Religion and National Integration

THE HINDU-MUSLIM PROBLEM

 

The country is passing through a difficult and critical phase on the vexed issue of the Ayodhya - Babri Masjid problem. It is not really a problem of the temple and the mosque but much more fundamentally the problem of the Hindu - Muslim coexistence. It was the inability to solve this problem that led to the partition of the country in 1947 and unless we face this issue squarely and boldly and solve it once for all on a sure and sound basis it will recur again and again whether at Ayodhya or at Varanasi or in fact anywhere; for there are many contentious issues which can at any moment raise their ugly head and create strife all over again. As a result, critics constantly remind us all over the world and even in India that this is a proof of our political incapacity. It is therefore necessary that we look at this charge and after removing some misconceptions, find ways of solving this difficult problem.

 

First, it must be noted that India is the only country in the world in which all the religions are being actively practised and that too with a sizeable population. Most other countries in the world have only one religion and in a sense the Western nations have only half a religion - either Catholic Christianity or the Protestant form. It is also interesting to note that in the nations where Islam has succeeded in establishing itself, no other religion has been allowed to function; the same may be said though to a lesser extent of the Christian nations too. There can be little doubt that India is the only nation where all the religions have coexisted and vigorously flourished. That makes India a land of rich religious diversity and complexity - almost the whole world on a mini scale - and quite naturally the political unity becomes that much more difficult. However, the central problem in India centres around the Hindu-Muslim problem. We shall try and see the roots of this problem and the possible solution.

 

"It is the Mussulman conquest - failing in the hands of the Arabs - but successfully reattempted after a long interval, and all that followed it which has served to justify the political

 

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incapacity of the Indian peoples. The conquest took place at a time when the vitality of ancient Indian life and culture after two thousand years of activity and creation was already exhausted for a time or very near exhaustion and needed a breathing space to rejuvenate itself by transference from the Sanskrit to the popular tongues and the newly forming regional peoples. The conquest was effected rapidly enough in the North, although not entirely complete there for several centuries, but the South long preserved its freedom as of old against the earlier indigenous empires and there was not so long a distance between the extinction of the kingdom of Vijaynagara and the rise of the Mahrattas. The Rajputs maintained their independence until the time of Akbar and his successors and it was in the end partly with the aid of Rajput princes acting as their generals and ministers that the Moghuls completed their sway over the east and the south. And this was again possible because - a fact too often forgotten - the Mussulman domination ceased very rapidly to be a foreign rule. The vast mass of the Mussulmans in the country were and are Indians by race, only a very small admixture of Pathan,Turkish and Mogul blood took place and even the foreign kings and nobles became immediately wholly Indian in mind, life and interest. If the race had really like certain European countries remained for many centuries passive, acquiescent and impotent under an alien sway, that would indeed have been a proof of a great inherent weakness, a fundamental political incapacity.

 

The real problem introduced by the Mussulman conquest was not that of subjection to a foreign rule and the ability to recover freedom, but the struggle between two civilisations, one ancient and indigenous, the other medieval and brought in from outside. That which rendered the problem insoluble was the attachment of each to a powerful religion, the one militant and aggressive and the other spiritually tolerant indeed and flexible, but obstinately faithful in its discipline to its own principle and standing on the defence behind a barrier of social forms.

 

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There are two conceivable solutions, the rise of a greater spiritual principle and formulation which would reconcile the two and a political patriotism surmounting the religious struggle and uniting the two communities".

 

During the freedom struggle an attempt was made to create this political patriotism and was partially successful but in the end the religious intolerance and mistrust took over and the result was the partition of the country.

 

It is now high time to attempt the solution of the problem on both these lines. The institution of SAARC is itself a first step and opportunity in this direction and this forum can be used to create a patriotism on both political and economic lines.

 

As for religion, we shall quote this passage to illustrate the solution.
 

"The conflict of religions arises because each one claims the exclusive truth and demands a complete adherence to it by the method of dogma, ritual, ceremony and prescribed acts. The solution would be, first to recognise that the real truth of religion is in the spiritual experiences of which it is an outer formulation. To transcend therefore the outer form, and insist on the spiritual experience and in addition to recognise that there can be infinite and valid varieties of spiritual experiences is the important step in the solution. It is not by insisting on religion that India and the world can be reconstructed. The new world will transcend religions and will insist on the purity of spiritual experience.

 

Instead of taking religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more integral approach to the Divine.

 

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India's attempt in her religion was to some extent directed to this inner perception; it is at present lost but we must now place forward this perception clearly and radically, not revive religion or religious spirit, but present the ideal of spiritual perfection which consists of an integral realisation of the spirit and its full manifestation on physical life".

 

This is the line of thought and action that the political leaders and more particularly the religious heads of these two communities should stress. If this is done with sincerity and persistence, it should be possible to create the conditions for the emergence of a great synthesis of all the religions and thus open the way for a true spiritual flowering of India and eventually of the world.

 

For an understanding of the possible synthesis refer to the article on Religion and National Integration.

 

KITTU REDDY
 

This note was addressed in August 1992 to the then Prime Minister, Shri PV Narsimha Rao.

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RELIGION AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION
 

Introduction
 

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Introduction

"The conflict of religions arises because each one claims the exclusive truth and demands a complete adherence to it by the method of dogma, ritual, ceremony and prescribed acts. The solution would be, first to recognise that the real truth of religion is in the spiritual experiences of which it is an outer formulation. To transcend therefore the outer form, and insist on the spiritual experience and in addition to recognise that

 

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there can be infinite and valid varieties of spiritual experiences is the important step in the solution. It is not by insisting on religion that India and the world can be reconstructed. The new world will transcend religions and will insist on the purity of spiritual experience.

Instead of taking religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more integral approach to the Divine.

India's attempt in her religion was to some extent directed to this inner perception; it is at present lost but we must now place forward this perception clearly and radically, not revive religion or religious spirit, but present the ideal of spiritual perfection which consists of an integral realisation of the spirit and its full manifestation on physical life".

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THE HUMAN ASPIRATION

 

The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened consciousness and. as it seems its inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,- for it survives the longest period of scepticism and returns after every banishment,- is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration . The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

WHAT IS RELIGION

Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God, or Spirit, or Truth, or Faith, or Knowledge, or the Infinite, or some kind of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach.

Religion is that instinct, idea, activity, discipline in man which aims directly at the Divine, while all the rest (science, philosophy, art and ethics) seem to aim at it only indirectly and reach to it with difficulty, after much wandering and stumbling in the pursuit of the outward and imperfect appearance of things.

PURPOSE OF RELIGION

The task of religion and spirituality is to mediate between God and Man, between the Eternal and Infinite

 

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and this transient, yet persistent finite, between a luminous Truth-Consciousness not expressed or not yet expressed here and the Mind's ignorance.

 

THE MEANING OF IGNORANCE AND THE NEED OF A GRADUAL APPROACH TO SPIRITUALITY

Nothing is more difficult than to bring home the greatness and uplifting power of spiritual consciousness to the natural man forming the vast majority of the race; for his mind and senses are turned outwards towards the external calls of life and its objects and never inwards towards the Truth which lies behind them . This external vision and attraction are the essence of the universal blinding force which is designated in Indian philosophy the Ignorance. Ancient Indian spirituality recognised that man lives in Ignorance and has to be led through its imperfect indications to a highest inmost knowledge. The highest spirituality indeed moves in a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious form and dogma ; it does not bear easily their limitation and even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal religious mind is unintelligible.

But man does not arrive immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him at once, he would never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of ascent; he asks for some scaffolding of worship, sign, form, symbol, some indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he can stand while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is completed, can the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear .

 

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THE THREE FUNDAMENTALS OF INDIAN RELIGION

Indian religion is founded upon three basic ideas or rather three fundamentals of a highest and widest spiritual experience.

1. The idea of the One Eternal - belief in the One Supreme Existence.

First comes the idea of the One Existence of the Veda to whom sages give different names, the One without a second of the Upanishads who is all that is and beyond all that is , the Permanent of the Buddhists, the Absolute of the Illusionists, the Supreme God or Purusha of the Theists, who holds in his power the soul and Nature,- in a word the Eternal, the Infinite. To discover and closely approach and enter into whatever kind of degree of unity with this permanent, this Infinite, this Eternal is the highest and last effort of its spiritual experience. This is the first universal credo of the religious mind of India.

2. Infinite ways of approaching the eternal

The second basic idea is the manifold way of man's approach to the Eternal and Infinite. The Infinite is full of many infinities and each of these infinities is itself the very Eternal. One may approach the Supreme through any of these names and forms, with knowledge or in ignorance; for through them and beyond them we can proceed at last to the supreme experience.

3. The eternal exists in each individual

The idea of strongest consequence at the base of Indian religion is the most dynamic for the inner spiritual life. It is that, That or He can be met by each individual soul in itself, in its own spiritual part because there is something in it that is intimately related with the one divine existence.

 

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Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart or the Seat of Consciousness - it is all the same. The point to be grasped is this that Heart means the Core of one's being, the centre without which there is nothing whatever."- Ramana Maharishi

 

INDIAN RELIGION PLACED FOUR NECESSITIES BEFORE HUMAN LIFE

First, it imposed upon the mind a belief in the highest consciousness or state of existence, universal and transcendent of the universe in which all comes, in which all lives and moves without knowing it and of which all must one day grow aware, returning towards that which is perfect, eternal and infinite.

Next it laid upon the individual life the need of self-preparation by development and experience till man is ready for an effort to grow consciously into the truth of this great existence.

Thirdly it provided it (individual life ) with a well founded, well explored, many branching and always enlarging way of knowledge and of spiritual or religious discipline.

Lastly for those not yet ready for these higher steps it provided an organisation of the individual and collective life, a framework of personal and social discipline and conduct of mental and moral and vital development by which they could move each in his own limits, and according to his own nature in such a way as to become eventually ready for the great existence.

 

THE LIMITATIONS OF RELIGION

We must note that historically and as a matter of fact the accredited religions and their hierarchs and exponents have too often been a force for retardation, have too

 

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often thrown their weight on the side of darkness, oppression and ignorance, and that it has needed a denial , a revolt of the oppressed human mind and heart to correct these errors and set religion right. We must observe the root of this evil which is not in true religion itself, but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or church; so strong is the human tendency to this error that even the old tolerant Paganism slew Socrates in the name of religion and morality, feebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or the cult of Mithra and more vigorously what is conceived to be the subversive and anti-social religion of the early Christians; and even in still more fundamentally tolerant Hinduism with all its spiritual broadness and enlightenment it led at one time to the milder mutual hatred and occasional though brief-lived persecution of Buddhist, Jain, Shaiva, Vaishnava.

The whole root of the historic insufficiency of religion as a guide and control of human society lies there. Churches and creeds have, for example, stood violently in the way of philosophy and science, burned a Giordano Bruno, imprisoned a Galileo, and so generally misconducted themselves in this matter that philosophy and science had in self-defence to turn upon religion and rend her to pieces in order to get a free field for their legitimate development; and this because men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion was bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny had to be put down by the fire and sword; scientific and philosophical truth had to be denied in order that religious error survive. We see too that a narrow religious spirit often oppresses and impoverishes the joy of life, either from an intolerant asceticism, or, as the Puritans

 

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attempted it, because they could not see that religious austerity is not the whole of religion, though it may be an important side of it, is not the sole ethico-religious approach to God, since love, charity, gentleness, tolerance, kindliness are also and even more divine, and they forgot or never knew that God is love and beauty as well as purity. In politics religion has often thrown itself on the side of power and has resisted the coming of larger political ideals because it was itself in the form of a Church supported by power and because it confused religion with the Church or because it stood for a false theocracy, forgetting that a true theocracy is the kingdom of God in man and not the kingdom of a Pope, a priesthood or a sacerdotal class. So too it has often supported a rigid and outworn social system, because it thought its own life bound up with social forms with which it happened to have been associated during a long portion of its own history and erroneously concluded that even a necessary change there would be a violation of religion and a danger to its existence. As if so mighty and inward a power as the religious spirit in man could be destroyed by anything so small as the change of a social form or so outward as a social readjustment. This error in its many shapes has been the great weakness of religion as practised in the past and the opportunity and justification for the revolt of the intelligence, the aesthetic sense, the social and political idealism, even the ethical spirit of the human being against what should have been its own highest tendency and law.

 

TWO ASPECTS OF RELIGION

There are two aspects of religion: true religion and religionism. True religion is spiritual religion, that which seeks to live in the spirit, in what is beyond the intellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and to inform and govern these members of our

 

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being by the higher light and law of the spirit. Religionism on the contrary entrenches itself in some narrow pietistic exaltation of the lower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, on some fixed and rigid moral code, on some religio-political or religio-social system. Not that these things are altogether negligible or that they must be unworthy or unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of forms, ceremonies, creeds or systems. On the contrary they are needed by man because the lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can directly feel the spirit and obey its law. An intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, a form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, a set moral code by man's vital nature in their turn towards the inner light. But these things are aids and supports, not the real essence; precisely because they belong to the rational and infrarational parts, they can be nothing more, and if too blindly insisted on, may even hamper the suprarational light. Such as they are, they should be offered to man and used by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law by a forced and inflexible domination. In the use of them toleration and free permission of variation is the first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of religion is alone the one thing supremely needful, the thing to which we have always to hold and subordinate to it every other element or motive.

 

 
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF EACH RELIGION

Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection. Christianity gave him some vision of Divine love and charity, Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser,

 

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gentler and purer; Judaism and Islam, how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand in the way.

All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution.

 

WHAT IS YOGA

The contact of the human and individual consciousness with the Divine is the very essence of Yoga. Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality. The contact may take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effective in the physical through the body ; in the vital through the action of those functionings which determine the state and experiences of our nervous being, through the mentality whether by the means of our emotional heart, the active will or more largely by general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. It may be equally accomplished through a great awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And according to the point of the contact that we choose, will be the type of Yoga that we practise.

 

 
THE SYSTEMS OF YOGA

Hatha Yoga dealing with the life and body aims at the supernormal perfection of the physical life and its

 

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capacities and goes beyond into the domain of the mental life.

Rajayoga operating with the mind aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of spiritual existence.

The path of knowledge (Jnana Yoga) aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme self.

The path of devotion aims at the enjoyment of the supreme love and Bliss and utilises normally the conception of the Supreme Lord in his personality as the divine Lover and enjoyer of the universe.

 
The path of works (Karma Yoga ) aims at dedication of every human activity to the Supreme will. To that, our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned.

 

THE SYNTHESIS OF YOGA

The synthesis must be effected by neglecting the forms and outsides of the Yogic disciplines and seizing rather on some central principle common to all which will include and utilise in the right place and proportion their particular principles, and on some central dynamic force in which is the common secret of their divergent methods and capable therefore of organizing a natural selection and combination of their varied energies and different utilities. The divinising of the normal material life of man and of his great secular attempt of mental and moral self-culture in the individual and the race by this integralisation of a widely perfect spiritual existence would thus be the crown alike of our individual and of our common effort. Such a consummation being no other than the kingdom of heaven within reproduced in the kingdom of heaven without, would be also the true

 

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fulfilment of the great dream cherished in different terms by the world's religions .

 

ALL LIFE IS SPIRITUAL

The division between "ordinary life and "spiritual" life is an outdated antiquity. All human beings have it in their minds, the division between leading a spiritual life and leading an ordinary life, having a spiritual consciousness and an ordinary consciousness - it is not true , there is only one consciousness. If an opposition is still needed, we can have the opposition between truth and falsehood . For in all things, falsehood and truth are mixed everywhere .It would be better not to make any divisions .

 

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WHAT INDIA MUST DO NOW

If a rebirth of the soul of India into a new body of energy, a new form of its ancient and innate spirit, is to take place, it must insist much more finally and integrally than it has as yet done on its spiritual turn, on the greater and greater action of the spiritual motive in every sphere of our living. But here we are liable to be met by the remnants of a misunderstanding or a refusal to understand, - it is something of both, - which was perhaps to a little extent justified by a certain ascetic or religionist exaggeration, a distrust which is accentuated by a recoil from the excessive other-worldliness that has marked certain developments of the Indian mind and life, but yet is not justified, because it misses the true point at issue. Thus we are sometimes asked what on earth we mean by spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life, - a confession of ignorance strange enough in any Indian mouth at this stage of our national history, or how art and poetry will be any the better when they have got into them what I have recently seen described as the "twang of spirituality", and how the practical problems either of society or of politics are going at all to profit by this element. We have here really an echo of the European idea, now of sufficiently long standing, that religion and spirituality on one side and intellectual activity and practical life on the other are two entirely different things and have each to be pursued in its own separate lines and in obedience to its own

 

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separate principles. Again, we may be met also by the suspicion that in holding up this ideal rule before India we are pointing her to the metaphysical and away from the dynamic and pragmatic or inculcating some obscurantist reactionary principle of mystical or irrational religiosity and diverting her from the paths of reason and modernity which she must follow if she is to be an efficient and well organised nation able to survive in the shocks of the modern world. We must, therefore try to make clear what it is we mean by a renaissance governed by the principle of spirituality.

But first let us say what we do not mean by this ideal. Clearly it does not signify that we shall regard earthly life as a temporal vanity, try to become all of us as soon as possible monastic ascetics, frame our social life into a preparation for the monastery or cavern or mountain top or make of it a static life without any great progressive ideals but only some aim which has nothing to do with earth or the collective advance of the human race. That may have been the tendency for some time of the Indian mind, but it was never the whole tendency. Nor does spirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of the national being to suit the limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular religion, as was often enough attempted by the old societies, an idea which still persists in many minds by the power of old mental habits and associations; clearly such an attempt would be impossible, even if it were desirable in a country full of the most diverse religious opinions and harbouring too three distinct general forms as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, to say nothing of the numerous special forms to which each has given birth . Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion and in the larger ideas that are now coming on us, even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or brand of the one universal religion; by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the

 

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greatest self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.

Nor do we mean the exclusion of anything whatsoever from our scope, of any of the great aims of human life, any of the great problems of our modern world, any form of human activity, any general or inherent human impulse, or characteristic means of the desire of the soul of man for development, expansion, increasing vigour and joy, light, power and perfection. Spirit without mind, spirit without body is not the type of man, therefore a human spirituality must not belittle the mind, life or body or hold them of small account; it will rather hold them of high account, of immense importance, precisely because they are the conditions and instruments of the life of the spirit in man. The ancient Indian culture attached quite as much value to the soundness, growth, and strength of the mind, life and body as the old Hellenic or the modern scientific thought, although for a different end and a greater motive. Therefore to every thing that serves and belongs to the healthy fullness of these things it gave free play, to the activity of the reason, to science and philosophy, to the satisfaction of the aesthetic being and to all the many arts great or small, to the health and strength of the body, to the physical and economical well-being, ease, opulence of the race- there was never a national ideal of poverty in India as some would have us believe, nor was bareness and squalor the essential setting of her spirituality,- and to its general military, political, social strength and efficiency. Their aim was high, but firm and wide too was the base that they sought to establish and great the care they bestowed on these first instruments. Necessarily, the new India will seek the same and in new ways under the vivid impulse of fresh and large ideas and by an instrumentality suited to more complex

 

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conditions; but the scope of her effort and action and the suppleness of the variety of her mind will not be less, but greater than of old. Spirituality is not necessarily exclusive; it can be and in its fullness must be all-inclusive.

But still there is a great difference between the spiritual and the purely material and mental values of existence. The spiritual view holds that the mind, life, body are man's means and not his aims and even that they are not his last and highest means. It sees them as his outer instrumental self and not his whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things finite and it adjudges the value of the finite by higher infinite values of which they are the imperfect translation and towards which, to a truer expression of them , they are always trying to arrive. It sees a greater reality than the apparent not only behind man and the world, but within man and the world and this soul, self, divine thing in man, it holds to be that in him which is of the highest importance , that which everything else in him must try in whatever way to bring out and express, and this soul, self, divine presence in the world it holds to be that which man has ever to try to see and recognise through all appearances, to unite his thought with it and in it to find his unity with his fellows. This alters necessarily our whole normal view of things; even in preserving all the aims of human life, it will give them a different sense and direction.

 
We aim at the health and vigour of the body, but with what object? For its own sake, will be the ordinary reply, because it is worth having or else that we may have long life and a sound basis for our intellectual, vital and emotional satisfactions. Yes, for its own sake , in a way, but in this sense that the physical too is an expression of the spirit and its perfection is worth having, is part of the dharma of the complete human living; but still more as a basis for all that higher activity which ends in the

 

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discovery and expression of the divine self in man, sariram khalu dharma sadhanam, runs the old Sanskrit saying. the body is our means for fulfilling the dharma, the Godward law of our being .The mental, the emotional, the aesthetics parts of us have to be developed, is the ordinary view, so that they may have a greater satisfaction or because that is man's finer nature, because so he feels himself more alive and fulfilled. This, but not this only, rather because these things too are the expressions of the spirit, things which are seeking in him for their divine values and by their growth, subtlety, flexibility, power, intensity he is able to come nearer to the divine reality in the world, to lay hold on it variously, to tune eventually his whole life into unity and conformity with it. Morality is in the ordinary view, a well regulated individual and social conduct, which keeps society going and leads towards a better, a more rational, temperate, sympathetic, self-restrained dealing with our fellows. But ethics in the spiritual point of view is much more, it is essentially a means of developing in our action and still more essentially in the character of our being the diviner self in us, a step of our growing into the nature of the Godhead. So with all our aims and activities; spirituality takes them all and gives them a greater, diviner, more intimate sense. Philosophy is in the western way of dealing with it, a dispassionate inquiry by the light of the reason into the first truths of existence, which we shall get at either by observing the facts science places at our disposal or by a careful dialectical scrutiny of the concepts of the reason or a mixture of the two methods. But from the spiritual view-point truth of existence is to be found by intuition and inner experience and not only by scientific observation; the work of philosophy is to arrange the data given by the various means of knowledge, excluding none and put them into relation to the One Truth, the one supreme and universal reality. Eventually, its real value is to

 

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prepare a basis for spiritual realisation and the growing of the human being into his divine nature. Science itself becomes only a knowledge of the world which throws an added light on the spirit of the universe and his way in things. Nor will it confine itself to a physical knowledge and its practical fruits or to the knowledge of life and mind based upon the idea of matter or material energy as our starting -point; a spiritualised culture will make room for new fields of research, for new and old psychical sciences and results which start from spirit as the first truth and from the power of mind and of what is greater than mind to act upon life and matter. The primitive aim of art and poetry is to create images of man and nature which shall satisfy the sense of beauty and embody artistically the ideas of the intelligence about life and the responses of the imagination to it; but in a spiritual culture they become too in their aim a revelation of greater things concealed in man and Nature and of the deepest spiritual and universal beauty. Politics, society, economy are in the first form of human life simply an arrangement by which man collectively can live and produce. satisfy their desires, enjoy, progress in bodily, vital and mental efficiency, but the spiritual aim makes them much more than this, first a framework of life within which man can seek for and grow into his real self and divinity, and secondly, an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being in life, thirdly a collective advance towards the light, power, peace, unity, harmony of the divine nature of humanity which the race is trying to evolve. This and nothing more but nothing less, this in all its potentialities is what we mean by a spiritual culture and the application of spirituality in life.

Those who distrust this ideal or who cannot understand it, are still under the sway of the European conception of life which for a time threatened to swamp entirely the Indian spirit. But let us remember that Europe itself is

 

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labouring to outgrow the limitations of its own conceptions and precisely by a rapid infusion of the ideas of the East,- naturally, essential ideas and not the mere forms,- which have been first infiltrating and are now more freely streaming into Western thought, poetry, art, ideas of life. not to overturn its culture, but to transform, enlighten and aggrandise its best values and to add new values which have long been ignored and forgotten. It will be singular if while Europe is thus intelligently enlarging herself in the new light she has been able to seize and admitting the truths of the spirit and the aim of a divine change in man and his life, we in India are to take up the cast-off clothes of European thought and life and to straggle along in the old rut of her wheels always taking up today what she has cast off yesterday. We should not allow our cultural independence to be paralysed by the accident that at the moment Europe came in upon us, we were in a state of ebb and weakness such as comes some day upon all civilisations. That no more proves that our spirituality, our culture, our leading ideas were entirely mistaken and the best we can do is to vigorously Europeanise, rationalise, materialise ourselves in the practical parts of life, keeping perhaps some spirituality, religion, Indianism as a graceful decoration in the background,-than the great catastrophe of the war proves that Europe's science, her democracy, her progress were all wrong and she should return to the Middle Ages or imitate the culture of China or Turkey or Tibet. Such generalisations are facile falsehoods of a hasty and unreflecting ignorance.

We have both made mistakes, faltered in the true application of our ideals, been misled into unhealthy exaggerations. Europe has understood the lesson, she is striving to correct herself ; but she does not for this reason forswear science, democracy, progress but purposes to complete and perfect them, to use them

 

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better, to give them a sounder direction. She is admitting the light of the East but on the basis of her own way of thinking and living, opening herself to truth of spirit, but not abandoning her own truth of life and science and social ideals. We should be as faithful, as free in our dealings with the Indian spirit and modern influences, correct what went wrong with us; apply our spirituality on broader and freer lines, be if possible not less but more spiritual than were our forefathers; admit Western science, reason, progressiveness the essential modern ideas, but on the basis of our own way of life and assimilated to our spiritual aim and ideal, open ourselves to the throb of life, the pragmatic activity, the great modern endeavour but not therefore abandon our fundamental view of God and man and Nature. There is no real quarrel between them; for rather these two things need each other to fill themselves in, to discover all their own implications, to awaken their own richest and completest significance.

 
India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose , the rejection of every thing new that comes to us in the stream of time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light or added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive and evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not answer, adopting the language used by the poet in a slightly different

 

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connection that our fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall, the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation. But the reason assigned is not the true one. If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we would not be where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic, self-seeking, materialistic that they fell. It is possible that on one side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, and on the other into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating life-givers. But the root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its generality and broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life.

 
Perhaps there was too much religion in one sense ; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to religion the sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all-embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much of religion, but rather too little of it - and in what there was, a too one sided and therefore insufficiently ample tendency. The right remedy is not to belittle still farther the age long ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in which philosophy, poetry, art in the West are still more or less obscurely

 

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but with an increasing light beginning to turn and even some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across political ideals. India has the key to the knowledge and conscious application of the ideal; what was dark to her before in its application, she can now, with a new light, illumine; what was wrong and wry in her old methods she can now rectify; the fences which she created to protect the outer growth of the spiritual ideal and which afterwards became barriers of its expansion and farther application she can now break down and give her spirit a new and decisive turn to the problems over which all mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient knowledge. Whether she will rise to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance which is coming upon her is the question of her destiny.

 

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