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It is essential, if we are to get a right view of Indian civilisation
or of any civilisation, to keep to the central, living, governing things
and not to be led away by the confusion of accidents and details. This
is a precaution which the critics of our culture steadily refuse to
take. A civilisation, a culture must be looked at first in its initiating,
supporting, durable central motives, in its heart of abiding principle;
otherwise we shall be likely to find ourselves, like these critics,
in a maze without a clue and we shall stumble about among false and
partial conclusions and miss entirely the true truth of the matter.
The importance of avoiding this error is evident when we are seeking
for the essential significance of Indian religious culture.
But the same method must be held to when we proceed to observe its dynamic
formulation and the effect of its spiritual ideal on life.
Indian culture recognises the spirit as the truth of our being and our
life as a growth and evolution of the spirit. It sees the Eternal, the
Infinite, the Supreme, the All; it sees this as the secret highest Self
of all, this is what it calls God, the Permanent, the Real, and it sees
man as a soul and power of this being of God in Nature. The progressive
growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards
God, towards the universal, the eternal, the infinite, in a word his
growth into spiritual consciousness, by the development of his ordinary
ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for
Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existence.
To this deeper and more spiritual idea of Nature and of existence a
great deal of what is strongest and most potential of fruitful consequences
in recent European thinking already turns with a growing impetus. This
turn may be a relapse to “barbarism” or it may be the high
natural outcome of her own increasing and ripened culture; that is a
question for Europe to decide. But always to India this ideal inspiration
or rather this spiritual vision of Self, God, Spirit, this nearness
to a cosmic consciousness, a cosmic sense and feeling, a cosmic idea,
will, love, delight into which we can release the limited, ignorant,
suffering ego, this drive towards the transcendental, eternal and infinite,
and the moulding of man into a conscious soul and power of that greater
Existence have been the engrossing motive of her philosophy, the sustaining
force of her religion, the fundamental idea of her civilisation and
culture.
I have suggested that the formal turn, the rhythmic lines of effort
of this culture must be regarded as having passed through two complete
external stages; while a third has taken its initial steps and is the
destiny of her future. The early Vedic was the first stage: then religion
took its outward formal stand on the natural approach of the physical
mind of man to the Godhead in the universe, but the initiates guarded
the sacrificial fire of a greater spiritual truth behind the form. The
Purano-Tantric was the second stage: then religion took its outward
formal stand on the first deeper approaches of man's inner mind and
life to the Divine in the universe, but a greater initiation opened
the way to a far more intimate truth and pushed towards an inner living
of the spiritual life in all its profundity and in all the infinite
possibilities of an uttermost sublime experience. There has been long
in preparation a third stage which belongs to the future. Its inspiring
idea has been often cast out in limited or large, veiled and quiet or
bold and striking spiritual movements and potent new disciplines and
religions, but it has not yet been successful in finding its way or
imposing new lines on human life. The circumstances were adverse, the
hour not yet come. This greatest movement of the Indian spiritual mind
has a double impulse. Its will is to call the community of men and all
men each according to his power to live in the greatest light of all
and found their whole life on some fully revealed power and grand uplifting
truth of the Spirit. But it has had too at times a highest vision which
sees the possibility not only of an ascent towards the Eternal but of
a descent of the Divine Consciousness and a change of human into divine
nature. A perception of the divinity hidden in man has been its crowning
force. This is a turn that cannot be rightly understood in the ideas
or language of the European religious reformer or his imitators. It
is not what the purist of the reason or the purist of the spirit imagines
it to be and by that too hasty imagination falls short in his endeavour.
Its index vision is pointed to a truth that exceeds the human mind and,
if at all realised in his members, would turn human life into a divine
superlife. And not until this third largest sweep of the spiritual evolution
has come into its own, can Indian civilisation be said to have discharged
its mission, to have spoken its last word and be functus officio, crowned
and complete in its office of mediation between the life of man and
the spirit.
The past dealings of Indian religion with life must be judged according
to the stages of its progress; each age of its movement must be considered
on its own basis. But throughout it consistently held to two perceptions
that showed great practical wisdom and a fine spiritual tact. First,
it saw that the approach to the spirit cannot be sudden, simple and
immediate for all individuals or for the community of men; it must come
ordinarily or at least at first through a gradual culture, training,
progress. There must be an enlarging of the natural life accompanied
by an uplifting of all its motives; a growing hold upon it of the higher
rational, psychic and ethical powers must prepare and lead it towards
a higher spiritual law. But the Indian religious mind saw too at the
same time that if its greater aim was to be fruitful and the character
of its culture imperative, there must be throughout and at every moment
some kind of insistence on the spiritual motive. And for the mass of
men this means always some kind of religious influence. That pervasive
insistence was necessary in order that from the beginning some power
of the universal inner truth, some ray from the real reality of our
existence might cast its light or at least its sensible if subtle influence
on the natural life of man. Human life must be induced to flower, naturally
in a way, but at the same time with a wise nurturing and cultivation
into its own profounder spiritual significance. Indian culture has worked
by two coordinated, mutually stimulating and always interblended operations
of which these perceptions are the principle. First, it has laboured
to lead upward and enlarge the life of the individual in the community
through a natural series of life-stages till it was ready for the spiritual
levels. But also it has striven to keep that highest aim before the
mind at every stage and throw its influence on each circumstance and
action both of man's inner and his outer existence.
In the plan of its first aim it came nearer to the highest ancient culture
of mankind in other regions, but in a type and with a motive all its
own. The frame of its system was constituted by a triple quartette.
Its first circle was the synthesis and gradation of the fourfold object
of life, vital desire and hedonistic enjoyment, personal and communal
interest, moral right and law, and spiritual liberation. Its second
circle was the fourfold order of society, carefully graded and equipped
with its fixed economic functions and its deeper cultural, ethical and
spiritual significances. Its third, the most original and indeed unique
of its englobing life-patterns, was the fourfold scale of the successive
stages of life, student, householder, forest recluse and free supersocial
man. This frame, these lines of a large and noble life-training subsisted
in their purity, their grand natural balance of austerity and accommodation,
their fine effectiveness during the later Vedic and heroic age of the
civilisation: afterwards they crumbled slowly or lost their completeness
and order. But the tradition, the idea with some large effect of its
force and some figure of its lines endured throughout the whole period
of cultural vigour. However deflected it might have been from its true
form and spirit, however mutilated and complicated for the worse, there
was always left some presence of its inspiration and power. Only in
the decline do we get the slow collapse, the degraded and confused mass
of conventions which still labours to represent the ancient and noble
Aryan system, but in spite of relics of glamour and beauty, in spite
of survivals of spiritual suggestion and in spite of a residue of the
old high training, is little better than a detritus or a mass of confused
relics. Still even in this degradation enough of the original virtue
has remained to ensure a remarkable remnant of the ancient beauty, attractiveness
and power of survival.
But the turn given to the other and more direct spiritual operation
of this culture is of a still greater importance. For it is that which,
always surviving, has coloured permanently the Indian mind and life.
It has remained the same behind every change of forms and throughout
all the ages of the civilisation it has renewed its effectiveness and
held its field. This second side of the cultural effort took the form
of an endeavour to cast the whole of life into a religious mould; it
multiplied means and devices which by their insistent suggestion and
opportunity and their mass of effect would help to stamp a Godward tendency
on the entire existence. Indian culture was founded on a religious conception
of life and both the individual and the community drank in at every
moment its influence. It was stamped on them by the training and turn
of the education; the entire life atmosphere, all the social surroundings
were suffused with it; it breathed its power through the whole original
form and hieratic character of the culture. Always was felt the near
idea of the spiritual existence and its supremacy as the ideal, highest
over all others; everywhere there was the pervading pressure of the
notion of the universe as a manifestation of divine Powers and a movement
full of the presence of the Divine. Man himself was not a mere reasoning
animal, but a soul in constant relation with God and with the divine
cosmic Powers. The soul's continued existence was a cyclic or upward
progress from birth to birth; human life was the summit of an evolution
which terminated in the conscious Spirit, every stage of that life a
step in a pilgrimage. Every single action of man had its importance
of fruit whether in future lives or in the worlds beyond the material
existence.
But Indian religion was not content with the general pressure of these
conceptions, the training, the atmosphere, the stamp on the culture.
Its persistent effort was to impress the mind at every moment and in
each particular with the religious influence. And to do this more effectively
by a living and practical adaptation, not asking from anyone what was
too much for him or too little, it took as a guiding idea its perception
of the varying natural capacity of man, adhikâra. It provided
in its system means by which each man high or low, wise or ignorant,
exceptional or average might feel in the way suitable to his nature
and evolutionary stage the call, the pressure, the influence. Avoiding
the error of the religions that impose a single dogmatic and inflexible
rule on every man regardless of the possibilities of his nature, it
tried rather to draw him gently upward and help him to grow steadily
in religious and spiritual experience. Every part of human nature, every
characteristic turn of its action was given a place in the system; each
was suitably surrounded with the spiritual idea and a religious influence,
each provided with steps by which it might rise towards its own spiritual
possibility and significance. The highest spiritual meaning of life
was set on the summits of each evolving power of the human nature. The
intelligence was called to a supreme knowledge, the dynamic active and
creative powers pointed to openness and unity with an infinite and universal
Will, the heart and sense put in contact with a divine love and joy
and beauty. But this highest meaning was also put everywhere indicatively
or in symbols behind the whole system of living, even in its details,
so that its impression might fall in whatever degree on the life, increase
in pervasion and in the end take up the entire control. This was the
aim and, if we consider the imperfections of our nature and the difficulty
of the endeavour, we can say that it achieved an unusual measure of
success. It has been said with some truth that for the Indian the whole
of life is a religion. True of the ideal of Indian life, it is true
to a certain degree and in a certain sense in its fact and practice.
No step could be taken in the Indian's inner or outer life without his
being reminded of a spiritual existence. Everywhere he felt the closeness
or at least saw the sign of something beyond his natural life, beyond
the moment in time, beyond his individual ego, something other than
the needs and interests of his vital and physical nature. That insistence
gave its tone and turn to his thought and action and feeling; it produced
that subtler sensitiveness to the spiritual appeal, that greater readiness
to turn to the spiritual effort which are even now distinguishing marks
of the Indian temperament. It is that readiness, that sensitiveness
which justifies us when we speak of the characteristic spirituality
of the Indian people.
The ancient idea of the adhikâra has to be taken into careful
account if we would understand the peculiar character of Indian religion.
In most other religious systems we find a high-pitched spiritual call
and a difficult and rigid ethical standard far beyond the possibilities
of man's half-evolved, defective and imperfect nature. This standard,
this call are announced as if imperative on all; but it is evident that
only a few can give an adequate response. There is presented to our
view for all our picture of life the sharp division of two extremes;
the saint and the worldling, the religious and the irreligious, the
good and the bad, the pious and the impious, souls accepted and souls
rejected, the sheep and the goats, the saved and the damned, the believer
and the infidel, are the two categories set constantly before us. All
between is a confusion, a tug of war, an uncertain balance. This crude
and summary classification is the foundation of the Christian system
of an eternal heaven and hell; at best, the Catholic religion humanely
interposes a precarious chance hung between that happy and this dread
alternative, the chance of a painful purgatory for more than nine tenths
of the human race. Indian religion set up on its summits a still more
high-pitched spiritual call, a standard of conduct still more perfect
and absolute; but it did not go about its work with this summary and
unreflecting ignorance. All beings are to the Indian mind portions of
the Divine, evolving souls, and sure of an eventual salvation and release
into the spirit. All must feel, as the good in them grows or, more truly,
the godhead in them finds itself and becomes conscious, the ultimate
touch and call of their highest self and through that call the attraction
to the Eternal and Divine. But actually in life there are infinite differences
between man and man; some are more inwardly evolved, others are less
mature, many if not most are infant souls incapable of great steps and
difficult efforts. Each needs to be dealt with according to his nature
and his soul stature. But a general distinction can be drawn between
three principal types varying in their openness to the spiritual appeal
or to the religious influence or impulse. This distinction amounts to
a gradation of three stages in the growing human consciousness. One
crude, ill-formed, still outward, still vitally and physically minded
can be led only by devices suited to its ignorance. Another, more developed
and capable of a much stronger and deeper psycho-spiritual experience,
offers a riper make of manhood gifted with a more conscious intelligence,
a larger vital or aesthetic opening, a stronger ethical power of the
nature. A third, the ripest and most developed of all, is ready for
the spiritual heights, fit to receive or to climb towards the loftiest
ultimate truth of God and of its own being and to tread the summits
of divine experience. It was to meet the need of the first type or level
that Indian religion created that mass of suggestive ceremony and effective
ritual and strict outward rule and injunction and all that pageant of
attracting and compelling symbol with which the cult is so richly equipped
or profusely decorated. These are for the most part forming and indicative
things which work upon the mind consciently and subconsciently and prepare
it for an entry into the significance of the greater permanent things
that lie behind them. And for this type too, for its vital mind and
will, is intended all in the religion that calls on man to turn to a
divine Power or powers for the just satisfaction of his desires and
his interests, just because subject to the right and the law, the Dharma.
In the Vedic times the outward ritual sacrifice and at a later period
all the religious forms and notions that clustered visibly around the
rites and imagery of temple worship, constant festival and ceremony
and daily act of outward devotion were intended to serve this type or
this soul-stage. Many of these things may seem to the developed mind
to belong to an ignorant or half awakened religionism; but they have
their concealed truth and their psychic value and are indispensable
in this stage for the development and difficult awakening of the soul
shrouded in the ignorance of material Nature.
The middle stage, the second type starts from these things, but gets
behind them; it is capable of understanding more clearly and consciently
the psychic truths, the conceptions of the intelligence, the aesthetic
indications, the ethical values and all the other mediating directions
which Indian religion took care to place behind its symbols. These intermediate
truths vivify the outward forms of the system and those who can grasp
them can go through these mental indices towards things that are beyond
the mind and approach the profounder truths of the spirit. For at this
stage there is already something awake that can go inward to a more
deeply psycho-religious experience. Already the mind, heart and will
have some strength to grapple with the difficulties of the relations
between the spirit and life, some urge to satisfy more luminously or
more inwardly the rational, aesthetic and ethical nature and lead them
upward towards their own highest heights; one can begin to train mind
and soul towards a spiritual consciousness and the opening of a spiritual
existence. This ascending type of humanity claims for its use all that
large and opulent middle region of philosophic, psycho-spiritual, ethical,
aesthetic and emotional religious seeking which is the larger and more
significant portion of the wealth of Indian culture. At this stage intervene
the philosophical systems, the subtle illumining debates and inquiries
of the thinkers; here are the nobler or more passionate reaches of devotion,
here are held up the higher, ampler or austerer ideals of the Dharma;
here break in the psychical suggestions and first definite urgings of
the eternal and infinite which draw men by their appeal and promise
towards the practice of Yoga.
But these things, great as they were, were not final or supreme: they
were openings, steps of ascension towards the luminous grandeurs of
spiritual truth and its practice was kept ready and its means of attainment
provided for the third and greatest type of human being, the third loftiest
stage of the spiritual evolution. The complete light of spiritual knowledge
when it emerges from veil and compromise and goes beyond all symbols
and middle significances, the absolute and universal divine love, the
beauty of the All-beautiful, the noblest dharma of unity with all beings,
universal compassion and benevolence calm and sweet in the perfect purity
of the spirit, the upsurge of the psychical being into the spiritual
unity or the spiritual ecstasy, these divinest things were the heritage
of the human being ready for divinity and their way and call were the
supreme significances of Indian religion and Yoga. He reached by them
the fruits of his perfect spiritual evolution, an identity with the
Self and Spirit, a dwelling in or with God, the divine law of his being,
a spiritual universality, communion, transcendence.
But distinctions are lines that can always be overpassed in the infinite
complexity of man's nature and there was no sharp and unbridgeable division,
only a gradation, since the actuality or potentiality of the three powers
coexist in all men.
Both the middle and the highest significances were near and present
and pervaded the whole system, and the approaches to the highest status
were not absolutely denied to any man, in spite of certain prohibitions:
but these prohibitions broke down in practice or left a way of escape
to the man who felt the call; the call itself was a sign of election.
He had only to find the way and the guide. But even in the direct approach
the principle of adhikâra, differing capacity and varying nature,
svabhâva, was recognised in subtle ways, which it would be beyond
my present purpose to enumerate. One may note as an example the significant
Indian idea of the ishTa-devatâ, the special name, form, idea
of the Divinity which each man may choose for worship and communion
and follow after according to the attraction in his nature and his capacity
of spiritual intelligence. And each of the forms has its outer initial
associations and suggestions for the worshipper, its appeal to the intelligence,
psychical, aesthetic, emotional power in the nature and its highest
spiritual significance which leads through some one truth of the Godhead
into the essence of spirituality. One may note too that in the practice
of Yoga the disciple has to be led through his nature and according
to his capacity and the spiritual teacher and guide is expected to perceive
and take account of the necessary gradations and the individual need
and power in his giving of help and guidance. Many things may be objected
to in the actual working of this large and flexible system and I shall
take some note of them when I have to deal with the weak points or the
pejorative side of the culture against which the hostile critic directs
with a misleading exaggeration his missiles. But the principle of it
and the main lines of the application embody a remarkable wisdom, knowledge
and careful observation of human nature and an assured insight into
the things of the spirit which none can question who has considered
deeply and flexibly these difficult matters or had any close experience
of the obstacles and potentialities of our nature in its approach to
the concealed spiritual reality.
This carefully graded and complex system of religious development and
spiritual evolution was linked on by a process of pervading intimate
connection to that general culture of the life of the human being and
his powers which must be the first care of every civilisation worth
the name. The most delicate and difficult part of this task of human
development is concerned with the thinking being of man, his mind of
reason and knowledge. No ancient culture of which we have knowledge,
not even the Greek, attached more importance to it or spent more effort
on its cultivation. The business of the ancient Rishi was not only to
know God, but to know the world and life and to reduce it by knowledge
to a thing well understood and mastered with which the reason and will
of man could deal on assured lines and on a safe basis of wise method
and order. The ripe result of this effort was the Shastra. When we speak
of the Shastra nowadays, we mean too often only the religio-social system
of injunctions of the middle age made sacrosanct by their mythical attribution
to Manu, Parashara and other Vedic sages. But in older India Shastra
meant any systematised teaching and science; each department of life,
each line of activity, each subject of knowledge had its science or
Shastra. The attempt was to reduce each to a theoretical and practical
order founded on detailed observation, just generalisation, full experience,
intuitive, logical and experimental analysis and synthesis, in order
to enable man to know always with a just fruitfulness for life and to
act with the security of right knowledge. The smallest and the greatest
things were examined with equal care and attention and each provided
with its art and science. The name was given even to the highest spiritual
knowledge whenever it was stated not in a mass of intuitive experience
and revelatory knowledge as in the Upanishads, but for intellectual
comprehension in system and order, - and in that sense the Gita is able
to call its profound spiritual teaching the most secret science, guhyatamaM
shâstram. This high scientific and philosophical spirit was carried
by the ancient Indian culture into all its activities. No Indian religion
is complete without its outward form of preparatory practice, its supporting
philosophy and its Yoga or system of inward practice or art of spiritual
living: most even of what seems irrational in it to a first glance,
has its philosophical turn and significance. It is this complete understanding
and philosophical character which has given religion in India its durable
security and immense vitality and enabled it to resist the acid dissolvent
power of modern sceptical inquiry; whatever is ill-founded in experience
and reason, that power can dissolve, but not the heart and mind of these
great teachings. But what we have more especially to observe is that
while Indian culture made a distinction between the lower and the higher
learning, the knowledge of things and the knowledge of self, it did
not put a gulf between them like some religions, but considered the
knowledge of the world and things as a preparatory and a leading up
to the knowledge of Self and God. All Shastra was put under the sanction
of the names of the Rishis, who were in the beginning the teachers not
only of spiritual truth and philosophy, - and we may note that all Indian
philosophy, even the logic of Nyaya and the atomic theory of the Vaisheshikas,
has for its highest crowning note and eventual object spiritual knowledge
and liberation, - but of the arts, the social, political and military,
the physical and psychic sciences, and every instructor was in his degree
respected as a guru or âcârya, a guide or preceptor of the
human spirit. All knowledge was woven into one and led up by degrees
to the one highest knowledge.
The whole right practice of life founded on this knowledge was in the
view of Indian culture a Dharma, a living according to a just understanding
and right view of self-culture, of the knowledge of things and life
and of action in that knowledge. Thus each man and class and kind and
species and each activity of soul, mind, life, body has its dharma.
But the largest or at least most vitally important part of the Dharma
was held to be the culture and ordering of the ethical nature of man.
The ethical aspect of life, contrary to the amazingly ignorant observation
of a certain type of critics, attracted a quite enormous amount of attention,
occupied the greater part of Indian thought and writing not devoted
to the things of pure knowledge and of the spirit and was so far pushed
that there is no ethical formation or ideal which does not reach in
it its highest conception and a certain divine absolutism of ideal practice.
Indian thought took for granted,- - though there are some remarkable
speculations to the contrary, - the ethical nature of man and the ethical
law of the world. It considered that man was justified in satisfying
his desires, since that is necessary for the satisfaction and expansion
of life, but not in obeying the dictates of desire as the law of his
being; for in all things there is a greater law, each has not only its
side of interest and desire, but its dharma or rule of right practice,
satisfaction, expansion, regulation. The Dharma, then, fixed by the
wise in the Shastra is the right thing to observe, the true rule of
action. First in the web of Dharma comes the social law; for man's life
is only initially for his vital, personal, individual self, but much
more imperatively for the community, though most imperatively of all
for the greatest Self one in himself and in all beings, for God, for
the Spirit. Therefore first the individual must subordinate himself
to the communal self, though by no means bound altogether to efface
himself in it as the extremists of the communal idea imagine. He must
live according to the law of his nature harmonised with the law of his
social type and class, for the nation and in a higher reach of his being
- this was greatly stressed by the Buddhists - for humanity. Thus living
and acting he could learn to transcend the social scale of the Dharma,
practise without injuring the basis of life the ideal scale and finally
grow into the liberty of the spirit, when rule and duty were not binding
because he would then move and act in a highest free and immortal dharma
of the divine nature. All these aspects of the Dharma were closely linked
up together in a progressive unity. Thus, for an example, each of the
four orders had its own social function and ethics, but also an ideal
rule for the growth of the pure ethical being, and every man by observing
his dharma and turning his action Godwards could grow out of it into
the spiritual freedom. But behind all dharma and ethics was put, not
only as a safeguard but as a light, a religious sanction, a reminder
of the continuity of life and of man's long pilgrimage through many
births, a reminder of the Gods and planes beyond and of the Divine,
and above it all the vision of a last stage of perfect comprehension
and unity and of divine transcendence.
The system of Indian ethics liberalised by the catholicity of the ancient
mind did not ban or violently discourage the aesthetic or even the hedonistic
being of man in spite of a growing ascetic tendency and a certain high
austerity of the summits. The aesthetic satisfactions of all kinds and
all grades were an important part of the culture. Poetry, the drama,
song, dance, music, the greater and lesser arts were placed under the
sanction of the Rishis and were made instruments of the spirit's culture.
A just theory held them to be initially the means of a pure aesthetic
satisfaction and each was founded on its own basic rule and law, but
on that basis and with a perfect fidelity to it still raised up to minister
to the intellectual, ethical and religious development of the being.
It is notable that the two vast Indian epics have been considered as
much as Dharma-shastras as great historico-mythic epic narratives, itihâsas.
They are, that is to say, noble, vivid and puissant pictures of life,
but they utter and breathe throughout their course the law and ideal
of a great and high ethical and religious spirit in life and aim in
their highest intention at the idea of the Divine and the way of the
mounting soul in the action of the world. Indian painting, sculpture
and architecture did not refuse service to the aesthetic satisfaction
and interpretation of the social, civic and individual life of the human
being; these things, as all evidences show, played a great part in their
motives of creation, but still their highest work was reserved for the
greatest spiritual side of the culture, and throughout we see them seized
and suffused with the brooding stress of the Indian mind on the soul,
the Godhead, the spiritual, the Infinite. And we have to note too that
the aesthetic and hedonistic being was made not only an aid to religion
and spirituality and liberally used for that purpose, but even one of
the main gates of man's approach to the Spirit. The Vaishnava religion
especially is a religion of love and beauty and of the satisfaction
of the whole delight-soul of man in God and even the desires and images
of the sensuous life were turned by its vision into figures of a divine
soul-experience. Few religions have gone so far as this immense catholicity
or carried the whole nature so high in its large, puissant and many-sided
approach to the spiritual and the infinite.
Finally, there is the most outwardly vital life of man, his ordinary
dynamic, political, economical and social being. This too Indian culture
took strenuously in hand and subjected its whole body to the pressure
of its own ideals and conceptions.
Its method was to build up great shastras of social living, duty and
enjoyment, military and political rule and conduct and economical well-being.
These were directed on one side to success, expansion, opulence and
the right art and relation of these activities, but on those motives,
demanded by the very nature of the vital man and his action, was imposed
the law of the Dharma, a stringent social and ethical ideal and rule
- thus the whole life of the king as the head of power and responsibility
was regulated by it in its every hour and function, - and the constant
reminder of religious duty. In latter times a Machiavellian principle
of statecraft, that which has been always and is still pursued by governments
and diplomats, encroached on this nobler system, but in the best age
of Indian thought this depravation was condemned as a temporarily effective,
but lesser, ignoble and inferior way of policy. The great rule of the
culture was that the higher a man's position and power, the larger the
scope of his function and influence of his acts and example, the greater
should be the call on him of the Dharma. The whole law and custom of
society was placed under the sanction of the Rishis and the gods, protected
from the violence of the great and powerful, given a socio-religious
character and the king himself charged to live and rule as the guardian
and servant of the Dharma with only an executive power over the community
which was valid so long as he observed with fidelity the Law. And as
this vital aspect of life is the one which most easily draws us outward
and away from the inner self and the diviner aim of living, it was the
most strenuously linked up at every point with the religious idea in
the way the vital man can best understand, in the Vedic times by the
constant reminder of the sacrifice behind every social and civic act,
at a later period by religious rites, ceremonies, worship, the calling
in of the gods, the insistence on the subsequent results or a supraterrestrial
aim of works. So great was this preoccupation, that while in the spiritual
and intellectual and other spheres a considerable or a complete liberty
was allowed to speculation, action, creation, here the tendency was
to impose a rigorous law and authority, a tendency which in the end
became greatly exaggerated and prevented the expansion of the society
into new forms more suitable for the need of the spirit of the age,
the Yugadharma.
A door of liberty was opened to the community by the provision of an
automatic permission to change custom and to the individual in the adoption
of the religious life with its own higher discipline or freedom outside
the ordinary social weft of binding rule and injunction. A rigid observation
and discipline of the social law, a larger nobler discipline and freer
self-culture of the ideal side of the Dharma, a wide freedom of the
religious and spiritual life became the three powers of the system.
The steps of the expanding human spirit mounted through these powers
to its perfection.
Thus the whole general character of the application of Indian ideals
to life became throughout of this one texture, the constant, subtly
graded, subtly harmonised preparation of the soul of man for its spiritual
being. First, the regulated satisfaction of the primary natural being
of man subjected to the law of the Dharma and the ethical idea and besieged
at every moment by the suggestions of religion, a religion at first
appealing to his more outward undeveloped mind, but in each of its outward
symbols and circumstances opening to a profounder significance, armed
with the indication of a profoundest spiritual and ideal meaning as
its justification. Then, the higher steps of the developed reason and
psychical, ethical and aesthetic powers closely interwoven and raised
by a similar opening beyond themselves to their own heights of spiritual
direction and potentiality. Finally, each of these growing powers in
man was made on its own line of approach a gateway into his divine and
spiritual being. Thus we may observe that there was created a Yoga of
knowledge for the self-exceeding of the thinking intellectual man, a
Yoga of works for the self-exceeding of the active, dynamic and ethical
man, a Yoga of love and bhakti for the self-exceeding of the emotional,
aesthetic, hedonistic man, by which each arrived to perfection through
a self-ward, spiritual, God-ward direction of his own special power,
as too a Yoga of self-exceeding through the power of the psychical being
and even through the power of the life in the body, - Yogas which could
be practised in separation or with some kind of synthesis. But all these
ways of self-exceeding led to a highest self-becoming. To become one
with universal being and all existences, one with the self and spirit,
united with God completed the human evolution, built the final step
of man's self-culture.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL, Volume 14, pages 156-171
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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