Swami Vivekananda                           

Religion and Dharma

UC-NRLF 

M73 

RELIGION AND DHARMA 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

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LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 

RELIGION AND 

DHARMA 

BY 

SISTER NIVEDITA 

(MARGARET E. NOBLE) 

WITH A PREFACE BY S. K. RATCLIFFE 

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 

BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 

1915 

PREFACE. 

FROM an early stage of her life in India Sister Nivedita 

was closely in touch with the student community, 

especially in Bengal where her work lay. She was 

at the call of almost any group, so long as she was 

satisfied that there were sincere seekers among them, 

and her influence spread widely and rapidly, alike 

through her public addresses, which were eagerly 

welcomed, and through the exercise of her personal 

sympathy and counsel. When " The Web of Indian 

Life" was published, in 1904, the enthusiasm of the 

national movement was rising in Young India. Sister 

Nivedita was among the most forceful and devoted of 

its spiritual leaders, and the services of her voice and 

pen were in demand from every side. So far as the 

exacting claims of other work permitted, she yielded 

to requests for newspaper and magazine articles, and 

produced a good deal of occasional writing, besides 

more laborious studies which first appeared in the 

magazines. She gave cordial encouragement to such 

ventures of educational journalism as the Modern 

Review of Calcutta, then as now directed by Mr. 

Ramananda Chatterjee. To the pages of this admir- 

able monthly she contributed the greater part of the 

papers afterwards collected in " Studies from an 

Eastern Home " and practically the whole of those 

in the " Footfalls of Indian History." At the same 

time she was writing, month by month, in the editorial 

columns of the Modern Review a series of notes 

and brief articles suggested chiefly by the ethical and 

religious aspects of the advancing national movement. 

It is from those pieces that the present volume has 

been compiled. 

vi PREFACE 

, None saw more clearly than Sister Nivedita, from the 

beginning, the possibilities and the perils of Indian na- 

i tionalism as then understood and preached. There were 

many, both Indian and European, to insist upon the 

difficulties, or the futility, of the nationalist conception 

and aim ; to argue that it was but one more expression 

of the chaos wrought by the working of the West upon 

the East. The confusion was not to be denied ; but 

Sister Nivedita had no doubt as to the capacity of the 

Indian mind and character to emerge. To her, the 

striking characteristic of the Transition was the speed 

with which, in the nineteenth century, the ancient 

social order of India had adjusted itself to the demands 

of a modern alien civilization. The later steps should 

be not more, but less, difficult since they would be 

conscious and controlled. They must, in Sister 

Nivedita's view, be taken by India itself. There could, 

she held, be no question as to the power of the Indian 

consciousness to absorb the contribution of the West 

and to transmute it ; and the way to that she saw 

through an exchange of organic ideals between East 

and West For India it would mean a renascence 

of Dharma : in other words, a re-interpretation in 

modern terms of the faith and practice of the past ; a 

fresh relation of the contemplative to the active life ; 

a new conception of worship and of sacrifice to the 

ideal ; the monastic ideal expressed in social service ; 

the recovery of the civic sense, and its re-establishment 

in a fuller understanding of the Indian social order ; the 

exaltation of work, of positive character, and of know- 

ledge, in which alone could He the mastery of the future. 

Such is the theme of these papers. In fairness to 

the memory of the author, and for their right under- 

standing, they should be read with a recollection of 

the circumstances amidst which they were thrown off 

with great rapidity in the midst of a crowded and 

arduous life of service in India. The reader will not 

fail to remark, as an illustration of the completeness 

PREFACE vii 

with which Sister Nivedita identified herself with India 

and its spirit, her constant use of " we" and "ours". 

Some readers may wonder at the implied antithesis 

in the title between an English and a Sanskrit word 

which are frequently taken to be practically identical 

in meaning. Dharma, however, is a word that to the 

Hindu has a larger and more complex significance than 

that of Religion as commonly used among us. It in- 

cludes the whole social conception of law and conduct 

and worship. Dharma is the force or principle that 

binds together ; the union of traditional thought and 

faith, of common custom, loyalty, and understanding, 

that makes of society an organic or religious unity. 

" This patience, this steadfastness, this sincerity/' 

Sister Nivedita wrote, " is Dharma the substance, the 

self-ness, of things and of men." l She preferred to 

translate the word as the National Righteousness, 

and on the whole perhaps that is as close to an 

equivalent term in English as we may hope to achieve. 

Viscount Haldane, in the address delivered before 

the American Bar Association in IQI3, 2 has some 

remarks on the principle of Higher Nationality which 

bear upon the matter. Law, in the greater sense, he 

said, imports something more than the code of rules 

laid down by the State ; it has a relation to the ob- 

ligations of conscience and the General Will of Society. 

The field of individual conduct is covered, in the case 

of the citizen, only to a small extent by legality on the 

one hand and the dictates of the individual conscience 

on the other. " There is a more extensive system of 

guidance which regulates conduct and which differs 

from both in its character and sanction." Lord 

Haldane continues : 

In the English language we have no name for it, and this is 

unfortunate, for the lack of a distinctive name has occasioned 

1 P. 51. 2 " Higher Nationality," London : John Murray, 1913. 

viii PREFACE 

confusion both of thought and of expression. German writers 

have, however, marked out the system to which I refer and have 

given it the name of Sittlichkeit. . . . Sittlichkeit is the system 

of habitual customary conduct, ethical rather than legal, which 

embraces all those obligations of the citizen which it is " bad 

form " or " not the thing " to disregard. 

Sitte is the German for custom, and Sittlichkeit implies 

custom and a habit of mind and action ; let us say, 

the blend of social morality and social sanction em- 

bodying the ideal of the conduct of people towards 

each other and towards the community to which they 

belong. 

Without such conduct and the restraints which it imposes 

there could be no tolerable social life, and real freedom from in- 

terference would not be enjoyed. It is the instinctive sense of 

what to do and what not to do in daily life and behaviour that is 

the source of liberty and ease. And it is this instinctive sense 

of obligation that is the chief foundation of society. Its reality 

takes objective shape and displays itself in family life and in our 

other civic and social institutions. It is not limited to any one 

form, and it is capable of manifesting itself in new forms and of 

developing and changing old forms. Indeed the civic community 

is more than a political fabric. It includes all the social institu- 

tions in and by which the individual life is influenced such as 

are the family, the school, the church, the legislature, and the 

executive. None of these can subsist in isolation from the rest ; 

together they and other institutions of the kind form a single 

organic whole, the whole which is known as the Nation. 1 

Sister Nivedita would have accepted every word 

of this exposition as covering a great part of the life 

of citizenship. And she would have added, with 

truth, that Dharma is a finer and more satisfying word 

for the living principle of conduct and society finer 

and more satisfying in the measure of the infinitely 

more rich and profound conception which the Indian 

has of religion than the conception reached by the 

people from whom Lord Haldane borrowed his word. 

S. K. R. 

LONDON, August, 1915. 

1 " Higher Nationality," p. 23. 

CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

PREFACE (by S. K. Ratcliffe) v 

RELIGION AND DHARMA i 

MUKTI : FREEDOM 5 

THE GREATER RITUAL 9 

THE CROWN OF HINDUISM 12 

HINDUISM AND ORGANIZATION 16 

CO-OPERATION 21 

SECTARIANISM 25 

THE SAMAJ 29 

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE 34 

RELIGION AND NATIONAL SUCCESS 37 

THE SPIRIT OF RENUNCIATION 40 

THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR 45 

QUIT YE LIKE MEN ! 48 

SINCERITY 51 

FACING DEATH 53 

LUXURY AND MANHOOD 56 

STRENGTH 59 

TRUE AMBITION 61 

CHARACTER 64 

DISCRIMINATION 67 

FITNESS 70 

ix 

x CONTENTS 

PAGE 

THE TEACHER . 73 

THE GURU AND HIS DISCIPLE ....... 77 

SELF-IDEALISM 82 

REALIZATION 86 

PROGRESS 89 

WORK 92 

REALIZATION THROUGH WORK 95 

THE POWER OF FAITH 98 

THE BEE AND THE LOTUS ........ 102 

THE LIFE OF IDEAS 106 

THE SHAPING OF LIFE 108 

NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS in 

THE FLOWER OF WORSHIP 115 

RESPONSIBILITY 120 

THE WORLD-SENSE IN ETHICS 127 

CHARACTER is SPIRITUALITY 133 

THE TASK BEFORE Us 139 

THE IDEAL. . 150 

GLOSSARY 155 

RELIGION AND DHARMA. 

EVERY religion centres round some particular idea : 

Ancient Egypt round death ; Persia round the mystery 

of Good and Evil ; Christianity round the redeeming 

love of a divine Incarnation. Only Hinduism aims at 

the heights of Vairagyam and Mukti, and at nothing 

secular. This is indeed the weak point of Hinduism. 

The quality by which Hinduism has it in her power 

to make up for this defect of her greatness, is her ca- 

pacity for synthetizing every religious idea with which 

she comes in contact. The absorptive power of Hindu- 

ism as a religion, coupled with its resistant power as a 

civilization, furnishes one of the most startling para- 

doxes in the history of man. Derived originally from 

a veritable network of religions, in which the co-or- 

dinating element was the philosophy now known as 

Vedarita, it has thrown out reforming sects in the 

Mohammedan period, and thrown out reforming sects 

in the Christian period, each of these being in fact the 

expression of its admiration for the new ideal of which 

it has caught a glimpse. 

To-day, however, Hindus see that the greatest call 

upon the religious instincts of the country lies in the 

need of assimilating whole new areas of life. We 

must make possible the " short views " of the Chris- 

tians. There must be some religious teaching and 

2 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

encouragement for those who only want heaven, not 

Mukti. There must be a recognition of righteousness, 

as well as of holiness. Righteousness lies in duty 

done : holiness requires renunciation. A thousand 

good citizens are necessary, as the background of one 

great sannyasin. There must then be a philosophy of 

citizenship, as well as of Sannyas. 

And in truth the exaltation of one thing does not 

demand the decrying of its fellow. The ideal is always 

infinite, always divine. A highly moralized society 

produces the greatest saints. The purity of fathers 

and mothers makes possible the birth of Avatars. 

Where marriage is faithfully kept, there sincere San- 

nyas is possible, not amongst profligates and riotous 

livers. Similarly, the presence of honourable citizens 

is necessary to the maintenance of a grand religious 

ideal, and the citizen is as necessary to its manifesta- 

tion as the monk. 

But if this is so, we have to search our ancient 

scriptures with a new aim. We must seek for all that 

can support and encourage us in doing manfully the 

work of this present world. Renunciation can be 

achieved through duty quite as well as by the abandon- 

ment of duty. We have thousands of texts to tell us 

so, but the prevailing preconception in favour of San- 

nyas has led to our ignoring all that favours Dharma. 

, The weak point of European society lies in the ab- 

: sence of the monastic ideal. True. But equally sure 

is it that the weak point of Hinduism is the want of 

\emphasis on the ideal of the householder and the 

citizen. The reason lies largely in the fact that 

when our texts were formulated our society was as

RELIGION AND DHARMA 3 

rich in virtue as in material resources. When the last 

of these deserts us, it is difficult to prevent the decay 

of the former ; and what is wanted to-day is a de- 

liberate recapture of both. 

For this, we must exalt work. We must look upon 

the world as a school, in which it is worth while to 

strive for promotion from class to class. We must set 

our shoulder to the wheel and struggle unceasingly to 

attain the end we have set before ourselves. Our 

philosophy tells us that absolute progress is impossible 

in the things of this life. But relative progress is fully 

possible ; and while we move on this plane of relativ- 

ity, we must work as if perfection would reward the 

very next step. 

Let us set before ourselves the master-ideals, even in 

things relative. " I do not make good screws, sir, I 

make the best that can be made," said an indignant 

workman in reply to too casual an inquiry. This 

ought to be our attitude. We must make the best 

screws that can possibly be made. In every direction 

it must be the same. The best not too good, the 

highest not too difficult, for us to attain. Nothing less 

than the utmost. Nothing easy. Nothing cheap. 

The same energy that might have made an ascetic 

will also make a workman, if that will better serve the 

Mother's purpose. 

And let our ideals be higher for our friends also. 

Let no man consort with mean company. Monk or 

citizen, let a man be noble. Whether Brahman or 

pariah, let him practise self-respect, and demand the 

like from others. We help no one by being so pas- 

sive as to convert him into a brute ! 

4 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

In the school, the lessons are graduated, but all 

alike are EDUCATION. All are equally the concern of 

the school-authorities. Even so with our civilization. 

The integrity of the man of business is to the full as 

acceptable an offering as the renunciation of the monk, 

for unless there be honest men of the world, the religi- 

ous orders must come to an end. 

Thus Hinduism, fully recognizing the need of the 

practical and secular life, and drawing from within 

herself the stores that are necessary for its develop- 

ment and growth, synthetizes once more ideals that 

seemed opposite. The super-social life is seen in its 

true relation to society. The goal is preached as at- 

tainable, not only by the sadhu in the forest, but also 

by the butcher in the town and the wife in the home. 

MUKTI: FREEDOM. 

OF all the questions that a wakeful and fresh intellect 

will constantly ask, there is none, perhaps, more sure 

to recur than, What is Freedom ? Many of us are 

born struggling for actual freedom, for our own free- 

dom. All of us are born to struggle for something. 

Nothing more terrible could be imagined than a human 

being put into circumstances so artificial that all mo- 

tive for struggle was eliminated, and he was deprived 

of the natural human right of something to desire and 

strive for. We can imagine a man in prison for life 

realizing such hopelessness, though, if so, it must be 

because his whole conception of activity is social or 

muscular, and therefore can be thwarted. Or a cage 

made of riches, or rank, such a cage as that of royal 

birth, for instance, might produce this effect on a 

nature too good to lose itself in fleshly delights, and 

too stupid to find paths of self-development. But if 

so, the man who never struggled would grow up an 

idiot. That at least is certain. All our vivacity, all 

our intelligence, is developed by struggle. Only 

shapeless incapacity could result from its lack. 

It has been said that the great may be distinguished 

from the little by whether or not they are struggling 

for freedom. This may be true. For there is no 

doubt that we may struggle for, and even realize, a 

thing which we could not possibly define intellectually. 

5 

6 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

Most of us win our own freedom in this thing and that 

thing, and thus gradually build up a more or less per- 

fect freedom. Many struggle for freedom under the 

name of the Right. " God and my Right " Dieu et 

mon droit is a formula that refers to some such con- 

test of the soul. It is only Hinduism that has been 

subtle enough to recognize that beyond the thing it- 

self which seems to be the object of our strife, the real 

thirst of the soul is for freedom and that this freedom 

is the essential condition of self-development. The 

man who is free, says Dharma, is the only man who is 

himself. The man who is really and fully himself is 

free free in all directions, free of all bonds. 

One essential characteristic of freedom is that it 

has always to be realized in opposition to something. 

The struggle of every individuality whether a simple 

or a compound is to define itself, by attaining self- 

direction, by repudiating the control of its fellow-or- 

ganisms. Freedom from the pressure of his social 

surroundings is an absolute necessity of manly men. 

The manly man may choose to act precisely as his 

society would desire, but he must believe that he does 

this because he himself chooses, and not because society 

compels. And yet any great anxiety on this point is 

crude enough, since manly men are too accustomed to 

their own freedom, and their own power of defending 

their freedom, to be uneasy about it, or suspicious of 

invasions upon it. It is only a child, who has never 

yet felt himself grown-up, who finds it necessary to re- 

fuse whatever is asked of him, in order that he may 

hug to himself his own liberty of refusal. And here 

we note the vanity, the selfishness, the pre-occupation 

MUKTI: FREEDOM 7 

with self, and indifference to the needs of others, that 

make such natures, at such a stage, unfit for high and 

arduous forms of co-operation. The really great 

are born with such assurance of their own freedom to 

withhold, that they are full of eagerness to give, and 

welcome every opportunity of serving as a privilege. 

Such natures we see every day. Unselfishness is not 

rare amongst human beings. On the contrary, it is the 

mortar that joins the bricks of the whole edifice. 

Society, then, is one of the forces against which the 

individual has to realize his own freedom one of the 

powers from which he has to wrest it. But the question 

again occurs, what is that freedom for which the indi- 

vidual is struggling? And here arises one of the supreme 

fallacies. Some take it that freedom is identified with 

slavery to their own impulses. This is the freedom 

that makes drunkards, gluttons, and libertines. 

At first, all our activity, all our development of 

faculty, depends upon desire : afterwards, desire is seen 

as a form of disease, of which we must be cured ! Is 

this the truth ? The momentum of desire, that impels 

us to yield inevitably to our own caprices, is not 

freedom. It is the last and subtlest form of bondage, 

the more dangerous and deadly for the fact that we 

are liable to mistake its nature. Liberty to realize 

what is our own will may be an essential condition of 

freedom, but until we are as free from that will, and 

the desires suggested by that body and mind, as from 

those of all the other hundreds of millions of human 

beings, we do not know what real freedom is. 

How large, how calm, how full of exquisite joy and 

graciousness, never dimmed, is the heritage of life that 

8 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

awaits the individual in those elysian fields of the soul, 

where this freedom has been won ! It may be mani- 

fested in any way, by any means. For only the free 

can apprehend what freedom is. Only the free can de- 

termine how freedom shall be shown. Only the actions 

of the free are potent, unhampered by feebleness of their 

own or aggression of others free ! free ! Freedom is 

indeed the supreme good of the soul. So far from being 

"a night in which all cows are black," it is, as every 

Hindu knows, the perfect access of daylight, neither too 

much nor too little, into every nook and cranny of our 

universe. But even so, when we seek to define it, we 

are met by an eternal impossibility, and can only 

ejaculate " Neti ! neti ! Not this ! Not this ! " 

The soldier has to learn that obedience is his form 

of prayer. To be doing ja^am when one ought to be 

resting, and consequently to be sleepy when one ought 

to be at work, is not a meritorious condition. No 

punya that way ! The sunny-heartedness of the child, 

on the other hand, ready to forget all about its mother, 

if its mother tells it to run away and play, is true 

bhakti^ and better than many prandms. 

Manliness may often prove to be the whole of piety ! 

Some races have practised such virtue out of sheer in- 

stinct, but never before was a survey of life so com- 

prehensive, so far-reaching, added to the treasury 

of authoritative pronouncements on religious truth. 

This manliness-which-is-righteousness involves, it will 

be noticed, a kind of Mukti y for the manly man has no 

time to be conscious of his own manliness. Heroism 

in great moments is the natural blossom of a life that 

in its little moments is fine and fearless. 

THE GREATER RITUAL. 

So far from remaining unchanged, a religion that is 

alive must be always growing. Only the dead can be 

petrified in rigid forms. The living must be con- 

stantly assimilating new forces, new materials, respond- 

ing in fresh ways to unprecedented stimuli, tending 

in some degree to remake the very environment that 

is re-moulding itself. 

Even of the Sanathan Dharma this is true. Hin- 

duism would not be eternal, were it not constantly 

growing and spreading, and taking in new areas of ex- 

perience. Precisely because it has this power of self- 

addition and re-adaptation, in greater degree than any 

other religion that the world has ever seen, we be- 

lieve it to be the one immortal faith, the great tree- 

stem, bearing on itself, as outlying branches, all the 

more fugitive creeds of the world. 

It is necessary, however, to know in what direction 

to look for changes, if we would be intelligent about re- 

cognizing these when they come. Like Roman Cathol- 

icism, Hinduism has gone on for the last twelve hundred 

years developing more and more into a religion of 

segregation, the culture of the soul, a secret between 

the worshipper and the priest, or the soul and God. 

Undoubtedly it has been true, in this respect, to the 

ultimate message of all religions. The emancipation 

9 

io RELIGION AND DHARMA 

of the soul Spiritual Individualism, as the Swami 

Vivekananda called it is the main business of or- 

ganized creeds. A few social benedictions are a mere 

side-issue. 

But religion has also a communistic side. It lifts 

the soul to God, but it also binds together man and 

man. If we are the children of the Mother, we must 

for that very reason be brothers of one another. A 

specialization in one direction requires to be corrected 

by a compensating development in the other. More 

souls will now be emancipated by attention paid to 

the democratic or communistic side of worship. 

For this, there will have to be common prayer. 

And common prayer itself must be organized. That 

is to say, there must be services in which responses 

are required from several worshippers at once, and 

these responses should be in the vernacular. When 

slokas are recited by a great number all together, it 

will be found desirable to divide these into two sections, 

and let them repeat the texts in antiphon. 

The religious uses of the procession must be restored. 

We cannot doubt when we study Buddhism, which 

was, of course, only a version of an older Hinduism, 

that the procession, with banners, shanks, drums, in- 

cense, and holy water, was a great feature in old 

Indian worship. A few of its most beautiful uses still 

remain, as when seven women carry torches round the 

bridegroom, or the sons encircle the dead father with 

fire. 

There ought now to be an anxious scrutinizing of 

these old ritual observances, and of the whole subject 

of ritual in general. Many of our own most lovely 

THE GREATER RITUAL 11 

rites are still practised in Europe, though lost to us. 

We must restore the greater meanings of our Hindu 

ceremonies. Worship is in the future to have a place 

for the people, as well as for the priest. There is to 

be co-operation and self-organization, even in the 

praising of God. 

THE CROWN OF HINDUISM. 

WE have heard much, lately, more or less sincere, 

about the Crown of Hinduism. But how many Hindus 

have themselves any idea of what is in fact the crown 

of their faith ? If it really deserves all the good things 

said of it, it will not succumb, we may be sure, to the 

attacks of a foreign religion. The fact that such a 

fate can be foretold for it, with smiles, ought to be an 

indication to us of how much is meant by an empty 

compliment. The fact is, foreigners with all their 

perspicacity, cannot easily or actually distinguish be- 

tween our religion and our social system, bound up as 

that is with a network of semi-religious sanctions. But 

our whole social system might conceivably disappear 

without in any degree affecting the most distinctive and 

important of our religious ideas. They are indeed as 

applicable to the West as to the East. Perhaps the 

real crown of Hinduism lies in the fact that it, almost 

alone amongst formulated faiths, has a section devoted 

to absolute and universal truths, and has no fear what- 

ever of discriminating between these and such ac- 

cidental expressions as might be confounded by the 

superficial with their belief itself. 

In spite of its seemingly vast mythology, the actual 

content of Hinduism is infinitely less dependent on 

mythological ideas than any other religion whatsoever. 

He who is driven to abandon the historicity of Western 

12 

THE CROWN OF HINDUISM 13 

beliefs has but sorry ground henceforth to stand upon. 

Not so the Hindu. There is no shade of the search 

after truth that is not looked upon here as religious 

heroism. We are in no danger of persecuting a man 

for no better reason than that he can see farther and 

deeper than we ! Giordano Bruno would never have 

been burnt, Galileo would never have been put to the 

torture, if India had been their home and birthplace. 

The Sanathan Dharma sanctions and endorses every 

form of honest striving after knowledge. It is jealous 

and suspicious of no form of truth. Perhaps in this 

lies the true crown of Hinduism. 

Ours is the religion of a people who have never re- 

lapsed into barbarism, and have never had any quarrel 

with education. We do not distinguish between the 

sacredness of different forms of truth. Truth is truth. 

We are not really so seriously incommoded by our 

mythology as those are who call us idolatrous by 

theirs. We must be true to what we believe. All 

knowledge is sacred. In the trust that has been 

snatched from the abyss, it is not for us to say what 

is more and what less binding. Mathematics is also 

God's. Men of science are also rishis. 

We can afford to laugh at our foreign friends, in the 

fashions that sweep across their religious horizon. 

God really exists, the Westerns are inclined to believe, 

because a leading scientific man says so. This is mere 

childishness. Do they expect others to accept a reli- 

gion whose own sons do it so little justice as this ? To 

the Hindu, religion is experience or nothing. If science 

is also experience, he does not feel it incumbent upon 

him to deny either of two things, both of which he 

14 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

knows to be true. Is God in his keeping? Does the 

universe depend upon his immediate understanding of 

it ? If he were a criminal judge he might have to ex- 

ercise more humility and patience than this ! 

Hinduism never tends to make men contented to 

read or to believe. To have a right to talk, a man 

must first realize. No counterfeit coin will be accepted 

for this. We know the difference at sound between 

the spurious and the real. We can tell who speaks 

with authority and who as the scribes. Our faith rests 

from first to last on a basis of experience, of realiza- 

tion, of personal appropriation. Without this, a mere 

lip-adhesion is of no consequence in our eyes. Let it 

come, let it go. It does not count. Were the whole 

of our system of scaffolding to be swept away to- 

morrow, we should be able to reconstruct it all again : 

nay, we should be compelled to do so, out of the very 

wants of the human heart. 

Let those who are disposed to wail by the river- 

side, shedding false tears over our approaching ex- 

tinction, take heed lest it be not their own superstitions 

that are at the point of death instead of ours ! Hin- 

duism is not going to die because her sons have learnt 

to drink a cup of morning tea, forsooth ! Caste, and 

occupation, and mode of living, and forms of culture 

might all disappear, and Hinduism remain intact as 

ever. In fact, is not something of the kind to be 

expected in the speedy spread of Hinduistic ideas to 

Christian lands ? Our religion is fully compatible 

with any of the higher forms of civilization. But it 

will never die out of the land of its birth. If anything 

were needed to make this more certain, it would be 

THE CROWN OF HINDUISM 15 

just such ill-considered and premature exultation as 

that to which we have been alluding. Do we not 

know that with the passing of characteristic faiths 

comes the death of nations ? Are we fools, that we 

should not know the meaning of the tale of con- 

temporary civilizations in Ancient Egypt, and in 

Babylon, dead beyond power to revive, because they 

parted with their ancestral trust of thought ? India 

shall not do this ! Rather shall she go out into all 

the world, and see the inadequacy of more childish 

faiths met out of her own brimming store. Rather 

shall she become the Guru and instructor of all others, 

and learn to measure the greatness of her own thinkers 

by the littleness and shallowness of those who oppose 

them. Rather shall her pride and confidence in this her 

own treasure wax greater day by day. Smiling serenely, 

she will pass over her flatterers, her hypocritical sympa- 

thisers and her well-intentioned but foolish children 

easily elated by meaningless words, and let her own 

glance rest, in calm and content, on a future not far 

distant when the positions shall be reversed. 

That such a time is coming, nay, that it is close at 

hand, we should be strangely disloyal to our Mother- 

Church to doubt. We should be strangely incompe- 

tent readers of her past triumphs, if we could not see. 

Not the churches of the world alone, but the very 

universities of Europe, will yet do homage before the 

names of Indian thinkers, who, living in the shelter of 

forest-trees, and clad in birch-bark or in loin-cloths, 

have formulated truths more penetrating and more 

comprehensive than any of which Europe herself 

childishly bent on material comfort ever dreamed.

HINDUISM AND ORGANIZATION. 

HINDUISM is one of the finest and most coherent 

growths in the world. Its disadvantages arise out of 

the fact that it is a growth, not an organization ; a 

tree, not a machine. In an age in which the whole 

world worships the machine, for its exactness, its 

calculableness, and its dirigibility, this fact, while 

it makes for a greater permanence, also involves 

a certain number of desiderata. The fruits of the 

tree of Hinduism are of an excellence unparalleled ; 

but it is not easy to reach by its means those benefits 

that do not occur spontaneously, ends that have to be 

foreseen and deliberately planned and arranged for. 

For instance, alone amongst the world's faiths perhaps, 

ours has no quarrel of any sort with truth. Under 

its sway, the scientific mind is absolutely free to 

pursue to the uttermost its researches into the Infinite 

Nescience of things, the philosopher is encouraged to 

elucidate his conclusions, and simple piety does not 

dream of passing judgment on things admittedly too 

high for it. All this is true of Hinduism. At the 

same time, what has it done to grasp the highest 

scientific education for its children, or to impel its 

people forward upon the pursuit of mastery in learn- 

ing or in ministering to social service ? 

There is nothing in Hinduism to forbid an attempt 

16 

HINDUISM AND ORGANIZATION 17 

on our part to compass these things, and the only 

thing that could drive us to make the effort, namely 

a vigilant and energetic sense of affairs, a public spirit 

that took account of things as a whole, was un- 

doubtedly indicated by the Swami Vivekananda, as 

part of what he meant by Aggressive Hinduism. 

We ought to make our faith aggressive, not only 

internationally, by sending out missionaries, but also 

socially, by self-improvement ; not only doctrinally, 

by accepting converts, but also spiritually, by intensify- 

ing its activity. What we need is to supplement 

religion by public spirit, an enlightened self-sense in 

which every member of the community has a part. 

Class-preference is obsolete in matters of education. 

The career of the intellect is now for him who has the 

talent. By us, this principle has to be boldly and 

enthusiastically accepted. Even as the school is open 

to all, so must every form of social ministration be 

made. The college, the orphanage, the hospital, the 

women's refuge, these must be opened by such as have 

the devotion and energy for the task, and nothing 

must be said of the birth of the servant of humanity. 

By virtue of his consecration, he becomes a saint, even 

as, by his jnanam, the philosopher makes himself a 

rishi. 

Activity is eased and heightened if it is socialized : 

that is to say, if it is the work of a body, espousing a 

common conviction, and not of a solitary individual, 

wandering the world, and divided between his idea 

itself and the question of its support. This common 

conviction, driving into work, is the reason why small 

religious sects are so often the source of vast move- 

1 8 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

ments of human amelioration. Many of these out- 

standing problems of Hinduism have been attacked, 

for instance, by the Brahmo Samaj, with considerable 

success. The little church forms a background and 

home for the worker. It sends him out to his task, 

rejoices over his success, and welcomes him back with 

laurels, or with ministration, when he turns home 

to die. Without some such city of the heart, it is 

difficult to see how the worker is to keep up his 

energy and courage. The praise and pleasure of our 

own little group of beloved ones is very sweet to all of 

us, and quite properly spurs us on to surmount many 

an obstacle that we should not otherwise attempt. 

Let the soul grow, by saying " not this ! not this ! " to 

what height it will ; but let it have the occasion for 

practising this discrimination. 

We must take up our problems, then, as social 

groups. Let no man enter on the apostolate that 

is to shake the world, alone. Everything done, every 

discovery made, even every poem written, and every 

dream dreamed, is a social achievement. Society has 

contributed to it, and will receive its benefits. Let 

the missionary, then, on whom the effort seems to rest, 

not reckon himself to be the chief actor. There must 

be some two or three, knit together by some well- 

wrought bond, in every undertaking that is to benefit 

humanity. Perhaps they were comrades at school and 

college. Perhaps they are disciples of a single master. 

Possibly they belong to the same village. Maybe 

they are fellow-workmen in some common employment. 

Whatever be the shaping force, there must be as- 

sociation of aim and co-operation of effort, if there is 

HINDUISM AND ORGANIZATION 19 

to be success, and there must be a strong bond of love 

amongst those few ardent souls who form the central 

core. 

Voluntary association, the desire of a body to take 

on corporate individuality, is thus the point of de- 

parture within Hinduism for civic activity. But we 

must not forget how much every activity owes to the 

general movement of society around it. Work must 

be done by the few as the servants, not as the enemies, 

of the many. Every single movement needs other 

counter-movements to supplement it, if it is to main- 

tain itself in vigour. Thus, the difficulty about technical 

education in India is not want of funds, which have 

been poured in in abundance ; but want of general 

industrial development, in the society around. There 

is a fixed ratio between education and development 

which cannot be passed, hence only by definite and 

alternating increments to the one and to the other 

can progress take place. Again, there is a fixed pro- 

portion between the total of these and the community's 

need of the highest scientific research, which cannot 

be contravened. And all these alike must find them- 

selves inhering in an inclusive social energy, which 

takes account of its own needs, its own problems and 

its own organs. The vivifying of this general social 

sense is the first of all our problems. We have to 

awaken it, to refresh it, and to keep it constantly 

informed. What this social sense has now first and 

foremost to realize, is our want of education, the need 

of a real ploughing of the mind. For this, high and 

low, we ought to be content to starve and slave and 

bear the utmost pinch of poverty. And not for our 

20 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

own sons alone. This is a matter in which the interest 

of all should be the interest of each one, the necessity 

of one the interest of all. We have to energize our 

culture. We have to learn to think of things in their 

wholeness, and to see them from new points of view. 

We have to possess ourselves of all that is known 

by humanity, not to continue in contentment with a 

mere corner of its knowledge, well fenced off. Are 

we mentally capable of science, of sanity, of com- 

prehensiveness? If so, we have now to prove our 

capacity. 

And where shall we find the starting-point for this 

new assault on the citadel of our own ignorance 1 ? Let 

us find it boldly amongst religious forces. In Buddhist 

countries, the monastery is the centre round which are 

grouped schools, libraries, museums, and efforts at 

technical education. Why should we not, in our South- 

ern cities expect the temple, similarly, to take the lead, 

in the fostering of the new and higher education ? 

Why should we dread the Brahman's tendency to ex- 

clusiveness and reaction ? If it be really true that we 

are capable of sanity, is the Brahman to remain an ex- 

ception to that sanity? Let us expect of our own 

country and of our own people, the highest and noblest 

and most progressive outlook that any people in the 

world might take. And in doing this, let us look to 

become Hindus, in a true sense, for the first time. For 

it is a question whether so grand a word ought to be 

borne by us unless we have first earned and approved 

our right to it. Ought not the name of our country 

and our faith to be to us as a sort of order of merit, a 

guerdon of loyal love, the token of accepted toil ? 

CO-OPERATION. 

BOTH Hindus and Mohammedans have great need 

amongst themselves of such work as has been done 

amongstiChristians, during the past century, by mutual 

association. No one would suggest that such forms of 

association should be deliberately imitated by Orientals 

amongst themselves. But a very different matter is 

the apprehension of the idea that is represented by the 

institution, and its re-expression in some other form. 

The impact of Western life and thought has shattered 

many of our own most precious methods of self-or- 

ganization. The old village-community, with its co- 

herence, its moral order, its sense of purpose, and its 

openness to the highest thought and sacrifice, has 

gone, and in its place we have the heap of disconnected 

fragments that goes in modern times by the name of a 

city. 

Even the city, of the mediaeval poch, had its own 

way of fulfilling the purposes of modern voluntary as- 

sociations. The newcomer to Benares or Allahabad 

found himself immediately in his own quarter, sur- 

rounded by men from his own part of India, directly 

or indirectly connected with himself. In the outer ap- 

partments of their homes he met with friends, received 

assistance and advice, and was able to avail himself of 

local culture. This para of his own countrymen was 

21

22 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

to all intents and purposes his club, his home, his 

hospital. And it served all these ends far better than 

any modern society of the cities can possibly do. It 

was here that there grew up the organized communal 

opinion that resulted sooner or later in the extension 

of scope in required directions. For the communal or- 

ganization in all provinces was generous, and free, and 

debonair, full of comradeship, rising in its richer 

members into princely liberality. It is the continuity 

of our social environment, moreover, that keeps us all 

on our own highest level in character and conduct. 

And this continuity was admirably provided for in the 

old city paras. The youth who came from the south 

in those days, was not open to the same temptations as 

now, from the dissipations of the city. And this for 

the good reason that the elders about him were men of 

his own district. The news of any lapses from decorum 

would assuredly travel back to the old people at home, 

and in the village of his birth his family would hang 

their heads for shame of him. It is not easy to esti- 

mate the moral restraint imposed by this series of 

facts. 

While we remember this, however, we cannot fail to 

consider the contrast presented by modern develop- 

ments. Let us think, for instance, of the crowds of 

poor Mohammedans who find their way into a city like 

Calcutta, chiefly perhaps from Patna and Behar, to 

act as syces and coachmen. The temptations of this 

particular life are notorious in all countries. Liquor- 

shops are banefully on the increase. The custom of 

congregating in one's own quarter is on the wane. 

Can it be wondered at that the life of the city proves 

CO-OPERATION 23 

utterly destructive to the happiness of many a simple 

country home? 

And yet, though all this is but too true, we must 

not speak as if any people in the world could compare 

with our own people even here. Very often the poor 

man whose hold on life is so sadly impaired by the 

foreignness of his environment, is nevertheless strug- 

gling to live on one meal a day and send half of his 

tiny wages to his home. No one will ever know the 

whole history of the self-sacrifice of Indian servants 

in these days. The commonest of our countrymen are 

able to practise a control of hunger that in any other 

land would canonize them as martyrs. 

We, and especially the student classes, who live in 

cities, would do well to consider the social problems 

that surround us. What can we do for the People? 

How can we strengthen the People to recover them- 

selves ? We are not called upon to create new forces 

of restitution. These, in abundance, are our heritage 

from our forefathers. But we are called upon to con- 

serve, to use, to develop, and re-adjust to modern needs, 

the treasure of moral impulses and moralizing and co- 

ordinating institutions that is ours. 

Let each of us ask himself, Where are the Sudras who 

have come from his father's village ? Does one not 

know ? Then how sadly one has failed in the duty of 

solidarity ! Could one do anything to help them ? 

Anything to share with them one's own privileges ? 

One never knows, till one has tried, how many and how 

great those privileges are. What a revolution would 

be effected, and how quickly, in Indian ideas, if every 

student in the land took a vow each year to give twelve 

24 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

lessons to some person or group of persons who had 

no other means of education ! Twelve lessons would 

not be a great tax on any one, yet how immensely help- 

ful to the taught ! The lessons might take the form 

of anything the teacher had to offer. Physical exercise 

would do, if that were all one could give. Reading and 

writing, or counting, would be good. But better than 

any of these would be talks about geography and his- 

tory, or the interchange of simple scientific conceptions, 

or a training in the observation of the everyday facts 

about us. 

Have we thought how the acquisition of a few ideas 

helps living, how an intellectual speculation, left to 

germinate in the mind, raises and deepens the days it 

colours ? Knowledge is truly the bread of life. Let 

us hasten, with the best that is in us, to offer knowledge 

to all about us ! 

SECTARIANISM. 

A GREAT deal is commonly said of the evil done by 

the existence of sects. It may be, however, that such 

statements take somewhat too much for granted ; that 

they are made thoughtlessly ; and that the whole ques- 

tion of the use and abuse of sects is worthy of careful 

consideration. 

Undoubtedly the temper that splits hairs continually 

over minute differences of doctrine, that welcomes dis- 

pute, and divides societies on the slightest pretext, is 

mischievous and reprehensible. If sectarianism of this 

description be the necessary characteristic of sects, then 

the less we see of them the better. All sects must be 

regarded as an evil, and hardly anything could be an 

excuse for their creation. But is it necessary that the 

schismatic temper should be the one inevitable product 

of a sect ? 

It is not the desire to separate from others, but the 

desire of men to unite themselves together, round the 

banner of a common truth or ideal, that brings the sect 

into being. The sect is a church, and a church, to quote 

a time-honoured definition, is neither more nor less 

than " a company of faithful people." In this sense, we 

might almost call any body of persons associating them- 

selves voluntarily for the purposes of some scholarly 

study, or learned idea, a sect, or church. In a sense, a 

35 

26 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

gathering of the fellows of a medical society, or an 

Asiatic society, is a congregation. In a sense, since 

these bodies are made up of persons " faithful " to a 

certain idea, they are churches. And as soon as we say 

this, we realize that the sect is really an assertion of 

unity, not of difference ; an association, not a separa- 

tion ; a brotherhood, not a schism. 

But let us look at the religious body, the church 

gathered round some central idea of faith or conduct, 

the ecclesiastical church. Do sects of this kind play no 

large and generous purpose in the world, from which 

we may learn ? Undoubtedly they do. In the first 

place, they form a confraternity, even, in a certain sense, 

a home. The struggling, poverty-stricken member has 

those about him who will aid, those whose communal 

interest lies in his well-being, those who will defend him 

from the sneers and oppression of the world without. 

This aspect of the sect may be seen in the Jewish, the 

Jain, and the Parsi communities. 

The sect is also a school. The children of its 

members have a heritage in the idea, and their church 

is responsible for their education in it. They are born 

to a place in an army, and the ideals and discipline, as 

well as the solidarity, of soldiers, are theirs from the first 

moment of life. 

The sect is an arena. Each member's life is plunged 

in the open, with the moral enthusiasm of all about him 

to be his guide and stay. The honour of the church 

demands the highest possible achievement of each one 

of its sons. She gives her hero parting salutation, and 

welcome on return. She treasures up every significant 

act of his life, and makes it available to those who live 

SECTARIANISM 27 

in his shadow. She provides a home and friends in the 

distant cities for the youth who fares forth to seek 

fortune and adventure. She is mother and friend and 

guardian, guru and generalissimo and banner, all in one. 

Is a sect altogether an evil ? 

Yet the final use of the sect is the transcending of 

sects. Its greatest sin is to deny the truth to those 

without. Every moment of our lives is Judgment- 

Day. Even at their culmination, when the part has 

been played with honour in the sight of all men, there 

is the question as to the spirit in which the whole shall 

be summed up. Shall we end by claiming the sole in- 

fallibility for ourselves? Or shall our final message be 

" Lo, this is the light that lighteth every man that 

cometh into the world"? 

In India the land from which the words just quoted 

surely emanated there can be no doubt as to which of 

these is the true attitude. No one church has a mon- 

opoly of truth. No single shepherd is alone infallible. 

There is no final sect except Humanity, and that 

Humanity must include, as Buddha thought, all that 

lives and enshrines a soul. 

The day may perhaps have gone by for the forming 

of sects, but not for taking their spirit and inspiring 

our own lives with it. As the church is a school, a 

home, a brotherhood, so let every village be, amongst 

us. As the sect is a great over-arching Motherhood, 

so be to us our country and our fellows. The religious 

band gathered round a common truth. But we are 

called together by the sacredness of our place. The 

ancient Aryan planted his altar, and lighted the sacred 

fire when he came to the spot that seemed to him most 

3

28 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

sacred. And so to us, every common hearth-place is 

the Vedic altar. The household, the village, the city, 

and the country, are they not so many different forth- 

shinings to the heart, of One Immensity of Mother- 

hood ? As Her children, born in the light of these Her 

shrines, are we not all one brotherhood - in the closest 

of bonds ? 

THE SAMAJ. 

A VISIT to a Christian church impresses one very 

powerfully with the organizing and co-operating instinct 

of the European races. Their religious thought, like 

that of the Jewish people from whom they derive it, 

often seems to us, in comparison with the rich back- 

ground of Hinduism, poor, or even childish ; but as to 

the beauty and impressiveness of their ceremonial and 

liturgical expression, there can be no dispute. 

Nor do we class all Christian forms as equal in this 

respect. The old Latin Church, while much more 

historic, and much closer to Asiatic ritual, does not 

seem to us to compare, in the simple grandeur of its 

services, with the modern church of Anglican Protes- 

tantism. In the Roman Church, a great deal of the 

service is performed by a priest, on behalf of a silent 

kneeling congregation. This is parallel with the part 

played by the Brahman in our own services. The great 

stroke of genius, in which the European mind reaches 

its most distinctive manifestation, appears to have 

been the invention of Common Prayer. It was per- 

haps the Mohammedans who first thought of it, 1 and 

Europe had been saturated with the idea of Moham- 

1 Sister Nivedita, quoting Swami Vivekananda, was accustomed to 

attribute the institution of common prayer to Islam. This view over- 

looks its establishment in Jewish worship many centuries earlier. 

EDITOR. 

*> 3* 

30 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

medan institutions, doubtless, throughout the whole 

period of the Crusades. Then again, one of the most 

powerful contributory causes of the Reformation itself 

had lain in the capture of Constantinople, in 1453 A.D., 

by the Ottoman Turks. This was an event which 

must, in the nature of things, have revived and deepened 

the European tradition of the Saracen and his ways. 

And who shall say what impression falls deepest into 

the mind of nation or individual, to germinate most 

powerfully? 

Mean it what it may, it is certain that Christianity 

began by being an Asiatic idea, but ends, attaining its 

most distinctive characteristics, as European Protes- 

tantism ; that common prayer meaning the united 

prayer of the congregation, taking a definite part in the 

drama of worship began with Islam, but ends in such 

places as the Anglican Church. 

Hinduism possesses congregational worship in rudi- 

ment only. Hitherto, it has not greatly recognized 

anything beyond the priest and the single worshipping 

soul. Its view of the act of prayer is so much more 

intense than the European, that it would seem to it a 

confusion in terms to talk of such conceptions as de- 

mocratic worship ! And yet, for this worship by the 

individual soul, it offers the beaten paths of liturgy and 

ritual, written prayer and pre-determined act. In this, 

again, it provides us with the exact antithesis of Europe, 

where those sects who exalt the individual experience 

in matters spiritual become nonconformist, and discard 

all pre-determined expression and form. 

Christianity produces very few rishis and great 

saints. Only at long intervals do we meet, in Europe, 

THE SAMAJ 31 

with a Francis, a Teresa, or a Joan. And we meet with 

them almost exclusively in the church of images and 

Tapasyd, of Sddhand and Bhajana. In spite of a 

Frances Ridley Havergal, and the American Shakers, in 

spite of Swedenborg amongst the riskis, and the Wes- 

leys and Catherine Booth amongst the saints, Protestan- 

tism can hardly be said to have made up the full tale 

of numbers due from her as yet. The strength of 

Christianity, the strength of Europe, does not, in fact, 

lie in the exceptions it produces. Its strength lies tin 

its average. It may be defective in greatness ; it is 

remarkably well represented when it comes to a fair 

working level, of a somewhat crude type perhaps, 

aggressive, very cocksure, extremely limited in ideas ; 

but a success, when we consider how well it is held by 

the majority, how little, comparatively speaking, is the 

lapse below it. For this, Christianity has lopped off 

the heads of her tallest growths, that there might be 

none, either, hopelessly dwarfed. For this she makes 

her worship into a sort of literary and musical exercise, 

knowing well that we cannot constantly lend ourselves 

to the articulation of given ideas, without eventually 

becoming approximated to them in our own nature. 

For this, she has confined herself to the narrow ground 

of a scheme of salvation nineteen hundred years old. 

For this, she exalts service above Jndnam, and social 

utility above Bhakti that she might create a strong, 

mutually-coherent, self-respecting average, and raise 

her multitudes to its level. 

In matters of religion, a Hindu peasant seems like a 

cultivated man of the world beside what is often the 

childishness of a European man of letters. In matters 

32 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

of civic right, the humblest European will often regard 

as obvious and inevitable what is hidden from the Hindu 

leader and statesman. 

But we are come to the age of the Interchange of 

Ideals. Humanity does not repeat her lessons. What 

is learnt in one province of her great kingdom she 

expects another to take and use. Undoubtedly the 

thought of the East is about to effect the conquest of 

the West. And the ideals of the West, in turn, are 

to play their part in the evolution of the East. This 

point of view has little in common with that of the 

missionary, for it means that neither will displace the 

other. Each will act as complementary only. 

Hinduism will undoubtedly in the future develop a 

larger democratic element. She will begin to recognize 

the value of liturgical prayer. A new consideration will 

be felt amongst us for the education and training of 

the average man. Notions of service, ideals of action, 

will come in, to re-enforce our too exclusive admiration 

for the higher forms of realization. It is to be hoped 

that we shall never lose our regard for the segregation 

of the soul, as the path to God. But without losing 

this, we could well afford to emphasize the potentialities 

of the crowd. To a certain extent, these tendencies 

have already found exemplification in the Arya, Brahmo, 

and Prarthana Samajes. In Bengal, the Adi Brahmo 

Samaj, of the Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, repre- 

sents to us much that the Lutheran and Anglican 

Churches represent in Christianity. It is Protestant, so 

to speak, yet liturgical ; full of tradition, yet congrega- 

tional. The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, on the other 

hand, corresponds to the nonconforming sects in Eng- 

THE SAMAJ 33 

land. There is still in it, perhaps, a greater regard for 

inherited prayers and formulae than amongst the icono- 

clasts of Europe. But this is not to be wondered at, 

in a religion so much more venerable than theirs as 

ours. 

What we still want, nevertheless, is the taking up of 

these new features into modern orthodox Hinduism. 

If Hinduism is to become aggressive, taking back 

its own perverted children, and holding its arms open 

to foreign converts, it must also develop, so to speak, 

a democratic wing. The People must find a place and 

a united voice in its services. The procession must be 

made articulate in hymns and responses. There will 

be stated times of assembly, and the temple steps may 

even become the pulpit, the place of exposition, and 

exhortation. All these changes will not displace the in- 

dividual/^. None of us need fear the loss of religious 

treasures whose true value we are only now able to 

appreciate. 

But these are the days of a great new outpouring of 

God upon our people, and the Mother-Church, ever 

responsive, will feel this and give it utterance, even as 

in the past she has reflected each phase of our national 

history. We shall abandon nothing, but add all things. 

For the sake of the many we shall learn to exalt action, 

to idealize work. But Hinduism will not, for all that, 

cease to be the school of the few, leading them to 

Jnanam> to Bhakti, to renunciation, and to Mukti. 

Religion is not passive and static. It is dynamic, ever 

growing. This truth remains for us to prove. 

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE. 

SOME people strive to be truly Indian by looking 

back, and some aim at the same goal by looking for- 

ward. It is quite evident that we need both, yet 

that of the two the second is still the more impor- 

tant. We need the two, because the future must be 

created out of the strength of the past. None of us 

can be educated by rebuke alone. The teacher who 

really forms us, is he who sees better than we did our- 

selves what we really longed and strove for, how far 

our effort was right, and in what points we might make 

it still finer and better. He who interprets us to our- 

selves, and at the same time gives us hope, is the true 

educator. 

In the same way a nation cannot be aided by con- 

tempt or abuse. The future cannot be founded on a 

past admitted to be a failure. He who attempts to do 

this will never understand his own defeat. Before we 

can teach, we must first worship the Divine that ex- 

presses itself through the taught. Service is really 

worship. Charity is worship. And even education is 

worship. Because I see in you the infinite Atman 

pure, free, irresistible and eternal, I may help you to 

remove some of the barriers to Its free expression. If 

the whole of humanity were not in you, what would be 

the use of our efforts ? They could bring forth no fruit. 

34 

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE 35 

It follows that the advance of communities, like 

that of individuals, depends in the first place upon a 

clear conception of the goal before them, and a reverent 

appreciation of the work they have done in the past 

towards that end. Hence there must be a certain ele- 

ment of conservatism in all great social upheavals. 

But it would be better to be confined to the future 

than to be confined to the past ! After all, whether 

we know it or not, we cannot help carrying a certain 

amount of our inherited strength with us. And we 

must be hewing out the path for the advance of others. 

It is this tendency to limitation, to refuse full freedom 

to others, that is apt to make the young so impatient 

of what they take to be blind reaction. But the fault 

is not in conservatism itself, as our youth themselves 

will one day come to see, but rather in its denial of 

freedom to advance. All religions are true, as Sri 

Ramakrishna taught us, and practically everything in 

them is true, save and except those points in which 

they declare other faiths to be false. Similarly, our 

conservatives are right enough, except when they say 

that the youngsters are wrong, and the youngsters are 

true, except when they fret against the back-looking 

elders. 

Each has need to love and pray for the success of 

the other. Do we want to see India turned into a pale 

copy of America ? God forbid ! How precious, as a 

bulwark against our own impatience then, are these 

staunch old believers who hold the national treasure, 

and guard the national colour, against all innovation ! 

But do we want to see India with her wings clipped, 

chained to the roosting-perch, unable to do or to be or 

36 RELIGION AND.DHARMA 

to soar where she will ? If not, let our love and bene- 

diction go everywhere with our wayward children, in 

their sublime assault upon the future. On, on, strong 

souls, with your experiments in progress, your fiery 

hopes, and your fearless forward march ! We know 

the love that burns in your hearts for the village home, 

and the father and grandfather. Better, we hold, 

could the land do without us than without you ! The 

time will yet come when you will return to the old 

home, tired of wandering, weary of the fight, and leav- 

ing your own children to man the breach you leave, will 

turn your hearts to the ancient wisdom, and seek the 

final release. How grateful will you then be to the 

grey heads that preserved the national home ! No 

other refuge could have seemed so cool as this old 

house. No music could have been so sweet as these 

temple bells. It is for the future that the past lives 

on. The past has no bhakta to compare with that 

future ! 

RELIGION AND NATIONAL SUCCESS. 

WE cannot too strongly condemn the reckless non- 

sense that is sometimes talked amongst our country- 

men to the effect that countries are rendered effete by 

their religion, that by reason of her religion India has 

fallen upon a period of decline, and that because she 

has no religion Japan is a success. 

The difficulty in dealing with this tangle of untruths 

is to know where to begin. Shall we first attack our 

friends' notion of what is religion ? Or would it be 

wiser first to notice their idea of what constitutes the 

decline and success of countries ? Some of us would 

indignantly reject the assumption that Japan is a suc- 

cess, preferring to maintain that precisely because she 

has no religion, in half a century she will be outstripped 

and forgotten. 

Again, some of us would decline to admit that India 

is in a state of decay, being prepared to hold against 

all-comers the contrary opinion that she stands on the 

threshold of a great future, and feels coursing within 

her veins the blood of youth. 

But these are matters in which our personal tem- 

perament and experience will largely determine our 

view. Hence, argument is more or less useless about 

them. The only demonstration that can be really 

successful will be that of the new heaven and the new 

37 

38 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

earth, rising up about us, and the evidence of our 

senses themselves as to the truth. That argument 

will not be created by those who despair and talk of 

senile exhaustion ! 

The main point to be considered is what our friends 

are pleased to mean by religion. Perhaps, when this 

is well defined, we shall see that if India is not dead 

to-day, she owes her survival to the fact of her religion. 

Religion in this sense is not superstition, it is not fear, 

or mythology, or the practice of penances. It is living 

thought and belief, with their reaction in character. 

Hinduism is not in this sense an idolatry of the 

fugitive. Success is as fleeting in the lives of nations 

as is defeat. Hinduism is no gospel of success. It 

does not even profess to hold out any short cut there. 

To do this is the domain of magic. Our religion is 

something better than a series of magical formulae. 

If Hinduism were the gospel of success, it would be- 

long only to one-half of experience. 

When we are true to the faith that is in us, we be- 

come the witness, looking on at the spectacle of victory 

and of defeat. Seeking for triumph to the utmost of 

our power, we are not therefore enslaved by it. 

Striving with all our might to reverse our defeat, we 

are nevertheless not bowed down by it. In conquer- 

ing as in being conquered, we stand serene, in the 

power of religion, conscious of a sovereign self-re- 

straint within that yields to none of the circumstances 

of life, whether these be good or ill. Are we indeed 

jealous of those whose whole good is in the world about 

them ? Do we not know that in the pairs of opposites 

there is oscillation, that good is followed by ill, fame

RELIGION AND NATIONAL SUCCESS 39 

by ignominy, brilliant success by blackness of dis- 

aster ? 

Religion is the permanent element, the accumula- 

tion of human thought and character in the midst of 

the ebb and flow of circumstance. This building up 

of the corporate personality is closely associated with 

the maintenance of native religious ideas. Who shall 

restore ancient Egypt, or Mesopotamia, Chaldaea or 

Assyria ? None, for the things that made them indi- 

viduals have disappeared for ever. Even a language 

can only persist round some central expression of a 

people's genius. We must not be misled by the bril- 

liance of a moment. Where is Rome ? Where is 

Portugal ? Where is Spain ? A few centuries are to 

the spirit of history only as an hour in the life of an 

ordinary man. Nations are not made or unmade 

by the flight of time, but by the steadiness and pati- 

ence with which they hold, or do not hold, to the trust 

that it is theirs to carry through the ages. A moment 

of brilliant commercial exploitation does not constitute 

historic success, unless there are forces at work to main- 

tain intact the personality of the victor. Nor can that 

commercial success itself endure, apart from character 

and integrity in those who have achieved it. Our re- 

ligion teaches us that this world is not real. It is im- 

possible for one who sincerely holds this, to barter the 

life of mind and conscience for external ease and com- 

fort. Yet this preference of conscience above the in- 

terest of the moment is the master-quality in attaining 

the inheritance even of the earth itself. 

THE SPIRIT OF RENUNCIATION. 

AMONGST fallacies which are characteristic of special 

states of society there is in modern times none which 

is more common than the question, " Does it pay ? " 

The remark ought always to be answered by a counter- 

question. " Pay whom ? " And until this is clearly 

and fully replied to, no further answer should be given. 

It will generally be found that the reference is to 

the individual. Is a given course of conduct likely to 

benefit that individual who engages in it, within a cer- 

tain relatively short period ? If so, that conduct is ad- 

visable, but if otherwise, then not. 

Now this would be all very well, if a sufficiently 

large meaning could be given to the idea of the indi- 

vidual, or to the notion of what his benefit involved. 

Unfortunately, however, the class of mind to which the 

argument appeals strongly and clearly is not one which 

is capable of giving a larger significance to anything. 

If we are contemplating a course of vice it is a fair 

argument to ask " Does it pay ? " because vice or sin 

of any kind is always in the long run detrimental to 

the best interests not only of the individual but also 

of the society. 

Every advance in human knowledge, every inven- 

tion, every achievement, almost without exception, 

throughout the history of Humanity, has been gained 

40 

THE SPIRIT OF RENUNCIATION 41 

by those who had abandoned the idea of profit for 

themselves, and who were contented to labour for the 

profit of mankind. We are too apt, in India, to re- 

gard this as an ideal proper to the sannyasin only. 

We have to learn to-day that there must be no society 

without its sannyasins, and that many social applica- 

tions have yet to be found for Sannyas. 

As a matter of fact, curiously few undertakings are 

capable in all their stages of paying the individual. 

There is nothing which is more necessary socially than 

education. Yet is it not notorious that only in ex- 

ceptional states of society can the educator be ade- 

quately paid ? Why do the religious orders of the 

Roman Catholic Church carry so much of the educa- 

tional burden in countries that are not Roman Catho- 

lic ? Only because the individual worker contributes 

his service, as far as his community is concerned, free 

of charge. And thus his community triumphs. The 

training of the men whom it attracts ensures its prestige, 

their unselfishness its victory. This is the case with 

education to-day. But the same happened in Central 

Europe in earlier ages, with regard to other equally 

important activities. Thus J. R. Green says of the 

Begging Friars, or sannyasins, who came to England 

in the year 1224 A.D. : 

" The work of the Friars was physical as well as 

moral. The rapid progress of population within the 

boroughs had outstripped the sanitary regulations of the 

middle ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible 

scourge of leprosy festered in the wretched hovels of 

the suburbs. It was to haunts such as these that 

Francis had pointed his disciples, and the Grey 

42 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

Brethren at once fixed themselves in the meanest and 

poorest quarters of each town. Their first work lay 

in the noisome lazar-houses, it was amongst the lepers 

that they commonly chose the site of their homes. At 

London they settled in the shambles of Newgate ; at 

Oxford they made their way to the swampy ground 

between its walls and the streams of Thames. Huts 

of mud and timber, as mean as the huts around them, 

rose within the rough fence and ditch that bounded the 

friary." 

All this was in the thirteenth century. But at the 

end of the eleventh, there had already arisen in Europe 

an austere order of monks, known as the Cistercians, 

who spread themselves over the moors and forests of 

France and the Rhine-countries ; built abbeys and cath- 

edrals ; began agriculture on a large scale ; drained 

the swamps, and cleared the common-lands. It was 

these Cistercians who afterwards sent out from their 

English mother-houses daughter-communities to settle 

in Norway, and these it was who alone in that country 

were able to practise building in stone, and who taught 

Roman letters, and enabled the people to write down 

their national epics. 

Thus even the West notwithstanding her present 

loud assertions of self-interest and quick profit as valid 

motives of action even the West is built up on unpaid 

labour, on labour whose hire the labourers remitted 

and allowed to accumulate in the interests of the 

commonwealth. In fact it is only after an activity 

has been thoroughly institutionalized, and made com- 

mon and standard, that it can expect to command a 

market rate of wages, so to speak. But before it can 

THE SPIRIT OF RENUNCIATION 43 

be institutionalized, it has to be explored and experi- 

mented on by some one or many of the more heroic 

pioneer-souls, in the cause of the community or of the 

race. 

Even the English in India, with all their corporate 

selfishness, trace back their rights, as we remember, to 

a certain physician who would accept from a Mogul 

sovereign no personal reward but a factory-concession 

for the merchants, his fellow-countrymen. There is 

no need to fear a movement that has no Sannyas at its 

command. We shall find, however, that the counter- 

part of such Sannyas is always a strong and ever-pre- 

sent conception of the community. It was because 

Dr. Hamilton was so well aware of the needs of the 

company of merchants, and because he felt himself so 

strongly to be one of them, that he was able to be un- 

selfish on their behalf. And therefore the true birth 

of an era takes place with a rise of a new idea of social 

combination. 

There is no question as to what will eventually be 

done in India in the name of Nationality. Let only 

the thought of the nation be vivid enough, and it will 

carry all the necessary sacrifice in its train. And such 

sacrifice, for the nation, for the city, for the common- 

weal, is the school for that loftier, more remote sacri- 

fice, which Hinduism knows as Vairagyam. He who 

has practised the civic Sannyas is best prepared for the 

national service. And he who has been chastened and 

purified in the national unselfishness is the most ready 

for that last and highest renunciation which reacts in 

life as Jndnam, or Bhaktz, or Karma- Yoga. 

But through what a strange series of Sddhands is 

4 

44 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

this emancipation to be brought about ! Children 

will need to renounce personal ambition, and parents 

to make the deeper renunciation of ambition for their 

children. And yet these tyagis of the new time will 

wear no gerrua. Seated in an office or ruling over a 

factory ; enrolling his fellows in unions, or studying 

with every nerve and muscle the organization of labour 

on a large scale; giving himself to education, or even, 

it may be, ruling faithfully and devotedly over a house- 

hold of his own, not in the name of its limited interests, 

but against its interests, on behalf of the Indian people, 

such will be the gerrua-c\ad of the new order. 

" He who knows neither fear nor desire," says the 

Gita, " is the true monk." Not the sannyasz'n-clad, but 

the sannyasm-hG&rted. He who has neither fear for 

himself nor hope for himself. He who could see his 

own family starve, if need were, in the communal cause. 

He who is contented to fail, if only out of his failure 

others may sometime in the future succeed. He who 

has no home outside his work, no possession save a 

selfless motive, no hope save that which his own blood 

shall enable his fellows to realize. These are the men 

who are to be found in every class of students to-day. 

And we dare to say to them, and to their neighbours 

and parents : Trust these high hopes that surge up 

within you ! Risk all on your great hopes ! Believe 

in yourselves, and in those who shall succeed you ! So 

forward. Do what you see, and trust Mother for the 

next step. For verily it is of your hearts and your 

minds, of your life and your work that the New India 

which is to come shall yet be made. And blessed are 

ye who have not seen and yet can believe !

THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

INDIA alone, amongst all the countries of the earth, 

has had the boldness that could abolish the mental 

barriers between sacred and secular, high and low. 

India alone, having thought out the great philosophy 

of Advaita, has had the imagination to command Man 

to become the Witness, to declare life to be only play. 

It is a lofty task, to be worthy of the deeds and the 

dreams of our ancestors. Yet if we walk not their 

road, how shall we call others there ? 

" And the Lord said, ' Simon, Simon, Satan hath de- 

sired to have thee, that he may sift thee as wheat ! ' ' 

These sombre words are recorded in the Christian 

Gospel of St. Luke, as spoken by Christ, only an hour 

or two before He was betrayed to His enemies. Such 

is the strength of the Avatar, that when the whole 

world has conspired to put Him on His trial, to hyp- 

notize Him into a belief in His own weakness and 

forlornness, He is only conscious the while of putting 

the world on its trial, and sifting it as wheat. He is 

the one steady point in the great matrix of humanity, 

quivering, sifting, and oscillating in all directions. He 

is the point of inversion of all the feebleness and weak- 

ness of the common mind. 

And from this point of view, the occurrence of the 

45 4* 

46 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

Divine Man is a logical necessity. Without Him, as 

the spiritual pole, the tendency to co-ordinate our 

wandering impulses in the fixed outlines of character 

would be impossible. Even the meanest and poorest 

of us, inasmuch as we are man at all, are witnesses to 

Him, since all our efforts culminate in Him. Even 

the least of our strivings relates us to His vast achieve- 

ment, and to that alone. Seen in this light, how true 

it is that we should pray for more strength, and not 

for lighter burdens ! It is strength we want, not calm. 

Calm is only a result. It can be cultivated by practice. 

But if we have strength as the root, then calm and peace 

and steadfastness cannot fail to be its flower. 

The ego that is identified with the body has its gaze 

entirely on one set of phenomena. It sees itself at- 

tacked, condemned, suffering, and scorned. The ego 

that identifies itself with Brahman is directly aware of 

none of these things. Afar off, it may be the witness 

of them. But its gaze is fixed on the opposite whorl 

of movement, that of spiritual intensity, and to it, it 

appears that the world is being put to the test. He 

who knows Himself to be One with the whole universe, 

how should He think of loneliness, how dream of pas- 

sivity ? He knows Himself as the persecutor, as well 

as the persecuted, and both alike as "the Mother's 

Play." Unbroken Sachchid&nanda is His conscious- 

ness, unflawed bliss is in His bearing. And in Him 

meet the hopes and longings of us all. 

There is one form of realization which can be de- 

veloped in the thakur-ghar, and quite another in the 

rough-and-tumble of the world. Both, let us remem- 

ber, are realization. Both are paths hewn through the 

THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR 47 

mind to the knowledge of Brahman. Only the science 

of the Avatar can help us, even in the life of street 

and market-place. In Sachchidananda culminate all 

joys and all knowledge, even the knowledge and the 

joy of earth. 

QUIT YE LIKE MEN ! 

ALL is in the mind. Nothing outside us has any 

power save what we give it. However imposing the 

external world may seem, it is in reality only the toy 

of mind. It is but a feeble expression of what has 

first been thought. " All that we are is the result of 

what we have thought" says Buddha ; " it is founded on 

our thoughts ; it is made up of our thoughts." 

It is for this reason that education is so much the 

most important concern of life. The mind must be 

kept in a condition to work. It must be held at the 

command of the will, from its lowest up to the highest 

possible activity. It must be made competent to en- 

visage any problem, and answer it in a fashion not in- 

adequate. A people can afford to eat poorer food, 

and less of it, than was their custom. They cannot 

afford to let the mind grow dim. They cannot afford 

to part with education. 

In this, the question is not of the particular subject 

through which we receive education. The question is 

of the mind itself, of the education behind the subject. 

Whatever the form of the drill, we must keep up our 

intellectual potentiality. There are two factors in this 

question, one is that of the particular tool or weapon, 

the other that of the mental muscle, the training of the 

limb that gives the grip. It is well, doubtless, to be 

4 8 

QUIT YE LIKE MEN ! 49 

familiar with the sword : it is better far to have power 

of arm. Whether by Sanskrit or by technology, by 

mathematics or by poetry, by English or by classic, 

does not matter. These are but the toys through 

which the power is won. What we want is the power 

itself, power of concentration, power of thought. 

India has been strangely fortunate in the production 

of this power. This is what the practice of concentra- 

tion means. This is what samadhi, if we could reach 

it, would mean. This is what prayers and pujas and 

japams all aim at, the power of controlling the mind, 

carried to its highest point. A people must ultimately 

measure itself against others, not in terms offeree, but 

in terms of mind. Their superiority may be invisible, 

may be held in solution, as it were, waiting for the 

favourable moment to form the dense precipitate. But 

let them only practise. Let them only never relax. 

And the potentiality of self- recovery will not pass away. 

Yet we should not allow our superiority to be in- 

visible, or held in suspension. We should be fully 

equal to its assertion. It will be remembered how 

little Sri Ramakrishna admired the cobra who aban- 

doned not only biting, but also even hissing. A whole 

community that knew how to hiss, would mean a 

community that never required to bite. " Peace on 

earth" is only, really, to be attained by this means! 

How keen and clear was the intellect that saw this, 

and laid it down as a great human ideal ! How 

masterly was that other mind that penetrated all our 

controversies and summed up all our perplexities in 

the one pronouncement, " Quit ye like men ! " 

And how are we to quit us like men ? By never 

50 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

sitting down short of the goal. By aspiring to the 

front on the field of battle, and the back in the durbar. 

By struggle, struggle, struggle, within and without. 

Above all, by every form of self-mastery and self-direc- 

tion. There is no tool that we must not try to wield, no 

weapon that we can be content to leave to others. In 

every field we must enter into the world-struggle. And 

we must aim at defeating every competitor. The New 

Learning is ours, no less than other men's. The search 

for truth is ours, and we are as well equipped for it as 

any. Civic integrity is ours. We have only to de- 

monstrate it. Honour is ours. We may have to carry 

it into places new and strange. The communal con- 

sciousness, the corporate individuality, all are ours, 

though we have to express them in unknown ways. 

Public spirit and self-sacrifice, we are capable of these. 

But to realize the ideal that these words call up be- 

fore us, we must struggle for education of all kinds, as 

captives for air, as the famine-stricken for food. We 

must capture for ourselves the means of a fair struggle, 

and then, turn on us all the whiteness of your search- 

lights, oh ye tests of modern progress ! Ye shall not 

find the children of India shrink from the fierceness of 

your glow ! 

SINCERITY. 

LET us, in our own lives, and in the training of our 

children, try to get back to the fundamental virtues. 

None can ask us for success. Any may demand of 

us truth, simplicity, purity, courage. All these are 

only so many different faces, as it were, of one central 

perseverance in virtue, one nuclear sincerity, which 

makes the whole life of a man into a patient following 

of a thread, an idea, which he sees within his mind. 

This patience, this steadfastness, this sincerity, is 

Dharma the substance, the self-ness, of things and of 

men. Dharma makes us the toys of the great world- 

forces. Do we desire to be other? It makes us as 

dead leaves borne onwards by the furious tempests of 

the conscience. Is there a higher lot ? Instruments of 

ideas, used, not using ; slaves of the gods, scourged 

along all the thorny roads of life ; resting not, fearing 

not, embracing ecstasy at the heart of despair. 

Sincerity is what we want. Sincerity is the key and 

foundation of all realizations. Sincerity is the simplest 

of all the great qualities, and of them all, it goes the 

farthest. Sincerity and the heart fixed steadfastly on 

the Unseen it is the whole of victory. Truth, purity, 

courage, can their opposites exist in him who is 

sincere ? Are they not all forms of that one clear- 

sightedness ? The man who step by step proceeds to- 

51 

52 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

wards his own soul's quest, conscious of that and that 

alone, is there any lie, cowardice, or grossness that can 

tempt him? 

The opposite of sincerity is ostentation, hypocrisy, 

love of show. To seek constantly for advertisement, 

to talk big, to ask for results instead of methods, this 

is to undermine sincerity, to build up stuff of failure 

instead of triumph. It is this, of which we must seek 

to root out even the incipient impulse. It is this over 

which we must strive to help our children. It is this 

that we must learn to avoid with passionate horror. 

By reserve, by modesty, by labour to make the deed 

greater than the word, we must deny and punish that 

thing in us that cries out for self-assertion, for cheap 

praise, and easy notoriety. 

Everything in the modern world tends to foster the 

habit of loud talk. We have travelled far away from 

the quiet dignity and simple pride of our forefathers. 

Their freedom from self-consciousness is what we want. 

But it is to be got in one way, and one alone. We 

must do as they did, take ideals and thoughts that are 

greater than ourselves and set them before us, till our 

life's end, as the goals of the soul. Only when we 

are merged in the flood-tide that is God, can we in 

very truth forget the reflection in the mirror that is 

called the Ego. And the flood-tide of God takes many 

names, some amongst them being strangely familiar in 

their spelling. Let us live for anything, so only it be 

great enough to teach us forgetfulness of self ! Forget- 

fulness of self is in itself the finding of God.

FACING DEATH. 

THE worshipper of God as a Providence does un- 

doubtedly gain something from his worship in courage ; 

since every man believes instinctively that God is with 

him, whomsoever He might be against. Yet nothing 

can wipe out from Providence-worships the stain of 

using God, of subordinating Him to the petty interests 

of Self. 

The belief in Destiny has its dangers, also. For we 

sink so easily into the assumption that Destiny alone 

is active, while we regard ourselves as passive. Yet 

the truth in fact is that we are active and dominant, 

and Destiny at the most is passive. " Kismet ! " cries 

the Arab soldier, as he speeds forward in the charge, 

or rushes madly into the breach. No soldier, for 

an immediate victory, like this. But " Kismet ! " he 

mutters again, solemnly, as the return fire forces his 

first rush backwards, and that very belief in Destiny 

that made him a moment ago the fiercest soldier in the 

world, makes him now the most difficult to rally. 

Different from either of these is the courage born of 

Mother-worship in Hinduism. Here, the embrace is 

death, the reward is pain, the courage is rapture All, 

not the good alone, is Her touch on the brow All, 

not simply the beneficent, is Her will for Her child. 

" Where shall I look," he cries, " that Thou art not ? 

53 

54 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

If I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the 

uttermost parts of the sea, lo, Thou art there ! If I 

go down into Hell, Thou art there also ! " 

The worship of the Mother is in truth the Vedanta 

of the hero. She is the whole, the Primal Force, the 

Infinite Power, the Adi-Sakti. To become one-d with 

That Power is to reach samddhi. It is by blotting out 

self, by annihilating personality, that we may enter 

that vision. "When desire is gone, and all the cords 

of the heart are broken, then" says the Veda, " a man 

attains to immortality." 

We do not naturally love that whose strength is too 

great for us. One who had been left alone for a few 

minutes in a cavern beside Niagara, told of a passion 

of hatred that overwhelmed her as she looked. It was 

the active form of physical fear. We should feel the 

same hatred, perhaps, for the midnight universe that 

looks now to us so brilliantly beautiful, were we free to 

move along the paths of the stars, and come face to face 

with foreign suns. Our emotions are, for the most part, 

the result of an immediate and subconscious measure- 

ment of ourselves and our relations to that by which we 

are confronted. To few indeed has it been given to 

know " the joy of the witness." To fewer still, the 

last and highest rapture of the union, once for all, with 

the Mother. 

Those who would reach this must worship Death. 

Drinking the cup of suffering to the dregs, again and 

again they will hold it out, empty, for more. To the 

strong, no going back ; to the resolute, no disillusion- 

ment. The disillusionments of which we read in poetry 

are not signs of strength. They are sudden reactions 

FACING DEATH 55 

of self-consciousness and egoism, at unexpected move- 

ments. The hero, with his irresistible energy, and his 

unflinching gaiety, does not know whether that which 

meets him is pleasant or sad. He goes through it, and 

demands more. He treads on a sword as it were on 

air. He has passed beyond self. 

" Sri Ramakrishna," said the Swami Vivekananda, 

" never thought of being humble. But he had long ago 

forgotten that Ramakrishna ever existed." This is the 

energy, and this the courage, of the Mother-worshipper. 

He who has realized the Infinite, of what shall he be 

afraid? Death is contained within him. How then 

shall he fear death ? In what shall he think pain differ- 

ent from pleasure ? He has broken the great illusion. 

How shall it be of avail against him ? Says George 

Eliot 

" Strong souls live like fire-hearted suns, 

To spend their strength in farthest action. 

Breathe more free in mighty anguish 

Than in trivial ease." 

And the words ring true. For such is strength. 

And such are the heroes who are born of Mother.

LUXURY AND MANHOOD. 

NOTHING is a greater test of education than the noble 

employment of leisure and means. It is not nearly so 

much by our performance of duties, as by our selection 

of interests, that our character is revealed. This is why 

an age of luxury is apt to act so disastrously on the 

richer classes. The man who would have been a gentle- 

man and a man of honour, under steady toil, becomes 

a mere animal, and sometimes not even a sane or 

healthy animal, when his whole life is turned into play. 

When the standards of luxury, however, by which we 

are invaded, are imported and extraneous to our civil- 

ization, their danger to the conscience is increased a 

hundred-fold. The moral sense of Europe itself can 

hardly stand against the intensification of waste which 

has come in with the motor car. How then were Indian 

princes to resist the sudden incursion of alcohol, sport, 

and the acquaintance with Western methods of gam- 

bling, all these being bestowed upon them, moreover, 

by individuals who remained more or less unaffected 

themselves by any of the deeper ethical idealisms of 

their own world ? 

Yet it is precisely by the types of freedom which it 

develops that a system is to be judged. There are 

many different ways of arriving at a given end. A man 

may arrive at personal cleanliness, refinement, and 

56 

LUXURY AND MANHOOD 57 

honour, by methods Hindu, Mohammedan, or Euro- 

pean. But whatever be the road he takes, he must, in 

the end, prove himself a gentleman, or the method of 

his training stands condemned. Betting, smoke-sod- 

denness, and intoxication, are not the marks of a man 

of good breeding in Europe, any more than in the East. 

And even when they do occur, in their native habitat, 

they usually tend to be somewhat corrected, in their 

manifestation, by the social habits of their proper en- 

vironment. A certain alertness of manner must be 

maintained in Western circles, if a man is not to be 

set down by his associates as an effeminate fool. Per- 

sonal diffidence and an instinctive courtesy to, and re- 

sponsibility for the protection of, women and the weak, 

are demanded of every one. Spareness of form and 

hardness of muscles, together with the readiness to 

shoulder physical hardships with enjoyment, are ab- 

solute essentials of the gentleman. Thus the caste-ideal 

tends in some measure to correct caste-vice. But the 

adhesion of the individual to the ideal is often automatic 

and only half-conscious. The things that are apt to 

pass on energetically to a royal Indian pupil are the 

vices, instead of the virtues, of his class. 

Corresponding truths hold, in various degrees, of all 

the ranks affected by Western habits. We are only too 

likely to catch the contagion of luxury instead of that 

of ideals. The Englishman's society allows him to 

drink tea in the morning, but requires that when he 

travels away from railways, he shall either walk or ride. 

Our danger is, lest we indulge in the tea but continue 

to have ourselves wheeled in rickshaws, or carried in 

chairs and dandies. The Englishman eats well, but he 

58 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

also works well ; he never refers to his health in public ; 

he masters the use of a weapon, and goes through life 

(if he be true to his ideals) at the price of his own power 

to defend himself, " like a man." It is much easier for 

the foreigner to catch his habit of eating chicken than 

his strenuous suppression of the letter " I " and arduous 

avoidance of degrading ease. It is much easier to em- 

ulate his privileges than his manliness and notions of 

personal dignity. 

Forewarned, however, is forearmed. Few of us re- 

alize the power, in saving us from moral danger, of 

clear thought. Our own ideals are our best armour. 

Let us keep our minds clear as to what constitutes 

glory of manhood, and glory of womanhood. Doing 

this, each increment of ease and wealth becomes fresh 

material for sacrifice to some noble object. 

STRENGTH. 

RENUNCIATION is always of the lower, for the sake of 

the higher. It is never of the higher, in order to pos- 

sess the lower. Renunciation is of the easy, in favour 

of the difficult, of the superficial, to reach the pro- 

found. It proposes new duties : it never bestows ease. 

Sri Ramakrishna's wonderful story of the penitent 

cobra contains in a sentence the whole doctrine of per- 

sonal dignity and power. " Raise the hood, but don't 

bite ! " how many occasions are there in life, when 

this gives us the key of the situation ! With how many 

persons do we maintain excellent relations merely be- 

cause they know that at a moment's notice, on the 

slightest infringement of our relative positions, our 

sweetness would leave us, and we should become 

threatening in attitude, menacing, hostile ! The cobra 

would, in other words, have lifted his hood. 

But we must not make the mistake of supposing that 

every act of fretfulness or irritation is such a lifting of 

the hood. In the cobra we find a developed power of 

anger, a trained power to use the most formidable 

weapons of offence in the world, an instant perception 

of the moment's need, and, above all, every one of these 

held in conscious restraint. It is the power behind him 

that makes the serpent so formidable. It is no use for 

fools or cowards to talk of lifting the hood ! It follows 

that there were years of growth behind the penitence 

59 5 

60 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

of our hero, during which his sole duty was to become 

the cobra. Having gained his power , true strength was 

shown by controlling it. It is the duty of every man 

to be the cobra. Ours is no gospel of weaklings ! We 

ought so to live that in our presence can be wrought 

no wrong. Even biting may be needful, when the 

power of the cobra is not understood, but the hurt dealt 

should always be by way of warning, never an act of 

vengeance. Relatively to our consciousness of strength, 

it must only be the lifting of the hood. 

All these truths are easily seen in the punishment of 

a child. What should we think of the parent whose 

whole soul went into the chastisement of his son ? It 

is evident here that there must be a certain detach- 

ment, a certain aloofness from our own action, if the 

punishment is ever to be effective. Punishment given 

in anger rouses nothing but the contempt of a culprit. 

Punishment gravely and sorrowfully dealt out, by one 

who is conscious the while of the ideal that has been 

outraged, converts while it pains. 

Force is only well used by the man who has an idea 

beyond force. Force is meant to be used, not to carry us 

away on its flood. It represents the horses, well-reined- 

in by the successful driver. Restraint is the highest ex- 

pression of strength. But strength must first be present, 

to be restrained. No one respects the man without 

courage : and no one respects the blind human brute, 

whose actions are at the mercy of his own impulses of 

rage. Ours is the religion of strength. To be strong 

is, to our thinking, the first duty of man. So to live that 

our mere presence enforces righteousness, and protects 

weakness, is no mean form of personal achievement. 

TRUE AMBITION. 

EVERY man's estimate of himself is a focussing-point for 

his estimate of the society to which he belongs. Is there 

anything that makes proud like the consciousness of 

family ? Is there anything that makes sensitive like 

pride of race ? That man who gives high respect to 

others is the same who demands the finest courtesy for 

himself. By the freedom we constantly assert, we ap- 

praise the freedom of our blood in the eyes of the 

whole world. 

The pride of birth has been cultivated in India, for 

thousands of years, as a social and national safeguard. 

Like other forms of pride, it is a virtue when it is posi- 

tive, and a vice only when it denies the right of equal 

pride to others. The vanity that cuts us off from the 

community, telling us that we are better than they, is 

petty and vulgar, and while it humiliates those whom 

we would insult, it only makes a laughing-stock of 

ourselves in the eyes of all who are competent to judge. 

However celebrated our family, it is hardly possible to 

be of such exalted birth that there is not anyone else 

in any single respect still more exalted. Our joy 

therefore can at best be but relative, till it may dawn 

upon us that the greatest distinction lies in simplicity, 

and that privilege or monopoly is, after all, conter- 

minous with meanness. 

6! 5* 

62 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

Pride of birth, in fact, like other forms of Karma, 

should be regarded as an opportunity, a responsibility, 

a trust. The higher my position, the more difficult 

and arduous my duty. The purer my inheritance, the 

greater my powers of endurance. If we could but see 

truly, we should know that to be a man is to be nobly 

born, and our merit remains for us to prove. All 

things are possible to all men, for equally are the ex- 

pressions of the Infinite, the Pure, the All-knowing, the 

Free. Man may make distinctions between man and 

man. But God makes none. He opens to each one 

of us the franchise of struggle, and leaves it to us to 

make our own place. 

Oh for lofty ambitions ! What shall we do with 

our lives ? Let us swear to eliminate self. Walking 

any path, doing any task, let us pursue the ideal for its 

own sake, the ideal to the utmost, the ideal to the 

end. Whatever we do, let us do it with our might. 

Spurning ease, forsaking gain, renouncing self, let us 

snatch the highest achievement that offers itself, at any 

cost, and cease not from struggle till it is in our hands. 

This is what was meant by the ancient reformers, when 

they said " he who attains to God is the true Brahman." 

Birth was but a preliminary condition, and that not 

essential ; it could never be substituted for the end itself. 

Every study has its own problems. The Modern 

Learning carries its own questions. The Brahman of 

to-day ought to enter into these. He ought to share 

the modern curiosity. The whole of education is com- 

plete if we once waken in a child a thirst for knowledge. 

Can we not waken a like thirst in ourselves ? Are 

flying-machines and motors to receive no elaboration 

TRUE AMBITION 63 

from the Indian mind ? Is that mind not equal to such 

tasks? Then is it inferior to the European? If we 

claim equality, on us lies the responsibility of proving 

the claim. Let us do away with trumpery ambitions ! 

Let us learn in order to teach the world, in order to win 

truth for Humanity, not in order to strut in borrowed 

plumes before a village crowd. Let us be severe with 

ourselves. Let us know, on the subject we take up, 

all that there is to be known. Let us read great books. 

Let us make perfect collections. No difficulty should 

daunt us. Fate offers obstacles that man may overcome. 

Thus he becomes the nursling of the gods, gifted with 

divine strength, and seats himself amidst the immortals. 

In great struggles all men are equal. Anyone may 

enter these lists. The prize is to the winner, high or low, 

man or woman. But no man can rise alone. Collective 

effort is essential. He who mounts far must have 

twenty behind him, close upon his heels. Our learn- 

ing is not all our own. We gain it through others, as 

well as by our own effort. Alone, we could not cover 

the necessary ground. Our society sets us a high 

standard, and shining there, we succeed before the 

world. Thus each one is aided by the victory of any 

other, and the glory of one is the glory of all. 

Thought, thought, we want clear thought ! And for 

clear thought, labour is necessary, knowledge is neces- 

sary, struggle is necessary. Clear thought and rightly- 

placed affection are essential conditions of victory in 

any field. The nation that is true to itself and its age 

will give birth to millions of great men, for the inflow- 

ing of the Divine Spirit is without limit, and the great- 

ness of one is the greatness of all. 

CHARACTER. 

CHARACTER is latency. A man's very being is the 

record of his whole past. This is the secret of the 

profound significance of history. The future cannot 

be different from the past, any more than a man's body 

can be inherited from the ancestors of another. 

But the future is not born of some portion only of 

the past. It is born and created and conditioned by 

the whole. This is what is really meant by the 

doctrine of Karma. The East, with its belief in re- 

incarnation, has a wonderful instrument for the under- 

standing and discrimination of life. It catches shades 

and tints of personality that others could not dis- 

tinguish. In what the man is, it can read what he 

aspired to. In what he unconsciously does, it can 

see the past. The throne may often fall to the lot of 

one who was used to be a slave. But we may be 

sure that for deeply penetrating sight the monarch's 

robes cannot conceal the lash-marks on his back. The 

serf may many times have been an emperor. The 

keen observer will not fail to note the ring of 

command in his voice, the eye of decision in a crisis, 

the flush of pride rising hot under insult. 

The whole of a man is in his every act, however 

difficult to the world be the reading of the script. 

Noble longing is never vain. Lofty resolve is never 

6 4 

CHARACTER 65 

wasted. As the act is expression of the man, so is the 

life the expression of the character. And so is the 

character the key to the life. The only sequences that 

never fail are the spiritual truths. " All that we are is 

the result of what we have thought." Water rises to 

its own level, say the engineers, and what is true of 

water is as true of the mind of man. One step gained 

in mastery finds a million applications. As high as we 

have climbed on this mountain, so high shall we at- 

tain, without rest or hindrance, on every height 

whereon our feet shall be set. The man ruling an 

empire may be doing nothing more in reality than re- 

acting the part he played in the games of his child- 

hood. A Wellington, in his babyhood, rights all the 

battles of the future with his wooden soldiers. Even 

so one who has once found the secret of unity will 

never rest, in any birth, till he has reached once more, 

through the material he finds about him there, as 

deep a view. 

How marvellous are the potentialities of humanity ! 

There is no man so mean or servile but hides within 

himself the possibility of the Infinite. The ultimate 

fact in the world is man, not power: the ultimate 

fact in man is God. Therefore let all men believe in 

themselves. To all men let us say Be strong. Quit 

ye like men. Work out that which worketh in you. 

Believe in yourselves. For he that asketh, receiveth ; 

he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, it 

shall be opened. The whole past is in every man of 

us. At any moment may the Supreme Light shine 

through me. At any moment may my personal be- 

come the hand, the lips, of That Impersonal. Why 

66 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

then should I be weak, either in taking or in losing ? 

Am I not the Infinite Itself? Of whom and of what 

should I be afraid ? Henceforth do I cast aside plead- 

ing and prayer. Henceforth do I throw away all 

hope, all fear, all desire, all shame. Contented am I 

to be a man, and that alone. For I know that if I be 

not that, verily even the jewels of the king and robes 

of state shall not hide my shame, nor the rags of the 

beggar detract from the glory of my manhood, if I 

have it. 

DISCRIMINATION. 

THERE is a vast difference between the human being 

who lives his life like a mouse or a mole from 

moment to moment, and sensation to sensation, and 

the man who lives for an idea. Even a mistaken idea 

is infinitely higher than the life of the senses. Even 

the poorest of those who strive to walk in the footsteps 

of the saints is higher than the man, however grandiose 

his expression, however demonic his energy, whose 

life is limited to self, with its interests and pleasures. 

We must never allow mere size to impose upon us. 

Discrimination is the glow of spirituality upon each 

of the virtues. Without discrimination, man is no 

better than an animal, whatever the form that his 

animal comforts may take. 

Youth admires careless and lavish giving. It thinks 

the man who sometimes refuses a gift, for a reason he 

will not tell, neither so great nor so generous as he 

who empties his pockets at the first chance call. The 

Gita, on the contrary, tells us that ideal charity is 

rightly timed and placed, and offered only to the 

proper person. It is evident that the gift, given with 

discrimination, is higher than the mere largesse, which 

never looks at the recipient, or foresees any one of its 

own effects. 

In the same way, it is the level of our general dis- 

67 

68 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

crimination, between mind and flesh, idea and sense, 

that determines, on the large scale, our rank as human 

beings. The Bible tells how a certain king made a 

golden image of himself and set it up for all the world 

to worship. And that same monarch, a little later, 

under the spell of mania, went out into the fields to 

eat grass with the cattle ! The dazzling idealism of 

self covered the grossest animality. It was the same 

man who one day propounded a new religion, and the 

next crawled on all-fours ! The poorest and lowest 

who is sincerely striving for unselfishness, for self- 

control, and to give love, is greater than this. That 

is why the real helpers of mankind have been unable 

to preach anything less than this ultimate truth. The 

difference between man and man lies, not in pos- 

sessions, or in the positions they have achieved, or in 

the power they wield, but in the degree of their self- 

control, and in that alone. 

" By any means catching hold of things" said Sri 

Ramakrishna, " make your way out of the world." 

Let us not forget this " catching hold." No religious 

man ought to think his behaviour in the world a 

matter of no consequence. Religion is not confined 

to Sddhands. Tapasya is not a matter of the thakur- 

ghar alone. Every great idea that presents itself in 

the secular sphere is a form of God calling for our 

worship. Shall we range ourselves with it, or against 

it? The answer makes no difference to God, no 

difference to the truth, but it constitutes a judgment 

day of the soul. It makes all the difference in the 

world to us. Every day, every act, every question 

that arises, is a judgment day. Life is one long test. 

DISCRIMINATION 69 

To each little act we bring the whole weight of our 

character. Each act leaves us either stronger or 

weaker. It adds to or takes from our ultimate worth. 

Spirituality does not arise by accident. Only in a 

temple long and carefully builded of well-hewn blocks, 

can the image of universal and eternal truth be placed. 

Only where truth has been sought in all things, can 

the lamp of Truth be lighted in the soul. Discrimina- 

tion in every act of life makes for that last dis- 

crimination that is eternal bliss. 

FITNESS. 

THE Eternal Faith holds up as the Ideal that there 

shall be fitness in every thought and action, over and 

above the goodness that it expresses. In this way, 

amongst others, the Mother Church labours to impress 

upon us the necessity of thought, of knowledge, of in- 

tellectual maturity. Learning is as necessary to the 

Hindu faith as prayer the only religious doctrine in 

the world that has no quarrel with truth, wherever it 

may be found, or wherever it may be. Think of it ! 

Other religions may tolerate science, or persons within 

their fold may see that they owe a duty to themselves 

or to knowledge; but Hinduism requires it. Like the 

clear welling-forth of water from a deep spring should 

be the thought of great Hindu thinkers. 

Alas, the very absence of resistance is apt to take 

away the force of activity! Europe is full of great 

scholars. How many have we ? Yet look at the dif- 

ference ! In Europe the whole world, and especially 

the priesthood, barked and yelped at the heels of 

Charles Darwin for twenty years. Even to-day, one 

will hear a sneer from the pulpit levelled against Buckle 

or Lecky. Every priest feels secretly that there is an 

antagonism between his cause and that of the unfet- 

tered historian or critic : in India, such fears are re- 

ferred to as " sectarianism." But the very attack on 

70 

FITNESS 71 

truth is a war-cry calling the young to rally to its de- 

fence. We all know the story of the captain sent with 

his thirty-three men, to deliver terms of surrender to 

Hasan and Hussain, who, his message done, ranged 

himself and his followers under their banner, though 

for them the result could be nothing but death. In 

all ages it is the same. Truth is its own propaganda. 

Humanity is ever accessible to the Absolute. The 

thing which we conceive to be true, we cannot but 

embrace, though disaster, suffering and death be our 

portion with it. Therefore attack is better than for- 

getfulness ; contumely is better than silence ; persecu- 

tion is better than worship ; if only with all these the 

idea be kept constantly before the mind. 

"When our country is unfortunate," said a European 

the other day, " the>duty of the individual is to renounce 

his own career, and work for her only." What the 

speaker meant, was the personal career, the work that 

brings happiness, wealth, and position. Devotion to 

the impersonal idea often creates a career, but it is one 

for which we pay heavily in poverty, hard work, and 

sometimes final catastrophe and failure. Only the ap- 

prehension of some infinite good to be attained by this, 

for ourselves or for others, could nerve us to such a 

choice. For this, we have to wake in ourselves the 

great appetites. The sannyasin thirsts for renunciation. 

Let us so thirst for knowledge, for truth, for justice or 

for strength. Let us long to help and to save, even as 

children in the dark cry out for help. Realizing that 

only by the laborious climb towards the highest we per- 

ceive, can we be wholly helpful, let us work, work, work, 

to reach the Absolute Good in whatever path we seek 

72 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

to make our own. And above all, let us pray ever the 

ancient prayer of the Hebrew Scriptures " Show Thy 

servants Thy work, O Lord, and their children Thy 

glory ! " 

But while the appetite grows strong in us, let us not 

be content with the first satisfaction that comes to our 

hand. Headstrong activity makes bitterness of failure. 

How often do we meet the man who wails and wrings 

his hands, because his efforts for the good of the world 

are not immediately rewarded ! This is not true charity. 

This is but impulse, full of tamas. Long work, long 

thought, long growth of wisdom, are necessary, ere that 

man can strike the blows that count. And for such 

wisdom, we must have experience, and for such expe- 

rience, again, work. 

" Sharp as the blade of a razor, long and distant, 

And the way so hard to find ! 

Such the sages have declared it. 

Yet do not despair ! Awake ! Arise ! 

Struggle on ! and stop not till the goal is reached ! " 

THE TEACHER. 

THE true teacher knows that no one can really aid an- 

other. No one can rightly do for another what that other 

ought to do for himself. All that we can do is to stim- 

ulate him to help himself, and remove from his path the 

real obstacles to his doing so. 

The taught, moreover, must develop along his own 

path. He must advance towards his own end No 

one can develop along another's road, in order to reach 

that other's goal. The first need of the teacher, there- 

fore, is to enter into the consciousness of the taught, to 

understand where he is and towards what he is pro- 

gressing. Without this, there can be no lesson. 

The act of education must always be initiated by the 

taught, not by the teacher. Some spontaneous action 

of the mind or body of the learner gives the signal, and 

the wise teacher takes advantage of this, in accordance 

with known laws of mind, in order to develop the power 

of action further. If however there is no initial activity 

of the pupil, the lesson might as well be given to wood 

or brick. Education or evolution must always begin 

with some spontaneous self-activity. 

The laws of thought are definite. Mental action is 

not erratic or incalculable, a gust here, a whirlwind 

there. No : thought is always the outcome of concrete 

experience. A given sequence and intensity of action 

finding form and application on subtler and finer planes 

73 

74 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

of reality, is thought. And just as water rises to its 

own level, so all our past determines the height to which 

our unresting thought shall wing its way. Inevitable 

is its rise so far, but at what infinite cost of toil and 

faith is won the next few feet of ascent in the clear 

atmosphere of knowledge ! 

To those who are accustomed to think in this way, 

the doctrine of reincarnation becomes a necessity. It 

is impossible to extinguish a mind, impossible to ar- 

rest the cycles of thought. The same force, the same 

knowledge will go on eternally finding new expressions. 

Or it will deepen and intensify. It cannot be destroyed. 

But it can be lost. It can be forgotten. Man is ever 

divine, ever the embodied Atman of the Universe. But 

he can lose sight of his high heritage, and though its 

potentiality may remain with him ever, as a possibility 

of recovery, yet in tilling the fields or scouring the 

cooking-pots its actuality may have vanished. 

Spirituality comes to one soul at a time. Intellectual 

labour prepares the soil of millions for the whispers of 

truth. Intellect is the open door to the socializing of 

great realization. Therefore is mental toil a duty. 

Right belief is a duty. The highest achievements of 

the mind are a Sddhana. We must be true to Truth. 

We must be greedy of wide views. Education to the 

utmost of which we are capable is the first of human 

rights. It was not the form of his knowledge but its 

selflessness, that made man a rishi. That man who 

has followed any kind of knowledge to its highest point 

is a rishi. If he had cared for money or pleasure, he 

could not have spent himself on labour that might have 

ended in nothing. If he had wanted name or fame, he 

THE TEACHER 75 

would have gone far enough to tell what the world 

wanted to hear, and there he would have stopped. But 

he went to the utmost. This was because he wanted 

truth. The man who sees truth directly is a jndni. 

This truth may take the form of geography. Elisee 

Reclus, writing his Universal Geography, and trying to 

give his highest results to the working-men of Brussels, 

was zjndni, as truly as any saint who ever lived. His 

knowledge was for the sake of knowledge : his enjoy- 

ment of his knowledge was selfless : and when he died 

the modern world lost a saint. The truth may take the 

form of history or science, or the study of society. 

Would any one who has read the " Origin of Species," 

deny to Charles Darwin the place of a great sage ? 

Kropotkin, living in a workman's cottage in England, 

and working breathlessly to help men to new forms of 

mutual aid, is he not one of the apostles ? 

It is in India, aided by the doctrine of Advaita, that 

we ought to know better than in any other land the 

value of all this. Here alone does our religion itself 

teach us that not only that which is called God IS Good. 

It is the vision of Unity that is the goal, and any path 

by which man may reach to this is a religion. Thus 

the elements of mathematics are to the full as sacred 

as the stanzas of the Mahabharata. A knowledge of 

physics is as holy as a knowledge of the Shastras. 

The truths of historical science are as desirable as the 

beliefs of tradition. 

In order to manifest this great ideal of the Sanathan 

Dharma, we must try to set alight once more amongst 

us the fires of lofty intellectual ambitions. The great 

cannot be destroyed, but it can be obscured by the 

6 

76 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

little. We must fight against this. We must remem- 

ber the passion of those who seek truth for its own sake. 

They cannot stop short in learning. Did any ever stop 

short in the struggle for spirituality, saying now he had 

enough ? Such a man was never a seeker of spirituality. 

The same is true of all intellectual pursuits. The man 

who has ever experienced the thirst for knowledge, can 

never stop short. If one step has been taken purely, 

he can never again rest till he has attained. 

We cannot be satisfied, therefore, till our society has 

produced great minds in every branch of human activ- 

ity. Advaita can be expressed in mechanics, in en- 

gineering, in art, in letters as well as in philosophy 

and meditation. But it can never be expressed in 

half-measures. The true Advaitin is the master of the 

world. He does not know a good deal of his chosen sub- 

ject : he knows all there is to be known. He does not 

perform his particular task fairly well : he does it as well 

as it is possible to do it. In the little he sees the great. 

In the pupil whom he teaches, he sees the nation and 

Humanity. In the act he sees the principle. In the 

new thought he finds himself nearer truth itself. 

We are men, not animals. We are minds, not 

bodies. Our life is thought and realization, not food 

and sleep. All the ages of man those of the Vedas 

and the heroes, as well as our own small lives are in 

the moment called now. All this do I claim as mine. 

On this infinite power do I take my stand. I desire 

knowledge for its own sake, therefore I want all know- 

ledge. I would serve Humanity for the sake of serving. 

Therefore must I cast out all selfishness. Am I not a 

son of the Indian sages ? Am I not an Advaitin ? 

THE GURU AND HIS DISCIPLE. 

WHEN the doctrines of Hinduism can be formulated 

with sufficient breadth and clearness, it will doubtless 

be found that they furnish a key to the laws of thought 

in all directions. For the emancipation of man by his 

induction into constantly widening ideas is the real 

motive of Hindu speculation, and is the unspoken 

effort in every scheme of learning the world over. 

The source of Buddhism in Hinduism is nowhere better 

illustrated than in the opening words of the Dham- 

mapada : " All that we are is the result of what we 

have thought. It is founded on our thoughts. It is 

made up of our thoughts." In all the world, only an 

Indian thinker would have dreamed of basing a re- 

ligious system on this solitary truth. 

In the great body of observations which have be- 

come current in India as religious doctrines, none is 

more interesting or more difficult to unravel than that 

which deals with Guru-bhakti. That in order to reach 

a given idea, one must hold the mind passive to the 

teacher of that idea, at the same time that one offers 

him personal service, is a truth which has only to be 

tested to be believed. But we shall make a mistake 

if we think that it applies only to religious teaching, just 

as we shall make an equal mistake if we call a man 

77 6 

78 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

our guru for the simple reason that he teaches us a 

series of facts which have a religious colour. 

We must turn a receptive attitude to all truth. We 

must be respectful to all from whom we learn. Age, 

rank, and relationship ought all to constitute claims on 

our deference, but nothing should win from us the deep 

passivity that we yield to character and learning. 

Amongst all who teach us there will be one whose 

own personality is his greatest lesson. He, and he 

alone, is the Guru. He alone represents that particu- 

lar path along which our own experience is to lead us. 

But in everything that we make our own, even the 

most secular knowledge, we must constantly remem- 

ber the source from which we received it. Every one 

that we meet must appear before us as a possible giver 

of knowledge. We should be on the watch for the 

realizations that each man has been able to reach. 

Thus a habit of attentiveness, respect for the knowledge 

and opinions of others, and an expectation of new 

truth, are all marks of one who is accustomed to mix 

in cultivated society. Nor can there possibly be a 

greater mark of vulgarity and want of fine associations 

than self-opinionatedness and forgetfulness of seniority 

in ideas. 

Temptations to such errors meet young men at every 

step in a generation that takes up a new idea. The 

fact that they have departed from the paths of their 

fathers blinds them to the other fact that outside the 

special point of departure their fathers are apt to have 

greater wisdom than they ; that even in the new idea 

itself they have their own elders and betters ; that in 

any case, the idea is not worth much if it cannot deepen

THE GURU AND HIS DISCIPLE 79 

their appreciation of social cohesion and of the older 

culture they have left. Yet by such heedlessness and 

loss of delicacy a youth only succeeds in shutting the 

doors of fine society against himself. He is tried 

once, and allowed thenceforward to associate with his 

inferiors. His superiors find him intolerable. A 

young man with a hearty belief in his own leadership, 

is a social nuisance. The great impulses are calling 

for disciples, for martyrs, for trembling self-devoted 

service in which eagerness and humility bear equal 

parts. Those who are ready to offer themselves as 

leaders can be hired behind any counter or in any 

barrack. True leaders, we may understand once for 

all, are made, not born. They are made out of faith- 

ful followers. By much service, by deep and humble 

apprehension, let us hasten to their making. 

The Guru puts us in touch with all that Humanity 

has yet reached in a given line. Through him, we 

enter into life spiritual and intellectual, as through our 

parents we received the human body. He represents 

to us all that, up to his time, could be known. It 

follows that the first of his qualifications was an un- 

usual power of learning. 

The real object of universities is to train the student 

to learn. The fine intellectual leader is he who learns 

most from a given circumstance. The power of pas- 

sivity is the highest mark of education. This passivity, 

however, is not stupid or inert. It was not Arjuna 

alone who listened to Sri Krishna. His touch was felt 

and his words were heard by the delighted horses also. 

Nor must we forget that the sound-waves which make 

the Gita impinged upon the chariot itself. Chariot, 

8o RELIGION AND DHARMA 

horses, and man, all heard, but was there no difference 

between their three forms of passivity? Nay, two men 

will themselves hear differently. Nothing is more 

crude than an ill-timed activity. But the passivity that 

marks our advance is intensive, not idle, and contains 

within itself the fruit of all our struggles in the past. 

It is the power of the Guru that is the force behind 

our realization. Whatever be the line of our effort, it 

would amount to very little if we had to go out into 

the wilderness and begin all over again, as isolated 

hints, the discoveries of man. Any significance that 

we have comes from our place at the end of the ages, 

our place at the dawning of to-morrow. This place is 

given us by our solidarity with the Guru, and by no- 

thing else. The more we know, the more infinitesimal 

will our own contributions to human knowledge appear 

to us. The more we know, the more will history speak 

to us in trumpet-tones, the more full of meaning will 

the acts of great men become to us, the more shall we 

see ourselves to be striving with difficulty to see as our 

leader saw, to be making only a new attempt on his 

behalf. 

On the other hand, the Guru makes no demands. 

The gift of discipleship is free. The Guru indicates 

the ideal. There is a vast difference between this 

and the attempt to enslave. Nay, there is none 

who so strives to give the freedom in which ideals grow 

and ripen as does the Guru. The disciple's devotion 

is for ever out-stripping anything that could be asked 

of it. In his own time the Guru ends personal service 

and proclaims the impersonal mission. But this is of 

his doing and not of his pupil's seeking. 

THE GURU AND HIS DISCIPLE 81 

The Guru's achievement is the disciple's strength, 

and this though it be the common ideal that is followed 

by both. Better to be no man's son than an original 

genius without root or ancestry in the world of the 

spirit. Quickly, how quickly, shall such wither away ! 

They wither, and the men who set limits to their own 

offering never strike root. Which of these two is the 

deeper condemnation ? 

SELF-IDEALISM. 

OF all forms of ignorance, few are at once so mean 

and so easy to fall into as that of self-idealism. How 

often, instead of aspiring upwards, we are merely 

worshipping our own past ! Almost all good people 

are conscious of a great intensity of power and devo- 

tion in early youth. They are very apt to look back, 

for ever after, on the outside form which their life took 

at that period, and try all their lives to force that par- 

ticular form on others. True freedom is a thing of 

which very few of us have ever caught a glimpse. 

Self-idealism is a very special danger at the present 

time. This is a period of the recapture of ideals. 

We are always diving into the past in order to recover 

the thread of our own development. We exalt the 

name we bear. We praise our own ancestors. We 

seem to laud ourselves up to the skies. All this, how- 

ever, is meant for encouragement, not for conceit. 

" Children of the rishis!" exclaims a great orator to 

the crowd before him ; but if some common man de- 

rives from this the idea that he is a riski, he shows his 

own tamas, and nothing more. This was not the re- 

action intended by the orator. 

Similarly, when we say that Christ represents in 

Europe the Asiatic man, we mean the ideal of Asia, 

not any chance individual on the pavement. We must 

82 

SELF-IDEALISM 83 

be careful to think clearly in this matter. Many 

persons propose for three hundred millions of people 

that they should practise the methods of Jesus, of 

Chaitanya, of Tukaram, and nothing, they say, could 

resist them. 

Nothing could resist them ! Of course not, if each 

one of us were a Chaitanya, or a Jesus ! " As a sheep 

before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His 

mouth," said the prophet of the Christ. But is our 

silence so eloquent as this ? Only tamas makes this 

mistake ! The methods of Christ will not bring the 

victory of Christ to the man who is not Christ ! In him 

the dumbness of the sheep is mere sheepishness, not 

Christ-likeness. 

Again says the tdmasic : ' ' Let me wait for the victory, 

then, till I am like Him ! " Very good, if self-engross- 

ment were the way to become so. But unfortunately 

for you, it is not ! Only the man who forgets himself, 

for the victory, can ever reach Christhood. Buddha 

died for smaller ends five hundred times, before it was 

possible for Him to become the Buddha ! Each time 

He forgot Himself, forgot life, forgot death, became 

merged in the struggle, without a thought beyond. 

In the end He had earned the empire of the world, and 

had to renounce the certainty of that in order to mount 

the step beyond that made Him the vessel of com- 

passion to the soul. 

Each man has his own stepping-stones across the 

river of Maya. From stone to stone, one step at a 

time, we go. Our whole soul must be in the next step. 

Not for most of us to reach the Absolute now : for 

most of us only the immediate end, whatever it be, 

84 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

and for that, to forget self! Only through action 

can we rise to that which is beyond action. The world 

is full of causes for which a man may give his all. 

Ladders of rope by which we may draw ourselves up 

to the Mukti at present out of sight. Many souls, 

many planes ; not for all souls a single gospel. Only 

through all runs the great law : by renunciation alone, 

by forgetfulhess of self, does man rise to the Supreme 

Goal. 

If we really forget self, any good-not-our-own will 

appeal to us. The good of others as an end in itself 

will become an appetite in us. We shall spend no time 

arguing as to theories and ideals, methods and plans. 

We shall live for the good of others ; we shall merge 

ourselves in the struggle. The battle, the soldier, and 

the enemy will become one. Ours only the right to 

action, ours never the fruit of action ! 

But not as having already attained ! Ages of strenu- 

ous activity are the opportunity of many to reach God- 

consciousness. We pant for the ordeal, we thirst for 

active service not that we are already fit, but that by 

facing the cannon's mouth we may become fit. " By 

pouring himself like an oblation on the fire of battle, 

by remaining unterrified in moments of great terror, 

has Duryodhana attained to this felicity!" How 

knightly is the commendation ! How heroic the path ! 

" Things are not bettered, but we are bettered, by 

making changes in them," said the Swami Viveka- 

nanda. 

So the world is a school, a gymnasium for the soul. 

Humanity is not a great hall of mirrors, in which a 

single figure is reflected again and again, here well, and 

SELF-IDEALISM 85 

badly there. God yearns to achieve Himself supremely, 

and differently, in each one of us. All that we may 

take from the pattern-lives is the law that guided them, 

the aim for which they toiled. Renunciation ! Re- 

nunciation ! Renunciation ! In the panoply of renun- 

ciation plunge thou into the ocean of the unknown. 

Accept the exigencies of thy time, the needs of thy 

place, as the material out of which the soul is to build 

its own boat for the great journey. Think not that it 

can copy exactly any that has gone before. To them, 

look only for the promise that where they have suc- 

ceeded thou shalt not utterly fail. Then build, and 

launch. Set out to find Thyself ! And let thy going- 

forth be as a blaze of encouragement to those who have 

yet to depart ! 

REALIZATION. 

THE time has come when the Great Lives that have 

been lived in our midst are beginning to be recorded 

and written down for transmission to posterity. We 

can form some idea at this moment of the treasure 

that has been granted to the present generation, for 

which many in ages to come will long to have been 

here, or even to have looked upon the faces of those 

who possess such memories as ours. As we read, we 

belong at once to those who have seen, and to those 

who merely hear. We can share the feelings of both, 

at one and the same time. 

In reading the Life of Sri Ramakrishna, one is first 

struck with his reverence for his own realization. Re- 

alization is the end and object of his life. Then he 

takes pains to protect and keep it. Yet he has so 

much ! And we, who have so little, what do we do, to 

cherish that little ? 

It is told how he was one morning gathering flowers 

for the temple-worship, when it suddenly flashed upon 

his mind that the whole earth was a vast altar, and the 

flowers blossoming on the plants were already offered 

in worship at the feet of God. Sri Ramakrishna never 

again gathered puja-flowers. 

What sacrifices do we make for the glimpses of 

thought and revelation that come to us ? Every pilgrim 

after making a tirtha practises some abstinence in 

86 

REALIZATION 87 

memory of the great journey. What memorials do 

we set up of the journeys of the soul ? When the 

abstinence comes to notice once more, in the daily 

round, the pilgrim is reminded of the interior experi- 

ence. He is wafted for a moment into the Divine 

Presence. So Sri Ramakrishna, looking at the flowers 

he would not pluck, was kept ever in the mood of that 

most vivid realization, renewing and deepening it from 

day to day. With us, the hurry and pressure of the 

little things of life soon crushes out of sight the great 

moments of the soul's life. It is the little things that 

matter to us, not the great ! Why should the higher 

realizations be granted to us, seeing that we have so 

little room for them ? Only at the end of long long 

struggle do we gain the least flash of knowledge. And 

when gained, what value do we place upon it ? How 

long are we true to it ? Verily, the lives of most of us 

are very like the footsteps of a man who climbs in slid- 

ing sand ! What we gain we lose immediately, and, 

caught by new interests, are not even conscious that any- 

thing has happened ! 

No man can altogether escape the life of the soul. 

This is not the dominant, it is actually the only reality 

that surrounds us. The veil of the senses cannot fail 

to wear thin at times. We have but to set open the 

door and God streams in on every side. It is our ab- 

sorption in the broken and contorted sun-rays of the 

body that hides from our eyes the Undifferentiated 

Light ! When we become passive to it, when we al- 

low it to shine upon us, when we are willing to make 

room for the One behind manifoldness, then we may 

find that the soul's life shapes all things. Life or death, 

88 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

happiness or sorrow, and the far greater destiny of 

knowledge or ignorance, are all determined by the 

spiritual energy. To this alone all else is plastic. By 

it all else is to be measured and interpreted. But there 

arises not only the question " What has one learnt?" 

but also that other, " What sacrifice has been made to 

keep this knowledge?" 

PROGRESS. 

" LOVE as principle, Order as basis, and Progress as 

end." In these words a great modern teacher Au- 

guste Comte sums up his aspirations for human 

society. By him, with his view limited to the condi- 

tions of a single hemisphere, the idea of progress is 

postulated instinctively. The doubt of the East, that 

there could be any such thing in the end as progress, 

has>not occurred to Comte. " Progress as end," appears 

to him an absolute truth. This is one of the more 

spiritual temptations of materialism, and of materialistic 

civilizations. When men have craved to place the end 

in happiness, or pleasure, or desire, then they are apt 

to declare that opportunity, that education, that ameli- 

oration of things themselves is the end. " Work for 

Humanity" sounds very grand as a declaration of one's 

object in life. 

Here the pitiless analysis of the East comes in. Is 

Humanity, then, to be eternally in want of service ? 

Is my beatitude to demand, as its essential condition, 

another's necessity? Is civilization capable, in any 

case, of expressing the infinite capacity, satisfying the 

infinite love, of the soul ? Obviously, the service of 

man. apprehended as a motive in itself, is nevertheless 

89 

90 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

only a means to an end, and that end is to be measured 

by the individual consciousness, not by anything outside. 

In other words, there is not ultimately such a thing as 

"social progress." This is an absolute truth. Let 

this never blind us, however, to the fact that, rela- 

tively to our own place in it, " social progress " is a very 

very real fact indeed. 

For those in the life of the world, the aspiration 

after progress is a true and right aspiration. The world 

is a school for the soul. It is true there is a life be- 

yond school, but this is best lived by him who has been 

faithful, heart and soul, in the life of the school, its work, 

its play, and its characteristic illusions. The Grihas- 

thdshrama is the school of Sannyas. It is not the 

loose-living citizen who will make the noble sadhu. 

Quite the reverse. 

Again, there is no absolute progress, perhaps, regis- 

tered by Humanity as a whole. In the West, the 

progress of material luxury in one class is accompanied 

by the progress of poverty and degradation in another. 

The rise of Europe goes hand in hand with the decay 

of Asia. Apparent good is balanced by manifest evil, 

gain shadowed by a corresponding loss. Yes, but this 

very fact is in itself a battle-cry. There is no final 

progress, but there is oscillation of appearances. The 

rise of Europe cannot go on for ever, and neither can 

the decay of Asia. It is by contrast with its opposite 

that each gains momentum. If fall were not changed 

into ascent, by the energy of those falling, where would 

the power come from, for the counter-rise, later, of the 

opposite hemisphere ? 

Humanity is one, and each part of it is necessary to 

PROGRESS 91 

all. The constructive ability of the Roman has as 

much meaning for the Hindu as the power and insight 

of the Upanishads have to-day for the Teuton. Rela- 

tively to space and time, Progress is a truth ; and our 

most imperative duty is to live for it. 

WORK. 

ALL the Incarnations have talked of Work. What 

else did they come for, but to serve mankind ? It had 

been far easier for them to have remained in the utter- 

most Bliss. By their eyes was seen at all times the 

vision of One-ness. Why should they plunge into 

manifoldness, and renounce the great joy, save by 

momentary flashes ? It was all for man. It was all 

that others might reach their side. It was all that 

many might be made rich, even though the method 

should be by making themselves poor. Oh beautiful 

lives of the Avatars and Prophets ! Wondrous mercy of 

the saints and teachers ! How are we to make our- 

selves worthy of our union with you ? 

There is but one answer, it is by Work. By strip- 

ping ourselves of ease, of privilege, of leisure. By 

emptying ourselves of self. By working for others, for 

ideas, and ideals. " As the ignorant fight, from selfish 

motives, so must we fight unselfishly." Our struggle 

must be as intense as that of the meanest miser. We 

must labour for the good of others as the drowning 

man clutches at a straw. There must be as much 

energy thrown into our renunciation as into most men's 

self-preservation. 

How true is the monk to his vow ! How he dreads 

the possibility of a fall ! How unlimited are the sacri- 

92 

WORK 93 

fices he dreams of, if only he may be found faithful at 

the last ! Equally must we tremble and shrink from 

cowardice, from compromise, from failure in the task 

that has been laid upon us. Well has it been told us, 

by those who know life, that the world has no hell 

like that of having betrayed a trust that was laid 

upon us. 

Do we desire above all things to fulfil our own ideal 

of integrity? Then what room is there for com- 

promise ? A compromise represents a mean found 

between opposite desires. If we have but one desire, 

what motive is there for compromise ? Let each of us 

swear to himself that he will have nothing to do with 

any half-following, with lip-service, with weak-kneed- 

ness, and facing-both-ways. Let us throw our lives 

away, freely, gladly, as a very little thing. We would 

give fifty, if we had them, with the same royal glee. 

Let us be true to our work. Our task is our swa- 

dharma. " Better for each man is his swadharma, how- 

ever faulty his performance, than the task of another, 

though he could do it easily." That thing which faces 

me and frightens me ; that very thing that seems the 

one most difficult ; that beyond which I dare not look 

, there let me embrace Death ! 

"Right for ever on the scaffold?" asks Russell 

Lowell, "wrong for ever on the throne?" And then 

he bursts into his own answer : 

" But that scaffold sways the future ! and, behind the dim unknown, 

Standeth GOD within the shadow, keeping watch above His Own ! " 

It is a grand gospel this doctrine of fearlessness, of 

courage, of self-conquest. Arise, thou Great Divinity 

that liest hidden within us ! In Thy name, all things 

7* 

94 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

are possible to us ! Making victory and defeat the 

same, plunge we into battle ! 

But how are we to fight ? Most of us, by work. 

The world's work is the great Sddhand, wherein we 

accumulate character, by which, when the time comes, 

we can rise even into the Nirvikalpa Samddhi itself. 

Character is self-restraint. Self-restraint is self-direc- 

tion. Self-direction is concentration. Concentration 

when perfect is Samddhi. From perfect work to per- 

fect Mukti. This is the swing of the soul. Let us then 

be perfect in work ! 

REALIZATION THROUGH WORK. 

THROUGHOUT history we may meet with instances of 

the poisonous effect on the human mind of ideas with- 

out work. The struggle with material conditions is 

eternally necessary to the upward growth of the spirit. 

When Karma has been exhausted, and the moment of 

enlightenment is at hand, this condition also must be 

held to have been transcended. But as things are, 

there are very very few of the human race on the earth 

at any one time for whom it is not essential that the 

whole strength should be thrown into concrete effort, 

into concentrated struggle, with the world about them. 

Only by this can there be progress in the idea itself. 

Only through this can there be growth of apprehension. 

Work then is as necessary to the growth of the soul 

as is the Vedanta : perhaps more so. And work is at all 

times within our own power. The bhakta practises the 

ceremonies of worship. Work is the puja which a man 

offers to that Great Power which is manifested as 

Nature. 

The idea, thought of as mere words, leads irretriev- 

ably to scholasticism and verbiage. Most serious of 

intellectual vices is a hair-splitting metaphysic. This 

may indicate the potentiality, but it can never be an 

actual manifestation of the power, of a mind. Left to 

run its own course, it proves the beginning of mental 

95 

96 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

and moral disintegration. It has to be corrected and 

restrained, step by step, by the conscientious endeavour 

for the practical realization of ideas and ideals. 

The world has known many great ages of faith. 

They have not, for the most part, been ages of inaction. 

The thirteenth' century in Europe tended too much, it 

is true, to argument ; but it was also the century of the 

building of splendid churches. Most of the finest of 

the cathedrals took their birth then. Similarly in India 

we are apt to overlook these truly great ages because 

they are not marked by the flames of war or the crash 

of falling dynasties. But the ages of faith are in truth 

the constructive ages, the ages of growth, of arts and 

industries, of the spread of education and the crafts. 

Great faith is above all things the concomitant and 

support of mighty action. 

Again the trumpet-blast of truth has been sounded 

in our midst. Once more is our country waking up 

to that renewed apprehension of her religious wealth 

which has been the forerunner of every great impulse 

known to our history. The time may seem to us slow 

in coming, but it will assuredly arrive, when the influx 

of Indian thought upon the modern consciousness will 

seem to historians and critics the great event of these 

passing centuries. 

Meanwhile, what of us ? Are we to give the rich 

stores of our past, are we to enrich the world, and re- 

main ourselves poverty-stricken and bare? If not, 

how shall we escape ? If not, what must our course 

be? Our course must be REALIZATION THROUGH 

WORK. To the metaphysics of our theology has already 

succeeded the race-course of modern science. We have 

REALIZATION THROUGH WORK 97 

to throw ourselves upon this, and win our guerdon there. 

This is the task of our race in the world, to prove the 

authenticity and grandeur of the ancient Indian wisdom, 

by proving the soundness and genuineness of the Indian 

mind itself, in that sphere of inquiry which the Time- 

Spirit has now opened up to all nations alike. 

Amongst ourselves, however, there is another, and 

equally arduous duty. We have to share our knowledge 

as we gain it. This is the Sadhana that will make our 

reading real. This is the practice that will turn it from 

mere words into actual knowledge. This is the struggle, 

sanative, concentrated, all-absorbing, that will give us 

new spiritual muscle, and add wings to our feet. 

THE POWER OF FAITH. 

ALL large systems of culture, of thought, of polity, 

need " beacon-lives," as they have been called, in 

which for a moment the innermost ideals of the com- 

munal aspiration are made real and visible to every 

man's understanding. And where the heart of a 

people is true and sincere in its striving, the great 

souls come. It was a critical moment in American 

history when the man Abraham Lincoln stood at the 

helm and embodied the national ideals. America 

may not always remain true to those ideals. She 

may seem to betray them in strangely complex ways. 

Yet nevertheless, freedom and democracy are her 

ideals, and no disaster that could befall her would be 

comparable in extent to loss of faith in her own sin- 

cerity in desiring to realize them. 

The man who has thus lost faith in his own or his 

people's sincerity is known as a cynic. He stands 

aside and sneers at all effort, because it is bound to 

involve mistakes. He laughs at all feeling, because 

to his wisdom it appears childish. He makes light of 

prayer and hope, because he deems them to be hy- 

pocrisy. The cynic is the canker-worm of the cor- 

porate life. He openly avows his preference of selfish 

to unselfish ends and believes himself the greater for 

it. In ages of division and mutual antagonism cynics 

98 

THE POWER OF FAITH 99 

abound. In ages of great and united enthusiasm 

they cease to be. This is why large civic movements 

are necessary to the health of nations, whatever be 

the ends proposed by the movements in question. In 

the rush and flow of the mighty current, the emotionally 

poor, the morally barren, those who would, without 

it, have been cynics are swept up and carried on to 

ports that alone they could never have attempted to 

reach. Humanity is not yet wholly individuated. 

The crowd does not act as many : it acts as one, with 

a common heart and common mind. Nothing is 

more important than the power to form a single part 

of the great instrument, beating true at each step to 

its central impulse, apprehending what is to the 

interest of the whole, recoiling as by instinct from 

its insult or its hurt. 

But this is a power which belongs wholly to the 

heart. The man who has it is like a little child, and 

because he is so, enters into his kingdom of heaven. 

He has never questioned the fact that there are in the 

world about him greater ends than his own good. 

He strives for more ends. Let the wise and prudent 

say what they will. He knows himself for a single 

brick in the great wall that is to be built, a single 

stone in the cairn to be heaped up. And where there 

is one man thus selfless, thousands more will come. 

The same causes that brought him into being will 

create his brethren. 

The same unity holds good, as between guru and 

disciples, between leader and followers. The great 

gurus reach the vision of unity : their disciples struggle 

to attain it, by the conquest of manifoldness. But all 

ioo RELIGION AND DHARMA 

these are one. The lowest of the saved is as much a 

part of the church as the highest of the saviours. In 

Vivekananda, for instance, Hinduism attains the real- 

ization of Mukti. And in the meanest task-man who 

follows him sincerely in the daily routine, she merely 

passes to the other extreme of the swing of the 

pendulum. The two are one. Their vision is one. 

Sincerity is the thread of their union, the sincerity 

and childlike whole-hearted ness of both. 

Thus we are all one. To each man his own deed 

should be as sacred and as pure as to the yogi the 

meditation at nightfall. Is it English or Persian, is 

it chemistry or manufacture, that we would study ? 

Whatever it be, it is holy. All work is holy. All 

deeds are revelations. All knowledge is Veda. There 

is no difference between secular and sacred. The 

modern history of India is as much a part of religion 

as the ancient. What ! Shall Bharata be a figure in 

the Shdstras, and the kings and leaders of public 

opinion to-day move outside? Not so. We are one. 

The highest and lowest of us, one. The oldest and 

most modern, one. Time is one. God is one. There 

was never a moment holier than the present. There 

was never a deed more worthy than that which I am 

set to do, be it weaving, or sweeping, or the keeping 

of accounts, or the study of the Vedas, or the struggle 

of meditation, ay, or the blow to be struck with the 

bared fist. Let my own life express the utmost that 

is known to me. However hard be the attempt let 

me essay the thing I think right. However bold be 

the effort required, let no great thing call to me in 

vain. I shall fail. Ah yes ! My failure is the one 

THE POWER OF FAiJtf- : .: :' '-ib 

thing certain. But let me reverence my own failure ! 

I have the right to fail. Only by failure upon failure 

can I win success. 

The world about us is sacred. It becomes unreal 

only when we have found a greater reality beyond it. 

Till then, it is of infinite moment that we should deal 

with it in manly fashion. Not succumbing to self- 

interest ; not bribed by vanity or comfort ; not en- 

slaved by the mean ideals ; so let us push on to the 

greatest that we know. And falling by the way, as 

most of us will fall, let us know that the attempt was 

well worth while. It was God whom we worshipped 

thus in Humanity. It was worship that we called by 

the name of work. The Calcutta lad who perished in 

a city-drain, in the vain attempt to save two workmen 

the other day, was as truly saint and martyr as if he 

had died at the stake for his opinions, or thrown him- 

self down from the mountain- top in sacrifice. 

THE BEE AND THE LOTUS. 

IN the India of the Transition there is no word that 

seems to us more important or more a propos than the 

great saying of Sri Ramakrishna : " Bring your own 

lotus to blossom ; the bees will come of themselves." 

All over the country are workers at forlorn hopes. 

Here it is a magazine, there a business. Somewhere 

else a man is working at science or invention. Again, 

he is doing what he can to organize some branch of in- 

dustry or labour. Every one is confronted by per- 

plexities that seem hopeless, by difficulties that appal 

him. Almost every one has to struggle against want 

of co-operation. All are striving to achieve success, 

without the tools or material of success. 

To all in this position we would say, " Be not afraid ! 

You can see, through the mists, only one step ? Take 

that step. Plant your foot firm. You have done 

all you could, and to-morrow morning sees you fail ? 

Expect that failure, if you will, but, for to-night, act 

as if you would succeed. Stand to the guns. Be true." 

There is not one who can command means. Rarely is 

a Napoleon born, to find all he needs for his task at 

his hand. And even he has been made through millen- 

niums of exertion. All that we have at our own dis- 

posal is our own effort. " Bring your own lotus to 

blossom." Be faithful to yourself. 

But there is another side to this picture. The bees 

102

THE BEE AND THE LOTUS 103 

do come. The lotus feels no difference between to-day 

and yesterday. She knows not that at dawn her petals 

opened wide for the first time. She knows it only by 

the coming of the bees. The young athlete feels in 

himself no difference, of sterner control and finer ad- 

justment, between the act of to-day and that of yester- 

day. But to-day's stroke went home. We do not know 

when success may come to us. Even now, it may be 

but an hour before we meet it. In any case, we work, 

we put in our full strength. When victory comes, be 

it late or early, it will find us on the field. 

" Making gain and loss the same." This is not 

counsel for religious practices alone. In every under- 

taking it is the golden rule. Only he who can do this 

can ever succeed. But he who does, succeeds. No 

sooner does the mind steady itself on its true fulcrum- 

point of self-control than results pour in. It was our 

own confusion of motive, our own blindness of aim, 

that baffled us so long. Aim true. The arrow hits 

the mark. When his hour strikes, the bow Gandiva 

returns to the hand of Arjuna. 

But we have to determine what is the effort to which 

we have a right. The will is like a great serpent. 

Not on its outmost coil is its striking-point. Nor on 

the next, nor the next. At the very centre of the 

spiral we find the deadly arrow. Rearing the head 

high, the cobra sees its mark, and strikes. We have 

to place ourselves aright, to poise ourselves on our own 

centre of equilibrium, to attain mental clearness. The 

schoolmaster would fain deliver his country, but he sees 

none on the benches before him who were made of the 

stuff of heroes, Let the schoolmaster teach as though 

104 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

he saw heroes. Let him arrive at clear thought and 

conviction. Let him educate with all his might, mak- 

ing defeat and success the same. The man who can 

do this will create heroes. He brings his own lotus 

to blossom. The bees come of themselves. 

The potter yearns to deliver his people. Let him 

make good pots. The energy of his passion will make 

deliverers of the very men who stoke his fires. He 

thought to mould pots and vases. He was moulding 

men the while, out of the clay of the human will. 

How strange that the lotus has to hear from the 

bees the news of its own blooming ! So silent are the 

great spiritual happenings. Yet they are all-mastering. 

Events follow them. They do not lead. Means 

come to the man who can use means ; always, without 

exception. Is victory , or defeat my task ? Fool ! 

STRUGGLE is your task. 

The higher and more responsible the duty before us, 

the longer shall we be in reaching it. And we must 

fight every inch of the way. In the end the deed it- 

self may seem to be trivial. It lasts, maybe, only an 

instant. Many a soldier has paid with his life for the 

turning of a key, or a single flash from the gun. Yet 

to be in his place at that supreme moment had required 

all his past. A Gladstone, a Darwin, shows no ex- 

traordinary power save that of steady work at school 

or college. Maybe, the soul of him knows that the 

daily routine is for it, the army-drill of higher battles. 

Maybe, such have some instinctive consciousness of 

greatness. Maybe ; maybe not. Neither he nor we 

can command our destiny. But we can all work. 

We want higher ideals of struggle, The diver 

THE BEE AND THE LOTUS 105 

struggles to find treasure. The miser struggles to win 

gold. The lover struggles for the smile of the beloved. 

The whole mind is set on the goal proposed. One of 

Sri Ramakrishna's great sayings, again, refers to the 

chdshd (cultivator) whose crop has failed. The gentle- 

man-farmer abandons farming when he has experienced 

one or two bad seasons. But the chdshA sows at sow- 

ing time, whatever was his lot at harvest. However 

humble our task, this should be its spirit. Over and 

over and over again, the unwearied effort should be re- 

peated. We should struggle to the death. Like the 

swimmer shipwrecked within sight of land ; like the 

mountaineer scarcely reaching the ice-peak ; so we 

should labour to be perfect in every little task. 

Out of the shrewdness of small shopkeepers in Scot- 

land have been born the Scottish merchants whose 

palaces and warehouses confront us on every side the 

whole world over. Out of the same experience was 

written Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations." Even so 

the small and humble task is ever the class-room of 

the high and exalted. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth 

to do, do it with thy whole might." 

THE LIFE OF IDEAS. 

GREAT is the life of ideas. Men die that an idea may 

live. Generation after generation may pass away, 

while the idea on which they were threaded grows 

only the stronger for their decay. Let none, then, feel 

that in his own defeat lies any disaster to truth. A 

life given ? What of that ? Thought may be enriched 

by the death of thinkers ! What is any one of us, un- 

less the Infinite Light is seen behind and through him ? 

And for the Light to be seen, may it not sometimes 

be needful that the vessel should be broken? 

How often it happens that everything a man has 

believed is summed up and asserted in the moment of 

his death ! Death consecrates. Death renders im- 

personal. It suddenly withdraws from the sight of 

others all the petty nervous irritations that have veiled 

the man's real intention, and he stands revealed in his 

greatness, instead of his littleness, before his contem- 

poraries. 

It sometimes happens that the greatest service a 

man can render is to retire. Great men must always 

take care to withdraw when the message is uttered. 

Only alone, and in freedom, can the child or the student 

or the disciple work out the idea that has reached him. 

The seed is buried while it germinates. The obscure 

processes of development would only suffer check from 

100 

THE LIFE OF IDEAS 107 

the attempt to watch and regulate. We seek ever to 

give birth to the greater-than-ourselves. But for this, 

it is essential that we seek not to see results. To give 

and die ; to speak and leave free ; to act, looking for 

no fruit ; this is the great mood, that paves the way for 

the world-changes. 

How many could throw themselves from the palm- 

tree's height? Those who are able to do this, having 

faith in truth, are the fathers of the future, the masters 

of the world, because only through them can the Im- 

personal flow in its fulness. Says a Christian hymn : 

" Oh to be nothing, nothing ! 

Only to lie at His feet, 

A broken and empty vessel, 

For the Master's use made meet ! 

Empty that He may fill me, 

As forth to His service I go ! 

Broken that so more freely, 

His life through mine may flow ! " 

THE SHAPING OF LIFE. 

IT will often seem as if life hammered the poor man, 

working him to that form which will exactly fill its 

place in the social setting, while the rich man, in the 

nature of things, is privileged, and allowed apparently 

to escape opposition. In fact, however, this hammer- 

ing is experience, and is one of those the most im- 

portant regards in which the buying power of poverty 

is greater than that of wealth. 

Service, poverty, helplessness, are for strong natures 

great schools. It is only the man who is in a position 

at some time in his life to feel the full consequences of 

each word and act on the hearts of others, it is only 

that man who is able fully to explore the social con- 

sciousness. Only he whose single self-respect can ex- 

actly balance the respect that is due to others. For 

the manner and bearing of the subject should be dif- 

ferent in form but wholly equal in dignity to those of 

the king himself. We ought so to serve that we might 

at any moment assume authority. This is the service 

that the great desire to have. He who longs to thwart 

and mortify the pride of the server invites defeat from 

his own subordinate. 

The only bond that can knit together master and 

servant, sovereign and subject, officer and private 

soldier, is not their personal relation, but the con- 

stant subconscious recognition in every word and 

108 

THE SHAPING OF LIFE 109 

deed of an ideal of perfect conduct which both alike 

are co-operating to carry out. The man who sees the 

army, with his mind's eye, will not forget the deference 

due to his commander. And he in turn, being con- 

scious that only as part of a great whole does he wield 

power, will be gentle and generous and winning in its 

use. When the moment comes for wrath, for condemn- 

ing the disobedient man to sudden death, it will be 

this long' habit of delicacy, and the fact that even now 

the claim is impersonal, is made in the name of an 

ideal, that will give power to the order, so that others 

will hasten to put it into effect. 

For such maintenance of authority how much self- 

control is necessary ! How complex an experience ! 

In the brain-cells of the dispenser of law how long a 

memory must be stored up ! Only such authority can 

be deep or enduring. It is a fact which anyone may 

put to the test, that only that man can maintain order 

who controls himself. Children, servants, and subjects 

are all alike contemptuous of the man whose own 

temper is not under his own command. And again, 

in order to learn the power of discipling others, it is 

first needful that we practise discipline within. Thus, 

authority and obedience are but obverse and reverse of 

a single power. The higher our education, the greater 

our ability to obey instructions. He who rules to-day 

obeyed yesterday. Let us so hold ourselves in obedi- 

ence that to-morrow we may command. These are a 

few of the secrets of strong human combinations. 

A man goes to a university, not that he may become 

a teacher, but that he may be trained to learn. He is 

best educated to whom all that he sees and hears con- 

8 * 

i io RELIGION AND DHARMA 

veys its lesson. He whose senses are open, whose 

brain is alert, he who is not deaf or blind nor the man 

who has seen and heard most, is truly educated. To 

the uneducated, the movements of the plant carry no 

tale. They pass all unobserved beneath his very eyes. 

To the uneducated, custom is an arbitrary and mean- 

ingless yoke. And the best educated man is not ne- 

cessarily he who knows most already, but he who is 

most prepared to take advantage of what experience 

is bringing him. Thus every mental act prepares us for 

others. Every thought adds to our capacity for thought. 

Every moment of true concentration increases our 

ability to command the mind, and therefore the world. 

How vast, then, is the moral difference between the 

man who applies himself to learning in order that he 

may lead the life of a scholar, and him who goes through 

the same course in order that he may enjoy advance- 

ment, or may earn money to spend on pleasure or 

luxury ! The one is the son and beloved child of Sar- 

aswati Herself, the other is at best but Her hired 

servant. This is the distinction that is conveyed in 

those injunctions of which our Sh&stras are so full, to 

practise love for its own sake, the pursuit of wisdom 

for its own sake, righteousness for its own sake. The 

stainless motive, that rises beyond self, ready to de- 

stroy the dreamer himself before the altar of the dream, 

this is the only possible condition of true achieve- 

ment. And this is why it is better to be born of 

generations of saints than of a race of conquerors. The 

conqueror is paid for his sacrifice. He spends what 

he has won. The saint adds his strength to that of his 

fore-goers, storing it up for them that shall come after. 

NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

INDIA is evolving a new civilization. New ideals and 

new methods have already made their appearance. 

Already she is projecting herself upon new develop- 

ments in many different directions. The great danger 

of such an era is the loss of moral stability which it is 

apt to involve. For the aim and effort of civilization 

is always to maintain the supremacy of the moral 

faculty. And in periods of violent transition, the ten- 

dency is, by the breaking of old bonds and associations, 

to make the moral scum and wreckage of society come 

to the surface, and take the lead. The word " civiliza- 

tion " is a Western equivalent for our word Dharma 

or " national righteousness," and a nation may be re- 

garded as having proved the value of its past, only when 

character has always been reckoned by it as the first 

of political and social assets, when the hypocrite has 

always been rated by it at his true value, and when the 

will of the people has spontaneously known to pursue 

good and avoid evil, all the days of its life. 

No people can boast that they have shown these 

characteristics to perfection. This is obviously a race 

in which success is only of relative measurement. Yet 

the fact remains that if there could be an absolute 

standard for the appraisement of national and social 

in 

ii2 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

systems it would be in terms of morality, not in those 

of wealth or industry or even of happiness, that that 

perfection must be expressed. 

Morality is not to be understood here as the 

morality of social habit merely. The keeping of a 

time-worn law may depend upon our weakness quite 

as much as on our strength. True morality is a fire of 

will, of purity, of character, of sacrifice. It is here, and 

not to the expression, that we must look, to make the 

valuation of a nation's attainment. Yet some things 

are clear. When countries that have long preached a 

religion of renunciation, a religion of the poor and 

lowly, of self-denial, of common property, of brotherly 

love, when such countries are found suddenly to have 

abandoned themselves to the practice of exploitation 

political, commercial, financial, or all three at once, 

then we see a discrepancy between theory and practice, 

on which we can and ought to pass a judgment. 

It is clear that a sound and true doctrine is not 

weapon enough for the will of man in the hour of a 

great temptation. Besides that of the truth or un- 

truth of the doctrine held, there is also the deeper 

question to be considered of how far the nature of the 

man has been saturated with it, how far he has bent to 

it, how far he has assimilated it. Unless a nation be 

literally sodden with its religion, it is bound, when the 

opportunity comes, to throw it away in favour of self- 

interest. And this is the defeat of civilization. This is 

the true bar-sinister on the scutcheon of history. 

At this point, however, comes in the question of the 

intellectual limitations of different faiths. Clearly, a 

code of religion and ethics which commands the un-

NATIONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS 113 

grudging assent of our whole intellect will restrain and 

impel us more effectually than one that we are driven 

to regard as more or less an old wives' tale. Here we 

see the importance of a religion that is not discredited. 

And here also we find the secret of the failure of Chris- 

tianity in the nineteenth century. Science, by dint of 

her mechanical inventions, has created a new world for 

Christian peoples to dwell in. Alas, that same science 

has also led to the scorning of the very Christianity 

which had been the great guiding and ennobling force 

in the world as they already knew it, and a Christian 

without his Christianity is apt to be an armed dacoit. 

Christianity was not strong enough to include science. 

Is Hinduism strong enough to include the modern civ- 

ilization ? We answer yes ! For towering behind the 

habits and practices of Hinduism lies that great gener- 

alized philosophy of the Vedanta, to which any religious 

ritual, any social scheme would serve equally well as 

area of illustration and experimental school. And 

from amidst the Vedanta itself, again, rises the Advaita 

of Sankaracharya as the peak of Gouri-Shankar crowns 

the long range of the Himalayas. 

We are about to throw ourselves forward upon a 

great secularity. As a new development of Hinduism, 

in future, is to stand the Indian Nation. Instead of 

the Samaj and orthodoxy, the civic life. Instead of 

new worships and triumphant religious austerities, we 

are buckling on our armour to-day for the battlefield 

of learning, of co-operation, of self-organization. But 

what of that ? Can the foundations of the Sanathan 

Dharma be shaken thereby ? No, for have we not 

long ago been told, Ekam Sat Viprd BahudhA Vadanti? 

114 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

" All that exists is ONE. Learned men but call it by 

different names." 

Does it matter that instead of ringing the temple- 

bells at evening we are to turn now to revive a dying 

industry? Does it matter that instead of altars we 

are to build factories and universities ? Does it matter 

that instead of" slaves of the Brahmans " we are in future 

to write ourselves down as " slaves of the Motherland " ? 

Does it matter that instead of offering worship, we are 

to turn henceforth with gifts of patient service, of food, 

of training, of knowledge, to those who are in sore 

need ? If " All that exists is One," then all paths alike 

are paths to that Oneness. Fighting is worship as 

good as praying. Labour is offering as acceptable as 

Ganges water. Study is austerity more costly and 

more precious than a fast. Mutual aid is better than 

any puja. For concentration is the only means of 

vision The One, the only goal. 

O man, whosoever thou art who goest forth to work, 

in this hour of the nation's need, clasp to thy heart the 

weapon of thy service. Let mind and body be one in 

the act of labour, every muscle hard-knit, every sinew 

tense. Let all thy faculties converge on embracing 

the task. Let thy thought, day and night, be on that 

which thou hast taken in hand to do. Let character 

be thy supreme guide, perfection of service thy one 

dream. So shall there come an hour of knowledge. 

And the new age shall have added to the children of 

the Motherland the race of the saints of the market- 

place and the field, the heroes of the civic and the 

national life. 

THE FLOWER OF WORSHIP. 

THERE was a mood, to which we sometimes obtain a 

moment's entrance, when we hold in our hands an old 

book, an old picture, an old jewel, or even things as 

simple as a padlock, a piece of brass-work, or a fragment 

of embroidery. It was a mood of leisure and sim- 

plicity, to which the work in hand at the moment was 

the whole aim of life. The craftsman was concentrated 

upon his labour. The whole of Dharma lay in the 

beauty he was bringing forth. His craft was for the 

moment or for that moment in the existence of hu- 

manity that we call a man's life his religion. 

Great things are always created thus. There is 

nothing worth having that has not cost a human life. 

Men have given themselves thus, for things that may 

seem, to the careless eye, to have been not worth the 

price. A single vind or violin one out of the many 

required in the course of a year may have cost all 

this to make. Patient search of materials, careful 

seasoning and mellowing, earnest study of conditions, 

infinite lavishing of work, all these are necessary to the 

instrument that will be perfect. But having them, 

there have been some that were as individual as human 

beings, some whose voices live in history. It has 

happened, often enough, that a man would give years of 

labour to the carving of a cameo, or the illuminating of 

ii6 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

a manuscript. Such things we think of as the posses- 

sions of kings, and we speak of them as mediaeval. That 

is to say, they are the product of ages like those of the 

European Middle Ages. But in India the Middle Ages 

lasted till the other day. Even yet we may see them 

persisting in humble streets, and bazaars, and in 

villages that lie off the line of railway. India is, as 

a whole, a mediaeval country. The theses of the 

Transition belong to her passage from one age into 

another, out of the Mediaeval into the Modern. 

What, then, were the characteristics of the Mediaeval 

Age, that enabled it to produce its miracles of beauty 

and skill ? It may be worth while to examine for a 

moment into this subject. In the first place, it had a 

great simplicity. A man lived, ate, and slept, in the 

room in which he worked. He was not surrounded by 

the multitudinous objects of his desire. His desire 

was only one. It was concentrated in his work. At 

the utmost, by way of ornament, he had about him a 

picture of some god, and a few specimens of his own 

achievements. Thus, his thirst after perfection fed 

upon itself. We do not often realize how much a great 

workman may owe to bareness and perfect simplicity 

of surroundings. To a certain extent, we may see this 

simplicity, any day, in the bazaar. The shopkeeper 

lives and receives his friends amongst his wares. 

Study, laboratory, living-room, all these are one, to the 

mediaeval man. 

Another point lay in the fact that partly owing to 

the fewness of his wants, and partly to the abundance 

of food then in the country, the mediaeval workman 

was in no hurry to be rich. He could afford, there- 

THE FLOWER OF WORSHIP 117 

fore, to be lavish of time. The thing he made was, to 

a great extent, his only reward. Nor could he expect 

that to anyone else it would afford the enjoyment that 

he could derive from it. None else knew, as did he, 

the precise reasons why this curve or that colour had 

been chosen, rather than something else. None else 

could realize the feeling of rest, or gratification, or the 

sense of successful expression that rose in his mind 

when he looked upon it. He himself derived from his 

own work a pleasure that he never dreamed of de- 

scribing to anyone, a joy that he could not hope to 

communicate. The work was done for the work's 

own sake. 

Nothing tells so strongly and clearly in a piece of 

work as its motive. The desire for fame or money 

leads to qualities that destroy all true greatness in art. 

The genuine worker never asks for advertisement. 

He is contented to do well. Like the farmer of whom 

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa spoke, he returns to the 

task itself again and again, whatever be the discour- 

agements that meet him in it. He strives with all his 

might, to bring his own lotus to blossom. What con- 

cern of his are the bees ? 

He works for sheer joy of self-expression, and his 

work is a joy to all he loves. Even the greatest things 

in the world have been made out of the happiness of 

such simple souls, who were contented to work as a 

child to play with toys. Cathedrals and temples, 

pictures and images, cities and kingdoms, have all been 

toys to the fashioners of them, working out of their 

own sense of things, even as a bird sings in the sun- 

light. The modern organization has upset many 

n8 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

things which the ancient organization laboured to com- 

pass. Amongst others, it has made life complex. It 

has increased our needs. It has confronted us with 

many temptations, of which, in our old-time isolation, 

we knew little. The aimless desire for an accumulation 

of useless objects has seized upon us, and we do not 

realize that for this we have bartered what is infinitely 

more precious, the power of steady and absorbed work. 

For pictures on our walls, for sofas and chairs and 

round tables, for an air of luxury, and an infinite 

weariness of household drudgery, we have sold our 

birthright of dignified simplicity and a concentrated 

mind and heart. 

Back to simplicity, and the lofty uses of simplicity ! 

Back to the bareness that was beauty, and the depth 

of thought that meant culture ! Back to the mat on 

the bare floor, and the thoughts that were so lofty ! 

Let us ordain ourselves free of the means of living : 

let us give our whole mind to the developing of life it- 

self. Not in the age of scrambling for appointments, 

and struggling for a livelihood, was Sankaracharya 

born, was Buddha born. Let the thatched hut at the 

foot of the palm be wealth sufficient : woe the day 

when Indian mothers cease to bring forth, and Indian 

homes cease to nurture, the lions of intellect and 

spirituality ! 

What the sannyasin is to life, that the craftsman 

must be to his craft, that each one of us to the task in 

hand. We must have a single eye to the thing itself, 

not to any of the fruits that come of it. We must keep 

ourselves simple, dependent upon no external aid, 

listening more and more as life goes on for that inner

THE FLOWER OF WORSHIP 119 

voice which is the guide to self-expression. In each 

line we must seek for that peculiar and partial form of 

mukti which is its goal. When mukti has been piled 

upon mukti y God knows if the Absolute shall be ours. 

Five hundred times died Buddha ere he attained the 

infinite compassion. Shall we grudge a life, with its 

hour of toil, that we may feast our eyes upon some 

symbol of perfection ? Shall we measure the devotion 

that, given without stint, is to make of us the puja- 

flowers laid before the feet of God ? In a world of 

infinite variety the vision of Reality ends every road. 

Let us then push on with brave hearts, not fainting 

by the way. Whatever we have taken in hand to do, 

let us make the means our end. Let us pursue after 

the ideal for the ideal's own sake, and cease not, stop 

not, till we are called by the voice that cannot go un- 

heeded to put away childish things and enter the city 

of the soul. 

RESPONSIBILITY. 

THE growth of modern cities in India shows that 

we are leaving behind us the organization of the undi- 

vided family, which once formed our largest conceivable 

social unit, and entering into still larger and much freer 

social combination. The city is one of the widest 

groups that can be formed. Nations are made up of 

citizens, and conversely, cities are the schools of na- 

tionality. A city is the most complex type of mole- 

cule, so to speak, in the national organism. 

In a given molecule all the atoms contained are essen- 

tial. Each atom, each sub-atom, and the relation of each 

to the rest, is integral to the whole. Can we say this 

of our cities of to-day ? Knot, they are not organized on 

^permanent basis. In mediaeval Benares, in mediaeval 

Lucknow, each atom and each series of atoms was es- 

sential to the city. In Conjeeveram and in many of our 

rural market-towns of the South the same is true to- 

day. Is it true of our modern cities, of Calcutta, Ma- 

dras, Bombay ? If not, the inessential elements will 

yet prove to be but temporary. They will eventually 

be cast out. 

There is a difference between mechanical complexity 

and organic complexity. Those factors which do not 

belong organically to the civic com plexus are the factors 

that cannot endure. And what is the test of the or- 

120 

RESPONSIBILITY 121 

ganic necessity of any given atom ? The test that our 

ancestors would have accepted was dharma. Those who 

uphold the national righteousness belong to the city, 

belong to the nation ; those who destroy and deterior- 

ate it will have to go. The test of our cohesion, then, 

is a moral test, a test of character, of conduct, of up- 

rightness. It is that particular kind of character, 

moreover, which makes large social combinations pos- 

sible. 

A study of such traits of character would then be 

valuable. Each of us, if we set ourselves to observe 

what these are, will notice different things. One will 

lay stress on good manners. There is no doubt that 

these are necessary, and that the standard will be much 

more precise and severe when we move in a circle 

drawn from all parts of India than when we lived only 

amongst our own relatives. Courtesy is a great lubri- 

cant to public life, and the delicate social emotions that 

make courtesy sincere and natural are one of the most 

precious gifts of humanity. Courtesy, too, may well 

be practised in the home. It is no excuse for a brutal 

manner that so-and-so is my mother or wife or brother. 

What then ? Am I to be impertinent to my nearest 

and dearest, and reserve my best self for those whom 

I scarcely know ? 

Another will notice the need of punctuality, of order, 

of regular habits. All these are absolutely imperative 

in the civic circle. And all these are Dharma, for all 

mean self-control for the good of others. 

We have to learn to be reliable, or what is called 

" dependable," in our dealings with others. Respon- 

sibility is God's test of man. We must be equal to our 

122 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

task. It is worse than useless, it is positively ruinous, 

like the uncompleted sacrifice, to undertake a duty that 

we do not carry through to its last syllable. The 

performance of duty, the social duty, the civic duty, is 

not to be allowed to vary with our own feelings, with 

our impulses, our tempers, even (up to certain neces- 

sary limits) with our health. " I am responsible " is a 

word that, uttered by oneself to oneself, should spur 

us to the highest effort, to the sternest sacrifice. 

There is no reason for charity, for tenderness, for for- 

bearance, no reason that can be urged, which is so 

strong as the need of him to whom kindness or gentle- 

ness is shown. And similarly, the most intense of all 

social, motives is not ambition or self-interest, or love of 

fame or power, intense as any of these may be. The 

most intense of all motives lies in the thought "I am 

trusted : this duty or this need depends upon me." Here 

is the thought that makes the sentinel die at his post, 

that calls the fireman to the hottest point of danger, 

that rouses the slumbering spirit and puts spurs into 

the flagging will. And this is Dharma. 

For examples of what is to be won by energy of 

social experiment, we are agreed that we must turn 

to the West. Even in the pursuit of ideas, while the 

idea is often better realized in India, its reflection in the 

social organization is better accomplished in Europe. 

These things are to be studied and contemplated. 

There is no solvent of error in conduct like true thought 

and right knowledge. We are of those who urge neither 

conservatism nor reform in social questions. We ask 

only for right understanding. And we hold that the 

temper of mind that will rush hurriedly upon either one 

RESPONSIBILITY 123 

act or the other is not conducive to true understanding, 

which needs above all things disinterestedness and calm. 

Let us then compare the European solution of vari- 

ous problems with our own, and see, if possible, 

whether we have not much to gain from such con- 

sideration. 

Even in religion, we find Indian worship a one-priest 

matter, while European ritual is a vast co-operation of 

singers, servers, ministrants, and others. In monasti- 

cism, the ideal monk of the East is a wanderer who goes 

free, from place to place, working out the personal ideal 

derived from his guru. He is often the embodiment of 

great and sometimes of supreme individual illumina- 

tion. But he never has the discipline of the member 

of a close-knit organization, in which obedience is 

practised as a mortification, and punctuality, order, and 

business habits are rigorously imposed. Yet so com- 

pletely has the monastic formation been assimilated by 

the West as a social institution, that such words as 

abbot, prior, novice, refectory, cloister, bands, vespers, and 

others, are now part of the common language, each 

with its precise meaning expressed and understood by 

all members of society alike. It was the organization 

of the great religious orders, moreover, the Cistercians 

practising agriculture, the Dominicans and Jesuits 

giving education, the Franciscans acting as moral and 

religious missioners, a sort of mediaeval Salvation 

Army, that made the modern organization of hos- 

pitals, red-cross sisterhoods, and relief associations in 

general, a possibility. It was their work in education 

that laid the foundations of all the universities and 

common schools in Europe. 

9 

I2 4 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

But we have monasteries In India also. What is the 

distinguishing characteristic of the European ? The 

distinguishing characteristic of European monasticism 

is its system, its organization, its clear and well-defined 

division of responsibilities. One man is the head. 

Under him may be the prior and even a sub-prior. 

One man trains novices ; another attends to guests. 

However many persons live under one roof, there is 

no overlapping of functions, no repetition of offices. 

There is not one hour of the day that has not its ap- 

pointed duty. The body monastic is close-knit, co- 

herent, organic, and a degree of obedience to superiors 

is required of every member which is not surpassed by 

that of an army occupying hostile territory. 

Developments like these, taking many centuries to 

perfect, have furnished that thought material, those con- 

ceptions of character and conduct, out of which the 

great commercial and industrial organizations of the 

present age have been constructed. Society is really 

one, and the experiments made by each part become 

the knowledge of the whole. 

Behind every mental realization, however, whether 

of individuals or of societies, always stands some 

concrete experience. What was the concrete experi- 

ence that so worked itself into the very nerves and 

blood of European races that their idea of a working- 

unity became so definite 'and differentiated ? It is said 

by sociologists that this concrete experience was the 

conquest of the ocean. European peoples are coast- 

line-dwellers. Their conception of organization is 

furnished by the crew of a ship, and their temptation 

incidentally, not only their temptation, but also their 

RESPONSIBILITY 125 

characteristic vice is piracy. In the crew of the ship, 

the family with the father as captain, eldest son first 

mate, second son as second mate, younger sons and 

nephews as working sailors, and so on becomes trans- 

formed into the complex human working-unit, the 

social instrument, whose unity and discipline are tested 

for life or for death in every gale that the fishing-smack 

encounters. 

In India and the East generally, it is supposed, in 

similar fashion, that the great concrete experience on 

which the national character is built, and by which its 

potency for co-operation is largely determined, is the rice- 

field. Here, it is said, whole families co-operate, under 

one man's direction, on an equal footing. They sow 

seed, they transplant seedlings, they harvest crops, 

without, say the sociologists, anything happening to 

call forth a great preponderance of ability in any one 

above the others. No special reward waits on in- 

genuity or inventive ability in the transplanting of rice. 

Every man's labour is more or less like the rest and of 

equal amount. Hence the firm hold obtained by the es- 

sentially democratic institutions of village, caste, guild, 

and family, in India. India is essentially a democratic 

country. Her monarchies and aristocracies are quite 

extraneous to her social system, and it is this which she 

has to thank for her stability and solidarity under ex- 

periences that would have shattered the unity of any 

less coherent organization. The only point in which 

India fails to stand comparison with the West is in the 

complexity of her social organization. 

Benares is asbeautiful as any mediaeval city in Europe. 

Indeed Europe has not more than one or two jewels to 

9* 

126 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

compare with it. Yet anyone who has seen a European 

cathedral will know what is meant by complex unity. 

The Western cathedral is not a mere building. It is 

like a Southern Indian temple a treasure-house of 

carvings in stone and wood ; of paintings on walls, on 

glass, and on canvas ; of musical instruments ; old 

metalwork ; embroideries ; libraries ; and fifty other 

things. It represents, as many writers have pointed 

out, a synthesis of occupations, all held together by a 

single aim, governed by one head, united in the realiza- 

tion of a common design. And European cathedrals 

were the fruit of the sudden realization by the people 

of their own unity and their own freedom. For they 

sprang up in the great age of the passing away of the 

Feudal System and the birth of the great Free Cities of 

the Middle Ages. 

If the complex unity of the ship's crew enable the 

European peoples to build cathedrals, the building of 

cathedrals, in like manner, has helped towards the 

modern complexity and success of industrial and com- 

mercial co-operation. For those who undertake great 

tasks and hold faithfully to their part in them, become 

possessed of great powers, and apply them uncon- 

sciously in every other function. 

Let us also, then, undertake great tasks. Let us be 

faithful even in little things. A single wheel or screw 

may be small, even minute, yet a whole machine may 

turn on it. Let us be responsible, trustworthy. Let 

our word be our bond. The hand we have taken in 

ours, let it never fail for want of one to hold it. So 

shall every deed be the seed-plot of new powers. So 

shall every gain become the stronghold of a nation. 

THE WORLD-SENSE IN ETHICS. 

THE relation between the individual and the com- 

munity, the extent to which no one of us is an indi- 

vidual at all, but merely constitutes an instrument 

carrying hands and feet and senses for the great social 

organism behind us, this is a subject on which we 

think too little and too seldom. Yet few questions 

are at the present time more important. A distin- 

guished European sociologist has said that man in his 

earliest development thinks as "we," and only later 

as "I." The statement is not so paradoxical as 

it sounds. Most educated persons are aware that if 

a frog's brain be removed, and a drop of acid then 

placed on the hind foot of the frog, the foot will be 

rapidly withdrawn and the leg folded convulsively 

against the body. This is called "reflex action," be- 

cause it is carried out without the necessary interven- 

tion of consciousness. Similarly, much of our social 

conduct, perhaps all that is a part of our characters, is 

reflex. 

Imagine for instance, a slight put upon our family 

honour. Can we not feel the impulse of retaliation 

that is demanded of each and every member of the 

family alike, in the men as acts, in the women as 

malediction ? Is such retaliation planned or instinc- 

tive ? Can we not see from this something of what the 

European scholar meant ? Is it not true that in family- 

127 

128 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

matters we think even now rather as " we " than as 

"I"? And can we not see, casting our glance back 

over the evolution of humanity, that this must be 

more and more so, the earlier the period under re- 

view ? In an age when individual scope was small, 

each man would be more true to the type of the 

family or the tribe, or the race, than in a later epoch, 

when, even physically, there is greater divergence of 

the individual from his kindred and brothers. Every 

state of society, then, and every social institution, 

carries with it its own reflex consciousness, its own 

code, its own ideals. Polygamy has its ethics, quite 

as much as monogamy. The European woman has 

her poets, as truly as the Oriental. Joan of Arc is 

also a saint, though so different in type from Sita. 

Taking the whole of this reflex consciousness, these 

codes, these ideals, and putting together the principles 

of conduct which we can deduce from them, we 

call the result morality. Morality is fundamentally 

the expression of Humanity as a whole, through the 

individual. It follows that morality is not the same 

in all ages. It becomes finer and more complex, with 

the growth of intellectual knowledge and social ex- 

perience. There was a time when the morality of 

family and tribe was all-sufficient ; when it seemed 

right to a people to extirpate, in the name of this 

morality, not only the people pf other tribes, but also 

their gods ! Indeed as we look about us to-day, we 

may perhaps be pardoned if we think that that time, 

even now, has not altogether gone by. 

It is the proud distinction of the Indian culture 

that Hindus have never, within historic times, been

THE WORLD-SENSE IN ETHICS 129 

contented with the tribal morality, or the tribal ideal. 

This fact it is which forms the granite foundation of 

that destiny, in right of which India, as we believe, is 

yet again to lead the world. Even a philosophy like 

the Vedanta, even an ideal like that of Advaita, is 

organically related to the social experience, or it could 

never have been formulated. The day will yet dawn 

in this country, when young men shall set themselves 

to conquer all the most difficult knowledge of the 

world, with the sole object of being able to trace out 

these connexions between the communal organization 

and the national achievement. It may be that the 

caste-system, with its suggestion of a synthesis of 

races, ideals, and customs, was the concrete basis of 

that intellectual comprehensiveness which is yet to be 

the gift of India to the world. Or the secret may be 

found elsewhere. In any case, if we of to-day would 

prove ourselves the worthy children of our ancestors, 

we, like them, must refuse to be contented with a 

tribal morality. India may seem now to be but a 

trifling factor in the development of man, but it will 

not be always so, and great or small, none can 

measure the power of true thought, for the world is 

governed by mind, and not by matter. 

Our rishis and yogis tell us of a stage of meditation 

in which we develop a cosmic sense, and feel ourselves 

to be present in the moon, the sun, and the stars. 

Far below this meditative experience, however, we 

must train ourselves and our children to another, 

which will assuredly help to fit us for it, a world- \ 

sense. Through this consciousness, we must develop 

the power to suffer with the pain, and hope with the 

130 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

hope, of all men. All human sorrows are our sorrows, 

personally and collectively. Let us educate ourselves 

to feel them so, and then, in the moment of power it 

may be, we shall give birth to a morality which shall 

include them all. 

In some such way has every advance in morality 

been made. First the trained sympathy, secondly the 

cultivated intellect, and third and last, the moral 

impulse, ending in a new institution, that cuts a step 

higher than humanity had heretofore reached, in the 

icy face of the mountain peaks. That is to say, all 

new social developments must arise out of new sym- 

pathies, new emotional experiences, giving birth to 

new and loftier ideals, and through these to a renewal 

or reform of institutions. Not by a mere substitution 

of one custom for another can a society be mended. 

Such thoughts occur to us in connexion with the 

much-disputed question of woman's education. All 

that Indian women can do for themselves they would 

seem to have done. Forty years ago, we are told, 

they had still, for the most part, to learn to read and 

write in their vernaculars. All over India, spon- 

taneously as it seemed, the effort began. The simple 

magazines which are so essential to first steps in such 

a culture-process found their way, by the cheap postal 

system, from the city-presses to the eagerly-waiting 

subscribers in the country. The vernacular education 

of Indian women was organized by the women them- 

selves, and some very few well-wishers outside. 

To-day, to a great extent, this vernacular education 

has been assimilated. In Bengal, Maharashtra, Madras, 

and the Punjab, every little girl expects to have to 

THE WORLD-SENSE IN ETHICS 131 

learn, not only to read her mother-tongue, but also to 

write it. This amount of wisdom is often attainable 

in the zenana itself, which thus becomes for the 

moment almost a schoolroom. In Bengal at least, 

such historical narratives as those of Romesh Ch. 

Dutt, and some of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, have 

been read by all orthodox ladies, and there are maga- 

zines, and even illustrated magazines, in abundance. 

But to-day we stand before the question of a new 

step to be taken in the education of woman, and it is 

meet that there should here be a certain searching of 

heart. Education is the highest and most moral of all 

social functions, and unless it is rightly directed, it 

may easily be made pernicious. Its direction, more- 

over, is more than anything else an affair of its motive. 

What is our motive in desiring education for our 

sisters and daughters? Is it that they may be decked 

out in the faded finery of European accomplishments, 

and so take a better place in the matrimonial market ? 

If so, the education that we are likely to give them is 

little calculated to help them over life's rough places. 

It is in fact, merely an extension of privilege, it is no 

enfranchisement, and perhaps those who receive it 

were better without it. Or do we desire to educate 

the women we are ourselves to wed, in the hope that 

their knowledge may save us trouble in the future ? 

It is undoubtedly convenient to have a wife who can, 

unaided, take the baby's temperature when he has 

fever. If we go further than this, and feel that we 

should like to spend our lives with our intellectual 

equal, instead of with a prisoner, bound to the tread- 

mill of daily routine, and capable of few speculations 

132 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

beyond, in the darkness of the mental jail, we are, 

even then, only men of taste, crying out for a more 

appetizing morsel than the common. We are not yet 

true advocates and champions of the education of 

woman. 

The only ground on which woman can claim, or 

man assist her to obtain, anything worthy of the name 

of education, is that of the common humanity in both, 

which makes the one fit to be trusted and reverenced 

as the other, makes the one worthy of honour and 

responsibility as the other, and finally, makes the 

whole question of sex a subordinate consideration, 

like that of a blue or a green garment. For Hu- 

manity is primarily soul and mind, and only in a very 

secondary sense body. " Whatsoever things are just, 

whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are 

beautiful, whatsoever things are true, think on these 

things," is a text that has even more often cried for 

fulfilment by woman than by man. But how shall it 

be fulfilled, except in knowledge ? 

If woman is really as much a human being as man, 

then she has the same right to her fullest possible de- 

velopment as he has. If we should hesitate to em- 

phasize the sex of man, then we ought also to hesitate 

at emphasizing that of woman. If we seek by every 

available means to ennoble the one, then we must surely 

seek equally to ennoble the other. The development 

of woman must be regarded as an end, and a sacred 

end. And this for the sake of woman herself, and not 

in any way as a mere accessory to the happiness or 

well-being of man. 

CHARACTER IS SPIRITUALITY. 

ONE of the most valuable generalizations of the modern 

era is that which was first arrived at, just about the 

time of the French Revolution, that the individual, in 

his development, follows the race. Each man and woman, 

that is to say, when perfectly educated, becomes an 

epitome of the history either of his or her own race, or 

of Humanity as a whole. This great perception made 

itself felt as a definite element in a new scheme of 

education, through Pestalozzi, the saint and guru of 

teachers in the twentieth-century West. Pestalozzi 

saw that, if there were ever to be hope for the people, 

it must be through an education at once modern, that 

is liberal, psychological, that is founded on a know- 

ledge of mental laws, and in accordance with the his- 

toric development of man. 

The problem which the young student Pestalozzi, 

son and lover of the people, had to face at the end of 

the French Revolution, in Switzerland, was of trifling 

magnitude compared with that which confronts the 

son and lover of India to-day. And yet, in their inner- 

most nature, the two are identical. For this, like 

that, consists in the difficulty of opening up the human 

field to a new thought-harvest, while at the same time 

avoiding the evils of mere surface-culture. The soil 

that has brought forth the mango and the palm ought 

133 

134 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

not to be degraded to producing only gourds and 

vetches. And similarly, the land of the Vedas and of 

Jn&na- Yoga has no right to sink into the r61e of mere 

critic or imitator of European letters. 

Yet this is the present condition of Indian culture, 

and it appears likely to remain so, unless the Indian 

mind can deliberately discipline itself to the historic 

point of view. To do this is like adjusting oneself to 

a new dimension. Things which were hitherto merged 

in each other all at once become distinct. That which 

till now was instinctive is suddenly seen to have a goal, 

which is capable, in its turn, of clear definition. The 

social and the religious idea, under Hinduism as under 

Islam, were in the past indistinguishable. Philo- 

sophically, of course, every tyro could detach one from 

the other; in practice, however, they were one, and 

could not be separated. For religious reasons, as was 

supposed, we must eat in a certain way, wear specified 

clothing, and fulfil a definite scheme of purification. 

Suddenly, through the modern catastrophe, the sun- 

light of comparison, contrast, and relativity is poured 

over the whole area, and we discover that by living up 

to custom, we have been not accumulating pious 

merit, but merely approximating to that ideal of ab- 

solute refinement, cleanliness, and purity, which is the 

dream of all fine human life, and which may as well, 

or better, be achieved by some other canon as by our 

own. Seeing the goal thus clearly, we become able to 

analyse and compare various methods ; to add to our 

own conduct the virtues of others, and to eliminate 

from it the defects of all. Above all, we find out how 

to distinguish effectively between the social idea and 

CHARACTER IS SPIRITUALITY 135 

religion. It is thus that it becomes possible to talk 

of " aggressive Hinduism." 

Aggression is to be the dominant characteristic of 

the India that is to-day in school and class-room, 

aggression, and the thought and ideals of aggression. 

Instead of passivity, activity ; for the standard of weak- 

ness, the standard of strength ; in place of a steadily 

yielding defence, the ringing cheer of the invading host. 

Merely to change the attitude of the mind in this way 

is already to accomplish a revolution. And the incep- 

tion of some such change will have become evident to 

us all within a dozen years. 

But before the first step can be taken there must be 

clear thought about essentials. The object of all re- 

ligious systems is the formation of character. Theo- 

cratic systems aim at the construction of character 

through the discipline of personal habit. But at bottom 

it is character and not habit that they desire to create. 

No one will dispute that her ideals are a still prouder 

fruit of Hinduism than her widespread refinement. It 

is true that India is the only country in the world where 

a penniless wanderer may surpass a king in social pres- 

tige. But still grander is the fact that the king may 

be a Janaka, and the beggar a Suke Deva. 

Let us, then, touch on the comparative study of the 

value of habit as a factor in the evolution of character. 

We find in India that society watches a man all the 

years of his life, ready to criticize him for the hour at 

which he bathes and eats and prays, the mode of his 

travel, the fashion in which, perhaps, he wears his hair. 

To attempt a serious innovation on social custom in 

such directions as marriage or education seems to hor- 

136 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

rifled public opinion not merely selfish, but also sacri- 

legious. And this kind of criticism becomes more 

and more powerful over the individual as the villages 

empty themselves into the cities. For the man who 

might have had the courage to make his mark in the 

smaller community would think it presumptuous to 

go his own way in the larger. Hence the aggregation 

of men tends to become the multiplication of their 

weaknesses and defects. It is the mean and warped 

judgment that gains fastest in weight. 

But let us look at a community in which active ends 

and ideals are energetically pursued. Here a certain 

standard of personal refinement is exacted of the in- 

dividual, as rigidly as in India itself. But public 

opinion, being strong enough to kill, does not stoop to 

discuss such points. The learning of the method is 

relegated to the nursery, where it is imparted by 

women. Having passed through this stage of his 

education, it is not expected that the hero will fall 

short in future of its standards ; but if he did so, society 

would know how to punish him, by ignoring his exist- 

ence. Both he and society, meanwhile, are too busy 

with other efforts to be able to waste force on what 

is better left to his own pride. For a whole new range 

of ideals has now come in sight. From the time that 

a Western child steps out of the nursery, it is not 

quietness, docility, resignation, and obedience, that his 

teachers and guardians strive to foster in him, so much 

as strength, initiative, sense of responsibility, and 

power of rebellion. Temper and self-will are regarded 

by Western educators as a very precious power, which 

must by no means be crushed or destroyed, though 

CHARACTER IS SPIRITUALITY 137 

they must undoubtedly be disciplined and subordinated 

to impersonal ends. It is for this reason that fighting 

is encouraged in the playgrounds, the only stipulation 

being for fairplay. To forbid a boy to undergo the 

physical ordeal, means, as we think, undermining his 

sincerity, as well as his courage. But for him to strike 

one who is weaker than himself is to stand disgraced 

amongst his equals. 

That is to say, a social evolution which in Asia has 

occupied many centuries is in the West relegated to, at 

most, the first ten years of a child's upbringing, and 

he then passes into the period of chivalry. Indeed if, 

as some suppose, the ten Avatars of Vishnu are but 

the symbol of a single perfect life, India herself has 

not failed to point this lesson. For after the stages of 

fish, tortoise, boar, and man-lion, are all safely and 

happily passed, and the child has become " a little 

man," it still remains for him to be twice a Kshatriya 

before he is able to become a Buddha. What is this 

but the modern generalization that the individual in 

his development follows the race ? And in the last 

sublime myth of Kalki, may it not be that we have the 

prophecy of a great further evolution, in which Buddha- 

hood itself shall plunge once more into a sovereign act 

of redeeming love and pity, and initiate, for every indi- 

vidual of us, the triumph of active and aggressive ideals ? 

Let us suppose, then, that we see Hinduism no 

longer as the preserver of Hindu custom, but as the 

creator of Hindu character. It is surprising to think 

how radical a change is entailed in many directions by 

this conception. We are no longer oppressed with 

jealousy or fear, when we contemplate encroachments 

138 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

on our social and religious consciousness. Indeed, the 

idea of encroachment has ceased, because our work is 

not now to protect ourselves but to convert others. 

Point by point, we are determined, not merely to keep 

what we had, but to win what we never had before. 

The question is no longer of other people's attitude to 

us, but, rather, of what we think of them. It is not, 

how much have we kept ? but, how much have we an- 

nexed ? We cannot afford, now, to lose, because we 

are sworn to carry the battle far beyond our remotest 

frontiers. We no longer dream of submission, because 

struggle itself has become only the first step towards 

a distant victory to be won. 

No other religion in the world is so capable of this 

dynamic transformation as Hinduism. To Nagarjuna 

and Buddhaghosha, the Many was real and the Ego un- 

real. To Sankaracharya, the One was real and the 

Many unreal. To Ramakrishna arid Vivekananda, the 

Many and the One were the same Reality, perceived 

differently and at different times by the human con- 

sciousness. Do we realize what this means ? It 

means that CHARACTER IS SPIRITUALITY. It means 

that laziness and defeat are not renunciation. It 

means that to protect another is infinitely greater than 

to attain salvation. It means that Mukti lies in over- 

coming the thirst for Mukti. It means that conquest 

may be the highest form of Sannyas. It means, in 

short, that Hinduism is become aggressive, that the 

trumpet of Kalki is sounded already in our midst, and 

that it calls all that is noble, all that is lovely, all that 

is strenuous and heroic amongst us, to a battlefield on 

which the bugles of retreat shall never more be heard. 

THE TASK BEFORE US. 

IT is small wonder if, in the act of transition from old 

forms to new, from a mode of thought some centuries 

venerable, to one untried, and at best but modern, 

it is small wonder if in the throes of so great a crisis, 

India should have passed through a generation or two 

of intellectual confusion. The astonishing phenome- 

non is rather the speed and ease of her re-adjustment. 

Within fifty years to have assimilated a new language, 

and that of an unforeseen type, and to have made 

changes at almost every rung in the ladder of ideal 

culture, is this a little thing ? Is it a fact that could 

be duplicated anywhere ? To speak, in reply, of Japan, 

is mere foolishness. The problem of Japan, when 

midway through the nineteenth century, could hardly 

be compared with that of India. A small and com- 

pact people, of single origin, inhabiting islands and 

strong in their sense of insularity, could naturally mobi- 

lize themselves in any direction they pleased. 

The trouble hitherto has been that the people were 

as passive to modern culture as to ancient. In a land 

where the segregation of the soul has been the aim of 

the highest thought and life, for thousands of years, it 

has not been easy to turn every energy suddenly in the 

direction of activity and mutual co-operation. At 

bottom, however, there is strength enough in India, 

and in spite of the demoralization of hunger and baf- 

139 10 

140 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

fled hope, her people are about to set foot on the 

threshold of a new era. The ebb of the tide has al- 

ready reached its utmost. The reaction of fortune is 

about to begin. That this is so, is due to the fact 

that at the beginning of the twentieth century the Indian 

people can take a bird's-eye view of their past history, 

and are able to understand clearly their true position. 

There is a saying in India that to see through Maya 

is to destroy her. But few realize how literally this 

is true. The disaster or difficulty that has ceased to 

confuse and bewilder us, is about to be defeated. The 

evil about which we can think and express ourselves 

clearly, has already lost its power. To measure our 

defeat accurately is to reverse it. When a people, 

as a people, from the highest to the lowest, are united 

in straight and steady understanding of their circum- 

stances, without doubt and without illusion, then events 

are about to precipitate themselves. Discrimination is 

the mark of the highest spirituality. Spirituality is the 

only irresistible force. Like the fire that wraps a 

forest in flame, is the power of the mind of a whole 

nation. 

From the year 1858 onwards, there has been no 

possible goal for the Indian people but a complete as- 

similation of the modern consciousness. At that point 

the mediaeval order was at an end. Prithvi Rai and 

Shah Jehan, Asoka and Akbar were mingled in a 

common oblivion. Only the soil they had loved, only 

the people they had led, remained, to address them- 

selves to a new task, to stand or fall by their power to 

cope with a new condition. Sharp as the contrast be- 

tween the Gunga and the Jumna was the difference be- 

THE TASK BEFORE US 141 

tween the mediaeval and the modern. Invincible as 

the resistless current of the Bhagirathi is that new 

India that is to be born of both. 

Up to the present, however, in the exhaustion of 

the transition, it has not been possible for the national 

mind to envisage the problem, so as to see or state its 

terms clearly. To-day this first stage is over. The 

Indian mind is no longer in blind collapse. It is 

awaking to fresh strength, and about to survey both 

past and present, that by their means it may determine 

and forecast its future. 

What are the differentia, what is the precise problem 

of this modern age ? Definitions are proverbially rash, 

but it is not difficult to state some facts and considera- 

tions bearing on this subject, with great precision. 

The outstanding fact about the modern period has been, 

undoubtedly, the geographical discovery of the world 

as a whole. The one characteristic of the modern 

mind, that makes it unlike the mind of any other age, 

is the completeness with which it is able to survey and 

define the surface of the planet Earth. The discovery 

of steam, with the consequent invention of railways 

and steamboats, has undoubtedly been the efficient 

cause of this exploration, and out of the consequent 

clash of faiths and cultures, has come the power to 

make the personal or mythological equation ; to cancel, 

more or less to one's own satisfaction, all the elements 

of local prejudice in a given problem ; and from this 

again has been born the ideal of modern science, of 

modern culture generally, the attempt to extract the 

root-fact from all the diversity of phenomena in which 

it clothes itself. 

10*

142 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

In this way, the intellectual and spiritual discovery 

of the world has followed hard on the physical or 

geographical. In culture, a new era has been pro- 

claimed. It is no longer enough to know one thing 

well. It is also incumbent upon us to understand its 

place amongst other things, and its relation to the 

scheme of knowledge as a whole. 

The pioneers of modernism, meanwhile, have been 

dominated by the ideal of the machine, to which they 

have owed so much of their success. To this fact we 

may trace our present-day standards of order and 

efficiency. A large house of business, with its staff, is 

simply a human machine of an intricate kind. It has 

been said that the Oriental regards his servants as 

personal attendants, the Western as so many hidden 

machines. Nothing could be more true. The Oriental 

is in every case an agriculturist, accustomed to the 

picturesque disorder of seed-time and harvest, cowshed 

and barn, and far from irritated by it. Every thought 

and habit of the Western, on the other hand, is domin- 

ated by the notion of mechanical accuracy and effici- 

ency, and by the effort of the mechanician to achieve 

a given end by the most economical possible means. 

In a society in which the highest knowledge fulfils 

the twofold test of order and synthesis, the great sin 

is provincialism. And here the new world differs from 

the old, in which the tastes of aristocrats were supreme, 

and mortal crime lay in vulgarity. 

But while the great intellectual and social failure of 

to-day lies in provincialism, no serious mind assumes 

that the world-idea is to be arrived at easily. Only 

the tree that is firm-rooted in its own soil can offer us 

THE TASK BEFORE US 143 

a perfect crown of leaf and blossom. And similarly, 

only the heart that responds perfectly to the claims of 

its immediate environment, only the character that 

fulfils to the utmost its stint of civic duty, only this 

heart and mind is capable of taking its place in the 

ranks of the truly cosmopolitan. Only the fully na- 

tional can possibly contribute to the cosmo-national. 

And this is understood to-day by cultured persons, 

all the world over. The cheap superciliousness of the 

young man who, on leaving his village in Kamschatka 

or Uganda, has been initiated into the habits and 

manners of the European democracy, and takes himself 

for this reason as an exalted and competent critic of 

his own people, only evokes a smile. No one desires 

his acquaintance, for he has nothing to add to the 

thought-world of those with whom he is so proud to 

have been associated. Every act, every movement, 

writes large across his forehead the word "snob." 

On the other hand, to take one's stand persistently 

on the local prejudices of the village in Kamschatka or 

Uganda, is, though infinitely more manly and self-re- 

specting, almost as futile. It is better to be provincial 

than to be vulgar, for our horror of vulgarity is the 

longer-grown. But both miss the effective achievement. 

What the time demands of us is that in us our whole 

past shall be made a part of the world's life. This is 

what is called the realization of the national idea. But 

it must be realized everywhere, in the world idea. In 

order to attain a larger power of giving, we may break 

through any barrier of custom. But it is written inex- 

orably in the very nature of things that, if we sacrifice 

custom merely for some mean or selfish motive, fine 

144 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

men and women everywhere will refuse to admit us to 

their fellowship. 

Cosmo-nationality of thought and conduct, then, is 

not easy for any man to reach. Only through a per- 

fect realization of his own nationality can anyone, any- 

where, win to it. And cosmo-nationality consists in 

holding the local idea in the world idea. It is well known 

that culture is a matter of sympathy, rather than of 

information. It would follow that the cultivation of 

the sense of humanity as a whole, is the essential fea- 

ture of a modern education. But this cannot be 

achieved by mere geographical knowledge. The uni- 

fication of the world -has emancipated the human mind 

to some extent, and we now understand that a man's 

character is the sum of his assimilated experiences ; in 

other words, that his history is written in his face. And 

what is true of persons we see also to be true of 

countries. The very landscape is a key to the hopes 

and dreams of men. Their hopes and dreams explain 

to us the heritage they have left. History, then, is as 

essential to the modern consciousness as geography. 

It is the second dimension, as it were, of Truth, as we 

now seek it, naked and dynamic. 

Our changed attitude changes all our conceptions. 

We make a new survey of our knowledge, and are no 

longer content to view dog as dog and cow as cow, 

but must needs learn all the links and developments 

between them. Their very differences are now re- 

garded by us as a guarantee of their fundamental com- 

munity of origin. We break open the rocks and scour 

the waste places of the earth, that we may find forms 

which will explain to us the divergence of horse- 

THE TASK BEFORE US 145 

hoof from cow-hoof, reptile from fish, and bird from 

both. 

Or we turn to the study of art and letters. Here 

again, our scrutiny has entered on the comparative 

stage. If we investigate the records of Baghdad, we 

must understand also those of Moorish Spain. It is 

not enough to follow the course of chivalry in France, 

unless we also assist at its birth in the German forests. 

Our idea of unity has become organic, evolutionary, 

and some picture of the movement and clash of the 

world as a whole is an overmastering need. 

Yet even the finest mind is limited by its own 

ignorance. What a painful blank in modern culture 

whenever we come upon the word " China " ! How little 

has it been possible to say about India to which any 

cultivated Indian can give more than a pitying smile ! 

And how utterly misunderstood is the Mohammedan 

world ! The world of culture, be it remembered, is not 

tainted by political corruption. Race-prejudice has 

no place in the ideal aspiration after knowledge. Why 

then should a silence, almost political, pervade the 

spaces that ought to be filled with Oriental interpre- 

tation, in modern thought ? 

The reason, as regards India, is easy enough to find. 

The Indian mind has not reached out to conquer and 

possess its own land as its own inalienable share and 

trust, in the world as a whole. It has been content, 

even in things modern, to take obediently whatever 

was given to it. And the newness and strangeness 

of the thing given, has dazed it. The Indian people 

as a whole for the last two generations have been as 

men walking in a dream, without manhood, without 

146 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

power to react freely against conditions, without even 

common- sense. 

But to-day, in the deliberate adoption of an aggres- 

sive policy, we have put all this behind us. Realizing 

that life is struggle, we are now determined that our 

wrestling with the powers that are against us, shall 

enable us to contribute to the world's sum of culture, 

not merely to make adaptations from it. Our part 

henceforth is active, and not passive. The Indianizing 

of India, the organizing of our national thought, the 

laying out of our line of march, all this is to be done by 

us, not by others on our behalf. We accept no more 

programmes. Henceforth are we become the makers 

of programmes. We obey no more policies. Hence- 

forth do we create policies. We refuse longer to call 

by the name of " education " the apprenticeship neces- 

sary for a ten-rupee clerkship. We put such things in 

their true place. We ordain ourselves intellectually 

free. What then is the task before us ? 

Our task is to translate ancient knowledge into 

modern equivalents. We have to clothe the old 

strength in a new form. The new form without that 

old strength is nothing but a mockery : almost equally 

foolish is the savage anachronism of an old-time power 

without fit expression. Spiritually, intellectually, there 

is no undertaking but we must attempt it. 

Great realms of the ideal open for our exploration. 

New conceptions of life and duty and freedom ; new 

ideas of citizenship ; untried expressions of love and 

friendship into all these we must throw ourselves with 

burning energy, and make them our own. 

We must create a history of India in living terms. 

THE TASK BEFORE US 147 

Up to the present that history, as written in English, 

practically begins with Warren Hastings, and crams 

in certain unavoidable preliminaries, which cover a few 

thousands of years, and, troublesome as they are, cannot 

be altogether omitted ! All this is merely childish 

and has to be brought to the block. The history of 

India has yet to be written for the first time. It has 

to be humanized, emotionalized, made the trumpet- 

voice and evangel of the races that inhabit India. 

And to do this, it must be re-connected with place. 

Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, are the present view- 

points. Surely the heroes that sleep on ancient battle- 

fields, the forefathers that made for themselves the 

wide-walled cities, the scholars ithat left behind them 

precious thought and script, have laughed sometimes 

when they have not wept to see from high heaven 

the grotesque docility of their descendants ! The 

history of India consists in truth of the strata of at 

least three thousand years. Ocean-bed and river- 

sands, forest and marsh, and ocean-floor again, lie 

piled one upon the other and in each period some new 

point is centre. Ayodhya, and Hastinapura, In- 

draprastha and Pataliputra, Ujjain and Delhi, Conjeeve- 

ram and Amaravati, what of the vanished worlds of 

which all these were born ? There is no evangel without 

worship. Throw yourselves, children of India, into the 

worship of these and your whole past. Strive passion- 

ately for knowledge. Yours are the spades and mattocks 

of this excavation. For with you and not with the 

foreigner are the thought and language that will make 

it easy to unearth the old significance. India's whole 

hope lies in a deeper research, a more rigid investiga- 

148 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

tion of facts. With her, encouragement, and not des- 

pair, is on the side of truth ! 

Great literatures have to be created in each of the 

vernaculars. These literatures must voice the past, 

translate the present, forecast the future. The science 

and the imagination of Europe have to be brought, 

through the vernacular, to every door. India cannot 

afford to imitate foreign institutions. Neither can she 

afford to remain ignorant of foreign ideals. The his- 

tory of the past has to be re-written in simple terms. 

True hope for the time to come must fill all hearts, 

like a nation's Common Prayer. On the creation of 

such vernacular literatures depends the effective edu- 

cation of women. 

Art must be reborn. Not the miserable travesty of 

would-be Europeanism that we at present know. 

There is no voice like that of art to reach the people. 

A song, a picture, may be the fiery cross l that reaches 

all the tribes, and makes them one. And art will be 

reborn, for she has found a new subject, India herself. 

Ah, to be a thinker in bronze and give to the world 

the beauty of the Southern flariak, as he swings, scarce 

clad, along the Beach-Road at Madras ! Ah to be a 

Millet, and paint the woman worshipping at dawn be- 

side the sea ! Oh for a pencil that would interpret 

the beauty of the Indian sari ; the gentle life of village 

and temple ; the coming and going at the Ganges' side ; 

the play of the children ; the faces, and the labours, 

of the cows ! 

1 A rough cross of charred wood used to be passed from clan to clan 

in the Scottish Highlands, as the call to war. We all know the folded 

chapati of the Indian villages. 

THE TASK BEFORE US 149 

But far more, on behalf of India herself, do we need 

artists, half poets and half draughtsmen, who can wake 

in us the great new senses. We want men of the 

Indian blood who can portray for us the men of old, 

Bhishma and Yudhisthira, Akbar and Sher Shah, 

Pratap Singh and Chand Bibi, in such fashion as to 

stir the blood. We want through these to feel out, as 

a people, towards the new duties of the time to be. 

Not only to utter India to the world, but also to voice 

India to herself, this is the mission of art, divine 

mother of the ideal, when it descends to clothe itself 

in forms of realism. 

At each step, then, the conquest must be twofold. 

On this side something to be added to the world's 

knowledge, and on that an utterance to be given for 

the first time for India to herself. This is the battle 

that opens before the present generation. On our 

fighting a good fight, the very existence, it may be, of 

the next depends. Our national life is become per- 

force a national assault. As yet the very outworks 

of the besieged city are almost unstormed. Herewith 

then let us sound the charge. Sons of the Indian past, 

do ye fear to sleep at nightfall on your shields ? On, 

on, in the name of a new spirituality, to command the 

treasures of the modern world ! On, on, soldiers of 

the Indian Motherland, seize ye the battlements and 

penetrate to the citadel ! Place garrison and watch 

within the hard-won towers, or fall, that others may 

climb on your dead bodies to the height ye strove to 

win ! 

THE IDEAL. 

THE adoption of the active or aggressive attitude of 

mind changes for us all our theories. We sight now 

nothing but the goal. Means have become ends, ends 

means. The power to count the cost and hesitate is 

gone for ever. We seek great objects and create them, 

scorning small hopes. The India about us has become 

Maha BMrata, Heroic India. The future offers 

wider chances of sacrifice than the past. We look to 

make our descendants greater than our ancestors. 

Words have changed their meanings. Karma is no 

longer a destiny but an opportunity. Do I behold 

injustice? Mine the right to prohibit oppression, and 

I do it. Before the honest indignation of one fearless 

man, the whole of Maya trembles and departs. Des- 

tiny is passive before me. I triumph over it. Strength 

is the power to take our own life, at its most perfect, 

and break it if need be across the knee. This strength 

is now ours, and with it we conquer the earth. No 

one is so invincible as the man who has not dreamed 

of defeat, because he has a world beyond victory to 

achieve. 

Our desires have grown immeasurable. But they 

are desires to give, not to receive. We would fain win, 

that we may abandon to those behind us, and pass on. 

For that which is dearer to us than self, we long 

150

THE IDEAL 151 

greatly to throw away our life, and this defeated sacri- 

fice transforms all our work with energy. The whole 

of life becomes the quest of death. Those that are 

close to us become associated with ourselves in our 

risks and defiances. We learn to realize that in this 

fact lies their beatitude. Buddha did not sacrifice 

Yasodhara when he left her. He conferred on her the 

glory of renouncing with him. 

Or is it Brahmacharya ? This is not only for the 

monk. Nor is it wholly of the body. " Abstinence," 

says one, " without a great purpose, is nothing. It is 

only the loss of another power." But even Brahma- 

charya has to be made aggressive. Celibacy, here, is 

only the passive side of a life that sees human beings 

actively as minds and souls. Marriage itself ought to 

be, in the first place, a friendship of the mind. Ex- 

change of thought and communion of struggle is far 

beyond the offering of comfort, and the one need not 

exclude the other. The brahmacharya of the hero 

makes marriage noble, for it seeks the good of another 

as an end in itself. In true Brahmacharya is involved 

the education of women, for a radiant purity comes to 

its perfect fruition in thought and knowledge and as- 

similation of experience, and there is a brahmacharya 

of the wife as well as of the nun. 

In the life of Tapasya is constant renewal of energy 

and light. Every task becomes easy to the worshipper 

of Sarasvati. He spurns ease. Daily and hourly 

does the impersonal triumph in him over the personal. 

His ideal aspires upward like a living flame. Each 

circle reveals fresh heights to be gained. The wife 

shares in the ideals of her husband. She protects them, 

152 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

as if they were her children, even against himself. She 

urges him on towards them, when alone he might 

have flagged. She measures their common glory by 

the degree of this realization. Her womanhood is grave 

and tender like some sacrament of the eternal. " Not 

this, not this, " is the cry ever in the ears of both. 

Counting happiness for self a little thing, each gives 

it to the other in seeking to bestow it on the world 

around. 

Sannyasin, again, is a word charged with new signifi- 

cance. It is not his gerrua cloth, but his selflessness, 

that makes a monk. There may be monks of science 

and learning, monks of art and industry, monks of the 

public life and service, and monks for the defence of 

the defenceless. Great is the impulse of renunciation : 

greater is the sustained self-sacrifice of a heroic life. In 

the soul of the maha-purusha it is difficult, sometimes, 

to tell whether soldier or sannyasin is predominant. 

He combines the daring of the one with the freedom 

of the other. Years leave no mark on the aggressive 

life. It is as ready to cast itself down from the palm- 

tree's height, in old age, as it was in youth. Or more. 

For the spiritual will has grown stronger with time. 

Nothing is measured by personal hope or fear. All is 

tested by the supreme purpose, as making an end in 

itself. Self ceases to be a possible motive. The hand 

once put to the plough, it grows there, and the man 

would not know how to turn back. The sannyasin 

cannot be touched by misery. For him defeat is merely 

a passing phase. Ultimate victory is inevitable. He 

is light-hearted in failure, as in success. 

Obedience to the guru becomes eager fulfilment of 

THE IDEAL 153 

an idea, and a seeking out of new ways in which to bring 

about fulfilment. Every act of attainment is now un- 

derstood to be a spiritual achievement, and there is no 

rest without the handing on of each realization, as to 

disciples. At the same time, the standard of disciple- 

ship has grown inexorable. There is no passing of 

the spurious coin as genuine. The aspirant must serve, 

because without much service there is no germination 

of truth. He must worship, because without loyalty 

there is no manhood. But one stain of insincerity, 

one blemish of self-interest, and the guru must recog- 

nize though to do so be like going maimed for life, 

that this is not that chela for whom all gurus seek. 

Love and hatred are now immense powers. Love, 

when no longer personal, when all strength, becomes 

rousing, invigorating, life-giving. Hatred is the refusal 

to compromise. It cuts off meanness and falsehood 

root and branch. Love, now, finds unity of intention 

behind everything that is sincere. Pride is too proud 

to found itself on a lie. The man is silent until he 

has first acted. Nor dare he boast himself of the 

deeds of his ancestors or the achievements of his 

fellows. A fierce humility mingles with all his am- 

bition and tells him that praise from unworthy lips is 

sacrilege. 

And finally the life's purpose has become a consuming 

fire. The object is desired for its own sake. Like Shivi- 

Rana, whose whole soul was set on sacrifice, the left 

side weeps that to the right alone it is given to suffer. 

Like Myer the German chemist, who had an eye and 

an arm torn off in the discovery of nitrogen compounds, 

the soul kneels in the midst of agony, to give thanks 

154 RELIGION AND DHARMA 

in an ecstasy that enough is still left to continue the 

search for knowledge. The vibration of the word 

Work when uttered by such workmen, carries the 

thrill offndna to other hearts. 

Strong as the thunder-bolt, austere as Brahmacharya, 

great-hearted and selfless, such should be that sannya- 

sin who has taken the service of others as his Sannyas, 

and not less than this should be the son of a militant 

Hinduism. 

GLOSSARY. 

THE papers contained in this volume were written for an 

almost exclusively Indian audience. A brief glossary, how- 

ever, is appended for the assistance of the European reader 

who may be unfamiliar with the Sanskrit words in the text. 

Sister Nivedita, in her occasional writing, adopted conveni- 

ent spellings. Some of the words require, of course, a much 

fuller interpretation. 

Advaita. 

Atman. 

Bhajana. 

Bhakta. 

Bhakti. 

Brahma- 

charya. 

Brahman. 

Chela. 

Gerrua. 

Grihastha- 

shrama. 

Guru. 

Guru-bhakti. 

Japam. 

Jnana. 

Jnanam. 

Jnana- Yoga. 

Karma. 

Karma- 

Yoga. 

Maha- 

purusha. 

Literally, " One without a second." Absolute monism ; 

one of the four principal schools of Vedanta philoso- 

phy. 

The self. 

Devotional song. 

One who has attained through devotion or love. 

Realization of the Divinity through love or devotion. 

Pupilage in divine knowledge during celibacy. 

The one Existence, the Absolute. 

Disciple. 

The orange-coloured garment of the ascetic. 

The stage of worldly and family life being one of the 

four stages into which a Hindu's life is traditionally 

divided. 

Teacher, spiritual preceptor. 

Devotion towards the Guru. 

Prayer, with the telling of beads. 

Knowledge. 

Birth, life, incarnation. 

Realization through knowledge. 

One who has attained through knowledge. 

Work ; also the results of work. The law of cause and 

effect in the moral world. 

Realization by a life of action or work. 

The Great Soul. 

155 

156 

RELIGION AND DHARMA 

Maya. The conception of the universe in its phenomenal (illu- 

sory) aspect, or as relative existence. 

Mukti. Deliverence ; complete realization. 

Nirvikalpa Super-consciousness, in which the consciousness of 

Samcldhi. knowledge, subject, and object disappears. 

Para. Quarter (of a city). 

Pranam. Bowing, salutation. 

Puja. Worship. 

Punya. Religious merit. 

Rishi. Sage ; master of divine wisdom. 

Sachchid- The three attributes of the Absolute : Sa* (Being), Chit 

dnanda. (Knowledge), Anand (Bliss). 

Sadhan&. Originally, the propitiation of the elemental powers for 

achieving a desired object or result ; spiritual en- 

deavour towards attainment ; the life of realization. 

Sadhu. Saint, religious mendicant. 

Samadhi. Super-consciousness, trance. 

Sanathan 

Dharma. Eternal religion. 

Sannyas. Renunciation of worldly life. 

Sannyasin. One who has renounced worldly life ; a religious ascetic. 

Sari. The garment of the Indian woman. 

Sloka. A Sanskrit verse, a couplet. 

Swadharma. One's own duty varying with the different capacities 

in which a man stands in relation to God, the world, 

country, state, family, etc. 

Tamas. Darkness, inertia. 

Tamasic. Relating to Tamas. 

Tapasya. Life regulated on the practice of Tapas. 

Tapas. Fasting and other ways of controlling the body. 

Thakur-ghar. The household oratory; usually a small structure of 

wood or metal, in which the images are kept and the 

worship is performed. 

Tirtha. Pilgrimage, also a place of pilgrimage. 

Ty^gi. One who has renounced the world. 

Vairagyam. Renunciation. 

Vedanta. The system of transcendental philosophy so named 

because founded upon the latter part of the Vedas : 

conceived as embodying the ultimate aim of the 

Vedas. " The oldest name of the oldest philosophy 

in India " (Max Miiller). 

Yoga. Literally, joining ; the union of the lower self with the 

higher self. 

Yogi. One who practises yoga. 

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