Part 11 (1/2)
Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an East and a West, and an impa.s.sable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking of England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approaches the question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decide whether there is really an East and a West, and what either stands for.
That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its own, is, I think, true. But it must be limited in time to the last two centuries, and in s.p.a.ce to the countries of Western Europe and the continent of America. So understood, the West forms, in all the most important respects, a h.o.m.ogeneous system. True, it is divided into different nations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and often conflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important, that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form in the burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in the perspective of history, they are survivals, atrophying and disappearing.
Behind and despite of them there is a common Western mind and a common Western organisation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan; trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, and the results achieved by it are common. There is one system of industry, that known as Capitalism; and the problems arising from it and the solutions propounded appear alike in every nation. There is one political tendency, or fact, that of popular government. There are cognate aims and similar achievements in literature and art. There is, in brief, a Western movement, a Western problem, a Western mentality; and the particular happenings of particular nations are all parts of this one happening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common religion. I do not refer to Christianity, for the religion I mean is held by hundreds and thousands who are not Christians, and indeed does not very readily find in Christianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has not been formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard in all the serious work and all the serious thought of the West. It is the religion of Good and Evil, of Time and the process in Time. If it tried to draw up a confession of faith perhaps it would produce, as its first attempt, something of this kind:--
”I believe in the ultimate distinction between Good and Evil, and in a real process in a real Time. I believe it to be my duty to increase Good and diminish Evil; I believe that in doing this I am serving the purpose of the world. I know this; I do not know anything else; and I am reluctant to put questions to which I have no answer, and to which I do not believe that anyone has an answer. Action, as defined above, is my creed. Speculation weakens action. I do not wish to speculate, I wish to live. And I believe the true life to be the life I have described.”
In saying that this is the real creed of the modern Western man I do not pretend that he always knows or would admit it to be so. But if his actions, his words, and his thoughts be sympathetically interpreted, where all are at their best, I think they will be found to imply something of this kind. And this att.i.tude I call religious, not merely ethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards Good is of the essence of the World, not only of men, or of Man. To believe this is an act of faith, not of reason; though it is not contrary to reason, as no faith should be or long can be. Many men do _not_ believe it, for many are not religious; others, while believing it, may believe also many other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of religion in the modern West, the justification of our life, the faith of our works. I call it the Religion of Time, and distinguish it thus from the Religion of Eternity.
In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common aim and a common motive, there is really a West. Is there also an East? That is not so clear. In some important respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisations are alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their industry is manual not mechanical. Their social unit is the extended family. To travel in the East is to realise that life on the soil and in the village is there still the normal life, as it has been almost everywhere and always, throughout civilisation, until the last century in the West.
But though there is thus in the East a common way of life, there is not a common organisation nor a common spirit. Economically, the great Eastern countries are still independent of one another. Each lives for the most part by and on itself. And their intellectual and spiritual intercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negligible as their economic commerce. The influence that is beginning to be strong upon them all is that of Western culture; and if they become alike in their outlook on life, it will be by a.s.similating that. But, at present, they are not alike. It is easy, in this matter, to be deceived by the outward forms of religion. Because Buddhism originated in India and spread to China and j.a.pan, because j.a.pan took Confucian ideals from China, it is natural to conclude that there is a common religious spirit throughout the East, or the Far East. But one might as reasonably infer that the spirit of the christianised Teutons was the same as that of the Jews or of the Christians in the East. Nations borrow religions, but they shape them according to their own genius. And if I am not very much mistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, radically distinct from and even opposed to that of China or j.a.pan. These latter countries, indeed, I believe, are far closer to the West than they are to India. Let me explain.
India is the true origin and home of what I have called the religion of Eternity. That idea seems to have gone out from her to the rest of the world. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and pa.s.sion.
Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In India they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. No society, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activity in Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the direct and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, would bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the very physical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal was first conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the pa.s.sion to realise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the date of the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method of realisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of the temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Western influences have been excluded. Let me ill.u.s.trate from the words of Sri Ramakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late in the nineteenth century.
First, for the claim to pa.s.s directly into union with the Eternal:
”I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! Why then should I reason? I do actually see that it is the Absolute Who has become all these things about us; it is He who appears as the finite soul and the phenomenal world. One must have such an awakening of the Spirit within to see this Reality.... Spiritual awakening must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of this world.”[5]
And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi is merely one of intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, or super-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains many accounts of its effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them:
”He is now in a state of Samadhi, the superconscious or G.o.d-conscious state. The body is again motionless. The eyes are again fixed! The boys only a moment ago were laughing and making merry! Now they all look grave. Their eyes are steadfastly fixed on the master's face. They marvel at the wonderful change that has come over him. It takes him long to come back to the sense world. His limbs now begin to lose their stiffness. His face beams with smiles, the organs of sense begin to come back each to its own work. Tears of joy stand at the corners of his eyes.
He chants the sacred name of Rama.”[6]
The object, then, of this saint, and one he claims to have attained, is to come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes him altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, a.s.sume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; they merely attempt to give them a new content. If conduct is to have any meaning, Good and Evil must be real in a real world. If they are held to be appearances conduct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's view of this matter? The whole life that we Western men call real is to him a mere game played by and for the sake of G.o.d, or, to use his phrase, of the Divine Mother. For her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, instead of free in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates and maintains Evil. I quote the pa.s.sage:
”My Divine Mother is always in Her sportive mood. The world, indeed, is Her toy. She will have Her own way. It is Her pleasure to take out of the prisonhouse and set free only one or two among a hundred thousand of her children!
”_A Brahmo_: Sir, She can if She pleases set everybody free.
Why is it then, that She has bound us hand and foot with the chains of the world?
”_Sri Ramakrishna_: Well, I suppose it is her pleasure. It is her pleasure to go on with Her sport with all these beings that She has brought into existence. The player amongst the children that touches the person of the Grand-dame, the same need no longer run about. He cannot take any further part in the exciting play of Hide and Seek that goes on.
”The others who have not touched the goal must run about and play to the great delight of the Grand-dame.”[7]
Thus the Indian saint. Let us now try to bring his conception into relation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In a railway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowly burned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his misery. What is this? It is the sport of G.o.d! In Putumayo innocent natives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tortured, and murdered, that shareholders in Europe may receive high dividends. What is this?
The sport of G.o.d! In the richest countries of the West a great proportion of those who produce the wealth receive less than the wages which would suffice to keep them in bare physical health. What is this?
Once more the sport of G.o.d! One might multiply examples, but it would be idle. No Western man could for a moment entertain the view of Sri Ramakrishna. To him such a G.o.d would be a mere devil. The Indian position, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an idealism conditioned by defective experience of the life in Time. The saint has chosen another experience. But clearly he has not transcended ours, he has simply left it out.
Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the most sincere representatives of religion in India that Sri Ramakrishna does not typify the Indian att.i.tude. Perhaps not, if we take contemporary India.
But then contemporary India has been profoundly influenced by Western thought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly have thought and felt as they did, and do, were it not for this influence. The following poem of Rabindranath Tagore may aptly symbolise this breaking in of the West upon the East, though I do not know that that was the author's intention:
”With days of hard travail I raised a temple. It had no doors or windows, its walls were thickly built with ma.s.sive stones.
I forgot all else, I shunned all the world, I gazed in rapt contemplation at the image I had set upon the altar.
It was always night inside, and lit by the lamps of perfumed oil. The ceaseless smoke of incense wound my heart in its heavy coils.