She has not been
attentive
to learn its secret.
Tagore - Creative Unity
The Baul poet expressly says that if we try
to approach God through the senses we miss him:
Bring him not into your house as the guest of your eyes;
but let him come at your heart's invitation.
Opening your doors to that which is seen only, is to lose it.
Yet, being a poet, he also knows that the objects of sense can reveal
their spiritual meaning only when they are not seen through mere
physical eyes:
Eyes can see only dust and earth,
But feel it with your heart, it is pure joy.
The flowers of delight blossom on all sides, in every form,
but where is your heart's thread to weave them in a garland?
These Bauls have a philosophy, which they call the philosophy of the
body; but they keep its secret; it is only for the initiated.
Evidently the underlying idea is that the individual's body is itself
the temple, in whose inner mystic shrine the Divine appears before the
soul, and the key to it has to be found from those who know. But as
the key is not for us outsiders, I leave it with the observation that
this mystic philosophy of the body is the outcome of the attempt to
get rid of all the outward shelters which are too costly for people
like themselves. But this human body of ours is made by God's own
hand, from his own love, and even if some men, in the pride of their
superiority, may despise it, God finds his joy in dwelling in others
of yet lower birth. It is a truth easier of discovery by these people
of humble origin than by men of proud estate.
The pride of the Baul beggar is not in his worldly distinction, but in
the distinction that God himself has given to him. He feels himself
like a flute through which God's own breath of love has been breathed:
My heart is like a flute he has played on.
If ever it fall into other hands,--
let him fling it away.
My lover's flute is dear to him.
Therefore, if to-day alien breath have entered it and
sounded strange notes,
Let him break it to pieces and strew the dust with them.
So we find that this man also has his disgust of defilement. While the
ambitious world of wealth and power despises him, he in his turn
thinks that the world's touch desecrates him who has been made sacred
by the touch of his Lover. He does not envy us our life of ambition
and achievements, but he knows how precious his own life has been:
I am poured forth in living notes of joy and sorrow by your breath.
Morning and evening, in summer and in rains, I am fashioned to music.
Yet should I be wholly spent in some flight of song,
I shall not grieve, the tune is so precious to me.
Our joys and sorrows are contradictory when self separates them in
opposition. But for the heart in which self merges in God's love,
they lose their absoluteness. So the Baul's prayer is to feel in all
situations--in danger, or pain, or sorrow--that he is in God's hands.
He solves the problem of emancipation from sufferings by accepting and
setting them in a higher context:
I am the boat, you are the sea, and also the boatman.
Though you never make the shore, though you let me sink,
why should I be foolish and afraid?
Is the reaching the shore a greater prize than losing myself
with you?
If you are only the haven, as they say, then what is the sea?
Let it surge and toss me on its waves, I shall be content.
I live in you, whatever and however you appear.
Save me or kill me as you wish, only never leave me in
others' hands.
III
It is needless to say, before I conclude, that I had neither the
training nor the opportunity to study this mendicant religious sect in
Bengal from an ethnological standpoint. I was attracted to find out
how the living currents of religious movements work in the heart of
the people, saving them from degradation imposed by the society of the
learned, of the rich, or of the high-born; how the spirit of man, by
making use even of its obstacles, reaches fulfilment, led thither, not
by the learned authorities in the scriptures, or by the mechanical
impulse of the dogma-driven crowd, but by the unsophisticated
aspiration of the loving soul. On the inaccessible mountain peaks of
theology the snows of creed remain eternally rigid, cold, and pure.
But God's manifest shower falls direct on the plain of humble hearts,
flowing there in various channels, even getting mixed with some mud in
its course, as it is soaked into the underground currents, invisible,
but ever-moving.
I can think of nothing better than to conclude my paper with a poem of
Jnandas, in which the aspiration of all simple spirits has found a
devout expression:
I had travelled all day and was tired; then I bowed my head
towards thy kingly court still far away.
The night deepened, a longing burned in my heart.
Whatever the words I sang, pain cried through them--for
even my songs thirsted--
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
When time seemed lost in darkness,
thy hand dropped its sceptre to take up the lute and
strike the uttermost chords;
And my heart sang out,
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
Ah, who is this whose arms enfold me?
Whatever I have to leave, let me leave; and whatever I
have to bear, let me bear.
Only let me walk with thee,
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
Descend at whiles from thy high audience hall, come down
amid joys and sorrows.
Hide in all forms and delights, in love,
And in my heart sing thy songs,--
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
EAST AND WEST
I
It is not always a profound interest in man that carries travellers
nowadays to distant lands. More often it is the facility for rapid
movement. For lack of time and for the sake of convenience we
generalise and crush our human facts into the packages within the
steel trunks that hold our travellers' reports.
Our knowledge of our own countrymen and our feelings about them have
slowly and unconsciously grown out of innumerable facts which are full
of contradictions and subject to incessant change. They have the
elusive mystery and fluidity of life. We cannot define to ourselves
what we are as a whole, because we know too much; because our
knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of
personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or
sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our
compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the
generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form.
When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes
the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his
rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable authority of his
personal experience. It is like a man who has his own boat for
crossing his village stream, but, on being compelled to wade across
some strange watercourse, draws angry comparisons as he goes from
every patch of mud and every pebble which his feet encounter.
Our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are
insular. There are men who become impatient and angry at the least
discomfort when their habits are incommoded. In their idea of the next
world they probably conjure up the ghosts of their slippers and
dressing-gowns, and expect the latchkey that opens their lodging-house
door on earth to fit their front door in the other world. As
travellers they are a failure; for they have grown too accustomed to
their mental easy-chairs, and in their intellectual nature love home
comforts, which are of local make, more than the realities of life,
which, like earth itself, are full of ups and downs, yet are one in
their rounded completeness.
The modern age has brought the geography of the earth near to us, but
made it difficult for us to come into touch with man. We go to strange
lands and observe; we do not live there. We hardly meet men: but only
specimens of knowledge. We are in haste to seek for general types and
overlook individuals.
When we fall into the habit of neglecting to use the understanding
that comes of sympathy in our travels, our knowledge of foreign people
grows insensitive, and therefore easily becomes both unjust and cruel
in its character, and also selfish and contemptuous in its
application. Such has, too often, been the case with regard to the
meeting of Western people in our days with others for whom they do not
recognise any obligation of kinship.
It has been admitted that the dealings between different races of men
are not merely between individuals; that our mutual understanding is
either aided, or else obstructed, by the general emanations forming
the social atmosphere. These emanations are our collective ideas and
collective feelings, generated according to special historical
circumstances.
For instance, the caste-idea is a collective idea in India. When we
approach an Indian who is under the influence of this collective idea,
he is no longer a pure individual with his conscience fully awake to
the judging of the value of a human being. He is more or less a
passive medium for giving expression to the sentiment of a whole
community.
It is evident that the caste-idea is not creative; it is merely
institutional. It adjusts human beings according to some mechanical
arrangement. It emphasises the negative side of the individual--his
separateness. It hurts the complete truth in man.
In the West, also, the people have a certain collective idea that
obscures their humanity. Let me try to explain what I feel about it.
II
Lately I went to visit some battlefields of France which had been
devastated by war. The awful calm of desolation, which still bore
wrinkles of pain--death-struggles stiffened into ugly ridges--brought
before my mind the vision of a huge demon, which had no shape, no
meaning, yet had two arms that could strike and break and tear, a
gaping mouth that could devour, and bulging brains that could conspire
and plan. It was a purpose, which had a living body, but no complete
humanity to temper it. Because it was passion--belonging to life, and
yet not having the wholeness of life--it was the most terrible of
life's enemies.
Something of the same sense of oppression in a different degree, the
same desolation in a different aspect, is produced in my mind when I
realise the effect of the West upon Eastern life--the West which, in
its relation to us, is all plan and purpose incarnate, without any
superfluous humanity.
I feel the contrast very strongly in Japan. In that country the old
world presents itself with some ideal of perfection, in which man has
his varied opportunities of self-revelation in art, in ceremonial, in
religious faith, and in customs expressing the poetry of social
relationship. There one feels that deep delight of hospitality which
life offers to life. And side by side, in the same soil, stands the
modern world, which is stupendously big and powerful, but
inhospitable. It has no simple-hearted welcome for man. It is living;
yet the incompleteness of life's ideal within it cannot but hurt
humanity.
The wriggling tentacles of a cold-blooded utilitarianism, with which
the West has grasped all the easily yielding succulent portions of the
East, are causing pain and indignation throughout the Eastern
countries. The West comes to us, not with the imagination and sympathy
that create and unite, but with a shock of passion--passion for power
and wealth. This passion is a mere force, which has in it the
principle of separation, of conflict.
I have been fortunate in coming into close touch with individual men
and women of the Western countries, and have felt with them their
sorrows and shared their aspirations. I have known that they seek the
same God, who is my God--even those who deny Him. I feel certain that,
if the great light of culture be extinct in Europe, our horizon in the
East will mourn in darkness. It does not hurt my pride to acknowledge
that, in the present age, Western humanity has received its mission to
be the teacher of the world; that her science, through the mastery of
laws of nature, is to liberate human souls from the dark dungeon of
matter. For this very reason I have realised all the more strongly,
on the other hand, that the dominant collective idea in the Western
countries is not creative. It is ready to enslave or kill individuals,
to drug a great people with soul-killing poison, darkening their whole
future with the black mist of stupefaction, and emasculating entire
races of men to the utmost degree of helplessness. It is wholly
wanting in spiritual power to blend and harmonise; it lacks the sense
of the great personality of man.
The most significant fact of modern days is this, that the West has
met the East. Such a momentous meeting of humanity, in order to be
fruitful, must have in its heart some great emotional idea, generous
and creative. There can be no doubt that God's choice has fallen upon
the knights-errant of the West for the service of the present age;
arms and armour have been given to them; but have they yet realised in
their hearts the single-minded loyalty to their cause which can resist
all temptations of bribery from the devil? The world to-day is offered
to the West. She will destroy it, if she does not use it for a great
creation of man. The materials for such a creation are in the hands of
science; but the creative genius is in Man's spiritual ideal.
III
When I was young a stranger from Europe came to Bengal. He chose his
lodging among the people of the country, shared with them their frugal
diet, and freely offered them his service. He found employment in the
houses of the rich, teaching them French and German, and the money
thus earned he spent to help poor students in buying books. This meant
for him hours of walking in the mid-day heat of a tropical summer;
for, intent upon exercising the utmost economy, he refused to hire
conveyances. He was pitiless in his exaction from himself of his
resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation;
and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was
not born, yet whom he dearly loved. He did not come to us with a
professional mission of teaching sectarian creeds; he had not in his
nature the least trace of that self-sufficiency of goodness, which
humiliates by gifts the victims of its insolent benevolence. Though he
did not know our language, he took every occasion to frequent our
meetings and ceremonies; yet he was always afraid of intrusion, and
tenderly anxious lest he might offend us by his ignorance of our
customs. At last, under the continual strain of work in an alien
climate and surroundings, his health broke down. He died, and was
cremated at our burning-ground, according to his express desire.
The attitude of his mind, the manner of his living, the object of his
life, his modesty, his unstinted self-sacrifice for a people who had
not even the power to give publicity to any benefaction bestowed upon
them, were so utterly unlike anything we were accustomed to associate
with the Europeans in India, that it gave rise in our mind to a
feeling of love bordering upon awe.
We all have a realm, a private paradise, in our mind, where dwell
deathless memories of persons who brought some divine light to our
life's experience, who may not be known to others, and whose names
have no place in the pages of history. Let me confess to you that this
man lives as one of those immortals in the paradise of my individual
life.
He came from Sweden, his name was Hammargren. What was most remarkable
in the event of his coming to us in Bengal was the fact that in his
own country he had chanced to read some works of my great countryman,
Ram Mohan Roy, and felt an immense veneration for his genius and his
character. Ram Mohan Roy lived in the beginning of the last century,
and it is no exaggeration when I describe him as one of the immortal
personalities of modern time. This young Swede had the unusual gift of
a far-sighted intellect and sympathy, which enabled him even from his
distance of space and time, and in spite of racial differences, to
realise the greatness of Ram Mohan Roy. It moved him so deeply that he
resolved to go to the country which produced this great man, and offer
her his service. He was poor, and he had to wait some time in England
before he could earn his passage money to India. There he came at
last, and in reckless generosity of love utterly spent himself to the
last breath of his life, away from home and kindred and all the
inheritances of his motherland. His stay among us was too short to
produce any outward result. He failed even to achieve during his life
what he had in his mind, which was to found by the help of his scanty
earnings a library as a memorial to Ram Mohan Roy, and thus to leave
behind him a visible symbol of his devotion. But what I prize most in
this European youth, who left no record of his life behind him, is not
the memory of any service of goodwill, but the precious gift of
respect which he offered to a people who are fallen upon evil times,
and whom it is so easy to ignore or to humiliate. For the first time
in the modern days this obscure individual from Sweden brought to our
country the chivalrous courtesy of the West, a greeting of human
fellowship.
The coincidence came to me with a great and delightful surprise when
the Nobel Prize was offered to me from Sweden. As a recognition of
individual merit it was of great value to me, no doubt; but it was the
acknowledgment of the East as a collaborator with the Western
continents, in contributing its riches to the common stock of
civilisation, which had the chief significance for the present age. It
meant joining hands in comradeship by the two great hemispheres of the
human world across the sea.
IV
To-day the real East remains unexplored. The blindness of contempt is
more hopeless than the blindness of ignorance; for contempt kills the
light which ignorance merely leaves unignited. The East is waiting to
be understood by the Western races, in order not only to be able to
give what is true in her, but also to be confident of her own mission.
In Indian history, the meeting of the Mussulman and the Hindu produced
Akbar, the object of whose dream was the unification of hearts and
ideals. It had all the glowing enthusiasm of a religion, and it
produced an immediate and a vast result even in his own lifetime.
But the fact still remains that the Western mind, after centuries of
contact with the East, has not evolved the enthusiasm of a chivalrous
ideal which can bring this age to its fulfilment. It is everywhere
raising thorny hedges of exclusion and offering human sacrifices to
national self-seeking. It has intensified the mutual feelings of envy
among Western races themselves, as they fight over their spoils and
display a carnivorous pride in their snarling rows of teeth.
We must again guard our minds from any encroaching distrust of the
individuals of a nation. The active love of humanity and the spirit of
martyrdom for the cause of justice and truth which I have met with in
the Western countries have been a great lesson and inspiration to me.
I have no doubt in my mind that the West owes its true greatness, not
so much to its marvellous training of intellect, as to its spirit of
service devoted to the welfare of man. Therefore I speak with a
personal feeling of pain and sadness about the collective power which
is guiding the helm of Western civilisation. It is a passion, not an
ideal. The more success it has brought to Europe, the more costly it
will prove to her at last, when the accounts have to be rendered. And
the signs are unmistakable, that the accounts have been called for.
The time has come when Europe must know that the forcible parasitism
which she has been practising upon the two large Continents of the
world--the two most unwieldy whales of humanity--must be causing to
her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration.
As an example, let me quote the following extract from the concluding
chapter of _From the Cape to Cairo_, by Messrs. Grogan and Sharp, two
writers who have the power to inculcate their doctrines by precept and
example. In their reference to the African they are candid, as when
they say, "We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. "
These two sentences, carefully articulated, with a smack of
enjoyment, have been more clearly explained in the following
statement, where some sense of that decency which is the attenuated
ghost of a buried conscience, prompts the writers to use the phrase
"compulsory labour" in place of the honest word "slavery"; just as the
modern politician adroitly avoids the word "injunction" and uses the
word "mandate. " "Compulsory labour in some form," they say, "is the
corollary of our occupation of the country. " And they add: "It is
pathetic, but it is history," implying thereby that moral sentiments
have no serious effect in the history of human beings.
Elsewhere they write: "Either we must give up the country
commercially, or we must make the African work. And mere abuse of
those who point out the impasse cannot change the facts. We must
decide, and soon. Or rather the white man of South Africa will
decide. " The authors also confess that they have seen too much of the
world "to have any lingering belief that Western civilisation benefits
native races. "
The logic is simple--the logic of egoism. But the argument is
simplified by lopping off the greater part of the premise. For these
writers seem to hold that the only important question for the white
men of South Africa is, how indefinitely to grow fat on ostrich
feathers and diamond mines, and dance jazz dances over the misery and
degradation of a whole race of fellow-beings of a different colour
from their own. Possibly they believe that moral laws have a special
domesticated breed of comfortable concessions for the service of the
people in power. Possibly they ignore the fact that commercial and
political cannibalism, profitably practised upon foreign races, creeps
back nearer home; that the cultivation of unwholesome appetites has
its final reckoning with the stomach which has been made to serve it.
For, after all, man is a spiritual being, and not a mere living
money-bag jumping from profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of
human races in its financial leapfrog.
Such, however, has been the condition of things for more than a
century; and to-day, trying to read the future by the light of the
European conflagration, we are asking ourselves everywhere in the
East: "Is this frightfully overgrown power really great? It can bruise
us from without, but can it add to our wealth of spirit? It can sign
peace treaties, but can it give peace? "
It was about two thousand years ago that all-powerful Rome in one of
its eastern provinces executed on a cross a simple teacher of an
obscure tribe of fishermen. On that day the Roman governor felt no
falling off of his appetite or sleep. On that day there was, on the
one hand, the agony, the humiliation, the death; on the other, the
pomp of pride and festivity in the Governor's palace.
And to-day? To whom, then, shall we bow the head?
Kasmai devaya havisha vidhema?
(To which God shall we offer oblation? )
We know of an instance in our own history of India, when a great
personality, both in his life and voice, struck the keynote of the
solemn music of the soul--love for all creatures. And that music
crossed seas, mountains, and deserts. Races belonging to different
climates, habits, and languages were drawn together, not in the clash
of arms, not in the conflict of exploitation, but in harmony of life,
in amity and peace. That was creation.
When we think of it, we see at once what the confusion of thought was
to which the Western poet, dwelling upon the difference between East
and West, referred when he said, "Never the twain shall meet. " It is
true that they are not yet showing any real sign of meeting. But the
reason is because the West has not sent out its humanity to meet the
man in the East, but only its machine. Therefore the poet's line has
to be changed into something like this:
Man is man, machine is machine,
And never the twain shall wed.
You must know that red tape can never be a common human bond; that
official sealing-wax can never provide means of mutual attachment;
that it is a painful ordeal for human beings to have to receive
favours from animated pigeonholes, and condescensions from printed
circulars that give notice but never speak. The presence of the
Western people in the East is a human fact. If we are to gain anything
from them, it must not be a mere sum-total of legal codes and systems
of civil and military services. Man is a great deal more to man than
that. We have our human birthright to claim direct help from the man
of the West, if he has anything great to give us. It must come to us,
not through mere facts in a juxtaposition, but through the
spontaneous sacrifice made by those who have the gift, and therefore
the responsibility.
Earnestly I ask the poet of the Western world to realise and sing to
you with all the great power of music which he has, that the East and
the West are ever in search of each other, and that they must meet not
merely in the fulness of physical strength, but in fulness of truth;
that the right hand, which wields the sword, has the need of the left,
which holds the shield of safety.
The East has its seat in the vast plains watched over by the
snow-peaked mountains and fertilised by rivers carrying mighty volumes
of water to the sea. There, under the blaze of a tropical sun, the
physical life has bedimmed the light of its vigour and lessened its
claims. There man has had the repose of mind which has ever tried to
set itself in harmony with the inner notes of existence. In the
silence of sunrise and sunset, and on star-crowded nights, he has sat
face to face with the Infinite, waiting for the revelation that opens
up the heart of all that there is. He has said, in a rapture of
realisation:
"Hearken to me, ye children of the Immortal, who dwell in the Kingdom
of Heaven. I have known, from beyond darkness, the Supreme Person,
shining with the radiance of the sun. "
The man from the East, with his faith in the eternal, who in his soul
had met the touch of the Supreme Person--did he never come to you in
the West and speak to you of the Kingdom of Heaven? Did he not unite
the East and the West in truth, in the unity of one spiritual bond
between all children of the Immortal, in the realisation of one great
Personality in all human persons?
Yes, the East did once meet the West profoundly in the growth of her
life. Such union became possible, because the East came to the West
with the ideal that is creative, and not with the passion that
destroys moral bonds. The mystic consciousness of the Infinite, which
she brought with her, was greatly needed by the man of the West to
give him his balance.
On the other hand, the East must find her own balance in Science--the
magnificent gift that the West can bring to her. Truth has its nest as
well as its sky. That nest is definite in structure, accurate in law
of construction; and though it has to be changed and rebuilt over and
over again, the need of it is never-ending and its laws are eternal.
For some centuries the East has neglected the nest-building of truth.
She has not been attentive to learn its secret. Trying to cross the
trackless infinite, the East has relied solely upon her wings. She has
spurned the earth, till, buffeted by storms, her wings are hurt and
she is tired, sorely needing help. But has she then to be told that
the messenger of the sky and the builder of the nest shall never
meet?
THE MODERN AGE
I
Wherever man meets man in a living relationship, the meeting finds its
natural expression in works of art, the signatures of beauty, in which
the mingling of the personal touch leaves its memorial.
On the other hand, a relationship of pure utility humiliates man--it
ignores the rights and needs of his deeper nature; it feels no
compunction in maltreating and killing things of beauty that can never
be restored.
Some years ago, when I set out from Calcutta on my voyage to Japan,
the first thing that shocked me, with a sense of personal injury, was
the ruthless intrusion of the factories for making gunny-bags on both
banks of the Ganges. The blow it gave to me was owing to the precious
memory of the days of my boyhood, when the scenery of this river was
the only great thing near my birthplace reminding me of the existence
of a world which had its direct communication with our innermost
spirit.
Calcutta is an upstart town with no depth of sentiment in her face and
in her manners. It may truly be said about her genesis:--In the
beginning there was the spirit of the Shop, which uttered through its
megaphone, "Let there be the Office! " and there was Calcutta. She
brought with her no dower of distinction, no majesty of noble or
romantic origin; she never gathered around her any great historical
associations, any annals of brave sufferings, or memory of mighty
deeds. The only thing which gave her the sacred baptism of beauty was
the river. I was fortunate enough to be born before the smoke-belching
iron dragon had devoured the greater part of the life of its banks;
when the landing-stairs descending into its waters, caressed by its
tides, appeared to me like the loving arms of the villages clinging to
it; when Calcutta, with her up-tilted nose and stony stare, had not
completely disowned her foster-mother, rural Bengal, and had not
surrendered body and soul to her wealthy paramour, the spirit of the
ledger, bound in dead leather.
But as an instance of the contrast of the different ideal of a
different age, incarnated in the form of a town, the memory of my last
visit to Benares comes to my mind. What impressed me most deeply,
while I was there, was the mother-call of the river Ganges, ever
filling the atmosphere with an "unheard melody," attracting the whole
population to its bosom every hour of the day. I am proud of the fact
that India has felt a most profound love for this river, which
nourishes civilisation on its banks, guiding its course from the
silence of the hills to the sea with its myriad voices of solitude.
The love of this river, which has become one with the love of the best
in man, has given rise to this town as an expression of reverence.
This is to show that there are sentiments in us which are creative,
which do not clamour for gain, but overflow in gifts, in spontaneous
generosity of self-sacrifice.
But our minds will nevermore cease to be haunted by the perturbed
spirit of the question, "What about gunny-bags? " I admit they are
indispensable, and am willing to allow them a place in society, if my
opponent will only admit that even gunny-bags should have their
limits, and will acknowledge the importance of leisure to man, with
space for joy and worship, and a home of wholesale privacy, with
associations of chaste love and mutual service. If this concession to
humanity be denied or curtailed, and if profit and production are
allowed to run amuck, they will play havoc with our love of beauty, of
truth, of justice, and also with our love for our fellow-beings. So it
comes about that the peasant cultivators of jute, who live on the
brink of everlasting famine, are combined against, and driven to lower
the price of their labours to the point of blank despair, by those who
earn more than cent per cent profit and wallow in the infamy of their
wealth. The facts that man is brave and kind, that he is social and
generous and self-sacrificing, have some aspect of the complete in
them; but the fact that he is a manufacturer of gunny-bags is too
ridiculously small to claim the right of reducing his higher nature to
insignificance. The fragmentariness of utility should never forget its
subordinate position in human affairs. It must not be permitted to
occupy more than its legitimate place and power in society, nor to
have the liberty to desecrate the poetry of life, to deaden our
sensitiveness to ideals, bragging of its own coarseness as a sign of
virility. The pity is that when in the centre of our activities we
acknowledge, by some proud name, the supremacy of wanton
destructiveness, or production not less wanton, we shut out all the
lights of our souls, and in that darkness our conscience and our
consciousness of shame are hidden, and our love of freedom is killed.
I do not for a moment mean to imply that in any particular period of
history men were free from the disturbance of their lower passions.
Selfishness ever had its share in government and trade. Yet there was
a struggle to maintain a balance of forces in society; and our
passions cherished no delusions about their own rank and value. They
contrived no clever devices to hoodwink our moral nature. For in those
days our intellect was not tempted to put its weight into the balance
on the side of over-greed.
But in recent centuries a devastating change has come over our
mentality with regard to the acquisition of money. Whereas in former
ages men treated it with condescension, even with disrespect, now they
bend their knees to it. That it should be allowed a sufficiently large
place in society, there can be no question; but it becomes an outrage
when it occupies those seats which are specially reserved for the
immortals, by bribing us, tampering with our moral pride, recruiting
the best strength of society in a traitor's campaign against human
ideals, thus disguising, with the help of pomp and pageantry, its true
insignificance. Such a state of things has come to pass because, with
the help of science, the possibilities of profit have suddenly become
immoderate. The whole of the human world, throughout its length and
breadth, has felt the gravitational pull of a giant planet of greed,
with concentric rings of innumerable satellites, causing in our
society a marked deviation from the moral orbit. In former times the
intellectual and spiritual powers of this earth upheld their dignity
of independence and were not giddily rocked on the tides of the money
market. But, as in the last fatal stages of disease, this fatal
influence of money has got into our brain and affected our heart. Like
a usurper, it has occupied the throne of high social ideals, using
every means, by menace and threat, to seize upon the right, and,
tempted by opportunity, presuming to judge it. It has not only science
for its ally, but other forces also that have some semblance of
religion, such as nation-worship and the idealising of organised
selfishness. Its methods are far-reaching and sure. Like the claws of
a tiger's paw, they are softly sheathed. Its massacres are invisible,
because they are fundamental, attacking the very roots of life. Its
plunder is ruthless behind a scientific system of screens, which have
the formal appearance of being open and responsible to inquiries. By
whitewashing its stains it keeps its respectability unblemished. It
makes a liberal use of falsehood in diplomacy, only feeling
embarrassed when its evidence is disclosed by others of the trade. An
unscrupulous system of propaganda paves the way for widespread
misrepresentation. It works up the crowd psychology through regulated
hypnotic doses at repeated intervals, administered in bottles with
moral labels upon them of soothing colours. In fact, man has been able
to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating
the obstructive forces that come from the higher region of his
humanity. With his cult of power and his idolatry of money he has, in
a great measure, reverted to his primitive barbarism, a barbarism
whose path is lit up by the lurid light of intellect. For barbarism is
the simplicity of a superficial life. It may be bewildering in its
surface adornments and complexities, but it lacks the ideal to impart
to it the depth of moral responsibility.
II
Society suffers from a profound feeling of unhappiness, not so much
when it is in material poverty as when its members are deprived of a
large part of their humanity. This unhappiness goes on smouldering in
the subconscious mind of the community till its life is reduced to
ashes or a sudden combustion is produced. The repressed personality of
man generates an inflammable moral gas deadly in its explosive force.
We have seen in the late war, and also in some of the still more
recent events of history, how human individuals freed from moral and
spiritual bonds find a boisterous joy in a debauchery of destruction.
There is generated a disinterested passion of ravage. Through such
catastrophe we can realise what formidable forces of annihilation are
kept in check in our communities by bonds of social ideas; nay, made
into multitudinous manifestations of beauty and fruitfulness. Thus we
know that evils are, like meteors, stray fragments of life, which need
the attraction of some great ideal in order to be assimilated with the
wholesomeness of creation. The evil forces are literally outlaws;
they only need the control and cadence of spiritual laws to change
them into good. The true goodness is not the negation of badness, it
is in the mastery of it. Goodness is the miracle which turns the
tumult of chaos into a dance of beauty.
In modern society the ideal of wholeness has lost its force. Therefore
its different sections have become detached and resolved into their
elemental character of forces. Labour is a force; so also is Capital;
so are the Government and the People; so are Man and Woman. It is said
that when the forces lying latent in even a handful of dust are
liberated from their bond of unity, they can lift the buildings of a
whole neighbourhood to the height of a mountain. Such disfranchised
forces, irresponsible free-booters, may be useful to us for certain
purposes, but human habitations standing secure on their foundations
are better for us. To own the secret of utilising these forces is a
proud fact for us, but the power of self-control and the
self-dedication of love are truer subjects for the exultation of
mankind. The genii of the Arabian Nights may have in their magic their
lure and fascination for us. But the consciousness of God is of
another order, infinitely more precious in imparting to our minds
ideas of the spiritual power of creation. Yet these genii are abroad
everywhere; and even now, after the late war, their devotees are
getting ready to play further tricks upon humanity by suddenly
spiriting it away to some hill-top of desolation.
III
We know that when, at first, any large body of people in their history
became aware of their unity, they expressed it in some popular symbol
of divinity. For they felt that their combination was not an
arithmetical one; its truth was deeper than the truth of number. They
felt that their community was not a mere agglutination but a creation,
having upon it the living touch of the infinite Person. The
realisation of this truth having been an end in itself, a fulfilment,
it gave meaning to self-sacrifice, to the acceptance even of death.
But our modern education is producing a habit of mind which is ever
weakening in us the spiritual apprehension of truth--the truth of a
person as the ultimate reality of existence. Science has its proper
sphere in analysing this world as a construction, just as grammar has
its legitimate office in analysing the syntax of a poem. But the
world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than
a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes
exclusive hold of our minds.
Upon the loss of this sense of a universal personality, which is
religion, the reign of the machine and of method has been firmly
established, and man, humanly speaking, has been made a homeless
tramp. As nomads, ravenous and restless, the men from the West have
come to us. They have exploited our Eastern humanity for sheer gain of
power. This modern meeting of men has not yet received the blessing of
God. For it has kept us apart, though railway lines are laid far and
wide, and ships are plying from shore to shore to bring us together.
It has been said in the Upanishads:
Yastu sarvani bhutani atmanyevanupashyati
Sarva bhuteshu chatmanam na tato vijugupsate.
(He who sees all things in _atma_, in the infinite spirit,
and the infinite spirit in all beings, remains no longer
unrevealed. )
In the modern civilisation, for which an enormous number of men are
used as materials, and human relationships have in a large measure
become utilitarian, man is imperfectly revealed. For man's revelation
does not lie in the fact that he is a power, but that he is a spirit.
The prevalence of the theory which realises the power of the machine
in the universe, and organises men into machines, is like the eruption
of Etna, tremendous in its force, in its outburst of fire and fume;
but its creeping lava covers up human shelters made by the ages, and
its ashes smother life.
IV
The terribly efficient method of repressing personality in the
individuals and the races who have failed to resist it has, in the
present scientific age, spread all over the world; and in consequence
there have appeared signs of a universal disruption which seems not
far off. Faced with the possibility of such a disaster, which is sure
to affect the successful peoples of the world in their intemperate
prosperity, the great Powers of the West are seeking peace, not by
curbing their greed, or by giving up the exclusive advantages which
they have unjustly acquired, but by concentrating their forces for
mutual security.
But can powers find their equilibrium in themselves? Power has to be
made secure not only against power, but also against weakness; for
there lies the peril of its losing balance. The weak are as great a
danger for the strong as quicksands for an elephant. They do not
assist progress because they do not resist; they only drag down. The
people who grow accustomed to wield absolute power over others are apt
to forget that by so doing they generate an unseen force which some
day rends that power into pieces. The dumb fury of the downtrodden
finds its awful support from the universal law of moral balance. The
air which is so thin and unsubstantial gives birth to storms that
nothing can resist. This has been proved in history over and over
again, and stormy forces arising from the revolt of insulted humanity
are openly gathering in the air at the present time.
Yet in the psychology of the strong the lesson is despised and no
count taken of the terribleness of the weak. This is the latent
ignorance that, like an unsuspected worm, burrows under the bulk of
the prosperous. Have we never read of the castle of power, securely
buttressed on all sides, in a moment dissolving in air at the
explosion caused by the weak and outraged besiegers? Politicians
calculate upon the number of mailed hands that are kept on the
sword-hilts: they do not possess the third eye to see the great
invisible hand that clasps in silence the hand of the helpless and
waits its time. The strong form their league by a combination of
powers, driving the weak to form their own league alone with their
God. I know I am crying in the wilderness when I raise the voice of
warning; and while the West is busy with its organisation of a
machine-made peace, it will still continue to nourish by its
iniquities the underground forces of earthquake in the Eastern
Continent. The West seems unconscious that Science, by providing it
with more and more power, is tempting it to suicide and encouraging it
to accept the challenge of the disarmed; it does not know that the
challenge comes from a higher source.
Two prophecies about the world's salvation are cherished in the hearts
of the two great religions of the world. They represent the highest
expectation of man, thereby indicating his faith in a truth which he
instinctively considers as ultimate--the truth of love. These
prophecies have not for their vision the fettering of the world and
reducing it to tameness by means of a close-linked power forged in the
factory of a political steel trust. One of the religions has for its
meditation the image of the Buddha who is to come, Maitreya, the
Buddha of love; and he is to bring peace. The other religion waits for
the coming of Christ. For Christ preached peace when he preached love,
when he preached the oneness of the Father with the brothers who are
many. And this was the truth of peace. Christ never held that peace
was the best policy. For policy is not truth. The calculation of
self-interest can never successfully fight the irrational force of
passion--the passion which is perversion of love, and which can only
be set right by the truth of love. So long as the powers build a
league on the foundation of their desire for safety, secure enjoyment
of gains, consolidation of past injustice, and putting off the
reparation of wrongs, while their fingers still wriggle for greed and
reek of blood, rifts will appear in their union; and in future their
conflicts will take greater force and magnitude. It is political and
commercial egoism which is the evil harbinger of war. By different
combinations it changes its shape and dimensions, but not its nature.
This egoism is still held sacred, and made a religion; and such a
religion, by a mere change of temple, and by new committees of
priests, will never save mankind. We must know that, as, through
science and commerce, the realisation of the unity of the material
world gives us power, so the realisation of the great spiritual Unity
of Man alone can give us peace.
THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM
(A LETTER FROM NEW YORK TO THE AUTHOR'S OWN COUNTRYMEN)
When freedom is not an inner idea which imparts strength to our
activities and breadth to our creations, when it is merely a thing of
external circumstance, it is like an open space to one who is
blindfolded.
In my recent travels in the West I have felt that out there freedom as
an idea has become feeble and ineffectual. Consequently a spirit of
repression and coercion is fast spreading in the politics and social
relationships of the people.
In the age of monarchy the king lived surrounded by a miasma of
intrigue. At court there was an endless whispering of lies and
calumny, and much plotting and planning among the conspiring courtiers
to manipulate the king as the instrument of their own purposes.
In the present age intrigue plays a wider part, and affects the whole
country. The people are drugged with the hashish of false hopes and
urged to deeds of frightfulness by the goadings of manufactured
panics; their higher feelings are exploited by devious channels of
unctuous hypocrisy, their pockets picked under anaesthetics of
flattery, their very psychology affected by a conspiracy of money and
unscrupulous diplomacy.
In the old order the king was given to understand that he was the
freest individual in the world. A greater semblance of external
freedom, no doubt, he had than other individuals. But they built for
him a gorgeous prison of unreality.
The same thing is happening now with the people of the West. They are
flattered into believing that they are free, and they have the
sovereign power in their hands. But this power is robbed by hosts of
self-seekers, and the horse is captured and stabled because of his
gift of freedom over space. The mob-mind is allowed the enjoyment of
an apparent liberty, while its true freedom is curtailed on every
side. Its thoughts are fashioned according to the plans of organised
interest; in its choosing of ideas and forming of opinions it is
hindered either by some punitive force or by the constant insinuation
of untruths; it is made to dwell in an artificial world of hypnotic
phrases. In fact, the people have become the storehouse of a power
that attracts round it a swarm of adventurers who are secretly
investing its walls to exploit it for their own devices.
Thus it has become more and more evident to me that the ideal of
freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West. The mentality
is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men
tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of
mutual distrust and fear. The appalling scenes of inhumanity and
injustice, which are growing familiar to us, are the outcome of a
psychology that deals with terror. No cruelty can be uglier in its
ferocity than the cruelty of the coward. The people who have
sacrificed their souls to the passion of profit-making and the
drunkenness of power are constantly pursued by phantoms of panic and
suspicion, and therefore they are ruthless even where they are least
afraid of mischances. They become morally incapable of allowing
freedom to others, and in their eagerness to curry favour with the
powerful they not only connive at the injustice done by their own
partners in political gambling, but participate in it. A perpetual
anxiety for the protection of their gains at any cost strikes at the
love of freedom and justice, until at length they are ready to forgo
liberty for themselves and for others.
My experience in the West, where I have realised the immense power of
money and of organised propaganda,--working everywhere behind screens
of camouflage, creating an atmosphere of distrust, timidity, and
antipathy,--has impressed me deeply with the truth that real freedom
is of the mind and spirit; it can never come to us from outside. He
only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to
extend it to others. He who cares to have slaves must chain himself to
them; he who builds walls to create exclusion for others builds walls
across his own freedom; he who distrusts freedom in others loses his
moral right to it. Sooner or later he is lured into the meshes of
physical and moral servility.
Therefore I would urge my own countrymen to ask themselves if the
freedom to which they aspire is one of external conditions. Is it
merely a transferable commodity? Have they acquired a true love of
freedom? Have they faith in it? Are they ready to make space in their
society for the minds of their children to grow up in the ideal of
human dignity, unhindered by restrictions that are unjust and
irrational?
Have we not made elaborately permanent the walls of our social
compartments? We are tenaciously proud of their exclusiveness. We
boast that, in this world, no other society but our own has come to
finality in the classifying of its living members. Yet in our
political agitations we conveniently forget that any unnaturalness in
the relationship of governors and governed which humiliates us,
becomes an outrage when it is artificially fixed under the threat of
military persecution.
When India gave voice to immortal thoughts, in the time of fullest
vigour of vitality, her children had the fearless spirit of the
seekers of truth. The great epic of the soul of our people--the
_Mahabharata_--gives us a wonderful vision of an overflowing life,
full of the freedom of inquiry and experiment. When the age of the
Buddha came, humanity was stirred in our country to its uttermost
depth. The freedom of mind which it produced expressed itself in a
wealth of creation, spreading everywhere in its richness over the
continent of Asia. But with the ebb of life in India the spirit of
creation died away. It hardened into an age of inert construction. The
organic unity of a varied and elastic society gave way to a
conventional order which proved its artificial character by its
inexorable law of exclusion.
Life has its inequalities, I admit, but they are natural and are in
harmony with our vital functions. The head keeps its place apart from
the feet, not through some external arrangement or any conspiracy of
coercion. If the body is compelled to turn somersaults for an
indefinite period, the head never exchanges its relative function for
that of the feet. But have our social divisions the same
inevitableness of organic law? If we have the hardihood to say "yes"
to that question, then how can we blame an alien people for subjecting
us to a political order which they are tempted to believe eternal?
By squeezing human beings in the grip of an inelastic system and
forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and
growth. We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making
them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design,
and of mastering their own destiny. Borrowing our ideal of life from a
dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness
of soul under the immovable weight of a remote past. We have set up an
elaborate ceremonial of cage-worship, and plucked all the feathers
from the wings of the living spirit of our people. And for us,--with
our centuries of degradation and insult, with the amorphousness of our
national unity, with our helplessness before the attack of disasters
from without and our unreasoning self-obstructions from within,--the
punishment has been terrible. Our stupefaction has become so absolute
that we do not even realise that this persistent misfortune, dogging
our steps for ages, cannot be a mere accident of history, removable
only by another accident from outside.
Unless we have true faith in freedom, knowing it to be creative,
manfully taking all its risks, not only do we lose the right to claim
freedom in politics, but we also lack the power to maintain it with
all our strength. For that would be like assigning the service of God
to a confirmed atheist. And men, who contemptuously treat their own
brothers and sisters as eternal babies, never to be trusted in the
most trivial details of their personal life,--coercing them at every
step by the cruel threat of persecution into following a blind lane
leading to nowhere, driving a number of them into hypocrisy and into
moral inertia,--will fail over and over again to rise to the height of
their true and severe responsibility. They will be incapable of
holding a just freedom in politics, and of fighting in freedom's
cause.
The civilisation of the West has in it the spirit of the machine which
must move; and to that blind movement human lives are offered as fuel,
keeping up the steam-power. It represents the active aspect of inertia
which has the appearance of freedom, but not its truth, and therefore
gives rise to slavery both within its boundaries and outside. The
present civilisation of India has the constraining power of the mould.
It squeezes living man in the grip of rigid regulations, and its
repression of individual freedom makes it only too easy for men to be
forced into submission of all kinds and degrees. In both of these
traditions life is offered up to something which is not life; it is a
sacrifice, which has no God for its worship, and is therefore utterly
in vain. The West is continually producing mechanical power in excess
of its spiritual control, and India has produced a system of
mechanical control in excess of its vitality.
THE NATION
The peoples are living beings. They have their distinct personalities.
But nations are organisations of power, and therefore their inner
aspects and outward expressions are everywhere monotonously the same.
Their differences are merely differences in degree of efficiency.
In the modern world the fight is going on between the living spirit of
the people and the methods of nation-organising. It is like the
struggle that began in Central Asia between cultivated areas of man's
habitation and the continually encroaching desert sands, till the
human region of life and beauty was choked out of existence. When the
spread of higher ideals of humanity is not held to be important, the
hardening method of national efficiency gains a certain strength; and
for some limited period of time, at least, it proudly asserts itself
as the fittest to survive. But it is the survival of that part of man
which is the least living. And this is the reason why dead monotony is
the sign of the spread of the Nation. The modern towns, which present
the physiognomy due to this dominance of the Nation, are everywhere
the same, from San Francisco to London, from London to Tokyo. They
show no faces, but merely masks.
The peoples, being living personalities, must have their
self-expression, and this leads to their distinctive creations. These
creations are literature, art, social symbols and ceremonials. They
are like different dishes at one common feast.
to approach God through the senses we miss him:
Bring him not into your house as the guest of your eyes;
but let him come at your heart's invitation.
Opening your doors to that which is seen only, is to lose it.
Yet, being a poet, he also knows that the objects of sense can reveal
their spiritual meaning only when they are not seen through mere
physical eyes:
Eyes can see only dust and earth,
But feel it with your heart, it is pure joy.
The flowers of delight blossom on all sides, in every form,
but where is your heart's thread to weave them in a garland?
These Bauls have a philosophy, which they call the philosophy of the
body; but they keep its secret; it is only for the initiated.
Evidently the underlying idea is that the individual's body is itself
the temple, in whose inner mystic shrine the Divine appears before the
soul, and the key to it has to be found from those who know. But as
the key is not for us outsiders, I leave it with the observation that
this mystic philosophy of the body is the outcome of the attempt to
get rid of all the outward shelters which are too costly for people
like themselves. But this human body of ours is made by God's own
hand, from his own love, and even if some men, in the pride of their
superiority, may despise it, God finds his joy in dwelling in others
of yet lower birth. It is a truth easier of discovery by these people
of humble origin than by men of proud estate.
The pride of the Baul beggar is not in his worldly distinction, but in
the distinction that God himself has given to him. He feels himself
like a flute through which God's own breath of love has been breathed:
My heart is like a flute he has played on.
If ever it fall into other hands,--
let him fling it away.
My lover's flute is dear to him.
Therefore, if to-day alien breath have entered it and
sounded strange notes,
Let him break it to pieces and strew the dust with them.
So we find that this man also has his disgust of defilement. While the
ambitious world of wealth and power despises him, he in his turn
thinks that the world's touch desecrates him who has been made sacred
by the touch of his Lover. He does not envy us our life of ambition
and achievements, but he knows how precious his own life has been:
I am poured forth in living notes of joy and sorrow by your breath.
Morning and evening, in summer and in rains, I am fashioned to music.
Yet should I be wholly spent in some flight of song,
I shall not grieve, the tune is so precious to me.
Our joys and sorrows are contradictory when self separates them in
opposition. But for the heart in which self merges in God's love,
they lose their absoluteness. So the Baul's prayer is to feel in all
situations--in danger, or pain, or sorrow--that he is in God's hands.
He solves the problem of emancipation from sufferings by accepting and
setting them in a higher context:
I am the boat, you are the sea, and also the boatman.
Though you never make the shore, though you let me sink,
why should I be foolish and afraid?
Is the reaching the shore a greater prize than losing myself
with you?
If you are only the haven, as they say, then what is the sea?
Let it surge and toss me on its waves, I shall be content.
I live in you, whatever and however you appear.
Save me or kill me as you wish, only never leave me in
others' hands.
III
It is needless to say, before I conclude, that I had neither the
training nor the opportunity to study this mendicant religious sect in
Bengal from an ethnological standpoint. I was attracted to find out
how the living currents of religious movements work in the heart of
the people, saving them from degradation imposed by the society of the
learned, of the rich, or of the high-born; how the spirit of man, by
making use even of its obstacles, reaches fulfilment, led thither, not
by the learned authorities in the scriptures, or by the mechanical
impulse of the dogma-driven crowd, but by the unsophisticated
aspiration of the loving soul. On the inaccessible mountain peaks of
theology the snows of creed remain eternally rigid, cold, and pure.
But God's manifest shower falls direct on the plain of humble hearts,
flowing there in various channels, even getting mixed with some mud in
its course, as it is soaked into the underground currents, invisible,
but ever-moving.
I can think of nothing better than to conclude my paper with a poem of
Jnandas, in which the aspiration of all simple spirits has found a
devout expression:
I had travelled all day and was tired; then I bowed my head
towards thy kingly court still far away.
The night deepened, a longing burned in my heart.
Whatever the words I sang, pain cried through them--for
even my songs thirsted--
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
When time seemed lost in darkness,
thy hand dropped its sceptre to take up the lute and
strike the uttermost chords;
And my heart sang out,
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
Ah, who is this whose arms enfold me?
Whatever I have to leave, let me leave; and whatever I
have to bear, let me bear.
Only let me walk with thee,
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
Descend at whiles from thy high audience hall, come down
amid joys and sorrows.
Hide in all forms and delights, in love,
And in my heart sing thy songs,--
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
EAST AND WEST
I
It is not always a profound interest in man that carries travellers
nowadays to distant lands. More often it is the facility for rapid
movement. For lack of time and for the sake of convenience we
generalise and crush our human facts into the packages within the
steel trunks that hold our travellers' reports.
Our knowledge of our own countrymen and our feelings about them have
slowly and unconsciously grown out of innumerable facts which are full
of contradictions and subject to incessant change. They have the
elusive mystery and fluidity of life. We cannot define to ourselves
what we are as a whole, because we know too much; because our
knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of
personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or
sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our
compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the
generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form.
When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes
the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his
rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable authority of his
personal experience. It is like a man who has his own boat for
crossing his village stream, but, on being compelled to wade across
some strange watercourse, draws angry comparisons as he goes from
every patch of mud and every pebble which his feet encounter.
Our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are
insular. There are men who become impatient and angry at the least
discomfort when their habits are incommoded. In their idea of the next
world they probably conjure up the ghosts of their slippers and
dressing-gowns, and expect the latchkey that opens their lodging-house
door on earth to fit their front door in the other world. As
travellers they are a failure; for they have grown too accustomed to
their mental easy-chairs, and in their intellectual nature love home
comforts, which are of local make, more than the realities of life,
which, like earth itself, are full of ups and downs, yet are one in
their rounded completeness.
The modern age has brought the geography of the earth near to us, but
made it difficult for us to come into touch with man. We go to strange
lands and observe; we do not live there. We hardly meet men: but only
specimens of knowledge. We are in haste to seek for general types and
overlook individuals.
When we fall into the habit of neglecting to use the understanding
that comes of sympathy in our travels, our knowledge of foreign people
grows insensitive, and therefore easily becomes both unjust and cruel
in its character, and also selfish and contemptuous in its
application. Such has, too often, been the case with regard to the
meeting of Western people in our days with others for whom they do not
recognise any obligation of kinship.
It has been admitted that the dealings between different races of men
are not merely between individuals; that our mutual understanding is
either aided, or else obstructed, by the general emanations forming
the social atmosphere. These emanations are our collective ideas and
collective feelings, generated according to special historical
circumstances.
For instance, the caste-idea is a collective idea in India. When we
approach an Indian who is under the influence of this collective idea,
he is no longer a pure individual with his conscience fully awake to
the judging of the value of a human being. He is more or less a
passive medium for giving expression to the sentiment of a whole
community.
It is evident that the caste-idea is not creative; it is merely
institutional. It adjusts human beings according to some mechanical
arrangement. It emphasises the negative side of the individual--his
separateness. It hurts the complete truth in man.
In the West, also, the people have a certain collective idea that
obscures their humanity. Let me try to explain what I feel about it.
II
Lately I went to visit some battlefields of France which had been
devastated by war. The awful calm of desolation, which still bore
wrinkles of pain--death-struggles stiffened into ugly ridges--brought
before my mind the vision of a huge demon, which had no shape, no
meaning, yet had two arms that could strike and break and tear, a
gaping mouth that could devour, and bulging brains that could conspire
and plan. It was a purpose, which had a living body, but no complete
humanity to temper it. Because it was passion--belonging to life, and
yet not having the wholeness of life--it was the most terrible of
life's enemies.
Something of the same sense of oppression in a different degree, the
same desolation in a different aspect, is produced in my mind when I
realise the effect of the West upon Eastern life--the West which, in
its relation to us, is all plan and purpose incarnate, without any
superfluous humanity.
I feel the contrast very strongly in Japan. In that country the old
world presents itself with some ideal of perfection, in which man has
his varied opportunities of self-revelation in art, in ceremonial, in
religious faith, and in customs expressing the poetry of social
relationship. There one feels that deep delight of hospitality which
life offers to life. And side by side, in the same soil, stands the
modern world, which is stupendously big and powerful, but
inhospitable. It has no simple-hearted welcome for man. It is living;
yet the incompleteness of life's ideal within it cannot but hurt
humanity.
The wriggling tentacles of a cold-blooded utilitarianism, with which
the West has grasped all the easily yielding succulent portions of the
East, are causing pain and indignation throughout the Eastern
countries. The West comes to us, not with the imagination and sympathy
that create and unite, but with a shock of passion--passion for power
and wealth. This passion is a mere force, which has in it the
principle of separation, of conflict.
I have been fortunate in coming into close touch with individual men
and women of the Western countries, and have felt with them their
sorrows and shared their aspirations. I have known that they seek the
same God, who is my God--even those who deny Him. I feel certain that,
if the great light of culture be extinct in Europe, our horizon in the
East will mourn in darkness. It does not hurt my pride to acknowledge
that, in the present age, Western humanity has received its mission to
be the teacher of the world; that her science, through the mastery of
laws of nature, is to liberate human souls from the dark dungeon of
matter. For this very reason I have realised all the more strongly,
on the other hand, that the dominant collective idea in the Western
countries is not creative. It is ready to enslave or kill individuals,
to drug a great people with soul-killing poison, darkening their whole
future with the black mist of stupefaction, and emasculating entire
races of men to the utmost degree of helplessness. It is wholly
wanting in spiritual power to blend and harmonise; it lacks the sense
of the great personality of man.
The most significant fact of modern days is this, that the West has
met the East. Such a momentous meeting of humanity, in order to be
fruitful, must have in its heart some great emotional idea, generous
and creative. There can be no doubt that God's choice has fallen upon
the knights-errant of the West for the service of the present age;
arms and armour have been given to them; but have they yet realised in
their hearts the single-minded loyalty to their cause which can resist
all temptations of bribery from the devil? The world to-day is offered
to the West. She will destroy it, if she does not use it for a great
creation of man. The materials for such a creation are in the hands of
science; but the creative genius is in Man's spiritual ideal.
III
When I was young a stranger from Europe came to Bengal. He chose his
lodging among the people of the country, shared with them their frugal
diet, and freely offered them his service. He found employment in the
houses of the rich, teaching them French and German, and the money
thus earned he spent to help poor students in buying books. This meant
for him hours of walking in the mid-day heat of a tropical summer;
for, intent upon exercising the utmost economy, he refused to hire
conveyances. He was pitiless in his exaction from himself of his
resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation;
and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was
not born, yet whom he dearly loved. He did not come to us with a
professional mission of teaching sectarian creeds; he had not in his
nature the least trace of that self-sufficiency of goodness, which
humiliates by gifts the victims of its insolent benevolence. Though he
did not know our language, he took every occasion to frequent our
meetings and ceremonies; yet he was always afraid of intrusion, and
tenderly anxious lest he might offend us by his ignorance of our
customs. At last, under the continual strain of work in an alien
climate and surroundings, his health broke down. He died, and was
cremated at our burning-ground, according to his express desire.
The attitude of his mind, the manner of his living, the object of his
life, his modesty, his unstinted self-sacrifice for a people who had
not even the power to give publicity to any benefaction bestowed upon
them, were so utterly unlike anything we were accustomed to associate
with the Europeans in India, that it gave rise in our mind to a
feeling of love bordering upon awe.
We all have a realm, a private paradise, in our mind, where dwell
deathless memories of persons who brought some divine light to our
life's experience, who may not be known to others, and whose names
have no place in the pages of history. Let me confess to you that this
man lives as one of those immortals in the paradise of my individual
life.
He came from Sweden, his name was Hammargren. What was most remarkable
in the event of his coming to us in Bengal was the fact that in his
own country he had chanced to read some works of my great countryman,
Ram Mohan Roy, and felt an immense veneration for his genius and his
character. Ram Mohan Roy lived in the beginning of the last century,
and it is no exaggeration when I describe him as one of the immortal
personalities of modern time. This young Swede had the unusual gift of
a far-sighted intellect and sympathy, which enabled him even from his
distance of space and time, and in spite of racial differences, to
realise the greatness of Ram Mohan Roy. It moved him so deeply that he
resolved to go to the country which produced this great man, and offer
her his service. He was poor, and he had to wait some time in England
before he could earn his passage money to India. There he came at
last, and in reckless generosity of love utterly spent himself to the
last breath of his life, away from home and kindred and all the
inheritances of his motherland. His stay among us was too short to
produce any outward result. He failed even to achieve during his life
what he had in his mind, which was to found by the help of his scanty
earnings a library as a memorial to Ram Mohan Roy, and thus to leave
behind him a visible symbol of his devotion. But what I prize most in
this European youth, who left no record of his life behind him, is not
the memory of any service of goodwill, but the precious gift of
respect which he offered to a people who are fallen upon evil times,
and whom it is so easy to ignore or to humiliate. For the first time
in the modern days this obscure individual from Sweden brought to our
country the chivalrous courtesy of the West, a greeting of human
fellowship.
The coincidence came to me with a great and delightful surprise when
the Nobel Prize was offered to me from Sweden. As a recognition of
individual merit it was of great value to me, no doubt; but it was the
acknowledgment of the East as a collaborator with the Western
continents, in contributing its riches to the common stock of
civilisation, which had the chief significance for the present age. It
meant joining hands in comradeship by the two great hemispheres of the
human world across the sea.
IV
To-day the real East remains unexplored. The blindness of contempt is
more hopeless than the blindness of ignorance; for contempt kills the
light which ignorance merely leaves unignited. The East is waiting to
be understood by the Western races, in order not only to be able to
give what is true in her, but also to be confident of her own mission.
In Indian history, the meeting of the Mussulman and the Hindu produced
Akbar, the object of whose dream was the unification of hearts and
ideals. It had all the glowing enthusiasm of a religion, and it
produced an immediate and a vast result even in his own lifetime.
But the fact still remains that the Western mind, after centuries of
contact with the East, has not evolved the enthusiasm of a chivalrous
ideal which can bring this age to its fulfilment. It is everywhere
raising thorny hedges of exclusion and offering human sacrifices to
national self-seeking. It has intensified the mutual feelings of envy
among Western races themselves, as they fight over their spoils and
display a carnivorous pride in their snarling rows of teeth.
We must again guard our minds from any encroaching distrust of the
individuals of a nation. The active love of humanity and the spirit of
martyrdom for the cause of justice and truth which I have met with in
the Western countries have been a great lesson and inspiration to me.
I have no doubt in my mind that the West owes its true greatness, not
so much to its marvellous training of intellect, as to its spirit of
service devoted to the welfare of man. Therefore I speak with a
personal feeling of pain and sadness about the collective power which
is guiding the helm of Western civilisation. It is a passion, not an
ideal. The more success it has brought to Europe, the more costly it
will prove to her at last, when the accounts have to be rendered. And
the signs are unmistakable, that the accounts have been called for.
The time has come when Europe must know that the forcible parasitism
which she has been practising upon the two large Continents of the
world--the two most unwieldy whales of humanity--must be causing to
her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration.
As an example, let me quote the following extract from the concluding
chapter of _From the Cape to Cairo_, by Messrs. Grogan and Sharp, two
writers who have the power to inculcate their doctrines by precept and
example. In their reference to the African they are candid, as when
they say, "We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. "
These two sentences, carefully articulated, with a smack of
enjoyment, have been more clearly explained in the following
statement, where some sense of that decency which is the attenuated
ghost of a buried conscience, prompts the writers to use the phrase
"compulsory labour" in place of the honest word "slavery"; just as the
modern politician adroitly avoids the word "injunction" and uses the
word "mandate. " "Compulsory labour in some form," they say, "is the
corollary of our occupation of the country. " And they add: "It is
pathetic, but it is history," implying thereby that moral sentiments
have no serious effect in the history of human beings.
Elsewhere they write: "Either we must give up the country
commercially, or we must make the African work. And mere abuse of
those who point out the impasse cannot change the facts. We must
decide, and soon. Or rather the white man of South Africa will
decide. " The authors also confess that they have seen too much of the
world "to have any lingering belief that Western civilisation benefits
native races. "
The logic is simple--the logic of egoism. But the argument is
simplified by lopping off the greater part of the premise. For these
writers seem to hold that the only important question for the white
men of South Africa is, how indefinitely to grow fat on ostrich
feathers and diamond mines, and dance jazz dances over the misery and
degradation of a whole race of fellow-beings of a different colour
from their own. Possibly they believe that moral laws have a special
domesticated breed of comfortable concessions for the service of the
people in power. Possibly they ignore the fact that commercial and
political cannibalism, profitably practised upon foreign races, creeps
back nearer home; that the cultivation of unwholesome appetites has
its final reckoning with the stomach which has been made to serve it.
For, after all, man is a spiritual being, and not a mere living
money-bag jumping from profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of
human races in its financial leapfrog.
Such, however, has been the condition of things for more than a
century; and to-day, trying to read the future by the light of the
European conflagration, we are asking ourselves everywhere in the
East: "Is this frightfully overgrown power really great? It can bruise
us from without, but can it add to our wealth of spirit? It can sign
peace treaties, but can it give peace? "
It was about two thousand years ago that all-powerful Rome in one of
its eastern provinces executed on a cross a simple teacher of an
obscure tribe of fishermen. On that day the Roman governor felt no
falling off of his appetite or sleep. On that day there was, on the
one hand, the agony, the humiliation, the death; on the other, the
pomp of pride and festivity in the Governor's palace.
And to-day? To whom, then, shall we bow the head?
Kasmai devaya havisha vidhema?
(To which God shall we offer oblation? )
We know of an instance in our own history of India, when a great
personality, both in his life and voice, struck the keynote of the
solemn music of the soul--love for all creatures. And that music
crossed seas, mountains, and deserts. Races belonging to different
climates, habits, and languages were drawn together, not in the clash
of arms, not in the conflict of exploitation, but in harmony of life,
in amity and peace. That was creation.
When we think of it, we see at once what the confusion of thought was
to which the Western poet, dwelling upon the difference between East
and West, referred when he said, "Never the twain shall meet. " It is
true that they are not yet showing any real sign of meeting. But the
reason is because the West has not sent out its humanity to meet the
man in the East, but only its machine. Therefore the poet's line has
to be changed into something like this:
Man is man, machine is machine,
And never the twain shall wed.
You must know that red tape can never be a common human bond; that
official sealing-wax can never provide means of mutual attachment;
that it is a painful ordeal for human beings to have to receive
favours from animated pigeonholes, and condescensions from printed
circulars that give notice but never speak. The presence of the
Western people in the East is a human fact. If we are to gain anything
from them, it must not be a mere sum-total of legal codes and systems
of civil and military services. Man is a great deal more to man than
that. We have our human birthright to claim direct help from the man
of the West, if he has anything great to give us. It must come to us,
not through mere facts in a juxtaposition, but through the
spontaneous sacrifice made by those who have the gift, and therefore
the responsibility.
Earnestly I ask the poet of the Western world to realise and sing to
you with all the great power of music which he has, that the East and
the West are ever in search of each other, and that they must meet not
merely in the fulness of physical strength, but in fulness of truth;
that the right hand, which wields the sword, has the need of the left,
which holds the shield of safety.
The East has its seat in the vast plains watched over by the
snow-peaked mountains and fertilised by rivers carrying mighty volumes
of water to the sea. There, under the blaze of a tropical sun, the
physical life has bedimmed the light of its vigour and lessened its
claims. There man has had the repose of mind which has ever tried to
set itself in harmony with the inner notes of existence. In the
silence of sunrise and sunset, and on star-crowded nights, he has sat
face to face with the Infinite, waiting for the revelation that opens
up the heart of all that there is. He has said, in a rapture of
realisation:
"Hearken to me, ye children of the Immortal, who dwell in the Kingdom
of Heaven. I have known, from beyond darkness, the Supreme Person,
shining with the radiance of the sun. "
The man from the East, with his faith in the eternal, who in his soul
had met the touch of the Supreme Person--did he never come to you in
the West and speak to you of the Kingdom of Heaven? Did he not unite
the East and the West in truth, in the unity of one spiritual bond
between all children of the Immortal, in the realisation of one great
Personality in all human persons?
Yes, the East did once meet the West profoundly in the growth of her
life. Such union became possible, because the East came to the West
with the ideal that is creative, and not with the passion that
destroys moral bonds. The mystic consciousness of the Infinite, which
she brought with her, was greatly needed by the man of the West to
give him his balance.
On the other hand, the East must find her own balance in Science--the
magnificent gift that the West can bring to her. Truth has its nest as
well as its sky. That nest is definite in structure, accurate in law
of construction; and though it has to be changed and rebuilt over and
over again, the need of it is never-ending and its laws are eternal.
For some centuries the East has neglected the nest-building of truth.
She has not been attentive to learn its secret. Trying to cross the
trackless infinite, the East has relied solely upon her wings. She has
spurned the earth, till, buffeted by storms, her wings are hurt and
she is tired, sorely needing help. But has she then to be told that
the messenger of the sky and the builder of the nest shall never
meet?
THE MODERN AGE
I
Wherever man meets man in a living relationship, the meeting finds its
natural expression in works of art, the signatures of beauty, in which
the mingling of the personal touch leaves its memorial.
On the other hand, a relationship of pure utility humiliates man--it
ignores the rights and needs of his deeper nature; it feels no
compunction in maltreating and killing things of beauty that can never
be restored.
Some years ago, when I set out from Calcutta on my voyage to Japan,
the first thing that shocked me, with a sense of personal injury, was
the ruthless intrusion of the factories for making gunny-bags on both
banks of the Ganges. The blow it gave to me was owing to the precious
memory of the days of my boyhood, when the scenery of this river was
the only great thing near my birthplace reminding me of the existence
of a world which had its direct communication with our innermost
spirit.
Calcutta is an upstart town with no depth of sentiment in her face and
in her manners. It may truly be said about her genesis:--In the
beginning there was the spirit of the Shop, which uttered through its
megaphone, "Let there be the Office! " and there was Calcutta. She
brought with her no dower of distinction, no majesty of noble or
romantic origin; she never gathered around her any great historical
associations, any annals of brave sufferings, or memory of mighty
deeds. The only thing which gave her the sacred baptism of beauty was
the river. I was fortunate enough to be born before the smoke-belching
iron dragon had devoured the greater part of the life of its banks;
when the landing-stairs descending into its waters, caressed by its
tides, appeared to me like the loving arms of the villages clinging to
it; when Calcutta, with her up-tilted nose and stony stare, had not
completely disowned her foster-mother, rural Bengal, and had not
surrendered body and soul to her wealthy paramour, the spirit of the
ledger, bound in dead leather.
But as an instance of the contrast of the different ideal of a
different age, incarnated in the form of a town, the memory of my last
visit to Benares comes to my mind. What impressed me most deeply,
while I was there, was the mother-call of the river Ganges, ever
filling the atmosphere with an "unheard melody," attracting the whole
population to its bosom every hour of the day. I am proud of the fact
that India has felt a most profound love for this river, which
nourishes civilisation on its banks, guiding its course from the
silence of the hills to the sea with its myriad voices of solitude.
The love of this river, which has become one with the love of the best
in man, has given rise to this town as an expression of reverence.
This is to show that there are sentiments in us which are creative,
which do not clamour for gain, but overflow in gifts, in spontaneous
generosity of self-sacrifice.
But our minds will nevermore cease to be haunted by the perturbed
spirit of the question, "What about gunny-bags? " I admit they are
indispensable, and am willing to allow them a place in society, if my
opponent will only admit that even gunny-bags should have their
limits, and will acknowledge the importance of leisure to man, with
space for joy and worship, and a home of wholesale privacy, with
associations of chaste love and mutual service. If this concession to
humanity be denied or curtailed, and if profit and production are
allowed to run amuck, they will play havoc with our love of beauty, of
truth, of justice, and also with our love for our fellow-beings. So it
comes about that the peasant cultivators of jute, who live on the
brink of everlasting famine, are combined against, and driven to lower
the price of their labours to the point of blank despair, by those who
earn more than cent per cent profit and wallow in the infamy of their
wealth. The facts that man is brave and kind, that he is social and
generous and self-sacrificing, have some aspect of the complete in
them; but the fact that he is a manufacturer of gunny-bags is too
ridiculously small to claim the right of reducing his higher nature to
insignificance. The fragmentariness of utility should never forget its
subordinate position in human affairs. It must not be permitted to
occupy more than its legitimate place and power in society, nor to
have the liberty to desecrate the poetry of life, to deaden our
sensitiveness to ideals, bragging of its own coarseness as a sign of
virility. The pity is that when in the centre of our activities we
acknowledge, by some proud name, the supremacy of wanton
destructiveness, or production not less wanton, we shut out all the
lights of our souls, and in that darkness our conscience and our
consciousness of shame are hidden, and our love of freedom is killed.
I do not for a moment mean to imply that in any particular period of
history men were free from the disturbance of their lower passions.
Selfishness ever had its share in government and trade. Yet there was
a struggle to maintain a balance of forces in society; and our
passions cherished no delusions about their own rank and value. They
contrived no clever devices to hoodwink our moral nature. For in those
days our intellect was not tempted to put its weight into the balance
on the side of over-greed.
But in recent centuries a devastating change has come over our
mentality with regard to the acquisition of money. Whereas in former
ages men treated it with condescension, even with disrespect, now they
bend their knees to it. That it should be allowed a sufficiently large
place in society, there can be no question; but it becomes an outrage
when it occupies those seats which are specially reserved for the
immortals, by bribing us, tampering with our moral pride, recruiting
the best strength of society in a traitor's campaign against human
ideals, thus disguising, with the help of pomp and pageantry, its true
insignificance. Such a state of things has come to pass because, with
the help of science, the possibilities of profit have suddenly become
immoderate. The whole of the human world, throughout its length and
breadth, has felt the gravitational pull of a giant planet of greed,
with concentric rings of innumerable satellites, causing in our
society a marked deviation from the moral orbit. In former times the
intellectual and spiritual powers of this earth upheld their dignity
of independence and were not giddily rocked on the tides of the money
market. But, as in the last fatal stages of disease, this fatal
influence of money has got into our brain and affected our heart. Like
a usurper, it has occupied the throne of high social ideals, using
every means, by menace and threat, to seize upon the right, and,
tempted by opportunity, presuming to judge it. It has not only science
for its ally, but other forces also that have some semblance of
religion, such as nation-worship and the idealising of organised
selfishness. Its methods are far-reaching and sure. Like the claws of
a tiger's paw, they are softly sheathed. Its massacres are invisible,
because they are fundamental, attacking the very roots of life. Its
plunder is ruthless behind a scientific system of screens, which have
the formal appearance of being open and responsible to inquiries. By
whitewashing its stains it keeps its respectability unblemished. It
makes a liberal use of falsehood in diplomacy, only feeling
embarrassed when its evidence is disclosed by others of the trade. An
unscrupulous system of propaganda paves the way for widespread
misrepresentation. It works up the crowd psychology through regulated
hypnotic doses at repeated intervals, administered in bottles with
moral labels upon them of soothing colours. In fact, man has been able
to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating
the obstructive forces that come from the higher region of his
humanity. With his cult of power and his idolatry of money he has, in
a great measure, reverted to his primitive barbarism, a barbarism
whose path is lit up by the lurid light of intellect. For barbarism is
the simplicity of a superficial life. It may be bewildering in its
surface adornments and complexities, but it lacks the ideal to impart
to it the depth of moral responsibility.
II
Society suffers from a profound feeling of unhappiness, not so much
when it is in material poverty as when its members are deprived of a
large part of their humanity. This unhappiness goes on smouldering in
the subconscious mind of the community till its life is reduced to
ashes or a sudden combustion is produced. The repressed personality of
man generates an inflammable moral gas deadly in its explosive force.
We have seen in the late war, and also in some of the still more
recent events of history, how human individuals freed from moral and
spiritual bonds find a boisterous joy in a debauchery of destruction.
There is generated a disinterested passion of ravage. Through such
catastrophe we can realise what formidable forces of annihilation are
kept in check in our communities by bonds of social ideas; nay, made
into multitudinous manifestations of beauty and fruitfulness. Thus we
know that evils are, like meteors, stray fragments of life, which need
the attraction of some great ideal in order to be assimilated with the
wholesomeness of creation. The evil forces are literally outlaws;
they only need the control and cadence of spiritual laws to change
them into good. The true goodness is not the negation of badness, it
is in the mastery of it. Goodness is the miracle which turns the
tumult of chaos into a dance of beauty.
In modern society the ideal of wholeness has lost its force. Therefore
its different sections have become detached and resolved into their
elemental character of forces. Labour is a force; so also is Capital;
so are the Government and the People; so are Man and Woman. It is said
that when the forces lying latent in even a handful of dust are
liberated from their bond of unity, they can lift the buildings of a
whole neighbourhood to the height of a mountain. Such disfranchised
forces, irresponsible free-booters, may be useful to us for certain
purposes, but human habitations standing secure on their foundations
are better for us. To own the secret of utilising these forces is a
proud fact for us, but the power of self-control and the
self-dedication of love are truer subjects for the exultation of
mankind. The genii of the Arabian Nights may have in their magic their
lure and fascination for us. But the consciousness of God is of
another order, infinitely more precious in imparting to our minds
ideas of the spiritual power of creation. Yet these genii are abroad
everywhere; and even now, after the late war, their devotees are
getting ready to play further tricks upon humanity by suddenly
spiriting it away to some hill-top of desolation.
III
We know that when, at first, any large body of people in their history
became aware of their unity, they expressed it in some popular symbol
of divinity. For they felt that their combination was not an
arithmetical one; its truth was deeper than the truth of number. They
felt that their community was not a mere agglutination but a creation,
having upon it the living touch of the infinite Person. The
realisation of this truth having been an end in itself, a fulfilment,
it gave meaning to self-sacrifice, to the acceptance even of death.
But our modern education is producing a habit of mind which is ever
weakening in us the spiritual apprehension of truth--the truth of a
person as the ultimate reality of existence. Science has its proper
sphere in analysing this world as a construction, just as grammar has
its legitimate office in analysing the syntax of a poem. But the
world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than
a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes
exclusive hold of our minds.
Upon the loss of this sense of a universal personality, which is
religion, the reign of the machine and of method has been firmly
established, and man, humanly speaking, has been made a homeless
tramp. As nomads, ravenous and restless, the men from the West have
come to us. They have exploited our Eastern humanity for sheer gain of
power. This modern meeting of men has not yet received the blessing of
God. For it has kept us apart, though railway lines are laid far and
wide, and ships are plying from shore to shore to bring us together.
It has been said in the Upanishads:
Yastu sarvani bhutani atmanyevanupashyati
Sarva bhuteshu chatmanam na tato vijugupsate.
(He who sees all things in _atma_, in the infinite spirit,
and the infinite spirit in all beings, remains no longer
unrevealed. )
In the modern civilisation, for which an enormous number of men are
used as materials, and human relationships have in a large measure
become utilitarian, man is imperfectly revealed. For man's revelation
does not lie in the fact that he is a power, but that he is a spirit.
The prevalence of the theory which realises the power of the machine
in the universe, and organises men into machines, is like the eruption
of Etna, tremendous in its force, in its outburst of fire and fume;
but its creeping lava covers up human shelters made by the ages, and
its ashes smother life.
IV
The terribly efficient method of repressing personality in the
individuals and the races who have failed to resist it has, in the
present scientific age, spread all over the world; and in consequence
there have appeared signs of a universal disruption which seems not
far off. Faced with the possibility of such a disaster, which is sure
to affect the successful peoples of the world in their intemperate
prosperity, the great Powers of the West are seeking peace, not by
curbing their greed, or by giving up the exclusive advantages which
they have unjustly acquired, but by concentrating their forces for
mutual security.
But can powers find their equilibrium in themselves? Power has to be
made secure not only against power, but also against weakness; for
there lies the peril of its losing balance. The weak are as great a
danger for the strong as quicksands for an elephant. They do not
assist progress because they do not resist; they only drag down. The
people who grow accustomed to wield absolute power over others are apt
to forget that by so doing they generate an unseen force which some
day rends that power into pieces. The dumb fury of the downtrodden
finds its awful support from the universal law of moral balance. The
air which is so thin and unsubstantial gives birth to storms that
nothing can resist. This has been proved in history over and over
again, and stormy forces arising from the revolt of insulted humanity
are openly gathering in the air at the present time.
Yet in the psychology of the strong the lesson is despised and no
count taken of the terribleness of the weak. This is the latent
ignorance that, like an unsuspected worm, burrows under the bulk of
the prosperous. Have we never read of the castle of power, securely
buttressed on all sides, in a moment dissolving in air at the
explosion caused by the weak and outraged besiegers? Politicians
calculate upon the number of mailed hands that are kept on the
sword-hilts: they do not possess the third eye to see the great
invisible hand that clasps in silence the hand of the helpless and
waits its time. The strong form their league by a combination of
powers, driving the weak to form their own league alone with their
God. I know I am crying in the wilderness when I raise the voice of
warning; and while the West is busy with its organisation of a
machine-made peace, it will still continue to nourish by its
iniquities the underground forces of earthquake in the Eastern
Continent. The West seems unconscious that Science, by providing it
with more and more power, is tempting it to suicide and encouraging it
to accept the challenge of the disarmed; it does not know that the
challenge comes from a higher source.
Two prophecies about the world's salvation are cherished in the hearts
of the two great religions of the world. They represent the highest
expectation of man, thereby indicating his faith in a truth which he
instinctively considers as ultimate--the truth of love. These
prophecies have not for their vision the fettering of the world and
reducing it to tameness by means of a close-linked power forged in the
factory of a political steel trust. One of the religions has for its
meditation the image of the Buddha who is to come, Maitreya, the
Buddha of love; and he is to bring peace. The other religion waits for
the coming of Christ. For Christ preached peace when he preached love,
when he preached the oneness of the Father with the brothers who are
many. And this was the truth of peace. Christ never held that peace
was the best policy. For policy is not truth. The calculation of
self-interest can never successfully fight the irrational force of
passion--the passion which is perversion of love, and which can only
be set right by the truth of love. So long as the powers build a
league on the foundation of their desire for safety, secure enjoyment
of gains, consolidation of past injustice, and putting off the
reparation of wrongs, while their fingers still wriggle for greed and
reek of blood, rifts will appear in their union; and in future their
conflicts will take greater force and magnitude. It is political and
commercial egoism which is the evil harbinger of war. By different
combinations it changes its shape and dimensions, but not its nature.
This egoism is still held sacred, and made a religion; and such a
religion, by a mere change of temple, and by new committees of
priests, will never save mankind. We must know that, as, through
science and commerce, the realisation of the unity of the material
world gives us power, so the realisation of the great spiritual Unity
of Man alone can give us peace.
THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM
(A LETTER FROM NEW YORK TO THE AUTHOR'S OWN COUNTRYMEN)
When freedom is not an inner idea which imparts strength to our
activities and breadth to our creations, when it is merely a thing of
external circumstance, it is like an open space to one who is
blindfolded.
In my recent travels in the West I have felt that out there freedom as
an idea has become feeble and ineffectual. Consequently a spirit of
repression and coercion is fast spreading in the politics and social
relationships of the people.
In the age of monarchy the king lived surrounded by a miasma of
intrigue. At court there was an endless whispering of lies and
calumny, and much plotting and planning among the conspiring courtiers
to manipulate the king as the instrument of their own purposes.
In the present age intrigue plays a wider part, and affects the whole
country. The people are drugged with the hashish of false hopes and
urged to deeds of frightfulness by the goadings of manufactured
panics; their higher feelings are exploited by devious channels of
unctuous hypocrisy, their pockets picked under anaesthetics of
flattery, their very psychology affected by a conspiracy of money and
unscrupulous diplomacy.
In the old order the king was given to understand that he was the
freest individual in the world. A greater semblance of external
freedom, no doubt, he had than other individuals. But they built for
him a gorgeous prison of unreality.
The same thing is happening now with the people of the West. They are
flattered into believing that they are free, and they have the
sovereign power in their hands. But this power is robbed by hosts of
self-seekers, and the horse is captured and stabled because of his
gift of freedom over space. The mob-mind is allowed the enjoyment of
an apparent liberty, while its true freedom is curtailed on every
side. Its thoughts are fashioned according to the plans of organised
interest; in its choosing of ideas and forming of opinions it is
hindered either by some punitive force or by the constant insinuation
of untruths; it is made to dwell in an artificial world of hypnotic
phrases. In fact, the people have become the storehouse of a power
that attracts round it a swarm of adventurers who are secretly
investing its walls to exploit it for their own devices.
Thus it has become more and more evident to me that the ideal of
freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West. The mentality
is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men
tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of
mutual distrust and fear. The appalling scenes of inhumanity and
injustice, which are growing familiar to us, are the outcome of a
psychology that deals with terror. No cruelty can be uglier in its
ferocity than the cruelty of the coward. The people who have
sacrificed their souls to the passion of profit-making and the
drunkenness of power are constantly pursued by phantoms of panic and
suspicion, and therefore they are ruthless even where they are least
afraid of mischances. They become morally incapable of allowing
freedom to others, and in their eagerness to curry favour with the
powerful they not only connive at the injustice done by their own
partners in political gambling, but participate in it. A perpetual
anxiety for the protection of their gains at any cost strikes at the
love of freedom and justice, until at length they are ready to forgo
liberty for themselves and for others.
My experience in the West, where I have realised the immense power of
money and of organised propaganda,--working everywhere behind screens
of camouflage, creating an atmosphere of distrust, timidity, and
antipathy,--has impressed me deeply with the truth that real freedom
is of the mind and spirit; it can never come to us from outside. He
only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to
extend it to others. He who cares to have slaves must chain himself to
them; he who builds walls to create exclusion for others builds walls
across his own freedom; he who distrusts freedom in others loses his
moral right to it. Sooner or later he is lured into the meshes of
physical and moral servility.
Therefore I would urge my own countrymen to ask themselves if the
freedom to which they aspire is one of external conditions. Is it
merely a transferable commodity? Have they acquired a true love of
freedom? Have they faith in it? Are they ready to make space in their
society for the minds of their children to grow up in the ideal of
human dignity, unhindered by restrictions that are unjust and
irrational?
Have we not made elaborately permanent the walls of our social
compartments? We are tenaciously proud of their exclusiveness. We
boast that, in this world, no other society but our own has come to
finality in the classifying of its living members. Yet in our
political agitations we conveniently forget that any unnaturalness in
the relationship of governors and governed which humiliates us,
becomes an outrage when it is artificially fixed under the threat of
military persecution.
When India gave voice to immortal thoughts, in the time of fullest
vigour of vitality, her children had the fearless spirit of the
seekers of truth. The great epic of the soul of our people--the
_Mahabharata_--gives us a wonderful vision of an overflowing life,
full of the freedom of inquiry and experiment. When the age of the
Buddha came, humanity was stirred in our country to its uttermost
depth. The freedom of mind which it produced expressed itself in a
wealth of creation, spreading everywhere in its richness over the
continent of Asia. But with the ebb of life in India the spirit of
creation died away. It hardened into an age of inert construction. The
organic unity of a varied and elastic society gave way to a
conventional order which proved its artificial character by its
inexorable law of exclusion.
Life has its inequalities, I admit, but they are natural and are in
harmony with our vital functions. The head keeps its place apart from
the feet, not through some external arrangement or any conspiracy of
coercion. If the body is compelled to turn somersaults for an
indefinite period, the head never exchanges its relative function for
that of the feet. But have our social divisions the same
inevitableness of organic law? If we have the hardihood to say "yes"
to that question, then how can we blame an alien people for subjecting
us to a political order which they are tempted to believe eternal?
By squeezing human beings in the grip of an inelastic system and
forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and
growth. We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making
them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design,
and of mastering their own destiny. Borrowing our ideal of life from a
dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness
of soul under the immovable weight of a remote past. We have set up an
elaborate ceremonial of cage-worship, and plucked all the feathers
from the wings of the living spirit of our people. And for us,--with
our centuries of degradation and insult, with the amorphousness of our
national unity, with our helplessness before the attack of disasters
from without and our unreasoning self-obstructions from within,--the
punishment has been terrible. Our stupefaction has become so absolute
that we do not even realise that this persistent misfortune, dogging
our steps for ages, cannot be a mere accident of history, removable
only by another accident from outside.
Unless we have true faith in freedom, knowing it to be creative,
manfully taking all its risks, not only do we lose the right to claim
freedom in politics, but we also lack the power to maintain it with
all our strength. For that would be like assigning the service of God
to a confirmed atheist. And men, who contemptuously treat their own
brothers and sisters as eternal babies, never to be trusted in the
most trivial details of their personal life,--coercing them at every
step by the cruel threat of persecution into following a blind lane
leading to nowhere, driving a number of them into hypocrisy and into
moral inertia,--will fail over and over again to rise to the height of
their true and severe responsibility. They will be incapable of
holding a just freedom in politics, and of fighting in freedom's
cause.
The civilisation of the West has in it the spirit of the machine which
must move; and to that blind movement human lives are offered as fuel,
keeping up the steam-power. It represents the active aspect of inertia
which has the appearance of freedom, but not its truth, and therefore
gives rise to slavery both within its boundaries and outside. The
present civilisation of India has the constraining power of the mould.
It squeezes living man in the grip of rigid regulations, and its
repression of individual freedom makes it only too easy for men to be
forced into submission of all kinds and degrees. In both of these
traditions life is offered up to something which is not life; it is a
sacrifice, which has no God for its worship, and is therefore utterly
in vain. The West is continually producing mechanical power in excess
of its spiritual control, and India has produced a system of
mechanical control in excess of its vitality.
THE NATION
The peoples are living beings. They have their distinct personalities.
But nations are organisations of power, and therefore their inner
aspects and outward expressions are everywhere monotonously the same.
Their differences are merely differences in degree of efficiency.
In the modern world the fight is going on between the living spirit of
the people and the methods of nation-organising. It is like the
struggle that began in Central Asia between cultivated areas of man's
habitation and the continually encroaching desert sands, till the
human region of life and beauty was choked out of existence. When the
spread of higher ideals of humanity is not held to be important, the
hardening method of national efficiency gains a certain strength; and
for some limited period of time, at least, it proudly asserts itself
as the fittest to survive. But it is the survival of that part of man
which is the least living. And this is the reason why dead monotony is
the sign of the spread of the Nation. The modern towns, which present
the physiognomy due to this dominance of the Nation, are everywhere
the same, from San Francisco to London, from London to Tokyo. They
show no faces, but merely masks.
The peoples, being living personalities, must have their
self-expression, and this leads to their distinctive creations. These
creations are literature, art, social symbols and ceremonials. They
are like different dishes at one common feast.
