Teilhard de Chardin and our Time

Teilhard's Christianity and the Ancient Vedanta

Our task of comparison will be all the more interesting because one of the cross-purposes in Teilhard's life was just that he found himself simultaneously attracted by and at variance with old Indian thought. As he has explained in his essay, How 1 Believe,¹ he recognised in this thought "an abundant sense of the Whole", which chimed with his own faith, but he saw in it (1) a suppression of the individual and the rich dynamism of life in a "homogeneous unity" and (2) a vision of matter as "dead weight and illusion". If anything in the modern Orient struck him as a sign of hope, it was that it appeared "already almost to have forgotten the original passivity of its pantheism".²

Sri Aurobindo's remark on Schweitzer can therefore directly apply to Teilhard. And we may observe that Teilhard falls into an error which Sri Aurobindo has particularly warned us against. In speaking of oriental religions Teilhard³ especially mentions Buddhism. Sri Aurobindo⁴ - after asserting it to be "a misrepresentation to say that Indian culture denies all value to life, detaches from terrestrial interests and insists on the unimportance of the life of the moment" - says:

"To read these European comments one would imagine that in all Indian thought there was nothing but the nihilistic school of Buddhism and the monistic Illusionism of Shankara and that all Indian art, literature and social thinking were nothing but the statement of their recoil from the falsehood and vanity of things....

"Even the most extreme philosophies and religions. Buddhism and Illusionism, which held life to be an imperma-nence or ignorance that must be transcended and cast away, yet did not lose sight of the truth that man must develop

1.christianity and Evolution (Collins, London, 1971), p. 122.

2.Ibid., p. 130.

3.Ibid., p.

4.The Foundations of Indian Culture (The Sri Aurobindo Library Inc., New York, 1953), pp. 79, 203-05.

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himself under the conditions of this present ignorance or impermanence before he can attain to knowledge and to that Permanent which is the denial of temporal being. Buddhism was not solely a cloudy sublimation of Nirvana, nothingness, extinction and the tyrannous futility of Karma; it gave us a great and powerful discipline for the life of man on earth. The enormous positive effects it has on society and ethics and the creative impulse it imparted to art and thought and in a less degree to literature, are a sufficient proof of the strong vitality of its method. If this positive turn was present in the most extreme philosophy of denial, it was still more largely present in the totality of Indian culture.

"There has been indeed from early times in the Indian mind a strain, a tendency towards a lofty and austere exaggeration in the direction taken by Buddhism and Maya-vada^s.... But the European critic very ordinarily labours under the idea that this exaggeration...was actually the whole of Indian thought and sentiment or the one undisputed governing idea of the culture. Nothing could be more false and inaccurate. The early Vedic religion did not deny, but laid a full emphasis on life. The Upanishads did not deny life, but held that the world is a manifestation of the Eternal, of Brahman, all here is Brahman, all is in the Spirit and the Spirit is in all, the self-existent Spirit has become all things and creatures; life too is Brahman, the life-force is the very basis of our existence, the life-spirit, Vayu, is the manifest and evident Eternal, pratyaksam brahma. But it affirmed that the present way of existence of man is not the highest or the whole; his outward mind and life are not all his being; to be fulfilled and perfect he has to grow out of his physical and mental ignorance into spiritual self-knowledge.

"Buddhism arrived at a later stage and seized on one side of these ancient teachings to make a sharp spiritual and intellectual opposition between the impermanence of life and the permanence of the Eternal which brought to a head and

5. Mayavada = Illusionism. (K.D.S.)

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made a gospel of the ascetic exaggeration. But the synthetic Hindu mind struggled against this negation and finally threw out Buddhism, though not without contracting an increased bias in this direction. That bias came to its height in the philosophy of Shankara, his theory of Maya, which put its powerful imprint on the Indian mind and, coinciding with a progressive decline in the full vitality of the race, did tend for a time to fix a pessimistic and negative view of terrestrial life and distort the larger Indian ideal. But his theory is not at all a necessary deduction from the great Vedantic authorities, the Upanishads, Brahmasutras and Gita, and was always combated by other Vedantic philosophies and religions which drew from them and from spiritual experience very different conclusions. At the present time, in spite of a temporary exaltation of Shankara's philosophy, the most vital movements of Indian thought and religion are moving again towards the synthesis of spirituality and life which was an essential part of the ancient Indian ideal."

Among other points, what is notable in Sri Aurobindo's words is the stress on the double formula - "all is in the Spirit and the Spirit is in all" - which is typical of panentheism.

Some more words from Sri Aurobindo may be cited by way of further introduction to the brief look we shall take at the ancient Vedanta, They touch directly not on the synthesis of spirituality and life but on the synthesis within spirituality itself, born of the sense that if spirituality is to be living it should have the plasticity and variety which life in its creative movement exhibits. Sri Aurobindo⁶ tells us:

"The religious thinking of Europe is accustomed to rigid impoverishing definitions, to strict exclusions, to a constant preoccupation with the outward idea, the organisation, the form,... The Indian mind, on the contrary, is averse to intolerant mental exclusions; for. a great force of intuition and inner experience has given it from the beginning that towards which the mind of the West is only now reaching with much

6. The Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 151-54.

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fumbling and difficulty, - the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic vision. Even when it sees the One without a second, it still admits his duality of Spirit and Nature; it leaves room for his many trinities and million aspects. Even when it concentrates on a single limiting aspect of the Divinity and seems to see nothing but that, it still keeps instinctively at the back of its consciousness the sense of the All and the idea of the One. Even when it distributes its worship among many objects, it looks at the same time through the objects of its worship and sees' beyond the multitude of godheads the unity of the Supreme. This synthetic turn is not peculiar to the mystics or to a small literate class or to philosophic thinkers nourished on the high sublimities of the Veda and Vedanta, It permeates the popular mind nourished on the thoughts, images, traditions, and cultural symbols of the Purana and Tantra; for these things are only concrete representations or living figures of the synthetic monism, the many-sided unitarian ism, the large cosmic universalism of the Vedic scriptures.

"Indian religion founded itself on the conception of a timeless, nameless and formless Supreme, but it did not feel called upon like the narrower and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger races, to deny or abolish all intermediary forms and names and powers and personalities of the Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague transcendental Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one Godhead is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is He or made out of His being or His nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism; for beyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal. Indian polytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for here the worshipper of many gods still knows that all his divinities are forms, names, personalities and powers of the One; his gods proceed from the one Purusha, his goddesses are energies of the one divine Force. Those ways of Indian cult which most resemble a popular form of Theism, are still something more; for they do not exclude, but admit the many aspects of God. Indian image-worship is not the idolatry of a

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barbaric or undeveloped mind, for even the most ignorant know that the image is a symbol and support and can throw it away when its use is over. The later religious forms which most felt the impress of the Islamic idea, like Nanak's worship of the timeless One, Akala, and the reforming creeds of today, born under the influence of the West, yet draw away from the limitations of western or Semitic monotheism. Irresistibly they turn from these infantile conceptions towards the fathomless truth of Vedanta. The divine Personality of God and his human relations with man are strongly stressed by Vaishnavism and Shaivism as the most dynamic Truth; but that is not the whole of these religions, and this divine Personality is not the limited magnified-human personal God of the West. Indian religion cannot be described by any of the definitions known to the occidental intelligence. In its totality it has been a free and tolerant synthesis of all spiritual worship and experiences. Observing the one truth from all its many sides, it shut out none. It gave itself no specific name and bound itself by no limiting distinction. Allowing separative designations for its constituting cults and divisions, it remained itself nameless, formless, universal, infinite, like the Brahman of its agelong seeking. Although strikingly distinguished from other creeds by its traditional scriptures, cults and symbols, it is not in its essential character a credal religion at all but a vast and many-sided, an always unifying and always progressive and self-enlarging system of spiritual culture."

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