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I have described the framework of the Indian idea from the outlook of
an intellectual criticism, because that is the standpoint of the critics
who affect to disparage its value. I have shown that Indian culture
must be adjudged even from this alien outlook to have been the creation
of a wide and noble spirit. Inspired in the heart of its being by a
lofty principle, illumined with a striking and uplifting idea of individual
manhood and its powers and its possible perfection, aligned to a spacious
plan of social architecture, it was enriched not only by a strong philosophic,
intellectual and artistic creativeness but by a great and vivifying
and fruitful life-power. But this by itself does not give an adequate
account of its spirit or its greatness. One might describe Greek or
Roman civilisation from this outlook and miss little that was of importance;
but Indian civilisation was not only a great cultural system, but an
immense religious effort of the human spirit.
The whole root of difference between Indian and European culture springs
from the spiritual aim of Indian civilisation.
It is the turn which this aim imposes on all the rich and luxuriant
variety of its forms and rhythms that gives to it its unique character.
For even what it has in common with other cultures gets from that turn
a stamp of striking originality and solitary greatness. A spiritual
aspiration was the governing force of this culture, its core of thought,
its ruling passion. Not only did it make spirituality the highest aim
of life, but it even tried, as far as that could be done in the past
conditions of the human race, to turn the whole of life towards spirituality.
But since religion is in the human mind the first native, if imperfect
form of the spiritual impulse, the predominance of the spiritual idea,
its endeavour to take hold of life, necessitated a casting of thought
and action into the religious mould and a persistent filling of every
circumstance of life with the religious sense; it demanded a pervadingly
religio-philosophic culture. The highest spirituality indeed moves in
a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed
by religious form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations
and, even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience
which to the formal religious mind is unintelligible. But man does not
arrive immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded
from him at once, he would never arrive there. At first he needs lower
supports and stages of ascent; he asks for some scaffolding of dogma,
worship, image, sign, form, symbol, some indulgence and permission of
mixed half-natural motive on which he can stand while he builds up in
him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is completed, can
the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear. The religious culture
which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled this purpose,
but, unlike certain credal religions, it knew its purpose. It gave itself
no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal
adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow
path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously
enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavour of the human spirit. An
immense many-sided many-staged provision for a spiritual self-building
and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name
it knew, the eternal religion, sanâtana dharma. It is only if
we have a just and right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian
religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and
spirit of Indian culture.
Now just here is the first baffling difficulty over which the European
mind stumbles; for it finds itself unable to make out what Hindu religion
is. Where, it asks, is its soul? where is its mind and fixed thought?
where is the form of its body? How can there be a religion which has
no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no theological
postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo distinguishing it from
antagonistic or rival religions? How can there be a religion which has
no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or
congregational system, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory
on all its adherents, no one administration and discipline? For the
Hindu priests are mere ceremonial officiants without any ecclesiastical
authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere interpreters
of the Shastra, not the lawgivers of the religion or its rulers. How
again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs,
allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits
all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures?
The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and
even that varies in different castes, regions, communities. The caste
rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for
his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary
doctrine or a new spiritual leader. If it excommunicates Christian or
Muslim, it is not for religious belief or practice, but because they
break with the social rule and order. It has been asserted in consequence
that there is no such thing as a Hindu religion, but only a Hindu social
system with a bundle of the most disparate religious beliefs and institutions.
The precious dictum that Hinduism is a mass of folk-lore with an ineffective
coat of metaphysical daubing is perhaps the final judgment of the superficial
occidental mind on this matter.
This misunderstanding springs from the total difference of outlook on
religion that divides the Indian mind and the normal Western intelligence.
The difference is so great that it could only be bridged by a supple
philosophical training or a wide spiritual culture; but the established
forms of religion and the rigid methods of philosophical thought practised
in the West make no provision and even allow no opportunity for either.
To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma;
the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the contrary
to the Western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the most important
part of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes
it from others. For it is its formulated beliefs that make it either
a true or a false religion, according as it agrees or does not agree
with the credo of its critic. This notion, however foolish and shallow,
is a necessary consequence of the Western idea which falsely supposes
that intellectual truth is the highest verity and, even, that there
is no other. The Indian religious thinker knows that all the highest
eternal verities are truths of the spirit. The supreme truths are neither
the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal
statement, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. Intellectual truth
is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since
intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature
many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs
can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite.
However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many
side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme
Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions
are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths
to the One Eternal.
Indian religion placed four necessities before human life. First, it
imposed upon the mind a belief in a highest consciousness or state of
existence universal and transcendent of the universe, from which all
comes, in which all lives and moves without knowing it and of which
all must one day grow aware, returning towards that which is perfect,
eternal and infinite. Next, it laid upon the individual life the need
of self-preparation by development and experience till man is ready
for an effort to grow consciously into the truth of this greater existence.
Thirdly, it provided it with a well-founded, well-explored, many-branching
and always enlarging way of knowledge and of spiritual or religious
discipline. Lastly, for those not yet ready for these higher steps it
provided an organisation of the individual and collective life, a framework
of personal and social discipline and conduct, of mental and moral and
vital development by which they could move each in his own limits and
according to his own nature in such a way as to become eventually ready
for the greater existence. The first three of these elements are the
most essential to any religion, but Hinduism has always attached to
the last also a great importance; it has left out no part of life as
a thing secular and foreign to the religious and spiritual life. Still
the Indian religious tradition is not merely the form of a religio-social
system, as the ignorant critic vainly imagines. However greatly that
may count at the moment of a social departure, however stubbornly the
conservative religious mind may oppose all pronounced or drastic change,
still the core of Hinduism is a spiritual, not a social discipline.
Actually we find religions like Sikhism counted in the Vedic family
although they broke down the old social tradition and invented a novel
form, while the Jains and Buddhists were traditionally considered to
be outside the religious fold although they observed Hindu social custom
and intermarried with Hindus, because their spiritual system and teaching
figured in its origin as a denial of the truth of Veda and a departure
from the continuity of the Vedic line. In all these four elements that
constitute Hinduism there are major and minor differences between Hindus
of various sects, schools, communities and races; but nevertheless there
is also a general unity of spirit, of fundamental type and form and
of spiritual temperament which creates in this vast fluidity an immense
force of cohesion and a strong principle of oneness.
The fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common to the highest
human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being
or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact
here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing
all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a
supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient,
a one Eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal
Divinity or divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount
and continent and inhabitant of things.
Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of
this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal. But this Truth
of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical speculation,
a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the intelligence.
It was not an idea to be indulged by the thinker in his study, but otherwise
void of practical bearing on life. It was not a mystic sublimation which
could be ignored in the dealings of man with the world and Nature. It
was a living spiritual Truth, an Entity, a Power, a Presence that could
be sought by all according to their degree of capacity and seized in
a thousand ways through life and beyond life. This Truth was to be lived
and even to be made the governing idea of thought and life and action.
This recognition and pursuit of something or someone Supreme is behind
all forms the one universal credo of Indian religion, and if it has
taken a hundred shapes, it was precisely because it was so much alive.
The Infinite alone justifies the existence of the finite and the finite
by itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence. Life,
if it is not an illusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory
of the Infinite. Or it is a means by which the soul growing in Nature
through countless forms and many lives can approach, touch, feel and
unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and adoration and
a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this infinite
Existence.
This Self or this self-existent Being is the one supreme reality, and
all things else are either only appearances or only true by dependence
upon it. It follows that self-realisation and God-realisation are the
great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and
thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation
and God-realisation.
Indian religion never considered intellectual or theological conceptions
about the supreme Truth to be the one thing of central importance. To
pursue that Truth under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain
to it by inner experience, to live in it in consciousness, this it held
to be the sole thing needful. One school or sect might consider the
real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the
supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in essence
but different from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and
the individual soul in man to be three eternally different powers of
being. But for all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even
to the Indian dualist God is the supreme self and reality in whom and
by whom Nature and man live, move and have their being and, if you eliminate
God from his view of things, Nature and man would lose for him all their
meaning and importance. The Spirit, universal Nature (whether called
Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Jiva, are the
three truths which are universally admitted by all the many religious
sects and conflicting religious philosophies of India. Universal also
is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self in man,
the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting contact
or absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal
Brahman is the condition of spiritual perfection. It is open to us to
conceive and have experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute
and Infinite or to approach and know and feel Him as a transcendent
and universal sempiternal Person: but whatever be our way of reaching
him, the one important truth of spiritual experience is that he is in
the heart and centre of all existence and all existence is in him and
to find him is the great self-finding. Differences of credal belief
are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing the
one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing needful;
to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after
and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common
idea and aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation,
that is the living Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following
after the highest spiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are
the uniting bond of Indian religion and, behind all its thousand forms,
its one common essence.
If there were nothing else to be said in favour of the spiritual genius
of the Indian people or the claim of Indian civilisation to stand in
the front rank as a spiritual culture, it would be sufficiently substantiated
by this single fact that not only was this greatest and widest spiritual
truth seen in India with the boldest largeness, felt and expressed with
a unique intensity, and approached from all possible sides, but it was
made consciously the grand uplifting idea of life, the core of all thinking,
the foundation of all religion, the secret sense and declared ultimate
aim of human existence. The truth announced is not peculiar to Indian
thinking; it has been seen and followed by the highest minds and souls
everywhere. But elsewhere it has been the living guide only of a few
thinkers, or of some rare mystics or exceptionally gifted spiritual
natures. The mass of men have had no understanding, no distant perception,
not even a reflected glimpse of this something Beyond; they have lived
only in the lower sectarian side of religion, in inferior ideas of the
Deity or in the outward mundane aspects of life. But Indian culture
did succeed by the strenuousness of its vision, the universality of
its approach, the intensity of its seeking in doing what has been done
by no other culture. It succeeded in stamping religion with the essential
ideal of a real spirituality; it brought some living reflection of the
very highest spiritual truth and some breath of its influence into every
part of the religious field. Nothing can be more untrue than to pretend
that the general religious mind of India has not at all grasped the
higher spiritual or metaphysical truths of Indian religion. It is a
sheer falsehood or a wilful misunderstanding to say that it has lived
always in the externals only of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the
contrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy
in their broad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation
have been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya,
Lila, divine Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and
the worshipper in the temple as to the philosopher in his seclusion,
the monk in his monastery and the saint in his hermitage. The spiritual
reality which they reflect, the profound experience to which they point,
has permeated the religion, the literature, the art, even the popular
religious songs of a whole people.
It is true that these things are realised by the mass of men more readily
through the fervour of devotion than by a strenuous effort of thinking;
but that is as it must and should be since the heart of man is nearer
to the Truth than his intelligence. It is true, too, that the tendency
to put too much stress on externals has always been there and worked
to overcloud the deeper spiritual motive; but that is not peculiar to
India, it is a common failing of human nature, not less but rather more
evident in Europe than in Asia. It has needed a constant stream of saints
and religious thinkers and the teaching of illuminated Sannyasins to
keep the reality vivid and resist the deadening weight of form and ceremony
and ritual. But the fact remains that these messengers of the spirit
have never been wanting. And the still more significant fact remains
that there has never been wanting either a happy readiness in the common
mind to listen to the message. The ordinary materialised souls, the
external minds are the majority in India as everywhere. How easy it
is for the superior European critic to forget this common fact of our
humanity and treat this turn as a peculiar sin of the Indian mentality!
But at least the people of India, even the “ignorant masses”
have this distinction that they are by centuries of training nearer
to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of
the universal ignorance and are more easily led back to a vital glimpse
of God and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass of men or even the
cultured elite anywhere else. Where else could the lofty, austere and
difficult teaching of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the popular
mind? Where else could the songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir,
the Sikh gurus and the chants of the Tamil saints with their fervid
devotion but also their profound spiritual thinking have found so speedy
an echo and formed a popular religious literature? This strong permeation
or close nearness of the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind
of a whole nation to turn to the highest realities is the sign and fruit
of an age-long, a real and a still living and supremely spiritual culture.
The endless variety of Indian philosophy and religion seems to the European
mind interminable, bewildering, wearisome, useless; it is unable to
see the forest because of the richness and luxuriance of its vegetation;
it misses the common spiritual life in the multitude of its forms. But
this infinite variety is itself, as Vivekananda pertinently pointed
out, a sign of a superior religious culture. The Indian mind has always
realised that the Supreme is the Infinite; it has perceived, right from
its Vedic beginnings, that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always
present itself in an endless variety of aspects. The mentality of the
West has long cherished the aggressive and quite illogical idea of a
single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force
of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies,
one array of prohibitions and injunctions, one ecclesiastical ordinance.
That narrow absurdity prances about as the one true religion which all
must accept on peril of persecution by men here and spiritual rejection
or fierce eternal punishment by God in other worlds. This grotesque
creation of human unreason, the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty,
obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take
firm hold of the free and supple mind of India. Men everywhere have
common human failings, and intolerance and narrowness especially in
the matter of observances there has been and is in India. There has
been much violence of theological disputation, there have been querulous
bickerings of sects with their pretensions to spiritual superiority
and greater knowledge, and sometimes, at one time especially in southern
India in a period of acute religious differences, there have been brief
local outbreaks of active mutual tyranny and persecution even unto death.
But these things have never taken the proportions which they assumed
in Europe. Intolerance has been confined for the most part to the minor
forms of polemical attack or to social obstruction or ostracism; very
seldom have they transgressed across the line to the major forms of
barbaric persecution which draw a long, red and hideous stain across
the religious history of Europe.
There has played ever in India the saving perception of a higher and
purer spiritual intelligence, which has had its effect on the mass mentality.
Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments,
the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a
perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual
in his approach to the Infinite.
India recognised authority of spiritual experience and knowledge, but
she recognised still more the need of variety of spiritual experience
and knowledge. Even in the days of decline when the claim of authority
became in too many directions rigorous and excessive, she still kept
the saving perception that there could not be one but must be many authorities.
An alert readiness to acknowledge new light capable of enlarging the
old tradition has always been characteristic of the religious mind in
India. Indian civilisation did not develop to a last logical conclusion
its earlier political and social liberties, - that greatness of freedom
or boldness of experiment belongs to the West; but liberty of religious
practice and a complete freedom of thought in religion as in every other
matter have always counted among its constant traditions. The atheist
and the agnostic were free from persecution in India. Buddhism and Jainism
might be disparaged as unorthodox religions, but they were allowed to
live freely side by side with the orthodox creeds and philosophies;
in her eager thirst for truth she gave them their full chance, tested
all their values, and as much of their truth as was assimilable was
taken into the stock of the common and always enlarging continuity of
her spiritual experience. That ageless continuity was carefully conserved,
but it admitted light from all quarters. In latter times the saints
who reached some fusion of the Hindu and the Islamic teaching were freely
and immediately recognised as leaders of Hindu religion, - even, in
some cases, when they started with a Mussulman birth and from the Mussulman
standpoint. The Yogin who developed a new path of Yoga, the religious
teacher who founded a new order, the thinker who built up a novel statement
of the many-sided truth of spiritual existence, found no serious obstacle
to their practice or their propaganda. At most they had to meet the
opposition of the priest and pundit instinctively adverse to any change;
but this had only to be lived down for the new element to be received
into the free and pliant body of the national religion and its ever
plastic order.
The necessity of a firm spiritual order as well as an untrammelled spiritual
freedom was always perceived; but it was provided for in various ways
and not in any one formal, external or artificial manner. It was founded
in the first place on the recognition of an ever enlarging number of
authorised scriptures. Of these scriptures some like the Gita possessed
a common and widespread authority, others were peculiar to sects or
schools: some like the Vedas were supposed to have an absolute, others
a relative binding force. But the very largest freedom of interpretation
was allowed, and this prevented any of these authoritative books from
being turned into an instrument of ecclesiastical tyranny or a denial
of freedom to the human mind and spirit. Another instrument of order
was the power of family and communal tradition, kuladharma, persistent
but not immutable. A third was the religious authority of the Brahmins;
as priests they officiated as the custodians of observance, as scholars,
acting in a much more important and respected role than the officiating
priesthood could claim, - for to the priesthood no great consideration
was given in India, - they stood as the exponents of religious tradition
and were a strong conservative power. Finally, and most characteristically,
most powerfully, order was secured by the succession of Gurus or spiritual
teachers, paramparâ, who preserved the continuity of each spiritual
system and handed it down from generation to generation but were empowered
also, unlike the priest and the Pundit, to enrich freely its significance
and develop its practice. A living and moving, not a rigid continuity,
was the characteristic turn of the inner religious mind of India. The
evolution of the Vaishnava religion from very early times, its succession
of saints and teachers, the striking developments given to it successively
by Ramanuja, Madhwa, Chaitanya, Vallabhacharya and its recent stirrings
of survival after a period of languor and of some fossilisation form
one notable example of this firm combination of agelong continuity and
fixed tradition with latitude of powerful and vivid change. A more striking
instance was the founding of the Sikh religion, its long line of Gurus
and the novel direction and form given to it by Guru Govind Singh in
the democratic institution of the Khalsa. The Buddhist Sangha and its
councils, the creation of a sort of divided pontifical authority by
Shankaracharya, an authority transmitted from generation to generation
for more than a thousand years and even now not altogether effete, the
Sikh Khalsa, the adoption of the congregational form called Samaj by
the modern reforming sects indicate an attempt towards a compact and
stringent order. But it is noteworthy that even in these attempts the
freedom and plasticity and living sincerity of the religious mind of
India always prevented it from initiating anything like the overblown
ecclesiastical orders and despotic hierarchies which in the West have
striven to impose the tyranny of their obscurantist yoke on the spiritual
liberty of the human race.
The instinct for order and freedom at once in any field of human activity
is always a sign of a high natural capacity in that field, and a people
which could devise such a union of unlimited religious liberty with
an always orderly religious evolution, must be credited with a high
religious capacity, even as they cannot be denied its inevitable fruit,
a great, ancient and still living spiritual culture. It is this absolute
freedom of thought and experience and this provision of a framework
sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet sufficiently
sure and firm to be the means of a stable and powerful evolution that
have given to Indian civilisation this wonderful and seemingly eternal
religion with its marvellous wealth of many-sided philosophies, of great
scriptures, of profound religious works, of religions that approach
the Eternal from every side of his infinite Truth, of Yoga-systems of
psycho-spiritual discipline and self-finding, of suggestive forms, symbols
and ceremonies which are strong to train the mind at all stages of development
towards the Godward endeavour. Its firm structure capable of supporting
without peril a large tolerance and assimilative spirit, its vivacity,
intensity, profundity and multitudinousness of experience, its freedom
from the unnatural European divorce between mundane knowledge and science
on the one side and religion on the other, its reconciliation of the
claims of the intellect with the claims of the spirit, its long endurance
and infinite capacity of revival make it stand out today as the most
remarkable, rich and living of all religious systems. The nineteenth
century has thrown on it its tremendous shock of negation and scepticism
but has not been able to destroy its assured roots of spiritual knowledge.
A little disturbed for a brief moment, surprised and temporarily shaken
by this attack in a period of greatest depression of the nation's vital
force, India revived almost at once and responded by a fresh outburst
of spiritual activity, seeking, assimilation, formative effort. A great
new life is visibly preparing in her, a mighty transformation and farther
dynamic evolution and potent march forward into the inexhaustible infinities
of spiritual experience.
The many-sided plasticity of Indian cult and spiritual experience is
the native sign of its truth, its living reality, the unfettered sincerity
of its search and finding; but this plasticity is a constant stumbling
block to the European mind. The religious thinking of Europe is accustomed
to rigid impoverishing definitions, to strict exclusions, to a constant
preoccupation with the outward idea, the organisation, the form. A precise
creed framed by the logical or theological intellect, a strict and definite
moral code to fix the conduct, a bundle of observances and ceremonies,
a firm ecclesiastical or congregational organisation, that is Western
religion. Once the spirit is safely imprisoned and chained up in these
things, some emotional fervours and even a certain amount of mystic
seeking can be tolerated - within rational limits; but, after all, it
is perhaps safest to do without these dangerous spices. Trained in these
conceptions, the European critic comes to India and is struck by the
immense mass and intricacy of a polytheistic cult crowned at its summit
by a belief in the one Infinite. This belief he erroneously supposes
to be identical with the barren and abstract intellectual pantheism
of the West. He applies with an obstinate prejudgment the ideas and
definitions of his own thinking, and this illegitimate importation has
fixed many false values on Indian spiritual conceptions, - unhappily,
even in the mind of “educated” India. But where our religion
eludes his fixed standards, misunderstanding, denunciation and supercilious
condemnation come at once to his rescue. The Indian mind on the contrary
is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for a great force of intuition
and inner experience had given it from the beginning that towards which
the mind of the West is only now reaching with much fumbling and difficulty,
- the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the
One without a second, it still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature;
it leaves room for his many trinities and million aspects. Even when
it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of the Divinity and seems
to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at the back of
its consciousness the sense of the All and the idea of the One. Even
when it distributes its worship among many objects, it looks at the
same time through the objects of its worship and sees beyond the multitude
of godheads the unity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar
to the mystics or to a small literate class or to philosophic thinkers
nourished on the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta. It permeates
the popular mind nourished on the thoughts, images, traditions and cultural
symbols of the Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete
representations or living figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided
unitarianism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures.
Indian religion founded itself on the conception of a timeless, nameless
and formless Supreme, but it did not feel called upon, like the narrower
and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger races, to deny or abolish
all intermediary forms and names and powers and personalities of the
Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague transcendental
Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one Godhead
is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is he or made out
of his being or his nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism;
for beyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal.
Indian polytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for
here the worshipper of many gods still knows that all his divinities
are forms, names, personalities and powers of the One; his gods proceed
from the one Purusha, his goddesses are energies of the one divine Force.
Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism,
are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many
aspects of God. Indian image-worship is not the idolatry of a barbaric
or undeveloped mind; for even the most ignorant know that the image
is a symbol and support and can throw it away when its use is over.
The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic
idea, like Nanak's worship of the timeless One, Akala, and the reforming
creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away
from the limitations of Western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly
they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth
of Vedanta. The divine Personality of God and his human relations with
man are strongly stressed by Vaishnavism and Shaivism as the most dynamic
Truth; but that is not the whole of these religions, and this divine
Personality is not the limited magnified-human personal God of the West.
Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known
to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has been a free and
tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experience. Observing
the one Truth from all its many sides, it shut out none. It gave itself
no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing
separative designations for its constituting cults and divisions, it
remained itself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman
of its agelong seeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other
creeds by its traditional scriptures, cults and symbols, it is not in
its essential character a credal religion at all but a vast and many-sided,
an always unifying and always progressive and self-enlarging system
of spiritual culture. It is necessary to emphasise this synthetic character
and embracing unity of the Indian religious mind, because otherwise
we miss the whole meaning of Indian life and the whole sense of Indian
culture. It is only by recognising this broad and plastic character
that we can understand its total effect on the life of the community
and the life of the individual.
And if we are asked, “But after all what is Hinduism, what does
it teach, what does it practise, what are its common factors?”
we can answer that Indian religion is founded upon three basic ideas
or rather three fundamentals of a highest and widest spiritual experience.
First comes the idea of the One Existence of the Veda to whom sages
give different names, the One without a second of the Upanishads who
is all that is and beyond all that is, the Permanent of the Buddhists,
the Absolute of the Illusionists, the supreme God or Purusha of the
Theists who holds in his power the soul and Nature, - in a word the
Eternal, the Infinite. This is the first common foundation; but it can
be and is expressed in an endless variety of formulas by the human intelligence.
To discover and closely approach and enter into whatever kind or degree
of unity with this Permanent, this Infinite, this Eternal, is the highest
height and last effort of its spiritual experience. That is the first
universal credo of the religious mind of India.
Admit in whatever formula this foundation, follow this great spiritual
aim by one of the thousand paths recognised in India or even any new
path which branches off from them and you are at the core of the religion.
For its second basic idea is the manifold way of man's approach to the
Eternal and Infinite. The Infinite is full of many infinities and each
of these infinities is itself the very Eternal. And here in the limitations
of the cosmos God manifests himself and fulfils himself in the world
in many ways, but each is the way of the Eternal. For in each finite
we can discover and through all things as his forms and symbols we can
approach the Infinite; all cosmic powers are manifestations, all forces
are forces of the One.
The gods behind the workings of Nature are to be seen and adored as
powers, names and personalities of the one Godhead.
An infinite Conscious-Force, executive Energy, Will or Law, Maya, Prakriti,
Shakti or Karma, is behind all happenings, whether to us they seem good
or bad, acceptable or inacceptable, fortunate or adverse. The Infinite
creates and is Brahma; it preserves and is Vishnu; it destroys or takes
to itself and is Rudra or Shiva. The supreme Energy beneficent in upholding
and protection is or else formulates itself as the Mother of the worlds,
Luxmi or Durga. Or beneficent even in the mask of destruction, it is
Chandi or it is Kali, the dark Mother. The One Godhead manifests himself
in the form of his qualities in various names and godheads. The God
of divine love of the Vaishnava, the God of divine power of the Shakta
appear as two different godheads; but in truth they are the one infinite
Deity in different figures. One may approach the Supreme through any
of these names and forms, with knowledge or in ignorance; for through
them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the supreme experience.
One thing however has to be noted that while many modernised Indian
religionists tend, by way of an intellectual compromise with modern
materialistic rationalism, to explain away these things as symbols,
the ancient Indian religious mentality saw them not only as symbols
but as world-realities, - even if to the Illusionist realities only
of the world of Maya.
For between the highest unimaginable Existence and our material way
of being the spiritual and psychic knowledge of India did not fix a
gulf as between two unrelated opposites. It was aware of other psychological
planes of consciousness and experience and the truths of these supraphysical
planes were no less real to it than the outward truths of the material
universe. Man approaches God at first according to his psychological
nature and his capacity for deeper experience, svabhâva, adhikâra.
The level of Truth, the plane of consciousness he can reach is determined
by his inner evolutionary stage. Thence comes the variety of religious
cult, but its data are not imaginary structures, inventions of priests
or poets, but truths of a supraphysical existence intermediate between
the consciousness of the physical world and the ineffable superconscience
of the Absolute.
The third idea of strongest consequence at the base of Indian religion
is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that while the
Supreme or the Divine can be approached through a universal consciousness
and by piercing through all inner and outer Nature, That or He can be
met by each individual soul in itself, in its own spiritual part, because
there is something in it that is intimately one or at least intimately
related with the one divine Existence. The essence of Indian religion
is to aim at so growing and so living that we can grow out of the Ignorance
which veils this self-knowledge from our mind and life and become aware
of the Divinity within us. These three things put together are the whole
of Hindu religion, its essential sense and, if any credo is needed,
its credo.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL, Volume 14, pages 117-138
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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