The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Pacifism and the Indian Spirit

THE ideal of peace is felt by every Indian to be as old as India herself and ingrained in her immemorial culture: one of our best known scriptural phrases is the ancient Vedic message, sarva janah sukhino bhavantu, "let all people live in happiness through peace." But "peace" is a veritable proteus of a word. There can be a dead peace as well as a living one. Was it not said by Tacitus about the conquest of Germany by the Romans: Solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant, "They make a desert and call it peace" ? Nor is it necessary to put a country to the sword in order to create the peace that is dead. If a country is either efficiently emasculated or ruthlessly regimented, we have a certain passivity or uniformity of mind, together with an absence of physical agitation, which has the appearance of peace but is really a state of death in disguise. For, there can be no peace that contradicts Cicero 's definition: "liberty in tranquillity." Even the peace that can prevail among free peoples may not yet be a living one in the true sense of the word : it may be merely a temporary lull in which war is found to be inexpedient and a co-operative opportunism has play. Or else an open conflict may be absent and still a selfish feud on the ideological level go on and a self interested economic throat-cutting continue. Surely this is not the peace meant by sincere pacifists the world over and implied by the old phrase from the Rig-Veda.

Should Pacifism Preclude War?

Dr. Rajendra Prasad once defined peace as "goodwill in action". A fair working definition, we may grant, but also a bit of a platitude likely to be pretty impotent unless we go beyond the purely ideative plane. For, active goodwill, as commonly conceived, cannot exist by itself and cannot persist for long. Man, as he ordinarily functions, is a mixture of the rational, the infra-rational and the supra-rational. He tries to order his life according

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to his intelligence, but constantly the tiger and the ape in him break out, laying waste the neat and glittering tracts of his reasoning mind, and when there is not this reversal to animality there is often a sudden reaching forth towards something grand and godlike, some power more wide than the intellect, and "a light that never was on sea or land" upsets his reasoned arrangements of attitude and gesture, so that he behaves with a splendid strangeness which sets at nought his virtues no less than his vices, his philosophies as well as his fantasies. Goodwill in action is the voice of man's reason in its ethical aspect; but if reason is only the middle term between what is below and what is above how shall this goodwill be a lasting and effective force? Not that it is an utter contradiction of the below and the above: there is in the former a certain instinct of mutual aid while in the latter is to be found a spontaneity of universal oneness, but the infra-rational has also a violent competitive impulse and the supra-rational brings at times a power of destruction at which the mere mind trembles and with which it can scarcely reconcile its principle of war-shunning pacifism. On one side, "Nature red in tooth and claw", on the other the dazzling devastation of Mahakali the Goddess who carries the Eternal Truth like a sword to cleave violently the darkness of ignorance and evil. No doubt there is also Mahalakshmi the beneficent Goddess, but she does not exclude the divine Warrior of the worlds; a subtle identity is between the two, most difficult for the human reason to understand and most disturbing to its ideative apotheosis of goodwill in action.

Although the brute competitiveness of the infrarational is to be curbed, the sword-sweep of the supra-rational cannot be rejected. The cry of Sri Krishna at the battle of Kurukshetra, "Fight and win a mighty kingdom" is too clear to be allegorised away, too insistent in one form or another down the ages, especially at their turning-points, to be drowned by any mellifluous sentimentalism. So we must stop contrasting peace to war: under particular circumstances war cannot help having justification, and not only defensive but also offensive war, since frequently the best method of defence is attack. A squeamish recoil from physical combat and destruction has no basis in the divine reality's method and

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movement vis-à-vis an evolving world in which truth and falsehood, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness are pitted against each other. Of course, every effort must be made to avoid such combat and destruction, compromise should go as far as is consistent with essential loyalty to the cause of civilisation, no mere convenience or superficial advantage should be cherished inordinately, yet a final resort to arms must not be looked upon as an evil. Consequently, from the highest point of view, absolute ahimsa, unmitigated non-violence, goes by the board at the very beginning of a discussion of pacifism. And when our Ministers make the apology that they are keeping an army and navy and air-fleet because they are too weak to follow correctly the ideal of pacifism and that this weakness should not be construed as a total forgetfulness of the ideal , they are making a false fetish of ahimsa and completely confusing the issue. Most of the foreign pacifists seem to be themselves in no less confusion, for the name of Gandhi as the apostle of non-violence is lavishly strewn in their writings and speeches. If ahimsa signifies, as Gandhi would have it, repugnance from shedding all blood except one's own even when one is confronted with Hitler's panzers or, to take a smaller yet sufficiently vicious example, the marauding tribesmen who with Pakistan's connivance broke into Kashmir, then ahimsa is just an unconscious collaboration with anti-civilisation forces and, far from being a merit, a pernicious mistake. To refuse to see in some collectivities of human beings on certain occasions of history a streak of the diabolic which cannot be mended but requires to be ended by physical attack is sheer blindness to facts. The last war threw these facts into so much relief that a host of sceptics, C. E. M. Joad the most prominent among them, who used to laugh at the idea of supernatural powers and principalities came to the necessity of faith in God by the curious road of finding themselves unable to overlook the existence of some sort of devilry acting from beyond the realm of Nature. Even in the absence of the markedly diabolic, we should be able to see the element of the infra-rational as quite likely at several times to need violent opposition on our part. Ahimsa, leading to an apologetic attitude towards our armed forces as if in keeping up the

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martial spirit we were defaulting from the ideal of the divine that India has always visioned, is an utter falsity. If the pacifists in India and abroad consider the avoidance of war by all means and the pedestalling of ahimsa at all costs to be the essence of their philosophy and their work, they are on a wrong track and, for all their good intentions, doing disservice to the world. Identify "goodwill in action" with extreme ahimsa and you immediately disqualify it from being a worthy pursuit.

What we have to pursue is noble effort to avoid war for selfish motives with their brood of hatred and greed: this is the only valid sense of pacifism in the context of international politics. Selfish motives: there is the arch-evil which pacifism should work to remove. As a result, the mere avoidance of war is not the summum bonum even if war be something wholly to be shunned. Hatred and greed can run riot without assuming the shape of tank and bomber. As a reminder of this truth, the phrase "goodwill in action" is genuinely useful and plunges towards the heart not only of what sincere pacifists everywhere mean but also of what our own ancient culture implies. The heart of meaning here may be broadly put as: a state of consciousness unagitated by selfish motives and therefore, so far as these motives go, at peace with the world and expressing that peace in active relation with living
creatures.

Goodwill and the Supra-rational

The question, however, remains: Can the active goodwill possible to rational man be quite clear of selfish motives, and function effectively in the interests of genuine peace? There is a strong tendency today to look on man not as a middle term between the infra-rational and the supra-rational but as the final term of the evolutionary process: all advancement is considered a further and further refining of man's rationality and of the contrast it presents to what is below it - the animal kingdom. Many an Indian is inclined to be an agnostic: he does not deny the greatness of saints and mystics and yogis, yet he sees their greatness to lie rather in their intense humanitarian activity than in their intense

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experience of the Divine and the Eternal. He even wonders whether this experience is not a kind of magnificent illusion and thinks that their humanitarian activity should be dissociated from it and set up as our goal. Here is an attitude almost akin to Bertrand Russell's. Russell admits the mystic's ecstasy as a datum of ex-perience and says that what is of most value in human life is analogous to the lofty unselfish principles enunciated by the great religious teachers, but denies that mysticism implies a vision of the highest reality or that the equanimity and compassion that are the message of those teachers are best fostered by the mystical experience and cannot be fostered without it. But it should be evident that selfishness would be subdued most effectively if one has the experience of an ever-peaceful infinity-enjoying state like Atman or Nirvana in which the small ego of man is utterly annulled and that unless a divine creative Mother or a beatific and luminous Lord of the world is realised by the heart no emotion of human brotherhood can attain an extreme life-transfiguring pitch. Call mysticism a holy hallucination, if you are bent on taking a superficial view of the testimony of the world's finest figures, but you cannot escape logically granting that nothing short of such an hallucination can give rise exceedingly to "what is", in Russell's own words, "of most value in human life". If you admit certain so-called moral virtues to be of paramount importance to rational man, you cannot by-pass the mystical quest of the supra-rational which renders them the most beautifully potent, the most widely practicable.

Gandhi, whose name dominates most pacifist thinking, was not a mystic in the real sense in which Ramakrishna or Vivekananda, Raman Maharsi or Sri Aurobindo is, yet whatever intensity of fellow-feeling and unselfish behaviour he brought was born directly of his fervent faith in a God who was to him the perfect father of all creatures and the light of a stainless truth. To try to follow Gandhi's ideal and example without sharing his faith is, of course, possible: the ethical nature is not dependent on the religious motive for its instinctive impulsion and emotional exaltation. Even intellectually it can justify itself without that motive: to do unto others as we would others to do unto us may seem capital sense to the thinking mind. But there are two levels

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of thought - the provisional and pragmatic, the fundamental and philosophic. Although the first level can provide the ethicist with "sensible" supports, the second will give him no standing ground except religion. It lays bare the full implication of the ethical consciousness. Ethics is essentially normative: its key terms are "right", "duty", "obligation", "good", "ought". These terms cannot be derived from natural factors with any finality: the study of natural factors is science - a study which is purely descriptive and not m the least normative. The universe of the scientist is impotent to yield those terms. Not even a human natural factor like "society" can be their source, for it can only impose on the individual what many individuals consider to be advantageous to collective existence-and its will is not from any plane higher than that of the single individual and hence cannot have a definitively binding character. Mere numbers cannot make a thing right. Nor can any punishment visited on the recalcitrant individual prove the duty of not being dishonest, cruel and selfish: it can impress him only with the inexpediency of certain types of behaviour, convince him merely of the need to be clever enough to get away with dishonesty, cruelty and selfishness and not be foolishly found out. The real logic of ethical conduct can lie in nothing else than a Law Eternal behind the codes and statutes of men, a Law which men strive to embody according to their best lights. Our ideals and morals may not always image the divine depths of the Eternal Law, but logically there can be no idealism and morality without an effort or aspiration to image the depths that are' divine of a Law that is eternal. The sense of unconditional imperativeness and inherent validity, without which no "ought" can have justification, must argue that we are ethical inasmuch as we strain to express a supreme and absolute Reality faultlessly, guided by its own Truth-light. Philosophically, ethics can be neither valid nor imperative without a religious sanction. Goodwill has its sole logical support in a sense of God-will.

Religion and Religionism

Pacifism, therefore, should identify itself with faith in the Infinite and the Eternal, an open acknowledgment of the supra-rational

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source of the flow of the true, the beautiful and the good to the earth. However, we must admit that a religious orientation of rational man is insufficient to transfigure life so long as there is no marked turn towards mystical experience. For, religion tends to degenerate into religionism. What should be a matter of soul-discovery and of living contact and communion with the divine depths and heights of our being stops with a narrow creed, a rigid ritualism, a bigoted churchianity. The rational mind, if not influenced powerfully by the beyond-mind, is disposed to cut up the truth of existence and erect one part or another as the total verity: it cannot hold many things together in a harmonious synthesising view, the utmost it does is to attempt the subsumption of everything under one particular aspect which it exaggerates out of proportion. In consequence, we have trenchant oppositions of limited doctrines and, at best, "catholic systems" which yet are sectarian by sweeping all existence into a formula unduly magnifying a particular facet of reality. Intolerance, fanaticism, obscurantism are bound thus to go hand in hand with religion if the profound religious impulse is not directly aligned to the supra-rational. Progress has to come often by an attack on religious systems and much of the modern world's intellectual and social development is due to its break with the religionism that was rampant up to the European Renaissance.

But this break, for all its benefits of reaction towards freedom and wideness, is a negative force and must sooner or later lead to an arrant materialism and a shipwreck of precious values. Religion true to the depths and heights of being from which it is a shining visitor to rational man is what should replace the credal, formal, sectarian stuff that is so perilous to the bosom and weighs so heavily upon the dreaming and aspiring heart. The turn not in the direction of crass secularity but in that of mystical experience should be the sequel to the leap away from religionism. One of the first signs of the desirable turn is the intellectual attempt to find the common vital measure of the various denominations into which the world of believers is fragmented: a movement like the International Congress of World Fellowship of Faiths which lately met in India was therefore a right one. And it was as a significant

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and happy omen that a concourse of religious representatives bent on discovering ways and means to establish brotherhood in mankind should have taken place in India. But the full force of the omen would be lost if we failed to understand the stress India has always laid upon spiritual realisation, upon direct experience of the Divine. The motto of the International Congress of World Fellowship of Faiths was Omnia vincit amor, "Love conquers everything." Beautiful words - yet liable to be mere tinkling cymbals until we break through the surface of their sentimental idealism and reach some meaningful mantra charged with the supra-rational. A gospel of "sweet reasonableness" set in a religious key cannot be the master-instrument of genuine pacifism. Although it will carry more conviction than any secular version of "goodwill in action", it will never, without the rhythm of mystical experience, re-tune the human heart to a divine harmony. There must be men in whom the rational has been absorbed and taken up into sainthood, seerhood, yoga - men who have inwardly opened to the Lord seated in the heart of hearts, the Cosmic Consciousness and the Transcendent Self and Master, men who are no moral preachers with an intellectually guided religious fervour but such as are at least on the way to realising the goal so integrally revealed in that fourfold mantra of Sri Aurobindo's:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.

Yes, it is the mystic and the yogi who alone can bring the secret of world unity, the love that will conquer everything because it burns with the direct consciousness of the immortal, the illimitable and the perfect, has at all times the fire-keen impulsion of the supra-rational truth and beatitude, and is no honeyed weakness of either the nerves or the emotions wedded to an unthinking and unqualified ahimsa, no syrup of goody-goodiness manufactured from a recipe of pleasant religious ideas and conventional prayers, not even the sincere yet unenlightened

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zeal of social service in the name of a distantly paternal God, nor the well-meaning missionary indoctrination content with a result of superficial assent and formal knee-bending before the tables of the ten commandments or the eightfold path. If there is a God in whom are all beauty and harmony, an effort must be made to know Him as we know the sun of midday, feel Him as we feel our flesh and the flesh of those who are dear to us, live Him as we live our hungers and our desires, manifest Him as we manifest the weight and warmth and vigour of our bodies. In short, by setting forth on the via mystica, we must strive to reach in our lives an incarnation of the Divinity we worship. Congresses of faiths soon become, for all their speeches and resolutions, frail and futile memories unless the mystic and the yogi infuse life into them. Out of the great hum of holy words and high declarations that made famous in its own day the first Parliament of Religions at Chicago almost half a century back, only one creative cry has remained the voice of Swami Vivekananda. It has remained because it broke from a living realisation of the Infinite and the Eternal. Vivekananda uttered his message with the actual mystical experience glowing within him of the one supreme Self of selves present everywhere and the mighty Mother-Spirit from whom the entire universe has sprung.

His message may not be quite complete since with its superb dynamism it still mingled the feeling that man's fulfilment is ultimately outside earth and that the physical existence, the life-force and the mind-energy have to grow great and work magnificently for only a while and in the end serve as a stupendous bow shooting the soul out of the cosmos into some absolute Peace. Not a supra-cosmic quiescence is the supreme peace we need, any more than we need a cessation of the warrior, the hero, the kshatriya in us, or an outward political and social cooperation among earth's peoples precariously sustained with the help of a sort of liberal universal religion veneering with a reasoned goodwill our brute brain. The integral Godhead must be "force one with unimaginable rest", and our earth-being and its members must find perfection of themselves here and now in the multiplicity-in-unity of that supra-rational Power from whom this

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being and its members have originated because of some truth or archetype of them existing there. A divine creative and all-transforming peace should be our prayer. But, though we may look even beyond Vivekananda, his name is most appropriate in connection with the endeavour to establish world peace through religion. Without men like Vivekananda this endeavour will find little more than a glow-worm illumination, and neither moon nor star will shine for it, much less will dawn the day of truth.

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