency to secularism is
\na necessary consequence of the cult of life and reason divorced from their inmost
\ninlook<\/span>. Ancient Europe did not separate religion and
\nlife; but that was because it had no need for the separation. Its religion,
\nonce it got rid of the Oriental element of the mysteries, was a secular
\ninstitution which did not look beyond a certain supraphysical<\/span>
\nsanction and convenient aid to the government of this life. And even then the
\ntendency was to philosophise and reason away the relics of the original
\nreligious spirit, to exile the little shadow that remained of the brooding
\nwings of a suprarational mystery and to get into the clear sunlight of the
\nlogical and practical reason. But modern Europe went farther and to the very
\nend of this way. The more effectually to shake off the obsession of the
\nChristian idea, which like all oriental religious thought claims to make
\nreligion commensurate with life and, against whatever obstacles may be opposed
\nto it by the unregenerate vital nature of the animal man, spiritualise the
\nwhole being and its action, modern Europe separated religion from life, from philosophy,
\nfrom art and science, from politics, from the greater part of social action and
\nsocial existence. And it secularised and rationa\u00adlised too the ethical demand
\nso that it might stand in itself on its own basis and have no need of any aid
\nfrom religious sanction or mystic insistence. At the end of this turn is an
\nantinomian tendency, constantly recurring in the life-history of Europe and now
\nagain in evidence. This force seeks to annul ethics also, not by rising above
\nit into the absolute purity of the spirit, as mystic experience claims to do,
\nbut by breaking out of its barriers below into an exultant freedom of the vital
\nplay. In this evolution reli\u00adgion was left aside, an impoverished system of
\nbelief and cere\u00admony to which one might or might not subscribe with very little
\ndifference to the march of the human mind and life. Its pene\u00adtrating and
\ncolouring power had been reduced to a faint minimum; a superficial pigmentation
\nof dogma, sentiment and<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 83<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

emotion
\nwas all that survived this drastic process. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nEven the poor little comer
\nthat was still conceded to it, intel\u00adlectualism insisted on flooding as much as
\npossible with the light of reason. The trend has been to reduce, not only the infrarational<\/span>, but equally the suprarational refuges of the
\nreli\u00adgious spirit. The old pagan polytheistic symbolism had clothed with its
\nbeautiful figures the ancient idea of a divine Presence and supraphysical<\/span>
\nLife and Power in all Nature and in every particle of life and matter and in
\nall animal existence and in all the mental action of man, but this idea, which
\nto the secularist reason is only an intellectualised animism, had already been
\nruthlessly swept aside. The Divinity had abandoned the earth and lived far
\naloof and remote in other worlds, in a celestial heaven of saints and immortal
\nspirits. But why should there be any other worlds? I admit cried the
\nprogressing intellect, only this mate\u00adrial world to which our reason and senses
\nbear witness. A vague bleak abstraction of spiritual existence without any living
\nhabita\u00adtion, without any means of dynamic nearness was left to satisfy the
\nwintry remnants of the old spiritual sense or the old fantastic illusion. A
\nblank and tepid Theism remained or a rationalised Christianity without either
\nthe name of Christ or his presence. Or why should that even be allowed by the
\ncritical light of the intelligence? A Reason or Power, called God for want of a
\nbetter name, represented by the moral and physical Law in the material
\nuniverse, is quite sufficient for any rational mind, and so we get to Deism, to
\na vacant intellectual formula. Or why should there be any God at all? The
\nreason and the senses by themselves give no witness to God; at best they can
\nmake of Him only a plausible hypothesis. But there is no need of an unsubstantial
\nhypothesis, since Nature is enough and the sole thing of which we have
\nknowledge. Thus by an inevitable process we reach the atheistic or agnostic
\ncult of secularism, the acme of denial, the zenith of the positive
\nintelligence. And there reason and life may hence\u00adforward take their foundation
\nand reign well satisfied over a con\u00adquered world, ― if only that
\ninconvenient veiled ambiguous infinite Something behind will leave them alone
\nfor the future! <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nA temperament, an outlook of
\nthis kind must necessarily be impatient of any such thing as an earnest
\nstraining after the<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 84<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nsuprarational and the infinite. It may tolerate some moderate play of
\nthese fine hallucinations as an innocent indulgence of the speculative mind or the
\nartistic imagination, provided it is not too se\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>rious<\/span> and does not intrude upon
\nlife. But asceticism and otherworldliness are abhorrent to its temperament and
\nfatal to its outlook. Life is a thing to be possessed and enjoyed rationally or
\nforcefully according to our power, but this earthly life, the one thing we
\nknow, our only province. At most a moderate intellectual and ethical <\/font> <\/span>
\nasceticism is
\npermissible, the simple life, plain living, hi<\/font><\/span>gh
\nthinking; but an ecstatic spiritual asceticism is an offence to the reason,
\nalmost a crime. Pessimism of the vitalistic<\/span> kind
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nmay be <\/font> <\/span>
\nallowed its mood or its hour; for it admits that life is an
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nevil that has to be lived and does not cut at its roots. But the obvious
\nright standpoint is to take life as it is and make the most of it, either
\npractically for the best ordering of its mixed good and evil or ideally with
\nsome hope of a relative perfection. If spiri\u00adtuality is to have any meaning, it
\ncan only signify the aim or the <\/font> <\/span>
\nhigh labour of a lofty intelligence, rational will,
\nlimited beauty<\/font><\/span> and moral good which will try to make the best
\nof this life that is, but not vainly look beyond to some unhuman<\/span>,
\nunattainable, infinite or absolute satisfaction. If religion is to survive, let
\nits <\/font> <\/span>
\nfunction
\nbe to serve this kind of spiritual aim, to govern conduct, <\/font> <\/span>
\nto give beauty and purity to our living, but let it minister
\n<\/font> <\/span>only to this sane
\nand virile spirituality, let it keep within the bounds of the practical reason
\nand an earthly intelligence: This description no doubt isolates the main
\nstrands and ignores depar\u00adtures to one side or the other; and in all human
\nnature there must be departures, often of an extreme kind. But it would not, I
\nthink, be an unfair or exaggerated description of the persistent ground and
\ncharacteristic turn of the Western temperament and its outlook and the normal
\npoise of its intelligence. This is its self-fulfilled static poise before it
\nproceeds to that deflection or that self-exceeding to which man is inevitably
\nmoved when he reaches the acme of his normal nature. For he harbours a power in
\nNature that must either grow or else stagnate and cease and disintegrate, and
\nuntil he has found all himself, there is for him no static abiding and no
\npermanent home for his spirit. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nNow when this Western mind is
\nconfronted with the still<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 85<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nsurviving force of Indian religion, thought, culture, it finds that all
\nits standards are denied, exceeded or belittled; all that it honours is given a
\nsecond place, all that it has rejected is still held in honour. Here is a philosoppy<\/span> which founds itself on the immediate reality of
\nthe Infinite, the pressing claim of the Absolute. And this is not as a thing to
\nspeculate about, but as a real Presence and a constant Power which demands the
\nsoul of man and calls it. Here is a mentality which sees the Divine in Nature
\nand man and animal and inanimate thing, God at the beginning, God in the
\nmiddle, God at the end, God everywhere. And all this is not a permissible
\npoetical play of the imagination that need not be taken too seriously by life,
\nbut is put forward as a thing to be lived, realised, put at the back even of
\noutward action, turned into stuff of thought, feeling and conduct! And whole
\ndisciplines are systematised for this purpose, disciplines which men still
\npractise! And whole lives are given up to this pursuit of the supreme Person,
\nthe universal Godhead, the One, the Absolute, the Infinite! And to pursue this
\nimmaterial aim men are still content to abandon the outward life and society
\nand home and family and their most cherished pursuits and all that has to a
\nrational mind a substantial and ascertainable value! Here is a country which is
\nstill heavily coloured with the ochre tint of the garb of the Sannyasin, where
\nthe Beyond is still preached as a truth and men have a living belief in other
\nworlds and reincarnation and a whole army of antique ideas whose truth is quite
\nunverifiable by the instruments of physical Science. Here the experiences of
\nYoga are held to be as true or more true than the experiments of the laboratory.
\nIs this not a thinking of things evidently unthinkable since the rational
\nWestern mind has ceased to think about them? Is it not an attempt to know
\nthings evident\u00adly unknowable since the modern mind has abandoned all attempt to
\nknow them? There is amongst these irrational half-savages an endeavour even to
\nmake this unreal thing the highest flight of life, its very goal, and a
\ngoverning force, a shaping power in art and culture and conduct. But art and
\nculture and conduct are things which, this rational mind tells us, Indian
\nspirituality and religion ought logically not to touch at all; for they belong
\nto the realm of the finite and can only be founded on the intellectual<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 86<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

reason and the practical environment and the truths and suggestions of
\nphysical Nature. There in its native form is the apparent gulf between the two
\nmentalities and it looks unbridgeable. Or rather, the Indian <\/i>mind can
\nunderstand well enough, even when it does not share, the positivist turn of the
\nOccidental intelligence; but it is itself to the latter a thing, if not
\ndamnable, at least abnormal and unintelligible. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe effects of the Indian religio<\/span>-philosophical standpoint on life are to the
\nOccidental critic still more intolerable. If his reason was already offended by
\nthis suprarational and to him antirational urge, it is the strongest instincts
\nof his temperament that are now violently shocked by their own direct contrasts
\nand opposites. Life, the thing on which he puts an entire and unques\u00adtioning
\nvalue, is questioned here. It is belittled and discouraged by the extremest<\/span> consequences of one side of the Indian outlook or
\ninlook<\/span> and is nowhere accepted as it is for its own
\nsake. Asce\u00adticism ranges rampant, is at the head of things, casts its shadow on
\nthe vital instincts and calls man to exceed the life of the body and even the
\nlife of the mental will and intelligence. The Wes\u00adtern mind lays an enormous
\nstress upon force of personality, upon the individual will, upon the apparent
\nman and the desires and demands of his nature. But here is an opposing stress
\non a high growth towards impersonality, on the widening of the indi\u00advidual into
\nthe universal will, on an increasing or breaking be\u00adyond the apparent man and
\nhis limits. The flowering of the mental and vital ego or at most its
\nsubservience to the larger ego of the community is the West’s cultural ideal.
\nBut here the ego is regarded as the chief obstacle to the soul’s perfection and
\nits place is proposed to be taken not by the concrete communal ego, but by
\nsomething inward, abstract, transcendental, something supramental, supraphysical<\/span>, absolutely real. The Western tem\u00adperament is
\nrajasic, kinetic, pragmatic, active; thought for it turns always to action and
\nhas little value except for the sake of action or else for a fine satisfaction
\nof the mind’s play and vigour. But here the type proposed for admiration is the
\nself-possessed sattwic man for whom calm thought, spiritual knowledge and the
\ninner life are the things of the greatest importance and action is chiefly of
\nconsequence not for its own sake, not for its rewards<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 87<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and fruits, but for its effects on the growth of the inner nature. Here
\ntoo is a disconcerting quietism which looks forward to the cessation or Nirvana
\nof all thought and action in a perpetual light and peace. It is not surprising
\nthat a critic with an un\u00adreleased Occidental mind should look upon these
\ncontrasts with much dissatisfaction, a recoil of antipathy, an almost ferocious
\nrepugnance. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut at any rate these things,
\nhowever remote they may seem to his understanding, contain something that is
\nlofty and noble. He can disparage them as false, antirational and depressing,
\nbut not denounce them as evil and ignoble. Or he can do this only on the
\nstrength of such misrepresentations as some of those we have noted in Mr.Archer’s<\/span> more irresponsible strictures. These things may
\nbe signs of an antique or an antiquated mind, but are certainly not the fruits
\nof a barbaric culture. But when he surveys the forms of the religion which they
\nenlighten and animate, it does look to him as if he was in the presence of a
\npure barbarism, a savage ignorant muddle. For here is an abundance of
\neverything of which he has so long been steadily emptying religion in his own
\nculture, well content to call that emptiness refor\u00admation, enlightenment and
\nthe rational truth of things. He sees a gigantic polytheism, a super-abundance
\nof what seems to his intelligence rank superstition, a limitless readiness of
\nbelief in things that are to him without significance or incredible. The Hindu
\nis popularly credited with thirty crores<\/span> and more of
\ngods, as many inhabitants for all the many heavens as there are men in this
\nsingle earthly peninsula India, and he has no objection to adding, if need be,
\nto this mighty multitude. Here are temples, images, a priesthood, a mass of
\nunintelligible rites and ceremonies, the daily repetition of Sanskrit Mantras
\nand prayers, some of them of a prehistoric creation, a belief in all kinds of supraphysical<\/span> beings and forces, saints, Gurus, holy days,
\nvows, offerings, sacrifice, a constant reference of life to powers and
\ninfluences of which there can be no physical evidence, instead of a rational
\nscientific dependence on the material laws which alone govern the existence of
\nmortal creatures. It is to him an unintelligible chaos; it is animism; it is a
\nmonstrous folk-lore. The meaning which Indian thought puts upon these things,
\ntheir<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 88<\/span><\/p>\n

\n


\nspritual<\/font><\/span><\/span> sense, escapes him altogether
\nor it leaves him incredul<\/font><\/span>ous or else strikes his mind
\nas a vain and mad symbolism, subtle, useless, futile. And not only is the cult
\nand belief of this people antiquated and mediaeval in kind, but it is not kept
\nin its proper place. Instead of putting religion into an unobtrusive and ineffec\u00ad<\/font><\/span>tive <\/font> <\/span>
\ncomer, the Indian mind has the pretension, the preposterous
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\npretension which rational man has outgrown for ever, of filling
\n<\/font> <\/span>with it the whole
\nof life. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nIt would be difficult to
\nconvince the too positive average <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nEuropean intelligence
\nwhich has "outgrown" the religious menta\u00adlity or is only struggling
\nback towards it after a not yet liquidated bankruptcy of rationalistic
\nmaterialism that there is any pro\u00adfound truth or meaning in these Indian
\nreligious forms. It has been well said that they are rhythms of the spirit; but
\none who misses the spirit must necessarily miss too the connection of the
\nspirit and the rhythm. The gods of this worship are, as every Indian knows,
\npotent names, divine forms, dynamic perso\u00adnalities, living aspects of the one
\nInfinite. Each Godhead is a form or derivation or dependent power of the
\nsupreme Trinity, each Goddess a form of the universal Energy, Conscious-Force
\nor Shakti. But to the logical European mind monotheism, polythe\u00adism, pantheism
\nare irreconcilable warring dogmas; oneness, many-ness, all-ness are not and
\ncannot be different but concor\u00addant aspects of the eternal Infinite. A belief
\nin one Divine Being superior to cosmos, who is all cosmos and who lives in many
\nforms of godhead, is a hotch-potch<\/span>, mush, confusion
\nof ideas; for synthesis, intuitive vision, inner experience are not the forte
\nof this strongly external, analytic and logical mind. The image to the Hindu is
\na physical symbol and support of the supraphysical<\/span>;
\nit is a basis for the meeting between the embodied mind and sense of man and
\nthe supraphysical<\/span> power, force or presence which he
\nworships and with which he wishes to communicate. But the average European has
\nsmall faith in disembodied entities and, if <\/font> <\/span>
\nthey
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>are at
\nall, he would put them away into a category apart, <\/font> <\/span>
\nanother
\nunconnected world, a separate existence. A nexus be\u00adtween the physical and supraphysical<\/span> is to his view a meaningless subtlety
\nadmissible only in imaginative poetry and romance. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe rites,
\nceremonies, system of cult and worship of Hindu\u00ad<\/font><\/span><\/span>–<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 89<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

ism can only be understood if we remember its fundamental character. It
\nis in the first place a non-dogmatic inclusive religion and would have taken
\neven Islam and Christianity into itself, if they had tolerated the process. All
\nthat it has met on its way it has taken into itself, content if it could put
\nits forms into some valid relation with the truth of the supraphysical<\/span>
\nworlds and the truth of the Infinite. Again, it has always known in its heart
\nthat religion, if it is to be a reality for the mass of men and not only for a
\nfew saints and thinkers, must address its appeal to the whole of our being, not
\nonly to the suprarational and the rational parts, but to all the others. The
\nimagination, the emotions, the aesthe\u00adtic sense, even the very instincts of the
\nhalf-subconscient<\/span> parts must be taken into the
\ninfluence. Religion must lead man to\u00adwards the suprarational, the spiritual
\ntruth and it must take the aid of the illumined reason on the way, but it
\ncannot afford to neglect to call Godwards the rest of our complex nature. And
\nit must take too each man where he stands and spiritualise him through what he
\ncan feel and not at once force on him something which he cannot yet grasp as a
\ntrue and living power. That is the sense and aim of all those parts of Hinduism
\nwhich are specially stigmatised as irrational or antirational by the positivist
\nintelli\u00adgence. But the European mind has failed to understand this plain
\nnecessity or has despised it. It insists on "purifying" religion, by
\nthe reason and not by the spirit, on "reforming" it, by the reason
\nand not by the spirit. And we have seen what were the results of this kind of
\npurification and reformation in Europe. The infallible outcome of that ignorant
\ndoctoring has been first to impoverish and then slowly to kill religion; the
\npatient has fallen a victim to the treatment, while he might well have survived
\nthe disease. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe accusation of a want of
\nethical content is almost mons\u00adtrously false, it is the direct opposite of the
\ntruth; but we must look for its explanation in some kind of characteristic
\nmisunder\u00adstanding; for it is not new. Hindu thought and literature might almost
\nbe accused of a tyrannously pervading ethical obsession; everywhere the ethical
\nnote recurs. The idea of the Dharma is, next to the idea of the Infinite, its
\nmajor chord; Dharma, next to spirit, is its foundation of life. There is no
\nethical idea which it<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 90<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nhas not stressed, put in its most ideal and imperative form, en\u00ad<\/font><\/span>forced <\/font> <\/span>
\nby teaching, injunction, parable, artistic
\ncreation, forma<\/font><\/span>tive <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nexamples. Truth,
\nhonour, loyalty, fidelity, courage, chastity, <\/font> <\/span>
\nlove, long-suffering,
\nself-sacrifice, harmlessness, forgiveness, compassion, benevolence, beneficence
\nare its common themes, are in its view the very stuff of a right human life,
\nthe essence of man’s Dharma. Buddhism with its high and noble ethics, Jain\u00adism
\nwith its austere ideal of self-conquest, Hinduism with its magnificent examples
\nof all sides of the Dharma are not inferior in ethical teaching and practice to
\nany religion or system, but rather take the highest rank and have had the
\nstrongest effective force. For the practice of these virtues in older times
\nthere is abundant internal and foreign evidence. A considerable stamp of them
\nstill remains in spite of much degeneracy even though there has been some
\ndepression of the manlier qualities which only flourish in their fullest power
\non the soil of freedom. The legend to the contrary began in the minds of
\nEnglish scholars with a Christian bias who were misled by the stress which
\nIndian philosophy lays on knowledge rather than works as the means of
\nsalvation. For they did not note or could not grasp the meaning of the rule
\nwell-known to all Indian spiritual seekers that a pure sattwic mind and life
\nare presupposed as the first step towards the divine knowledge ―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe doers of evil find me not, says the
\n<\/font> <\/span>Gita. And they were
\nunable to realise that knowledge of the truth means for Indian thought not
\nintellectual assent or recogni\u00adtion, but a new consciousness and a life
\naccording to the truth of the Spirit. Morality is for the Western mind mostly a
\nthing of outward conduct; but conduct for the Indian mind is only one means of
\nexpression and sign of a soul-state. Hinduism only incidentally strings
\ntogether a number of commandments for ob\u00adservance, a table of moral laws; more
\ndeeply it enjoins a spiritual or ethical purity of the mind with action as one
\noutward index. It says strongly enough, almost too strongly, "Thou shouldst<\/span> not kill," but insists more firmly on the
\ninjunction, "Thou shalt<\/span> not hate, thou shalt<\/span> not yield to greed, anger or malice," for these
\nare the roots of killing. And Hinduism admits relative standards, a wisdom too
\nhard for the European intelligence. Non-injuring is the very highest of its
\nlaws, ahirhs<\/i>\u00e3<\/span><\/span>
\nparamo<\/span> dharmah; <\/i>still it<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 91<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

does not lay it down as a physical rule for the warrior, but insis\u00adtently
\ndemands from him mercy, chivalry, respect for the non\u00adbelligerent<\/span>,
\nthe weak, the unarmed, the vanquished, the prisoner, the wounded, the fugitive,
\nand so escapes the unpracticality<\/span> of a too absolutist
\nrule for all life. A misunderstanding of this inward\u00adness and this wise
\nrelativity is perhaps responsible for much misrepresentation. The Western
\nethicist likes to have a high standard as a counsel of perfection and is not
\ntoo much concerned if it is honoured more by the breach than by the observance;
\nIndian ethics puts up an equally high and often higher standard; but less
\nconcerned with high professions than with the truth of life, it admits stages
\nof progress and in the lower stages is satisfied if it can moralise as much as
\npossible those who are not yet capable of the highest ethical concepts and
\npractice. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nAll these criticisms of Hinduism
\nare therefore either false in fact or invalid in their very nature. It remains
\nto be consi\u00addered whether the farther yet more common charge is justified in
\nfull or in part, <\/font> <\/span>
\n– <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe damaging
\naccusation that Indian culture depresses the vital force, paralyses the will,
\ngives no great or vigorous power, no high incentive, no fortifying and’
\nennobling motive to human life<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 92<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n5<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span>THE
\nquestion before us is whether Indian culture has a sufficient power for the fortifying
\nand ennobling of our normal human existence. Apart from its transcendental
\naims, has it any pragmatic, non-ascetic, dynamic value, any power for expansion
\nof life and for the right control of life? This is <\/font> <\/span>
\na
\nquestion of central importance. For if it has nothing of this kind to give us,
\nthen whatever its other cultural greatness, it cannot live. It becomes an
\nabnormal cis<\/span>-Himalayan hothouse splen\u00addour which
\ncould subsist in its peninsular seclusion, but must perish in the keen and
\narduous air of the modern struggle of life. No<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nanti-vital culture
\ncan survive. A too intellectual or too ethereal<\/font><\/span>
\ncivilisation void of strong vital stimulus and motive must languish for want of
\nsap and blood. A culture to be permanently and completely serviceable to man must
\ngive him something more than some kind of rare transcendental uprush<\/span> towards an exceeding of all earthly life-values. It
\nmust do more even than adorn with a great curiosity of knowledge, science and
\nphiloso\u00adphic enquiry or a rich light and blaze of art, poetry and archi\u00adtecture,
\nthe long stability and orderly well-being of an old, ripe and humane society.
\nAll this Indian culture did in the past to a noble purpose. But it must satisfy
\ntoo the tests of a progressive Life-power. There must be some inspiration for
\nthe terrestrial endeavour of man, an object, a stimulus, a force for
\ndevelopment d a will to live. Whether or not our end is silence and Nirvana, a
\nspiritual cessation or a material death, this is certain that the world itself
\nis a mighty labour of a vast Life-Spirit and man the present doubtful crown on
\nearth and the struggling but still unsuccessful present hero and protagonist of
\nits endeavour or its drama. A great human culture must see this truth in some
\nfull\u00adness; it must impart some conscious and ideal power of self-effectuation
\nto this upward effort. It is not enough to found a stable base for life, not
\nenough to adorn it, not enough to shoot up sublimely to summits beyond it; the
\ngreatness and growth of <\/font> <\/span>
\ne race on earth must be our equal care. To miss this
\ngreat inter-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 93<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

mediate reality is a capital imperfection and in itself a seal of
\nfailure. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nOur critics will have it that
\nthe whole body of Indian culture bears the stamp of just such a failure. The Western
\nimpression has been that Hinduism is an entirely metaphysical and other\u00adworldly
\nsystem dreaming of things beyond, oblivious of the now and here: a depressing
\nsense of the unreality of life or an intoxi\u00adcation of the Infinite turns it
\naway from any nobility, vitality and greatness of human aspiration and the
\nearth’s labour. Its philo\u00adsophy may be sublime, its religious spirit fervent,
\nits ancient social system strong, symmetrical and stable, its literature and
\nits art good in their own way, but the salt of life is absent, the breath of
\nwill-power, the force of a living endeavour. This new journalis\u00adtic Apollo, our
\nArcher who is out to cleave with his arrows the python coils of Indian
\nbarbarism, abounds in outcries in this sense. But, if that is so, evidently
\nIndia can have done nothing great, contributed no invigorating power to human
\nlife, produced no men of mighty will, no potent personalities, no strong signi\u00adficant
\nhuman lives, no vital human figures in art and poetry, no significant
\narchitecture and sculpture. And that is what our devil’s advocate tells us in
\ngraphic phrases. He tells us that there is in this religion and philosophy a
\ngeneral undervaluing of life and endeavour. Life is conceived as a shoreless<\/span> expanse in which generations rise and fall as
\nhelplessly and purposelessly as waves in mid-ocean; the individual is
\neverywhere dwarfed and depreciated; one solitary great character, Gautama<\/span> Buddha, who "perhaps never existed", is
\nIndia’s sole contribution to the world’s pantheon, or for the rest a pale
\nfeatureless Asoka<\/span>. The characters of drama and poetry
\nare lifeless exaggerations or pup\u00adpets of supernatural powers; the art is empty
\nof reality; the whole history of the civilisation makes a drab, effete,
\nmelancholy picture. There is no power of life in this religion and this philo\u00adsophy,
\nthere is no breath of life in this history, there is no colour of life in this
\nart and poetry; that is the blank result of Indian culture. Whoever has seen at
\nfirst hand and felt the literature, followed the history, studied the
\ncivilisation of India can see that this is a bitter misrepresentation, a
\nviolent caricature, an absurd falsehood. But it is an extreme and unscrupulous
\nway of putting<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 94<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

an impression often given to the European mind and, as before, we must
\nsee why different eyes see the same object in such diffe\u00adrent colours. It is
\nthe same primary <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

misunderstanding that is at the root. India has lived and
\nlived richly, splendidly, greatly, but with a different will in life from
\nEurope. The idea and plan of her life have been peculiar to her temperament,
\noriginal and unique. Her values are not easy to seize for an outsider and her
\nhighest things are easily open to hostile misrepresentation by the ignorant,
\nprecisely because they are too high for the normal un\u00adtrained mind and apt to
\nshoot beyond its limits. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nThere are three powers that we
\nmust grasp in order to judge the life-value of a culture. There is, first, the
\npower of its original conception of life; there is, next, the power of the forms,
\ntypes and rhythms it has given to life; there is, last, the inspiration, the
\nvigour, the force of vital execution of its motives manifested in the actual
\nlives of men and of the community that flourished under its influence. The
\nEuropean conception of life is a thing with which we in India are now very
\nfamiliar, because our pre\u00adsent thought and effort are obscured with its shadow
\nwhen they are not filled with its presence. For we have been trying hard to
\nassimilate something of it, even to shape ourselves, and especially our
\npolitical, economic and outward conduct into some imitation of its forms and
\nrhythms. The European idea is the conception of a Force that manifests itself
\nin the material universe and a Life in it of which man is almost the only discoverable
\nmeaning. This anthropocentric view of things has not been altered by the recent
\nstress of Science on the vast blank inanities of an inconscient mechanical
\nNature. And in man, thus unique in the inert drift of Nature, the whole effort
\nof Life is to arrive at some light and harmony of the understanding and
\nordering reason, some effi\u00adcient rational power, adorning beauty, strong
\nutility, vital en\u00adjoyment, economic welfare. The free power of the individual
\nego, the organised will of the corporate ego, these are the great needed
\nforces. The development of individual personality and an organised efficient
\nnational life are the two things that matter in the European ideal. These two
\npowers have grown, striven, run riot at times, and the restless and often
\nviolent vividness of the historic stir and the literary and artistic vivacity
\nof Europe<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 95<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nare due to their powerful colours. The enjoyment of life
\nand force, the gallop of egoistic passion and vital satisfaction are a loud and
\ninsistent strain, a constant high-voiced motive. Against them is another
\nopposite effort, the endeavour to govern life by reason, science, ethics, art; a
\nrestraining and harmonising utility is here the foremost motive. At different
\ntimes different powers have taken the lead. Christian religiosity too has come
\nin and added new tones, modified some tendencies, deepened others. Each age and
\nperiod has increased the wealth of contributory lines and forces and helped the
\ncomplexity and largeness of the total conception. At present the sense of the
\ncorporate life dominates and it is served by the idea of a great intellectual
\nand material progress, an ameliorated political and social state go\u00adverned by
\nscience. There is an ideal of intelligent utility, liberty and equality or else
\nan ideal of stringent organisation and effi\u00adciency and a perfectly mobilised,
\ncarefully marshalled uniting of forces in a ceaseless pull towards the general
\nwelfare. This en\u00addeavour of Europe has become terribly outward and mechanical in
\nits appearance; but some renewed power of a more humanistic idea is trying to
\nbeat its way in again and man may perhaps before long refuse to be tied on the
\nwheel of his own triumphant machinery and conquered by his apparatus. At any
\nrate we need not lay too much emphasis on what may be a passing phase. The broad
\npermanent European conception of life remains and it is in its own limits a
\ngreat and invigorating conception, ― imperfect, narrow at the top, shut in under
\na heavy lid, poor in its horizons, too much of the soil, but still with a sense
\nin it that is strenuous and noble<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe Indian conception
\nof life starts from a deeper centre and moves on less external lines to a very
\ndifferent objective. The peculiarity of the Indian eye of thought is that it
\nlooks through the form, looks even through the force, and searches for the
\nspirit in things everywhere. The peculiarity of the Indian will in life is that
\nit feels itself to be unfulfilled, not in touch with per\u00adfection, not
\npermanently justified in any intermediate satisfaction if it has not found and
\ndoes not live in the truth of the spirit. The Indian idea of the world, of
\nNature and of existence is not phy\u00adsical, but psychological and spiritual.
\nSpirit, soul, consciousness<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage- 96<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nare not only greater than inert matter and inconscient force, but they
\nprecede and originate these lesser things. All force is power, or means of a
\nsecret spirit; the force that sustains the world is a conscious Will, and
\nNature is its machinery of executive power. Matter is the body or field of a
\nconsciousness hidden within it, the material universe a form and movement of
\nthe Spirit. Man himself is not a life and mind born of Matter and eternally sub\u00adject
\nto physical Nature, but a spirit that uses life and body. It is an understanding
\nfaith in this conception of existence, it is the attempt to live it out, it is
\nthe science and practice of this high endeavour, and it is the aspiration to
\nbreak out in the end from this mind bound to life and matter into a greater
\nspiritual con\u00adsciousness that is the innermost sense of Indian culture. It is
\nthis that constitutes the much talked of Indian spirituality. It is evidently
\nvery remote from the dominant European idea; it is different even from the form
\ngiven by Europe to the Christian conception of life. But it does not mean at
\nall that Indian culture concedes no reality to life, follows no material or
\nvital aims and satisfactions, or cares to do nothing for our actual human exis\u00adtence.
\nIt cannot truly be contended that a conception of this kind can give no
\npowerful and inspiring motive to the human effort of man. Certainly, in this
\nview, matter, mind, life, reason, form are only powers of the spirit and
\nvaluable not for their own sake, but because of the Spirit within them, <\/font> <\/span>
\n\u00e3<\/font><\/span>tm<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>rtham<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span>; <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nthey exist for the
\nsake of the Self, says the Upanishad, and this is certainly the Indian attitude
\nto these things. But that does not depreciate them or deprive them of their
\nvalue; on the contrary it increases a hundredfold their significance. Form and
\nbody immensely increase in importance if they are felt to be instinct with the
\nlife of the Spirit and are conceived as a support for the rhythm of its
\nworkings. And human life was in ancient Indian thought no vile and unworthy
\nexistence; it is the greatest thing known to us; it is desired, the Purana
\nboldly says, even by the gods in heaven. The deepening and raising of the
\nriches or the most potent ener\u00adgies of our minds, our hearts, our life-power,
\nour bodies are all means by which the spirit can proceed to self-discovery and
\nthe return to its own infinite freedom and power. For when mind and heart and
\nreason heighten to their greatest lights and powers,<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 97<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthey bring embodied life to the point where it
\ncan open to a still<\/font><\/span>, <\/font> <\/span>
\ngreater light and power beyond them; the individual
\nmind widens into a vast universal consciousness and lifts towards a high spiri\u00adtual
\ntranscendence. These are at least no sterilising and depres\u00adsing ideas; they
\nexalt the life of man and make something like godhead its logical outcome.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe dignity given
\nto human existence by the Vedantic thought and by the thought of the classical
\nages of Indian culture exceeded anything conc<\/font><\/span>eived by the western idea of
\nhumanity. Man in the West has always been only an ephemeral creature of Nature
\nor a -soul manufactured at birth by an arbitrary breath of the whimsical Creator
\nand set under impossible conditions to get salvation, but far more likely to be
\nthrown away <\/span><\/font>
\n
\ninto the burning refuse-heap
\nof Hell as a hopeless failure. <\/font> <\/span>
\nAt best he is exalted by a reasoning mind and will and
\nan effort to be better than God or Nature made him. Far more ennobling,
\ninspiring, filled with the motive-force of a great idea is the con\u00adception
\nplaced before us by Indian culture. Man in the Indian idea is a. spirit veiled
\nin the works of energy, moving to self-discovery, capable of Godhead. He is a
\nsoul that is growing through Nature to conscious self-hood; he is a divinity
\nand an eternal existence; he is an ever-flowing wave of the God-ocean, an
\ninextinguishable spark of the supreme Fire. Even, he is in his uttermost
\nreality identical with the ineffable Transcendence from which he came and
\ngreater than the godheads whom he worships. The natural half-animal creature
\nthat for a while he seems to be is not at all his whole being and is not in any
\nway his real being, His inmost reality is the divine Self or at least one
\ndynamic eter\u00adnal portion of it, and to find that and exceed his outward, ap\u00adparent,
\nnatural self is the greatness of which he alone of terres\u00adtrial beings is
\ncapable. He has the spiritual capacity to pass to a supreme and extraordinary
\npitch of manhood and. that is the first aim which is proposed to him by Indian
\nculture. Living no more in the first crude type of an undeveloped humanity to
\nwhich most men still belong, na<\/i><\/span> yath\u00e4<\/span><\/span>
\npr\u00e4<\/span>krto<\/span>
\njanah<\/span>, <\/i>he can even be\u00adcome a free perfected
\nsemi-divine man, mukta<\/i><\/span>, siddha<\/span>.
\n<\/i>But he can do more; released into the cosmic consciousness, his spirit can
\nbecome one with God, one self with the Spirit of the universe<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage –
\n98<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nor rise into a Light and Vastness that transcends the universe; his
\nnature can become one dynamic power with universal Nature or one Light with a
\ntranscendental Gnosis. To be shut up for ever in his ego is not his ultimate
\nperfection; he can become a universal soul, one with the supreme Unity, one
\nwith others, one with all beings. This is the high sense and power concealed in
\nhis humanity that he can aspire to this perfection and transcendence. And he
\ncan arrive at it through any or all of his natural powers if they will accept
\nrelease, through his mind and reason and thought and their illuminations,
\nthrough his heart and its unlimited power of love and sympathy, through his
\nwill and its dynamic drive towards mastery and right action, through his
\nethical nature and its hunger for the universal Good, through his aesthetic
\nsense and its seekings<\/span> after delight and beauty, or
\nthrough his inner soul and its power of absolute spiritual calm, wideness, joy
\nand peace.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThis is the sense of that spiritual
\nliberation and perfection of which Indian thought and inner discipline have
\nbeen full since the earliest Vedic times. However high and arduous this aim may
\nbe it has always seemed to it possible and even in a way near and normal, once
\nspiritual realisation has discovered its path. The positivist Western mind
\nfinds it difficult to give this concep\u00adtion the rank of a living and
\nintelligible idea. The status of the siddha<\/i><\/span><\/font>,
\n<\/font>
\n<\/i><\/span>
\n
\nbh<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>gavata<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span>, mukta<\/span> <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\n
\nappears to it a baseless
\nchimera. It <\/font> <\/span>seems to its Christian associations a blasphemy against
\nthe soli\u00adtary greatness of God, before whom man is only a grovelling worm, to
\nits fierce attachment to the normal ego a negation of personality and a
\nrepellent menace, to its earth-bound rationa\u00adlism a dream, a self-hypnotic
\nhallucination or a deluding mania. And yet in ancient Europe the Stoics,
\nPlatonists, Pythagoreans had made some approach to this aspiration, and even
\nafterwards, a few rare souls have envisaged or pursued it through occult ways.
\nAnd now it is again beginning to percolate into the Western imagination, but
\nless as a dynamic life-motive than in poetry and in certain aspects of general
\nthought or through movements like Theosophy that draw from ancient and oriental
\nsources. Science and philosophy and religion still regard it with scorn as an
\nillusion, with indifference as a dream or with con\u00ad<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 99<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

demnation<\/font><\/span> as a heathen
\narrogance. It is the distinction of Indian culture to have seized on this great
\ndynamic hope, to have kept it a living and practicable thing and to have
\nsearched out all the possible paths to this spiritual way of perfect existence.
\nIndian thought has made this great thing the common highest aim and universal
\nspiritual destiny of the soul that is in every human creature. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe value of the
\nIndian conception for life must depend on the relations and gradations by which
\nit connects this difficult and distant perfection with our normal living and
\npresent every\u00adday nature. Put over against the latter without any connection or
\nany gradations that lead up to it and make it possible, it would either be a
\nhigh unattainable ideal or the detached remote passion of a few exceptional
\nspirits. Or even it would discourage the springs of our natural life by the too
\ngreat contrast between the spiritual being and our own poor imperfect nature.
\nSome\u00adthing of the kind has happened in later times; the current Western
\nimpression about the exaggerated asceticism and other\u00adworldliness of Indian
\nreligion and philosophy is founded on the growing gulf created by a later
\nthought between man’s spiritual possibilities and his terrestrial status. But
\nwe must not be misled by extreme tendencies or the overemphasis put upon them
\nin a period of decline. If we would get at the real meaning of the In\u00addian idea
\nof life, we must go back to its best times. And we must not look at this or
\nthat school of philosophy or at some side of it as the whole of Indian thought;
\nthe totality of the ancient phi\u00adlosophical thinking, religion, literature, art,
\nsociety must be our ground of enquiry. The Indian conception in its early
\nsoundness made no such mistake as to imagine that this great thing can or even
\nought to be done by some violent, intolerant, immediate leap from one pole of
\nexistence to its opposite. Even the most extreme philosophies do not go so far.
\nThe workings of the Spirit in the universe were a reality to one side of the
\nIndian mind, to another only a half reality, a self-descriptive Lila or
\nillusory Maya. To the one the world was an action of the Infinite Energy,
\nShakti, to the other a figment of some secondary para\u00addoxical consciousness in
\nthe Eternal, Maya: but life as an inter\u00admediate reality was never denied by any
\nschool of Indian thinking.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 100<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Indian thought recognised that the normal life of man has to be passed
\nthrough with a conscientious endeavour to fulfil its pur\u00adpose: its powers must
\nbe developed with knowledge; its forms must be perused, interpreted and
\nfathomed; its values must be worked out, possessed and lived; its enjoyments
\nmust be fully taken on their own level. Only afterwards can we go on to self-\u00adexistence
\nor a supra-existence. The spiritual perfection which opens before man is the
\ncrown of a long, patient, millennial outflowering<\/span> of
\nthe spirit in life and nature. This belief in a gra\u00addual spiritual progress and
\nevolution here is indeed the secret of the almost universal Indian acceptance
\nof the truth of reincarna\u00adtion. It is only by millions of lives in inferior
\nforms that the secret soul in the universe, conscious even in the inconscient, cetana<\/i>h<\/span><\/span>;
\nacetanes<\/span>u<\/span>, <\/i>has arrived at humanity: it is only by hundreds
\nor thousands, perhaps even millions of human lives that man can grow <\/font> <\/span>
\ninto his divine self-existence. Every life is a step which he
\n<\/font> <\/span>can take backward
\nor forward; his action in life, his will in life, his thought and knowledge by
\nwhich he governs and directs his life, determine what he is yet to be from the
\nearliest stages to the last transcendence. Yath<\/i>\u00e4<\/span><\/span><\/font> karma yath\u00e4<\/span><\/span> <\/font> <\/i><\/span>
\n\u0160<\/font><\/span>rutam<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThis belief in a
\ngradual soul evolution with a final perfection or divine transcendence and human
\nlife as its first direct means and often repeated opportunity, is the pivot of
\nthe Indian con\u00adception of existence. This gives to our life the figure of an
\nascent in spirals or circles; and the long period of the ascent has to be filled
\nin with human knowledge and ‘human action and human experience. There is room
\nwithin it for all terrestrial aims, acti\u00advities and aspirations; there is place
\nin the ascent for all types of human character and nature. For the spirit in the
\nworld assumes hundreds of forms and follows many tendencies and gives many
\nshapes to his play or Lila. All are part of the total mass of our necessary
\nexperience; each has its justification; each has its natural or true law and
\nreason of being, each has its utility in the play and the process. The claim of
\nsense satisfaction was not ignored, it was given its just importance. The soul’s
\nneed of labour and heroic action was not stifled, it was urged to its fullest
\naction and freest scope. The hundred forms of the pursuit of knowledge were
\ngiven an absolute freedom of movement.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-101<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nthe play of the emotions was allowed, refined, trained till they were
\nfit for the divine levels; the demand of the aesthetic faculties was encouraged
\nin its highest rarest forms and in life’s common\u00adest details. Indian culture
\ndid not deface nor impoverish the richness of the grand game of human life; it
\nnever depressed or mutilated the activities of our nature. On the contrary,
\nsubject to a certain principle of harmony and government, it allowed them their
\nfull, often their extreme value. Man was allowed to fathom on his way all
\nexperience, to give to his character and action a large rein and heroic
\nproportions, and to fill in life opulently with colour and beauty and
\nenjoyment. This life side of the Indian idea is stamped in strong relief over
\nthe epic and the classical literature. His amazing indeed that anyone with an
\neye or a brain could have read the Ramayana, Mahabharata, the dramas, the
\nliterary epics, the romances, and the great abundance of gnomic and lyric
\npoetry in Sanskrit and in the later tongues (to say nothing of the massive
\nremains of other cultural work and social and political system, and
\nspeculation), and yet failed to perceive this breadth, wealth and greatness.
\nOne must have read without eyes to see or without a mind to understand; most
\nindeed of the adverse critics have not read or studied at all, but only flung
\nabout their preconceived notions with a violent or a high-browed ignorant
\nassurance.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut while it is the generous
\noffice of culture to enrich, en\u00adlarge and encourage human life, it must also
\ngive the vital forces a guiding law, subject them to some moral and rational
\ngovern\u00adment and lead them beyond their first natural formulations, until it can
\nfind for life the clue to a spiritual freedom, perfection and greatness. The
\npre-eminent value of the ancient Indian civilisa\u00adtion lay in the power with
\nwhich it did this work, the profound wisdom and high and subtle skill with
\nwhich it based society and ordered the individual life, and encouraged and
\nguided the pro\u00adpensities of human nature and finally turned them all towards
\nthe realisation of its master idea. The mind it was training, while not called
\naway from its immediate aims, was never allowed to lose sight of the use of
\nlife as a discipline for spiritual perfection and a passage to the Infinite.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe Indian mind whether in
\nthe government of life or in the<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 102<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

discipline of spirituality, kept always in sight two main truths of our
\nexistence. First, our being in its growth has stages through which it must
\npass: if there are sometimes leaps forward, yet most of its growth is a
\ndeveloping progression; the swiftest race has its stadia. Then again, life is
\ncomplex and the nature of man is complex; in each life man has to figure a
\ncertain sum of his complexity and put that into some kind of order. But the
\ninitial movement of life is that form of it which develops the powers of the
\nnatural ego in man; self-interest and hedonistic desire are the original human
\nmotives, ―<\/font><\/span> k<\/i>\u00e4<\/span>ma<\/i><\/span>, artha<\/span>. <\/i>Indian culture gave a <\/font> <\/span>
\nlarge recognition to this
\nprimary turn of our nature. These powers have to be accepted and put in order;
\nfor the natural ego-life must be lived and the forces it evolves in the human
\nbeing must be brought to fullness. But this element must be kept from making
\nany too unbridled claim or heading furiously to\u00adwards its satisfaction; only so
\ncan it get its full results without disaster and only so can it be inspired
\neventually to go beyond itself and turn in the end to a greater spiritual Good
\nand Bliss. An internal or external anarchy cannot be the rule; a life governed
\nin any absolute or excessive degree by self-will, passion, sense-attraction,
\nself-interest and desire cannot be the natural whole of a human or a humane
\nexistence. The tempting imagina\u00adtion that it can and that this is the true law
\nis a lure with which the Western mind has played -in characteristic leanings or
\noutbursts; but this turn unjustly called Paganism, ― for the Greek or
\nPagan intelligence had a noble thought for law and harmony and self-rule,
\n― is alien to the Indian spirit. India has felt the call’ of the senses
\nnot less than Greece, Rome or modern Europe; she perceived very well the
\npossibility of a materialistic life and its attraction worked on certain minds
\nand gave birth to the philo\u00adsophy of the Charvakas<\/span>:
\nbut this could not take full hold or establish even for a time any dominant
\nempire. Even if we can see in it, when lived on a grand scale, a certain
\nperverse greatness, still a colossal egoism indulgent of the sole life of the
\nmind and the senses was regarded by her as the nature of the Asura and
\nRakshasa. It is the Titanic, gigantic or demoniac type of spirit, permitted in
\nits own plane, but not the proper law for a human life. Another power claims
\nman and overtops desire and self\u00ad<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 103<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

interest and self-will, the power of the <\/font> <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Dharma.<\/font><\/span>Dharma, at once
\nreligious law of action and deepest law of our nature, is not, as in the
\nWestern idea, a creed, cult or ideal inspiring an ethical and social rule; it
\nis the right law of function\u00ading of our life in all its parts. The tendency of
\nman to seek after a just and perfect law of his living finds its truth and its
\njustifica\u00adtion in the Dharma. Everything indeed has its Dharma, its law of life
\nimposed on it by its nature; but. for man the Dharma is the conscious
\nimposition of a rule of ideal living on all his members. Dharma is fixed in its
\nessence, but still it develops in our con\u00adsciousness and evolves and has its
\nstages; there are gradations of spiritual and ethical ascension in the search
\nfor the highest law of our nature. All men cannot follow in all things one
\ncommon and invariable rule. Life is too complex to admit of the arbitrary ideal
\nsimplicity which the moralising theorist loves. Natures differ; the position,
\nthe work we have to do has its own claims and standards, aim and bent; the call
\nof life, the call of the spirit within is not the same for everyone: the degree
\nand turn of development and the capacity, adhik<\/i>\u00e4<\/span>ra<\/i><\/span>, <\/i>are not
\nequal. Man lives in society and by society, and every society has its own
\ngeneral Dharma, and the individual life must be fitted into this wider law of
\nmovement. But there too the individual’s part in society, and his nature and
\nthe needs of his capacity and tempera\u00adment vary and have many kinds and
\ndegrees: the social law must make some room for this variety and would lose by
\nbeing rigidly one for all. The man of knowledge, the man of power, the pro\u00adductive
\nand acquisitive man, the priest, scholar, poet, artist, ruler, fighter, trader,
\ntiller of the soil, craftsman, labourer, servant cannot usefully have the same
\ntraining, cannot be shaped in the same pattern, cannot all follow the same way
\nof living. All ought not to be put under the same tables of the law; for that
\nwould be a senseless geometric rigidity that would spoil the plastic truth of
\nlife. Each has his type of nature and there must be a rule for the perfection
\nof that type; each has his own proper function and there must be a canon and
\nideal for the function. There must be in all things some wise and understanding
\nstandard of practice and idea of perfection and living rule, ― that is
\nthe one thing needful for the Dharma. A lawless impulsion of desire and<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 104<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\ninterest and propensity cannot be allowed to lead human conduct; even in
\nthe frankest following of desire and interest and propensity there must be a
\ngoverning and restraining and direc\u00adting line, a guidance. There must be an
\nethic or a science, a res\u00adtraint as well as a scope arising from the truth of
\nthe thing sought, a standard of perfection, an order. Differing with the type
\nof the man and the type of the function these special Dharmas would yet rise
\ntowards the greater law and truth that contains and over\u00adtops the others and is
\nuniversally effective. This then was the Dharma, special for the special
\nperson, stage of development, pursuit of life or individual field of action,
\nbut universal too in the broad lines which all ought to pursue.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe universal embracing Dharma
\nin the Indian idea is a law of ideal perfection for the developing mind and
\nsoul of man; it compels him to grow in the power and force of certain high or
\nlarge universal qualities which in their harmony build a highest type of
\nmanhood. In Indian thought and life this was the ideal of the best, the law of
\nthe good or noble man, the discipline laid down for the self-perfecting
\nindividual, <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n\u00e4<\/font><\/span>rya<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span>, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\n\u0160<\/font><\/span>restha<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span>, sajjana<\/span>,
\ns\u00e4<\/span>dhu<\/span>.
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span><\/i>This
\nideal was not a purely moral or ethical conception, although that element might
\npredominate; it was also intellec\u00adtual, religious, social, aesthetic, the
\nflowering of the whole ideal man, the perfection of the total human nature. The
\nmost varied qualities met in the Indian conception of the best, <\/font> <\/span>
\n\u0160<\/font><\/span>restha<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span>, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nthe <\/font> <\/span>
\ngood
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>and
\nnoble man, <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n\u00e4<\/font><\/span>rya<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/span>. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nIn the heart
\nbenevolence, beneficence, <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nlove, compassion, altruism,
\nlong-suffering, liberality, kindliness, patience; in the character courage,
\nheroism, energy, loyalty, con\u00adtinence, truth, honour, justice, faith, obedience
\nand reverence <\/font> <\/span>
\nwhere <\/font> <\/span>
\nthese were due, but power too to govern and
\ndirect, a fine modesty and yet a strong independence and noble pride; in the
\nmind wisdom and intelligence and love of learning, knowledge of all the best
\nthought, an openness to poetry, art and beauty, an educated capacity and skill
\nin works; in the inner being a strong religious sense, piety, love of God,
\nseeking after the Highest, the spiritual turn; in social relations and conduct
\na strict observance of all the social Dharmas, as father, son, husband,
\nbrother, kinsman, friend, ruler or subject, master or servant, priest or
\nwarrior or worker, king or sage, member of clan or<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 105<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

caste: this was the total ideal of the Arya, the man of
\nhigh up\u00adbringing and noble nature. The ideal is clearly portrayed in the
\nwritten records of ancient India during two millenniums and it is the very
\nlife-breath of Hindu ethics. It was the creation of an at once ideal and
\nrational mind, spirit-wise and worldly-wise, deeply religious, nobly ethical,
\nfirmly yet flexibly intellectual, scientific and aesthetic, patient and
\ntolerant of life’s difficulties and human weakness, but arduous in
\nself-discipline. This was the mind that was at the base of the Indian
\ncivilisation and gave its character\u00adistic stamp to all the culture.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut even this was only the
\nfoundation and preparation for another highest thing which by its presence exalts
\nhuman life beyond itself into something spiritual and divine. Indian culture
\nraised the crude animal life of desire, self-interest and satisfied propensity
\nbeyond its first intention to a noble self-exceeding and shapeliness by
\ninfusing into it the order and high aims of the Dharma. But its profounder
\ncharacteristic aim ―<\/font><\/span> and in this
\n<\/font> <\/span>it was unique
\n― was to raise this nobler life too of the self-perfecting human being
\nbeyond its own intention to a mightiest self-exceeding and freedom; it laboured
\nto infuse into it the great aim of spiritual liberation and perfection, mukti,
\nmoksa. <\/i>The Law and its observance are neither the beginning nor the end of
\nman; there is beyond the field of the Law a larger realm of consciousness in
\nwhich, climbing, he emerges into a great spiri\u00adtual freedom. Not a noble but
\never death-bound manhood is the highest height of man’s perfection:
\nimmortality, freedom, divi\u00adnity are within his grasp. Ancient Indian culture
\nheld this highest aim constantly before the inner eye of the soul and insis\u00adtently
\ninspired with its prospect and light the whole conception of existence. The
\nentire life of the individual was ennobled by this aim, the whole ordering of
\nsociety was cast into a scale of graduated ascension towards this supreme
\nsummit.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nA well-governed
\nsystem of the individual and communal existence must be always in the first
\ninstance an ordering of the three first powers recognised, by Indian thought.
\nThe claim of the natural functionings must be recognised in it to the full; the
\npursuit of personal and communal interest and the satisfac\u00adtion of human
\ndesires as of human needs must be amply admitted <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage – 106<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

and there must be an understanding combination of knowledge and labour
\ntowards these ends. But all must be controlled, up\u00adlifted and widened to
\ngreater aims by the ideal of the Dharma. And if, as India believes, there is a
\nhigher spiritual conscious\u00adness towards which man can rise, that ascent must be
\nkept throughout in view as the supreme goal of life. The system of Indian
\nculture at once indulged and controlled man’s nature; it fitted him for his
\nsocial role; it stamped on his mind the generous ideal of an accomplished
\nhumanity refined, harmonised in all its capacities, ennobled in all its
\nmembers; but it placed before him too the theory and practice of a highest
\nchange, familiarised him with the conception of a spiritual existence and sowed
\nin him a hunger for the divine and the infinite. The symbols of his religion
\nwere filled with suggestions which led towards it; at every step he was
\nreminded of lives behind and in front and of worlds be\u00adyond <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe material existence; he was brought close to the near\u00ad<\/font><\/span>ness, even to the
\ncall and pressure of the Spirit that is greater than the life it informs, of
\nthe final goal, of a high possible im\u00admortality, freedom, God-consciousness,
\ndivine Nature. Man was not allowed to forget that he had in him a highest self
\nbeyond his little personal ego and that always he and all things live, move and
\nhave their being in God, in the Eternal, in the Spirit. There were ways and
\ndisciplines provided in number by which he could realise this liberating truth
\nor could at least turn and follow at a distance this highest aim according to
\nhis capacity and nature, adhik<\/i>\u00e4<\/span>ra<\/i><\/span>. <\/i>Around him he saw and revered the
\npowerful practicants<\/span> and mighty masters of these
\ndisciplines. These men were in early times the teachers of his youth, the
\nsummits of his society, the inspirers and fountain-heads of his civilisation,
\nthe great lights of his culture. Spiritual freedom, spiritual perfection were
\nnot figured as a far-off intangible ideal, but presented as the highest human
\naim towards which all must grow in the end and were made near and possible to
\nhis endeavour from a first practicable basis of life and the Dharma. The
\nspiritual idea governed, enlightened and gathered towards itself all the other
\nlife-motives of a great civilised people.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-107<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n7<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

THESE are the <\/span>
\nprincipal lines
\nupon which the structure of Indian civilisation was founded and they consti\u00adtute
\nthe power of its conception of life. I do not think it can be said that there
\nis here any inferiority to other human cultures or to any established
\nconception of life that has ever held sway over the mind of man in historic
\ntimes. There is nothing here that can be said to discourage life and its
\nflowering or to deprive it of im\u00adpetus and elevation and a great motive. On the
\ncontrary there is a full and frank recognition and examination of the whole of
\nhuman existence in all its variety and range and power, there is a clear and
\nwise and noble idea for its right government and there is an ideal tendency
\npointing it upward and a magnificent call to a highest possible perfection and
\ngreatness. These are the serious uses of culture, these are the things that
\nraise the life of man above a crude, primitive barbarism. If a civilisation is
\nto be judged by the power of its ideas, their power for these great uses,
\nIndian civilisation was inferior to none. Certainly, it was not perfect or
\nfinal or complete; for that can be alleged of no past or present cultural idea
\nor system. Man is in his inmost self an infinite being, in his mind and life
\ntoo he is continually grow\u00ading, with whatever stumblings and long relapses, and
\nhe cannot be permanently bound in anyone system of ideas or frame of living.
\nThe structures in which he lives are incomplete and pro\u00advisional; even those
\nwhich seem the most comprehensive lose their force to stand and are convicted
\nby time of insufficiency and must be replaced or change. But this at least can
\nbe said of the Indian idea that it seized with a remarkable depth and com\u00adprehensiveness
\non the main truths and needs of the whole being, on his mind and life and body,
\nhis artistic and ethical and intel\u00adlectual parts of nature, his soul and
\nspirit, and gave them a subtle and liberal, a profoundly large and high and
\nwise, a sympathetic and<\/font><\/span> yet nobly <\/span>
\narduous direction. More cannot be said for any
\npast or any existing culture.<\/font><\/span> <\/span> <\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\nBut there must be in any culture aiming at
\ncompleteness,<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-108<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

not only great and noble governing and inspiring ideas, but a harmony of
\nforms and rhythms, a mould into which the ideas and the life can run and
\nsettle. Here we must be prepared for a lesser perfection, a greater
\nincompleteness. And the reason is that just as the spirit is vaster than its
\nideas, the ideas too are larger than their forms, moulds and rhythms. Form has
\na certain fixity which limits; no form can exhaust or fully express the poten\u00adtialities
\nof the idea or force that gave it birth. Neither can any idea, however great,
\nor any limited play of force or form bind the infinite spirit: that is the
\nsecret of earth’s need of mutation and progress. The idea is only a partial
\nexpression of the spirit. Even within its own limits, on its own lines it ought
\nalways to become more supple, to fill itself <\/font> <\/span>
\nout<\/font><\/span> with other views, to rise
\nand broaden to new applications, and often it has to lose itself in uplifting
\ntransformations of its own meaning into vaster significances or fuse itself
\ninto new and richer syntheses. In the history of all great cultures therefore
\nwe find a passage through three periods, for this passage is a necessary
\nconsequence of this truth of things. There is a first period of large and loose
\nformation; there is a second period in which we see a fixing of forms, moulds
\nand. rhythms; and there is a closing or a critical period of superannuation,
\ndecay and disintegration. This last stage is the supreme crisis in the life of
\na civilisation; if it cannot transform itself, it enters into a slow lingering
\ndecline or else collapses in a death agony brought about by the rapid impact of
\nstronger and more immediately living though not necessarily greater or truer power
\nor formations. But if it is able to shake itself free of limiting forms, t6
\nrenovate its ideas and to give a new scope to its spirit, if it is willing to
\nunderstand, master and assimilate novel growths and necessities, then there is
\na rebirth, a fresh lease of life and expansion, a true renascence.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nIndian civilisation
\npassed in its own large and leisurely manner through all these stages. Its
\nfirst period was that of a great spiritual outflowering in which the forms were
\nsupple, flexible and freely responsive to its essential spirit. That fluid
\nmovement passed away into an age of strong intellectuality in which all was
\nfixed into distinct, sufficiently complex, but largely treated and still supple
\nforms and rhythms. There came as a<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-109<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

consequence a period of richly crystallised fixity shaken by crises
\nwhich were partly met by a change of ideas and a modification of forms. But the
\nhard binding of set forms triumphed at last and there was a decline of the
\ninspiring spirit, a stagnation of living force, a progressive decay of the
\noutward structure. The decay was accompanied and at once arrested for a moment
\nand hastened in the end by the impact of other cultures. Today we are in the
\nmidst of a violent and decisive crisis brought about by the inflooding of the
\nWest and of all for which it stands. An upheaval resulted that began with the
\nthreat of a total death and irretrievable destruction of the culture; but its
\ncourse is now up\u00adlifted on the contrary by the strong hope of a great revival,
\ntrans\u00admutation and renascence. Each of these three stages has its spe\u00adcial
\nsignificance for the student of culture. If we would under\u00adstand the essential
\nspirit of Indian civilisation, we must go back to its first formative period,
\nthe early epoch of the Veda and the Upanishads, its heroic creative seed-time.
\nIf we would study the fixed forms of its spirit and discern the thing it
\neventually realised as the basic rhythm of its life, we must look with an
\nobserving eye at the later middle period of the Shastras and the classic
\nwritings, the age of philosophy and science, legislation and political and<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nsocial theory and many-sided critical thought,
\nreligious fixation, <\/font> <\/span>
\nart, sculpture, painting, architecture. If we would discover the
\nlimitations, the points at which it stopped short and failed to develop its
\nwhole or its true spirit, we must observe closely the unhappy disclosures of
\nits period of decline. If, finally, we would discover the directions it is
\nlikely to follow in its transformation, we must try to fathom what lies beneath
\nthe still confused move\u00adments of its crisis of renascence. None of these can
\nindeed be cut clean apart from each other; for what developed in one period is
\nalready forecast and begun in the preceding age: but still on a certain large and
\nimprecise scale we can make these distinctions and they are necessary for a
\ndiscerning analytic view. But at present we are only concerned with the
\ndeveloped forms and the principal rhythms which persisted through its greater
\neras. 8888<\/font><\/span>The problem which Indian
\nculture had to solve was that of a firm outward basis on which to found the
\npractical development of its spirit and its idea in life. How are we to take
\nthe natural <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


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

\n

\nlife of man and, while allowing it sufficient scope and variety and
\nfreedom, yet to subject it to a law, canon, Dharma, <\/font> <\/span>
\na <\/font> <\/span>
\nlaw of function, a law of type, a law of each actual unideal human
\ntendency and a law too of highest ideal intention? And how again are we to
\npoint that Dharma towards its exceeding by ful\u00adfilment and cessation of its
\ndisciplinary purpose in the secure freedom of the spiritual life? Indian
\nculture from an early stage seized upon a double idea for its own guidance
\nwhich it threw into a basic system of the individual life in the social frame.
\nThis was the double system of the four Varnas and the four Ashramas, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nfour graded classes of society and four
\nsuccessive <\/font> <\/span>stages of a developing human life.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe ancient Chaturvarnya must
\nnot be judged by its later disintegrated degeneration and gross meaningless
\nparody, the caste system. But neither was it precisely the system of the
\nclasses which we find in other civilisations, priesthood, nobility, mer\u00adchant
\nclass and serfs or labourers. It may have had outwardly the same
\nstarting-point, but it was given a very different reveal\u00ading significance’. The
\nancient Indian idea was that man falls by his nature into four types. There
\nare, first and highest, the man of learning and thought and knowledge; next,
\nthe man of power and action, ruler, warrior, leader, administrator; third in
\nthe scale, the economic man, producer and wealth-getter, the mer\u00adchant,
\nartisan, cultivator: these were the twice-born, who re\u00adceived the initiation,
\nBrahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya. Last came the more undeveloped human type, not yet
\nfit for these steps of the scale, unintellectual, without force, incapable of
\ncreation or intelligent production, the man fit only for unskilled labour and
\nmenial service, the Shudra. The economic order of society was cast in the form
\nand gradation of these four types. The Brahmin class was called upon to give
\nthe community its priests, thinkers, men of letters, legislators, scholars,
\nreligious leaders and guides. The Kshatriya class gave it its kings, warriors,
\ngovernors and ad\u00administrators. The Vaishya order supplied it with its
\nproducers, agriculturists, craftsmen, artisans, merchants and traders. The\u00ad
\nShudra class ministered to its need of menials and servants. As far as this
\nwent, there was nothing peculiar in the system except its extraordinary
\ndurability and, perhaps, the supreme position<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


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

\n

\ngiven to religion, thought and learning, not only at the top of the
\nscale, <\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span> for that can be paralleled from one or two other civi\u00adlisations,
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> but
\nas the dominant power. The Indian idea in its purity fixed the status of a man
\nin this order not by his birth, but by his capacities and his inner nature,
\nand, if this rule had been strictly observed, that would have been a very clear
\nmark of distinctness, a superiority of a unique kind. But even the best society
\nis always something of a machine and gravitates towards the material sign and
\nstandard, and to found truly the social order upon this finer psychological
\nbasis would have been in those times a difficult and vain endeavour. In
\npractice we find that birth became the basis of the Vama. It is elsewhere that
\nwe must look for the strong distinguishing mark which has made of this social
\nstructure a thing apart and sole in its type. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nAt no time indeed was the
\nadherence to the economic rule quite absolute. The early ages show a
\nconsiderable flexibility which was not quite lost in the process of complex
\ncrystallisation into a fixed form. And even in the greater rigidity of the
\nlatter-day caste system there has been in practice a confusion of eco\u00adnomic
\nfunctions. The vitality of a vigorous community cannot obey at every point the
\nindications of a pattern and tradition cut by the mechanising mind. Moreover
\nthere was always a difference between the ideal theory of the system and its
\nrougher <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nunideal practice. For
\nthe material side of an idea or system has <\/font> <\/span>
\nalways its weaknesses even in
\nits best- times, and the final defect of all systems of this kind is that they
\nstiffen into a fixed hierarchy which cannot maintain permanently its purity or
\nthe utility it was meant to serve. It becomes a soulless form and prolongs
\nitself in a state of corruption, degeneracy or oppressive formalism when the
\nuses that justified it are no longer in existence. Even when its ways can no
\nlonger be made consistent with the developing needs of the growth of humanity,
\nthe formal system persists and corrupts the truth of life and blocks progress.
\nIndian society did not escape this general law; it was overtaken by these
\nde\u00adficiencies, lost the true sense of the thing with which it set out to embody
\nand degenerated into a chaos of castes, developing evils which we are now much
\nembarrassed to eliminate. But it was a well-devised and necessary scheme in its
\ntime; it gave the com-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\nmunity the <\/font> <\/span>
\nfirm
\nand nobly built stability it needed for the security <\/font> <\/span>
\nof
\nits <\/font> <\/span>
\ncultural development, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> a stability hardly paralleled <\/font> <\/span>
\nin any other <\/font> <\/span>
\nculture. And, as interpreted by the Indian genius, it
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nbecame <\/font> <\/span>
\na greater thing than a mere outward economic, political
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nand <\/font> <\/span>
\nsocial mechanism intended to serve the needs and conve\u00ad<\/font><\/span>nience of the collective life.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nFor the real greatness of the Indian
\nsystem of the four V<\/font><\/span>arnas <\/font> <\/span>
\ndid not lie in its well-ordered division of
\neconomic func\u00adtion; its true originality and permanent value was in the ethical
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\nand <\/font> <\/span>
\nspiritual content which the thinkers and builders of
\nthe <\/font> <\/span>
\nsociety <\/font> <\/span>
\npoured into these forms. This inner content started with
\n<\/font> <\/span>the idea that the
\nintellectual, ethical and spiritual growth of the individual is the central
\nneed of the race. Society itself is only <\/font> <\/span>
\nthe
\nnecessary <\/font> <\/span>framework for this growth; it is a system of rela\u00ad<\/font><\/span>tions which provides it with its needed medium, field and condi\u00adtions
\nand with a nexus of helpful influences. A secure place had to be found in the
\ncommunity for- the individual man from which <\/font> <\/span>
\nhe
\ncould at once serve these relations, helping to maintain the <\/font> <\/span>
\nsociety <\/font> <\/span>
\nand pay it his debt of duty and assistance, and
\nproceed <\/font> <\/span>
\nto
\nhis own self-development with the best possible aid from the communal life.
\nBirth was accepted in practice as the first gross and natural indicator; for
\nheredity to the Indian mind has always ranked as a factor of the highest
\nimportance: it was even taken in later thought as a sign of the nature and as
\nan index to the surroundings which the individual has prepared for himself by
\nhis past soul-development in former existences. But birth is not and cannot be
\nthe sole test of Varna. The intellectual capacity of the man, the turn of his
\ntemperament, his ethical nature, his spiritual stature, these are the important
\nfactors. There was erected therefore a rule of family living, a system of
\nindividual observance and self-training, a force of upbringing and education
\nwhich would bring out and formulate these essential things. The individual man
\nwas carefully trained in the capacities, habits and attainments, and habituated
\nto the sense of honour and duty necessary for the discharge of his allotted
\nfunction in life. He was scrupulously equipped with the science of the thing he
\nhad to do, the best way to succeed in it as an interest, artha, <\/i>and to
\nattain to the highest rule, canon and recognised perfection of its <\/font> <\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-113<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n
\nactivities,
\neconomic, political, sacerdotal, literary, scholastic or whatever else they
\nmight be. Even<\/font><\/span> <\/font>
\nthe most despised pursuits had their education, their law and
\ncanon, their ambition of success, their sense of honour in the discharge and
\nscruple of well-doing, their dignity of a fixed standard of perfection, and it
\nwas because they had these things that even the lowest and least attractive
\ncould be in a certain degree a means of self-finding and ordered
\nself-satisfaction. In addition to this special function and training there were
\nthe general accomplishments, sciences, arts, graces of life, those which
\nsatisfy the intellectual, aesthetic and hedonistic powers of human nature.
\nThese in ancient India were many and various, were taught with minuteness,
\nthoroughness and subtlety and were available to all men of culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut while there was provision
\nfor all these things and it was made with a vivid liberality of the life-spirit
\nand a noble sense of order, the spirit of Indian culture did not, like other
\nancient cultures, stop here. It said to the individual: "This is only the
\nsubstructure: it is of a pressing importance indeed, but still not the last and
\ngreatest thing. When you have paid your debt to society, filled well and
\nadmirably your place in its life, helped its maintenance and continuity and
\ntaken from it your legitimate and desired satisfactions, there still remains
\nthe greatest thing of all. There is still your own self, the inner you, the
\nsoul which is a spiritual portion of the Infinite, one in its essence with the
\nEter\u00adnal. This self, this soul in you, you have to find, you are here for that
\nand it is from, the place I have provided for you in life and by <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>this
\ntraining that you can begin to find it. For to each Varna I <\/font> <\/span>
\nhave supplied its
\nhighest ideal of manhood, the highest ideal way of which your nature is
\ncapable. By directing your life and nature in its own law of being towards that
\nperfection, you can not only grow towards the ideal and enter into harmony with
\nuniversal nature but come also into nearness and contact with a greater nature
\nof divinity and move towards transcendence. That is the real object before you.
\nFrom the life-basis I give you, you can rise to the liberating knowledge which
\nbrings a spiritual release, <\/font> mok<\/font><\/i><\/span>Ş<\/font><\/span>a. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nThen you can grow
\nout of all these limitations in which you are being trained; you can grow
\nthrough the fulfilled Dharma and beyond it into the eternity of your self, into
\nthe <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-114<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nfullness, freedom,
\ngreatness and bliss of the immortal spirit; for <\/font> <\/span>
\nthat <\/font> <\/span>
\nis what each man is behind the veils of his
\nnature. When you <\/font> <\/span>
\nhave done that you are free. Then you have gone beyond all the Dharmas;
\nyou are then a universal soul, one with all existence, and you can either act
\nin that divine liberty for the good of all living things or else turn to enjoy
\nin solitude the bliss of eternity and transcendence." The whole system of
\nsociety, founded on the four Varnas, was made a harmonious means for the
\nelevation and progress of the soul, mind and life from the natural pursuit of
\ninterest and desire, first to the perfection of the law of our <\/font> <\/span>
\nbeing, Dharma, and at the end to a highest spiritual freedom.
\n<\/font> <\/span>For man’s true end
\nin life must be always this realisation of his own immortal self, this entry in
\nits secret of an infinite and <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\neternal existence.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nThe Indian system
\ndid not entirely leave this difficult growth to the individual’s unaided inner
\ninitiative. It supplied him with a framework; it gave him a scale and gradation
\nfor his life which could be made into a kind of ladder rising in that sense.
\nThis high convenience was the object of the four Ashramas. Life was divided
\ninto four natural periods arid each of them marked out a stage in the working
\nout of this cultural idea of living. There was the period of the student, the
\nperiod of the householder, the period of the recluse or forest-dweller, the
\nperiod of the free super-social man, <\/font> parivr<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>jaka. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nThe student life
\nwas framed to lay the groundwork of what the man had to know, do and be. It
\ngave a thorough training in the necessary arts, sciences, branches of
\nknowledge, but it was still more insistent on the discipline of the ethical
\nnature and in earlier days contained as an indispen\u00adsable factor a grounding in
\nthe Vedic formula of spiritual know\u00adledge. In the earlier days this training
\nwas given in suitable sur\u00adroundings far away from the life of cities and the
\nteacher was one who had himself passed through the round of this circle of
\nliving and, very usually, even, one who had arrived at some remarkable
\nrealisation of spiritual knowledge. But subsequently education became more
\nintellectual and mundane; it was imparted in Cities and universities and aimed
\nless at an inner preparation of charac\u00adter and knowledge and more at
\ninstruction and the training of the intelligence. But in the beginning the
\nAryan man was really<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-115<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

prepared in some degree for the four great objects of his life,
\n<\/font> artha,
\nk<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>ma, dharma, mok<\/font><\/span><\/i>ş<\/font><\/span>a. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nEntering into the
\nhouseholder stage to live out his knowledge, he was, able to serve there the
\nthree first human objects; he satisfied his natural being and its interests and
\ndesire to take the joy of life, he paid his debt to the society and its demands
\nand by the way he discharged his life functions he prepared himself for the
\nlast greatest purpose of his existence. In the third stage he retired to the
\nforest and worked out in a certain seclusion the truth of his spirit. He lived
\nin a broad freedom from the stricter social bonds; but if he so willed,
\ngathering the young around him or receiving the inquirer and seeker, he could
\nleave his knowledge to the new rising generation as an educator or a spiritual
\nteacher. In the last stage of life, he was free to throw off every remaining
\ntie and to wander over the world in an extreme spiritual detachment from all
\nthe forms of social life, satisfying only the barest necessities, communing
\nwith the universal spirit, making his soul ready for eternity. This circle was
\nnot obligatory on all. The great majority never went beyond the two first
\nstages; many passed away in the <\/font> v<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>na\u00adprastha or <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nforest stage. Only
\nthe rare few made the last extreme venture and took the life of the wandering
\nrecluse. But this profoundly conceived cycle gave a scheme which kept the full
\ncourse of the human spirit in its view; it could be taken advan\u00adtage of by all
\naccording to their actual growth and in its fullness by those who were
\nsufficiently developed in their present birth to complete the circle<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nOn this first firm
\nand noble basis Indian civilisation grew to its maturity and became a thing
\nrich, splendid and unique. While it filled the view with the last mountain
\nprospect of a supreme spiritual elevation, it did not neglect the life of the
\nlevels. It lived between the busy life of the city and village, the freedom and
\nseclusion of the forest and the last overarching illimitable ether. Moving
\nfirmly between life and death it saw beyond both and cut out a hundred high
\nroads to immortality. It developed the external nature and drew it into the
\ninner self; it enriched life to raise it into the spirit. Thus founded, thus
\ntrained, the ancient Indian race grew to astonishing heights of culture and
\ncivilisa\u00adtion; it lived with a noble, well-based, ample and vigorous order<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


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

\n

\nand freedom; it developed a
\ngreat literature, sciences, arts, crafts, industries; it rose to the highest
\npossible ideals and no <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nmean <\/font> <\/span>
\npractice of knowledge and culture, of arduous greatness
\n<\/font> <\/span>and heroism, of
\nkindness, philanthropy and human sympathy and oneness; it laid the inspired
\nbasis of wonderful spiritual<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nphilosophies;
\nit examined the secrets of external nature and dis<\/font><\/span>covered and lived the
\nboundless and miraculous truths of the inner being; it fathomed self and
\nunderstood and possessed the world. As the civilisation grew in richness and
\ncomplexity, it lost indeed the first grand simplicity of its early order. The
\nin\u00adtellect towered and widened, but intuition waned or retreated into the
\nhearts of the saints and adepts and mystics. A greater stress came to be laid
\non scientific system, accuracy and order, not only in all the things of the
\nlife and mind, but even in the things of the spirit; the free flood of
\nintuitive knowledge was forced to run in hewn channels. Society became more
\nartificial and complex, less free and noble; more of a bond on the indi\u00advidual,
\nit was less a field for the growth of his spiritual -faculties. The old fine
\nintegral harmony gave place to an exaggerated stress on one or other of its elemental
\nfactors. Artha <\/i>and <\/font> k<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>ma, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\ninte\u00adrest and
\ndesire were in some directions developed at the expense of the dharma. <\/i>The
\nlines of the dharma <\/i>were filled and stamped in with so rigid a
\ndistinctness as to stand in the way of the free\u00addom of the spirit. Spiritual
\nliberation was pursued in hostility to life and not as its full-orbed result
\nand high crowning. But still some strong basis of the old knowledge remained to
\ninspire, to harmonise, to keep alive the soul of India. Even when de\u00adterioration
\ncame and a slow collapse, even when the life of the community degenerated into
\nan uneasily petrified ignorance and confusion, the old spiritual aim and
\ntradition remained to sweeten and humanise and save in its worst days the
\nIndian peoples. For we see that it continually swept back on the race in new
\nwaves and high outbursts of life-giving energy or leaped up in intense
\nkindlings of the spiritualised mind or heart, even as it now rises once more in
\nall its strength to give the impulse of a great renascence.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-117<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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