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The task of religion and spirituality is to mediate between God and
man, between the Eternal and Infinite and this transient, yet persistent
finite, between a luminous Truth-consciousness not expressed or not
yet expressed here and the Mind's ignorance. But nothing is more difficult
than to bring home the greatness and uplifting power of the spiritual
consciousness to the natural man forming the vast majority of the race;
for his mind and senses are turned outward towards the external calls
of life and its objects and never inwards to the Truth which lies behind
them. This external vision and attraction are the essence of the universal
blinding force which is designated in Indian philosophy the Ignorance.
Ancient Indian spirituality recognised that man lives in the Ignorance
and has to be led through its imperfect indications to a highest inmost
knowledge. Our life moves between two worlds, the depths upon depths
of our inward being and the surface field of our outward nature. The
majority of men put the whole emphasis of life on the outward and live
very strongly in their surface consciousness and very little in the
inward existence. Even the choice spirits raised from the grossness
of the common vital and physical mould by the stress of thought and
culture do not usually get farther than a strong dwelling on the things
of the mind. The highest flight they reach - and it is this that the
West persistently mistakes for spirituality - is a preference for living
in the mind and emotions more than in the gross outward life or else
an attempt to subject this rebellious life-stuff to the law of intellectual
truth or ethical reason and will or aesthetic beauty or of all three
together. But spiritual knowledge perceives that there is a greater
thing in us; our inmost self, our real being is not the intellect, not
the aesthetic, ethical or thinking mind, but the divinity within, the
Spirit, and these other things are only the instruments of the Spirit.
A mere intellectual, ethical and aesthetic culture does not go back
to the inmost truth of the spirit; it is still an Ignorance, an incomplete,
outward and superficial knowledge. To have made the discovery of our
deepest being and hidden spiritual nature is the first necessity and
to have erected the living of an inmost spiritual life into the aim
of existence is the characteristic sign of a spiritual culture.
This endeavour takes in certain religions the form of a spiritual exclusiveness
which revolts from the outward existence rather than seeks to transform
it. The main tendency of the Christian discipline was not only to despise
the physical and vital way of living, but to disparage and imprison
the intellectual and distrust and discourage the aesthetic thirsts of
our nature. It emphasised against them a limited spiritual emotionalism
and its intense experiences as the one thing needful; the development
of the ethical sense was the sole mental necessity, its translation
into act the sole indispensable condition or result of the spiritual
life. Indian spirituality reposed on too wide and many-sided a culture
to admit as its base this narrow movement; but on its more solitary
summits, at least in its later period, it tended to a spiritual exclusiveness
loftier in vision, but even more imperative and excessive. A spirituality
of this intolerant high-pointed kind, to whatever elevation it may rise,
however it may help to purify life or lead to a certain kind of individual
salvation, cannot be a complete thing. For its exclusiveness imposes
on it a certain impotence to deal effectively with the problems of human
existence; it cannot lead it to its integral perfection or combine its
highest heights with its broadest broadness. A wider spiritual culture
must recognise that the Spirit is not only the highest and inmost thing,
but all is manifestation and creation of the Spirit. It must have a
wider outlook, a more embracing range of applicability and, even, a
more aspiring and ambitious aim of its endeavour. Its aim must be not
only to raise to inaccessible heights the few elect, but to draw all
men and all life and the whole human being upward, to spiritualise life
and in the end to divinise human nature. Not only must it be able to
lay hold on his deepest individual being but to inspire too his communal
existence. It must turn by a spiritual change all the members of his
ignorance into members of the knowledge; it must transmute all the instruments
of the human into instruments of a divine living. The total movement
of Indian spirituality is towards this aim; in spite of all the difficulties,
imperfections and fluctuations of its evolution, it had this character.
But like other cultures it was not at all times and in all its parts
and movements consciously aware of its own total significance. This
large sense sometimes emerged into something like a conscious synthetic
clarity, but was more often kept in the depths and on the surface dispersed
in a multitude of subordinate and special stand-points. Still, it is
only by an intelligence of the total drift that its manifold sides and
rich variations of effort and teaching and discipline can receive their
full reconciling unity and be understood in the light of its own most
intrinsic purpose.
Now the spirit of Indian religion and spiritual culture has been persistently
and immovably the same throughout the long time of its vigour, but its
form has undergone remarkable changes. Yet if we look into them from
the right centre it will be apparent that these changes are the results
of a logical and inevitable evolution inherent in the very process of
man's growth towards the heights. In its earliest form, its first Vedic
system, it took its outward foundation on the mind of the physical man
whose natural faith is in things physical, in the sensible and visible
objects, presences, representations and the external pursuits and aims
of this material world. The means, symbols, rites, figures, by which
it sought to mediate between the spirit and the normal human mentality
were drawn from these most external physical things. Man's first and
primitive idea of the Divine can only come through his vision of external
Nature and the sense of a superior Power or Powers concealed behind
her phenomena, veiled in the heaven and earth, father and mother of
our being, in the sun and moon and stars, its lights and regulators,
in dawn and day and night and rain and wind and storm, the oceans and
the rivers and the forests, all the circumstances and forces of her
scene of action, all that vast and mysterious surrounding life of which
we are a part and in which the natural heart and mind of the human creature
feel instinctively through whatever bright or dark or confused figures
that there is here some divine Multitude or else mighty Infinite, one,
manifold and mysterious, which takes these forms and manifests itself
in these motions. The Vedic religion took this natural sense and feeling
of the physical man; it used the conceptions to which they gave birth,
and it sought to lead him through them to the psychic and spiritual
truths of his own being and the being of the cosmos. It recognised that
he was right when he saw behind the manifestations of Nature great living
powers and godheads, even though he knew not their inner truth, and
right too in offering to them worship and propitiation and atonement.
For that inevitably must be the initial way in which his active physical,
vital and mental nature is allowed to approach the Godhead. He approaches
it through its visible outward manifestations as something greater than
his own natural self, something single or multiple that guides, sustains
and directs his life, and he calls to it for help and support in the
desires and difficulties and distresses and struggles of his human existence.
The Vedic religion accepted also the form in which early man everywhere
expressed his sense of the relation between himself and the godheads
of Nature; it adopted as its central symbol the act and ritual of a
physical sacrifice. However crude the notions attached to it, this idea
of the necessity of sacrifice did express obscurely a first law of being.
For it was founded on that secret of constant interchange between the
individual and the universal powers of the cosmos which covertly supports
all the process of life and develops the action of Nature.
But even in its external or exoteric side the Vedic religion did not
limit itself to this acceptance and regulation of the first religious
notions of the natural physical mind of man. The Vedic Rishis gave a
psychic function to the godheads worshipped by the people; they spoke
to them of a higher Truth, Right, Law of which the gods were the guardians,
of the necessity of a truer knowledge and a larger inner living according
to this Truth and Right and of a home of Immortality to which the soul
of man could ascend by the power of Truth and of right doing. The people
no doubt took these ideas in their most external sense; but they were
trained by them to develop their ethical nature, to turn towards some
initial development of their psychic being, to conceive the idea of
a knowledge and truth other than that of the physical life and to admit
even a first conception of some greater spiritual Reality which was
the ultimate object of human worship or aspiration. This religious and
moral force was the highest reach of the external cult and the most
that could be understood or followed by the mass of the people.
The deeper truth of these things was reserved for the initiates, for
those who were ready to understand and practise the inner sense, the
esoteric meaning hidden in the Vedic scripture. For the Veda is full
of words which, as the Rishis themselves express it, are secret words
that give their inner meaning only to the seer, kavaye nivacanâ
niNyâ vacâMsi.
This is a feature of the ancient sacred hymns which grew obscure to
later ages; it became a dead tradition and has been entirely ignored
by modern scholarship in its laborious attempt to read the hieroglyph
of the Vedic symbols. Yet its recognition is essential to a right understanding
of almost all the ancient religions; for mostly they started on their
upward curve through an esoteric element of which the key was not given
to all. In all or most there was a surface cult for the common physical
man who was held yet unfit for the psychic and spiritual life and an
inner secret of the Mysteries carefully disguised by symbols whose sense
was opened only to the initiates. This was the origin of the later distinction
between the Shudra, the undeveloped physical-minded man, and the twice-born,
those who were capable of entering into the second birth by initiation
and to whom alone the Vedic education could be given without danger.
This too actuated the later prohibition of any reading or teaching of
the Veda by the Shudra. It was this inner meaning, it was the higher
psychic and spiritual truths concealed by the outer sense, that gave
to these hymns the name by which they are still known, the Veda, the
Book of Knowledge. Only by penetrating into the esoteric sense of this
worship can we understand the full flowering of the Vedic religion in
the Upanishads and in the long later evolution of Indian spiritual seeking
and experience. For it is all there in its luminous seed, preshadowed
or even prefigured in the verses of the early seers. The persistent
notion which through every change ascribed the foundation of all our
culture to the Rishis, whatever its fabulous forms and mythical ascriptions,
contains a real truth and veils a sound historic tradition. It reflects
the fact of a true initiation and an unbroken continuity between this
great primitive past and the riper but hardly greater spiritual development
of our historic culture.
This inner Vedic religion started with an extension of the psychic significance
of the godheads in the Cosmos. Its primary notion was that of a hierarchy
of worlds, an ascending stair of planes of being in the universe. It
saw a mounting scale of the worlds corresponding to a similar mounting
scale of planes or degrees or levels of consciousness in the nature
of man. A Truth, Right and Law sustains and governs all these levels
of Nature; one in essence, it takes in them different but cognate forms.
There is for instance the series of the outer physical light, another
higher and inner light which is the vehicle of the mental, vital and
psychic consciousness and a highest inmost light of spiritual illumination.
Surya, the Sun-God, was the lord of the physical Sun; but he is at the
same time to the Vedic seer-poet the giver of the rays of knowledge
which illumine the mind and he is too the soul and energy and body of
the spiritual illumination. And in all these powers he is a luminous
form of the one and infinite Godhead. All the Vedic godheads have this
outer and this inner and inmost function, their known and their secret
Names. All are in their external character powers of physical Nature;
all have in their inner meaning a psychic function and psychological
ascriptions; all too are various powers of some one highest Reality,
ekaM sat, the one infinite Existence. This hardly knowable Supreme is
called often in the Veda “That Truth” or “That One”,
tat satyam, tad ekam. This complex character of the Vedic godheads assumes
forms which have been wholly misunderstood by those who ascribe to them
only their outward physical significance. Each of these gods is in himself
a complete and separate cosmic personality of the one Existence and
in their combination of powers they form the complete universal power,
the cosmic whole, vaishvadevyam. Each again, apart from his special
function, is one godhead with the others; each holds in himself the
universal divinity, each god is all the other gods. This is the aspect
of the Vedic teaching and worship to which a European scholar, mistaking
entirely its significance because he read it in the dim and poor light
of European religious experience, has given the sounding misnomer, henotheism.
Beyond, in the triple Infinite, these godheads put on their highest
nature and are names of the one nameless Ineffable.
But the greatest power of the Vedic teaching, that which made it the
source of all later Indian philosophies, religions, systems of Yoga,
lay in its application to the inner life of man. Man lives in the physical
cosmos subject to death and the “much falsehood” of the mortal
existence. To rise beyond this death, to become one of the immortals,
he has to turn from the falsehood to the Truth; he has to turn to the
Light and to battle with and to conquer the powers of the Darkness.
This he does by communion with the divine Powers and their aid; the
way to call down this aid was the secret of the Vedic mystics.
The symbols of the outer sacrifice are given for this purpose in the
manner of the Mysteries all over the world an inner meaning; they represent
a calling of the gods into the human being, a connecting sacrifice,
an intimate interchange, a mutual aid, a communion. There is a building
of the powers of the godheads within man and a formation in him of the
universality of the divine nature. For the gods are the guardians and
increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the
infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods,
the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth
into the law of the Truth, ritasya panthâH. Man arrives at immortality
by breaking beyond the limitations not only of his physical self, but
of his mental and his ordinary psychic nature into the highest plane
and supreme ether of the Truth: for there is the foundation of immortality
and the native seat of the triple Infinite. On these ideas the Vedic
sages built up a profound psychological and psychic discipline which
led beyond itself to a highest spirituality and contained the nucleus
of later Indian Yoga. Already we find in their seed, though not in their
full expansion, the most characteristic ideas of Indian spirituality.
There is the one Existence, ekaM sat, supracosmic beyond the individual
and the universe. There is the one God who presents to us the many forms,
names, powers, personalities of his Godhead. There is the distinction
between the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the greater truth of an immortal
life opposed to the much falsehood or mixed truth and falsehood of mortal
existence. There is the discipline of an inward growth of man from the
physical through the psychic to the spiritual existence. There is the
conquest of death, the secret of immortality, the perception of a realisable
divinity of the human spirit. In an age to which in the insolence of
our external knowledge we are accustomed to look back as the childhood
of humanity or at best a period of vigorous barbarism, this was the
inspired and intuitive psychic and spiritual teaching by which the ancient
human fathers, pûrve pitaraH manushyâH, founded a great
and profound civilisation in India.
This high beginning was secured in its results by a larger sublime efflorescence.
The Upanishads have always been recognised in India as the crown and
end of Veda; that is indicated in their general name, Vedanta. And they
are in fact a large crowning outcome of the Vedic discipline and experience.
The time in which the Vedantic truth was wholly seen and the Upanishads
took shape, was, as we can discern from such records as the Chhandogya
and Brihadaranyaka, an epoch of immense and strenuous seeking, an intense
and ardent seed-time of the Spirit. In the stress of that seeking the
truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary men broke their
barriers, swept through the higher mind of the nation and fertilised
the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever increasing growth
of spiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. This turn was not
as yet universal; it was chiefly men of the higher classes, Kshatriyas
and Brahmins trained in the Vedic system of education, no longer content
with an external truth and the works of the outer sacrifice, who began
everywhere to seek for the highest word of revealing experience from
the sages who possessed the knowledge of the One. But we find too among
those who attained to the knowledge and became great teachers men of
inferior or doubtful birth like Janashruti, the wealthy Shudra, or Satyakama
Jabali, son of a servant-girl who knew not who was his father. The work
that was done in this period became the firm bedrock of Indian spirituality
in later ages and from it gush still the life-giving waters of a perennial
and never failing inspiration. This period, this activity, this grand
achievement created the whole difference between the evolution of Indian
civilisation and the quite different curve of other cultures.
For a time had come when the original Vedic symbols must lose their
significance and pass into an obscurity that became impenetrable, as
did the inner teaching of the Mysteries in other countries. The old
poise of culture between two extremes with a bridge of religious cult
and symbolism to unite them, the crude or half-trained naturalness of
the outer physical man on one side of the line, and on the other an
inner and secret psychic and spiritual life for the initiates could
no longer suffice as the basis of our spiritual progress. The human
race in its cycle of civilisation needed a large-lined advance; it called
for a more and more generalised intellectual, ethical and aesthetic
evolution to help it to grow into the light. This turn had to come in
India as in other lands. But the danger was that the greater spiritual
truth already gained might be lost in the lesser confident half-light
of the acute but unillumined intellect or stifled within the narrow
limits of the self-sufficient logical reason. That was what actually
happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The old knowledge was
prolonged in a less inspired, less dynamic and more intellectual form
by the Pythagoreans, by the Stoics, by Plato and the Neo-Platonists;
but still in spite of them and in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual
wave which swept over Europe from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity,
the whole real trend of Western civilisation has been intellectual,
rational, secular and even materialistic, and it keeps this character
to the present day. Its general aim has been a strong or a fine culture
of the vital and physical man by the power of an intellectualised ethics,
aesthesis and reason, not the leading up of our lower members into the
supreme light and power of the spirit. The ancient spiritual knowledge
and the spiritual tendency it had created were saved in India from this
collapse by the immense effort of the age of the Upanishads. The Vedantic
seers renewed the Vedic truth by extricating it from its cryptic symbols
and casting it into a highest and most direct and powerful language
of intuition and inner experience. It was not the language of the intellect,
but still it wore a form which the intellect could take hold of, translate
into its own more abstract terms and convert into a starting-point for
an ever widening and deepening philosophic speculation and the reason's
long search after a Truth original, supreme and ultimate. There was
in India as in the West a great upbuilding of a high, wide and complex
intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and social culture. But left in Europe
to its own resources, combated rather than helped by obscure religious
emotion and dogma, here it was guided, uplifted and more and more penetrated
and suffused by a great saving power of spirituality and a vast stimulating
and tolerant light of wisdom from a highest ether of knowledge.
The second or post-Vedic age of Indian civilisation was distinguished
by the rise of the great philosophies, by a copious, vivid, many-thoughted,
many-sided epic literature, by the beginnings of art and science, by
the evolution of a vigorous and complex society, by the formation of
large kingdoms and empires, by manifold formative activities of all
kinds and great systems of living and thinking. Here as elsewhere, in
Greece, Rome, Persia, China, this was the age of a high outburst of
the intelligence working upon life and the things of the mind to discover
their reason and their right way and bring out a broad and noble fullness
of human existence. But in India this effort never lost sight of the
spiritual motive, never missed the touch of the religious sense. It
was a birth time and youth of the seeking intellect and, as in Greece,
philosophy was the main instrument by which it laboured to solve the
problems of life and the world. Science too developed, but it came second
only as an auxiliary power. It was through profound and subtle philosophies
that the intellect of India attempted to analyse by the reason and logical
faculty what had formerly been approached with a much more living force
through intuition and the soul's experience. But the philosophic mind
started from the data these mightier powers had discovered and was faithful
to its parent Light; it went back always in one form or another to the
profound truths of the Upanishads which kept their place as the highest
authority in these matters. There was a constant admission that spiritual
experience is a greater thing and its light a truer if more incalculable
guide than the clarities of the reasoning intelligence.
The same governing force kept its hold on all the other activities of
the Indian mind and Indian life. The epic literature is full almost
to excess of a strong and free intellectual and ethical thinking; there
is an incessant criticism of life by the intelligence and the ethical
reason, an arresting curiosity and desire to fix the norm of truth in
all possible fields. But in the background and coming constantly to
the front there is too a constant religious sense and an implicit or
avowed assent to the spiritual truths which remained the unshakable
basis of the culture. These truths suffused with their higher light
secular thought and action or stood above to remind them that they were
only steps towards a goal. Art in India, contrary to a common idea,
dwelt much upon life; but still its highest achievement was always in
the field of the interpretation of the religio-philosophical mind and
its whole tone was coloured by a suggestion of the spiritual and the
infinite. Indian society developed with an unsurpassed organising ability,
stable effectiveness, practical insight its communal coordination of
the mundane life of interest and desire, kâma, artha; it governed
always its action by a reference at every point to the moral and religious
law, the Dharma: but it never lost sight of spiritual liberation as
our highest point and the ultimate aim of the effort of Life. In later
times when there was a still stronger secular tendency of intellectual
culture, there came in an immense development of the mundane intelligence,
an opulent political and social evolution, an emphatic stressing of
aesthetic, sensuous and hedonistic experience. But this effort too always
strove to keep itself within the ancient frame and not to lose the special
stamp of the Indian cultural idea. The enlarged secular turn was compensated
by a deepening of the intensities of psycho-religious experience. New
religious or mystic forms and disciplines attempted to seize not only
the soul and the intellect, but the emotions, the senses, the vital
and the aesthetic nature of man and turn them into stuff of the spiritual
life. And every excess of emphasis on the splendour and richness and
power and pleasures of life had its recoil and was balanced by a corresponding
potent stress on spiritual asceticism as the higher way. The two trends,
on one side an extreme of the richness of life experience, on the other
an extreme and pure rigorous intensity of the spiritual life, accompanied
each other; their interaction, whatever loss there might be of the earlier
deep harmony and large synthesis, yet by their double pull preserved
something still of the balance of Indian culture.
Indian religion followed this line of evolution and kept its inner continuity
with its Vedic and Vedantic origins; but it changed entirely its mental
contents and colour and its outward basis. It did not effectuate this
change through any protestant revolt or revolution or with any idea
of an iconoclastic reformation. A continuous development of its organic
life took place, a natural transformation brought out latent motives
or else gave to already established motive-ideas a more predominant
place or effective form. At one time indeed it seemed as if a discontinuity
and a sharp new beginning were needed and would take place. Buddhism
seemed to reject all spiritual continuity with the Vedic religion. But
this was after all less in reality than in appearance. The Buddhist
ideal of Nirvana was no more than a sharply negative and exclusive statement
of the highest Vedantic spiritual experience. The ethical system of
the eightfold path taken as the way to release was an austere sublimation
of the Vedic notion of the Right, Truth and Law followed as the way
to immortality, ritasya panthâH. The strongest note of Mahayana
Buddhism, its stress on universal compassion and fellow-feeling, was
an ethical application of the spiritual unity which is the essential
idea of Vedanta. The most characteristic tenets of the new discipline,
Nirvana and Karma, could have been supported from the utterances of
the Brahmanas and Upanishads. Buddhism could easily have claimed for
itself a Vedic origin and the claim would have been no less valid than
the Vedic ascription of the Sankhya philosophy and discipline with which
it had some points of intimate alliance. But what hurt Buddhism and
determined in the end its rejection, was not its denial of a Vedic origin
or authority, but the exclusive trenchancy of its intellectual, ethical
and spiritual positions. A result of an intense stress of the union
of logical reason with the spiritualised mind - for it was by an intense
spiritual search supported on a clear and hard rational thinking that
it was born as a separate religion, - its trenchant affirmations and
still more exclusive negations could not be made sufficiently compatible
with the native flexibility, many-sided susceptibility and rich synthetic
turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but
not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people. Indian religion
absorbed all that it could of Buddhism, but rejected its exclusive positions
and preserved the full line of its own continuity, casting back to the
ancient Vedanta.
This lasting line of change moved forward not by any destruction of
principle, but by a gradual fading out of the prominent Vedic forms
and the substitution of others. There was a transformation of symbol
and ritual and ceremony or a substitution of new kindred figures, an
emergence of things that are only hints in the original system, a development
of novel idea-forms from the seed of the original thinking. And especially
there was a farther widening and fathoming of psychic and spiritual
experience. The Vedic gods rapidly lost their deep original significance.
At first they kept their hold by their outer cosmic sense but were overshadowed
by the great Trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva, and afterwards faded altogether.
A new pantheon appeared which in its outward symbolic aspects expressed
a deeper truth and larger range of religious experience, an intenser
feeling, a vaster idea. The Vedic sacrifice persisted only in broken
and lessening fragments. The house of Fire was replaced by the temple;
the karmic ritual of sacrifice was transformed into the devotional temple
ritual; the vague and shifting mental images of the Vedic gods figured
in the mantras yielded to more precise conceptual forms of the two great
deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and of their Shaktis and their offshoots.
These new concepts stabilised in physical images which were made the
basis both for internal adoration and for the external worship which
replaced sacrifice. The psychic and spiritual mystic endeavour which
was the inner sense of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into the less intensely
luminous but more wide and rich and complex psycho-spiritual inner life
of Puranic and Tantric religion and Yoga.
The Purano-Tantric stage of the religion was once decried by European
critics and Indian reformers as a base and ignorant degradation of an
earlier and purer religion. It was rather an effort, successful in a
great measure, to open the general mind of the people to a higher and
deeper range of inner truth and experience and feeling. Much of the
adverse criticism once heard proceeded from a total ignorance of the
sense and intention of this worship. Much of this criticism has been
uselessly concentrated on side-paths and aberrations which could hardly
be avoided in this immensely audacious experimental widening of the
basis of the culture. For there was a catholic attempt to draw towards
the spiritual truth minds of all qualities and people of all classes.
Much was lost of the profound psychic knowledge of the Vedic seers,
but much also of new knowledge was developed, untrodden ways were opened
and a hundred gates discovered into the Infinite. If we try to see the
essential sense and aim of this development and the intrinsic value
of its forms and means and symbols, we shall find that this evolution
followed upon the early Vedic form very much for the same reason as
Catholic Christianity replaced the mysteries and sacrifices of the early
Pagan religions. For in both cases the outward basis of the early religion
spoke to the outward physical mind of the people and took that as the
starting-point of its appeal. But the new evolution tried to awaken
a more inner mind even in the common man, to lay hold on his inner vital
and emotional nature, to support all by an awakening of the soul and
to lead him through these things towards a highest spiritual truth.
It attempted in fact to bring the mass into the temple of the spirit
rather than leave them in the outer precincts. The outward physical
sense was satisfied through its aesthetic turn by a picturesque temple
worship, by numerous ceremonies, by the use of physical images; but
these were given a psycho-emotional sense and direction that was open
to the heart and imagination of the ordinary man and not reserved for
the deeper sight of the elect or the strenuous tapasya of the initiates.
The secret initiation remained but was now a condition for the passage
from the surface psycho-emotional and religious to a profounder psychic-spiritual
truth and experience.
Nothing essential was touched in its core by this new orientation; but
the instruments, atmosphere, field of religious experience underwent
a considerable change. The Vedic godheads were to the mass of their
worshippers divine powers who presided over the workings of the outward
life of the physical cosmos; the Puranic Trinity had even for the multitude
a predominant psycho-religious and spiritual significance. Its more
external significances, for instance the functions of cosmic creation,
preservation and destruction, were only a dependent fringe of these
profundities that alone touched the heart of its mystery. The central
spiritual truth remained in both systems the same, the truth of the
One in many aspects. The Trinity is a triple form of the one supreme
Godhead and Brahman; the Shaktis are energies of the one Energy of the
highest divine Being. But this greatest religious truth was no longer
reserved for the initiated few; it was now more and more brought powerfully,
widely and intensely home to the general mind and feeling of the people.
Even the so-called henotheism of the Vedic idea was prolonged and heightened
in the larger and simpler worship of Vishnu or Shiva as the one universal
and highest Godhead of whom all others are living forms and powers.
The idea of the Divinity in man was popularised to an extraordinary
extent, not only the occasional manifestation of the Divine in humanity
which founded the worship of the Avataras, but the Presence discoverable
in the heart of every creature. The systems of Yoga developed themselves
on the same common basis. All led or hoped to lead through many kinds
of psycho-physical, inner vital, inner mental and psycho-spiritual methods
to the common aim of all Indian spirituality, a greater consciousness
and a more or less complete union with the One and Divine or else an
immergence of the individual soul in the Absolute. The Purano-Tantric
system was a wide, assured and many-sided endeavour, unparalleled in
its power, insight, amplitude, to provide the race with a basis of generalised
psycho-religious experience from which man could rise through knowledge,
works or love or through any other fundamental power of his nature to
some established supreme experience and highest absolute status.
This great effort and achievement which covered all the time between
the Vedic age and the decline of Buddhism, was still not the last possibility
of religious evolution open to Indian culture. The Vedic training of
the physically-minded man made the development possible. But in its
turn this raising of the basis of religion to the inner mind and life
and psychic nature, this training and bringing out of the psychic man
ought to make possible a still larger development and support a greater
spiritual movement as the leading power of life. The first stage makes
possible the preparation of the natural external man for spirituality;
the second takes up his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical
living and brings him more directly into contact with the spirit and
divinity within him; the third should render him capable of taking up
his whole mental, psychical, physical living into a first beginning
at least of a generalised spiritual life. This endeavour has manifested
itself in the evolution of Indian spirituality and is the significance
of the latest philosophies, the great spiritual movements of the saints
and bhaktas and an increasing resort to the various paths of Yoga. But
unhappily it synchronised with a decline of Indian culture and an increasing
collapse of its general power and knowledge, and in these surroundings
it could not bear its natural fruit; but at the same time it has done
much to prepare such a possibility in the future. If Indian culture
is to survive and keep its spiritual basis and innate character, it
is in this direction, and not in a mere revival or prolongation of the
Puranic system, that its evolution must turn, rising so towards the
fulfilment of that which the Vedic seers saw as the aim of man and his
life thousands of years ago and the Vedantic sages cast into the clear
and immortal forms of their luminous revelation.
Even the psychic-emotional part of man's nature is not the inmost door
to religious feeling, nor is his inner mind the highest witness to spiritual
experience. There is behind the first the inmost soul of man, in that
deepest secret heart, hridaye guhâyâm, in which the ancient
seers saw the very tabernacle of the indwelling Godhead and there is
above the second a luminous highest mind directly open to a truth of
the Spirit to which man's normal nature has as yet only an occasional
and momentary access. Religious evolution, spiritual experience can
find their true native road only when they open to these hidden powers
and make them their support for a lasting change, a divinisation of
human life and nature. An effort of this kind was the very force behind
the most luminous and vivid of the later movements of India's vast religious
cycle. It is the secret of the most powerful forms of Vaishnavism and
Tantra and Yoga. The labour of ascent from our half-animal human nature
into the fresh purity of the spiritual consciousness needed to be followed
and supplemented by a descent of the light and force of the spirit into
man's members and the attempt to transform human into divine nature.
But it could not find its complete way or its fruit because it synchronised
with a decline of the life force in India and a lowering of power and
knowledge in her general civilisation and culture. Nevertheless here
lies the destined force of her survival and renewal, this is the dynamic
meaning of her future. A widest and highest spiritualising of life on
earth is the last vision of all that vast and unexampled seeking and
experiment in a thousand ways of the soul's outermost and innermost
experience which is the unique character of her past; this in the end
is the mission for which she was born and the meaning of her existence.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL, Volume 14, pages 139-155
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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