THE CORE OF HINDOOISM.
AMONG the great creeds which have influenced masses of mankind, there is none the inner strength of which it is so difficult to discern, as Hindooiam. Its governing tenets are so overlaid with superstitions, its central thoughts so obscured by a meanly gorgeous ritual, its essentials so smothered in what to its teachers seem non-important details, that many observers doubt if it has any inner life at all. Ninety in a hundred of the Europeans in India, including, unfortunately, many Missionaries, regard it as a mass of absurdities, foisted by cunning priests upon an ignorant population, and intended first of all to secure the ascendency and the easy living of a single hieratic corporation, recruited by hereditary descent, and trained in colleges which are in fact schools for the cultivation of ceremonial laws. A few Europeans of course have discerned that no faith of which this could be justly said, could have maintained its dominion over millions of intelligent men for tens of centuries, and have endeavoured from time to time to inform Europe of the ideas which, under an almost crushing weight of overgrowth, have kept Hindooism alive, which have given its general principles victory in a hundred revolts, and which to this day enchain some of the subtlest and most disin- terested thinkers that the world has produced. As a rule, however, these European exponents of Hindooism have found but thin audiences. They have either been distrusted as con- troversialists sworn to a particular view, or have been over- weighted with repellent learning, or have lost all clearness of utterance in the effort to reconcile the practice of Hindooism with the inner faith of its devotees. The Hindoos themselves luxe helped them very little. Asia is not given to explana-
tions such as Europeans understand; and so far as we know, there is no apology for Hindooism written in a European tongue by a Hindoo, to which any attention has been paid. It is therefore with some surprise, as well as much interest, that we have read a pamphlet written in English by a Madras Brahmin named Swami Vivektinanda, and published at three-farthings a copy, which is intended to supply this great deficiency. It was read, we believe, originally before the "Parliament of Religions" held at Chicago, and is certainly a remarkable performance. The writer is far too brief; he omits altogether to give us the Hindoo view of the relation of religion to morality, and he is obscure—probably with inten- tion—as to the Hindoo conception of what he calls " God; " and though he knows English as well as we do, he cannot entirely rid himself of the Asiatic tendency to an interjec- tional style, with all its assumptions and inflations. Still, his little pamphlet has merits not to be denied. He really understands at least part of what is wanted of him, and succeeds in telling any Englishman who will read him patiently, what the essential thought of Hindooism is.
There are, we believe, more than fifty accepted external forms of Hindooism, ranging from a worship which is hardly higher than fetishism—indeed, Swami Vivektinandti gives it that opprobrious appellation—up to the worship of the highest Snnyasees, which is free from any formulas or any kind of ritual, whether low or high, is indeed a service of pure thought or rapt contemplation of the Infinite ; but every Hindoo, whatever his intellectual grade, is aware of and accepts certain philosophic dogmas. One of these is that spirit exists as well as matter, and is of neces- sity, under laws which to Hindoos seem self-evident, in- herently above matter. As a fact, for which no one can account, spirits are imprisoned in bodies, but spirit is never- theless above matter, is deathless, as most European thinkers also believe, but, as none of them believe, is also without origin. The spirit, say the Hindoos, or "soul," to use our Western terminology, can by no conceivable possibility have been created, for if created it would be liable to die, and that which dies cannot be a spirit. Swami Viveleinandk puts this dogma forward in the simplest language, not as matter of argument, but as a fact which, to all who rei:spn, rant be self- evident. He says :—" Here I stand, and if I shut my eyes and try to conceive my existence, 'I,' 'I,' I,' what is the idea before me ? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of matter and material substances? The Vedas declare, 'No.' I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I will not die. Here am I in this body, and when it will fall still will I go on living. Also I had a past. The soul was not created from nothing, for creation means a combination, and that means a certain future dissolution. If, then, the soul was created, it must die. Therefore, it was not created." The soul being uncreated must be an emanation from something self- existent, and that can only be God or the self-existent spirit which is in all things and contains all things, being in truth the only reality of which everything else is a phenomenal manifestation. Being an emanation, the soul is always struggling to get back to its source, to liberate itself from the fetters of matter, and in regaining unity with the In- finite to regain at one and the same moment freedom and "bliss." The freedom from matter is self-evident, and so, asserts Swami Vivekinandi, is the bliss. He knows quite well that to the highly individualised Western this notion of absorption being bliss, seems almost absurd, or at least an assertion that torpor is bliss, and he meets that diffi- culty with almost child-like directness :—" We have often and often read about this being called the losing of indi- viduality as in becoming a stock or a stone. I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the con- sciousness of this small body, it must be more happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, or three, four, or five— and the ultimate of happiness would be reached when this sense of enjoyment would become a universal consciousness." As the spirit or soul is nncreated and cannot die, and struggles always to regain its habitat, and as clearly a great many men are not fit to regain it at once, it follows almost as a matter of course that the soul lives repeatedly in a conscious being, that is, is "transmigrated," a fact of which the memory of most men gives them no consciousness—any more, says the Madrassee Brahmin smilingly, than a littadrassee'e memory
gives him his English before he wants it and compels it to come to his mind—but which is nevertheless a fact proved by two arguments. If we have no past, our misfortunes are injustices, and God is a cruel tyrant, which is impossible ; and moreover certain " Rishis "—" saints " will do as a trans- lation—have positively remembered many lives, or even all their lives,—a huge conception, which the Swami never- theless asserts may be true of all men :—" This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by our Rishis. We have discovered the secrets by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up—follow them and you will get a complete reminiscence of your past life."
"Freedom" then being the end, how is freedom to be obtained ? It may be obtained, says the Hindoo, by all men, by the Christian no less than by himself, if only be will become "pure ;" and it is in this effort after "purity" that Hindooism as we see it, arises. Each sect, each caste, each subdivision of a caste, strives for it in its own way, and so long as the way tends to subordinate matter to spirit, no way is wrong. Swami Viva:IA:land:I rejects utterly, as we understand him, the idea that any worship can be sinful, and regards all as strugglers, some, like children, requiring images and ritual to wake the consciousness of spirit in them ; but all pressing farward, though with many fallings back, to a goal that must ultimately be attained. "Ye are the children of God," he says, '` the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye, divinities on earth, sinners ? It is a sin to call a man so. It is a standing libel on human nature. Come up 0! lions and shake off the delusion that you are sheep,—you are souls immortal, spirits free and blest and eternal, ye are not matter, ye are not bodies. Matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter If a man can realise his divine nature most easily with the help of an image, would it be right to call it a sin ? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindoo, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and associa- tion; and each of these religions, therefore, marks a stage of progress, and every soul is a child-eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious San."
This, then, is the inner Hindooism, the belief which every Hindoo accepts, and which sanctifies to him every act which he thinks or fancies or dreams may be worship. The lowest forms of idolatry, the most prejudicial rules of caste, the most cruel acts of self-maceration all help him on, as he believes, towards that " liberation " from the chain of matter which is to him the ideal and the perfect con- dition. No Hindoo, however low, is wholly without this belief, and, as we suspect, no Hindoo, even if he becomes a Christian, shakes himself in one generation wholly free from its influence. It is not our business, of course, to reply to Hindoo advocates,—to point out that their theory presup- poses an endless cycle organised rather by Fate than God ; that the impossibility of the creation of a spirit is a denial of omnipotence; that there is no particle of evidence for transmigration; or that their heaven, when attained, is only sleep, however blissful, even if it be not, as regards individual existence, simple annihilation. All we wish to point out to-day is that the Hindoos have behind their apparent creed another, which cannot fairly be denounced as either savage or ignoble, and that this creed is in its essence more hostile to Christianity than even sincere Christians are apt to believe. It rests on a totally different conception of the nature of the Supreme Being, who, says Swami Vivekanancla, with all thinking Hindoos, cannot be an individual, or possess " qualities; " on a radically separate conception of the soul, which in Hindooism is practically self- existent, and on a method of struggling towards heaven which may be in the highest minds a lofty dominance of matter by spirit, but may also be in average men nothing but a low formalism adopted, no doubt, with an idea of rising, but no more calculated to make a man rise than any form of the fetishism to which our Brahmin compares it. His tolerance, of which he is so proud, is hardly dis- tinguishable from indifference to truth, and we wish he would tell us in a pamphlet as brief as this one, what his ideas as to the final division between right and wrong really are, and how far Hindooism actually asserts what it always seems to assert, that that may be right in one man, one caste, or one nation which is hopelessly wrong in another. As we read his present pamphlet we under- stand him to say that anything done with the idea of getting higher is a virtuous act. Does he, in so teaching, recognise the existence of a sovereign and universal conscience, be it instinctive or be it revealed, or not ? We have tried for years, as patiently as a European may, to decide what Hindoos like the Swami think on that point, and we remain in a fog still. We cannot, that is, perceive how great Hindoo doctors permit polygamy in one caste—not to mention much worse things—and denounce it in another, yet keep up any unalterable distinctions based on the teaching of the inner light. And without that light how does a Hindoo know what will raise him higher?
Previous page
