No More Learning

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. They add richness to
our enjoyment and understanding of truth. They are making the world of
man fertile of life and variedly beautiful.

But the nations do not create, they merely produce and destroy.
Organisations for production are necessary. Even organisations for
destruction may be so. But when, actuated by greed and hatred, they
crowd away into a corner the living man who creates, then the harmony
is lost, and the people's history runs at a break-neck speed towards
some fatal catastrophe.

Humanity, where it is living, is guided by inner ideals; but where it
is a dead organisation it becomes impervious to them. Its building
process is only an external process, and in its response to the moral
guidance it has to pass through obstacles that are gross and
non-plastic.

Man as a person has his individuality, which is the field where his
spirit has its freedom to express itself and to grow. The professional
man carries a rigid crust around him which has very little variation
and hardly any elasticity. This professionalism is the region where
men specialise their knowledge and organise their power, mercilessly
elbowing each other in their struggle to come to the front.
Professionalism is necessary, without doubt; but it must not be
allowed to exceed its healthy limits, to assume complete mastery over
the personal man, making him narrow and hard, exclusively intent upon
pursuit of success at the cost of his faith in ideals.

In ancient India professions were kept within limits by social
regulation. They were considered primarily as social necessities, and
in the second place as the means of livelihood for individuals. Thus
man, being free from the constant urging of unbounded competition,
could have leisure to cultivate his nature in its completeness.

The Cult of the Nation is the professionalism of the people. This cult
is becoming their greatest danger, because it is bringing them
enormous success, making them impatient of the claims of higher
ideals. The greater the amount of success, the stronger are the
conflicts of interest and jealousy and hatred which are aroused in
men's minds, thereby making it more and more necessary for other
peoples, who are still living, to stiffen into nations. With the
growth of nationalism, man has become the greatest menace to man.
Therefore the continual presence of panic goads that very nationalism
into ever-increasing menace.

Crowd psychology is a blind force. Like steam and other physical
forces, it can be utilised for creating a tremendous amount of power.
And therefore rulers of men, who, out of greed and fear, are bent upon
turning their peoples into machines of power, try to train this crowd
psychology for their special purposes. They hold it to be their duty
to foster in the popular mind universal panic, unreasoning pride in
their own race, and hatred of others. Newspapers, school-books, and
even religious services are made use of for this object; and those
who have the courage to express their disapprobation of this blind and
impious cult are either punished in the law-courts, or are socially
ostracised. The individual thinks, even when he feels; but the same
individual, when he feels with the crowd, does not reason at all. His
moral sense becomes blurred. This suppression of higher humanity in
crowd minds is productive of enormous strength. For the crowd mind is
essentially primitive; its forces are elemental. Therefore the Nation
is for ever watching to take advantage of this enormous power of
darkness.

The people's instinct of self-preservation has been made dominant at
particular times of crisis. Then, for the time being, the
consciousness of its solidarity becomes aggressively wide-awake. But
in the Nation this hyper-consciousness is kept alive for all time by
artificial means. A man has to act the part of a policeman when he
finds his house invaded by burglars. But if that remains his normal
condition, then his consciousness of his household becomes acute and
over-wrought, making him fly at every stranger passing near his house.
This intensity of self-consciousness is nothing of which a man should
feel proud; certainly it is not healthful. In like manner, incessant
self-consciousness in a nation is highly injurious for the people. It
serves its immediate purpose, but at the cost of the eternal in man.

When a whole body of men train themselves for a particular narrow
purpose, it becomes a common interest with them to keep up that
purpose and preach absolute loyalty to it. Nationalism is the training
of a whole people for a narrow ideal; and when it gets hold of their
minds it is sure to lead them to moral degeneracy and intellectual
blindness. We cannot but hold firm the faith that this Age of
Nationalism, of gigantic vanity and selfishness, is only a passing
phase in civilisation, and those who are making permanent arrangements
for accommodating this temporary mood of history will be unable to fit
themselves for the coming age, when the true spirit of freedom will
have sway.

With the unchecked growth of Nationalism the moral foundation of man's
civilisation is unconsciously undergoing a change. The ideal of the
social man is unselfishness, but the ideal of the Nation, like that of
the professional man, is selfishness. This is why selfishness in the
individual is condemned, while in the nation it is extolled, which
leads to hopeless moral blindness, confusing the religion of the
people with the religion of the nation. Therefore, to take an example,
we find men more and more convinced of the superior claims of
Christianity, merely because Christian nations are in possession of
the greater part of the world. It is like supporting a robber's
religion by quoting the amount of his stolen property. Nations
celebrate their successful massacre of men in their churches. They
forget that Thugs also ascribed their success in manslaughter to the
favour of their goddess. But in the case of the latter their goddess
frankly represented the principle of destruction. It was the criminal
tribe's own murderous instinct deified--the instinct, not of one
individual, but of the whole community, and therefore held sacred. In
the same manner, in modern churches, selfishness, hatred and vanity in
their collective aspect of national instincts do not scruple to share
the homage paid to God.

Of course, pursuit of self-interest need not be wholly selfish; it can
even be in harmony with the interest of all. Therefore, ideally
speaking, the nationalism, which stands for the expression of the
collective self-interest of a people, need not be ashamed of itself
if it maintains its true limitations. But what we see in practice is,
that every nation which has prospered has done so through its career
of aggressive selfishness either in commercial adventures or in
foreign possessions, or in both. And this material prosperity not only
feeds continually the selfish instincts of the people, but impresses
men's minds with the lesson that, for a nation, selfishness is a
necessity and therefore a virtue. It is the emphasis laid in Europe
upon the idea of the Nation's constant increase of power, which is
becoming the greatest danger to man, both in its direct activity and
its power of infection.

We must admit that evils there are in human nature, in spite of our
faith in moral laws and our training in self-control. But they carry
on their foreheads their own brand of infamy, their very success
adding to their monstrosity. All through man's history there will be
some who suffer, and others who cause suffering. The conquest of evil
will never be a fully accomplished fact, but a continuous process like
the process of burning in a flame.

In former ages, when some particular people became turbulent and tried
to rob others of their human rights, they sometimes achieved success
and sometimes failed. And it amounted to nothing more than that. But
when this idea of the Nation, which has met with universal acceptance
in the present day, tries to pass off the cult of collective
selfishness as a moral duty, simply because that selfishness is
gigantic in stature, it not only commits depredation, but attacks the
very vitals of humanity. It unconsciously generates in people's minds
an attitude of defiance against moral law. For men are taught by
repeated devices the lesson that the Nation is greater than the
people, while yet it scatters to the winds the moral law that the
people have held sacred.

It has been said that a disease becomes most acutely critical when the
brain is affected. For it is the brain that is constantly directing
the siege against all disease forces. The spirit of national
selfishness is that brain disease of a people which shows itself in
red eyes and clenched fists, in violence of talk and movements, all
the while shattering its natural restorative powers. But the power of
self-sacrifice, together with the moral faculty of sympathy and
co-operation, is the guiding spirit of social vitality. Its function
is to maintain a beneficent relation of harmony with its
surroundings. But when it begins to ignore the moral law which is
universal and uses it only within the bounds of its own narrow sphere,
then its strength becomes like the strength of madness which ends in
self-destruction.

What is worse, this aberration of a people, decked with the showy
title of "patriotism," proudly walks abroad, passing itself off as a
highly moral influence. Thus it has spread its inflammatory contagion
all over the world, proclaiming its fever flush to be the best sign of
health. It is causing in the hearts of peoples, naturally inoffensive,
a feeling of envy at not having their temperature as high as that of
their delirious neighbours and not being able to cause as much
mischief, but merely having to suffer from it.

I have often been asked by my Western friends how to cope with this
evil, which has attained such sinister strength and vast dimensions.
In fact, I have often been blamed for merely giving warning, and
offering no alternative. When we suffer as a result of a particular
system, we believe that some other system would bring us better luck.
We are apt to forget that all systems produce evil sooner or later,
when the psychology which is at the root of them is wrong. The system
which is national to-day may assume the shape of the international
to-morrow; but so long as men have not forsaken their idolatry of
primitive instincts and collective passions, the new system will only
become a new instrument of suffering. And because we are trained to
confound efficient system with moral goodness itself, every ruined
system makes us more and more distrustful of moral law.

Therefore I do not put my faith in any new institution, but in the
individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly, and act
rightly, thus becoming the channels of moral truth. Our moral ideals
do not work with chisels and hammers. Like trees, they spread their
roots in the soil and their branches in the sky, without consulting
any architect for their plans.




WOMAN AND HOME


Creative expressions attain their perfect form through emotions
modulated. Woman has that expression natural to her--a cadence of
restraint in her behaviour, producing poetry of life. She has been an
inspiration to man, guiding, most often unconsciously, his restless
energy into an immense variety of creations in literature, art, music
and religion. This is why, in India, woman has been described as the
symbol of Shakti, the creative power.

But if woman begins to believe that, though biologically her function
is different from that of man, psychologically she is identical with
him; if the human world in its mentality becomes exclusively male,
then before long it will be reduced to utter inanity. For life finds
its truth and beauty, not in any exaggeration of sameness, but in
harmony.

If woman's nature were identical with man's, if Eve were a mere
tautology of Adam, it would only give rise to a monotonous
superfluity. But that she was not so was proved by the banishment she
secured from a ready-made Paradise. She had the instinctive wisdom to
realise that it was her mission to help her mate in creating a
Paradise of their own on earth, whose ideal she was to supply with her
life, whose materials were to be produced and gathered by her comrade.

However, it is evident that an increasing number of women in the West
are ready to assert that their difference from men is unimportant. The
reason for the vehement utterance of such a paradox cannot be ignored.
It is a rebellion against a necessity, which is not equal for both the
partners.

Love in all forms has its obligations, and the love that binds women
to their children binds them to their homes. But necessity is a
tyrant, making us submit to injury and indignity, allowing advantage
over us to those who are wholly or comparatively free from its burden.
Such has been the case in the social relationship between man and
woman. Along with the difference inherent in their respective natures,
there have grown up between them inequalities fostered by
circumstances. Man is not handicapped by the same biological and
psychological responsibilities as woman, and therefore he has the
liberty to give her the security of home.
This liberty exacts payment
when it offers its boon, because to give or to withhold the gift is
within its power. It is the unequal freedom in their mutual
relationships which has made the weight of life's tragedies so
painfully heavy for woman to bear.

Some mitigation of her disadvantage has been effected by her rendering
herself and her home a luxury to man. She has accentuated those
qualities in herself which insidiously impose their bondage over her
mate, some by pandering to his weakness, and some by satisfying his
higher nature, till the sex-consciousness in our society has grown
abnormal and overpowering. There is no actual objection to this in
itself, for it offers a stimulus, acting in the depth of life, which
leads to creative exuberance. But a great deal of it is a forced
growth of compulsion bearing seeds of degradation. In those ages when
men acknowledged spiritual perfection to be their object, women were
denounced as the chief obstacle in their way. The constant and
conscious exercise of allurements, which gave women their power,
attacked the weak spots in man's nature, and by doing so added to its
weakness. For all relationships tainted with repression of freedom
must become sources of degeneracy to the strong who impose such
repression.

Balance of power, however, between man and woman was in a measure
established when home wielded a strong enough attraction to make men
accept its obligations. But at last the time has come when the
material ambition of man has assumed such colossal proportions that
home is in danger of losing its centre of gravity for him, and he is
receding farther and farther from its orbit.

The arid zone in the social life is spreading fast. The simple
comforts of home, made precious by the touch of love, are giving way
to luxuries that can only have their full extension in the isolation
of self-centred life. Hotels are being erected on the ruins of homes;
productions are growing more stupendous than creations; and most men
have, for the materials of their happiness and recreation, their dogs
and horses, their pipes, guns, and gambling clubs.

Reactions and rebellions, not being normal in their character, go on
hurting truth until peace is restored. Therefore, when woman refuses
to acknowledge the distinction between her life and that of man, she
does not convince us of its truth, but only proves to us that she is
suffering. All great sufferings indicate some wrong somewhere. In the
present case, the wrong is in woman's lack of freedom in her
relationship with man, which compels her to turn her disabilities into
attractions, and to use untruths as her allies in the battle of life,
while she is suffering from the precariousness of her position.

From the beginning of our society, women have naturally accepted the
training which imparts to their life and to their home a spirit of
harmony. It is their instinct to perform their services in such a
manner that these, through beauty, might be raised from the domain of
slavery to the realm of grace. Women have tried to prove that in the
building up of social life they are artists and not artisans. But all
expressions of beauty lose their truth when compelled to accept the
patronage of the gross and the indifferent. Therefore when necessity
drives women to fashion their lives to the taste of the insensitive or
the sensual, then the whole thing becomes a tragedy of desecration.
Society is full of such tragedies. Many of the laws and social
regulations guiding the relationships of man and woman are relics of
a barbaric age, when the brutal pride of an exclusive possession had
its dominance in human relations, such as those of parents and
children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, teachers and
disciples. The vulgarity of it still persists in the social bond
between the sexes because of the economic helplessness of woman.
Nothing makes us so stupidly mean as the sense of superiority which
the power of the purse confers upon us.

The powers of muscle and of money have opportunities of immediate
satisfaction, but the power of the ideal must have infinite patience.
The man who sells his goods, or fulfils his contract, is cheated if he
fails to realise payment, but he who gives form to some ideal may
never get his due and be fully paid. What I have felt in the women of
India is the consciousness of this ideal--their simple faith in the
sanctity of devotion lighted by love which is held to be divine. True
womanliness is regarded in our country as the saintliness of love. It
is not merely praised there, but literally worshipped; and she who is
gifted with it is called _Devi_, as one revealing in herself Woman,
the Divine. That this has not been a mere metaphor to us is because,
in India, our mind is familiar with the idea of God in an eternal
feminine aspect. Thus the Eastern woman, who is deeply aware in her
heart of the sacredness of her mission, is a constant education to
man. It has to be admitted that there are chances of such an influence
failing to penetrate the callousness of the coarse-minded; but that is
the destiny of all manifestations whose value is not in success or
reward in honour.

Woman has to be ready to suffer. She cannot allow her emotions to be
dulled or polluted, for these are to create her life's atmosphere,
apart from which her world would be dark and dead. This leaves her
heart without any protection of insensibility, at the mercy of the
hurts and insults of life. Women of India, like women everywhere, have
their share of suffering, but it radiates through the ideal, and
becomes, like sunlight, a creative force in their world. Our women
know by heart the legends of the great women of the epic age--Savitri
who by the power of love conquered death, and Sita who had no other
reward for her life of sacrifice but the sacred majesty of sorrow.
They know that it is their duty to make this life an image of the life
eternal, and that love's mission truly performed has a spiritual
meaning. It is a religious responsibility for them to live the life
which is their own. For their activity is not for money-making, or
organising power, or intellectually probing the mystery of existence,
but for establishing and maintaining human relationships requiring the
highest moral qualities. It is the consciousness of the spiritual
character of their life's work, which lifts them above the utilitarian
standard of the immediate and the passing, surrounds them with the
dignity of the eternal, and transmutes their suffering and sorrow into
a crown of light.

I must guard myself from the risk of a possible misunderstanding. The
permanent significance of home is not in the narrowness of its
enclosure, but in an eternal moral idea. It represents the truth of
human relationship; it reveals loyalty and love for the personality of
man. Let us take a wider view, in a perspective truer than can be
found in its present conventional associations. With the discovery and
development of agriculture there came a period of settled life in our
history. The nomad ever moved on with his tents and cattle; he
explored space and exploited its contents. The cultivator of land
explored time in its immensity, for he had leisure. Comparatively
secured from the uncertainty of his outer resources, he had the
opportunity to deal with his moral resources in the realm of human
truth. This is why agricultural civilisation, like that of India and
China, is essentially a civilisation of human relationship, of the
adjustment of mutual obligations. It is deep-rooted in the inner life
of man. Its basis is co-operation and not competition. In other words,
its principle is the principle of home, to which all its outer
adventures are subordinated.

In the meanwhile, the nomadic life with its predatory instinct of
exploitation has developed into a great civilisation. It is immensely
proud and strong, killing leisure and pursuing opportunities. It
minimises the claims of personal relationship and is jealously careful
of its unhampered freedom for acquiring wealth and asserting its will
upon others. Its burden is the burden of things, which grows heavier
and more complex every day, disregarding the human and the spiritual.
Its powerful pressure from all sides narrows the limits of home, the
personal region of the human world. Thus, in this region of life,
women are every day hustled out of their shelter for want of
accommodation.

But such a state of things can never have the effect of changing woman
into man. On the contrary, it will lead her to find her place in the
unlimited range of society, and the Guardian Spirit of the personal in
human nature will extend the ministry of woman over all developments
of life. Habituated to deal with the world as a machine, man is
multiplying his materials, banishing away his happiness and
sacrificing love to comfort, which is an illusion. At last the present
age has sent its cry to woman, asking her to come out from her
segregation in order to restore the spiritual supremacy of all that is
human in the world of humanity. She has been aroused to remember that
womanliness is not chiefly decorative. It is like that vital health,
which not only imparts the bloom of beauty to the body, but joy to the
mind and perfection to life.




AN EASTERN UNIVERSITY


In the midst of much that is discouraging in the present state of the
world, there is one symptom of vital promise. Asia is awakening. This
great event, if it be but directed along the right lines, is full of
hope, not only for Asia herself, but for the whole world.

On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the relationship of the
West with the East, growing more and more complex and widespread for
over two centuries, far from attaining its true fulfilment, has given
rise to a universal spirit of conflict. The consequent strain and
unrest have profoundly disturbed Asia, and antipathetic forces have
been accumulating for years in the depth of the Eastern mind.

The meeting of the East and the West has remained incomplete, because
the occasions of it have not been disinterested. The political and
commercial adventures carried on by Western races--very often by
force and against the interest and wishes of the countries they have
dealt with--have created a moral alienation, which is deeply injurious
to both parties. The perils threatened by this unnatural relationship
have long been contemptuously ignored by the West. But the blind
confidence of the strong in their apparent invincibility has often led
them, from their dream of security, into terrible surprises of
history.

It is not the fear of danger or loss to one people or another,
however, which is most important. The demoralising influence of the
constant estrangement between the two hemispheres, which affects the
baser passions of man,--pride, greed and hypocrisy on the one hand;
fear, suspiciousness and flattery on the other,--has been developing,
and threatens us with a world-wide spiritual disaster.

The time has come when we must use all our wisdom to understand the
situation, and to control it, with a stronger trust in moral guidance
than in any array of physical forces.

In the beginning of man's history his first social object was to form
a community, to grow into a people. At that early period, individuals
were gathered together within geographical enclosures. But in the
present age, with its facility of communication, geographical barriers
have almost lost their reality, and the great federation of men, which
is waiting either to find its true scope or to break asunder in a
final catastrophe, is not a meeting of individuals, but of various
human races. Now the problem before us is of one single country, which
is this earth, where the races as individuals must find both their
freedom of self-expression and their bond of federation. Mankind must
realise a unity, wider in range, deeper in sentiment, stronger in
power than ever before. Now that the problem is large, we have to
solve it on a bigger scale, to realise the God in man by a larger
faith and to build the temple of our faith on a sure and world-wide
basis.

The first step towards realisation is to create opportunities for
revealing the different peoples to one another. This can never be done
in those fields where the exploiting utilitarian spirit is supreme. We
must find some meeting-ground, where there can be no question of
conflicting interests. One of such places is the University, where we
can work together in a common pursuit of truth, share together our
common heritage, and realise that artists in all parts of the world
have created forms of beauty, scientists discovered secrets of the
universe, philosophers solved the problems of existence, saints made
the truth of the spiritual world organic in their own lives, not
merely for some particular race to which they belonged, but for all
mankind. When the science of meteorology knows the earth's atmosphere
as continuously one, affecting the different parts of the world
differently, but in a harmony of adjustments, it knows and attains
truth. And so, too, we must know that the great mind of man is one,
working through the many differences which are needed to ensure the
full result of its fundamental unity. When we understand this truth in
a disinterested spirit, it teaches us to respect all the differences
in man that are real, yet remain conscious of our oneness; and to know
that perfection of unity is not in uniformity, but in harmony.

This is the problem of the present age. The East, for its own sake and
for the sake of the world, must not remain unrevealed. The deepest
source of all calamities in history is misunderstanding. For where we
do not understand, we can never be just.

Being strongly impressed with the need and the responsibility, which
every individual to-day must realise according to his power, I have
formed the nucleus of an International University in India, as one of
the best means of promoting mutual understanding between the East and
the West. This Institution, according to the plan I have in mind, will
invite students from the West to study the different systems of Indian
philosophy, literature, art and music in their proper environment,
encouraging them to carry on research work in collaboration with the
scholars already engaged in this task.

India has her renaissance. She is preparing to make her contribution
to the world of the future. In the past she produced her great
culture, and in the present age she has an equally important
contribution to make to the culture of the New World which is emerging
from the wreckage of the Old. This is a momentous period of her
history, pregnant with precious possibilities, when any disinterested
offer of co-operation from any part of the West will have an immense
moral value, the memory of which will become brighter as the
regeneration of the East grows in vigour and creative power.

The Western Universities give their students an opportunity to learn
what all the European peoples have contributed to their Western
culture. Thus the intellectual mind of the West has been luminously
revealed to the world. What is needed to complete this illumination is
for the East to collect its own scattered lamps and offer them to the
enlightenment of the world.

There was a time when the great countries of Asia had, each of them,
to nurture its own civilisation apart in comparative seclusion. Now
has come the age of co-ordination and co-operation. The seedlings that
were reared within narrow plots must now be transplanted into the open
fields. They must pass the test of the world-market, if their maximum
value is to be obtained.

But before Asia is in a position to co-operate with the culture of
Europe, she must base her own structure on a synthesis of all the
different cultures which she has. When, taking her stand on such a
culture, she turns toward the West, she will take, with a confident
sense of mental freedom, her own view of truth, from her own
vantage-ground, and open a new vista of thought to the world.
Otherwise, she will allow her priceless inheritance to crumble into
dust, and, trying to replace it clumsily with feeble imitations of the
West, make herself superfluous, cheap and ludicrous. If she thus
loses her individuality and her specific power to exist, will it in
the least help the rest of the world? Will not her terrible bankruptcy
involve also the Western mind? If the whole world grows at last into
an exaggerated West, then such an illimitable parody of the modern age
will die, crushed beneath its own absurdity.

In this belief, it is my desire to extend by degrees the scope of this
University on simple lines, until it comprehends the whole range of
Eastern cultures--the Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian and others. Its object
will be to reveal the Eastern mind to the world.

Of one thing I felt certain during my travels in Europe, that a
genuine interest has been roused there in the philosophy and the arts
of the East, from which the Western mind seeks fresh inspiration of
truth and beauty. Once the East had her reputation of fabulous wealth,
and the seekers were attracted from across the sea. Since then, the
shrine of wealth has changed its site. But the East is famed also for
her storage of wisdom, harvested by her patriarchs from long
successive ages of spiritual endeavour. And when, as now, in the midst
of the pursuit of power and wealth, there rises the cry of privation
from the famished spirit of man, an opportunity is offered to the East
to offer her store to those who need it.

Once upon a time we were in possession of such a thing as our own mind
in India. It was living. It thought, it felt, it expressed itself. It
was receptive as well as productive. That this mind could be of any
use in the process, or in the end, of our education was overlooked by
our modern educational dispensation. We are provided with buildings
and books and other magnificent burdens calculated to suppress our
mind. The latter was treated like a library-shelf solidly made of
wood, to be loaded with leather-bound volumes of second-hand
information. In consequence, it has lost its own colour and character,
and has borrowed polish from the carpenter's shop. All this has cost
us money, and also our finer ideas, while our intellectual vacancy has
been crammed with what is described in official reports as Education.
In fact, we have bought our spectacles at the expense of our eyesight.

In India our goddess of learning is _Saraswati_. My audience in the
West, I am sure, will be glad to know that her complexion is white.
But the signal fact is that she is living and she is a woman, and her
seat is on a lotus-flower. The symbolic meaning of this is, that she
dwells in the centre of life and the heart of all existence, which
opens itself in beauty to the light of heaven.

The Western education which we have chanced to know is impersonal. Its
complexion is also white, but it is the whiteness of the white-washed
class-room walls. It dwells in the cold-storage compartments of
lessons and the ice-packed minds of the schoolmasters. The effect
which it had on my mind when, as a boy, I was compelled to go to
school, I have described elsewhere. My feeling was very much the same
as a tree might have, which was not allowed to live its full life, but
was cut down to be made into packing-cases.

The introduction of this education was not a part of the solemn
marriage ceremony which was to unite the minds of the East and West in
mutual understanding. It represented an artificial method of training
specially calculated to produce the carriers of the white man's
burden. This want of ideals still clings to our education system,
though our Universities have latterly burdened their syllabus with a
greater number of subjects than before. But it is only like adding to
the bags of wheat the bullock carries to market; it does not make the
bullock any better off.

Mind, when long deprived of its natural food of truth and freedom of
growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students
have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations. Success
consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest
economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to
truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of a foolish imposition by which
the mind is encouraged to rob itself. But as we are by means of it
made to forget the existence of mind, we are supremely happy at the
result. We pass examinations, and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and
police inspectors, and we die young.

Universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for
collecting and distributing knowledge. Through them the people should
offer their intellectual hospitality, their wealth of mind to others,
and earn their proud right in return to receive gifts from the rest of
the world. But in the whole length and breadth of India there is not a
single University established in the modern time where a foreign or
an Indian student can properly be acquainted with the best products
of the Indian mind. For that we have to cross the sea, and knock at
the doors of France and Germany. Educational institutions in our
country are India's alms-bowl of knowledge; they lower our
intellectual self-respect; they encourage us to make a foolish display
of decorations composed of borrowed feathers.

This it was that led me to found a school in Bengal, in face of many
difficulties and discouragements, and in spite of my own vocation as a
poet, who finds his true inspiration only when he forgets that he is a
schoolmaster. It is my hope that in this school a nucleus has been
formed, round which an indigenous University of our own land will find
its natural growth--a University which will help India's mind to
concentrate and to be fully conscious of itself; free to seek the
truth and make this truth its own wherever found, to judge by its own
standard, give expression to its own creative genius, and offer its
wisdom to the guests who come from other parts of the world.

Man's intellect has a natural pride in its own aristocracy, which is
the pride of its culture. Culture only acknowledges the excellence
whose criticism is in its inner perfection, not in any external
success. When this pride succumbs to some compulsion of necessity or
lure of material advantage, it brings humiliation to the intellectual
man. Modern India, through her very education, has been made to suffer
this humiliation. Once she herself provided her children with a
culture which was the product of her own ages of thought and creation.
But it has been thrust aside, and we are made to tread the mill of
passing examinations, not for learning anything, but for notifying
that we are qualified for employments under organisations conducted in
English. Our educated community is not a cultured community, but a
community of qualified candidates. Meanwhile the proportion of
possible employments to the number of claimants has gradually been
growing narrower, and the consequent disaffection has been widespread.
At last the very authorities who are responsible for this are blaming
their victims. Such is the perversity of human nature. It bears its
worst grudge against those it has injured.

It is as if some tribe which had the primitive habit of decorating its
tribal members with birds' plumage were some day to hold these very
birds guilty of the crime of being extinct. There are belated
attempts on the part of our governors to read us pious homilies about
disinterested love of learning, while the old machinery goes on
working, whose product is not education but certificates. It is good
to remind the fettered bird that its wings are for soaring; but it is
better to cut the chain which is holding it to its perch. The most
pathetic feature of the tragedy is that the bird itself has learnt to
use its chain for its ornament, simply because the chain jingles in
fairly respectable English.

In the Bengali language there is a modern maxim which can be
translated, "He who learns to read and write rides in a carriage and
pair. " In English there is a similar proverb, "Knowledge is power. " It
is an offer of a prospective bribe to the student, a promise of an
ulterior reward which is more important than knowledge itself.
Temptations, held before us as inducements to be good or to pursue
uncongenial paths, are most often flimsy lies or half-truths, such as
the oft-quoted maxim of respectable piety, "Honesty is the best
policy," at which politicians all over the world seem to laugh in
their sleeves. But unfortunately, education conducted under a special
providence of purposefulness, of eating the fruit of knowledge from
the wrong end, _does_ lead one to that special paradise on earth, the
daily rides in one's own carriage and pair. And the West, I have heard
from authentic sources, is aspiring in its education after that
special cultivation of worldliness.

Where society is comparatively simple and obstructions are not too
numerous, we can clearly see how the life-process guides education in
its vital purpose. The system of folk-education, which is indigenous
to India, but is dying out, was one with the people's life. It flowed
naturally through the social channels and made its way everywhere. It
is a system of widespread irrigation of culture. Its teachers,
specially trained men, are in constant requisition, and find crowded
meetings in our villages, where they repeat the best thoughts and
express the ideals of the land in the most effective form. The mode of
instruction includes the recitation of epics, expounding of the
scriptures, reading from the Puranas, which are the classical records
of old history, performance of plays founded upon the early myths and
legends, dramatic narration of the lives of ancient heroes, and the
singing in chorus of songs from the old religious literature.
Evidently, according to this system, the best function of education
is to enable us to realise that to live as a man is great, requiring
profound philosophy for its ideal, poetry for its expression, and
heroism in its conduct. Owing to this vital method of culture the
common people of India, though technically illiterate, have been made
conscious of the sanctity of social relationships, entailing constant
sacrifice and self-control, urged and supported by ideals collectively
expressed in one word, _Dharma_.

Such a system of education may sound too simple for the complexities
of modern life. But the fundamental principle of social life in its
different stages of development remains the same; and in no
circumstance can the truth be ignored that all human complexities must
harmonise in organic unity with life, failing which there will be
endless conflict. Most things in the civilised world occupy more than
their legitimate space. Much of their burden is needless. By bearing
this burden civilised man may be showing great strength, but he
displays little skill. To the gods, viewing this from on high, it must
seem like the flounderings of a giant who has got out of his depth and
knows not how to swim.

The main source of all forms of voluntary slavery is the desire of
gain. It is difficult to fight against this when modern civilisation
is tainted with such a universal contamination of avarice. I have
realised it myself in the little boys of my own school. For the first
few years there is no trouble. But as soon as the upper class is
reached, their worldly wisdom--the malady of the aged--begins to
assert itself. They rebelliously insist that they must no longer
learn, but rather pass examinations. Professions in the modern age are
more numerous and lucrative than ever before. They need specialisation
of training and knowledge, tempting education to yield its spiritual
freedom to the claims of utilitarian ambitions.