Part 11 (2/2)
Sleepless, I carved on the walls fantastic figures in mazy bewildering lines--winged horses, flowers with human faces, women with limbs like serpents.
No pa.s.sage was left anywhere through which could enter the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum of the busy village.
The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that of incantations which I chanted.
My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my senses swooned in ecstasy.
I knew not how time pa.s.sed till the thunderstone had struck the temple, and a pain stung me through the heart.
The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless in the light, as they would fain hide themselves.
I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and alive with the living touch of G.o.d. The night I had imprisoned spread its wings and vanished.”[8]
The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the spiritual life of India, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous to the advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this--the symbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and the prevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wandering ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else, unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It is the religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is the religion of the Eternal.
But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produce her teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in a constant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order to live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality in the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?
I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggest that it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict between men's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live not because they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Their hold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I have been told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions against plague, that what they have to contend with is not so much the resistance as the indifference of the population. ”Why worry us?” they say, in effect; ”life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of it.” Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escape is either, for the ma.s.s, by death; or for the men of spiritual genius, by a flight to the Eternal. How this att.i.tude has arisen I do not here seek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, all no doubt have played their part. The spiritual att.i.tude is probably an effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, I think, who knows India, would dispute that this att.i.tude is a fact; and it is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but from the Far East.
For China and j.a.pan, though they have had, and to a less extent still have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese att.i.tude to life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the ma.s.s of the people wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable, more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built on the same foundations.
And j.a.pan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of the Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest pa.s.sion is patriotism. A j.a.panese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the splendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he has so little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readily throws it away. The j.a.panese are unlike the Chinese and unlike the Europeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in the world of time and change; and because of this att.i.tude, they and the rest of the world stand together like a mountain in the sun, contemplating uneasily that other mysterious peak, shrouded in mist, which is India.
The reader by this time will have grasped the point I am trying to put.
There are in Man two religious impulses, or, if the expression be preferred, two aspects of the religious impulse. I have called them the religion of the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India I suggest stands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, while the other countries of the East rank rather with the West than with India.
It is not necessary to my purpose to exaggerate this ant.i.thesis. I will say, if it be preferred, that in India the emphasis is on the Eternal, in the West on Time. But that much at least must be said and is plainly true. Now, as between these two att.i.tudes, I find myself quite clearly and definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the preceding pages hard things about Western civilisation. I hate many of its manifestations, I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I can see no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the south pole, and very little in the invention of aeroplanes; while gramophones, machine guns, advertis.e.m.e.nts, cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts, cosmopolitan hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous.
But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the spirit of adventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It is not the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anything but pernicious, for its main use is likely to be for war. But the fact that men so lightly risk their lives to perfect it, _that_ is valuable.
The West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous on a quest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes, lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to secure a society more just and more humane which inspires all men and all movements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who can understand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our most reckless enterprises. We are living very ”dangerously”; all the forces are loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we are living towards something; we are living with the religion of Time.
So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. But they may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, ”Is that all? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?” To this I must reply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of the Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatible with the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have urged, is that of most Indian, and as I think, of most Western mystics.
Not, however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in India.
Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his ”Sadhana,” has put forward a mysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include what I have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. For my own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view of Time, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be truly said by one who starts with the belief that that is real. The profoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goethe and George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my own small experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of that process in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the bettering of the material and social environment, though we hold the importance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. And that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from and beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of the world at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art, in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of the real processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see no limit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I am clear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same--to expand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command--I should rather say this impulse--seems to me absolute, the one certain thing on which everything else must build. I think it enough for religion, in the case at least of those who have got beyond the infant need for cert.i.tudes and dogmas. These perhaps are few; yet they may be really more numerous than appears. And on the increase in their numbers, and the intensity of their conviction and their life, the fate of the world seems to me to depend.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 5: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part 1., p. 310.]
[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 61.]
[Footnote 7: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part 1., p. 145.]
[Footnote 8: _The Gardener_, p. 125.]
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