{"id":929,"date":"2013-07-13T01:31:19","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=929"},"modified":"2013-12-01T16:36:40","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T00:36:40","slug":"08-religion-and-spirituality-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\/08-religion-and-spirituality-vol-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","title":{"rendered":"-08_Religion\u00a0and\u00a0Spirituality .htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\nReligion\u00a0 <\/span>and\u00a0 <\/span>Spirituality<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\n
\n       
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nI<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> \u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/span>HAVE<\/font> <\/span>
\ndescribed the
\nframework of the Indian idea from the outlook of an intellectual criticism, because
\nthat is the standpoint of the critics who affect to disparage its value. I have
\nshown that Indian culture must be adjudged even from this alien outlook to have
\nbeen the creation of a wide and noble spirit. Inspired in the heart of its
\nbeing by a lofty principle, illumined with a striking and uplifting idea of
\nindividual man- hood and its powers and its possible perfection, aligned to a
\nspacious plan of social architecture, it was enriched not only by a strong
\nphilosophic, intellectual and artistic creativeness but by a great and
\nvivifying and fruitful life-power. But this by itself does not give an adequate
\naccount of its spirit or its greatness. One might describe Greek or Roman
\ncivilisation from this outlook and miss little that was of importance; but
\nIndian civilisation was not only a great cultural system, but an immense
\nreligious effort of the human spirit.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe whole root of
\ndifference between Indian and European culture springs from the spiritual aim
\nof Indian civilization. It is the turn which this aim imposes on all the rich
\nand luxuriant variety of its forms and rhythms that gives to it its unique
\ncharacter. For even what it has in common with other cultures gets from that
\nturn a stamp of striking originality and solitary greatness. A spiritual
\naspiration was the governing force of this culture, its core of thought, its
\nruling passion: Not only did it make spirituality the highest aim of life, but
\nit even tried, as far as that could be done in the past conditions of the human
\nrace, to turn the whole of life towards spirituality. But since religion is in
\nthe human mind the first native, if imperfect form of the spiritual impulse,
\nthe predominance of the spiritual idea, its endeavour to take hold of life,
\nnecessitated a casting of thought and action into the religious mould and a
\npersistent filling of every circumstance of life with the religious sense; it
\ndemanded a pervading religio-philosophic culture. The highest spirituality
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-121<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nindeed moves in a
\nfree and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by
\nreligious form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations and, even
\nwhen it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the
\nformal religious mind is unintelligible. But man does not arrive immediately at
\nthat highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him at once, he
\nwould never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of
\nascent; he asks for some scaffolding of dogma, worship, image, sign, form,
\nsymbol, some indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he
\ncan stand while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the
\ntemple is completed can the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear. The
\nreligious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled
\nthis purpose, but, unlike certain other credal religions, it knew its purpose.
\nIt gave itself<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal
\nadhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or
\ngate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging
\ntradition of the Godward endeavourof the human spirit. An immense many-sided
\nand many- staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it
\nhad some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal
\nreligion, <\/font> san<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>tana dharma.
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/i>It is only if we have a just
\nand right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can
\ncome to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of Indian culture.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Now just here is the first baffling
\ndifficulty over which the European mind stumbles; for it finds itself unable to
\nmake out what Hindu religion is. Where, it asks, is its soul? Where is its mind
\nand fixed thought? Where is the form of its body? How can there be a religion
\nwhich has no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no
\ntheological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo, distinguishing it
\nfrom antagonistic or rival religions? How can there be a religion which has no
\npapal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or congregational
\nsystem, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory on all its adherents,
\nno one administration and discipline’? For the Hindu priests are mere
\nceremonial<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-122<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

officiants without any
\necclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere
\ninterpreters of the Shastra, not the law-givers of the religion or its rulers.
\nHow again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs,
\nallowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all
\npossible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures? The only
\nthing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that varies in
\ndifferent castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but
\neven the caste cannot punish a man for his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent
\nhis following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader. If it ex-
\ncommunicates the Christian or the Muslim, it is not for religious belief or
\npractice, but because they break with the social rule and order. It has been
\nasserted in consequence that there is no such thing as a Hindu religion, but
\nonly a Hindu social system with a bundle of the most disparate religious
\nbeliefs and institutions. The precious dictum that Hinduism is a mass of folk-
\nlore with an ineffective coat of metaphysical daubing is perhaps the final
\njudgment of the superficial occidental mind on this matter.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>This misunderstanding springs from the
\ntotal difference of outlook on religion that divides the Indian mind and the
\nnormal western intelligence. The difference is so great that it <\/i>could
\nonly be bridged by a supple philosophical training or a wide spiritual culture;
\nbut the established forms of religion and the rigid methods of philosophical
\nthought practised in the West make no provision and even allow no opportunity
\nfor either. To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its
\ndogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the
\ncontrary, to the western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the-most important
\npart of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes
\nit from others. For it is its formulated beliefs that make it either a true or
\na false religion, according as it agrees or does not agree with the credo of
\nits critic. This notion, however foolish and shallow, is a necessary
\nconsequence of the western idea which falsely supposes that intellectual truth
\nis the highest verity and, even, that there is no other. The Indian religious
\nthinker knows that all the highest eternal verities are truths of the<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-123<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nspirit. The supreme truths are
\nneither the rigid conc1~sions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of
\ncredal statement, but fruits of the soul’s inner experience. Intellectual truth
\nis only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple; And since
\nintellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature
\nmany-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be
\nequally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However
\nseparated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances
\nwhich admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true
\nand false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and
\ndegree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Indian religion placed four necessities
\nbefore human life. First, it imposed upon the mind a belief in a highest
\nconsciousness or state of existence universal-and transcendent of the universe,
\nfrom which all comes, in which all lives and moves without knowing it and of
\nwhich all must one day grow aware, returning to- wards that which is perfect,
\neternal and infinite. Next, it laid upon the individual life the need of
\nself-preparation by development and experience till man is ready for an effort
\nto grow consciously into the truth of this greater existence. Thirdly, it
\nprovided it with a well-founded, well-explored, many-branching and always
\nenlarging way of knowledge and of spiritual or religious discipline. Lastly,
\nfor those not yet ready for these higher steps it provided an organisation of
\nthe individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social
\ndiscipline and conduct, of mental and moral and vital development by which they
\ncould move each in his own limits and according to his own nature in such a way
\nas to become eventually ready for the greater existence. The first three of
\nthese elements are the most essential to any religion, but Hinduism has always
\nattached to the last also a great importance; it has left out no part of life
\nas a thing secular and foreign to the religious and spiritual life. Still the
\nIndian religious tradition is not merely the form of a religio social system,
\nas the ignorant critic vainly imagines. However greatly that may count at the
\nmoment of a social departure, however stubbornly the conservative religious
\nmind may oppose all pronounced or drastic change, still the core of Hinduism is
\na<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nspiritual, not social
\ndiscipline. Actually we find religions like Sikhism counted in the Vedic family
\nalthough they broke -down the old social tradition and invented a novel form,
\nwhile the Jains and Buddhists were traditionally considered to be outside the
\nreligious fold although they observed Hindu social custom and intermarried with
\nHindus, because their spiritual system and teaching figured in its origin as a
\ndenial of the truth of the Veda and a departure from the continuity of the
\nVedic line. In all these four elements that constitute Hinduism there are major
\nand minor differences between Hindus of various sects, schools, communities and
\nraces; but nevertheless there is also a general’ unity of spirit, of
\nfundamental type and form and of, spiritual temperament which creates in this
\nvast fluidity an immense force of cohesion and a strong principle of oneness.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The fundamental idea of all Indian
\nreligion is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme
\ntruth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical
\nappearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and
\nSelf containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is
\nrelative, a supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient,
\na one Eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal Divinity
\nor divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount and continent
\nand inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or
\npartial phenomenon of this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal. But
\nthis Truth of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical
\nspeculation, a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the
\nintelligence. It was not an idea to be indulged by the thinker in his study,
\nbut otherwise void of practical bearing on life. It was not a mystic
\nsublimation which could be ignored in the dealings of man with the world and Nature.
\nIt was a living spiritual Truth, an Entity, a Power, a Presence that could be
\nsought by all according to their degree of capacity and seized in a thousand
\nways through life and beyond life. This Truth was to be lived and even to be
\nmade the governing idea of thought and life and action. This recognition and
\npursuit of something or someone Supreme behind all forms is the one universal
\ncredo of Indian religion, and if it has taken a<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nhundred shapes, it was
\nprecisely because it was so much alive. The Infinite alone justifies the
\nexistence of the finite and the finite<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nby itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence.
\n<\/font> <\/span>Life, if it is not
\nan illusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. Or
\nit is a means by which the soul growing <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nin Nature through countless forms and many
\nlives can approach, <\/font> <\/span>
\ntouch, feel and unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and
\nadoration and a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this
\ninfinite Existence. This Self or this self- existent Being is the one supreme
\nreality, and an things else are either only appearances or only true by
\ndependence upon it. It follows that self-realisation and God-realisation are
\nthe great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and thought
\nare in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and
\nGod-realisation. <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Indian religion never considered
\nintellectual or theological conceptions about the supreme Truth to be the one
\nthing of central importance. To pursue that Truth under whatever conception or
\nwhatever form, to attain to it by inner experience, to live in it in
\nconsciousness, this it held to be the sole thing needful. One school or sect
\nmight consider the real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal
\nSelf or the supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in
\nessence but different from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and
\nthe individual soul in man to be three eternally different powers of being. But
\nfor all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even to the Indian
\ndualist, God is the supreme self and reality in whom and by whom Nature and man
\nlive, move and have their being and, if you eliminate God from his view of
\nthings, Nature and man would lose for him all their meaning and importance. The
\nSpirit, universal Nature (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul
\nin living beings, Jiva, are the three truths which are universally admitted by
\nall the many religious sects and conflicting religious philosophies of India.
\nUniversal also is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self
\nin man, the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting con- tact
\nor absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal
\nBrahman is the condition of spiritual perfection.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nIt is open to us to conceive
\nand have experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to
\napproach and know and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal
\nPerson: but whatever be our way of reaching him, the one important truth of
\nspiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and
\nall existence is in him and to find him is the great self-finding. Differences
\nof credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of
\nseeing the one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing
\nneedful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after
\nand discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and
\naim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living
\nTruth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest
\nspiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian
\nreligion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>If there were nothing else to be
\nsaid in favour of the spiritual genius of the Indian people or the claim of
\nIndian civilisation to stand in the front rank as a spiritual culture, it would
\nbe sufficiently substantiated by this single fact that not only was this
\ngreatest and widest spiritual truth seen in India with the boldest largeness,
\nfelt and expressed with a unique intensity, and approached from all possible
\nsides, but it was made consciously the grand uplifting idea of life, the core
\nof all thinking, the foundation of all religion~ the secret sense and declared
\nultimate aim of human existence. The truth announced is not peculiar to Indian
\nthinking; it has been seen and followed by the highest minds and souls
\neverywhere. But elsewhere it has been the living guide only of a few thinkers
\nor of some rare mystics or exception- any gifted spiritual natures. The mass of
\nmen have had no under- standing, no distinct perception, not even a reflected
\nglimpse of<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nthis something Beyond; they have lived only in the lower sectarian side of
\nreligion, in inferior ideas of the Deity or in the out- ward mundane aspects of
\nlife. But Indian culture did succeed by the strenuousness of its vision, the
\nuniversality of its approach, the intensity of its seeking, in doing what has
\nbeen done by no other culture. It succeeded in stamping religion with the
\nessential ideal of a real spirituality; it brought some living reflection of
\nthe<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nvery highest spiritual truth
\nand some breath of its influence into every part of the religious field.
\nNothing can be more untrue than to pretend that the general religious mind of
\nIndia has not at all grasped the higher spiritual or metaphysical truths of Indian
\nreligion. It is a sheer falsehood or a wilful misunderstanding to say that it
\nhas lived always in the externals only of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the
\ncontrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their
\nbroad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have
\nbeen stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya, Lila, divine
\nImmanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the
\ntemple as to the philosopher in his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and
\nthe saint in his hermitage. The spiritual reality which they reflect, the
\nprofound experience to which they point has permeated the religion, the
\nliterature, the art, even the popular religious songs of a whole people.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is true that these things are
\nrealised by the mass of men more readily through the fervour of devotion than
\nby a strenuous effort of thinking, but that is as it must and should be, since
\nthe heart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence. It is true, too,
\nthat the tendency to put too much stress on externals has always been there and
\nworked to overcloud the deeper spiritual motive; but that is not peculiar to
\nIndia, it is a common failing of human nature, not less but rather more evident
\nin Europe than in Asia. It has needed a constant stream of saints and religious
\nthinkers and the teaching of illuminated Sannyasins to keep the reality vivid
\nand resist the deadening weight of form and ceremony and ritual. But the fact
\nremains that these messengers of the spirit have never been wanting. And the
\nstill more significant fact remains that there has never been wanting either a
\nhappy readiness in the common mind to listen to the message. The ordinary
\nmaterialised souls, the external minds are the majority in India as everywhere.
\nHow easy it is for the superior European critic to forget this common fact of
\nour humanity and treat this turn as a peculiar sign of the Indian mentality!
\nBut at least the people of India, even the "ignorant masses" have
\nthis distinction that they are by centuries of training nearer to the<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\ninner realities, are divided
\nfrom them by a less thick veil of the universal ignorance and are more easily
\nled back to a ,vital glimpse of God and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass
\nof <\/i>men or even the cultured elite anywhere else. Where else could the
\nlofty, austere and difficult teaching of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the
\npopular mind? Where else could the songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir,
\nthe Sikh Gurus and the chants of the Tamil saints with their fervid devotion
\nbut also their pro- found spiritual thinking have found so speedy an echo and
\nformed a popular religious literature? This strong permeation or close nearness
\nof the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to
\nthe highest realities is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still
\nliving and supremely spiritual culture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The endless variety of Indian
\nphilosophy and religion seems to the European mind interminable, bewildering,
\nwearisome, useless; it is unable to see the forest because of the richness and
\nluxuriance of its vegetation; it misses the common spiritual life in the
\nmultitude of its forms. But this infinite variety is itself, as Vivekananda
\npertinently pointed out, a sign of a superior religious culture. The Indian
\nmind has always realised that the Supreme is the Infinite; it has perceived,
\nright from its Vedic beginnings, that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must
\nalways present itself in an endless variety of aspects. The mentality of the
\nWest has long cherished the aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single
\nreligion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its
\nnarrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one array of
\nprohibitions and injunctions, one ecclesiastical ordinance. That narrow
\nabsurdity prances about as the one true religion which all must accept on peril
\nof persecution by men here and spiritual rejection or fierce eternal punishment
\nby God in other worlds. This grotesque creation of human unreason, the parent
\nof so much intolerance, cruelty, obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has
\nnever been able to take firm hold of the free and supple mind of India. Men
\neverywhere have common human failings, and intolerance and narrowness
\nespecially in the matter of observances there has been and is in India. There
\nhas been much violence of theological disputation, there <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nhave been querulous bickerings
\nof sects with their pretensions to spiritual superiority and greater knowledge,
\nand sometimes, at one time especially in southern India in a period of acute
\nreligious differences, there have been brief local outbreaks of active mutual
\ntyranny and persecution even unto death. But these things have never taken the
\nproportions which they assumed in Europe. Intolerance has been confined for the
\nmost part to the minor forms of polemical attack or to social obstruction or
\nostracism; very seldom have they transgressed across the line to the major
\nforms of barbaric persecution which draw a long, red and hideous stain across
\nthe religious history of Europe. There has played ever in India the saving
\nperception of a higher and purer spiritual intelligence, which has had its
\neffect on the mass mentality. Indian religion has always felt that since the
\nminds, the temperaments, the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in
\ntheir variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to
\nthe individual in his approach to the Infinite.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>India recognised the authority of
\nspiritual experience and knowledge, but she recognised still more the need of
\nvariety of spiritual experience and knowledge. Even in the days of decline when
\nthe claim of authority became in too many directions rigorous and excessive,
\nshe still kept the saving perception that there could not be one but must be
\nmany authorities. An alert readiness to acknowledge new light capable of
\nenlarging the old tradition has always been characteristic of the religious
\nmind in <\/font><\/span>
\nIndia. Indian civilisation did not develop to a
\nlast logical conclusion its earlier political and social liberties, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> that
\ngreatness of<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nfreedom or boldness of experiment belongs to the West;
\nbut liberty of religious practice and a complete freedom of thought in religion
\nas in every other matter have always counted among its constant traditions. The
\natheist and the agnostic were free from persecution in India. Buddhism and
\nJainism might be disparaged as unorthodox religions, but they were allowed to
\nlive freely side by side with the orthodox creeds and philosophies; in her
\neager thirst for truth she gave them their full chance, tested all their
\nvalues, and as much of their truth as was assimilable was taken into the stock
\nof the common and always<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nenlarging continuity of her
\nspiritual experience. That ageless continuity was carefully conserved, but it
\nadmitted light from all quarters. In later times the saints who reached some
\nfusion of the Hindu and the Islamic teaching were freely and immediately
\nrecognised as leaders of Hindu religion,<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/span>even,
\nin some cases, when they started with a Mussulman birth and from the Mussulman
\nstandpoint. The Yogin who developed a new path of Yoga, the religious teacher
\nwho founded a new order, the thinker who built up a novel statement of the
\nmany-sided truth of spiritual existence, found no serious obstacle to their
\npractice or their propaganda. At most they had to meet the opposition of the
\npriest and Pundit instinctively adverse to any change; but this had only to be
\nlived down for the new element to be received into the free and pliant body of
\nthe national religion and its ever plastic order.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The necessity of a firm spiritual
\norder as well as an untrammelled spiritual freedom was always perceived but it
\nwas provided for in various ways and" not in anyone formal, external or
\nartificial manner. It was founded in the first place on the recognition of an
\never-enlarging number of authorised scriptures. Of these scriptures some like
\nthe Gita possessed a common and widespread authority, others were peculiar to
\nsects or schools: some like the Vedas were supposed to have an absolute, others
\na relative binding force. But the very largest freedom of interpretation was allowed,
\nand this prevented any of these authoritative books from being turned into an
\ninstrument of ecclesiastical tyranny or a denial of freedom to the human mind
\nand spirit. Another instrument of order was the power of family and communal
\ntradition, kuladharma, <\/i>persistent but not immutable. A third was the
\nreligious authority of the Brahmins; as priests they officiated as the
\ncustodians of observance, as scholars, acting in a much more important and
\nrespected role than the officiating priesthood could claim,<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> for to the priesthood no great consideration was given
\nin India,<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> they stood as the exponents of
\nreligious tradition and were a strong conservative power. Finally, and most
\ncharacteristically, most powerfully, order was secured by the succession of Gurus
\nor spiritual teachers, <\/font> parampar<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nwho preserved the
\ncontinuity of each spiritual system and<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nhanded it down from generation
\nto generation but were empowered also, unlike the priest and the Pundit, to
\nenrich freely its significance and develop its practice. A living and moving,
\nnot a rigid continuity, was the characteristic turn of the inner religious mind
\nof India. The evolution of the Vaishnava religion from very early times, its
\nsuccession of saints and teachers, the striking developments given to it
\nsuccessively by Ramanuja, Madhwa, Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and its recent
\nstirrings of survival after a period of languor and of some fossilisation form
\none notable example of this firm combination of agelong continuity and fixed
\ntradition with latitude of powerful and vivid change. A more striking instance
\nwas the founding of the Sikh religion, its long line of Gurus and the novel
\ndirection and form given to it by Guru Govind Singh in the democratic<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\ninstitution of the Khalsa. The Buddhist Sangha
\nand its councils, the creation of a sort of divided pontifical authority by
\nShankaracharya, an authority transmitted from generation to generation for more
\nthan a thousand years and even now not altogether effete, the Sikh Khalsa, the
\nadoption of the congregational form called Samaj by the modern reforming sects
\nindicate an attempt towards a compact and stringent order. But it is noteworthy
\nthat even in these attempts the freedom and plasticity and living sincerity of
\nthe religious mind of India always prevented it from initiating anything like
\nthe overblown ecclesiastical orders and despotic hierarchies which in the West
\nhave striven to impose the tyranny of their obscurantist yoke on the spiritual
\nliberty of the human race.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The instinct for order and freedom
\nat once in any field of human activity is always a sign of a high natural
\ncapacity in that field, and a people which could devise such a union of
\nunlimited religious liberty with an always orderly religious evolution, must be
\ncredited with a high religious capacity, even as they cannot be denied its
\ninevitable fruit, a great, ancient and still living spiritual culture. It is
\nthis absolute freedom of thought and experience and this provision of a
\nframework sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet
\nsufficiently sure and firm to be the means of a stable and powerful evolution
\nthat have given to Indian civilisation this wonderful and seemingly eternal
\nreligion<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-132<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nwith its marvellous wealth of
\nmany-sided philosophies, of great scriptures, of profound religious works, of
\nreligions that approach the Eternal from every side of his infinite Truth, of
\nYoga- systems of psycho-spiritual discipline and self-finding, of suggestive
\nforms, symbols and ceremonies, which are strong to train the mind at all stages
\nof development towards the Godward endeavour. Its firm structure capable of
\nsupporting without peril a large tolerance and assimilative spirit, its
\nvivacity, intensity, profundity and multitudinousness of experience, its
\nfreedom from the unnatural European divorce between mundane know- ledge and
\nscience on the one side and religion on the other, its reconciliation of the
\nclaims of the intellect with the claims of the spirit, its long endurance and
\ninfinite capacity of revival make it stand out today as the most remarkable,
\nrich and living of all religious systems. The nineteenth century has thrown on
\nit its tremendous shock of negation and scepticism but has not been able to destroy
\nits assured roots of spiritual knowledge. A little disturbed for a brief
\nmoment, surprised and temporarily shaken by this attack in a period of greatest
\ndepression of the nation’s vital force, India revived almost at once and
\nresponded by a fresh outburst of spiritual activity, seeking, assimilation,
\nformative effort. A great new life is visibly preparing in her, a mighty
\ntransformation and farther dynamic evolution and potent march forward into the
\ninexhaustible infinities of spiritual experience.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The many-sided plasticity of Indian cult and spiritual experience is the
\nnative sign of its truth, its living reality, the un- fettered sincerity of its
\nsearch and finding; but this plasticity is a constant stumbling-block to the
\nEuropean mind. The religious thinking of Europe is accustomed to rigid
\nimpoverishing definitions, to strict exclusions, to a constant preoccupation
\nwith the outward idea, the organisation, the form. A precise creed framed by the
\nlogical or theological intellect, a strict and definite moral code to fix the
\nconduct, a bundle of observances and ceremonies, a firm ecclesiastical or
\ncongregational organisation, that is western religion. Once the spirit is safely
\nimprisoned and chained up in these things, some emotional fervours and even a
\ncertain amount of mystic seeking can be tolerated <\/font><\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> within rational<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nlimits; but, after all, it is
\nperhaps safest to do without these dangerous spices. Trained in these
\nconceptions, the European critic comes to India and is struck by the immense
\nmass and intricacy of a polytheistic cult crowned at its summit by a belief in
\nthe one Infinite. This belief he erroneously supposes to be identical with the
\nbarren and abstract intellectual pantheism of the West. He applies with an
\nobstinate prejudgment the ideas and definitions of his own thinking, and this
\nillegitimate importation has fixed many false values on Indian spiritual
\nconceptions, <\/font> <\/span>― <\/font> <\/span>
\nunhappily, even in the mind of "educated" India. But
\nwhere our religion eludes his fixed standards, misunderstanding, denunciation
\nand supercilious condemnation come. at once to his rescue. The Indian mind, on
\nthe contrary, is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of
\nintuition and inner
\nexperience had given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the
\nWest is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> the cosmic
\nconsciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the One without a second,
\nit still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature; it leaves room for his many trinities
\nand million aspects. Even when it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of
\nthe Divinity and seems to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at
\nthe back of its conscious- ness the sense of the All and the idea of the One.
\nEven when it distributes its worship among many objects, it looks at the same
\ntime through the objects of its worship and sees beyond the multitude of
\ngodheads the unity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar to the
\nmystics or to a small literate class or to philosophic thinkers nourished on
\nthe high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta. It permeates the popular mind
\nnourished on the thoughts, images, traditions, and cultural symbols of the
\nPurana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living
\nfigures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarianism, the large cosmic
\nuniversalism of the Vedic scriptures.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Indian religion founded itself on
\nthe conception of a timeless, nameless and formless Supreme, but it did not
\nfeel called upon like the narrower and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger
\nraces, to deny or abolish all intermediary forms and<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\nPage-13<\/font>4<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nnames and powers and
\npersonalities of the Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague
\ntranscendental Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one
\nGodhead is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is he or made out of
\nhis being or his nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism; for
\nbeyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal. Indian
\npolytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for here the
\nworshipper of many gods still knows that all his divinities are forms, names,
\npersonalities and powers of the One; his gods proceed from the one Purusha, his
\ngoddesses are energies of the one divine Force. Those ways of Indian cult which
\nmost resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do
\nnot exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. Indian image-worship is not the
\nidolatry of a barbaric or undeveloped mind, for even the most ignorant know
\nthat the image is a symbol and support and can throw it away when its use is
\nover. The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic
\nidea, like Nanak’s worship of the timeless One, Akala, and the reforming creeds
\nof today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the
\nlimitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these
\ninfantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta. The divine
\nPersonality of God and his human relations with man are strongly stressed by
\nVaishnavism and Shaivism as the most dynamic Truth; but that is not the whole
\nof these religions, and this divine Personality is not the limited magnified-
\nhuman personal God of the. West. Indian religion cannot be described by any of
\nthe definitions known to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has
\nbeen a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experience.
\nObserving the one Truth from all its many sides, it shut out none. It gave
\nitself no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing
\nseparative designations for its constituting cults and divisions, it remained
\nitself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman of its agelong
\nseeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other creeds by its traditional
\nscriptures, cults and symbols, it is not in its essential character a credal
\nreligion at all but a vast and many-sided, an always unifying and always pro-<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-135<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\ngressive and self-enlarging
\nsystem of spiritual culture.1<\/sup>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is necessary to emphasise this synthetic
\ncharacter and embracing unity of the Indian religious mind, because other- wise
\nwe miss the whole meaning of Indian life and the whole sense of Indian culture.
\nIt is only by recognising this broad and plastic character that we can
\nunderstand its total effect on the life of the community and the life of the
\nindividual. And if we are asked, ‘But after all what is Hinduism, what does it
\nteach, what does it practise, what are its common factors?\u2019, we can answer that
\nIndian religion is founded upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals
\nof a highest and widest spiritual experience. First comes the idea of the One
\nExistence of the Veda to whom sages give different names, the One without a
\nsecond of the Upanishads who is All that is, and beyond all that is, the
\nPermanent of the Buddhists, the Absolute of the Illusionists, the supreme God
\nor Purusha of the Theists who holds in his power the soul and Nature,<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> in a word the Eternal, the Infinite. This is the first
\ncommon foundation; but it can be and is expressed in an endless variety of
\nformulas by the human intelligence. To discover and closely approach and enter
\ninto whatever kind or degree of unity with this Permanent, this In- finite,
\nthis Eternal, is the highest height and last effort of its spiritual
\nexperience. That is the first universal credo of <\/i>the religious mind of
\nIndia.
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\n   
\n<\/font> <\/span>Admit in whatever formula this foundation, follow this great spiritual aim by
\none of the thousand paths recognised in India or even any new path which
\nbranches off from them and you are at the core of the religion. For its second
\nbasic idea is the manifold way of man’s approach to the Eternal and Infinite.
\nThe Infinite is full of many infinities and each of these infinities is itself
\nthe very Eternal. And here in the limitations of the cosmos God manifests
\nhimself and fulfils himself in the world in many ways, but each is the way of
\nthe Eternal. For in each finite we can discover and through all things as his
\nforms and symbols we can<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\n1 <\/span><\/sup>
\nThe only religion that India has
\napparently rejected in the end is Buddhism; but in fact this appearance is a
\nhistorical error. Buddhism lost its separative force, because its spiritual substance, as opposed
\nto its credal parts, was absorbed by the religious mind of Hindu India. Even
\nso, it survived in the North and was exterminated not by Shankaracharya or
\nanother, but by the invading force of Islam<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-136<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\napproach the Infinite; all cosmic
\npowers are manifestations, all forces are forces of the One. The gods behind
\nthe workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as powers, names and
\npersonalities of the one Godhead. An infinite Conscicous-Force, executive
\nEnergy, Will or Law, Maya, Prakriti, Shakti or Karma, is behind all happenings,
\nwhether to us they seem good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, fortunate or
\nadverse. The Infinite creates and is Brahma; it preserves and is Vishnu; it
\ndestroys or takes to itself and is Rudra or Shiva. The supreme Energy
\nbeneficent in upholding and protection is or else formulates itself as the
\nMother of the worlds, Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the mask of
\ndestruction it is Chandi or it is Kali, the dark Mother. The One Godhead
\nmanifests himself in the form of his qualities in various names and godheads.
\nThe God of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of the Shakta
\nappear as two different godheads; but in truth they are the one infinite Deity
\nin different figures.1<\/sup>  One may approach
\nthe Supreme through any of these names and forms, with knowledge or in
\nignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the
\nsupreme experience.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>One thing however has to be noted
\nthat while many modernised Indian religionists tend, by way of an intellectual
\ncom- promise with modern materialistic rationalism, to explain away these
\nthings as symbols, the ancient Indian religious mentality saw them not only as
\nsymbols but as world-realities, – even if to the Illusionist realities only of
\nthe world of Maya. For between the highest unimaginable Existence and our
\nmaterial way of being the spiritual and psychic knowledge of India did not fix
\na gulf as between two unrelated opposites. It was aware of other psychological planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of these supraphysical planes were no less real to it than the out- ward truths of the
\nmaterial universe. Man approaches God at first according to his psychological
\nnature and his capacity for deeper experience, <\/font> svabh<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>va, adhik<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e4<\/font><\/span>ra.
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/i>The level of Truth, the<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

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

\n
\nPage-137<\/span><\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

plane of consciousness he can
\nreach is determined by, the inner evolutionary stage. Thence comes the variety
\nof religious cult, but its data are not imaginary structures, inventions of
\npriests or poets, but truths of a supraphysical existence intermediate between
\nthe consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience of
\nthe Absolute.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The idea of strongest consequence at the
\nbase of Indian religion is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is
\nthat while the Supreme or the Divine can be approached through a universal
\nconsciousness and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can
\nbe met by each individual soul in itself, in its own spiritual part, because
\nthere is something in it that is intimately one or at least intimately related
\nwith the one divine Existence. The essence of Indian religion is to aim at so
\ngrowing and so living that we can grow out of the Ignorance which veils this
\nself-knowledge from our mind and life and be- come aware of the Divinity within
\nus. These three things put together are the whole of Hindu religion, its
\nessential sense and, if any credo is needed, its credo.<\/font><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n


\nPage-138<\/span><\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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

 \n<\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span>            T<\/font>HE<\/font> task of religion and
\nspirituality is to mediate between God and man, between the Eternal and
\nInfinite and this transient, yet persistent finite, between a luminous
\nTruth-Consciousness not expressed or not yet expressed here and the Mind’s
\nignorance. But nothing is more difficult than to bring home the greatness and
\nuplifting power of the spiritual consciousness to the natural man forming the
\nvast majority of the race; for his mind and senses, are turned outward towards the
\nexternal calls of life and its objects and never inwards to the Truth which
\nlies behind them. This external vision and attraction are the essence of the
\nuniversal blinding force which is designated in Indian philosophy the
\nIgnorance. Ancient Indian spirituality recognised that man lives in the
\nIgnorance and has to be led through its imperfect indications to a highest
\ninmost knowledge. Our life moves between two worlds, the depths upon depths of
\nour inward being and the surface field of our outward nature. The majority of
\nmen put the whole emphasis of life on the outward and live very strongly in
\ntheir surface consciousness and very little in the inward existence. Even the
\nchoice spirits raised from the grossness of the common vital and physical mould
\nby the stress of thought and culture do not usually get farther than a strong
\ndwelling on the things of the mind. The highest flight they reach <\/span>
\n―<\/span> and it is
\nthis that the West persistently mistakes for spirituality <\/span>
\n―<\/span> is a preference for living in the mind and emotions
\nmore than in the gross outward life or else an attempt to subject this
\nrebellious life-stuff to the law of intellectual truth or ethical reason and
\nwill or aesthetic beauty or of all three together. But spiritual knowledge
\nperceives that there is a greater thing in us; our inmost self, our real being
\nis not the intellect, not the aesthetic, ethical or thinking mind, but the
\ndivinity within, the Spirit, and these other things are only the instruments of
\nthe Spirit. A mere intellectual, ethical and aesthetic culture does not go back
\nto the inmost truth of the spirit; it is still an Ignorance, an incomplete,
\noutward and super- <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-139 <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nficial knowledge. To have made
\nthe discovery of our deepest being and hidden spiritual nature is the first
\nnecessity and to have erected the living of an inmost spiritual life into the
\naim of existence is the characteristic sign of a spiritual culture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This endeavour takes in certain
\nreligions the form of a spiritual exclusiveness which revolts from the outward
\nexistence rather than seeks to transform it. The main tendency of the Christian
\ndiscipline was not only to despise the physical and vital way of living, but to
\ndisparage and imprison the intellectual and distrust and discourage the
\naesthetic thirsts of our nature. It emphasised against them a limited spiritual
\nemotionalism and its intense experiences as the one thing needful; the
\ndevelopment of the ethical sense was the sole mental necessity, its translation
\ninto act the sole indispensable condition or result of the spiritual life.
\nIndian spirituality reposed on too wide and many-sided a culture to admit as
\nits base this narrow movement; but on its more solitary summits, at least in
\nits later period, it tended to a spiritual exclusiveness loftier in vision, but
\neven more imperative and excessive. A spirituality of this intolerant
\nhigh-pointed kind, to whatever elevation it may rise, however it may help to
\npurify life or lead to a certain kind of individual salvation, cannot be a
\ncomplete thing. For its exclusiveness imposes on it a certain impotence to deal
\neffectively with the problems of human existence; it cannot lead it to its
\nintegral perfection or combine its highest heights with its broadest broadness.
\nA wider spiritual culture must recognise that the Spirit is not only the
\nhighest and inmost thing, but all is manifestation and creation of the Spirit.
\nIt must have a wider outlook, a more embracing range of applicability and,
\neven, a more aspiring and ambitious aim of its endeavour. Its aim must be not only
\nto raise to inaccessible heights the few elect, but to draw all men and all
\nlife and the whole human being upward, to spiritualise life and in the end to
\ndivinise human nature. Not only must it be able to lay hold on his deepest
\nindividual being but to inspire too his communal existence. It must turn, by a
\nspiritual change, all the members of his ignorance into members of the
\nknowledge; it must trans- mute all the instruments of the human into
\ninstruments of a divine living. The total movement of Indian spirituality <\/span>
\nis <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-140<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

towards this aim; in spite of
\nall the difficulties, imperfections and fluctuations of its evolution, it had
\nthis character. But like other cultures it was not at all times and in all its
\nparts and movements consciously aware of its own total significance. This large
\nsense sometimes emerged into something like a conscious synthetic clarity, but
\nwas more often kept in the depths and on the surface dispersed in a multitude
\nof subordinate and special standpoints. Still, it is only by an intelligence of
\nthe total drift that its manifold sides and rich variations of effort and
\nteaching and discipline can receive their full reconciling unity and be
\nunderstood in the light of its own most intrinsic purpose.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nNow the spirit of Indian religion
\nand spiritual culture has been persistently and immovably the same throughout
\nthe long time of its vigour, but its form has undergone remarkable changes. Yet
\nif we look into them from the right centre it will be apparent that these
\nchanges are the results of a logical and inevitable evolution inherent in the
\nvery process of man’s growth towards the heights. In its earliest form, its
\nfirst Vedic system, it took its outward foundation on the mind of the physical
\nman whose natural faith is in things physical, in the sensible and visible
\nobjects, presences, representations and the external pursuits and aims of the
\nmaterial world. The means, symbols, rites, figures, by which it sought to
\nmediate between the spirit and the normal human mentality were drawn from these
\nmost external physical things. Man’s first and primitive idea of the Divine can
\nonly come through his vision of external Nature and the sense of a superior
\nPower or Powers concealed behind her phenomena veiled in the heaven and earth,
\nfather and mother of our being, in the sun and moon and stars, its lights and
\nregulators, in dawn and day and night and rain and wind and storm, the oceans
\nand the rivers and the forests, all the circumstances and forces of her scene
\nof action, all that vast and mysterious surrounding life of which we are a part
\nand in which the natural heart and mind of the human creature feel
\ninstinctively through whatever bright or dark or confused figures that there is
\nhere some divine Multitude or else mighty Infinite, one, manifold and
\nmysterious, which takes these forms and manifests itself in these motions. The
\nVedic religion took this natural sense and feeling of the physical man;<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-141<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

it used the conceptions to which they gave birth, and it sought to lead
\nhim through them to the psychic and spiritual truths of his own being and the
\nbeing of the cosmos. It recognised that he was right when he saw behind the
\nmanifestations of Nature great living powers and godheads, even though he knew
\nnot their inner truth, and right too in offering to them worship and
\npropitiation and atonement. For that inevitably must be the initial way in
\nwhich his active physical, vital and mental nature is allowed to approach the
\nGodhead. He approaches it through its visible outward manifestations as
\nsomething greater than his own natural self, something single or multiple that
\nguides, sustains and directs his life, and he calls to it for help and support
\nin the desires and difficulties and distresses and struggles of his human
\nexistence.1<\/sup> (<\/span>) The Vedic religion
\naccepted also the form in which early man everywhere expressed his sense of the
\nrelation between himself and the godheads of Nature; it adopted as its central
\nsymbol the act and ritual of a physical sacrifice. However crude the notions
\nattached to it, this idea of the necessity of sacrifice did express obscurely a
\nfirst law of being. For it was founded on that secret of constant interchange
\nbetween the individual and the universal powers of the cosmos which covertly
\nsupports all the process of life and develops the action of Nature.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But even in its external and
\nexoteric side the Vedic religion did not limit itself to this acceptance and
\nregulation of the first religious notions of the natural physical mind of man.
\nThe Vedic Rishis gave a psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the
\npeople; they spoke to them of a higher Truth, Right, Law of which the gods were
\nthe guardians, of the necessity of a truer knowledge and a larger inner living
\naccording to this Truth and Right, and of a home of Immortality to which the
\nsoul of man could ascend by the power of Truth and of right doing. The people
\nno doubt took these ideas in their most external sense; but they were trained
\nby them to develop their ethical <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1 <\/span><\/sup>The Gita recognises four kinds of degrees of worshippers and
\nGod-seekers: There<\/font><\/span> are first the artharthi
\n<\/i>and ā<\/span>rta, <\/span><\/i>
\nthose who seek him
\nfor the fulfilment of desire and those who turn for divine help in the sorrow
\nand suffering of existence; there is next the ji<\/i><\/span>j\u00f1ā<\/span>su, <\/span> <\/i>
\nthe seeker of
\nknowledge, the questioner who is moved to seek the Divine in his truth and in
\nthat to meet him; last and highest, there is the <\/span>
\nj\u00f1ā<\/span><\/i><\/font>ni <\/i>who has
\n\t\talready contact with the truth and is able to live in unity with the
\n\t\tSpirit.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-142<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nnature, to turn towards some initial development of their psychic being, to
\nconceive the idea of a knowledge and truth other than that of the physical life
\nand to admit even a first conception of some greater spiritual Reality which
\nwas the ultimate object of human worship or aspiration. This religious and
\nmoral force was the highest reach of the external cult and the most that could
\nbe understood or followed by the mass of the people.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The deeper truth of these things was
\nreserved for the initiates, for those who were ready to understand and practise
\nthe inner sense, the esoteric meaning hidden in the Vedic scripture. For the
\nVeda is full of words which, as the Rishis themselves express it, are secret
\nwords that give their inner meaning only to the seer, kavaye nivacan<\/i><\/span>ā<\/span>ni niny<\/span><\/i>ā<\/span>ni vac<\/span><\/i>ā<\/span>msi. <\/span><\/i>
\nThis is a feature
\nof the ancient sacred hymns which grew obscure to later ages; it became a dead
\ntradition and has been entirely ignored by modem scholarship in its laborious
\nattempt to read the hieroglyph of the Vedic symbols. Yet its recognition is
\nessential to a right understanding of almost all the ancient religions; for
\nmostly they started on their upward curve through an esoteric element of which
\nthe key was not given to all. In all or most there was a surface cult for the
\ncommon physical man who was held yet unfit for the psychic and spiritual life
\nand an inner secret of the Mysteries carefully disguised by symbols whose sense
\nwas opened only to the initiates. This was the origin of the later distinction
\nbetween the Shudra, the undeveloped physical-minded man and the twice-born,
\nthose who were capable of entering into the second birth by initiation and to
\nwhom alone the Vedic education could be given without danger. This too actuated
\nthe later prohibition of any reading or teaching of the Veda by the Shudra. It
\nwas this inner meaning, it was the higher psychic and spiritual. truths
\nconcealed by the outer sense, that gave to these hymns the name by which they
\nare still known the Veda, the Book of Knowledge. Only by penetrating into the
\nesoteric sense of this worship can we understand the full flowering of the
\nVedic religion in the Upanishads and in the long later evolution of Indian
\nspiritual seeking and experience. For it is all there in its luminous seed,
\npreshadowed or even prefigured in the verses of the early seers. The persistent
\nnotion which through every change ascribed the<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-143<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

foundation of all our culture to the Rishis, whatever its fabulous forms
\nand mythical ascriptions, contains a real truth and veils a sound historic
\ntradition. It reflects the fact of a true initiation and an unbroken continuity
\nbetween this great primitive past and the riper but hardly greater spiritual
\ndevelopment of our historic culture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This inner Vedic religion started
\nwith an extension of the<\/span>
\npsychic
\nsignificance of the godheads in the Cosmos. Its primary notion was that of a
\nhierarchy of worlds, an ascending stair of planes of being in the universe. It
\nsaw a mounting scale of the worlds corresponding to a similar mounting scale of
\nplanes or degrees or levels of consciousness in the nature of man. A Truth,
\nRight and Law sustains and governs all these levels of Nature; one in essence,
\nit takes in them different but cognate forms. There is for instance the series
\nof the outer physical light, another higher and inner light which is the
\nvehicle of the mental, vital and psychic consciousness and a highest inmost
\nlight of spiritual illumination. Surya, the Sun- God, was the lord of the
\nphysical Sun; but he is at the same time to the Vedic seer-poet the giver of
\nthe rays of knowledge which illumine the mind and he is too the soul and energy
\nand body of the spiritual illumination. And in all these powers he is a
\nluminous form of the one and infinite Godhead. All the Vedic godheads have this
\nouter and this inner and inmost function, their known and their secret Names.
\nAll are in their external character powers of physical Nature; all have in
\ntheir inner meaning a psychic function and psychological ascriptions; all too are
\nvarious powers of some one highest Reality, ekam sat, <\/i>the one infinite
\nExistence. This hardly knowable Supreme is called often in the Veda
\n"That Truth" or "That One", tat sat yam, tad ekam. <\/i>This
\ncomplex character of the Vedic godheads assumes forms which have been wholly
\nmisunderstood by those who ascribe to them only their outward physical
\nsignificance. Each of these gods is in himself a complete and separate cosmic
\npersonality of the one Existence and in their combination of powers they form
\nthe complete universal power, the cosmic whole, vai<\/i>ś<\/span>vadevyam. <\/span><\/i>
\nEach again, apart
\nfrom his special function, is one godhead with the others; each holds in
\nhimself the universal divinity, each god is all the other gods.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-144<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

This is the aspect of the Vedic teaching and worship to which a European
\nscholar, mistaking entirely its significance because he read it in the dim and
\npoor light of European religious experience, has given the sounding misnomer,
\nhenotheism. Beyond, in the triple Infinite, these godheads put on their highest
\nnature and are names of the one nameless Ineffable.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But the greatest powers of the Vedic
\nteaching, that which made it the source of all later Indian philosophies,
\nreligions, systems of Yoga, lay in its application to the inner life of man.
\nMan lives in the physical cosmos subject to death and the "much
\nfalsehood" of the mortal existence. To rise beyond this death, to become
\none of the immortals, he has to turn from the falsehood to the Truth; he has to
\nturn to the Light and to battle with and to conquer the powers of the Darkness.
\nThis he does by communion with the divine Powers and their aid; the way to call
\ndown this aid was the secret of the Vedic mystics. The symbols of the outer
\nsacrifice are given for this purpose in the manner of the Mysteries all over
\nthe world an inner meaning; they represent a calling of the gods into the human
\nbeing, a connecting sacrifice, an intimate interchange, a mutual aid, a
\ncommunion. There is a building of the powers of the godheads within man and a
\nformation in him of the universality of the divine nature. For the gods are the
\nguardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of
\nthe infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the
\nway of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law
\nof the Truth, rtasya panth<\/i><\/span>ā<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>
\nMan arrives at
\nimmortality by breaking beyond the limitations not only of his physical self,
\nbut of his mental and his ordinary psychic nature into the highest plane and
\nsupreme ether of the Truth: for there is the foundation of immortality and the
\nnative seat of the triple infinite. On these ideas the Vedic sages built up a
\nprofound psychological and psychic discipline which led beyond itself to a
\nhighest spirituality and contained the nucleus of later Indian Yoga. Already we
\nfind in their seed, though not in their full expansion, the most characteristic
\nideas of Indian spirituality. There is the one Existence, ekam sat, <\/i>supracosmic
\nbeyond the individual and the universe. There is the one God who presents to us
\nthe many <\/span>
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-<\/span>145<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

forms, names, powers, personalities of his Godhead. There is the
\ndistinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance,1<\/sup> (<\/span>)<\/span> the greater truth
\nof an immortal life opposed to the much falsehood or mixed truth and falsehood
\nof mortal existence. There is the discipline of an inward growth of man from
\nthe physical through the psychic to the spiritual existence. There is the
\nconquest of death, the secret of immortality, the perception of a realisable
\ndivinity of the human spirit. In an age to which in the insolence of our
\nexternal knowledge we are accustomed to look back as the childhood of humanity
\nor at best a period of vigorous barbarism, this was the inspired and intuitive
\npsychic and spiritual teaching by which the ancient human fathers, p<\/i>u<\/span>rve pitarah manu<\/span><\/i>Ş<\/span>y<\/span><\/i>āh<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>
\nfounded a great and profound
\ncivilisation in India.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This high beginning was
\nsecured in its results by a larger sublime efflorescence. The Upanishads have
\nalways been recognised in India as the crown and end of the Veda; that is
\nindicated in their general name, Vedanta. And they are in fact a large crowning
\noutcome of the Vedic discipline and experience. The time in which the Vedantic
\ntruth was wholly seen and the Upanishads took shape, was, as we can discern
\nfrom such records as the Chhandogya and Brihadaranyaka, an epoch of immense and
\nstrenuous seeking, an intense and ardent seed-time of the Spirit. In the stress
\nof that seeking the truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary
\nmen broke their barriers, swept through the higher mind of the nation and
\nfertilised the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever-increasing growth
\nof spiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. This turn was not as yet
\nuniversal; it was chiefly men of the higher classes, Kshatriyas and Brahmins
\ntrained in the Vedic system of education, no longer content with an external
\ntruth and the works of the outer sacrifice, who began everywhere to seek for
\nthe highest word of revealing experience from the sages who possessed the
\nknowledge of<\/span> <\/span>the One. But we find too among those who attained to the knowledge and became
\ngreat teachers men of inferior or doubtful birth like Janashruti, the wealthy
\nShudra, or Satyakama Jabali, son of a servant-girl who knew not who was his
\nfather. The work <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1 <\/span><\/sup>Cittim acittim
\ncinavad vi vidv<\/font><\/span><\/i>ā<\/span>n: <\/span><\/i>
\n\t\t<\/font>
\n"Let the knower
\ndistinguish the Knowledge and the Ignorance."<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-146<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

that was done in this period became the firm bedrock of Indian
\nspirituality in later ages and from it gush still the life-giving waters of a
\nperennial never-failing inspiration. This period, this activity, this grand
\nachievement created the whole difference between the evolution of Indian civilisation
\nand the quite different curve of other cultures.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>For a time had come when the
\noriginal Vedic symbols must lose their significance and pass into an obscurity
\nthat became impenetrable, as did the inner teaching of the Mysteries in other
\ncountries. The old poise of culture between two extremes with a bridge of
\nreligious cult and symbolism to unite them, the crude or half-trained
\nnaturalness of the outer physical man on one side of the line, and on the other
\nan inner and secret psychic and spiritual life for the initiates could no
\nlonger suffice as the basis of our spiritual progress. The human race in its
\ncycle of civilisation needed a large-lined advance; it called for a more and
\nmore generalised intellectual, ethical and aesthetic evolution to help it to
\ngrow into the light. This turn had to come in India as in other lands. But the
\ndanger was that the greater spiritual truth already gained might be lost in the
\nlesser confident half-light of the acute but unillumined intellect or stifled
\nwithin the narrow limits of the self-sufficient logical reason. That was what
\nactually happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The old knowledge was
\nprolonged in a less inspired, less dynamic and more intellectual form by the
\nPythagoreans, by the Stoics, by Plato and the Neo-Platonists; but still in
\nspite of them and in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual wave which
\nswept over Europe from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity, the whole real
\ntrend of Western civilisation has been intellectual, rational, secular and even
\nmaterialistic, and it keeps this character to the present day. Its general aim
\nhas been a strong or a fine culture of the vital and physical man by the power
\nof an intellectualised ethics, aesthesis and reason, not the leading up of our lower
\nmembers into the supreme light and power of the spirit. The ancient spiritual
\nknowledge and the spiritual tendency it had created were saved in India from
\nthis collapse by the immense effort of the age of the Upanishads. The Vedantic
\nseers renewed the Vedic truth by extricating it from its cryptic symbols and
\ncasting it into <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-147<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

a highest and most direct and powerful language of intuition and inner
\nexperience. It was not the language of the intellect, but still it wore a form
\nwhich the intellect could take hold of, translate into its own more abstract
\nterms and convert into a a starting-point for an ever-widening and deepening
\nphilosophic speculation and the reason’s long search after a Truth original,
\nsupreme and ultimate. There was in India as in the West a great upbuilding of a
\nhigh, wide and complex intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and social culture. But
\nleft in Europe to its own resources, combated rather than helped by an obscure
\nreligious emotion and dogma, here it was guided, uplifted and more and more
\npenetrated and suffused by a great saving power of spirituality and a vast
\nstimulating and tolerant light of wisdom from a highest ether of knowledge.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The second or post- Vedic age of
\nIndian civilisation was distinguished by the rise of the great philosophies, by
\na copious, vivid, many-thoughted, many-sided epic literature, by the beginnings
\nof art and science, by the evolution of vigorous and complex society, by the
\nformation of large kingdoms and empires, by manifold formative activities of
\nall kinds and great systems of living and thinking. Here as elsewhere, in
\nGreece, Rome, Persia, China, this was the age of a high outburst of the
\nintelligence working upon life and the things of the mind to discover their
\nreason and their right way and bring out a broad and noble fullness of human
\nexistence. But in India this effort never lost sight of the spiritual motive,
\nnever missed the touch of the religious sense. It was a birth time and youth of
\nthe seeking intellect and, as in Greece, philosophy was the main instrument by
\nwhich it laboured to solve the problems of life and the world. Science too
\ndeveloped but it came second only as an auxiliary power. It was through
\nprofound and subtle philosophies that the intellect of India attempted to analyse
\nby the reason and logical faculty what had formerly been approached with a much
\nmore living force through intuition and the soul’s experience. But the
\nphilosophic mind started from the data these mightier powers had discovered and
\nwas faithful to its parent Light; it went back always in one form or another to
\nthe profound truths of the Upanishads which kept their place as the highest
\nauthority in <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-148<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual experience
\nis a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable guide than the
\nclarities of the reasoning intelligence.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The same governing force kept its
\nhold on all the other activities of the Indian mind and Indian life. The epic
\nliterature is full almost to excess of a strong and free intellectual and
\nethical thinking; there is an incessant criticism of life by the intelligence
\nand the ethical reason, an arresting curiosity and desire to fix the norm of
\ntruth in all possible fields. But in the background and coming constantly to
\nthe front there is too a constant religious sense and an implicit or avowed
\nassent to the spiritual truths which remained the unshakable basis of the
\nculture. These truths suffused with their higher light secular thought and
\naction or stood above to remind them that they were only steps towards a goal.
\nArt in India, contrary to a common idea, dwelt much upon life; but still its
\nhighest achievement was always in the field of the interpretation of the
\nreligio-philosophical mind and its whole tone was coloured by a suggestion of
\nthe spiritual and the infinite. Indian society developed with an unsurpassed
\norganising ability, stable effectiveness, practical insight its communal
\nco-ordination of the mundane life of interest and desire, k<\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/span>ma, artha; <\/span><\/i>it governed always its action by a reference at every
\npoint to the moral and religious law, the Dharma: but it never lost sight of
\nspiritual liberation as our highest point and the ultimate aim of the effort of
\nLife. In later times when there was a still stronger secular tendency of
\nintellectual culture, there came in an immense development of the mundane
\nintelligence, an opulent political and social evolution, an emphatic stressing
\nof aesthetic, sensuous and hedonistic experience. But this effort too always
\nstrove to keep itself within the ancient frame and not to lose the special
\nstamp of the Indian cultural idea. The enlarged secular turn was compensated by
\na deepening of the intensities of psychoreligious experience. New religions or
\nmystic forms and disciplines attempted to seize not only the soul and the
\nintellect, but the emotions, the senses, the vital and the aesthetic nature of
\nman and turn them into stuff of the spiritual life. And every excess of
\nemphasis on the splendour and richness and power and pleasures of life had its
\nrecoil and was balanced by a corres-<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-149<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

ponding potent stress on spiritual asceticism as the higher way. The two
\ntrends, on one side an extreme of the richness of life experience, on the other
\nan extreme and pure rigorous intensity of the spiritual life, accompanied each
\nother; their interaction, whatever loss there might be of the earlier deep
\nharmony and large synthesis, yet by their double pull preserved something still
\nof the balance of Indian culture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Indian religion followed this line
\nof evolution and kept its inner continuity with its Vedic and Vedantic origins;
\nbut it changed entirely its mental contents and colour and its outward basis.
\nIt did not effectuate this change through any protestant revolt or revolution,
\nor with any idea of an iconoclastic reformation. A continuous development of
\nits organic life took place, a natural transformation brought out latent
\nmotives or else gave to already established motive-ideas a more predominant
\nplace or effective form. At one time indeed it seemed as if a discontinuity and
\na sharp new beginning were needed and would take place. Buddhism seemed to
\nreject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic religion. But this was after all
\nless in reality than in appearance. The Buddhist ideal of Nirvana was no more
\nthan a sharply negative and exclusive statement of the highest Vedantic
\nspiritual experience. The ethical system of the eightfold path taken as the way
\nto release was an austere sublimation of the Vedic notion of the Right, Truth
\nand Law followed as the way to immortality, rtasya panth<\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/span>. <\/span><\/i>The strongest note of Mahayana Buddhism, its stress on universal
\ncompassion and fellow-feeling was an ethical application of the spiritual unity
\nwhich is the essential idea of Vedanta.1<\/sup> <\/span>
\n  The most characteristic tenets of the new discipline,
\nNirvana and Karma, could have been supported from the utterances of the
\nBrahmanas and Upanishads. Buddhism could easily have claimed for itself a Vedic
\norigin and the claim would have been no less valid than the Vedic ascription of
\nthe Sankhya philosophy and discipline with which it had some points of intimate
\nalliance. But ‘what hurt Buddhism and determined in the end its rejection, was
\nnot its denial of a Vedic origin or authority, but the exclusive trenchancy of
\n<\/i>its intellectual, ethical<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1 <\/span><\/sup>Buddha himself does not seem to have preached his tenets
\n\t\tas a novel revolutionary creed, but as the old Aryan way, the true form
\n\t\tof the eternal religion.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-150<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

and spiritual positions. A result of an intense stress of the union of
\nlogical reason with the spiritualised mind,<\/span> <\/span>
\n―<\/span> <\/span>for
\nit was by an intense spiritual seeking supported on a clear and hard rational <\/span>
\nthinking that it was born as a separate religion<\/span>, <\/span>
\n―<\/span> <\/span>its
\ntrenchant affirmations and still more exclusive negations could not be made
\nsufficiently compatible with the native flexibility, many- sided susceptibility
\nand rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high
\ncreed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people. Indian religion
\nabsorbed all that it could of Buddhism, but rejected its exclusive positions
\nand preserved the full line of its own continuity, casting back to the ancient
\nVedanta. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This lasting line of change moved
\nforward not by any destruction of principle, but by a gradual fading out of the
\nprominent Vedic forms and the substitution of others. There was a
\ntransformation of symbol and ritual and ceremony or a substitution of new
\nkindred figures, an emergence of things that are only hints in the original
\nsystem, a development of novel idea forms from the seed of the original
\nthinking. And especially there was a farther widening and fathoming of psychic
\nand spiritual experience. The Vedic gods rapidly lost their deep original
\nsignificance. At first they kept their hold by their outer cosmic sense but
\nwere overshadowed by the great Trinity, Brahma- Vishnu-Shiva, and afterwards
\nfaded altogether. A new pantheon appeared which in its outward symbolic aspects
\nexpressed a deeper truth and larger range of religious experience, an intenser
\nfeeling, a vaster idea. The Vedic sacrifice persisted only in broken and
\nlessening fragments. The house of Fire was replaced by the temple; the karmic
\nritual of sacrifice was transformed into the devotional temple ritual; the
\nvague and shifting mental images of the Vedic gods figured in the Mantras
\nyielded to more precise conceptual forms of the two great deities, Vishnu and
\nShiva, and of their Shaktis and their offshoots. These new concepts stabilised
\nin physical images were made the basis both for internal adoration and for the
\nexternal worship which replaced sacrifice. The psychic and spiritual mystic
\nendeavour which was the inner sense of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into the
\nless intensely luminous but more wide and rich and complex <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-151<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

\npsycho-spiritual inner life of
\nPuranic and Tantric religion and Yoga.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The Purano- Tantric stage of
\nthe religion was once decried by European critics and Indian reformers as a
\nbase and ignorant degradation of an earlier and purer religion. It was rather
\nan effort, successful in a great measure, to open the general mind of the
\npeople to a higher and deeper range of inner truth and experience and feeling.
\nMuch of the adverse criticism once heard proceeded from a total ignorance of
\nthe sense and intention of this worship. Much of this criticism has been
\nuselessly concentrated on side-paths and aberrations which could hardly be
\navoided in this immensely audacious experimental widening of the basis of the
\nculture. For there was a catholic attempt to draw towards the spiritual truth
\nminds of all qualities and people of all classes. Much was lost of the profound
\npsychic knowledge of the Vedic seers, but much also of new knowledge was
\ndeveloped, untrodden ways were opened and a hundred gates discovered into the
\nInfinite. If we try to see the essential sense and aim of this development and
\nthe intrinsic value of its forms and means and symbols, we shall find that this
\nevolution followed upon the early Vedic form very much for the same reason as
\nCatholic Christianity replaced the mysteries and sacrifices of the early Pagan
\nreligions. For in both cases the outward basis of the early religion spoke to
\nthe outward physical mind of the people and took that as the starting-point of
\nits appeal. But the new evolution tried to awaken a more inner mind even in the
\ncommon man, to lay hold on his inner vital and emotional nature, to support all
\nby an awakening of the soul and to lead him through these things towards a
\nhighest spiritual truth. It attempted in fact to bring the mass into the temple
\nof the spirit rather than leave them in the outer precincts. The outward
\nphysical sense was satisfied through its aesthetic turn by a picturesque temple
\nworship, by numerous ceremonies, by the use of physical images; but these were
\ngiven a psychic-emotional sense and direction that was open to the heart and
\nimagination of the ordinary man and not reserved for the deeper sight of the
\nelect or the strenuous tapasy<\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/span> <\/span><\/i>
\nof the initiates.
\nThe secret initiation remained but was now a condition for the passage from the
\nsurface psycho-emotional and <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-152<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nreligious to a profounder
\npsychic-spiritual truth and experience.
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Nothing essential was touched in its core
\nby this new orientation; but the instruments, atmosphere, field of religious
\nexperience underwent a considerable change. The Vedic godheads were to the mass
\nof their worshippers divine powers who presided over the workings of the
\noutward life of the physical cosmos; the Puranic Trinity had even for the
\nmultitude a predominant psycho-religious and spiritual significance. Its more
\nexternal significance, for instance, the functions of cosmic creation,
\npreservation and destruction, were only a dependent fringe of these profundities
\nthat alone touched the heart of its mystery. The central spiritual truth
\nremained in both systems the same, the truth of the One in many aspects. The
\nTrinity is a triple form of the one supreme Godhead and Brahman; the Shaktis
\nare energies of the one Energy of the highest divine Being. But this greatest
\nreligious truth was no longer reserved for the initiated few; it was now more
\nand more brought powerfully, widely and intensely home to the general mind and
\nfeeling of the people. Even the so-called henotheism of the Vedic idea was
\nprolonged and heightened in the larger and simpler worship of Vishnu or Shiva
\nas the one universal and highest Godhead of whom all others are living forms
\nand powers. The idea of the Divinity in man was popularised to an extraordinary
\nextent, not only the occasional manifestation of the Divine in humanity which
\nfounded the worship of the Avataras, but the Presence discoverable in the heart
\nof every creature. The systems of Yoga developed themselves on the same common
\nbasis. All led or hoped to lead through many kinds of psycho-physical, inner
\nvital, inner mental and psycho-spiritual methods to the common aim of all
\nIndian spirituality, a greater consciousness and a more or less complete union
\nwith the One and Divine or else an immergence of the individual soul in the
\nAbsolute. The Purano-Tantric system was a wide, assured and many-sided
\nendeavour, unparalleled in its power, insight, amplitude, to provide the race
\nwith a basis of generalised psycho-religious experience from which man could
\nrise through knowledge, works or love or through any other fundamental power of
\nhis nature to some established supreme experience and highest absolute status.<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-153<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

       
\nThis great effort and achievement which
\ncovered all the time between the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism, was
\nstill not the last possibility of religious evolution open to Indian culture.
\nThe Vedic training of the physically-minded man made the development possible.
\nBut in its turn this raising of the basis of religion to the inner mind and
\nlife and psychic nature, this training and bringing out of the psychic man
\nought to make possible a still larger development and support a greater
\nspiritual movement as the leading power of life. The first stage makes possible
\nthe preparation of the natural external man for spirituality; the second takes
\nup his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical living and brings him
\nmore directly into contact with the spirit and divinity within him; the third
\nshould render him capable of taking up his whole mental, psychical, physical
\nliving into a first beginning at least of a generalised spiritual life. This
\nendeavour has manifested itself in the evolution of Indian spirituality and is
\nthe significance of the latest philosophies, the great spiritual movements of
\nthe saints and Bhaktas and an increasing resort to various paths of Yoga. But
\nunhappily it synchronised with a decline of Indian culture and an increasing
\ncollapse of its general power and knowledge, and in these surroundings, it
\ncould not bear its natural fruit; but at the same time it has done much to
\nprepare such a possibility in the future. If Indian culture is to survive and
\nkeep its spiritual basis and innate character, it is in this direction, and not
\nin a mere revival or a prolongation of the Puranic system, that its evolution
\nmust turn, rising so towards the fulfilment of that which the Vedic seers saw
\nas the aim of man and his life thousands of years ago and the Vedantic sages
\ncast into the clear and immortal forms of their luminous revelation. Even the
\npsychic-emotional part of man’s nature is not the inmost door to religious
\nfeeling nor is his inner mind the highest witness to spiritual experience.
\nThere is behind the first the inmost soul of man, in that deepest secret heart,
\nhrdaye guh<\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/span>y<\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/span>m, <\/span><\/i>
\nin which the
\nancient seers saw the very tabernacle of the indwelling Godhead, and there is
\nabove the second a luminous highest mind directly open to a truth of the Spirit
\nto which man’s normal nature has as yet only an occasional and momentary
\naccess. Religious evolution, spiritual experience can find their true native
\nroad only when <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-154<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t<\/p>\n

\n

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

\nthey open to these hidden
\npowers and make them their support for a lasting change, a divinisation of
\nhuman life and nature. An effort of this kind was the very force behind the
\nmost luminous and vivid of the later movements of India’s vast religious
\ncycles. It is the secret of the most powerful forms of Vaishnavism and Tantra
\nand Yoga. The labour of ascent from our half animal human nature into the
\nfresh purity of the spiritual consciousness needed to be followed and
\nsupplemented by a descent of the light and force of the spirit into man’s
\nmembers and the attempt to transform human into divine nature.
\n<\/span>    <\/span>
\nBut it could not find its complete way or its fruit because it synchronised
\nwith a decline of the life-force in India and a lowering of power and knowledge
\nin her general civilisation and culture. Nevertheless here lies the destined
\nforce of her survival and renewal, this is the dynamic meaning of her future. A
\nwidest and highest spiritualising of life on earth is the last vision of all
\nthat vast and unexampled seeking and experiment in a thousand ways of the
\nsoul’s outermost and innermost experience which is the unique character of her
\npast; this in the end is the mission for which she was born and the meaning of
\nher existence. <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-155<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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

 \n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t            <\/font>
\n\tI<\/font><\/span>T IS<\/span><\/font> essential, if we
\n\tare to get a right view of Indian civilisation or of any civilisation, to
\n\tkeep to the central, living, governing things and not to be led away by the
\n\tconfusion of accidents and details. This is a precaution which the critics
\n\tof our culture steadily refuse to take. A civilisation, a culture must be
\n\tlooked at first in its initiating, supporting, durable central motives, in
\n\tits heart of abiding principle; otherwise we shall be likely to find
\n\tourselves, like these critics, in a maze without a clue and we shall stumble
\n\tabout among false and partial conclusions and miss entirely the true truth
\n\tof the matter. The importance of avoiding this error is evident when we are
\n\tseeking for the essential significance of Indian religious culture. But the
\n\tsame method must be held to when we proceed to observe its dynamic
\n\tformulation and the effect of its spiritual ideal on life.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Indian culture recognises the spirit as
\nthe truth of our being and our life as a growth and evolution of the spirit. It
\nsees the Eternal, the Infinite, the Supreme, the All; it sees this as the
\nsecret highest Self of all, this is what it calls God, the Permanent, the Real,
\nand it sees man as a soul and power of this being of God in Nature. The
\nprogressive growth of the finite conscious- ness of man towards this Self,
\ntowards God, towards the universal, the eternal, the infinite, in a word his
\ngrowth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his ordinary ignorant
\nnatural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the
\nsignificance of life and the aim of human existence. To this deeper and more
\nspiritual idea of Nature and of existence a great deal of what is strongest and
\nmost potential of fruitful consequences in recent European thinking already
\nturns with a growing impetus. This turn may be a relapse to
\n"barbarism" or it may be the high natural outcome of her own
\nincreasing and ripened culture; that is a question for Europe to decide. But
\nalways to India this ideal inspiration or rather this spiritual vision of Self,
\nGod, Spirit, this nearness to a cosmic consciousness, a cosmic sense and
\nfeeling, a cosmic idea, will, love, delight into<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/font><\/span>Page-156<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nwhich we can release the
\nlimited, ignorant suffering ego, this drive towards the transcendental,
\neternal and infinite, and the moulding of man into a conscious soul and power
\nof that greater Existence have been the engrossing motive of her philosophy,
\nthe sustaining force of her religion, the fundamental idea of her civilisation
\nand culture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>I have suggested that the formal
\nturn, the rhythmic lines of effort of this culture must be regarded as having
\npassed through two complete external stages, while a third has taken its
\ninitial steps and is the destiny of her future. The early Vedic was the first
\nstage: then religion took its outward formal stand on the natural approach of
\nthe physical mind of man to the Godhead in the universe, but the initiates
\nguarded the sacrificial fire of a greater spiritual truth behind the form. The
\nPurano- Tantric was the second stage: then religion took its outward formal
\nstand on the first deeper approaches of man’s inner mind and life to the Divine
\nin the universe, but a greater initiation opened the way to a far more intimate
\ntruth and pushed towards an inner living of the spiritual life in all its
\nprofundity and in all the infinite possibilities of an uttermost sublime
\nexperience. There has been long in preparation a third stage which belongs to
\nthe future. Its inspiring idea has been often cast out in limited or large,
\nveiled and quiet or bold and striking spiritual movements and potent new
\ndisciplines and religions, but it has not yet been successful in finding its
\nway or imposing new lines on human life. The circumstances were adverse, the
\nhour not yet come. This greatest movement of the Indian spiritual mind has a
\ndouble impulse. Its will is to call the community of men and all men each’
\naccording to his power to live in the greatest light of all and found their
\nwhole life on some fully revealed power and grand uplifting truth of the
\nSpirit. Bl,1t it has had too at times a highest vision which sees the
\npossibility not only of an ascent towards the Eternal but of a descent of the
\nDivine Conscious- ness and a change of human into divine nature. A perception
\nof the divinity hidden in man has been its crowning force. This is a turn that
\ncannot be rightly understood in the ideas or language of the European religious
\nreformer or his imitators. It is not what the purist of the reason or the
\npurist of the spirit imagines it to be<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-157<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nand by that too hasty
\nimagination falls short in his endeavour. Its index vision is pointed to a
\ntruth that exceeds the human mind and, if at all realised in his members, would
\nturn human life into a divine super-life. And not until this third largest
\nsweep of the spiritual evolution has come into its own, can Indian civilisation
\nbe said to have discharged its mission, to have spoken …<\/font> its last word and be functus officio, <\/i>crowned
\nand complete in its office of mediation between the life of man and the spirit.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The past dealings of Indian religion
\nwith life must be judged according to the stages of its progress; each age of
\nits movement must be considered on its own basis. But throughout it
\nconsistently held to two perceptions that showed great practical wisdom and a
\nfine spiritual tact. First, it saw that the approach to the spirit cannot be
\nsudden, simple and immediate for all individuals or for the community of men;
\nit must come ordinarily or at least at first through a gradual culture,
\ntraining, progress. There must be an enlarging of the natural life accompanied
\nby an uplifting of all its motives; a growing hold upon it of the higher
\nrational, psychic and ethical powers must prepare and lead it towards a higher
\nspiritual law. But the Indian religious mind saw too at the same time that if
\nits greater aim was to be fruitful and the character of its culture imperative,
\nthere must be throughout and at every moment some kind of insistence on the
\nspiritual motive. And for the mass of men this means always some kind of
\nreligious influence. That pervasive insistence was necessary in order that from
\nthe beginning some power of the universal inner truth, some ray from the real
\nreality of our existence might cast its light or at least its sensible if
\nsubtle influence on the natural life of man. Human life must be induced to
\nflower, naturally in away, but at the same time with a wise nurturing and
\ncultivation into its own profounder spiritual significance. Indian culture has
\nworked by two coordinated, mutually stimulating and always interblended
\noperations of which these perceptions are the principle. First, it has laboured
\nto lead upward and en- large the life of the individual in the community
\nthrough a natural series of life-stages till it was ready for the spiritual
\nlevels. But also it has striven to keep that highest aim before the mind at
\nevery stage and throw its influence on each circumstance and action<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-158<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>both of man’s inner and his
\nouter existence<\/font><\/span>.<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nIn the plan of its first aim
\nit came nearer to the highest ancient culture of mankind in other regions, but
\nin a type and with a motive all its own. The frame of its system was
\nconstituted by a triple quartette. Its first circle was the synthesis and
\ngradation of the fourfold object of life, vital desire and hedonistic
\nenjoyment, personal and communal interest, moral right and law, and spiritual
\nliberation. Its second circle was the fourfold order of society, carefully
\ngraded and equipped with its fixed economic functions and its deeper cultural,
\nethical and spiritual significances. Its third, the most original and indeed
\nunique of its englobing life-patterns was the fourfold scale and succession of
\nthe successive stages of life, student, householder, forest recluse and free
\nsupersocial man. This frame, these lines of a large and noble life-training
\nsubsisted in their purity, their grand natural balance of austerity and accommodation,
\ntheir fine effectiveness during the later Vedic and heroic age of the
\ncivilisation: after- wards they crumbled slowly or lost their completeness and
\norder. But the tradition, the idea, with some large effect of its force and
\nsome figure of its lines endured throughout the whole period of cultural
\nvigour. However deflected it might have been from its true form and spirit,
\nhowever mutilated and complicated for the worse, there was always left some
\npresence of its inspiration and power. Only in the decline do we get the slow
\ncollapse, the de- graded and confused mass of conventions which still labours
\nto represent the ancient and noble Aryan system, but in spite of relics of
\nglamour and beauty, in spite of survivals of spiritual suggestion and in spite
\nof a residue of the old high training, is little better than a detritus or a
\nmass of confused relics. Still, even in this degradation enough of the original
\nvirtue has remained to ensure a remarkable remnant of the ancient beauty,
\nattractive- ness and power of survival.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But the turn given to the other and
\nmore direct spiritual operation of this culture is of a still greater
\nimportance. For it is that which, always surviving, has coloured permanently the
\nIndian mind and life. It has remained the same behind every change of forms and
\nthroughout all the ages of the civilisation it has renewed its effectiveness
\nand held its field. This second<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-159<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nside of the cultural effort
\ntook the form of an endeavour to cast the whole of life into a religious mould;
\nit multiplied means and devices which by their insistent suggestion and
\nopportunity and their mass of effect would help to stamp a Godward tendency on
\nthe entire existence. Indian culture was founded on a religious conception of
\nlife and both the individual and the community drank in at every moment its
\ninfluence. It was stamped on them by the training and turn of the education;
\nthe entire life <\/font> <\/span>
\natmosphere, all the social surroundings were
\nsuffused with it; it <\/font> <\/span>
\nbreathed its power through the whole original form and
\nhieratic character of the culture. Always was felt the near idea of the
\nspiritual existence and its supremacy as the ideal, highest over all others;
\neverywhere there was the pervading pressure of the notion of the universe as a
\nmanifestation of divine Powers and a movement full of the presence of the
\nDivine. Man himself was not a mere reasoning animal, but a soul in constant
\nrelation with God and with the divine cosmic Powers. The soul’s continued
\nexistence was a cyclic or upward progress from birth to birth; human life was
\nthe summit of an evolution which terminated in the conscious Spirit, every
\nstage of that life a step in a pilgrimage. Every single action of man had its
\nimportance of fruit whether in future lives or in the worlds beyond the
\nmaterial existence.<\/font><\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But Indian religion was not content
\nwith the general pressure of these conceptions, the training, the atmosphere,
\nthe stamp on the culture. Its persistent effort was to impress the mind at
\nevery moment and in each particular with the religious influence. And to do
\nthis more effectively by a living and practical adaptation, not asking from
\nanyone what was too much for him or too little, it took as a guiding idea its
\nperception of the varying natural capacity of man, <\/font> adhik<\/font><\/i><\/span>ā<\/font><\/span>ra. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nIt provided in its system means by which each man high or low, wise or
\nignorant, exceptional or average might feel in the way suitable to his nature
\nand evolutionary stage the call, the pressure, the influence. Avoiding the
\nerror of the religions that impose a single dogmatic and inflexible rule on
\nevery man regardless of the possibilities of his nature, it tried rather to
\ndraw him gently upward and help him to grow steadily in religious and spiritual
\nexperience. Every\u00a0 <\/span>part<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-160<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nof
\nhuman nature, every characteristic turn of its action was given a place in the
\nsystem; each was suitably surrounded with’ the spiritual idea and a religious
\ninfluence, each provided with steps by which it might rise towards its own
\nspiritual possibility and significance. The highest spiritual meaning of life
\nwas set on the summits of each evolving power of the human nature. The
\nintelligence was called to a supreme knowledge, the dynamic active and creative
\npowers pointed to openness and unity with an infinite and universal Will, the
\nheart and sense put in contact with a divine love and joy and beauty. But
\nthis-highest meaning was also put everywhere indicatively or in symbols behind
\nthe whole system of living, even in its details, so that its impression might
\nfall in whatever degree on the life, increase in pervasion and in the end take
\nup the entire control. This was the aim and, if we consider the imperfections
\nof our nature and the difficulty of the endeavour, we can say that it achieved
\nan unusual measure of success. It has been said with some truth that for the
\nIndian the whole of life is a religion. True of the ideal of Indian life, it is
\ntrue to a certain degree and in a certain sense in its fact and practice. No
\nstep could be taken in the Indian’s inner or outer life without his being
\nreminded of a spiritual existence. Everywhere he felt the closeness or at least
\nsaw the sign of something beyond his natural life, beyond the moment in time,
\nbeyond his individual ego, something other than the needs and interests of his
\nvital and physical nature. That insistence gave its tone and turn to his
\nthought and action and feeling; it produced that subtler sensitiveness to the
\nspiritual appeal, that greater readiness to turn to the spiritual effort which
\nare even now the distinguishing marks of the Indian temperament. It is that
\nreadiness, that sensitiveness which justifies us when we speak of the
\ncharacteristic spirituality of the Indian people.<\/font><\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The ancient idea of the <\/font>
\nadhik<\/font><\/i><\/span>ā<\/font><\/span>ra<\/font><\/span> <\/span><\/i>
\nhas to be taken into careful account if we would
\nunderstand the peculiar character of Indian religion. In most other religious
\nsystems we find a high-pitched spiritual call and a difficult and rigid ethical
\nstandard far beyond the possibilities of man’s half-evolved, defective and
\nimperfect nature. This standard, this call are announced as if imperative on
\nall; but it is evident that only a few can give an adequate<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-<\/font><\/span>161<\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

 response. There is presented
\nto our view for all our picture of life the sharp division of two extremes; the
\nsaint and the worldling, the religious and the irreligious, the good and the
\nbad, the pious and the impious, souls accepted and souls rejected, the sheep
\nand the goats, the saved and the damned, the believer and the infidel, are the
\ntwo categories set constantly before us. All between is a confusion, a tug of
\nwar, an uncertain balance. This crude and summary classification is the
\nfoundation of the Christian system of an eternal heaven and hell; at best, the
\nCatholic religion humanely interposes a precarious chance hung between that
\nhappy and this dread alternative, the chance of a painful purgatory for more
\nthan nine-tenths of the human race. Indian religion set up on its summits a
\nstill more high-pitched spiritual call, a standard of conduct still more
\nperfect and absolute; but it did not go about its work with this summary and
\nunreflecting ignorance. All beings are to the Indian mind portions of the
\nDivine, evolving souls, and sure of an eventual salvation and release into the
\nspirit. All must feel, as the good in them grows or, more truly, the godhead in
\nthem finds itself and becomes conscious, the ultimate touch and call of their
\nhighest self and through that call the attraction to the Eternal and the Divine.
\nBut actually in life there are infinite differences between man and man; some
\nare more inwardly evolved, others are less mature, many if not most are infant
\nsouls incapable of great steps and difficult efforts. Each needs to be dealt
\nwith according to his nature and his soul stature. But a general distinction
\ncan be drawn between three principal types varying in their openness to the
\nspiritual appeal or to the religious influence or impulse. This distinction
\namounts to a gradation of three stages in the growing human consciousness. One
\ncrude, ill-formed, still outward, still vitally and physically minded can be
\nled only by devices suited to its ignorance. Another, more developed and
\ncapable of a much stronger and deeper psycho-spiritual experience, offers a
\nriper make of man-hood gifted with a more conscious intelligence, a larger
\nvital or aesthetic opening, a stronger ethical power of the nature. A third,
\nthe ripest and most developed of all, is ready for the spiritual heights, fit
\nto receive or to climb towards the loftiest ultimate truth of God and of its
\nown being and to tread the summits<\/font><\/span> <\/span>
\nof<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-162<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ndivine experience.1<\/sup> <\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
\n<\/font> <\/span>It was to meet the need of the first type or
\nlevel that ‘Indian religion created that mass of suggestive ceremony and
\neffective ritual and strict outward rule and injunction and all that pageant of
\nattracting and compelling symbol with which the cult is so richly equipped or
\nprofusely decorated. These are for the most part forming and indicative things
\nwhich work upon the mind consciently and subconsciently and prepare it for an
\nentry into the significance of the greater permanent things that lie behind
\nthem. And for this type too, for its vital mind and will, is in- tended all in
\nthe religion that calls on man to turn to a divine Power or powers for the just
\nsatisfaction of his desires and his interests, just because subject to the
\nright and the law, the Dharma. In the Vedic times the outward ritual sacrifice
\nand at a later period all the religious forms and notions that clustered
\nvisibly around the rites and imagery of temple worship, constant festival and
\nceremony and daily act of outward devotion were intended to serve this type or
\nthis soul-stage. Many of these things may seem to the developed mind to belong
\nto an ignorant or half-awakened religionism; but they have their concealed
\ntruth and their psychic value and are indispensable in this stage for the
\ndevelopment and difficult awakening of the soul shrouded in the ignorance of
\nmaterial Nature.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The middle stage, the second type
\nstarts from these things, but gets behind them; it is capable of understanding
\nmore clearly and consciently the psychic truths, the conceptions of the
\nintelligence, the aesthetic indications, the ethical values and all the other
\nmediating directions which Indian religion took care to place behind its
\nsymbols. These intermediate truths vivify the outward forms of the system and
\nthose who can grasp them can go through these mental indices towards things
\nthat are be- yond the mind and approach the profounder truths of the spirit.
\nFor at this stage there is already something awake that can go<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 \n<\/p>\n

\n1 <\/span><\/sup>
\nThe Tantric
\ndistinction is between the animal man, the hero man and the divine man, pasu,
\nvira, deva. <\/i>Or we may grade the difference according to the three Gunas, – first, the tamasic or rajaso-tamasic man ignorant,
\ninert or moved only in a little light by small motive forces, the rajasic or
\nsattwo-rajasic man struggling with an awakened mind and will towards
\nself-development or self-affirmation, and the sattwic man open in mind and heart
\nand will to the Light, standing at the top of the scale and ready to transcend
\nit.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\ninward to a more deeply
\npsycho-religious experience. Already the mind, heart and will have some
\nstrength to grapple with the difficulties of the relations between the spirit
\nand life, some urge to satisfy more luminously or more inwardly the rational,
\naesthetic and ethical nature and lead them upward towards their own highest
\nheights; one can begin to train mind and soul towards a spiritual consciousness
\nand the opening of a spiritual existence. This ascending type of humanity
\nclaims for its use all that large and opulent middle region of philosophic,
\npsycho-spiritual, ethical, aesthetic and emotional religious seeking which is
\nthe larger and more significant portion of the wealth of Indian culture. At
\nthis stage intervene the philosophical systems, the subtle illumining debates
\nand inquiries of the thinkers; here are the nobler or more passionate reaches
\nof devotion, here are held up the higher, ampler or austerer ideals of the
\nDharma; here break in the psychical suggestions and first definite urgings of
\nthe eternal and infinite which draw men by their appeal and promise towards the
\npractice of Yoga.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But these things, great as they
\nwere, were not final or supreme: they were openings, steps of ascension towards
\nthe luminous grandeurs of spiritual truth and its practice was kept ready and
\nits means of attainment provided for the third and greatest type of human
\nbeing, the third loftiest stage of the spiritual evolution. The complete light
\nof spiritual knowledge when it emerges from veil and compromise and goes beyond
\nall symbols and middle significances, the absolute and universal divine love, the
\nbeauty of the All-beautiful, the noblest Dharma of unity with all beings,
\nuniversal compassion and benevolence, calm and sweet in the perfect purity of
\nthe spirit, the upsurge of the psychical being into the spiritual ecstasy,
\nthese divinest things were the heritage of the human being ready for divinity
\nand their way and call were the supreme significances of Indian religion and
\nYoga. He reached by them the fruits of his perfect spiritual evolution, an
\nidentity with the Self and Spirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of
\nhis being, a spiritual universality, communion, transcendence. <\/font>
\n <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>But distinctions are lines that can always
\nbe overpassed in the infinite complexity of man’s nature and there was no sharp<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nand unbridgeable division,
\nonly a gradation, since the actuality or potentiality of the three powers
\ncoexist in all men. Both the middle and the highest significances were near and
\npresent and pervaded the whole system, and the approaches to the highest status
\nwere not absolutely denied to any man, in spite of certain prohibitions: but
\nthese prohibitions broke down in practice or left a way of escape to the man
\nwho felt the call; the call itself was a sign of election. He had only to find
\nthe way and the guide. But even in the direct approach, the principle of <\/font>
\nadhik<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>ra, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\ndiffering capacity and varying nature, <\/font>
\nsvabh<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>va, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nwas recognised in subtle ways, which it would be beyond my present
\npurpose to enumerate. One may note as an example the significant Indian, idea
\nof the i<\/font><\/span>S<\/font><\/span>ta-devat<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nthe special name,
\nform, idea of the Divinity which each man may choose for worship and communion
\nand follow after according to the attraction in his nature and his capacity of
\nspiritual intelligence. And each of the forms has its outer initial associations
\nand suggestions for the worshipper, its appeal to the intelligence, psychical,
\naesthetic, emotional power in the nature and its highest spiritual significance
\nwhich leads through some one truth of the Godhead into the essence of
\nspirituality. One may note too that in the practice of Yoga the disciple has to
\nbe led through his nature and according to his capacity and the spiritual
\nteacher and guide is expected to perceive and take account of the necessary
\ngradations and the individual need and power in his giving of help and
\nguidance. Many things may be objected to in the actual working of this large
\nand flexible system and I shall take some note of them when I have to deal with
\nthe weak points or the pejorative side of the culture against which the hostile
\ncritic directs with a misleading exaggeration his missiles. But the principle
\nof it and the main lines of the application embody a remarkable wisdom,
\nknowledge and careful observation of human nature and an assured insight into
\nthe things of the spirit which none can question who has considered deeply and
\nflexibly these difficult matters or had any close experience of the obstacles
\nand potentialities of our nature in its approach to the concealed spiritual
\nreality.<\/font><\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This carefully graded and complex system
\nof religious development and spiritual evolution was linked on by a process of
\nper-<\/font><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nvading intimate connection to
\nthat general culture of the life of the human being and his powers which must
\nbe the first care of every civilisation worth the name. The most delicate and
\ndifficult part of this task of human development is concerned with the thinking
\nbeing of man, his mind of reason and knowledge. No ancient culture of which we
\nhave knowledge, not even the Greek, attached more importance to it or spent
\nmore effort on its cultivation. The business of the ancient Rishi was not only
\nto know God, but to know the world and life and to reduce it by knowledge to a
\nthing well understood and mastered with which the reason and will of man could
\ndeal on assured lines and on a safe basis of wise method and order. The ripe
\nresult of this effort was the Shastra. When we speak of the Shastra nowadays,
\nwe mean too often only the religio-social system of injunctions of the middle
\nage made sacrosanct by their mythical attribution to Manu, Parasara and other
\nVedic sages. But in older India Shastra meant any systematised teaching and
\nscience; each department of life, each line of activity, each subject of know-
\nledge had its science or Shastra. The attempt was to reduce each to a
\ntheoretical and practical order founded on detailed observation, just
\ngeneralisation, full experience, intuitive, logical and experimental analysis
\nand synthesis, in order to enable man to know always with a just fruitfulness
\nfor life and to act with the security of right knowledge. The smallest and the
\ngreatest things were examined with equal care and attention and each provided
\nwith its art and science. The name was given even to the highest spiritual
\nknowledge whenever it was stated not in a mass of intuitive experience and
\nrevelatory knowledge as in the Upanishads, but for intellectual comprehension
\nin system and order, – and in that sense the Gita is able to call its profound
\nspiritual teaching the most secret science, <\/font> guhyatamam s<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>stram. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nThis high scientific and philosophical spirit was carried by the ancient
\nIndian culture into all its activities. No Indian religion is complete without
\nits outward form of preparatory practice, its supporting philosophy and its
\nYoga or system of inward practice or art of spiritual living: most even of what
\nseems irrational in it to a first glance, has its philosophical turn and
\nsignificance. It is this complete under- standing and philosophical character
\nwhich has given religion in<\/font><\/span> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nIndia its durable security and
\nimmense vitality and enabled it to resist the acid dissolvent power of modem
\nsceptical inquiry; whatever is ill-founded in experience and reason, that power
\ncan dissolve, but not the heart and mind of these great teachings. But what we
\nhave more especially to observe is that while Indian culture made a distinction
\nbetween the lower and the higher learning, the knowledge of things and the
\nknowledge of self, it did not put a gulf between them like some religions, but
\nconsidered the knowledge of the world and things as a preparatory and a leading
\nup to the knowledge of Self and God. All Shastra was put under the sanction of
\nthe names of the Rishis, who were in the beginning the teachers not only of
\nspiritual truth and philosophy, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> and we may note that all Indian philosophy,
\neven the logic of Nyaya and the atomic theory of the Vaisheshikas, has for its
\nhighest crowning note and eventual object spiritual knowledge and liberation, –
\nbut of the arts, the social, political and military, the physical and psychic
\nsciences, and every instructor was in his degree respected as a guru <\/i>or
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n\u00e3<\/font><\/span>c<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>rya,
\n<\/font> <\/span><\/i>a guide or preceptor of the
\nhuman spirit. All knowledge was woven into one and led up by degrees to the one
\nhighest knowledge.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The whole right practice of life
\nfounded on this knowledge was in the view of Indian culture a Dharma, a living
\naccording to a just understanding and right view of self-culture,<\/font> of the knowledge of things and
\nlife and of action in that knowledge. Thus each man and class and kind and species
\nand each activity of soul, mind, life, body has its Dharma. But the largest or
\nat least most vitally important part of the Dharma was held to be the culture
\nand ordering of the ethical nature of man. The ethical aspect of life, contrary
\nto the amazingly ignorant observation of a certain type of critics, attracted a
\nquite enormous amount of attention, occupied the greater part of Indian thought
\nand writing not devoted to the things of pure knowledge and of the spirit and
\nwas so far pushed that there is no ethical formation or ideal which does not
\nreach in it its highest conception and a certain divine absolutism of ideal
\npractice. Indian thought took for granted, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> though there are some remarkable speculations
\nto the contrary,<\/p>\n

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

<\/span>―<\/font><\/span> the ethical nature of man and the ethical law of the world. It considered
\nthat man was justified in satisfying his<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\ndesires, since that is
\nnecessary for the satisfaction and expansion of life, but not in obeying the
\ndictates of desire as the law of his being; for in all things there is a
\ngreater law, each has not only its side of interest and desire, but its Dharma
\nor rule of right practice, satisfaction, expansion, regulation. The Dharma,
\nthen, fixed by the wise in the Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true
\nrule of action. First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for man’s life
\nis only initially for his vital, personal, individual self, but much more
\nimperatively for the community, though most imperatively of all for the
\ngreatest Self one in him- self and in all beings, for God, for the Spirit.
\nTherefore first the individual must subordinate himself to the communal self,
\nthough by no means bound altogether to efface himself in it as the extremists
\nof the communal idea imagine. He must Jive according to the law of his nature
\nharmonised with the law of his social type and class, for the nation and in a
\nhigher reach of his being<\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span> this was greatly stressed by
\nthe Buddhists \u2013 for humanity. Thus Jiving and acting he could learn to
\ntranscend the social scale of the Dharma, practise without injuring the basis
\nof life, the ideal scale and finally grow into the liberty of the spirit, when
\nrule and duty were not binding because he would then move and act in a highest
\nfree and immortal Dharma of the divine na<\/font><\/span>ture.
\nAll these aspects of the Dharma were closely linked up<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\ntogether in a
\nprogressive unity. Thus, for an example, each of the four orders had its own
\nsocial function and ethics, but also an ideal rule for the growth of the pure
\nethical being, and every man by observing his Dharma and turning his action
\nGodwards could grow out of it into the spiritual freedom. But behind all Dharma
\nand ethics was put, not only as a safeguard but as a light, a religious
\nsanction, a reminder of the continuity of life and of man’s long pilgrimage
\nthrough many births, a reminder of the Gods and planes beyond and of the
\nDivine, and above it all the vision of a last stage of perfect comprehension
\nand unity and of divine transcendence.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The system of Indian ethics
\nliberalised by the catholicity of the ancient mind did not ban or violently
\ndiscourage the aesthetic or even the hedonistic being of man in spite of a
\ngrowing ascetic tendency and a certain high austerity of the summits. The<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\naesthetic satisfactions of all
\nkinds and all grades were an important part of the culture. Poetry, the drama,
\nsong, dance, music, the greater and lesser arts were placed under the sanction
\nof the Rishis and were made instruments of the spirit’s culture. A just theory
\nheld them to be initially the means of a pure aesthetic satisfaction and each
\nwas founded on its own basic rule and law, but on that basis and with a perfect
\nfidelity to it still-raised up to minister to the intellectual, ethical and
\nreligious development of the being. It is notable that the two vast Indian
\nepics have been considered as much as Dharma-shastras as great historico-mythic
\nepic narratives, <\/font> itih<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>sas. <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nThey are, that is
\nto say, noble, vivid and puissant pictures of life, but they utter and breathe
\nthroughout their course the law and ideal of a great and high ethical and
\nreligious spirit in life and aim in their highest intention at the idea of the
\nDivine and the way of the mounting soul in the action of the world. Indian
\npainting, sculpture and architecture did not refuse service to the aesthetic
\nsatisfaction and interpretation of the social, civic and individual life of the
\nhuman being; these things, as all evidences show, played a great part in their
\nmotives of creation, but still their highest work was reserved for the greatest
\nspiritual side of the culture, and throughout we see them seized and suffused
\nwith the brooding stress of the Indian mind on the soul, the Godhead, the
\nspiritual, the Infinite. And we have to note too that the aesthetic and
\nhedonistic being was made not only an aid to religion and spirituality and
\nliberally used for that purpose, but even one of the main gates of man’s
\napproach to the Spirit. The Vaishnava religion especially is a religion of love
\nand beauty and of the satisfaction of the whole delight-soul of man in God and
\neven the desires and images of the sensuous life were turned by its vision into
\nfigures of a divine soul-experience. Few religions have gone so far as this
\nimmense catholicity or carried’ the whole nature so high in its large, puissant
\nand many-sided approach to the spiritual and the infinite.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Finally, there is the most outwardly
\nvital life of man, his ordinary dynamic, political, economical and social
\nbeing. This too Indian culture took strenuously in hand and subjected its whole
\nbody to the pressure of its own ideals and conceptions. Its method was to build
\nup great Shastras of social living, duty<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n

\nand enjoyment, military and
\npolitical rule and conduct and economical well-being. These were directed on
\none side to success, expansion, opulence and the right art and relation of
\nthese activities, but on those motives, demanded by the very nature of the
\nvital man and his action, was imposed the law of the Dharma, a stringent social
\nand ethical ideal and rule,<\/font><\/span> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span> thus the whole life<\/font><\/span> of the king as the head of
\npower and responsibility was regulated by it in its every hour and function, –
\nand the constant reminder of religious duty. In later times a Machiavellian
\nprinciple of statecraft, that which has been always and is still pursued by
\ngovernments and diplomats, encroached on this nobler system, but in the best
\nage of Indian thought this depravation was condemned as a temporarily
\neffective, but lesser, ignoble and inferior way of policy. The great rule of
\nthe culture was that the higher a man’s position and power, the larger the
\nscope of his function and influence of his acts and example, the greater should
\nbe the call on him of the Dharma. The whole law and custom of society was
\nplaced under the sanction of the Rishis and the gods, protected from the
\nviolence of the great and powerful, given a socio-religious character and the
\nking himself charged to live and rule as the guardian and servant of the Dharma
\nwith only an executive power over the community which was valid so long as he
\nobserved with fidelity the Law. And as this vital aspect of life is the one
\nwhich most easily draws us outward and away from the inner self and the diviner
\naim of living, it was the most strenuously linked up at every point with the
\nreligious idea in the way the vital man can best understand, in the Vedic times
\nby the constant reminder of the sacrifice behind every social and civic act, at
\na later period by religious rites, ceremonies, worship, the calling in of the
\ngods, the insistence on the subsequent results or a supraterrestrial aim of
\nworks. So great was this preoccupation, that while in the spiritual and
\nintellectual and other spheres a considerable or a complete liberty was allowed
\nto speculation, action, creation, here the tendency was to impose a rigorous
\nlaw and authority, a tendency which in- the end became greatly exaggerated and
\nprevented the expansion of the society into new forms more suitable for the
\nneed of the spirit of the age, the Yuga-dharma. A door of liberty was opened to
\nthe community<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nby the provision of an
\nautomatic permission to change custom and to the individual in the adoption of
\nthe religious life with its own higher discipline or freedom outside the
\nordinary social weft of binding rule and injunction. A rigid observation and
\ndiscipline of the social law, a larger nobler discipline and freer self-culture
\nof the ideal side of the Dharma, a wide freedom’ of the religious and spiritual
\nlife became the three powers of the system. The steps of the expanding human
\nspirit mounted through these powers to its perfection.
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/span>
\nThus
\nthe whole general character of the application of Indian <\/font> <\/span>
\nideals to life
\nbecame throughout of this one texture, the constant, subtly graded, subtly
\nharmonised preparation of the soul of man for its spiritual being. First, the
\nregulated satisfaction of the primary natural being of man subjected to the law
\nof the Dharma and the ethical idea and besieged at every moment by the suggestions
\nof religion, a religion at first appealing to his more outward undeveloped
\nmind, but in each of its outward symbols and circumstances opening to a
\nprofounder significance, armed with the indication of a profoundest spiritual
\nand ideal meaning as its justification. Then, the higher steps of the developed
\nreason and psychical, ethical and aesthetic powers closely interwoven and
\nraised by a similar opening beyond themselves to their own heights of spiritual
\ndirection and potentiality. Finally, each of these growing powers in man was
\nmade on its own line of approach a gateway into his divine and spiritual being.
\nThus we may ob- serve that there was created a Yoga of knowledge for the self-
\nexceeding of the thinking intellectual man, a Yoga of works for the
\nself-exceeding of the active, dynamic and ethical man, a Yoga of love and
\nBhakti for the self-exceeding of the emotional, aesthetic, hedonistic man, by
\nwhich each arrived to perfection through a self-ward, spiritual, God-ward
\ndirection of his own special power, as too a Yoga of self-exceeding through the
\npower of the psychical being and even through the power of the life in the
\nbody, <\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span> Yogas which could be practised in separation or with some kind of
\nsynthesis. But all these ways of self-exceeding led to a highest self-becoming.
\nTo become one with universal being and all existences, one with the self and
\nspirit, united with God, completed the human evolution, built the final step of
\nman’s self-culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

\n
\n

\n
\n
\n4<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n               
\nI<\/span><\/font> <\/span>
\nHAVE<\/span><\/font> dwelt at some length, though
\nstill very inadequately, on the principles of Indian religion, the sense of its
\nevolution and the intention of its system, because these things are being
\nconstantly ignored and battle delivered by its defenders and assailants on
\ndetails, particular consequences and side-issues. Those too have their
\nimportance because they are part of the practical execution, the working out of
\nthe culture in life; but they cannot be rightly valued unless we seize hold of
\nthe intention which was behind the execution. And the first thing we see is that
\nthe principle, the essential intention of Indian culture was extraordinarily
\nhigh, ambitious and noble, the highest indeed that the human spirit can
\nconceive. For what can be a greater idea of life tl1an that which makes it a
\ndevelopment of the spirit in man to its most vast, secret and high
\npossibilities,<\/font> <\/span>
\n― <\/font> <\/span>
\na culture<\/font><\/span> that
\nconceives of life as a movement of the Eternal in time, of the universal in the
\nindividual, of the infinite in the finite, of the Divine in man, or holds that
\nman can become not only conscious of the eternal and the infinite, but live in
\nits power and universalise, spiritualise and divinise himself by
\nself-knowledge?<\/font><\/span> <\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>What<\/font><\/span> greater aims can be for the
\nlife of man than to grow by an inner and outer experience till he can live in
\nGod, realise his spirit, become divine in knowledge, in. will and in the joy of
\nhis highest existence? And that is the whole sense of the striving of Indian
\nculture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It is easy to say that these ideas
\nare fantastic, chimerical and impracticable, that there is no spirit and no
\neternal and nothing divine, and man would do much better not to dabble in
\nreligion and philosophy, but rather make the best he can of the ephemeral
\nlittleness of his life and body. That is a negation natural enough to the vital
\nand physical mind, but it rests on the assumption that man can only be what he
\nis at the moment, and there is nothing greater in him which it is his business
\nto evolve; such a negation has no enduring value. The whole aim of a great
\nculture is to lift man up to something which at first<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/font><\/span>Page-172<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nhe is not, to lead him to
\nknowledge though he starts from an unfathomable ignorance, to teach him to live
\nby his reason, though actually he lives much more by his unreason, by the law
\nof good and unity, though he is now full of evil and discord, by a law of
\nbeauty and harmony, though his actual life is a repulsive muddle of ugliness
\nand jarring barbarisms, by some high law of his spirit, though at present he is
\negoistic, material, unspiritual, engrossed by the needs and desires of his
\nphysical being. If a civilisation has not any of these aims, it can hardly at
\nall be said to have a culture and certainly in no sense a great and noble
\nculture. But the last of these aims, as conceived by ancient India, is the
\nhighest of all because it includes and surpasses all the others. To have made
\nthis attempt is to have ennobled the life of the race; to have failed in it is
\nbetter than if it had never at all been attempted; to have achieved even a
\npartial success is a great contribution to the future possibilities of the
\nhuman being.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The system of Indian culture is
\nanother thing. A system is in its very nature at once an effectuation and a
\nlimitation of the spirit; and yet we must have a science and art of life, a
\nsystem of living. All that is needed is that the lines laid down should be
\nlarge and noble, capable of evolution so that the spirit may more and more
\nexpress itself in life, flexible even in its firmness so that it may absorb and
\nharmonise new material and enlarge its variety and richness without losing its
\nunity. The system of Indian culture was all these things in its principle and
\nup to a certain point and a certain period in its practice. That a decline came
\nupon it in the end and a kind of arrest of growth, not absolute, but still very
\nserious and dangerous to its life and future, is perfectly true, and we shall
\nhave to ask whether that was due to the inherent character of the culture, to a
\ndeformation or to a temporary exhaustion of the force of living, and, if the
\nlast, how that exhaustion came. At present, I will only note in passing one
\npoint which has its importance. Our critic is never tired of harping on India’s
\nmisfortunes and he attributes them all to the incurable badness of our
\ncivilisation, the total absence of a true and sound culture. Now misfortune is
\nnot a proof of absence of culture, nor good fortune the sign of salvation.
\nGreece was unfortunate; she was as much torn by internal dissensions and civil
\nwars as India, she<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nwas finally unable to arrive
\nat unity or preserve independence yet Europe owes half its civilisation to
\nthose squabbling inconsequent petty peoples of Greece. Italy was unfortunate
\nenough in all conscience, yet few nations have contributed more to European
\nculture than incompetent and unfortunate Italy. The misfortunes of India have
\nbeen considerably exaggerated, at least in their incidence, but take them at
\ntheir worst, admit that no nation has suffered more. If all that is due to the
\nbadness of our civilisation, to what is due then the remarkable fact of the
\nobstinate survival of India, her culture and her civilisation under this load
\nof misfortunes, or the power which enables her still to assert herself and her
\nspirit at this moment, to the great wrath of her critics, against the
\ntremendous shock of the flood from Europe which has almost submerged other
\npeoples? If her misfortunes are due to her cultural deficiencies, must not by a
\nparity of reasoning this extraordinary vitality be due to some great force in
\nher, some enduring virtue of truth in her spirit? A mere lie and insanity
\ncannot live; its persistence is a disease which must before long lead to death;
\nit cannot be the source of an unslayable life. There must be some heart of
\nsoundness, some saving truth which has kept this people alive and still enables
\nit to raise its head and affirm its will to be and its faith in its mission.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But, finally, we have to see not
\nonly the spirit and principle of the culture, not only the ideal idea and scope
\nof intention in its system, but its actual working and effect in the values of
\nlife. Here we must admit great limitations, great imperfections. There is no
\nculture, no civilisation ancient or modem which in its system has been entirely
\nsatisfactory to the need of perfection in man; there is none in which the
\nworking has not been marred by considerable limitations and imperfections. And
\nthe’ greater the aim of the culture, the larger the body of the civilisation,
\nthe more are these flaws likely to overbear the eye. In the first place every
\nculture suffers by the limitations or defects of its qualities and, an almost
\ninfallible consequence, by the exaggerations too of its qualities. It tends to
\nconcentrate on certain leading ideas and to lose sight of others or unduly
\ndepress them; this want of balance gives rise to one-sided tendencies which are
\nnot properly checked, not kept in their due place, and bring about. Unhealthy<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-174<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nexaggerations. But so long as
\nthe vigour of the civilisation lasts, life accommodates itself, makes the most
\nof compensating forces and in spite of all stumblings, evils, disasters, some
\ngreat thing is done; but in a time of decline the defect or the excess of a
\nparticular quality gets the upper hand, becomes a disease, makes a general
\nravage and, if not arrested, may lead to decay and death. Again, the ideal may
\nbe great, may have even, as Indian culture had in its best times, a certain
\nkind of provisional completeness, a first attempt at comprehensive harmony, but
\nthere is always a great gulf between the ideal and the actual practice of life.
\nTo bridge that gulf or at least to make it as narrow as possible is the most
\ndifficult part of human endeavour. Finally, the evolution of our race, surprising
\nenough if we look across the ages, is still, when all is said, a slow and
\nembarrassed progress. Each age, each civilisation carries the heavy burden of
\nour deficiencies, each succeeding age ‘throws off something of the load, but
\nloses some virtue of the past, creates other gaps and embarrasses itself with
\nnew aberrations. We have to strike a balance, to see things in the whole, to
\nobserve whither we are tending and use a large secular vision; otherwise it
\nwould be difficult to keep an unfailing faith in the destinies of the race.
\nFor, after all, what we have accomplished so far in the main at the best of
\ntimes is to bring in a modicum of reason and culture and spirituality to leaven
\na great mass of barbarism. Mankind is still no more than semi- civilised and it
\nwas never anything else in the recorded history of its present cycle.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>And therefore every civilisation
\npresents a mixed and anomalous appearance and can be turned by a hostile or
\nunsympathetic observation which notes and exaggerates its defects, ignores its
\ntrue spirit and its qualities, masses the shades, leaves out the lights, into a
\nmass of barbarism, a picture of almost unrelieved gloom and failure, to the
\nlegitimate surprise and indignation of those to whom its motives appear to have
\na great and just value. For each has achieved something of special value for
\nhumanity in the midst of its general work of culture, brought out in a high
\ndegree some potentiality of our nature and given a first large standing-ground
\nfor its future perfection. Greece developed to a high degree the intellectual
\nreason and the sense of form<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-175<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nand harmonious beauty, Rome
\nfounded firmly strength and power and patriotism and law and order, modem
\nEurope has raised to enormous proportions practical reason, science and
\nefficiency and economic capacity, India developed the spiritual mind working on
\nthe other powers of man and exceeding them, the intuitive reason, the
\nphilosophical harmony of the Dharma in- formed by the religious spirit, the
\nsense of the eternal and the infinite. The future has to go on to a greater and
\nmore perfect comprehensive development of these things and to evolve fresh
\npowers, but we shall not do this rightly by damning the past or damning other
\ncultures than our own in a spirit of arrogant in- tolerance. We need not only a
\nspirit of calm criticism, but an eye of sympathetic intuition to extract the
\ngood from the past and present effort of humanity and’ make the most of it for
\nour future progress.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This being so, if our critic insists
\nthat the past culture of India was of the nature of a semi-barbarism, I shall
\nnot object, so long as I have the liberty of passing the same criticism,
\nequally valid or invalid, on the type of European culture which he wishes to
\nfoist on us in its place. Mr. Archer feels the openings which European
\ncivilisation gives to this kind of retort and he pleads plaintively that it
\nought not to be made; he takes refuge in the old tag that a tu quoque <\/i>is
\nno argument. Certainly the retort would be irrelevant if this were only a
\nquestion of the dispassionate criticism of Indian culture without arrogant
\ncomparisons and offensive pretensions. But it becomes a perfectly valid and
\neffective argument when the critic turns into a partisan and tries to trample
\nunderfoot all the claims of the Indian spirit and its civilisation in the name
\nof the superiority or <\/i>Europe. When he insists on our renouncing our own
\nnatural being and culture in order to follow and imitate the West as docile
\npupils on the ground of India’s failure to achieve cultural perfection or the
\nideal of a sound civilisation, we have a right to point out that Europe has to
\nits credit at least as ugly a failure, and for the same fundamental reasons. We
\nhave a right to ask whether science, practical reason and efficiency and an
\nunbridled economic production which makes man a slave of his life and body, a
\nwheel, spring or cog in a huge mechanism or a cell of an economic orga-<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-176<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nnism and translates into human
\nterms the ideal of the ant-hill and the bee-hive, is really the whole truth of
\nour being and a sound or complete ideal of civilisation. The ideal of this
\nculture, though it has its obstacles and difficulties, is at any rate not an
\nunduly exalted aim and ought to be more easy of accomplishment than the arduous
\nspiritual ideal of ancient India. But how much of the European mind and life is
\nreally governed by reason and what does this practical reason and efficiency
\ncome to in the end? To what perfection has it brought the human mind and soul
\nand life? The aggressive ugliness of modern European life, its paucity of
\nphilosophic reason and aesthetic beauty and religious aspiration, its constant
\nunrest, its harsh and oppressive mechanical burden, its lack of inner freedom,
\nits recent huge catastrophe, the fierce struggle of classes are things of which
\nwe have a right to take note. To harp in the style of the Archerian lyre on
\nthese aspects alone and to ignore the brighter side of modem ideals would
\ncertainly be an injustice. There was a time indeed many years ago, when, while
\nadmiring the past cultural achievement of Europe, the present industrial form
\nof it seemed to me an intellectualised titanic barbarism with Germany as its
\ntoo admired type and successful protagonist. A wider view of the ways of the
\nSpirit in the world corrects the one-sidedness of this notion, but still it
\ncontains a truth which Europe recognised in the hour of her agony, though now
\nshe seems to be forgetting too easily her momentary illumination. Mr. Archer
\nargues that at least the West is trying to struggle out of its barbarism while
\nIndia has been content to stagnate in her deficiencies. That may be a truth of
\nthe immediate past; but what then? The question still remains whether Europe is
\ntaking the only, the complete or the best way open to human endeavour and
\nwhether it is not the right thing for India, not to imitate Europe, though she
\nwell may learn from western experience, but to get out of her stagnation by
\ndeveloping what is best and most essential in her own spirit and culture.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/font><\/span>The
\nright, the natural path for India lies so obviously in this direction that in
\norder to destroy it Mr. Archer in his chosen role as devil’s advocate has to
\njuggle with the truth at every step and labour hard and vainly to re-establish
\nthe spell of hypnotic suggestion, now broken for good, which led most of us for
\na long <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-177<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nspace to condemn wholesale
\nourselves and our past and imagine that the Indian’s whole duty in life was to
\nturn an imitative ape in leading-strings and dance to the mechanic barrel-organ
\ntunes of the British civiliser. The claim of Indian culture to survival can be
\nmet first and most radically by challenging the value of its fundamental ideas
\nand the high things which are most native to its ideal, its temperament, its
\nway of looking at the world. To deny the truth or the value of spirituality, of
\nthe sense of the eternal and infinite, the inner spiritual experience, the
\nphilosophic mind and spirit, the religious aim and feeling, the intuitive
\nreason, the idea of universality and spiritual unity is one resource, and this
\nis the real attitude of our critic which emerges constantly in his vehement
\nphilippic. But he cannot carry it through consistently, because it brings him
\ninto conflict with ideas and perceptions which are ineradicable in the human
\nmind and which even in Europe are now after a temporary obscuration beginning
\nto come back into favour. Therefore he hedges and tries rather to prove that we
\nfind in India, even in her magnificent past, even at her best, no spirituality,
\nno real philosophy, no true or high religious feeling, no light of intuitive
\nreason, nothing at all of the great things to which she has directed her most
\nstrenuous aspiration. This assertion is sufficiently absurd, self-contradictory
\nand opposed to the express testimony of those who are eminently fitted and
\nentitled to express an authoritative opinion on these matters. He therefore
\nestablishes a third line of attack combined of two inconsistent and opposite
\nassertions, first, that the higher Hinduism which is made up of these greater
\nthings has had no effect on India and, secondly, that it has had on the
\ncontrary a most all-pervading, a most disastrous and paralysing, a
\nsoul-killing, life-killing effect. He attempts to make his indictment effective
\nby massing together all these inconsistent lines of attack and leading them all
\nto the one conclusion, that the culture of India is both in theory and practice
\nwrong, worthless, deleterious to the true aim of human living.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The last position taken is the only
\none which we need now consider, since the value of the essential ideas of
\nIndian culture cannot be destroyed and to deny them is futile. The things they
\nstand for are there, in whatever form, vaguely or distinctly seek-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-178<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\ning for themselves in the
\nhighest and deepest movements of human being and its nature. The peculiarity of
\nIndian culture lies only in this distinction that what is vague or confused or
\nimperfectly brought out in most other cultures, it has laboured rather to make
\ndistinct, to sound all its possibilities, to fix its aspects and lines and hold
\nit up as a true, precise, large and practicable ideal for the race. The
\nformulation may not be entirely complete; it may have to be still more
\nenlarged, bettered, put otherwise, things missed brought out, the lines and
\nforms modified, errors of stress and direction corrected; but a firm, a large
\nfoundation has been laid down not only in theory, but in solid practice. If
\nthere has been an actual complete failure in life, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> and that is the one point left,<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> it must be due to one of two causes; either there has
\nbeen some essential bungling in the application of the ideal to the facts of
\nlife as it is, or else there has been a refusal to recognise the facts of life at
\nall. Perhaps, then, there has been, to put it otherwise, an insistence on what
\nwe may be at some hardly attainable height of our being without having <\/font> <\/span>
\nfirst made the most of what we are. The infinite can only be<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nreached
\nafter we have grown in the finite, the eternal grasped only by man growing in
\ntime, the spiritual perfected only by man accomplished first in body, life and
\nmind. If that necessity has been ignored, then one may fairly contend that
\nthere has been a gross, impracticable and inexcusable error in the governing
\nidea of Indian culture. But as a matter of fact there has been no such error.
\nWe have seen what were the aim and idea and method of Indian culture and it
\nwill be perfectly clear that the value of life and its training were amply
\nrecognised in its system and given their proper place. Even the most extreme
\nphilosophies and religions, Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an
\nimpermanence or ignorance that must be transcended and cast away, yet did not
\nlose sight of the truth that man must develop himself under the conditions of
\nthis present ignorance or impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to
\nthat Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism was not solely a
\ncloudy sublimation of Nirvana, nothingness, extinction and the tyrannous
\nfutility of Karma; it gave us a great and powerful discipline for the life of
\nman on earth. The enormous positive<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-179<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\neffects it had on society and
\nethics and the creative impulse it imparted to art and thought and in a less
\ndegree to literature, are a sufficient proof of the strong vitality of its
\nmethod. If this positive turn was present in the most extreme philosophy of
\ndenial, it was still more largely present in the totality of Indian culture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>There has been indeed from early
\ntimes in the Indian mind a certain strain, a tendency towards a lofty and
\naustere exaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Mayavada. This
\nexcess was inevitable, the human mind being what it is; it had even its
\nnecessity and value. Our mind does not arrive at the totality of truth easily
\nand by one embracing effort; an arduous search is the condition of its finding.
\nThe mind opposes different sides of the truth to each other, follows each to
\nits extreme possibility, treats it even for a time as the sole truth, makes
\nimperfect compromises, arrives by various adjustments and gropings nearer to
\nthe true relations. The Indian mind followed this method; it covered, as far as
\nit could, the whole field, tried every position, looked at the truth from every
\nangle, attempted many extremes and many syntheses. But the European critic very
\nordinarily labours under the idea that this exaggeration in the direction of
\nnegating life was actually the whole of Indian thought and sentiment or the one
\nundisputed governing idea of the culture. Nothing could be more false and
\ninaccurate. The early Vedic religion did not deny, but laid a full emphasis on
\nlife. The Upanishads did not deny life, but held that the world is a
\nmanifestation of the Eternal, of Brahman, all here is Brahman, all is in the
\nSpirit and the Spirit is in all, the self-existent Spirit has become all these
\nthings and creatures; life too is Brahman, the life-force is the very basis of
\nour existence, the life-spirit, Vayu, is the manifest and evident Eternal, pratyaksam
\nbrahma. <\/i>But it affirmed that the present way of existence of man is not the
\nhighest or the whole; his outward mind and life are not all his being; to be
\nfulfilled and perfect he has to grow out of his physical and mental ignorance
\ninto spiritual self-knowledge.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Buddhism arrived at a later stage
\nand seized on one side of these ancient teachings to make a sharp spiritual and
\nintellectual opposition between the impermanence of life and the perma-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-180<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nnence of the Eternal which
\nbrought to a head and made a gospel of the ascetic exaggeration. But the
\nsynthetic Hindu mind struggled against this negation and finally threw out
\nBuddhism, though not without contracting an increased bias in this direction.
\nThat bias came to its height in the philosophy of Shankara, his theory of Maya,
\nwhich put its powerful imprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a
\nprogressive decline in the full vitality of the race, did tend for a time to
\nfix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort the larger
\nIndian ideal. But his theory is not at all a necessary deduction from the great
\nVedantic authorities, the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Gita, and was always
\ncombated by other Vedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them and
\nfrom spiritual experience very different conclusions. At the present time, in
\nspite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara’s philosophy, the most vital
\nmovements of Indian thought and religion are moving again towards the synthesis
\nof spirituality and life which was an essential part of the ancient Indian
\nideal. Therefore Mr. Archer’s contention that whatever India has achieved in
\nlife and creation and action has been done in spite of the governing ideas of
\nher culture, since logically she ought to have abandoned life and creation and
\naction, is as unsound as it is unnatural and grotesque. To develop to the full
\nthe intellectual, the dynamic and volitional, the ethical, the aesthetic, the
\nsocial and economic being of man was <\/font> <\/span>
\n
\nan important element
\nof Indian civilisation,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n― <\/font> <\/span>
\nif
\nfor nothing <\/font> <\/span>else, at least as an indispensable preliminary to spiritual perfection
\nand freedom. India’s best achievements in thought, art, literature, society
\nwere the logical outcome of her religiophilosophical culture.<\/font><\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But still it may be argued that
\nwhatever may have been the theory, the exaggeration was there and in practice
\nit discouraged life and action. That, when its other falsities have been
\neliminated, is what Mr. Archer’s criticism comes to in the end; the emphasis on
\nthe Self, the eternal, the universal, the impersonal, the infinite discouraged,
\nhe thinks, life, will, personality, human action and led to a false and
\nlife-killing asceticism. India achieved nothing of importance, produced no
\ngreat personalities, was impotent in will and endeavour, her literature and art<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-181<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nare a barbaric and monstrous
\nnullity not equal even to the third-rate work of Europe, her life story a long
\nand dismal record of incompetence and failure. An inconsistency more or less is
\nnothing to this critic and in the same breath he affirms that this very India,
\ndescribed by him elsewhere as always effete, sterile or a mother of monstrous
\nabortions, is one of the most interesting countries in the world, that her art
\ncasts a potent and attractive spell and has numberless beauties, that her very
\nbarbarisms are magnificent and that, most wonderful of all, in presence of some
\nof her personalities in the abodes of her ancient fine-spun aristocratic
\nculture a European is apt to feel like a semi- barbarian intruder! But let us
\nleave aside these signs of grace which are only an oocasional glimmering of
\nlight across the darkness and gloom of Mr. Archer’s mood. We must see how far
\nthere is any foundation for the substance of this criticism. What was the real
\nvalue of Indian life, will, personality, achievement, creation, those things
\nthat she regards as her glories, but her critic tells her she should shudder at
\nas her disgrace? That is the one remaining vital question.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-182<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

\n5<\/b><\/font><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/font><\/b>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n                   
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\nT<\/font><\/span>HE most general
\ncharge against Indian culture in its practical effects can be dismissed without
\nany serious difficulty. The critic with whom I have to deal has, in fact,
\nspoiled his case by the spirit of frantic exaggeration in which he writes. To
\nsay that there has been no great or vivid activity of life in India, that she
\nhas had no great personalities, with the mythical exception of Buddha and the
\nother pale exception of Asoka, that she has never shown any will-power and
\nnever done any great thing, is so contrary to all the facts of history that
\nonly<\/font><\/span>,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\na
\ndevil’s advocate in search of a case could advance it at all or put <\/font> <\/span>
\nit with that crude
\nvehemence. India has lived and lived greatly, whatever judgment one may pass on
\nher ideas and institutions. What is meant after all by life and when is it that
\nwe most fully and greatly live? Life is surely nothing but the creation and
\nactive self-expression of man’s spirit, powers, capacities, his will to be and
\nthink and create and love and do and achieve. When that is wanting or, since it
\ncannot be absolutely wanting, de- pressed, held under, discouraged or inert,
\nwhether by internal or external causes, then we may say that there is a lack of
\nlife. Life in its largest sense is the great web of our internal and external
\naction, the play of Shakti, the play of Karma; it is religion and philosophy
\nand thought and science and poetry and art, drama and song and dance and play,
\npolitics and society, industry, commerce and trade, adventure and travel, War and
\npeace, conflict and unity, victory and defeat and aspirations and vicissitudes,
\nthe thoughts, emotions, words, deeds, joys and sorrows which make up the
\nexistence of man. In a narrower sense life is sometimes spoken of as the more
\nobvious and external vital action, a thing which can be depressed by a
\ntop-heavy intellectuality or ascetic spirituality, sicklied over with the pale
\ncast of thought or the paler cast of world-weariness or made flat, stale and
\nuninteresting by a formalised, conventional or too straitlaced system of
\nsociety. Again, life may be very active and full of colour for a small and
\nprivileged part of the community, but<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-183<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nthe life of the mass dull,
\nvoid and miserable. Or, finally, there may be all the ordinary materials and
\ncircumstances of mere living, but if life is not uplifted by great hopes,
\naspirations and ideals, then we may well say that the community does not really
\nlive; it is defective in the characteristic greatness of the human spirit.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The ancient and mediaeval life of India
\nwas not wanting in any of the things that make up the vivid interesting
\nactivity of human existence. On the contrary, it was extraordinarily full of
\ncolour and interest. Mr. Archer’s criticism on this point, a criticism packed
\nfull of ignorance and built up by a purely fictitious construction of what
\nthings logically ought to have been on the theory of a dominating asceticism
\nand belief in the illusionary character of the world, is not and cannot be
\nborne out by anyone who has come close to the facts. It is true that while many
\nEuropean writers who have studied the history of the land and the people, have
\nexpressed strongly their appreciation of the vividness and interesting
\nfullness, colour and beauty of life in India before the present period,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n–<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>that unhappily exists no
\nlonger except in the pages of history and literature and the broken or
\ncrumbling fragments of the past, – those who see only from a distance or fix
\ntheir eyes only on one aspect, speak of it often as a land of metaphysics,
\nphilosophies, dreams and brooding imaginations, and certain artists and writers
\nare apt to write in a strain as if it were a country of the Arabian Nights, a
\nmere glitter of strange hues and fancies and marvels. But on the contrary India
\nhas been as much a home of serious and solid realities, of a firm grappling
\nwith the problems of thought and life, of measured and wise organisation and
\ngreat action as any other considerable centre of civilisation. The widely
\ndifferent view these perceptions express simply show the many-sided brilliance
\nand fullness of her life. The colour and magnificence have been its aesthetic
\nside; she has had great dreams and high and splendid imaginations, for that too
\nis wanted for the complete- ness of our living; but also deep philosophical and
\nreligious thinking, a wide and searching criticism of life, a great political
\nand social order, a strong ethical tone and a persistent vigour of individual
\nand communal living. That is a combination<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-184<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nwhich means life in all its
\nfullness, though deficient, it may be, except in extraordinary cases, in the
\nmore violent egoistic perversities and exaggerations which some minds seem to
\ntake for a proof of the highest vigour of existence.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>In what field indeed has not India attempted,
\nachieved, created, and in all on a large scale and yet with much attention to
\ncompleteness of detail? Of her spiritual and philosophic achievement there can
\nbe no real question. They stand there as the Himalayas stand upon the earth, in
\nthe phrase of Kalidasa, <\/font> prthivy<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span> iva m<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>nadandah, <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\n"as if earth’s measuring rod", mediating
\nstill between earth and heaven, measuring the finite, casting their plummet far
\ninto the infinite, plunging their extremities into the upper and lower seas of
\nthe superconscient and the subliminal, the spiritual and the natural being. But
\nif her philosophies, her religious disciplines, her long list of great
\nspiritual personalities, thinkers, founders, saints are her greatest glory, as
\nwas natural to her temperament and governing idea, they are by no means her
\nsole glories, nor are the others dwarfed by their eminence. It is now proved
\nthat in science she went farther than any country before the modern era, and
\neven Europe owes the beginning of her physical science to India as much as to
\nGreece, although not directly but through the medium of the Arabs. And, even if
\nshe had only gone as far, that would have been sufficient proof of a strong
\nintellectual life in an ancient culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy
\nand chemistry, the chief elements of ancient science, she discovered and
\nformulated much and well and anticipated by force of reasoning or experiment
\nsome of the scientific ideas and discoveries which Europe first arrived at much
\nlater, but was able to base more firmly by her new and completer method. She
\nwas well-equipped in surgery and her system of medicine survives to this day
\nand has still its value, though it declined intermediately in knowledge and is
\nonly now recovering its vitality.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>In literature, in the life of the mind,
\nshe lived and built greatly. Not only has she the Vedas, Upanishads and Gita,
\nnot to speak of less supreme but still powerful or beautiful work in that
\nfield, unequalled monuments of religious and philosophic poetry, a kind in
\nwhich Europe has never been able to do any-<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-185<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nthing much of any great value,
\nbut that vast national structure, the Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the
\npoetic literature and expressing so completely the life of a long formative
\nage, that it is said of it in a popular saying which has the justice if also
\nthe exaggeration of a too apt epigram, "What is not in this Bharata, is
\nnot in Bharatavarsha (India)", and the Ramayana, the greatest and most
\nremarkable poem of its kind, that most sublime and beautiful epic of ethical
\nidealism and a heroic semi- divine human life, and the marvellous richness,
\nfullness and colour of the poetry and romance of highly cultured thought,
\nsensuous enjoyment, imagination, action and adventure which makes up the
\nromantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor did this long continuous vigour
\nof creation cease with the loss of vitality by the Sanskrit tongue, but was
\nparalleled and carried on in a mass of great or of beautiful work in her other
\nlanguages, in Pali first and Prakrit, much unfortunately lost,1<\/sup> <\/font><\/span>
\n <\/font><\/span>and
\nTamil, afterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues. The long
\ntradition of her architecture, sculpture and painting speaks for itself, even
\nin what survives after all the ruin of stormy centuries: whatever judgment may
\nbe formed of it by the narrower school of western aesthetics, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> and at least
\nits fineness of execution and workmanship cannot be denied, nor the power with
\nwhich it renders the Indian mind,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> it
\ntestifies at least to a <\/font> <\/span>
\ncontinuous creative activity. And creation is proof of
\nlife and great creation of greatness of life.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But these things are, it may be
\nsaid, the things of the mind, and the intellect, imagination and aesthetic mind
\nof India may have been creatively active, but yet her outward life depressed,
\ndull, poor, gloomy with the hues of asceticism, void of will- power and
\npersonality, ineffective, null. That would be a hard proposition to swallow;
\nfor literature, art and science do not flourish in a void of life. But here too
\nwhat are the facts? India has not only had the long roll of her great saints,
\nsages, thinkers, religious founders, poets, creators, scientists, scholars,
\nlegists; she has had her great rulers, administrators, soldiers, conquerors,
\nheroes, men with the strong active will, the mind that plans and<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n1 <\/span><\/sup>E.g., the once famous work in Paisachi of which the <\/font>
\nKath<\/font><\/i><\/span>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>sarits<\/font><\/span><\/i>\u00e3<\/font><\/span>gara <\/font> <\/span><\/i>
\nis an inferior <\/font> <\/span>
\nversion.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-186<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nthe seeing force that builds.
\nShe has warred and ruled, traded and colonised and spread her civilisation,
\nbuilt polities and orga- nised communities and societies, done all that makes
\nthe outward activity of great peoples. A nation tends to throw out its most
\nvivid types in that line of action which is most congenial to its temperament
\nand expressive of its leading idea, and it is the great saints and religious
\npersonalities that stand at the head in India, and present the most striking
\nand continuous roll-call of greatness, just as Rome lived most in her warriors
\nand statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in ancient India was the outstanding figure
\nwith the hero just behind, while in later times the most striking feature is
\nthe long uninterrupted chain from Buddha and Mahavira to Ramanuja, Chaitanya,
\nNanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and beyond them to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and
\nDayananda. But there have been also the remarkable achievements of statesmen
\nand rulers, from the first dawn of ascertainable history which comes in with
\nthe striking figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya, Asoka, the Gupta emperors and
\ngoes down through the multitude of famous Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the
\nmiddle age to quite modern times. In ancient India there was the life of
\nrepublics, oligarchies, democracies, small kingdoms of which no detail of
\nhistory now survives, afterwards the long effort at empire-building, the colonisation
\nof Ceylon and the Archipelago, the vivid struggles that attended the rise and
\ndecline of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties, the Hindu struggle for survival in
\nthe south, the wonderful record of Rajput heroism and the great upheaval of
\nnational life in Maharashtra penetrating to the lowest strata of society, the
\nremarkable episode of the Sikh Khalsa. An adequate picture of that outward life
\nstill remains to be given; once given it would be the end of many fictions. All
\nthis mass of action was not accomplished by men without mind and will and vital
\nforce, by pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood had been
\ncrushed out under the burden of a gloomy and all-effacing asceticism, nor does
\nit look like the sign of a metaphysically minded people or dreamers averse to
\nlife and action. It was not men of straw or lifeless and will-less dummies or
\nthin-blooded dreamers who thus acted, planned, conquered, built great systems
\nof administration, founded kingdoms and<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-187<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nempires, figured as great
\npatrons of poetry and art and architecture or, later, resisted heroically
\nimperial power and fought for the freedom of clan or people. Nor was it a nation
\ndevoid of life which maintained its existence and culture and still lived on and
\nbroke out constantly into new revivals under the ever-increasing stress of
\ncontinuously adverse circumstances. The modem Indian revival, religious,
\ncultural, political, called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles and
\ngrieves the minds of her critics, is only a repetition under altered
\ncircumstances, in an adapted form, in a greater though as yet less vivid mass of
\nmovement, of a phenomenon which has constantly repeated itself
\nthroughout a millennium of Indian history.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>And it must be remembered that by virtue
\nof its culture and its system the whole nation shared in the common life. In
\nall countries in the past the mass has indeed lived with a less active and
\nvivid force than the few,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nsometimes
\nwith the mere elements of life, not with even any beginning of finished
\nrichness, <\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>nor has modern civilisation
\nyet got rid of this disparity, though it has opened the advantages or at least
\nthe initial opportunities of a first-hand life and thought and knowledge to a greater
\nnumber. But in ancient India, though the higher classes led and had the lion’s
\nshare of the force and wealth of life, the people too lived and until much
\nlater times intensely though on a lesser scale and with a more diffused and
\nless concentrated force. Their religious life was more intense than that of any
\nother country; they drank in with remarkable facility the thoughts of the
\nphilosophers and the influence of the saints; they heard and followed Buddha
\nand the many who came after him; they were taught by the Sannyasins and sang
\nthe songs of the Bhaktas and Bauls and thus possessed some of the most delicate
\nand beautiful poetical literature ever produced; they contributed many of the
\ngreatest names in our religion, and from the outcasts themselves came saints
\nrevered by the whole community. In ancient Hindu times they had their share of
\npolitical life and power; they were the people, the visah <\/i>of the Veda,
\nof whom the kings were the leaders and from them as well as from the sacred or
\nprincely families were born the Rishis; they held their villages as little
\nself- administered republics; in the time of the great kingdoms and<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-188<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nempires they sat in the
\nmunicipalities and urban councils and the bulk of the typical royal Council
\ndescribed in the books of political science was composed of commoners,
\nVaishyas, and not of Brahmin Pundits and Kshatriya nobles; for a long time they
\ncould impose their will on their kings, without the need of a long struggle, by
\na single demonstration of their displeasure. So long as Hindu kingdoms existed,
\nsomething of all this survived, and even the entrance into India of Central
\nAsian forms of absolutist despotism, never an indigenous Indian growth, left
\nsome remnant of the old edifice still in being. The people had their share too
\nin art and poetry, their means by which the essence of Indian culture was
\ndisseminated through the mass, a system of elementary edu- cation in addition
\nto the great universities of ancient times, a type of popular dramatic
\nrepresentation which was in some parts of the country alive even yesterday;
\nthey gave India her artists and architects and many of the famous poets in the
\npopular tongues; they preserved by the force of their long past culture an
\ninnate aesthetic sense and faculty of which the work of Indian craftsmen
\nremained a constant and striking evidence until it was destroyed or degraded by
\nthe vulgarisation and loss of aesthetic sense and beauty which has been one of
\nthe results of modern civilisation. Nor was the life of India ascetic, gloomy
\nor .sad, as the too logical mind of the critic would have it be. The outward
\nform is more quiet than in other countries, there is a certain gravity and
\nreserve before strangers which deceives the foreign observer, and in recent
\ntimes asceticism and poverty and an increase of puritanic tendency had their
\neffect; but the life portrayed in the literature of the country is glad and
\nvivid, and even now despite certain varieties of temperament and many forces
\nmaking for depression, laughter, humour, an unobtrusive elasticity and
\nequanimity in the vicissitudes of life are very marked features of the Indian
\ncharacter.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The whole theory of a want of life and
\nwill and activity in the Indian people as a result of their culture is then a
\nmyth. The circumstances which have given some colour to it in later times will
\nbe noted in their proper place; but they are a feature of the decline and even
\nthen must be taken with considerable qualification, and the much longer history
\nof its past greatness tells quite<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-189<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nanother story. That history
\nhas not been recorded in the European fashion; for the art of history and
\nbiography, though not entirely neglected, was never brought to perfection in
\nIndia, never sufficiently practised, nor does any sustained record of the
\ndoings of kings and great men and peoples before the Mussulman dynasties
\nsurvive except in the one solitary instance of Cashmere. This is certainly a
\ndefect and leaves a very serious gap. India has lived much, but has not sat
\ndown to record the history of her life. Her soul and mind have left their great
\nmonuments, but so much as we know<\/font><\/span> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span> and after all it is not little<\/font> <\/span>
\n― <\/font> <\/span>
\nof the rest, the more outward things, remains or has
\nemerged recently in spite of her neglect; such exact records as she had, she
\nhas allowed to rust forgotten or disappear. Perhaps what Mr. Archer really
\nmeans when he tells us that we have had no personalities in our history, is
\nthat they do not come home to his mind because their doings and sayings are not
\nminutely recorded in the western manner; their personality, will-power and
\ncreative force emerge only in their work or in indicative tradition and
\nanecdote or in incomplete records. And very curiously, very fancifully this de-
\nfect has been set down to an ascetic want of interest in life; it is supposed
\nthat India was so much absorbed in the eternal that she deliberately despised
\nand neglected time, so profoundly concentrated on the pursuit of ascetic
\nbrooding and quietistic peace that she looked down on and took no interest in the
\nmemory of action. That is another myth. The same phenomenon of a lack of
\nsustained and deliberate record appears in other ancient cultures, but nobody
\nsuggests that Egypt, Assyria or Persia have to be reconstructed for us by the
\narchaeologists for an analogous reason. The genius of Greece developed the art
\nof history, though only in the later period of her activity, and Europe has
\ncherished and preserved the art; India and other ancient civilisations did not
\narrive at it or neglected its full development. It is a defect, but there is no
\nreason why we should go out of our way in this one case to attribute it to a
\ndeliberate motive or to any lack of interest in life. And in spite of the
\ndefect the greatness and activity of the past life of India reveals itself and
\ncomes out in bolder relief the more the inquiry into her past unearths the vast
\namount of material still available.<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-190<\/span><\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nBut our critic will still have
\nit that India lived as it were in spite of herself and that in all this teeming
\naction there is ample evidence of the dwarfing of individual will and the
\nabsence of any great individual personality. He arrives at that result by
\nmethods which savour of the skill of the journalist or pamphleteer rather than
\nthe disinterested mind of the critic. He tells us, for instance, that India has
\ncontributed only one or at most two great names to the world’s Pantheon. By
\nthat, of course, he means Europe’s Pantheon, or the world’s Pantheon as
\nconstructed by the mind of Europe, crammed with the figures of western history
\nand achievement which are near and familiar to it and admitting only a very few
\nof the more gigantic names from the distant East, those which it finds it most
\ndifficult to ignore. One remembers the list made by a great French poet in the
\nfield of literature in which a sounding string of French names equals or
\noutnumbers the whole contribution of the rest of Europe! If an Indian were to
\nset about the same task in the same spirit, he would no doubt similarly pour
\nout an interminable list of Indian names with some great men of Europe and
\nAmerica, Arabia, Persia, China, Japan forming a brief tail to this large
\npeninsular body. These exercises of the partial mentality have no value. And it
\nis difficult to find out what measure of values Mr. Archer is using when he
\nrelegates other great Indian names, allowing for three or four only, to the
\nsecond plan and even there belittles them in comparison with corresponding
\nEuropean immortals. In what is Shivaji with his vivid and interesting life and
\ncharacter, who not only founded a kingdom but organised a nation, inferior to
\nCromwell, or Shankara whose great spirit in the few years of its mortal life
\nswept triumphant through India and reconstituted the whole religious life of
\nher peoples, inferior as a personality to Luther? Why are Chanakya and
\nChandragupta who laid down the form of empire-building in India and whose great
\nadministrative system survived with changes often for the worse down to modern
\ntimes, lesser men than the rulers and statesmen of European history? India may
\nnot present any recorded moment of her life so crowded as the few years of
\nAthens to which Mr. Archer makes appeal; she may have no parallel to the swarm
\nof interesting but often disturbing, questionable or even dark and revolting<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-191<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nfigures which
\nilluminate and stain the story of the Italian cities during the Renaissance,
\nalthough she has had too her crowded moments thronged by figures of a different
\nkind. But she has had many rulers, statesmen and encouragers of art as great in
\ntheir own way as Pericles or Lorenzo di Medici; the personalities of her famed
\npoets emerge more dimly through the mist of time, but with indications which
\npoint to a lofty spirit or a humanity as great as that of Aeschylus or
\nEuripides or a life-story as human and interesting as that of the famous
\nItalian poets. And if, comparing this one country with all Europe as Mr. Archer
\ninsists,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nmainly on the
\nground that Indians themselves make the comparison when they speak of the size
\nof the country, its many races, and the difficulty so long experienced in
\norganising Indian unity, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> it may be that in the field of political and
\nmilitary action Europe has a long lead, but what of the unparalleled profusion
\nof great spiritual personalities in which India is pre-eminent? Again, Mr.
\nArcher speaks with arrogant depreciation of the significant figures born of the
\ncreative Indian mind which people its literature and its drama. Here too it is
\ndifficult to follow him or to accept his measure of values. To an oriental mind
\nat least Rama and Ravana are as vivid and great and real characters as the
\npersonalities of Homer and Shakespeare, Sita and Draupadi certainly not less
\nliving than Helen or Cleopatra, Damayanti and Shakuntala and other feminine
\ntypes not less sweet, gracious and alive than Alcestis or Desdemona. I am not
\nhere affirming any superiority, but the bottomless inequality and inferiority
\nwhich this critic affirms exists, not in truth, but only in his imagination or
\nhis way of seeing.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>That perhaps is the one thing of
\nsignificance, the one thing which is really worth noting; the difference of
\nmentality which is at the bottom of these comparisons. There is not any
\ninferiority of life or force or active and reactive will but, as far as the
\nsameness of human nature allows, difference of type, character, personality,
\nlet us say, an emphasis in different and almost opposite directions. Will-power
\nand personality have not been wanting in India, but the direction preferably
\ngiven to them and the type most admired are of a different kind. The average
\nEuropean mind is prone to value or at least to be more interested in<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-192<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n1.Ajanta Cave No.16<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n…the magnificent statues of the cave-cathedrals<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n

\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n2. Nataraja, Mathura<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n
\n

\n\t\t<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t3. Vriksaka, Gwalior Museum<\/font><\/td>\n

\n

\n <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t4. Female figure, Ellora<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n
\n

\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t5. Nagaraja and Queen, Ajanta<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe sculptor must express always in static form;
\n\t\t<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tthe idea of the spirit is cut out for him in mass
\n\t\t<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tand line, significant in the stability of its
\n\t\tinsistence,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tand he can lighten the weight of this insistence<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tbut not get rid of it or away from it;<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tform him eternity seizes hold of time in its shapes<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tand arrests it in the monumental spirit of stone or
\n\t\t<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tbronze. (P.242)<\/font><\/i><\/td>\n

\n

\n\t\tArt after all is not forbidden to deal with the
\n\t\tunusual or to alter and overpass Nature…<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe means mater,<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\tbut less than the significance and the thing done and
\n\t\tthe power and beauty with which it expresses the dreams and truths of
\n\t\tthe human spirit. (P.236)<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n

\n\t\t<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t6. Vishnu (Varaha Avatara) and Prithvi, Pondicherry<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\nthe egoistic or self-asserting
\nwill which insists upon itself with a strong or a bold, an aggressive,
\nsometimes a fierce insistence; the Indian mind not only prizes more from the
\nethical standpoint, <\/font> <\/span>
\n― <\/font> <\/span>
\nthat is found everywhere, <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> but is more vividly
\ninterested in the calm, self-controlling or even the self-effacing personality;
\nfor the effacement of egoism seems to it to be not an effacement, but an
\nenhancement of value and power of the true person and its greatness. Mr. Archer
\nfinds Asoka pale and featureless; to an Indian mind he is supremely vivid and
\nattractive. Why is Asoka to be called pale in comparison with Charlemagne or,
\nlet us say, with Constantine? Is it because he only mentions his sanguinary
\nconquest of Kalinga in order to speak of his remorse and the turning of his
\nspirit, a sentiment which Charlemagne massacring the Saxons in order to make
\ngood Christians of them could not in the least have understood, nor any more
\nperhaps the Pope who anointed him? Constantine gave the victory to the
\nChristian religion, but there is nothing Christian in his personality; Asoka
\nnot only enthroned Buddhism, but strove though not with a perfect success to
\nfollow the path laid down by Buddha. And the Indian mind would account him not
\nonly a nobler will, but a greater and more attracting personality than
\nConstantine or Charlemagne. It is interested in Chanakya, but much more
\ninterested in Chaitanya. <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nAnd in literature also just as in
\nactual life it has the same turn. This European mind finds Rama and Sita
\nuninteresting and unreal, because they are too virtuous, too ideal, too white
\nin colour; but to the Indian mind, even apart from all religious sentiment,
\nthey are figures of an absorbing reality which appeal to the inmost fibres of
\nour being. A European scholar criticising the Mahabharata finds the strong and
\nviolent Bhima the only real character in that great poem; the Indian mind on
\nthe contrary finds greater character and a more moving interest in the calm and
\ncollected heroism of Arjuna, in the fine ethical temperament of Yudhishthira,
\nin the divine charioteer of Kurukshetra who works not for his own hand but for
\nthe founding of the kingdom of right and justice. Those vehement or
\nself-asserting characters or those driven by the storm of their passions which
\nmake the chief interest of European epic and drama, would either<\/font> <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nPage-193<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nbe relegated by it to the
\nsecond plan or else, if set in large proportions, so brought in in order to
\nbring into relief the greatness of the higher type of personality, as Ravana
\ncontrasts with and sets off Rama. The admiration of the one kind of mentality
\nin the aesthetics of life goes to the coloured, that of the other to the
\nluminous personality. Or, to put it in the form of the distinction made by the
\nIndian mind itself, the interest of the one centres more in the rajasic, that
\nof the other in the sattwic will and character.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>Whether this difference imposes an
\ninferiority on the aesthetics of Indian life and creation, each must judge for
\nhimself, but surely the Indian is the more evolved and spiritual conception.
\nThe Indian mind believes that the will and personality are not diminished but
\nheightened by moving from the rajasic or more coloured egoistic to the sattwic
\nand more luminous level of our being. Are not after all calm, self-mastery, a
\nhigh balance signs of a greater and more real force of character than mere
\nself- assertion of strength of will or the furious driving of the passions?
\nTheir possession does not mean that one must act with an inferior or less
\npuissant, but only with a more right, collected and balanced will. And it is a
\nmistake to think that asceticism itself rightly understood and practised
\nimplies an effacement of will; it brings much rather its greater concentration.
\nThat is the Indian view and experience and the meaning of the old legends in
\nthe epics,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nto which Mr.
\nArcher, misunderstanding the idea behind them, violently objects,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>―<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>attributing so enormous a
\nforce, even when it was misused, to the power gained by ascetic self-mastery,
\nTapasya. The Indian mind believed and still believes that soul power is a
\ngreater thing, works from a mightier centre of will and has greater results
\nthan a more outwardly and materially active will-force. But it will be said
\nthat India has valued most the impersonal and that must obviously discourage
\npersonality. But this too,<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\nexcept
\nfor the negative ideal of losing oneself in the trance or the silence of the
\nEternal, which is not the true essence of the matter,<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\n―<\/font><\/span> <\/font> <\/span>
\ninvolves a misconception. However paradoxical it may
\nsound, one finds actually that the acceptance of the eternal and impersonal
\nbehind one’s being and action and the attempt at unity with it is precisely the
\nthing that carries<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/font><\/span>Page-194<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

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

\nthe person to <\/i>his
\nlargest greatness and power. For this impersonality is not a nullity, but an
\noceanic totality of the being. The perfect man, the Siddha or the Buddha,
\nbecomes universal, embraces all being in sympathy and oneness, finds himself in
\nothers as in himself and by so doing draws into himself at the same time
\nsomething of the infinite power of a universal energy. That is the positive
\nideal of Indian culture. And when this hostile critic finds himself forced to
\ndo homage to the superiority of certain personalities who have sprung from this
\n"fine-spun aristocratic" culture, he is really paying a tribute to
\nsome results of this preference of the sattwic to the rajasic, the universal to
\nthe limited and egoistic man. Not to be as the common man, that is to say, as
\nthe crude natural or half-baked human being, was indeed the sense of this
\nancient endeavour and in that sense it may be called an aristocratic culture.
\nBut it was not a vulgar outward but a spiritual nobility which was the aim of
\nits self-discipline. Indian life, personality, art, literature must be judged
\nin this light and appreciated or depreciated after being seen in the real sense
\nand with the right understanding of Indian culture.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>Page-195<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Religion\u00a0 and\u00a0 Spirituality           I \u00a0HAVE described the framework of the Indian idea from the outlook of an intellectual criticism, because that is the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-14-the-foundation-of-indian-culture-volume-14","wpcat-18-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9720,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions\/9720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}