The characters of two eminent sages have been
described
in our
mythology.
mythology.
Tagore - Creative Unity
But art
gives our personality the disinterested freedom of the eternal, there
to find it in its true perspective. To see our own home in flames is
not to see fire in its verity. But the fire in the stars is the fire
in the heart of the Infinite; there, it is the script of creation.
Matthew Arnold, in his poem addressed to a nightingale, sings:
Hark! ah, the nightingale--
The tawny-throated!
Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark! --what pain!
But pain, when met within the boundaries of limited reality, repels
and hurts; it is discordant with the narrow scope of life. But the
pain of some great martyrdom has the detachment of eternity. It
appears in all its majesty, harmonious in the context of everlasting
life; like the thunder-flash in the stormy sky, not on the laboratory
wire. Pain on that scale has its harmony in great love; for by hurting
love it reveals the infinity of love in all its truth and beauty. On
the other hand, the pain involved in business insolvency is
discordant; it kills and consumes till nothing remains but ashes.
The poet sings again:
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!
And the truth of pain in eternity has been sung by those Vedic poets
who had said, "From joy has come forth all creation. " They say:
Sa tapas tapatva sarvam asrajata Yadidam kincha.
(God from the heat of his pain created all that there is. )
The sacrifice, which is in the heart of creation, is both joy and pain
at the same moment. Of this sings a village mystic in Bengal:
My eyes drown in the darkness of joy,
My heart, like a lotus, closes its petals in the rapture of the
dark night.
That song speaks of a joy which is deep like the blue sea, endless
like the blue sky; which has the magnificence of the night, and in its
limitless darkness enfolds the radiant worlds in the awfulness of
peace; it is the unfathomed joy in which all sufferings are made one.
A poet of mediaeval India tells us about his source of inspiration in a
poem containing a question and an answer:
Where were your songs, my bird, when you spent your nights in the nest?
Was not all your pleasure stored therein?
What makes you lose your heart to the sky, the sky that is limitless?
The bird answers:
I had my pleasure while I rested within bounds.
When I soared into the limitless, I found my songs!
To detach the individual idea from its confinement of everyday facts
and to give its soaring wings the freedom of the universal: this is
the function of poetry. The ambition of Macbeth, the jealousy of
Othello, would be at best sensational in police court proceedings; but
in Shakespeare's dramas they are carried among the flaming
constellations where creation throbs with Eternal Passion, Eternal
Pain.
THE RELIGION OF THE FOREST
I
We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon
our attitude of mind towards it--an attitude which is formed by our
habit of dealing with it according to the special circumstance of our
surroundings and our temperaments. It guides our attempts to establish
relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either
through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy. And
thus, in our realisation of the truth of existence, we put our
emphasis either upon the principle of dualism or upon the principle of
unity.
The Indian sages have held in the Upanishads that the emancipation of
our soul lies in its realising the ultimate truth of unity. They said:
Ishavasyam idam sarvam yat kinch jagatyam jagat.
Yena tyaktena bhunjitha ma graha kasyasvit dhanam.
(Know all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by
God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through
greed of possession. )
The meaning of this is, that, when we know the multiplicity of things
as the final truth, we try to augment ourselves by the external
possession of them; but, when we know the Infinite Soul as the final
truth, then through our union with it we realise the joy of our soul.
Therefore it has been said of those who have attained their
fulfilment,--"sarvam eva vishanti" (they enter into all things). Their
perfect relation with this world is the relation of union.
This ideal of perfection preached by the forest-dwellers of ancient
India runs through the heart of our classical literature and still
dominates our mind. The legends related in our epics cluster under the
forest shade bearing all through their narrative the message of the
forest-dwellers. Our two greatest classical dramas find their
background in scenes of the forest hermitage, which are permeated by
the association of these sages.
The history of the Northmen of Europe is resonant with the music of
the sea. That sea is not merely topographical in its significance, but
represents certain ideals of life which still guide the history and
inspire the creations of that race. In the sea, nature presented
herself to those men in her aspect of a danger, a barrier which
seemed to be at constant war with the land and its children. The sea
was the challenge of untamed nature to the indomitable human soul. And
man did not flinch; he fought and won, and the spirit of fight
continued in him. This fight he still maintains; it is the fight
against disease and poverty, tyranny of matter and of man.
This refers to a people who live by the sea, and ride on it as on a
wild, champing horse, catching it by its mane and making it render
service from shore to shore. They find delight in turning by force the
antagonism of circumstances into obedience. Truth appears to them in
her aspect of dualism, the perpetual conflict of good and evil, which
has no reconciliation, which can only end in victory or defeat.
But in the level tracts of Northern India men found no barrier between
their lives and the grand life that permeates the universe. The forest
entered into a close living relationship with their work and leisure,
with their daily necessities and contemplations. They could not think
of other surroundings as separate or inimical. So the view of the
truth, which these men found, did not make manifest the difference,
but rather the unity of all things. They uttered their faith in these
words: "Yadidam kinch sarvam prana ejati nihsratam" (All that is
vibrates with life, having come out from life). When we know this
world as alien to us, then its mechanical aspect takes prominence in
our mind; and then we set up our machines and our methods to deal with
it and make as much profit as our knowledge of its mechanism allows us
to do. This view of things does not play us false, for the machine has
its place in this world. And not only this material universe, but
human beings also, may be used as machines and made to yield powerful
results. This aspect of truth cannot be ignored; it has to be known
and mastered. Europe has done so and has reaped a rich harvest.
The view of this world which India has taken is summed up in one
compound Sanskrit word, Sachid? nanda. The meaning is that Reality,
which is essentially one, has three phases. The first is Sat; it is
the simple fact that things are, the fact which relates us to all
things through the relationship of common existence. The second is
Chit; it is the fact that we know, which relates us to all things
through the relationship of knowledge. The third is Ananda: it is the
fact that we enjoy, which unites us with all things through the
relationship of love.
According to the true Indian view, our consciousness of the world,
merely as the sum total of things that exist, and as governed by laws,
is imperfect. But it is perfect when our consciousness realises all
things as spiritually one with it, and therefore capable of giving us
joy. For us the highest purpose of this world is not merely living in
it, knowing it and making use of it, but realising our own selves in
it through expansion of sympathy; not alienating ourselves from it and
dominating it, but comprehending and uniting it with ourselves in
perfect union.
II
When Vikramaditya became king, Ujjayini a great capital, and Kalidasa
its poet, the age of India's forest retreats had passed. Then we had
taken our stand in the midst of the great concourse of humanity. The
Chinese and the Hun, the Scythian and the Persian, the Greek and the
Roman, had crowded round us. But, even in that age of pomp and
prosperity, the love and reverence with which its poet sang about the
hermitage shows what was the dominant ideal that occupied the mind of
India; what was the one current of memory that continually flowed
through her life.
In Kalidasa's drama, _Shakuntala_, the hermitage, which dominates the
play, overshadowing the king's palace, has the same idea running
through it--the recognition of the kinship of man with conscious and
unconscious creation alike.
A poet of a later age, while describing a hermitage in his Kadambari,
tells us of the posture of salutation in the flowering lianas as they
bow to the wind; of the sacrifice offered by the trees scattering
their blossoms; of the grove resounding with the lessons chanted by
the neophytes, and the verses repeated by the parrots, learnt by constantly
hearing them; of the wild-fowl enjoying "vaishva-deva-bali-pinda"
(the food offered to the divinity which is in all creatures); of the
ducks coming up from the lake for their portion of the grass seed
spread in the cottage yards to dry; and of the deer caressing with
their tongues the young hermit boys. It is again the same story. The
hermitage shines out, in all our ancient literature, as the place
where the chasm between man and the rest of creation has been bridged.
In the Western dramas, human characters drown our attention in the
vortex of their passions. Nature occasionally peeps out, but she is
almost always a trespasser, who has to offer excuses, or bow
apologetically and depart. But in all our dramas which still retain
their fame, such as _Mrit-Shakatika_, _Shakuntala_, _Uttara-Ramacharita_,
Nature stands on her own right, proving that she has her great
function, to impart the peace of the eternal to human emotions.
The fury of passion in two of Shakespeare's youthful poems is
exhibited in conspicuous isolation. It is snatched away, naked, from
the context of the All; it has not the green earth or the blue sky
around it; it is there ready to bring to our view the raging fever
which is in man's desires, and not the balm of health and repose which
encircles it in the universe.
_Ritusamhara_ is clearly a work of Kalidasa's immaturity. The youthful
love-song in it does not reach the sublime reticence which is in
_Shakuntala_ and _Kumara-Sambhava_. But the tune of these voluptuous
outbreaks is set to the varied harmony of Nature's symphony. The
moonbeams of the summer evening, resonant with the flow of fountains,
acknowledge it as a part of its own melody. In its rhythm sways the
Kadamba forest, glistening in the first cool rain of the season; and
the south breezes, carrying the scent of the mango blossoms, temper it
with their murmur.
In the third canto of _Kumara-Sambhava_, Madana, the God Eros, enters
the forest sanctuary to set free a sudden flood of desire amid the
serenity of the ascetics' meditation. But the boisterous outbreak of
passion so caused was shown against a background of universal life.
The divine love-thrills of Sati and Shiva found their response in the
world-wide immensity of youth, in which animals and trees have their
life-throbs.
Not only its third canto but the whole of the Kumara-Sambhava poem is
painted upon a limitless canvas. It tells of the eternal wedding of
love, its wooing and sacrifice, and its fulfilment, for which the gods
wait in suspense. Its inner idea is deep and of all time. It answers
the one question that humanity asks through all its endeavours: "How
is the birth of the hero to be brought about, the brave one who can
defy and vanquish the evil demon laying waste heaven's own kingdom? "
It becomes evident that such a problem had become acute in Kalidasa's
time, when the old simplicity of Hindu life had broken up. The Hindu
kings, forgetful of their duties, had become self-seeking epicureans,
and India was being repeatedly devastated by the Scythians. What
answer, then, does the poem give to the question it raises? Its
message is that the cause of weakness lies in the inner life of the
soul. It is in some break of harmony with the Good, some dissociation
from the True. In the commencement of the poem we find that the God
Shiva, the Good, had remained for long lost in the self-centred
solitude of his asceticism, detached from the world of reality. And
then Paradise was lost. But _Kumara-Sambhava_ is the poem of Paradise
Regained. How was it regained? When Sati, the Spirit of Reality,
through humiliation, suffering, and penance, won the Heart of Shiva,
the Spirit of Goodness. And thus, from the union of the freedom of the
real with the restraint of the Good, was born the heroism that
released Paradise from the demon of Lawlessness.
Viewed from without, India, in the time of Kalidasa, appeared to have
reached the zenith of civilisation, excelling as she did in luxury,
literature and the arts. But from the poems of Kalidasa it is evident
that this very magnificence of wealth and enjoyment worked against the
ideal that sprang and flowed forth from the sacred solitude of the
forest. These poems contain the voice of warnings against the
gorgeous unreality of that age, which, like a Himalayan avalanche, was
slowly gliding down to an abyss of catastrophe. And from his seat
beside all the glories of Vikramaditya's throne the poet's heart
yearns for the purity and simplicity of India's past age of spiritual
striving. And it was this yearning which impelled him to go back to
the annals of the ancient Kings of Raghu's line for the narrative
poem, in which he traced the history of the rise and fall of the ideal
that should guide the rulers of men.
King Dilipa, with Queen Sudakshina, has entered upon the life of the
forest. The great monarch is busy tending the cattle of the hermitage.
Thus the poem opens, amid scenes of simplicity and self-denial. But it
ends in the palace of magnificence, in the extravagance of
self-enjoyment. With a calm restraint of language the poet tells us of
the kingly glory crowned with purity. He begins his poem as the day
begins, in the serenity of sunrise. But lavish are the colours in
which he describes the end, as of the evening, eloquent for a time
with the sumptuous splendour of sunset, but overtaken at last by the
devouring darkness which sweeps away all its brilliance into night.
who lives in this palace?
King Dilipa and Queen Sudakshina live in the palace.
In this beginning and this ending of his poem there lies hidden that
message of the forest which found its voice in the poet's words. There
runs through the narrative the idea that the future glowed gloriously
ahead only when there was in the atmosphere the calm of self-control,
of purity and renunciation. When downfall had become imminent, the
hungry fires of desire, aflame at a hundred different points, dazzled
the eyes of all beholders.
Kalidasa in almost all his works represented the unbounded
impetuousness of kingly splendour on the one side and the serene
strength of regulated desires on the other. Even in the minor drama of
_Malavikagnimitra_ we find the same thing in a different manner. It
must never be thought that, in this play, the poet's deliberate object
was to pander to his royal patron by inviting him to a literary orgy
of lust and passion. The very introductory verse indicates the object
towards which this play is directed. The poet begins the drama with
the prayer, "Sanmargalokayan vyapanayatu sa nastamasi vritimishah"
(Let God, to illumine for us the path of truth, sweep away our
passions, bred of darkness). This is the God Shiva, in whose nature
Parvati, the eternal Woman, is ever commingled in an ascetic purity of
love. The unified being of Shiva and Parvati is the perfect symbol of
the eternal in the wedded love of man and woman. When the poet opens
his drama with an invocation of this Spirit of the Divine Union it is
evident that it contains in it the message with which he greets his
kingly audience. The whole drama goes to show the ugliness of the
treachery and cruelty inherent in unchecked self-indulgence. In the
play the conflict of ideals is between the King and the Queen, between
Agnimitra and Dharini, and the significance of the contrast lies
hidden in the very names of the hero and the heroine. Though the name
Agnimitra is historical, yet it symbolises in the poet's mind the
destructive force of uncontrolled desire--just as did the name
Agnivarna in _Raghuvamsha_. Agnimitra, "the friend of the fire," the
reckless person, who in his love-making is playing with fire, not
knowing that all the time it is scorching him black. And what a great
name is Dharini, signifying the fortitude and forbearance that comes
from majesty of soul! What an association it carries of the infinite
dignity of love, purified by a self-abnegation that rises far above
all insult and baseness of betrayal!
In _Shakuntala_ this conflict of ideals has been shown, all through
the drama, by the contrast of the pompous heartlessness of the king's
court and the natural purity of the forest hermitage. The drama opens
with a hunting scene, where the king is in pursuit of an antelope. The
cruelty of the chase appears like a menace symbolising the spirit of
the king's life clashing against the spirit of the forest retreat,
which is "sharanyam sarva-bhutanam" (where all creatures find their
protection of love). And the pleading of the forest-dwellers with the
king to spare the life of the deer, helplessly innocent and beautiful,
is the pleading that rises from the heart of the whole drama. "Never,
oh, never is the arrow meant to pierce the tender body of a deer, even
as the fire is not for the burning of flowers. "
In the _Ramayana_, Rama and his companions, in their banishment, had
to traverse forest after forest; they had to live in leaf-thatched
huts, to sleep on the bare ground. But as their hearts felt their
kinship with woodland, hill, and stream, they were not in exile amidst
these. Poets, brought up in an atmosphere of different ideals, would
have taken this opportunity of depicting in dismal colours the
hardship of the forest-life in order to bring out the martyrdom of
Ramachandra with all the emphasis of a strong contrast. But, in the
_Ramayana_, we are led to realise the greatness of the hero, not in a
fierce struggle with Nature, but in sympathy with it. Sita, the
daughter-in-law of a great kingly house, goes along the forest paths.
We read:
"She asks Rama about the flowering trees, and shrubs and creepers
which she has not seen before. At her request Lakshmana gathers and
brings her plants of all kinds, exuberant with flowers, and it
delights her heart to see the forest rivers, variegated with their
streams and sandy banks, resounding with the call of heron and duck.
"When Rama first took his abode in the Chitrakuta peak, that
delightful Chitrakuta, by the Malyavati river, with its easy slopes
for landing, he forgot all the pain of leaving his home in the capital
at the sight of those woodlands, alive with beast and bird. "
Having lived on that hill for long, Rama, who was "giri-vana-priya"
(lover of the mountain and the forest), said one day to Sita:
"When I look upon the beauties of this hill, the loss of my kingdom
troubles me no longer, nor does the separation from my friends cause
me any pang. "
Thus passed Ramachandra's exile, now in woodland, now in hermitage.
The love which Rama and Sita bore to each other united them, not only
to each other, but to the universe of life. That is why, when Sita was
taken away, the loss seemed to be so great to the forest itself.
III
Strangely enough, in Shakespeare's dramas, like those of Kalidasa, we
find a secret vein of complaint against the artificial life of the
king's court--the life of ungrateful treachery and falsehood. And
almost everywhere, in his dramas, foreign scenes have been introduced
in connection with some working of the life of unscrupulous ambition.
It is perfectly obvious in _Timon of Athens_--but there Nature offers
no message or balm to the injured soul of man. In _Cymbeline_ the
mountainous forest and the cave appear in their aspect of obstruction
to life's opportunities. These only seem tolerable in comparison with
the vicissitudes of fortune in the artificial court life. In _As You
Like It_ the forest of Arden is didactic in its lessons. It does not
bring peace, but preaches, when it says:
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
In the _Tempest_, through Prospero's treatment of Ariel and Caliban we
realise man's struggle with Nature and his longing to sever connection
with her. In _Macbeth_, as a prelude to a bloody crime of treachery
and treason, we are introduced to a scene of barren heath where the
three witches appear as personifications of Nature's malignant forces;
and in _King Lear_ it is the fury of a father's love turned into
curses by the ingratitude born of the unnatural life of the court that
finds its symbol in the storm on the heath. The tragic intensity of
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_ is unrelieved by any touch of Nature's
eternity. Except in a passing glimpse of a moonlight night in the love
scene in the _Merchant of Venice_, Nature has not been allowed in
other dramas of this series, including _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony
and Cleopatra_, to contribute her own music to the music of man's
love. In _The Winter's Tale_ the cruelty of a king's suspicion stands
bare in its relentlessness, and Nature cowers before it, offering no
consolation.
I hope it is needless for me to say that these observations are not
intended to minimise Shakespeare's great power as a dramatic poet, but
to show in his works the gulf between Nature and human nature owing to
the tradition of his race and time. It cannot be said that beauty of
nature is ignored in his writings; only he fails to recognise in them
the truth of the inter-penetration of human life with the cosmic life
of the world. We observe a completely different attitude of mind in
the later English poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, which can be
attributed in the main to the great mental change in Europe, at that
particular period, through the influence of the newly discovered
philosophy of India which stirred the soul of Germany and aroused the
attention of other Western countries.
In Milton's _Paradise Lost_, the very subject--Man dwelling in the
garden of Paradise--seems to afford a special opportunity for bringing
out the true greatness of man's relationship with Nature. But though
the poet has described to us the beauties of the garden, though he has
shown to us the animals living there in amity and peace among
themselves, there is no reality of kinship between them and man. They
were created for man's enjoyment; man was their lord and master. We
find no trace of the love between the first man and woman gradually
surpassing themselves and overflowing the rest of creation, such as we
find in the love scenes in _Kumara-Sambhava_ and _Shakuntala_. In the
seclusion of the bower, where the first man and woman rested in the
garden of Paradise--
Bird, beast, insect or worm
Durst enter none, such was their awe of man.
Not that India denied the superiority of man, but the test of that
superiority lay, according to her, in the comprehensiveness of
sympathy, not in the aloofness of absolute distinction.
IV
India holds sacred, and counts as places of pilgrimage, all spots
which display a special beauty or splendour of nature. These had no
original attraction on account of any special fitness for cultivation
or settlement. Here, man is free, not to look upon Nature as a source
of supply of his necessities, but to realise his soul beyond himself.
The Himalayas of India are sacred and the Vindhya Hills. Her majestic
rivers are sacred. Lake Manasa and the confluence of the Ganges and
the Jamuna are sacred. India has saturated with her love and worship
the great Nature with which her children are surrounded, whose light
fills their eyes with gladness, and whose water cleanses them, whose
food gives them life, and from whose majestic mystery comes forth the
constant revelation of the infinite in music, scent, and colour, which
brings its awakening to the soul of man. India gains the world through
worship, through spiritual communion; and the idea of freedom to which
she aspired was based upon the realisation of her spiritual unity.
When, in my recent voyage to Europe, our ship left Aden and sailed
along the sea which lay between the two continents, we passed by the
red and barren rocks of Arabia on our right side and the gleaming
sands of Egypt on our left. They seemed to me like two giant brothers
exchanging with each other burning glances of hatred, kept apart by
the tearful entreaty of the sea from whose womb they had their birth.
There was an immense stretch of silence on the left shore as well as
on the right, but the two shores spoke to me of the two different
historical dramas enacted. The civilisation which found its growth in
Egypt was continued across long centuries, elaborately rich with
sentiments and expressions of life, with pictures, sculptures,
temples, and ceremonials. This was a country whose guardian-spirit was
a noble river, which spread the festivities of life on its banks
across the heart of the land. There man never raised the barrier of
alienation between himself and the rest of the world.
On the opposite shore of the Red Sea the civilisation which grew up in
the inhospitable soil of Arabia had a contrary character to that of
Egypt. There man felt himself isolated in his hostile and bare
surroundings. His idea of God became that of a jealous God. His mind
naturally dwelt upon the principle of separateness. It roused in him
the spirit of fight, and this spirit was a force that drove him far
and wide. These two civilisations represented two fundamental
divisions of human nature. The one contained in it the spirit of
conquest and the other the spirit of harmony. And both of these have
their truth and purpose in human existence.
The characters of two eminent sages have been described in our
mythology. One was Vashishtha and another Vishvamitra. Both of them
were great, but they represented two different types of wisdom; and
there was conflict between them. Vishvamitra sought to achieve power
and was proud of it; Vashishtha was rudely smitten by that power. But
his hurt and his loss could not touch the illumination of his soul;
for he rose above them and could forgive. Ramachandra, the great hero
of our epic, had his initiation to the spiritual life from Vashishtha,
the life of inner peace and perfection. But he had his initiation to
war from Vishvamitra, who called him to kill the demons and gave him
weapons that were irresistible.
Those two sages symbolise in themselves the two guiding spirits of
civilisation. Can it be true that they shall never be reconciled? If
so, can ever the age of peace and co-operation dawn upon the human
world? Creation is the harmony of contrary forces--the forces of
attraction and repulsion. When they join hands, all the fire and fight
are changed into the smile of flowers and the songs of birds. When
there is only one of them triumphant and the other defeated, then
either there is the death of cold rigidity or that of suicidal
explosion.
Humanity, for ages, has been busy with the one great creation of
spiritual life. Its best wisdom, its discipline, its literature and
art, all the teachings and self-sacrifice of its noblest teachers,
have been for this. But the harmony of contrary forces, which give
their rhythm to all creation, has not yet been perfected by man in his
civilisation, and the Creator in him is baffled over and over again.
He comes back to his work, however, and makes himself busy, building
his world in the midst of desolation and ruins. His history is the
history of his aspiration interrupted and renewed. And one truth of
which he must be reminded, therefore, is that the power which
accomplishes the miracle of creation, by bringing conflicting forces
into the harmony of the One, is no passion, but a love which accepts
the bonds of self-control from the joy of its own immensity--a love
whose sacrifice is the manifestation of its endless wealth within
itself.
AN INDIAN FOLK RELIGION
I
In historical time the Buddha comes first of those who declared
salvation to all men, without distinction, as by right man's own. What
was the special force which startled men's minds and, almost within
the master's lifetime, spread his teachings over India? It was the
unique significance of the event, when a man came to men and said to
them, "I am here to emancipate you from the miseries of the thraldom
of self. " This wisdom came, neither in texts of Scripture, nor in
symbols of deities, nor in religious practices sanctified by ages, but
through the voice of a living man and the love that flowed from a
human heart.
And I believe this was the first occasion in the history of the world
when the idea of the Avatar found its place in religion. Western
scholars are never tired of insisting that Buddhism is of the nature
of a moral code, coldly leading to the path of extinction. They forget
that it was held to be a religion that roused in its devotees an
inextinguishable fire of enthusiasm and carried them to lifelong exile
across the mountain and desert barriers. To say that a philosophy of
suicide can keep kindled in human hearts for centuries such fervour of
self-sacrifice is to go against all the laws of sane psychology. The
religious enthusiasm which cannot be bound within any daily ritual,
but overflows into adventures of love and beneficence, must have in
its centre that element of personality which rouses the whole soul. In
answer, it may possibly be said that this was due to the personality
of Buddha himself. But that also is not quite true. The personality
which stirs the human heart to its immense depths, leading it to
impossible deeds of heroism, must in that process itself reveal to men
the infinite which is in all humanity. And that is what happened in
Buddhism, making it a religion in the complete sense of the word.
Like the religion of the Upanishads, Buddhism also generated two
divergent currents; the one impersonal, preaching the abnegation of
self through discipline, and the other personal, preaching the
cultivation of sympathy for all creatures, and devotion to the
infinite truth of love; the other, which is called the Mahayana, had
its origin in the positive element contained in Buddha's teachings,
which is immeasurable love. It could never, by any logic, find its
reality in the emptiness of the truthless abyss. And the object of
Buddha's meditation and his teachings was to free humanity from
sufferings. But what was the path that he revealed to us? Was it some
negative way of evading pain and seeking security against it? On the
contrary, his path was the path of sacrifice--the utmost sacrifice of
love. The meaning of such sacrifice is to reach some ultimate truth,
some positive ideal, which in its greatness can accept suffering and
transmute it into the profound peace of self-renunciation. True
emancipation from suffering, which is the inalienable condition of the
limited life of the self, can never be attained by fleeing from it,
but rather by changing its value in the realm of truth--the truth of
the higher life of love.
We have learnt that, by calculations made in accordance with the law
of gravitation, some planets were discovered exactly in the place
where they should be. Such a law of gravitation there is also in the
moral world. And when we find men's minds disturbed, as they were by
the preaching of the Buddha, we can be sure, even without any
corroborative evidence, that there must have been some great luminous
body of attraction, positive and powerful, and not a mere unfathomable
vacancy. It is exactly this which we discover in the heart of the
Mahayana system; and we have no hesitation in saying that the truth of
Buddhism is there. The oil has to be burnt, not for the purpose of
diminishing it, but for the purpose of giving light to the lamp. And
when the Buddha said that the self must go, he said at the same moment
that love must be realised. Thus originated the doctrine of the
Dharma-kaya, the Infinite Wisdom and Love manifested in the Buddha. It
was the first instance, as I have said, when men felt that the
Universal and the Eternal Spirit was revealed in a human individual
whom they had known and touched. The joy was too great for them, since
the very idea itself came to them as a freedom--a freedom from the
sense of their measureless insignificance. It was the first time, I
repeat, when the individual, as a man, felt in himself the Infinite
made concrete.
What was more, those men who felt the love welling forth from the
heart of Buddhism, as one with the current of the Eternal Love itself,
were struck with the idea that such an effluence could never have been
due to a single cataclysm of history--unnatural and therefore untrue.
They felt instead that it was in the eternal nature of truth, that the
event must belong to a series of manifestations; there must have been
numberless other revelations in the past and endless others to follow.
The idea grew and widened until men began to feel that this Infinite
Being was already in every one of them, and that it rested with
themselves to remove the sensual obstructions and reveal him in their
own lives. In every individual there was, they realised, the
potentiality of Buddha--that is to say, the Infinite made manifest.
We have to keep in mind the great fact that the preaching of the
Buddha in India was not followed by stagnation of life--as would
surely have happened if humanity was without any positive goal and his
teaching was without any permanent value in itself. On the contrary,
we find the arts and sciences springing up in its wake, institutions
started for alleviating the misery of all creatures, human and
non-human, and great centres of education founded. Some mighty power
was suddenly roused from its obscurity, which worked for long
centuries and changed the history of man in a large part of the world.
And that power came into its full activity only by the individual
being made conscious of his infinite worth. It was like the sudden
discovery of a great mine of living wealth.
During the period of Buddhism the doctrine of deliverance flourished,
which reached all mankind and released man's inner resources from
neglect and self-insult. Even to-day we see in our own country human
nature, from its despised corner of indignity, slowly and painfully
finding its way to assert the inborn majesty of man. It is like the
imprisoned tree finding a rift in the wall, and sending out its eager
branches into freedom, to prove that darkness is not its birthright,
that its love is for the sunshine. In the time of the Buddha the
individual discovered his own immensity of worth, first by witnessing
a man who united his heart in sympathy with all creatures, in all
worlds, through the power of a love that knew no bounds; and then by
learning that the same light of perfection lay confined within
himself behind the clouds of selfish desire, and that the
Bodhi-hridaya--"the heart of the Eternal Enlightenment"--every moment
claimed its unveiling in his own heart. Nagarjuna speaks of this
Bodhi-hridaya (another of whose names is Bodhi-Citta) as follows:
One who understands the nature of the Bodhi-hridaya, sees
everything with a loving heart; for love is the essence of
Bodhi-hridaya. [1]
[Footnote 1: _Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism_, by Dr. D. T.
Suzuki. ]
My object in writing this paper is to show, by the further help of
illustration from a popular religious sect of Bengal, that the
religious instinct of man urges him towards a truth, by which he can
transcend the finite nature of the individual self. Man would never
feel the indignity of his limitations if these were inevitable. Within
him he has glimpses of the Infinite, which give him assurance that
this truth is not in his limitations, but that this truth can be
attained by love. For love is the positive quality of the Infinite,
and love's sacrifice accordingly does not lead to emptiness, but to
fulfilment, to Bodhi-hridaya, "the heart of enlightenment. "
The members of the religious sect I have mentioned call themselves
"Baul. " They live outside social recognition, and their very obscurity
helps them in their seeking, from a direct source, the enlightenment
which the soul longs for, the eternal light of love.
It would be absurd to say that there is little difference between
Buddhism and the religion of these simple people, who have no system
of metaphysics to support their faith. But my object in bringing close
together these two religions, which seem to belong to opposite poles,
is to point out the fundamental unity in them. Both of them believe in
a fulfilment which is reached by love's emancipating us from the
dominance of self. In both these religions we find man's yearning to
attain the infinite worth of his individuality, not through any
conventional valuation of society, but through his perfect
relationship with Truth. They agree in holding that the realisation of
our ultimate object is waiting for us in ourselves. The Baul likens
this fulfilment to the blossoming of a bud, and sings:
Make way, O bud, make way,
Burst open thy heart and make way.
The opening spirit has overtaken thee,
Canst thou remain a bud any longer?
II
One day, in a small village in Bengal, an ascetic woman from the
neighbourhood came to see me. She had the name "Sarva-khepi" given to
her by the village people, the meaning of which is "the woman who is
mad about all things. " She fixed her star-like eyes upon my face and
startled me with the question, "When are you coming to meet me
underneath the trees? " Evidently she pitied me who lived (according to
her) prisoned behind walls, banished away from the great meeting-place
of the All, where she had her dwelling. Just at that moment my
gardener came with his basket, and when the woman understood that the
flowers in the vase on my table were going to be thrown away, to make
place for the fresh ones, she looked pained and said to me, "You are
always engaged reading and writing; you do not see. " Then she took the
discarded flowers in her palms, kissed them and touched them with her
forehead, and reverently murmured to herself, "Beloved of my heart. " I
felt that this woman, in her direct vision of the infinite personality
in the heart of all things, truly represented the spirit of India.
In the same village I came into touch with some Baul singers. I had
known them by their names, occasionally seen them singing and begging
in the street, and so passed them by, vaguely classifying them in my
mind under the general name of Vairagis, or ascetics.
The time came when I had occasion to meet with some members of the
same body and talk to them about spiritual matters. The first Baul
song, which I chanced to hear with any attention, profoundly stirred
my mind. Its words are so simple that it makes me hesitate to render
them in a foreign tongue, and set them forward for critical
observation. Besides, the best part of a song is missed when the tune
is absent; for thereby its movement and its colour are lost, and it
becomes like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked.
The first line may be translated thus: "Where shall I meet him, the
Man of my Heart? " This phrase, "the Man of my Heart," is not peculiar
to this song, but is usual with the Baul sect. It means that, for me,
the supreme truth of all existence is in the revelation of the
Infinite in my own humanity.
"The Man of my Heart," to the Baul, is like a divine instrument
perfectly tuned. He gives expression to infinite truth in the music
of life. And the longing for the truth which is in us, which we have
not yet realised, breaks out in the following Baul song:
Where shall I meet him, the Man of my Heart?
He is lost to me and I seek him wandering from land to land.
I am listless for that moonrise of beauty,
which is to light my life,
which I long to see in the fulness of vision, in gladness of heart.
The name of the poet who wrote this song was Gagan. He was almost
illiterate; and the ideas he received from his Baul teacher found no
distraction from the self-consciousness of the modern age. He was a
village postman, earning about ten shillings a month, and he died
before he had completed his teens. The sentiment, to which he gave
such intensity of expression, is common to most of the songs of his
sect. And it is a sect, almost exclusively confined to that lower
floor of society, where the light of modern education hardly finds an
entrance, while wealth and respectability shun its utter indigence.
In the song I have translated above, the longing of the singer to
realise the infinite in his own personality is expressed. This has to
be done daily by its perfect expression in life, in love. For the
personal expression of life, in its perfection, is love; just as the
personal expression of truth in its perfection is beauty.
In the political life of the modern age the idea of democracy has
given mankind faith in the individual. It gives each man trust in his
own possibilities, and pride in his humanity. Something of the same
idea, we find, has been working in the popular mind of India, with
regard to its religious consciousness. Over and over again it tries to
assert, not only that God is _for_ each of us, but also that God is
_in_ each of us. These people have no special incarnations in their
simple theology, because they know that God is special to each
individual. They say that to be born a man is the greatest privilege
that can fall to a creature in all the world. They assert that gods in
Paradise envy human beings. Why? Because God's will, in giving his
love, finds its completeness in man's will returning that love.
Therefore Humanity is a necessary factor in the perfecting of the
divine truth. The Infinite, for its self-expression, comes down into
the manifoldness of the Finite; and the Finite, for its
self-realisation, must rise into the unity of the Infinite. Then only
is the Cycle of Truth complete.
The dignity of man, in his eternal right of Truth, finds expression in
the following song, composed, not by a theologian or a man of letters,
but by one who belongs to that ninety per cent of the population of
British India whose education has been far less than elementary, in
fact almost below zero:
My longing is to meet you in play of love, my Lover;
But this longing is not only mine, but also yours.
For your lips can have their smile, and your flute
its music, only in your delight in my love;
and therefore you are importunate, even as I am.
If the world were a mere expression of formative forces, then this
song would be pathetic in its presumption. But why is there beauty at
all in creation--the beauty whose only meaning is in a call that
claims disinterestedness as a response? The poet proudly says: "Your
flute could not have its music of beauty if your delight were not in
my love. Your power is great--and there I am not equal to you--but it
lies even in me to make you smile, and if you and I never meet, then
this play of love remains incomplete. "
If this were not true, then it would be an utter humiliation to exist
at all in this world. If it were solely _our_ business to seek the
Lover, and _his_ to keep himself passively aloof in the infinity of
his glory, or actively masterful only in imposing his commands upon
us, then we should dare to defy him, and refuse to accept the
everlasting insult latent in the one-sided importunity of a slave. And
this is what the Baul says--he who, in the world of men, goes about
singing for alms from door to door, with his one-stringed instrument
and long robe of patched-up rags on his back:
I stop and sit here on the road. Do not ask me to walk farther.
If your love can be complete without mine, let me turn back
from seeing you.
I have been travelling to seek you, my friend, for long;
Yet I refuse to beg a sight of you, if you do not feel my need.
I am blind with market dust and midday glare,
and so wait, my heart's lover, in hopes that your own love
will send you to find me out.
The poet is fully conscious that his value in the world's market is
pitifully small; that he is neither wealthy nor learned. Yet he has
his great compensation, for he has come close to his Lover's heart. In
Bengal the women bathing in the river often use their overturned water
jars to keep themselves floating when they swim, and the poet uses
this incident for his simile:
It is lucky that I am an empty vessel,
For when you swim, I keep floating by your side.
Your full vessels are left on the empty shore, they are for use;
But I am carried to the river in your arms, and I dance
to the rhythm of your heart-throbs and heaving of the waves.
The great distinguished people of the world do not know that these
beggars--deprived of education, honour, and wealth--can, in the pride
of their souls, look down upon them as the unfortunate ones, who are
left on the shore for their worldly uses, but whose life ever misses
the touch of the Lover's arms.
The feeling that man is not a mere casual visitor at the palace-gate
of the world, but the invited guest whose presence is needed to give
the royal banquet its sole meaning, is not confined to any particular
sect in India. Let me quote here some poems from a mediaeval poet of
Western India--Jnandas--whose works are nearly forgotten, and have
become scarce from the very exquisiteness of their excellence. In the
following poem he is addressing God's messenger, who comes to us in
the morning light of our childhood, in the dusk of our day's end, and
in the night's darkness:
Messenger, morning brought you, habited in gold.
After sunset, your song wore a tune of ascetic grey,
and then came night.
Your message was written in bright letters across the black.
Why is such splendour about you, to lure the heart of one
who is nothing?
This is the answer of the messenger:
Great is the festival hall where you are to be the only guest.
Therefore the letter to you is written from sky to sky,
And I, the proud servant, bring the invitation with all ceremony.
And thus the poet knows that the silent rows of stars carry God's own
invitation to the individual soul.
The same poet sings:
What hast thou come to beg from the beggar, O King of Kings?
My Kingdom is poor for want of him, my dear one, and I
wait for him in sorrow.
How long will you keep him waiting, O wretch,
who has waited for you for ages in silence and stillness?
Open your gate, and make this very moment fit for the union.
It is the song of man's pride in the value given to him by Supreme
Love and realised by his own love.
The Vaishnava religion, which has become the popular religion of
India, carries the same message: God's love finding its finality in
man's love. According to it, the lover, man, is the complement of the
Lover, God, in the internal love drama of existence; and God's call
is ever wafted in man's heart in the world-music, drawing him towards
the union. This idea has been expressed in rich elaboration of symbols
verging upon realism. But for these Bauls this idea is direct and
simple, full of the dignified beauty of truth, which shuns all tinsels
of ornament.
The Baul poet, when asked why he had no sect mark on his forehead,
answered in his song that the true colour decoration appears on the
skin of the fruit when its inner core is filled with ripe, sweet
juice; but by artificially smearing it with colour from outside you do
not make it ripe. And he says of his Guru, his teacher, that he is
puzzled to find in which direction he must make salutation. For his
teacher is not one, but many, who, moving on, form a procession of
wayfarers.
Bauls have no temple or image for their worship, and this utter
simplicity is needful for men whose one subject is to realise the
innermost nearness of God. 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.
gives our personality the disinterested freedom of the eternal, there
to find it in its true perspective. To see our own home in flames is
not to see fire in its verity. But the fire in the stars is the fire
in the heart of the Infinite; there, it is the script of creation.
Matthew Arnold, in his poem addressed to a nightingale, sings:
Hark! ah, the nightingale--
The tawny-throated!
Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark! --what pain!
But pain, when met within the boundaries of limited reality, repels
and hurts; it is discordant with the narrow scope of life. But the
pain of some great martyrdom has the detachment of eternity. It
appears in all its majesty, harmonious in the context of everlasting
life; like the thunder-flash in the stormy sky, not on the laboratory
wire. Pain on that scale has its harmony in great love; for by hurting
love it reveals the infinity of love in all its truth and beauty. On
the other hand, the pain involved in business insolvency is
discordant; it kills and consumes till nothing remains but ashes.
The poet sings again:
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!
And the truth of pain in eternity has been sung by those Vedic poets
who had said, "From joy has come forth all creation. " They say:
Sa tapas tapatva sarvam asrajata Yadidam kincha.
(God from the heat of his pain created all that there is. )
The sacrifice, which is in the heart of creation, is both joy and pain
at the same moment. Of this sings a village mystic in Bengal:
My eyes drown in the darkness of joy,
My heart, like a lotus, closes its petals in the rapture of the
dark night.
That song speaks of a joy which is deep like the blue sea, endless
like the blue sky; which has the magnificence of the night, and in its
limitless darkness enfolds the radiant worlds in the awfulness of
peace; it is the unfathomed joy in which all sufferings are made one.
A poet of mediaeval India tells us about his source of inspiration in a
poem containing a question and an answer:
Where were your songs, my bird, when you spent your nights in the nest?
Was not all your pleasure stored therein?
What makes you lose your heart to the sky, the sky that is limitless?
The bird answers:
I had my pleasure while I rested within bounds.
When I soared into the limitless, I found my songs!
To detach the individual idea from its confinement of everyday facts
and to give its soaring wings the freedom of the universal: this is
the function of poetry. The ambition of Macbeth, the jealousy of
Othello, would be at best sensational in police court proceedings; but
in Shakespeare's dramas they are carried among the flaming
constellations where creation throbs with Eternal Passion, Eternal
Pain.
THE RELIGION OF THE FOREST
I
We stand before this great world. The truth of our life depends upon
our attitude of mind towards it--an attitude which is formed by our
habit of dealing with it according to the special circumstance of our
surroundings and our temperaments. It guides our attempts to establish
relations with the universe either by conquest or by union, either
through the cultivation of power or through that of sympathy. And
thus, in our realisation of the truth of existence, we put our
emphasis either upon the principle of dualism or upon the principle of
unity.
The Indian sages have held in the Upanishads that the emancipation of
our soul lies in its realising the ultimate truth of unity. They said:
Ishavasyam idam sarvam yat kinch jagatyam jagat.
Yena tyaktena bhunjitha ma graha kasyasvit dhanam.
(Know all that moves in this moving world as enveloped by
God; and find enjoyment through renunciation, not through
greed of possession. )
The meaning of this is, that, when we know the multiplicity of things
as the final truth, we try to augment ourselves by the external
possession of them; but, when we know the Infinite Soul as the final
truth, then through our union with it we realise the joy of our soul.
Therefore it has been said of those who have attained their
fulfilment,--"sarvam eva vishanti" (they enter into all things). Their
perfect relation with this world is the relation of union.
This ideal of perfection preached by the forest-dwellers of ancient
India runs through the heart of our classical literature and still
dominates our mind. The legends related in our epics cluster under the
forest shade bearing all through their narrative the message of the
forest-dwellers. Our two greatest classical dramas find their
background in scenes of the forest hermitage, which are permeated by
the association of these sages.
The history of the Northmen of Europe is resonant with the music of
the sea. That sea is not merely topographical in its significance, but
represents certain ideals of life which still guide the history and
inspire the creations of that race. In the sea, nature presented
herself to those men in her aspect of a danger, a barrier which
seemed to be at constant war with the land and its children. The sea
was the challenge of untamed nature to the indomitable human soul. And
man did not flinch; he fought and won, and the spirit of fight
continued in him. This fight he still maintains; it is the fight
against disease and poverty, tyranny of matter and of man.
This refers to a people who live by the sea, and ride on it as on a
wild, champing horse, catching it by its mane and making it render
service from shore to shore. They find delight in turning by force the
antagonism of circumstances into obedience. Truth appears to them in
her aspect of dualism, the perpetual conflict of good and evil, which
has no reconciliation, which can only end in victory or defeat.
But in the level tracts of Northern India men found no barrier between
their lives and the grand life that permeates the universe. The forest
entered into a close living relationship with their work and leisure,
with their daily necessities and contemplations. They could not think
of other surroundings as separate or inimical. So the view of the
truth, which these men found, did not make manifest the difference,
but rather the unity of all things. They uttered their faith in these
words: "Yadidam kinch sarvam prana ejati nihsratam" (All that is
vibrates with life, having come out from life). When we know this
world as alien to us, then its mechanical aspect takes prominence in
our mind; and then we set up our machines and our methods to deal with
it and make as much profit as our knowledge of its mechanism allows us
to do. This view of things does not play us false, for the machine has
its place in this world. And not only this material universe, but
human beings also, may be used as machines and made to yield powerful
results. This aspect of truth cannot be ignored; it has to be known
and mastered. Europe has done so and has reaped a rich harvest.
The view of this world which India has taken is summed up in one
compound Sanskrit word, Sachid? nanda. The meaning is that Reality,
which is essentially one, has three phases. The first is Sat; it is
the simple fact that things are, the fact which relates us to all
things through the relationship of common existence. The second is
Chit; it is the fact that we know, which relates us to all things
through the relationship of knowledge. The third is Ananda: it is the
fact that we enjoy, which unites us with all things through the
relationship of love.
According to the true Indian view, our consciousness of the world,
merely as the sum total of things that exist, and as governed by laws,
is imperfect. But it is perfect when our consciousness realises all
things as spiritually one with it, and therefore capable of giving us
joy. For us the highest purpose of this world is not merely living in
it, knowing it and making use of it, but realising our own selves in
it through expansion of sympathy; not alienating ourselves from it and
dominating it, but comprehending and uniting it with ourselves in
perfect union.
II
When Vikramaditya became king, Ujjayini a great capital, and Kalidasa
its poet, the age of India's forest retreats had passed. Then we had
taken our stand in the midst of the great concourse of humanity. The
Chinese and the Hun, the Scythian and the Persian, the Greek and the
Roman, had crowded round us. But, even in that age of pomp and
prosperity, the love and reverence with which its poet sang about the
hermitage shows what was the dominant ideal that occupied the mind of
India; what was the one current of memory that continually flowed
through her life.
In Kalidasa's drama, _Shakuntala_, the hermitage, which dominates the
play, overshadowing the king's palace, has the same idea running
through it--the recognition of the kinship of man with conscious and
unconscious creation alike.
A poet of a later age, while describing a hermitage in his Kadambari,
tells us of the posture of salutation in the flowering lianas as they
bow to the wind; of the sacrifice offered by the trees scattering
their blossoms; of the grove resounding with the lessons chanted by
the neophytes, and the verses repeated by the parrots, learnt by constantly
hearing them; of the wild-fowl enjoying "vaishva-deva-bali-pinda"
(the food offered to the divinity which is in all creatures); of the
ducks coming up from the lake for their portion of the grass seed
spread in the cottage yards to dry; and of the deer caressing with
their tongues the young hermit boys. It is again the same story. The
hermitage shines out, in all our ancient literature, as the place
where the chasm between man and the rest of creation has been bridged.
In the Western dramas, human characters drown our attention in the
vortex of their passions. Nature occasionally peeps out, but she is
almost always a trespasser, who has to offer excuses, or bow
apologetically and depart. But in all our dramas which still retain
their fame, such as _Mrit-Shakatika_, _Shakuntala_, _Uttara-Ramacharita_,
Nature stands on her own right, proving that she has her great
function, to impart the peace of the eternal to human emotions.
The fury of passion in two of Shakespeare's youthful poems is
exhibited in conspicuous isolation. It is snatched away, naked, from
the context of the All; it has not the green earth or the blue sky
around it; it is there ready to bring to our view the raging fever
which is in man's desires, and not the balm of health and repose which
encircles it in the universe.
_Ritusamhara_ is clearly a work of Kalidasa's immaturity. The youthful
love-song in it does not reach the sublime reticence which is in
_Shakuntala_ and _Kumara-Sambhava_. But the tune of these voluptuous
outbreaks is set to the varied harmony of Nature's symphony. The
moonbeams of the summer evening, resonant with the flow of fountains,
acknowledge it as a part of its own melody. In its rhythm sways the
Kadamba forest, glistening in the first cool rain of the season; and
the south breezes, carrying the scent of the mango blossoms, temper it
with their murmur.
In the third canto of _Kumara-Sambhava_, Madana, the God Eros, enters
the forest sanctuary to set free a sudden flood of desire amid the
serenity of the ascetics' meditation. But the boisterous outbreak of
passion so caused was shown against a background of universal life.
The divine love-thrills of Sati and Shiva found their response in the
world-wide immensity of youth, in which animals and trees have their
life-throbs.
Not only its third canto but the whole of the Kumara-Sambhava poem is
painted upon a limitless canvas. It tells of the eternal wedding of
love, its wooing and sacrifice, and its fulfilment, for which the gods
wait in suspense. Its inner idea is deep and of all time. It answers
the one question that humanity asks through all its endeavours: "How
is the birth of the hero to be brought about, the brave one who can
defy and vanquish the evil demon laying waste heaven's own kingdom? "
It becomes evident that such a problem had become acute in Kalidasa's
time, when the old simplicity of Hindu life had broken up. The Hindu
kings, forgetful of their duties, had become self-seeking epicureans,
and India was being repeatedly devastated by the Scythians. What
answer, then, does the poem give to the question it raises? Its
message is that the cause of weakness lies in the inner life of the
soul. It is in some break of harmony with the Good, some dissociation
from the True. In the commencement of the poem we find that the God
Shiva, the Good, had remained for long lost in the self-centred
solitude of his asceticism, detached from the world of reality. And
then Paradise was lost. But _Kumara-Sambhava_ is the poem of Paradise
Regained. How was it regained? When Sati, the Spirit of Reality,
through humiliation, suffering, and penance, won the Heart of Shiva,
the Spirit of Goodness. And thus, from the union of the freedom of the
real with the restraint of the Good, was born the heroism that
released Paradise from the demon of Lawlessness.
Viewed from without, India, in the time of Kalidasa, appeared to have
reached the zenith of civilisation, excelling as she did in luxury,
literature and the arts. But from the poems of Kalidasa it is evident
that this very magnificence of wealth and enjoyment worked against the
ideal that sprang and flowed forth from the sacred solitude of the
forest. These poems contain the voice of warnings against the
gorgeous unreality of that age, which, like a Himalayan avalanche, was
slowly gliding down to an abyss of catastrophe. And from his seat
beside all the glories of Vikramaditya's throne the poet's heart
yearns for the purity and simplicity of India's past age of spiritual
striving. And it was this yearning which impelled him to go back to
the annals of the ancient Kings of Raghu's line for the narrative
poem, in which he traced the history of the rise and fall of the ideal
that should guide the rulers of men.
King Dilipa, with Queen Sudakshina, has entered upon the life of the
forest. The great monarch is busy tending the cattle of the hermitage.
Thus the poem opens, amid scenes of simplicity and self-denial. But it
ends in the palace of magnificence, in the extravagance of
self-enjoyment. With a calm restraint of language the poet tells us of
the kingly glory crowned with purity. He begins his poem as the day
begins, in the serenity of sunrise. But lavish are the colours in
which he describes the end, as of the evening, eloquent for a time
with the sumptuous splendour of sunset, but overtaken at last by the
devouring darkness which sweeps away all its brilliance into night.
who lives in this palace?
King Dilipa and Queen Sudakshina live in the palace.
In this beginning and this ending of his poem there lies hidden that
message of the forest which found its voice in the poet's words. There
runs through the narrative the idea that the future glowed gloriously
ahead only when there was in the atmosphere the calm of self-control,
of purity and renunciation. When downfall had become imminent, the
hungry fires of desire, aflame at a hundred different points, dazzled
the eyes of all beholders.
Kalidasa in almost all his works represented the unbounded
impetuousness of kingly splendour on the one side and the serene
strength of regulated desires on the other. Even in the minor drama of
_Malavikagnimitra_ we find the same thing in a different manner. It
must never be thought that, in this play, the poet's deliberate object
was to pander to his royal patron by inviting him to a literary orgy
of lust and passion. The very introductory verse indicates the object
towards which this play is directed. The poet begins the drama with
the prayer, "Sanmargalokayan vyapanayatu sa nastamasi vritimishah"
(Let God, to illumine for us the path of truth, sweep away our
passions, bred of darkness). This is the God Shiva, in whose nature
Parvati, the eternal Woman, is ever commingled in an ascetic purity of
love. The unified being of Shiva and Parvati is the perfect symbol of
the eternal in the wedded love of man and woman. When the poet opens
his drama with an invocation of this Spirit of the Divine Union it is
evident that it contains in it the message with which he greets his
kingly audience. The whole drama goes to show the ugliness of the
treachery and cruelty inherent in unchecked self-indulgence. In the
play the conflict of ideals is between the King and the Queen, between
Agnimitra and Dharini, and the significance of the contrast lies
hidden in the very names of the hero and the heroine. Though the name
Agnimitra is historical, yet it symbolises in the poet's mind the
destructive force of uncontrolled desire--just as did the name
Agnivarna in _Raghuvamsha_. Agnimitra, "the friend of the fire," the
reckless person, who in his love-making is playing with fire, not
knowing that all the time it is scorching him black. And what a great
name is Dharini, signifying the fortitude and forbearance that comes
from majesty of soul! What an association it carries of the infinite
dignity of love, purified by a self-abnegation that rises far above
all insult and baseness of betrayal!
In _Shakuntala_ this conflict of ideals has been shown, all through
the drama, by the contrast of the pompous heartlessness of the king's
court and the natural purity of the forest hermitage. The drama opens
with a hunting scene, where the king is in pursuit of an antelope. The
cruelty of the chase appears like a menace symbolising the spirit of
the king's life clashing against the spirit of the forest retreat,
which is "sharanyam sarva-bhutanam" (where all creatures find their
protection of love). And the pleading of the forest-dwellers with the
king to spare the life of the deer, helplessly innocent and beautiful,
is the pleading that rises from the heart of the whole drama. "Never,
oh, never is the arrow meant to pierce the tender body of a deer, even
as the fire is not for the burning of flowers. "
In the _Ramayana_, Rama and his companions, in their banishment, had
to traverse forest after forest; they had to live in leaf-thatched
huts, to sleep on the bare ground. But as their hearts felt their
kinship with woodland, hill, and stream, they were not in exile amidst
these. Poets, brought up in an atmosphere of different ideals, would
have taken this opportunity of depicting in dismal colours the
hardship of the forest-life in order to bring out the martyrdom of
Ramachandra with all the emphasis of a strong contrast. But, in the
_Ramayana_, we are led to realise the greatness of the hero, not in a
fierce struggle with Nature, but in sympathy with it. Sita, the
daughter-in-law of a great kingly house, goes along the forest paths.
We read:
"She asks Rama about the flowering trees, and shrubs and creepers
which she has not seen before. At her request Lakshmana gathers and
brings her plants of all kinds, exuberant with flowers, and it
delights her heart to see the forest rivers, variegated with their
streams and sandy banks, resounding with the call of heron and duck.
"When Rama first took his abode in the Chitrakuta peak, that
delightful Chitrakuta, by the Malyavati river, with its easy slopes
for landing, he forgot all the pain of leaving his home in the capital
at the sight of those woodlands, alive with beast and bird. "
Having lived on that hill for long, Rama, who was "giri-vana-priya"
(lover of the mountain and the forest), said one day to Sita:
"When I look upon the beauties of this hill, the loss of my kingdom
troubles me no longer, nor does the separation from my friends cause
me any pang. "
Thus passed Ramachandra's exile, now in woodland, now in hermitage.
The love which Rama and Sita bore to each other united them, not only
to each other, but to the universe of life. That is why, when Sita was
taken away, the loss seemed to be so great to the forest itself.
III
Strangely enough, in Shakespeare's dramas, like those of Kalidasa, we
find a secret vein of complaint against the artificial life of the
king's court--the life of ungrateful treachery and falsehood. And
almost everywhere, in his dramas, foreign scenes have been introduced
in connection with some working of the life of unscrupulous ambition.
It is perfectly obvious in _Timon of Athens_--but there Nature offers
no message or balm to the injured soul of man. In _Cymbeline_ the
mountainous forest and the cave appear in their aspect of obstruction
to life's opportunities. These only seem tolerable in comparison with
the vicissitudes of fortune in the artificial court life. In _As You
Like It_ the forest of Arden is didactic in its lessons. It does not
bring peace, but preaches, when it says:
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
In the _Tempest_, through Prospero's treatment of Ariel and Caliban we
realise man's struggle with Nature and his longing to sever connection
with her. In _Macbeth_, as a prelude to a bloody crime of treachery
and treason, we are introduced to a scene of barren heath where the
three witches appear as personifications of Nature's malignant forces;
and in _King Lear_ it is the fury of a father's love turned into
curses by the ingratitude born of the unnatural life of the court that
finds its symbol in the storm on the heath. The tragic intensity of
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_ is unrelieved by any touch of Nature's
eternity. Except in a passing glimpse of a moonlight night in the love
scene in the _Merchant of Venice_, Nature has not been allowed in
other dramas of this series, including _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony
and Cleopatra_, to contribute her own music to the music of man's
love. In _The Winter's Tale_ the cruelty of a king's suspicion stands
bare in its relentlessness, and Nature cowers before it, offering no
consolation.
I hope it is needless for me to say that these observations are not
intended to minimise Shakespeare's great power as a dramatic poet, but
to show in his works the gulf between Nature and human nature owing to
the tradition of his race and time. It cannot be said that beauty of
nature is ignored in his writings; only he fails to recognise in them
the truth of the inter-penetration of human life with the cosmic life
of the world. We observe a completely different attitude of mind in
the later English poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, which can be
attributed in the main to the great mental change in Europe, at that
particular period, through the influence of the newly discovered
philosophy of India which stirred the soul of Germany and aroused the
attention of other Western countries.
In Milton's _Paradise Lost_, the very subject--Man dwelling in the
garden of Paradise--seems to afford a special opportunity for bringing
out the true greatness of man's relationship with Nature. But though
the poet has described to us the beauties of the garden, though he has
shown to us the animals living there in amity and peace among
themselves, there is no reality of kinship between them and man. They
were created for man's enjoyment; man was their lord and master. We
find no trace of the love between the first man and woman gradually
surpassing themselves and overflowing the rest of creation, such as we
find in the love scenes in _Kumara-Sambhava_ and _Shakuntala_. In the
seclusion of the bower, where the first man and woman rested in the
garden of Paradise--
Bird, beast, insect or worm
Durst enter none, such was their awe of man.
Not that India denied the superiority of man, but the test of that
superiority lay, according to her, in the comprehensiveness of
sympathy, not in the aloofness of absolute distinction.
IV
India holds sacred, and counts as places of pilgrimage, all spots
which display a special beauty or splendour of nature. These had no
original attraction on account of any special fitness for cultivation
or settlement. Here, man is free, not to look upon Nature as a source
of supply of his necessities, but to realise his soul beyond himself.
The Himalayas of India are sacred and the Vindhya Hills. Her majestic
rivers are sacred. Lake Manasa and the confluence of the Ganges and
the Jamuna are sacred. India has saturated with her love and worship
the great Nature with which her children are surrounded, whose light
fills their eyes with gladness, and whose water cleanses them, whose
food gives them life, and from whose majestic mystery comes forth the
constant revelation of the infinite in music, scent, and colour, which
brings its awakening to the soul of man. India gains the world through
worship, through spiritual communion; and the idea of freedom to which
she aspired was based upon the realisation of her spiritual unity.
When, in my recent voyage to Europe, our ship left Aden and sailed
along the sea which lay between the two continents, we passed by the
red and barren rocks of Arabia on our right side and the gleaming
sands of Egypt on our left. They seemed to me like two giant brothers
exchanging with each other burning glances of hatred, kept apart by
the tearful entreaty of the sea from whose womb they had their birth.
There was an immense stretch of silence on the left shore as well as
on the right, but the two shores spoke to me of the two different
historical dramas enacted. The civilisation which found its growth in
Egypt was continued across long centuries, elaborately rich with
sentiments and expressions of life, with pictures, sculptures,
temples, and ceremonials. This was a country whose guardian-spirit was
a noble river, which spread the festivities of life on its banks
across the heart of the land. There man never raised the barrier of
alienation between himself and the rest of the world.
On the opposite shore of the Red Sea the civilisation which grew up in
the inhospitable soil of Arabia had a contrary character to that of
Egypt. There man felt himself isolated in his hostile and bare
surroundings. His idea of God became that of a jealous God. His mind
naturally dwelt upon the principle of separateness. It roused in him
the spirit of fight, and this spirit was a force that drove him far
and wide. These two civilisations represented two fundamental
divisions of human nature. The one contained in it the spirit of
conquest and the other the spirit of harmony. And both of these have
their truth and purpose in human existence.
The characters of two eminent sages have been described in our
mythology. One was Vashishtha and another Vishvamitra. Both of them
were great, but they represented two different types of wisdom; and
there was conflict between them. Vishvamitra sought to achieve power
and was proud of it; Vashishtha was rudely smitten by that power. But
his hurt and his loss could not touch the illumination of his soul;
for he rose above them and could forgive. Ramachandra, the great hero
of our epic, had his initiation to the spiritual life from Vashishtha,
the life of inner peace and perfection. But he had his initiation to
war from Vishvamitra, who called him to kill the demons and gave him
weapons that were irresistible.
Those two sages symbolise in themselves the two guiding spirits of
civilisation. Can it be true that they shall never be reconciled? If
so, can ever the age of peace and co-operation dawn upon the human
world? Creation is the harmony of contrary forces--the forces of
attraction and repulsion. When they join hands, all the fire and fight
are changed into the smile of flowers and the songs of birds. When
there is only one of them triumphant and the other defeated, then
either there is the death of cold rigidity or that of suicidal
explosion.
Humanity, for ages, has been busy with the one great creation of
spiritual life. Its best wisdom, its discipline, its literature and
art, all the teachings and self-sacrifice of its noblest teachers,
have been for this. But the harmony of contrary forces, which give
their rhythm to all creation, has not yet been perfected by man in his
civilisation, and the Creator in him is baffled over and over again.
He comes back to his work, however, and makes himself busy, building
his world in the midst of desolation and ruins. His history is the
history of his aspiration interrupted and renewed. And one truth of
which he must be reminded, therefore, is that the power which
accomplishes the miracle of creation, by bringing conflicting forces
into the harmony of the One, is no passion, but a love which accepts
the bonds of self-control from the joy of its own immensity--a love
whose sacrifice is the manifestation of its endless wealth within
itself.
AN INDIAN FOLK RELIGION
I
In historical time the Buddha comes first of those who declared
salvation to all men, without distinction, as by right man's own. What
was the special force which startled men's minds and, almost within
the master's lifetime, spread his teachings over India? It was the
unique significance of the event, when a man came to men and said to
them, "I am here to emancipate you from the miseries of the thraldom
of self. " This wisdom came, neither in texts of Scripture, nor in
symbols of deities, nor in religious practices sanctified by ages, but
through the voice of a living man and the love that flowed from a
human heart.
And I believe this was the first occasion in the history of the world
when the idea of the Avatar found its place in religion. Western
scholars are never tired of insisting that Buddhism is of the nature
of a moral code, coldly leading to the path of extinction. They forget
that it was held to be a religion that roused in its devotees an
inextinguishable fire of enthusiasm and carried them to lifelong exile
across the mountain and desert barriers. To say that a philosophy of
suicide can keep kindled in human hearts for centuries such fervour of
self-sacrifice is to go against all the laws of sane psychology. The
religious enthusiasm which cannot be bound within any daily ritual,
but overflows into adventures of love and beneficence, must have in
its centre that element of personality which rouses the whole soul. In
answer, it may possibly be said that this was due to the personality
of Buddha himself. But that also is not quite true. The personality
which stirs the human heart to its immense depths, leading it to
impossible deeds of heroism, must in that process itself reveal to men
the infinite which is in all humanity. And that is what happened in
Buddhism, making it a religion in the complete sense of the word.
Like the religion of the Upanishads, Buddhism also generated two
divergent currents; the one impersonal, preaching the abnegation of
self through discipline, and the other personal, preaching the
cultivation of sympathy for all creatures, and devotion to the
infinite truth of love; the other, which is called the Mahayana, had
its origin in the positive element contained in Buddha's teachings,
which is immeasurable love. It could never, by any logic, find its
reality in the emptiness of the truthless abyss. And the object of
Buddha's meditation and his teachings was to free humanity from
sufferings. But what was the path that he revealed to us? Was it some
negative way of evading pain and seeking security against it? On the
contrary, his path was the path of sacrifice--the utmost sacrifice of
love. The meaning of such sacrifice is to reach some ultimate truth,
some positive ideal, which in its greatness can accept suffering and
transmute it into the profound peace of self-renunciation. True
emancipation from suffering, which is the inalienable condition of the
limited life of the self, can never be attained by fleeing from it,
but rather by changing its value in the realm of truth--the truth of
the higher life of love.
We have learnt that, by calculations made in accordance with the law
of gravitation, some planets were discovered exactly in the place
where they should be. Such a law of gravitation there is also in the
moral world. And when we find men's minds disturbed, as they were by
the preaching of the Buddha, we can be sure, even without any
corroborative evidence, that there must have been some great luminous
body of attraction, positive and powerful, and not a mere unfathomable
vacancy. It is exactly this which we discover in the heart of the
Mahayana system; and we have no hesitation in saying that the truth of
Buddhism is there. The oil has to be burnt, not for the purpose of
diminishing it, but for the purpose of giving light to the lamp. And
when the Buddha said that the self must go, he said at the same moment
that love must be realised. Thus originated the doctrine of the
Dharma-kaya, the Infinite Wisdom and Love manifested in the Buddha. It
was the first instance, as I have said, when men felt that the
Universal and the Eternal Spirit was revealed in a human individual
whom they had known and touched. The joy was too great for them, since
the very idea itself came to them as a freedom--a freedom from the
sense of their measureless insignificance. It was the first time, I
repeat, when the individual, as a man, felt in himself the Infinite
made concrete.
What was more, those men who felt the love welling forth from the
heart of Buddhism, as one with the current of the Eternal Love itself,
were struck with the idea that such an effluence could never have been
due to a single cataclysm of history--unnatural and therefore untrue.
They felt instead that it was in the eternal nature of truth, that the
event must belong to a series of manifestations; there must have been
numberless other revelations in the past and endless others to follow.
The idea grew and widened until men began to feel that this Infinite
Being was already in every one of them, and that it rested with
themselves to remove the sensual obstructions and reveal him in their
own lives. In every individual there was, they realised, the
potentiality of Buddha--that is to say, the Infinite made manifest.
We have to keep in mind the great fact that the preaching of the
Buddha in India was not followed by stagnation of life--as would
surely have happened if humanity was without any positive goal and his
teaching was without any permanent value in itself. On the contrary,
we find the arts and sciences springing up in its wake, institutions
started for alleviating the misery of all creatures, human and
non-human, and great centres of education founded. Some mighty power
was suddenly roused from its obscurity, which worked for long
centuries and changed the history of man in a large part of the world.
And that power came into its full activity only by the individual
being made conscious of his infinite worth. It was like the sudden
discovery of a great mine of living wealth.
During the period of Buddhism the doctrine of deliverance flourished,
which reached all mankind and released man's inner resources from
neglect and self-insult. Even to-day we see in our own country human
nature, from its despised corner of indignity, slowly and painfully
finding its way to assert the inborn majesty of man. It is like the
imprisoned tree finding a rift in the wall, and sending out its eager
branches into freedom, to prove that darkness is not its birthright,
that its love is for the sunshine. In the time of the Buddha the
individual discovered his own immensity of worth, first by witnessing
a man who united his heart in sympathy with all creatures, in all
worlds, through the power of a love that knew no bounds; and then by
learning that the same light of perfection lay confined within
himself behind the clouds of selfish desire, and that the
Bodhi-hridaya--"the heart of the Eternal Enlightenment"--every moment
claimed its unveiling in his own heart. Nagarjuna speaks of this
Bodhi-hridaya (another of whose names is Bodhi-Citta) as follows:
One who understands the nature of the Bodhi-hridaya, sees
everything with a loving heart; for love is the essence of
Bodhi-hridaya. [1]
[Footnote 1: _Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism_, by Dr. D. T.
Suzuki. ]
My object in writing this paper is to show, by the further help of
illustration from a popular religious sect of Bengal, that the
religious instinct of man urges him towards a truth, by which he can
transcend the finite nature of the individual self. Man would never
feel the indignity of his limitations if these were inevitable. Within
him he has glimpses of the Infinite, which give him assurance that
this truth is not in his limitations, but that this truth can be
attained by love. For love is the positive quality of the Infinite,
and love's sacrifice accordingly does not lead to emptiness, but to
fulfilment, to Bodhi-hridaya, "the heart of enlightenment. "
The members of the religious sect I have mentioned call themselves
"Baul. " They live outside social recognition, and their very obscurity
helps them in their seeking, from a direct source, the enlightenment
which the soul longs for, the eternal light of love.
It would be absurd to say that there is little difference between
Buddhism and the religion of these simple people, who have no system
of metaphysics to support their faith. But my object in bringing close
together these two religions, which seem to belong to opposite poles,
is to point out the fundamental unity in them. Both of them believe in
a fulfilment which is reached by love's emancipating us from the
dominance of self. In both these religions we find man's yearning to
attain the infinite worth of his individuality, not through any
conventional valuation of society, but through his perfect
relationship with Truth. They agree in holding that the realisation of
our ultimate object is waiting for us in ourselves. The Baul likens
this fulfilment to the blossoming of a bud, and sings:
Make way, O bud, make way,
Burst open thy heart and make way.
The opening spirit has overtaken thee,
Canst thou remain a bud any longer?
II
One day, in a small village in Bengal, an ascetic woman from the
neighbourhood came to see me. She had the name "Sarva-khepi" given to
her by the village people, the meaning of which is "the woman who is
mad about all things. " She fixed her star-like eyes upon my face and
startled me with the question, "When are you coming to meet me
underneath the trees? " Evidently she pitied me who lived (according to
her) prisoned behind walls, banished away from the great meeting-place
of the All, where she had her dwelling. Just at that moment my
gardener came with his basket, and when the woman understood that the
flowers in the vase on my table were going to be thrown away, to make
place for the fresh ones, she looked pained and said to me, "You are
always engaged reading and writing; you do not see. " Then she took the
discarded flowers in her palms, kissed them and touched them with her
forehead, and reverently murmured to herself, "Beloved of my heart. " I
felt that this woman, in her direct vision of the infinite personality
in the heart of all things, truly represented the spirit of India.
In the same village I came into touch with some Baul singers. I had
known them by their names, occasionally seen them singing and begging
in the street, and so passed them by, vaguely classifying them in my
mind under the general name of Vairagis, or ascetics.
The time came when I had occasion to meet with some members of the
same body and talk to them about spiritual matters. The first Baul
song, which I chanced to hear with any attention, profoundly stirred
my mind. Its words are so simple that it makes me hesitate to render
them in a foreign tongue, and set them forward for critical
observation. Besides, the best part of a song is missed when the tune
is absent; for thereby its movement and its colour are lost, and it
becomes like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked.
The first line may be translated thus: "Where shall I meet him, the
Man of my Heart? " This phrase, "the Man of my Heart," is not peculiar
to this song, but is usual with the Baul sect. It means that, for me,
the supreme truth of all existence is in the revelation of the
Infinite in my own humanity.
"The Man of my Heart," to the Baul, is like a divine instrument
perfectly tuned. He gives expression to infinite truth in the music
of life. And the longing for the truth which is in us, which we have
not yet realised, breaks out in the following Baul song:
Where shall I meet him, the Man of my Heart?
He is lost to me and I seek him wandering from land to land.
I am listless for that moonrise of beauty,
which is to light my life,
which I long to see in the fulness of vision, in gladness of heart.
The name of the poet who wrote this song was Gagan. He was almost
illiterate; and the ideas he received from his Baul teacher found no
distraction from the self-consciousness of the modern age. He was a
village postman, earning about ten shillings a month, and he died
before he had completed his teens. The sentiment, to which he gave
such intensity of expression, is common to most of the songs of his
sect. And it is a sect, almost exclusively confined to that lower
floor of society, where the light of modern education hardly finds an
entrance, while wealth and respectability shun its utter indigence.
In the song I have translated above, the longing of the singer to
realise the infinite in his own personality is expressed. This has to
be done daily by its perfect expression in life, in love. For the
personal expression of life, in its perfection, is love; just as the
personal expression of truth in its perfection is beauty.
In the political life of the modern age the idea of democracy has
given mankind faith in the individual. It gives each man trust in his
own possibilities, and pride in his humanity. Something of the same
idea, we find, has been working in the popular mind of India, with
regard to its religious consciousness. Over and over again it tries to
assert, not only that God is _for_ each of us, but also that God is
_in_ each of us. These people have no special incarnations in their
simple theology, because they know that God is special to each
individual. They say that to be born a man is the greatest privilege
that can fall to a creature in all the world. They assert that gods in
Paradise envy human beings. Why? Because God's will, in giving his
love, finds its completeness in man's will returning that love.
Therefore Humanity is a necessary factor in the perfecting of the
divine truth. The Infinite, for its self-expression, comes down into
the manifoldness of the Finite; and the Finite, for its
self-realisation, must rise into the unity of the Infinite. Then only
is the Cycle of Truth complete.
The dignity of man, in his eternal right of Truth, finds expression in
the following song, composed, not by a theologian or a man of letters,
but by one who belongs to that ninety per cent of the population of
British India whose education has been far less than elementary, in
fact almost below zero:
My longing is to meet you in play of love, my Lover;
But this longing is not only mine, but also yours.
For your lips can have their smile, and your flute
its music, only in your delight in my love;
and therefore you are importunate, even as I am.
If the world were a mere expression of formative forces, then this
song would be pathetic in its presumption. But why is there beauty at
all in creation--the beauty whose only meaning is in a call that
claims disinterestedness as a response? The poet proudly says: "Your
flute could not have its music of beauty if your delight were not in
my love. Your power is great--and there I am not equal to you--but it
lies even in me to make you smile, and if you and I never meet, then
this play of love remains incomplete. "
If this were not true, then it would be an utter humiliation to exist
at all in this world. If it were solely _our_ business to seek the
Lover, and _his_ to keep himself passively aloof in the infinity of
his glory, or actively masterful only in imposing his commands upon
us, then we should dare to defy him, and refuse to accept the
everlasting insult latent in the one-sided importunity of a slave. And
this is what the Baul says--he who, in the world of men, goes about
singing for alms from door to door, with his one-stringed instrument
and long robe of patched-up rags on his back:
I stop and sit here on the road. Do not ask me to walk farther.
If your love can be complete without mine, let me turn back
from seeing you.
I have been travelling to seek you, my friend, for long;
Yet I refuse to beg a sight of you, if you do not feel my need.
I am blind with market dust and midday glare,
and so wait, my heart's lover, in hopes that your own love
will send you to find me out.
The poet is fully conscious that his value in the world's market is
pitifully small; that he is neither wealthy nor learned. Yet he has
his great compensation, for he has come close to his Lover's heart. In
Bengal the women bathing in the river often use their overturned water
jars to keep themselves floating when they swim, and the poet uses
this incident for his simile:
It is lucky that I am an empty vessel,
For when you swim, I keep floating by your side.
Your full vessels are left on the empty shore, they are for use;
But I am carried to the river in your arms, and I dance
to the rhythm of your heart-throbs and heaving of the waves.
The great distinguished people of the world do not know that these
beggars--deprived of education, honour, and wealth--can, in the pride
of their souls, look down upon them as the unfortunate ones, who are
left on the shore for their worldly uses, but whose life ever misses
the touch of the Lover's arms.
The feeling that man is not a mere casual visitor at the palace-gate
of the world, but the invited guest whose presence is needed to give
the royal banquet its sole meaning, is not confined to any particular
sect in India. Let me quote here some poems from a mediaeval poet of
Western India--Jnandas--whose works are nearly forgotten, and have
become scarce from the very exquisiteness of their excellence. In the
following poem he is addressing God's messenger, who comes to us in
the morning light of our childhood, in the dusk of our day's end, and
in the night's darkness:
Messenger, morning brought you, habited in gold.
After sunset, your song wore a tune of ascetic grey,
and then came night.
Your message was written in bright letters across the black.
Why is such splendour about you, to lure the heart of one
who is nothing?
This is the answer of the messenger:
Great is the festival hall where you are to be the only guest.
Therefore the letter to you is written from sky to sky,
And I, the proud servant, bring the invitation with all ceremony.
And thus the poet knows that the silent rows of stars carry God's own
invitation to the individual soul.
The same poet sings:
What hast thou come to beg from the beggar, O King of Kings?
My Kingdom is poor for want of him, my dear one, and I
wait for him in sorrow.
How long will you keep him waiting, O wretch,
who has waited for you for ages in silence and stillness?
Open your gate, and make this very moment fit for the union.
It is the song of man's pride in the value given to him by Supreme
Love and realised by his own love.
The Vaishnava religion, which has become the popular religion of
India, carries the same message: God's love finding its finality in
man's love. According to it, the lover, man, is the complement of the
Lover, God, in the internal love drama of existence; and God's call
is ever wafted in man's heart in the world-music, drawing him towards
the union. This idea has been expressed in rich elaboration of symbols
verging upon realism. But for these Bauls this idea is direct and
simple, full of the dignified beauty of truth, which shuns all tinsels
of ornament.
The Baul poet, when asked why he had no sect mark on his forehead,
answered in his song that the true colour decoration appears on the
skin of the fruit when its inner core is filled with ripe, sweet
juice; but by artificially smearing it with colour from outside you do
not make it ripe. And he says of his Guru, his teacher, that he is
puzzled to find in which direction he must make salutation. For his
teacher is not one, but many, who, moving on, form a procession of
wayfarers.
Bauls have no temple or image for their worship, and this utter
simplicity is needful for men whose one subject is to realise the
innermost nearness of God. 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.
