If the world were a mere
expression
of formative forces, then this
song would be pathetic in its presumption.
song would be pathetic in its presumption.
Tagore - Creative Unity
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.
Only let me walk with thee,
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
Descend at whiles from thy high audience hall, come down
amid joys and sorrows.
Hide in all forms and delights, in love,
And in my heart sing thy songs,--
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
EAST AND WEST
I
It is not always a profound interest in man that carries travellers
nowadays to distant lands. More often it is the facility for rapid
movement. For lack of time and for the sake of convenience we
generalise and crush our human facts into the packages within the
steel trunks that hold our travellers' reports.
Our knowledge of our own countrymen and our feelings about them have
slowly and unconsciously grown out of innumerable facts which are full
of contradictions and subject to incessant change. They have the
elusive mystery and fluidity of life. We cannot define to ourselves
what we are as a whole, because we know too much; because our
knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of
personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or
sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our
compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the
generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form.
When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes
the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his
rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable authority of his
personal experience. It is like a man who has his own boat for
crossing his village stream, but, on being compelled to wade across
some strange watercourse, draws angry comparisons as he goes from
every patch of mud and every pebble which his feet encounter.
Our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are
insular. There are men who become impatient and angry at the least
discomfort when their habits are incommoded. In their idea of the next
world they probably conjure up the ghosts of their slippers and
dressing-gowns, and expect the latchkey that opens their lodging-house
door on earth to fit their front door in the other world. As
travellers they are a failure; for they have grown too accustomed to
their mental easy-chairs, and in their intellectual nature love home
comforts, which are of local make, more than the realities of life,
which, like earth itself, are full of ups and downs, yet are one in
their rounded completeness.
The modern age has brought the geography of the earth near to us, but
made it difficult for us to come into touch with man. We go to strange
lands and observe; we do not live there. We hardly meet men: but only
specimens of knowledge. We are in haste to seek for general types and
overlook individuals.
When we fall into the habit of neglecting to use the understanding
that comes of sympathy in our travels, our knowledge of foreign people
grows insensitive, and therefore easily becomes both unjust and cruel
in its character, and also selfish and contemptuous in its
application. Such has, too often, been the case with regard to the
meeting of Western people in our days with others for whom they do not
recognise any obligation of kinship.
It has been admitted that the dealings between different races of men
are not merely between individuals; that our mutual understanding is
either aided, or else obstructed, by the general emanations forming
the social atmosphere. These emanations are our collective ideas and
collective feelings, generated according to special historical
circumstances.
For instance, the caste-idea is a collective idea in India. When we
approach an Indian who is under the influence of this collective idea,
he is no longer a pure individual with his conscience fully awake to
the judging of the value of a human being. He is more or less a
passive medium for giving expression to the sentiment of a whole
community.
It is evident that the caste-idea is not creative; it is merely
institutional. It adjusts human beings according to some mechanical
arrangement. It emphasises the negative side of the individual--his
separateness. It hurts the complete truth in man.
In the West, also, the people have a certain collective idea that
obscures their humanity. Let me try to explain what I feel about it.
II
Lately I went to visit some battlefields of France which had been
devastated by war. The awful calm of desolation, which still bore
wrinkles of pain--death-struggles stiffened into ugly ridges--brought
before my mind the vision of a huge demon, which had no shape, no
meaning, yet had two arms that could strike and break and tear, a
gaping mouth that could devour, and bulging brains that could conspire
and plan. It was a purpose, which had a living body, but no complete
humanity to temper it. Because it was passion--belonging to life, and
yet not having the wholeness of life--it was the most terrible of
life's enemies.
Something of the same sense of oppression in a different degree, the
same desolation in a different aspect, is produced in my mind when I
realise the effect of the West upon Eastern life--the West which, in
its relation to us, is all plan and purpose incarnate, without any
superfluous humanity.
I feel the contrast very strongly in Japan. In that country the old
world presents itself with some ideal of perfection, in which man has
his varied opportunities of self-revelation in art, in ceremonial, in
religious faith, and in customs expressing the poetry of social
relationship. There one feels that deep delight of hospitality which
life offers to life. And side by side, in the same soil, stands the
modern world, which is stupendously big and powerful, but
inhospitable. It has no simple-hearted welcome for man. It is living;
yet the incompleteness of life's ideal within it cannot but hurt
humanity.
The wriggling tentacles of a cold-blooded utilitarianism, with which
the West has grasped all the easily yielding succulent portions of the
East, are causing pain and indignation throughout the Eastern
countries. The West comes to us, not with the imagination and sympathy
that create and unite, but with a shock of passion--passion for power
and wealth. This passion is a mere force, which has in it the
principle of separation, of conflict.
I have been fortunate in coming into close touch with individual men
and women of the Western countries, and have felt with them their
sorrows and shared their aspirations. I have known that they seek the
same God, who is my God--even those who deny Him. I feel certain that,
if the great light of culture be extinct in Europe, our horizon in the
East will mourn in darkness. It does not hurt my pride to acknowledge
that, in the present age, Western humanity has received its mission to
be the teacher of the world; that her science, through the mastery of
laws of nature, is to liberate human souls from the dark dungeon of
matter. For this very reason I have realised all the more strongly,
on the other hand, that the dominant collective idea in the Western
countries is not creative. It is ready to enslave or kill individuals,
to drug a great people with soul-killing poison, darkening their whole
future with the black mist of stupefaction, and emasculating entire
races of men to the utmost degree of helplessness. It is wholly
wanting in spiritual power to blend and harmonise; it lacks the sense
of the great personality of man.
The most significant fact of modern days is this, that the West has
met the East. Such a momentous meeting of humanity, in order to be
fruitful, must have in its heart some great emotional idea, generous
and creative. There can be no doubt that God's choice has fallen upon
the knights-errant of the West for the service of the present age;
arms and armour have been given to them; but have they yet realised in
their hearts the single-minded loyalty to their cause which can resist
all temptations of bribery from the devil? The world to-day is offered
to the West. She will destroy it, if she does not use it for a great
creation of man. The materials for such a creation are in the hands of
science; but the creative genius is in Man's spiritual ideal.
III
When I was young a stranger from Europe came to Bengal. He chose his
lodging among the people of the country, shared with them their frugal
diet, and freely offered them his service. He found employment in the
houses of the rich, teaching them French and German, and the money
thus earned he spent to help poor students in buying books. This meant
for him hours of walking in the mid-day heat of a tropical summer;
for, intent upon exercising the utmost economy, he refused to hire
conveyances. He was pitiless in his exaction from himself of his
resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation;
and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was
not born, yet whom he dearly loved. He did not come to us with a
professional mission of teaching sectarian creeds; he had not in his
nature the least trace of that self-sufficiency of goodness, which
humiliates by gifts the victims of its insolent benevolence. Though he
did not know our language, he took every occasion to frequent our
meetings and ceremonies; yet he was always afraid of intrusion, and
tenderly anxious lest he might offend us by his ignorance of our
customs. At last, under the continual strain of work in an alien
climate and surroundings, his health broke down. He died, and was
cremated at our burning-ground, according to his express desire.
The attitude of his mind, the manner of his living, the object of his
life, his modesty, his unstinted self-sacrifice for a people who had
not even the power to give publicity to any benefaction bestowed upon
them, were so utterly unlike anything we were accustomed to associate
with the Europeans in India, that it gave rise in our mind to a
feeling of love bordering upon awe.
We all have a realm, a private paradise, in our mind, where dwell
deathless memories of persons who brought some divine light to our
life's experience, who may not be known to others, and whose names
have no place in the pages of history. Let me confess to you that this
man lives as one of those immortals in the paradise of my individual
life.
He came from Sweden, his name was Hammargren. What was most remarkable
in the event of his coming to us in Bengal was the fact that in his
own country he had chanced to read some works of my great countryman,
Ram Mohan Roy, and felt an immense veneration for his genius and his
character. Ram Mohan Roy lived in the beginning of the last century,
and it is no exaggeration when I describe him as one of the immortal
personalities of modern time. This young Swede had the unusual gift of
a far-sighted intellect and sympathy, which enabled him even from his
distance of space and time, and in spite of racial differences, to
realise the greatness of Ram Mohan Roy. It moved him so deeply that he
resolved to go to the country which produced this great man, and offer
her his service. He was poor, and he had to wait some time in England
before he could earn his passage money to India. There he came at
last, and in reckless generosity of love utterly spent himself to the
last breath of his life, away from home and kindred and all the
inheritances of his motherland. His stay among us was too short to
produce any outward result. He failed even to achieve during his life
what he had in his mind, which was to found by the help of his scanty
earnings a library as a memorial to Ram Mohan Roy, and thus to leave
behind him a visible symbol of his devotion. But what I prize most in
this European youth, who left no record of his life behind him, is not
the memory of any service of goodwill, but the precious gift of
respect which he offered to a people who are fallen upon evil times,
and whom it is so easy to ignore or to humiliate. For the first time
in the modern days this obscure individual from Sweden brought to our
country the chivalrous courtesy of the West, a greeting of human
fellowship.
The coincidence came to me with a great and delightful surprise when
the Nobel Prize was offered to me from Sweden. As a recognition of
individual merit it was of great value to me, no doubt; but it was the
acknowledgment of the East as a collaborator with the Western
continents, in contributing its riches to the common stock of
civilisation, which had the chief significance for the present age. It
meant joining hands in comradeship by the two great hemispheres of the
human world across the sea.
IV
To-day the real East remains unexplored. The blindness of contempt is
more hopeless than the blindness of ignorance; for contempt kills the
light which ignorance merely leaves unignited. The East is waiting to
be understood by the Western races, in order not only to be able to
give what is true in her, but also to be confident of her own mission.
In Indian history, the meeting of the Mussulman and the Hindu produced
Akbar, the object of whose dream was the unification of hearts and
ideals. It had all the glowing enthusiasm of a religion, and it
produced an immediate and a vast result even in his own lifetime.
But the fact still remains that the Western mind, after centuries of
contact with the East, has not evolved the enthusiasm of a chivalrous
ideal which can bring this age to its fulfilment. It is everywhere
raising thorny hedges of exclusion and offering human sacrifices to
national self-seeking. It has intensified the mutual feelings of envy
among Western races themselves, as they fight over their spoils and
display a carnivorous pride in their snarling rows of teeth.
We must again guard our minds from any encroaching distrust of the
individuals of a nation. The active love of humanity and the spirit of
martyrdom for the cause of justice and truth which I have met with in
the Western countries have been a great lesson and inspiration to me.
I have no doubt in my mind that the West owes its true greatness, not
so much to its marvellous training of intellect, as to its spirit of
service devoted to the welfare of man. Therefore I speak with a
personal feeling of pain and sadness about the collective power which
is guiding the helm of Western civilisation. It is a passion, not an
ideal. The more success it has brought to Europe, the more costly it
will prove to her at last, when the accounts have to be rendered. And
the signs are unmistakable, that the accounts have been called for.
The time has come when Europe must know that the forcible parasitism
which she has been practising upon the two large Continents of the
world--the two most unwieldy whales of humanity--must be causing to
her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration.
As an example, let me quote the following extract from the concluding
chapter of _From the Cape to Cairo_, by Messrs. Grogan and Sharp, two
writers who have the power to inculcate their doctrines by precept and
example. In their reference to the African they are candid, as when
they say, "We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. "
These two sentences, carefully articulated, with a smack of
enjoyment, have been more clearly explained in the following
statement, where some sense of that decency which is the attenuated
ghost of a buried conscience, prompts the writers to use the phrase
"compulsory labour" in place of the honest word "slavery"; just as the
modern politician adroitly avoids the word "injunction" and uses the
word "mandate. " "Compulsory labour in some form," they say, "is the
corollary of our occupation of the country. " And they add: "It is
pathetic, but it is history," implying thereby that moral sentiments
have no serious effect in the history of human beings.
Elsewhere they write: "Either we must give up the country
commercially, or we must make the African work. And mere abuse of
those who point out the impasse cannot change the facts. We must
decide, and soon. Or rather the white man of South Africa will
decide. " The authors also confess that they have seen too much of the
world "to have any lingering belief that Western civilisation benefits
native races. "
The logic is simple--the logic of egoism. But the argument is
simplified by lopping off the greater part of the premise. For these
writers seem to hold that the only important question for the white
men of South Africa is, how indefinitely to grow fat on ostrich
feathers and diamond mines, and dance jazz dances over the misery and
degradation of a whole race of fellow-beings of a different colour
from their own. Possibly they believe that moral laws have a special
domesticated breed of comfortable concessions for the service of the
people in power. Possibly they ignore the fact that commercial and
political cannibalism, profitably practised upon foreign races, creeps
back nearer home; that the cultivation of unwholesome appetites has
its final reckoning with the stomach which has been made to serve it.
For, after all, man is a spiritual being, and not a mere living
money-bag jumping from profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of
human races in its financial leapfrog.
Such, however, has been the condition of things for more than a
century; and to-day, trying to read the future by the light of the
European conflagration, we are asking ourselves everywhere in the
East: "Is this frightfully overgrown power really great? It can bruise
us from without, but can it add to our wealth of spirit? It can sign
peace treaties, but can it give peace?
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.
Only let me walk with thee,
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
Descend at whiles from thy high audience hall, come down
amid joys and sorrows.
Hide in all forms and delights, in love,
And in my heart sing thy songs,--
O my Lover, my Beloved, my Best in all the world.
EAST AND WEST
I
It is not always a profound interest in man that carries travellers
nowadays to distant lands. More often it is the facility for rapid
movement. For lack of time and for the sake of convenience we
generalise and crush our human facts into the packages within the
steel trunks that hold our travellers' reports.
Our knowledge of our own countrymen and our feelings about them have
slowly and unconsciously grown out of innumerable facts which are full
of contradictions and subject to incessant change. They have the
elusive mystery and fluidity of life. We cannot define to ourselves
what we are as a whole, because we know too much; because our
knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of
personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or
sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our
compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the
generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form.
When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes
the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his
rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable authority of his
personal experience. It is like a man who has his own boat for
crossing his village stream, but, on being compelled to wade across
some strange watercourse, draws angry comparisons as he goes from
every patch of mud and every pebble which his feet encounter.
Our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are
insular. There are men who become impatient and angry at the least
discomfort when their habits are incommoded. In their idea of the next
world they probably conjure up the ghosts of their slippers and
dressing-gowns, and expect the latchkey that opens their lodging-house
door on earth to fit their front door in the other world. As
travellers they are a failure; for they have grown too accustomed to
their mental easy-chairs, and in their intellectual nature love home
comforts, which are of local make, more than the realities of life,
which, like earth itself, are full of ups and downs, yet are one in
their rounded completeness.
The modern age has brought the geography of the earth near to us, but
made it difficult for us to come into touch with man. We go to strange
lands and observe; we do not live there. We hardly meet men: but only
specimens of knowledge. We are in haste to seek for general types and
overlook individuals.
When we fall into the habit of neglecting to use the understanding
that comes of sympathy in our travels, our knowledge of foreign people
grows insensitive, and therefore easily becomes both unjust and cruel
in its character, and also selfish and contemptuous in its
application. Such has, too often, been the case with regard to the
meeting of Western people in our days with others for whom they do not
recognise any obligation of kinship.
It has been admitted that the dealings between different races of men
are not merely between individuals; that our mutual understanding is
either aided, or else obstructed, by the general emanations forming
the social atmosphere. These emanations are our collective ideas and
collective feelings, generated according to special historical
circumstances.
For instance, the caste-idea is a collective idea in India. When we
approach an Indian who is under the influence of this collective idea,
he is no longer a pure individual with his conscience fully awake to
the judging of the value of a human being. He is more or less a
passive medium for giving expression to the sentiment of a whole
community.
It is evident that the caste-idea is not creative; it is merely
institutional. It adjusts human beings according to some mechanical
arrangement. It emphasises the negative side of the individual--his
separateness. It hurts the complete truth in man.
In the West, also, the people have a certain collective idea that
obscures their humanity. Let me try to explain what I feel about it.
II
Lately I went to visit some battlefields of France which had been
devastated by war. The awful calm of desolation, which still bore
wrinkles of pain--death-struggles stiffened into ugly ridges--brought
before my mind the vision of a huge demon, which had no shape, no
meaning, yet had two arms that could strike and break and tear, a
gaping mouth that could devour, and bulging brains that could conspire
and plan. It was a purpose, which had a living body, but no complete
humanity to temper it. Because it was passion--belonging to life, and
yet not having the wholeness of life--it was the most terrible of
life's enemies.
Something of the same sense of oppression in a different degree, the
same desolation in a different aspect, is produced in my mind when I
realise the effect of the West upon Eastern life--the West which, in
its relation to us, is all plan and purpose incarnate, without any
superfluous humanity.
I feel the contrast very strongly in Japan. In that country the old
world presents itself with some ideal of perfection, in which man has
his varied opportunities of self-revelation in art, in ceremonial, in
religious faith, and in customs expressing the poetry of social
relationship. There one feels that deep delight of hospitality which
life offers to life. And side by side, in the same soil, stands the
modern world, which is stupendously big and powerful, but
inhospitable. It has no simple-hearted welcome for man. It is living;
yet the incompleteness of life's ideal within it cannot but hurt
humanity.
The wriggling tentacles of a cold-blooded utilitarianism, with which
the West has grasped all the easily yielding succulent portions of the
East, are causing pain and indignation throughout the Eastern
countries. The West comes to us, not with the imagination and sympathy
that create and unite, but with a shock of passion--passion for power
and wealth. This passion is a mere force, which has in it the
principle of separation, of conflict.
I have been fortunate in coming into close touch with individual men
and women of the Western countries, and have felt with them their
sorrows and shared their aspirations. I have known that they seek the
same God, who is my God--even those who deny Him. I feel certain that,
if the great light of culture be extinct in Europe, our horizon in the
East will mourn in darkness. It does not hurt my pride to acknowledge
that, in the present age, Western humanity has received its mission to
be the teacher of the world; that her science, through the mastery of
laws of nature, is to liberate human souls from the dark dungeon of
matter. For this very reason I have realised all the more strongly,
on the other hand, that the dominant collective idea in the Western
countries is not creative. It is ready to enslave or kill individuals,
to drug a great people with soul-killing poison, darkening their whole
future with the black mist of stupefaction, and emasculating entire
races of men to the utmost degree of helplessness. It is wholly
wanting in spiritual power to blend and harmonise; it lacks the sense
of the great personality of man.
The most significant fact of modern days is this, that the West has
met the East. Such a momentous meeting of humanity, in order to be
fruitful, must have in its heart some great emotional idea, generous
and creative. There can be no doubt that God's choice has fallen upon
the knights-errant of the West for the service of the present age;
arms and armour have been given to them; but have they yet realised in
their hearts the single-minded loyalty to their cause which can resist
all temptations of bribery from the devil? The world to-day is offered
to the West. She will destroy it, if she does not use it for a great
creation of man. The materials for such a creation are in the hands of
science; but the creative genius is in Man's spiritual ideal.
III
When I was young a stranger from Europe came to Bengal. He chose his
lodging among the people of the country, shared with them their frugal
diet, and freely offered them his service. He found employment in the
houses of the rich, teaching them French and German, and the money
thus earned he spent to help poor students in buying books. This meant
for him hours of walking in the mid-day heat of a tropical summer;
for, intent upon exercising the utmost economy, he refused to hire
conveyances. He was pitiless in his exaction from himself of his
resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation;
and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was
not born, yet whom he dearly loved. He did not come to us with a
professional mission of teaching sectarian creeds; he had not in his
nature the least trace of that self-sufficiency of goodness, which
humiliates by gifts the victims of its insolent benevolence. Though he
did not know our language, he took every occasion to frequent our
meetings and ceremonies; yet he was always afraid of intrusion, and
tenderly anxious lest he might offend us by his ignorance of our
customs. At last, under the continual strain of work in an alien
climate and surroundings, his health broke down. He died, and was
cremated at our burning-ground, according to his express desire.
The attitude of his mind, the manner of his living, the object of his
life, his modesty, his unstinted self-sacrifice for a people who had
not even the power to give publicity to any benefaction bestowed upon
them, were so utterly unlike anything we were accustomed to associate
with the Europeans in India, that it gave rise in our mind to a
feeling of love bordering upon awe.
We all have a realm, a private paradise, in our mind, where dwell
deathless memories of persons who brought some divine light to our
life's experience, who may not be known to others, and whose names
have no place in the pages of history. Let me confess to you that this
man lives as one of those immortals in the paradise of my individual
life.
He came from Sweden, his name was Hammargren. What was most remarkable
in the event of his coming to us in Bengal was the fact that in his
own country he had chanced to read some works of my great countryman,
Ram Mohan Roy, and felt an immense veneration for his genius and his
character. Ram Mohan Roy lived in the beginning of the last century,
and it is no exaggeration when I describe him as one of the immortal
personalities of modern time. This young Swede had the unusual gift of
a far-sighted intellect and sympathy, which enabled him even from his
distance of space and time, and in spite of racial differences, to
realise the greatness of Ram Mohan Roy. It moved him so deeply that he
resolved to go to the country which produced this great man, and offer
her his service. He was poor, and he had to wait some time in England
before he could earn his passage money to India. There he came at
last, and in reckless generosity of love utterly spent himself to the
last breath of his life, away from home and kindred and all the
inheritances of his motherland. His stay among us was too short to
produce any outward result. He failed even to achieve during his life
what he had in his mind, which was to found by the help of his scanty
earnings a library as a memorial to Ram Mohan Roy, and thus to leave
behind him a visible symbol of his devotion. But what I prize most in
this European youth, who left no record of his life behind him, is not
the memory of any service of goodwill, but the precious gift of
respect which he offered to a people who are fallen upon evil times,
and whom it is so easy to ignore or to humiliate. For the first time
in the modern days this obscure individual from Sweden brought to our
country the chivalrous courtesy of the West, a greeting of human
fellowship.
The coincidence came to me with a great and delightful surprise when
the Nobel Prize was offered to me from Sweden. As a recognition of
individual merit it was of great value to me, no doubt; but it was the
acknowledgment of the East as a collaborator with the Western
continents, in contributing its riches to the common stock of
civilisation, which had the chief significance for the present age. It
meant joining hands in comradeship by the two great hemispheres of the
human world across the sea.
IV
To-day the real East remains unexplored. The blindness of contempt is
more hopeless than the blindness of ignorance; for contempt kills the
light which ignorance merely leaves unignited. The East is waiting to
be understood by the Western races, in order not only to be able to
give what is true in her, but also to be confident of her own mission.
In Indian history, the meeting of the Mussulman and the Hindu produced
Akbar, the object of whose dream was the unification of hearts and
ideals. It had all the glowing enthusiasm of a religion, and it
produced an immediate and a vast result even in his own lifetime.
But the fact still remains that the Western mind, after centuries of
contact with the East, has not evolved the enthusiasm of a chivalrous
ideal which can bring this age to its fulfilment. It is everywhere
raising thorny hedges of exclusion and offering human sacrifices to
national self-seeking. It has intensified the mutual feelings of envy
among Western races themselves, as they fight over their spoils and
display a carnivorous pride in their snarling rows of teeth.
We must again guard our minds from any encroaching distrust of the
individuals of a nation. The active love of humanity and the spirit of
martyrdom for the cause of justice and truth which I have met with in
the Western countries have been a great lesson and inspiration to me.
I have no doubt in my mind that the West owes its true greatness, not
so much to its marvellous training of intellect, as to its spirit of
service devoted to the welfare of man. Therefore I speak with a
personal feeling of pain and sadness about the collective power which
is guiding the helm of Western civilisation. It is a passion, not an
ideal. The more success it has brought to Europe, the more costly it
will prove to her at last, when the accounts have to be rendered. And
the signs are unmistakable, that the accounts have been called for.
The time has come when Europe must know that the forcible parasitism
which she has been practising upon the two large Continents of the
world--the two most unwieldy whales of humanity--must be causing to
her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration.
As an example, let me quote the following extract from the concluding
chapter of _From the Cape to Cairo_, by Messrs. Grogan and Sharp, two
writers who have the power to inculcate their doctrines by precept and
example. In their reference to the African they are candid, as when
they say, "We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. "
These two sentences, carefully articulated, with a smack of
enjoyment, have been more clearly explained in the following
statement, where some sense of that decency which is the attenuated
ghost of a buried conscience, prompts the writers to use the phrase
"compulsory labour" in place of the honest word "slavery"; just as the
modern politician adroitly avoids the word "injunction" and uses the
word "mandate. " "Compulsory labour in some form," they say, "is the
corollary of our occupation of the country. " And they add: "It is
pathetic, but it is history," implying thereby that moral sentiments
have no serious effect in the history of human beings.
Elsewhere they write: "Either we must give up the country
commercially, or we must make the African work. And mere abuse of
those who point out the impasse cannot change the facts. We must
decide, and soon. Or rather the white man of South Africa will
decide. " The authors also confess that they have seen too much of the
world "to have any lingering belief that Western civilisation benefits
native races. "
The logic is simple--the logic of egoism. But the argument is
simplified by lopping off the greater part of the premise. For these
writers seem to hold that the only important question for the white
men of South Africa is, how indefinitely to grow fat on ostrich
feathers and diamond mines, and dance jazz dances over the misery and
degradation of a whole race of fellow-beings of a different colour
from their own. Possibly they believe that moral laws have a special
domesticated breed of comfortable concessions for the service of the
people in power. Possibly they ignore the fact that commercial and
political cannibalism, profitably practised upon foreign races, creeps
back nearer home; that the cultivation of unwholesome appetites has
its final reckoning with the stomach which has been made to serve it.
For, after all, man is a spiritual being, and not a mere living
money-bag jumping from profit to profit, and breaking the backbone of
human races in its financial leapfrog.
Such, however, has been the condition of things for more than a
century; and to-day, trying to read the future by the light of the
European conflagration, we are asking ourselves everywhere in the
East: "Is this frightfully overgrown power really great? It can bruise
us from without, but can it add to our wealth of spirit? It can sign
peace treaties, but can it give peace?
