India’s central conception and Her ceaseless pursuit of it
The concept of India has to be seen also from the
perspective of the foundations of Indian culture, how through millenium this
vast nation clinged to its central idea, the Nation soul and then progressed
through the cycles of society. Also how role of India has to be crucial in this
march of mankind to the next future through this evolutionary crisis. What
is India’s central conception and theme of evolution? India’s central
conception is that of Eternal and involution and evolution of Spirit in Matter
and how a material man grows and through rebirth raises to be mental man and
then above.
In the words of Sri Aurobindo,
“India’s central conception is that of
the Eternal, the Spirit here encased in matter, involved and immanent in it and
evolving on the material plane by rebirth of the individual up the scale of
being till in mental man it enters the world of ideas and realm of conscious
morality, dharma.”
India is a living culture. The peculiarity is a living culture with
harmony and reconciliation of spiritual and temporal: We need to rediscover key
to this harmony and the repair of the key, if needed has to be from within.
“Spiritual and temporal have indeed to
be perfectly harmonised, for the spirit works through mind and body. But the
purely intellectual or heavily material culture of the kind that Europe now
favours bears in its heart the seed of death; for the living aim of culture is
the realisation on earth of the kingdom of heaven. India, though its urge is
towards the Eternal, since that is always the highest, the entirely real, still
contains in her own culture and her own philosophy a supreme reconciliation of
the eternal and the temporal and she need not seek it from outside.”
The form of interdependence of mind, body and spirit in a harmonious
culture
On the same principle, the form of the
interdependence of mind, body and spirit in a harmonious culture is important
as well as the pure spirit; for the form is the rhythm of the spirit. It
follows that to break up the form is to injure the spirit’s self-expression or
at least to put it into grave peril. Change of forms there may and will be, but
the novel formation must be a new self-expression or self-creation developed
from within; it must be characteristic of the spirit and not servilely borrowed
from the embodiments of an alien nature.
Difference is making spirituality leading motive and determining
power and being obstinately recalcitrant to it
… Spirituality is not
the monopoly of India; however, it may hide submerged in intellectualism or
hid in other concealing veils, it is a necessary part of human nature. But the
difference is between spirituality made the leading motive and the determining
power of both the inner and the outer life and spirituality suppressed, allowed
only under disguises or brought in as a minor power, its reign denied or put
off in favour of the intellect or of a dominant materialistic vitalism.
India alone, with whatever fall or decline of light and vigour, has
remained faithful to the heart of the spiritual motive. India alone is still
obstinately recalcitrant; for Turkey and China and Japan, say her critics, have
outgrown that foolishness, by which it is meant that they have both grown
rationalistic and materialistic. India alone as a nation, whatever individuals
or a small class may have done, has till now refused to give up her worshipped
Godhead or bow her knee to the strong reigning idols of rationalism, commercialism
and economism, the successful iron gods of the West. Affected she has been, but
not yet overcome. Her surface mind rather than her deeper intelligence has been
obliged to admit many Western ideas, _ liberty, equality, democracy and others,
– and to reconcile them with her Vedantic Truth; but she has not been
altogether at ease with them in the Western form and she seeks about already in
her thought to give to them an Indian which cannot fail to be a spiritualised
turn.
India will lead or will be self oblivious
Either India will be rationalised and industrialised out of all
recognition and she will be no longer India or else she will be the leader in a
new world-phase, aid by her example and cultural infiltration the new tendencies
of the West and spiritualise the human race.
The basic difference between European mind and Indian mind:
The tendency of the normal Western mind is to live from below upward and
from out inward. A strong foundation is taken in the vital and material nature
and higher powers are invoked and admitted only to modify and partially uplift
the natural terrestrial life. The inner existence is formed and governed by
the external powers. India’s constant aim has been, on the contrary, to find a
basis of living in the higher spiritual truth and to live from the inner spirit
outwards, to exceed the present way of mind, life and body, to command and
dictate to external Nature. As the old Vedic seers put it, "Their divine
foundation was above even while they stood below, let its rays be settled deep
within us," nicinah sthur upari budhna esam asmen antar nihitah
ketavab syuh. Now that difference is no unimportant subtlety but of a
great and penetrating practical consequence.
But if the spiritual ideal points the final way
to a triumphant harmony of manifested life, then it is all-important for India
not to lose hold of the truth, not to give up the highest she knows and barter
it away for a perhaps more readily practicable but still lower ideal alien to
her true and constant nature.
A new creation is a must..with Shakti
within
A new creation of the old Indian svadharma, not a
transmutation to some law of the Western nature, is our best way to serve and
increase the sum of human progress.
…the forms of a culture are the right rhythm of its spirit and in
breaking the rhythm we may expel the spirit and dissipate the harmony for ever.
Yes, but though the Spirit is eternal in its essence and in the fundamental
principles of its harmony immutable, the actual rhythm of its self-expression
in form is ever mutable. Immutable in its being and in the powers of its being
but richly mutable in life, that is the very nature of the Spirit’s manifested
existence. And we have to see too whether the actual rhythm of the moment is
still a harmony or whether it has not become in the hands of an inferior and
ignorant orchestra a discord and no longer expresses rightly or sufficiently
the ancient spirit.
…on our capacity of response to the eternal Power and Wisdom and the
illumination of the Shakti within us and on our skill in works, the skill that
comes by unity with the eternal Spirit we are in the measure of our light
labouring to express; yogah karmasu kausalam.
Compensated in later ages by other powers:
If the
high spiritualised mind and stupendous force of spiritual will, tapasya, that
characterised ancient India were less in evidence, there were new gains of
spiritual emotion and sensitiveness to spiritual impulse on the lower planes of
consciousness, that had been lacking before. Architecture, literature,
painting, sculpture lost the grandeur, power, nobility of old, but evoked other
powers and motives full of delicacy, vividness and grace. There was a descent
from the heights to the lower levels, but a descent that gathered riches on its
way and was needed for the fullness of spiritual discovery and experience. The greatness of the
ideals of the past is a promise of greater ideals for the future. A continual
expansion of what stood behind past endeavour and capacity is the one abiding
justification of a living culture.
The double principle of persistence and mutation
double principle of persistence and mutation or
bear the penalty a decay and deterioration that may taint even its living
centre.
Evolutionary push forward keeping the spirit same
and reshaping forms:
Political system of its own design
It is true that India never evolved either the
scrambling and burdensome industrialism or the parliamentary organisation of
freedom and self-styled democracy characteristic of the bourgeois or Vaishya
period of the cycle of European progress. But the time is passing when the
uncritical praise of these things as the ideal state and the last word of
social and political progress
was fashionable, their defects are now visible and
the greatness of an oriental civilisation need not be judged by the standard of
these western developments. Indian scholars have attempted to read the modem
ideas and types of democracy and even a parliamentary system into the past of
India, but this seems to me an ill-judged endeavour. There was a strong
democratic element, if we must use the western terms, in Indian polity and even
institutions that present a certain analogy to the parliamentary form, but in
reality these features were of India’s own kind and not at all the same thing
as modem parliaments and modern democracy…It was a clan or tribal system, kula, founded
upon the equality of all the freemen of the clan or race; this was not at first
firmly founded upon the territorial basis, the migratory tendency was still in
evidence or recurred under pressure and the land was known by the name of the
people who occupied it, the Kuru country or simply the Kurus, the Malava
country or the Malavas. After the fixed settlement within determined boundaries
the system of the clan or tribe continued, but found a basic unit or constituent
atom in the settled village community. The meeting of the people, visah, assembling
for communal deliberation, for sacrifice and worship or as the host for war,
remained for a long time the power-sign of the mass body and the agent of the
active common life with the king as the head and representative,
-- The later
development out of this primitive form followed up to a certain point the
ordinary line of evolution as we see it in other communities, but at the same
time threw up certain very striking peculiarities that owing to the unique
mentality of the race fixed themselves, became prominent characteristics and
gave a different stamp to the political, economic and social factors of Indian
civilisation. The hereditary principle emerged at an early stage and increased
constantly its power and hold on the society until it became everywhere the
basis of the whole organisation of its activities.
The Democratic ideal:
Almost all the types of
political systems viz Anarchy, Socialism, democracy, Capitalism have been tried
all across globe and we have our own Indian model of decentralised democracy
which is as per Indias mission and swabhava. We mus not
imitate models of others as
the fallacy of imitated models is glaring and self destructive.
Sri Aurobindo has detailed
writing on the imitattion, failure and right approach to Polity, history on
Polity, the examples from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Shastras
and the Smritie, Janapadas, Vishas, Kula, Shreni, Panchyat, Samaj
Chakravartins, and empire builders as protectors of Dharma,
not destroying the local models. The emphasis on the local polity after
independence in panchayat raj is thus going back to roots of Indian polity as
we see still living polity models surviving even in tribal India since ages.
The world is moving on the principles leveraging technologies. The persistent
principle of regional autonomy: the grand ideal and backbone of Indian Polity
reasserted itself whenever central rule was weak.
A Rishi putting spiritual stamp on all:
A peculiar figure for some time was the Rishi, the
man of a higher spiritual experience and knowledge, born in any of the classes,
but exercising an authority by his spiritual personality over all, revered and
consulted by the king of whom he was sometimes the religious preceptor, and In
the then fluid state of social evolution able alone to exercise an important
role in evolving new basic ideas and effecting direct and immediate changes of
the socio-religious ideas and customs of the people. It was a marked feature of
the Indian mind that it sought to attach a spiritual meaning and a religious
sanction to all, even to the most external social and political circumstances
of its life, imposing on all classes and functions an ideal, not except
incidentally of rights and powers, but of duties, a rule of their action and an
ideal way and temperament, character, spirit in the action, a dharma with a
spiritual significance. It was the work of the Rishi to put this stamp
enduringly on the national mind, to prolong and perpetuate it, to discover and
interpret the ideal law and its practical meaning, to cast the life of the
people into the well-shaped ideals and significant forms of a civilisation
founded on the spiritual and religious sense. And in later ages we find the
Brahminic schools of legists attributing their codes, though in themselves only
formulations of existing rule and custom, to the ancient Rishis. Whatever the
developments of the Indian socio-political body in later days, this original
character still exercised its influence, even when all tended at last to become
traditionalised and conventionalised instead of moving forward constantly in
the steps of a free and living practice.” (FOIC)
The cycle of society and the truth of
collective being:
“A people, a great human collectivity, is in fact
an organic living being with a collective or rather—for the word collective is
too mechanical to be true to the inner reality—a common or communal soul, mind
and body. The life of the society like the physical life of the individual
human being asses through a cycle of birth, growth, youth, ripeness and
decline, and if this last stage goes far enough without any arrest of its
course towards decadence, it may perish,—even so all the older peoples and
nations except India and China perished,—as a man dies of old age. But the
collective being has too the capacity of renewing itself, of a recovery and a
new cycle. For in each people there is a soul idea or life idea at work, less
mortal than its body, and if this idea is itself sufficiently powerful, large
and force-giving and the people sufficiently strong, vital and plastic in mind
and temperament to combine stability with a constant enlargement or new
application of the power of the soul idea or life idea in its being, it may
pass through many such cycles before it comes to a final exhaustion. Moreover,
the idea is itself only the principle of soul manifestation of the communal
being and each communal soul again a manifestation and vehicle of the greater
eternal spirit that expresses itself in Time and on earth is seeking, as it
were, its own fullness in humanity through the vicissitudes of the human
cycles. A people then which learns to live consciously not solely in its
physical and outward life, not even only in that and the power of the life idea
or soul idea that governs the changes of its development and is the key to its
psychology and temperament, but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all
exhaust itself, may not end by disappearance or a dissolution or a fusion into
others or have to give place to a new race and people, but having itself fused
into its life many original smaller societies and attained to its maximum
natural growth pass without death through many renascences. And even if at any
time it appears to be on the point of absolute exhaustion and dissolution, it
may recover by the force of the spirit and begin another and perhaps a more
glorious cycle. The history of India has been that of the life of such a
people.
Dharma governs all
The master idea
that has governed the life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has
been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life—subject
to a necessary evolution first of his lower physical, vital and mental nature
—as a frame and means for that discovery and for man’s ascent from the ignorant
natural into the spiritual existence. This dominant idea India has never quite
forgotten even under the stress and material exigences and the externalities of
political and social construction. But the difficulty of making the social life
an expression of man’s true self and some highest realisation of the spirit
within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual
self-expression through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art,
literature, and while in these India reached extraordinary heights and
largenesses, she could not in the outward life go beyond certain very partial
realisations, and very imperfect tentatives,—a general spiritualising
symbolism, an infiltration of the greater aspiration, a certain cast given to
the communal life, the creation of institutions favourable to the spiritual
idea. Politics, society, economics are the natural field of the two first and
grosser parts of human aim and conduct recognised in the Indian system, interest and hedonistic desire : Dharma, the
higher law, has nowhere been brought more than partially into this outer side
of life, and in politics to a very minimum extent; for the effort at governing
political action by ethics is usually little more than a pretence. The
coordination or true union of the collective outward life with moksa, the
liberated spiritual existence, has hardly even been conceived or attempted,
much less anywhere succeeded in the past history of the yet hardly adult human
race. Accordingly, we find that the governance by the Dharma of India’s social,
economic and even, though here the attempt broke down earlier than in other
spheres, her political rule of life, system, turn of existence, with the
adumbration of a spiritual significance behind, —the full attainment of the
spiritual life being left as a supreme aim to the effort of the individual,—was
as far as her ancient system could advance.
Three stages of evolution of society in India and
the next step
Human society
has in its growth to pass through three stages of evolution before it can
arrive at the completeness of its possibilities. The first is a condition in
which the forms and activities of the communal existence are those of the
spontaneous play of the powers and principles of its life. All its growth, all its formations, customs,
institutions are then a natural organic development,—the motive and
constructive power coming mostly from the subconscient principle of the life
within it,—expressing, but without deliberate intention, the communal
psychology, temperament, vital and physical need, and persisting or altering
partly under the pressure of an internal impulse, partly under that of the
environment acting on the communal mind and temper. In this stage the people is
not yet intelligently self-conscious in the way of the reason, is not yet a
thinking collective being, and it does not try to govern its whole communal
existence by the reasoning will, but lives according to its vital intuitions or
their first mental renderings. The early framework of Indian society and polity
grew up in such a period as in most ancient and mediaeval communities, but also
in the later age of a growing social self-consciousness they were not rejected
but only farther shaped, developed, systematised so as to be always, not a
construction of politicians, legislators and social and political thinkers, but
a strongly stable vital order natural to the mind, instincts and life
intuitions of the Indian people.
A second stage
of the society is that in which the communal mind becomes more and more
intellectually self-conscious, first in its more cultured minds, then more
generally, first broadly, then more and more minutely and in
all the parts of its life. It learns to review and deal with its own life,
communal ideas, needs, institutions in the light of the developed intelligence
and finally by the power of the critical and constructive reason. This is a
stage which is fall of great possibilities but attended too by serious
characteristic dangers. Its first advantages are those which go always with the
increase of a clear and understanding and finally an exact and scientific
knowledge and the culminating stage is the strict and armoured efficiency which
the critical and constructive, the scientific reason used to the fullest degree
offers as its reward and consequence. Another and greater
outcome of this stage of social evolution is the emergence of high and luminous
ideals which promise to raise man beyond the limits of the vital being, beyond
his first social, economic and political needs and desires and out of their
customary moulds and inspire an impulse of bold experiment with the communal
life which opens a field of possibility for the realisation of a more and more
ideal society. This application of the scientific mind to life with the strict,
well-finished, armoured efficiency which is its normal highest result, this
pursuit of great consciously proposed social and political ideals and the.
progress which is the index of the ground covered in the endeavour, have been,
with whatever limits and drawbacks, the distinguishing advantages of the
political and social effort of Europe.
On the other
hand the tendency of the reason when it pretends to deal with the materials of
life as its absolute governor, is to look too far away from the reality of the
society as, a living growth and to treat it as a mechanism which can be
manipulated at will and constructed like so much dead wood or iron according to
the arbitrary dictates of the intelligence. The sophisticating, labouring,
constructing, efficient, mechanising reason loses hold of the simple principles
of a people’s vitality; it cuts it away from the secret roots of its life. The
result is an exaggerated dependence on system and institution, on legislation
and administration and the deadly tendency to develop, in place of a living
people, a mechanical State. An instrument of the communal life tries to take
the place of the life itself and there is created a powerful but mechanical and
artificial organisation; but, as the price of this exterior gain, there is lost
the truth of life of an organically self-developing communal soul in the body
of a free and living people. It is this error of the scientific reason stifling
the work of the vital and the spiritual intuition under the dead weight of its
mechanical method which is the weakness of Europe and has deceived her
aspiration and prevented her from arriving at the true realisation of her own
higher ideals.
It is only by reaching a third stage of the
evolution of the collective social as of the individual human being that
the ideals first seized and cherished by the thought of man can discover their
own real source and character and their true means and conditions of
effectuation or the perfect society be anything more than a vision on a shining
cloud constantly run after in a circle and constantly deceiving the hope
and escaping the embrace. That will be when man in the collectivity begins to
live more deeply and to govern his collective life neither primarily by the
needs, instincts, intuitions welling up out of the vital self, nor secondarily
by the constructions of the reasoning mind, but first, foremost and always by
the power of unity, sympathy, spontaneous liberty, supple and living order of his
discovered greater self and spirit in which the individual and the communal
existence have their law of freedom, perfection and oneness. That is a rule
that has not yet anywhere found its right conditions for even beginning its
effort, for it can only come when man’s attempt to reach and abide by the law
of the spiritual existence is no longer an exceptional aim for individuals or
else degraded in its more general aspiration to the form of a popular religion,
but is recognised and followed out as the imperative need of his being and its
true and right attainment the necessity of the next step in the evolution of
the race.
Preserving smaller aggregates, past forms and the
remarkable way of controlling Intellect in its later dominant age :
The small early
Indian communities developed like others through the first stage of a vigorous
and spontaneous vitality, finding naturally and freely its own norm and line,
casting up form of life and social and political institution out of the vital
intuition and temperament of the communal being. As they fused with each other
into an increasing cultural and social unity and formed larger and larger
political bodies, they developed a common spirit and a common basis and general
structure allowing of a great freedom of variation
in minor line and figure. There was no need of a rigid uniformity; the common
spirit and life impulse were enough to impose on this plasticity a law of
general oneness. And even when there grew up the great kingdoms and empires,
still the characteristic institutions of the smaller kingdoms, republics,
peoples were as much as possible incorporated rather than destroyed or thrown
aside in the new cast of the socio-political structure. Whatever could not
survive in the natural evolution of the people or was no longer needed, fell
away of itself and passed into desuetude; whatever could last by modifying
itself to new circumstance and environment was allowed to survive; whatever was
in intimate consonance with the psychical and the vital law of being and temperament
of the Indian people became universalised and took its place in the
enduring figure of the society and polity.
This
spontaneous principle of life was respected by the age of growing intellectual
culture. The Indian thinkers on society, economics and politics, Dharma Shastra
and Artha Shastra, made it their business not to construct ideals and systems
of society and government in the abstract intelligence, but to understand and
regulate by the practical reason the institutions and ways of communal living
already developed by the communal mind and life and to develop, fix and
harmonise without destroying the original elements, and whatever new element or
idea was needed was added or introduced as a superstructure or a modifying but
not a revolutionary and destructive principle. It was in this way that the
transition from the earlier stages to the fully developed monarchical polity
v/as managed; it proceeded by an incorporation of the existing institutions
under the supreme control of the king or the emperor. The character and status
of many of them was modified by the superimposition of the monarchical or
imperial system, but, as far as possible, they did not pass out of existence.
As a result we do not find in India the element of intellectually idealistic
political progress or revolutionary experiment which has been so marked a
feature of ancient and of modern Europe. A profound respect for the creations
of the past as the natural expression of the Indian mind and life, the sound
manifestation of its Dharma or right law of being, was the strongest element in
the mental attitude and this preservative instinct was not disturbed but rather
yet more firmly settled and fixed by the great millennium of high intellectual
culture. A slow evolution of custom and institution conservative of the
principle of settled order, of social and political precedent, of established
framework and structure was the one way of progress possible or admissible. On
the other hand, Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of
the mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people which has been
the disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous
artificial organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State. The
advantages of the idealising intellect were absent, but so also were the
disadvantages of the mechanising rational intelligence.
The Indian mind
has always been profoundly intuitive in habit even when it was the most
occupied with the development of the reasoning intelligence, and its political
and social thought has therefore been always an attempt to combine the
intuitions of life and the intuitions of the spirit with the light of the
reason acting as an intermediary and an ordering and regulating factor. It has
tried to base itself strongly on the established and persistent actualities of
life and to depend for its idealism not on the intellect but on the
illuminations, inspirations, higher experiences of the spirit, and it has used
the reason as a critical power testing and assuring the steps and aiding but
not replacing the life and the spirit—always the true and sound constructors.
From Kali yuga to Satya Yuga : Vasudevam sarvam iti
The spiritual
mind of India regarded life as a manifestation of the self: the community was
the body of the creator Brahma,
the people was a life body of Brahman in the samas%t%i, the collectivity, it was the collective
Narayana, as the individual was Brahman in the vyas%t%i, the separate Jiva, the individual Narayana,
the king was the living representative of the Divine and the other orders of
the community the natural powers of the collective self, prakr%tayah%. The agreed conventions, institutes, customs,
constitution of the body social and politic in all its parts had therefore not
only a binding authority but a certain sacrosanct character.
The right order
of human life as of the universe is preserved according to the ancient Indian
idea by each individual being following faithfully his svadharma, the
true law and norm of his nature and the nature of his kind and by the group
being, the organic collective life, doing likewise. The family, clan,
caste, class, social, religious, industrial or other community, nation, people
are all organic group beings that evolve their own dharma and to follow it is
the condition of their preservation, healthy continuity, sound action. There is
also the dharma of the position, the function, the particular relation with
others, as there is too the dharma imposed by the condition, environment,
age, yugadharma, the universal religious or ethical dharma,
and all these acting on the natural dharma, the action according to the svabhāva, create
the body of the Law. The ancient theory supposed that in an entirely right and
sound condition of man, individual and collective, —a condition typified by the
legendary Golden Age, Satya Yuga, Age of Truth,—there is no need of any
political government or State or artificial construction of society, because
all then live freely according to the truth of their enlightened self and
God-inhabited being and therefore spontaneously according to the inner divine
Dharma. The self-determining individual and self-determining community living
according to the right and free law of his and its being is therefore the
ideal. But in the actual condition of humanity, its ignorant and devious nature
subject to perversions and violations of the true individual and the true social dharma,
there has to be superimposed on the natural
life of society a State, a sovereign power, a king or governing body, whose
business is not to interfere unduly with the life of the society, which must be
allowed to function for the most part according to its natural law and custom
and spontaneous development, but to superintend and assist its right process
and see that the Dharma is observed and in vigour and, negatively, to punish
and repress and, as far as may be, prevent offences against the Dharma. A more
advanced stage of corruption of the Dharma is marked by the necessity of the
appearance of the legislator and the formal government of the whole of life by
external or written law and code and rule, but to determine it—apart from
external administrative detail—was not the function of the political sovereign,
who was only its administrator, but of the socio-religious creator, the Rishi,
or the Brahminic recorder and interpreter. And the Law itself written or
unwritten was always not a thing to be new created or fabricated by a political
and legislative authority, but a thing already existent and only to be interpreted
and stated as it was or as it grew naturally out of pre-existing law and
principle in the communal life and consciousness. The last and worst state of
the society growing out of this increasing artificiality and convention must be
a period of anarchy and conflict and dissolution of the Dharma,—Kali
Yuga,—which must precede through a red-grey evening of cataclysm and struggle a
recovery and a new self-expression of the spirit in the human being.
Three aspects of culture:
India,
the ancient possessor of the truth of the spirit, must resist It arrogant claim
and aggression and affirm her own deeper truths in spite of heavy odds and
against all comers. For in its preservation lies the only hope that mankind
instead of marching to a new cataclysm and primitive beginning with a constant
repetition of the old blind cycles will at last emerge into the light ..d
accomplish the drive forward which will bring the terrestrial evolution to its
next step of ascent in the progressive manifestation of the Spirit.
There is a side of thought, of ideal, of
upward will and the soul’s aspiration;
there is a side of creative self-expression and appreciative aesthesis,
intelligence and imagination; and there is a side of practical and outward
formulation. P51
The three powers and the
innermost sense of Indian culture:
There are three powers that we must grasp
in order to judge the life value of a culture. There is first, the power of its
original concept of life; there is, next, the power of the forms, types and
rhythms it has given to life, there is last the inspiration, the vigor, the
force of vital execution of its motives manifested in the actual lives of men
and of the community that flourished under its influence… The peculiarity of
the Indian will in life is that it feels itself to be unfulfilled, not in touch
with perfection, not permanently justified in any intermediate satisfaction if
it has not found and does not live in the truth of the spirit. The Indian idea
of the world, of Nature and of existence is not physical but psychological and
spiritual. Spirit, soul, consciousness are not only greater than inert matter
and inconscient force, but they precede and originate these lesser things. All
force is a power or means of a secret spirit; the force that sustains the world
is a conscious Will, and Nature is its machinery of executive power. Matter is
a body or field of consciousness hidden within it, the material universe a form
or a movement of the Spirit. Man himself is not a life and mind born of Matter
and eternally subject to physical Nature, but a spirit that uses life and body.
P97 It is an understanding faith in this
conception of existence, it is an attempt to live it out, it is the science and
practice of this high endeavor, and it is the aspiration to break out in the
end from this mind bound to life and matter into a greater spiritual
consciousness that is the innermost sense of Indian culture. It is this that
constitutes the much talked of Indian spirituality.
The spiritual idea governed, enlightened
and gathered towards itself all the other life motives of a great civilized
people.
In the history of all great cultures there
is passage through three stages: there is large and loose formation, in second
there is fixing of forms, moulds and rhythms, and there is third period of
superannuation, decay, disintegration. If it cannot transform itself, it moves
to death and decay. It has to take rebirth and renaissance. India passed
through these stages in own leisurely way. From Vedas to the last centuries. To
shastras, arts, sculptures..at this point it stopped short of its full
flowering and developing of the true spirit . And now is the still confused
movement…. This is only the
substructure : it is of a pressing importance indeed, but still not the last
and greatest thing. When you have paid your debt to society, filled well and
admirably your place in its life, helped its maintenance and continuity and
taken from it your legitimate and desired satisfactions, -there still remains
the greatest thing of all. There is still your own self, the inner you, the
soul which is a spiritual portion of the Infinite, one in its essence with the
Eternal
The trained minds by centuries of culture
The ordinary
materialised souls, the external minds are the majority in India as every
where. How easy it is for the superior European critic to forget this common
fact of our humanity and treat this turn as a peculiar sign of the Indian
mentality ! But at least the people of India, even the "ignorant
masses" have this distinction that they are by centuries of training
nearer to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of
the universal ignorance and are more easily led back to a vital glimpse of God
and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass of men or even the cultured elite
anywhere else. Where else could the lofty, austere and difficult teaching
of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the popular mind? Where else could the
songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir, the Sikh Gurus and the chants of the
Tamil saints with their fervid devotion but also their profound spiritual
thinking have found so speedy an echo and formed a popular religious
literature? This strong permeation or close nearness of the spiritual turn,
this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to the highest realities
is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still living and supremely
spiritual culture.
Instinct for Order and freedom at once ..a sign of superior natural
capacity
The instinct
for order and freedom at once in any field of human activity is always a sign
of a high natural capacity in that field, and a people which could devise such
a union of unlimited religious liberty with an always orderly religious
evolution, must be credited with a high religious capacity, even as they cannot
be denied its inevitable fruit, a great, ancient and still living spiritual
culture. It is this absolute freedom of thought and
experience and this provision of a framework sufficiently flexible and various
to ensure liberty and yet sufficiently sure and firm to be the means of a
stable and powerful evolution that have given to Indian civilisation this
wonderful and seemingly eternal religion with its marvellous wealth of
many-sided philosophies, of great scriptures, of profound religious works, of
religions that approach the Eternal from every side of his infinite Truth, of
Yoga-systems of psycho-spiritual discipline and self-finding, of suggestive
forms, symbols and ceremonies, which are strong to train the mind at all stages
of development towards the Godward endeavour.
Creation is the only sign of life and great
creation is sign of great life:
To develop to the full the intellectual, the
dynamic and volitional, the ethical, the aesthetic, the social and economic
being of man was an
important element of Indian civilisation,—if for
nothing else, at least as an indispensable preliminary to spiritual perfection
and freedom. India’s best achievements in thought, art, literature, society
were the logical outcome of her religio-philosophical culture.
India has been as much a home of serious and solid
realities, of a firm grappling with the problems of thought and life, of
measured and wise organisation and great action as any other considerable
centre of civilisation. The widely different view these perceptions express
simply show the many-sided brilliance and fullness of her life. The colour and
magnificence have been its aesthetic side; she has had great dreams and high
and splendid imaginations, for that too is wanted for the completeness of our
living ; but also deep philosophical and religious thinking, a wide and
searching criticism of life, a great political and social order, a strong
ethical tone and a ‘ persistent vigour of individual and communal living. That
is a combination which means life in all its fullness, though deficient, it may
be, except in extraordinary cases, in the more violent egoistic perversities
and exaggerations which some minds seem to take for a proof of the highest
vigour of existence.
In what field indeed has not India attempted, achieved, created, and in
all on a large scale and yet with much attention to completeness of detail ? Of
her spiritual and philosophic achievement there can be no real question. They
stand there as the Himalayas stand upon the earth, in the phrase of
Kalidasa, prthivyā iva mānadandah, "as if earth’s
measuring rod," mediating still between earth and heaven, measuring the
finite, casting their plummet far into the infinite, plunging their extremities
into the upper and lower seas of the superconscient and the subliminal, the
spiritual and the natural being. But if her philosophies, her religious
disciplines, her long list of great spiritual personalities, thinkers,
founders, saints are her greatest glory, as was natural to her temperament and
governing idea, they are by no means her sole glories, nor are the others
dwarfed by their eminence. It is now proved that in science she went farther
than any country before the modern era, and even Europe owes the beginning
of her physical science to India as much as to Greece, although not directly
but through the medium of the Arabs,
And even if she had only
gone as far, that would have been sufficient proof of a strong intellectual
life in an ancient culture. Especially in mathematics, astronomy and chemistry,
the chief elements of ancient science, she discovered and formulated much and
well and anticipated by force of reasoning or experiment some of the scientific
ideas and discoveries which Europe first arrived at much later, but was able to
base more firmly by her new and completer method. She was well-equipped in
surgery and her system of medicine survives to this day and has still its
value, though it declined intermediately in knowledge and is only now
recovering its vitality.
In literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly. Not
only has she the Vedas, Upanishads and Gita, not to speak of less supreme but
still powerful or beautiful work in that field, unequalled monuments of
religious and philosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe has never been able to
do anything much of any great value, but that vast national structure, the
Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the poetic literature and expressing so
completely the life of a long formative age, that it is said of it in a popular
saying which has the justice if also the exaggeration of a too apt epigram,
"What is not in this Bharata, is not in Bharatavarsha (India)," and
the Ramayana, the greatest and most remarkable poem of its kind, that most
sublime and beautiful epic of ethical idealism and a heroic semidivine human
life, and the marvellous richness, fullness and colour of the poetry and
romance of highly cultured thought, sensuous enjoyment, imagination, action and
adventure which makes up the romantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor
did this long continuous vigour of creation cease with the loss of vitality by the
Sanskrit tongue, but was parallelled and carried on m a mass of great or of
beautiful work in her other languages, in Pali first and Prakrit, much
unfortunately lost,1 and Tamil,
1 e.g., the once famous work in Paisachi of which the Kathāsaritsāgara is
an inferior version afterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other
tongues. The long tradition of her architecture, sculpture and painting speaks
for itself, even in what survives after all the ruin of stormy centuries :
whatever judgment may be formed of it by the narrower school of western
aesthetics,—and at least its fineness of execution and workmanship cannot be
denied, nor the power with which it renders the Indian mind,—it testifies at
least to a continuous creative activity. And creation is proof of life and
great creation of greatness of life.
Even expression in outward life, the polity, trade
and commerce was excellent
But these things are, it may be said, the things of the mind, and the
intellect, imagination and aesthetic mind of India may have been creatively
active, but yet her outward life depressed, dull, poor, gloomy with the hues of
asceticism, void of will-power and personality, ineffective, null. That would
be a hard proposition to swallow; for literature, art and science do not flourish
in a void of life. But here too what are the facts? India has not only had the
long roll of her great saints, sages, thinkers, religious founders, poets,
creators, scientists, scholars, legists ; she has had her great rulers,
administrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes, men with the strong active will,
the mind that plans and the seeing force that builds. She has warred and ruled,
traded and colonised and spread her civilisation, built polities and organised
communities and societies, done all that makes the outward activity of great
peoples.
Throws out the
most vivid part of itself: The Rishi, Saint, Sage
A nation tends to throw out its most vivid types in that line of action
which is most congenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading idea,
and it is the great saints and religious personalities that stand at the head
in India and present the most striking and continuous roll-call of greatness,
just as Rome lived most in her warriors and statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in
ancient India was the outstanding figure with the hero just behind, while in
later times the most striking feature is the long uninterrupted chain from
Buddha and Mahavira to Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and
beyond them p18 to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and Dayananda. But
there have been also the remarkable achievements of statesmen and rulers from
the first dawn of ascertainable history which comes in with the striking
figures of Chandragupta, Chanakya, Asoka, the Gupta emperors and goes down
through the multitude of famous Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the middle age
to quite modern times. In ancient India there was the life of republics,
oligarchies, democracies, small kingdoms of which no detail of. history now
survives, afterwards the long effort at empire-building, the colonisation of
Ceylon and the Archipelago, the vivid struggles that attended the rise and
decline of the Pathan and Mogul dynasties, the Hindu struggle for survival in
the south, the wonderful record of Rajput heroism and the great upheaval of
national life in Maharashtra penetrating to the lowest strata of society, the
remarkable episode of the Sikh Khalsa. An adequate picture of that outward life
still remains to be given; once given it would be the end of many fictions. All
this mass of action was not accomplished by men without mind and will and vital
force, by pale shadows of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood had been
crushed out under the burden of a gloomy and all-effacing asceticism, nor does
it look like the sign of a metaphysically minded people of dreamers averse to
life and action. It was not men of straw or lifeless and will-less dummies or
thin-blooded dreamers who thus acted, planned, conquered, built great systems
of administration, founded kingdoms and empires, figured as great patrons of
poetry and art and architecture or, later, resisted heroically imperial power
and fought for the freedom of clan or people. Nor was it a nation devoid of
life which maintained its existence and culture and still lived on and broke out
constantly into new revivals under the ever increasing stress of continuously
adverse circumstances. The modern Indian revival, religious, cultural,
political, called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles and grieves
the minds of her critics, is only a repetition under
altered circumstances, in an adapted form, in a greater though as yet less
vivid mass of movement, of a phenomenon which has constantly repeated itself
throughout a millennium of Indian history.
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