Part 12 (1/2)

CHAPTER XIX

THE IDEAS OF SIN AND SALVATION

”Conscience does make cowards of us _all_.”

--SHAKESPEARE.

[Sidenote: Recapitulation.]

[Sidenote: The new Theism.]

In the new India, as fish out of the water die, many things cannot survive. We have seen the educated Hindu dropping polytheism, forgetting pantheism, and adopting or readopting monotheism as the basis of his religious thinking and feeling. For modern enlightenment and Indian polytheism are incongruous; there is a like incongruity between Indian pantheism and the modern demand for practical reality. Likewise, both polytheism and pantheism are inconsistent with Christian thought, which is no minor factor in the education of modern India. Further, the theism that the educated Hindu is adopting as the basis of his religion approaches to Christian Theism. The doctrines of the Fatherhood of G.o.d and the Brotherhood of Man have become commonplaces in his mouth.

[Sidenote: Homage to Christ Himself]

Likewise, the educated Hindu is strongly attracted to the person of Jesus Christ, in spite of His alien birth and His a.s.sociation with Great Britain. There is a sweet savour in His presence, and the man of any spirituality finds it grateful to sit at His feet. That familiar oriental expression, hyperbolical to our ears, but ever upon the lips in India to express the relations.h.i.+p of student to trusted professor, or of disciple to religious teacher, expresses exactly the relations.h.i.+p to Jesus Christ of the educated man who is possessed of any religious instinct. To such a man the miracles, the superhuman claims, the highest t.i.tles of Jesus Christ, present no difficulty until they are formulated for his subscription in some hard dogmatic mould. Then he must question and discuss.

[Sidenote: Transmigration forgotten.]

Again, the educated Hindu finds himself employing about the dead and the hereafter not the language of transmigration, but words that convey the idea of a continuation of our present consciousness in the presence of a personal G.o.d. For life is becoming worth living, and the thought of life continuing and progressing is acceptable. This present life also has become a reality; a devotee renouncing the world may deny its reality; but how in this practical modern world can a man retain the doctrine of Maya or Delusion. It has dropped from the speech and apparently out of the mind of the educated cla.s.ses.

[Sidenote: The ideas of Sin and Salvation by faith in Jesus Christ not yet dynamical.]

I have suggested that those features of Christianity that are proving to be dynamical in India will be found to be those same that are proving to be dynamical in Britain. The converse also probably holds true, as our religious teachers might do well to note. The doctrines of Sin and Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ do not yet seem to have commended themselves in any measure in India. Positive repudiation of a Christian doctrine is rare, but the flouris.h.i.+ng new sect of the North-West, the [=A]ryas, make a point of repudiating the Christian doctrine of salvation by faith, although not explicitly denying it in their creed. Over against it they set up the Justice of G.o.d and the certainty of goodness and wickedness receiving each its meed. One can imagine that salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, the outstanding feature of Christianity, may have been unworthily presented to the [=A]rya leaders, so that it appeared to them merely as some cheap or gratis kind of ”indulgences.” The biographer of the Pa.r.s.ee philanthropist, Malabari, a forceful and otherwise well-informed writer, sets forth that idea of salvation by faith, or an idea closely akin. He is explaining why his religious-minded hero did not accept the religion of his missionary teachers. ”The proud Asiatic,” he says, ”strives to purchase salvation with work, and never stoops to accept it as alms, as it necessarily would be if faith were to be his only merit.” The unworthy presentation of ”salvation by faith” may have occurred either in feeble Christian preaching or in anti-Christian pamphlets. Neither is unknown in India; and anti-Christian pamphlets have been known to be circulated through [=A]rya agencies.

[Sidenote: The ideas of sin incompatible with pantheism.]

To appreciate the att.i.tude of the Hindu mind to the doctrines of Sin and Salvation, we must return again to the rough division of Hindus into--first, the ma.s.s of the people, polytheists; secondly, the educated cla.s.ses, now largely monotheists; thirdly, the brahmanically educated and the ascetics, pantheists. It is only with the monotheists that we have now to deal. As already said--to the pantheist the word sin has no meaning. Where all is G.o.d, sin or alienation from G.o.d is a contradiction in terms. The conception of sin implies the _two_ conceptions of G.o.d and Man, or at least of Law and Man; and where one or other of these two conceptions is lacking, the conception of sin cannot arise. In pantheism, the idea of man as a distinct individual is relegated to the region of Maya or Delusion; there cannot therefore be a real sinner.

Does such reasoning appear mere dialectics without practical application, or is it unfair, think you, thus to bind a person down to the logical deductions from his creed? On the contrary, persons denying that we can sin are easy to find. Writes the latest British apostle of Hinduism, for the leaders of reaction in India are a few English and Americans: ”There is no longer a vague horrible something called sin: This has given place to a clearly defined state of ignorance or blindness of the will.”[119] I quote again also from Swami Vivekananda, representative of Hinduism in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893. It is from his lecture published in 1896, ent.i.tled _The Real and the Apparent Man_. His statement is unambiguous. ”It is the greatest of all lies,” he says, ”that we are mere men; we are the G.o.d of the Universe.... The worst lie that you ever told yourself is that you were born a sinner.... The wicked see this universe as a h.e.l.l; and the partially good see it as heaven; and the perfect beings realise it as G.o.d Himself. By mistake we think that we are impure, that we are limited, that we are separate. The real man is the One Unit Existence.”

Such is the logical and the actual outcome of pantheism in regard to the idea of sin, and such is the standpoint of Hindu philosophy.

[Sidenote: Sankarachargya, the pantheist's, confession of sins.]

Or if further ill.u.s.tration be needed of the incompatibility of the ideas of pantheism and sin, listen to the striking prayer of Sankarachargya, the pantheistic Vedantist of the eighth century A.D., with whom is identified the pantheistic motto, ”One only, without a second.”[120] It attracts our attention because Sankarachargya is professedly confessing sins. Thus runs the prayer: ”O Lord, pardon my three sins: I have in contemplation clothed in form thee who art formless; I have in praise described thee who art ineffable; and in visiting shrines I have ignored thine omnipresence.”[121] Beautiful expressions indeed, confessions that finite language and definite acts are inadequate to the Infinite, nay, contradictions of the Infinite, expressions fit to be recited in prayer by any man of any creed who feels that G.o.d is a Spirit and omnipresent!

But in a Christian prayer such expressions would only form a preface to confession of one's own _moral_ sin; after adoration comes confession.

Whether, like Sankarachargya, we think of the Deity objectively, as the formless and literally omnipresent Being, the _pure Being_ which, according to Hegel, equals nothing, or whether like Swami Vivekananda we think of man and G.o.d as really one, all differentiation being a delusion within the mind--there is _no second_, neither any second to sin against nor any second to commit the sin.

[Sidenote: The ma.s.ses and the sense of sin.]

[Sidenote: Prescriptions for sinners.]

For the ignorant ma.s.ses, the sense of sin has been worn out by the importance attached to religious and social externals and by the artificial value of the service of a hereditary monopolist priesthood.

These right, all is right in the eyes of the millions of India. When one of the mult.i.tude proposes to himself a visit to some shrine or sacred spot, no doubt the motive often is some divine dissatisfaction with himself; it is a feeling that G.o.d is not near enough where he himself lives. But what is poured into his ears? By a visit to Dwaraka, the city of Krishna's sports, he will be liberated from all his sins. By bathing in the sacred stream of the Ganges he will wash away his sins. All who die at Benares are sure to go to heaven. By repeating the Gayatri (a certain verse of the Rigveda addressed to the sun) a man is saved. ”A brahman who holds the Veda in his memory is not culpable though he should destroy the three worlds”--so says the Code of Manu. The Tantras, or ritual works of modern Hinduism, abound in such prescriptions for sinners. ”He who liberates a bull at the Aswamedika place of pilgrimage obtains _mukti_, that is salvation or an end of his rebirths.” ”All sin is destroyed by the repet.i.tion of Kali's thousand names.” ”The water of a guru's [religious teacher's] feet purifies from all sin.” ”The man who carries the guru's dust [the dust of the guru's feet] upon his head is emanc.i.p.ated from all sin and is [the G.o.d] Siva himself.” ”By a certain inhalation of the breath through the left nostril, and holding of the breath, with repet.i.tion of _yam_, the V[=a]yu Bija or mystical spell of wind or air, the body and its indwelling sinful self are dessicated, the breath being expelled by the right nostril.”[122] And so on _ad infinitum_. Superst.i.tion, Western or Eastern, has no end of panaceas. We recall the advertis.e.m.e.nts of ”Plenaria indulgenzia” on the doors of churches in South Italy. Visiting Benares, the metropolis of popular Hinduism, the conception of salvation everywhere obtruded upon one is that it is a question of sacred spots, and of due offerings and performances thereat.

[Sidenote: The signification of sacrifices to the Indian ma.s.ses.]

[Sidenote: Description of animal sacrifice.]