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Before we turn to the practical side of Hinduism, it is necessary to clear the ground by referring to some of the chief objections urged against the conception of Hindu ethics. The doctrine of maya is supposed to repudiate the reality of the world and thus make all ethical relations meaningless. The world of nature is said to be unreal and human history illusory. There is no meaning in time and no significance in life. To be delivered from this illusion which has somehow come to dominate the race of man in the end of all endeavour.
The Vedic thinkers adopted a realistic view of the world. In the Upanisads we have an insistence on the relative reality of the world. The illustrations of a musical instrument and its notes, the substances of clay and gold and the things made of clay and gold, make out that the objects of the world derive their being from the Supreme. As Yajnavalkya puts it, everything in the world is of value as leading to the realisation of self. When the Svetasvatara Upanisad looks upon the Supreme as the great Mayin, it suggests that this wonderful creation is his product. The Upanisads do not support the view that the Supreme calls up appearances which have no existence except in deluded minds. The different theistic systems adopted by the large majority of the Hindus do not advocate the doctrine of maya. The theory is held by Samkara, who is regarded often as representing the standard type of Hindu thought.
It is quite true that Samkara regards the world as maya and urges several reasons in support of this thesis. The manifold of experience whether of co-existence in space or sequence in time is every incomplete and partial and we cannot unify it. There will always by a surplus uncovered by the largest unity. The fact that the time and space world cannot be rounded into a systematic whole indicates that it is imperfect and unreal. Again, the real must be exempt from all change and persist for all time. The historical particulars do not persist for all time, they die every moment. We may interpret this idea in our own terms. The historical particular finishes its course when it reaches its end. If the end is not reached, if our lives are to be wasted in the pursuit of travelling perpetually and never arriving, then the world process is unmeaning and the cry that has gone forth that all is vanity becomes justified. It cannot be interminable singing, there should also be such a thing as completion in a song. If the historical process is not all, if we are not perpetually doomed to the pursuit of an unattainable ideal, then we must reach perfection at some point of the historical process, and that will be the transcending of our historical individuality, of our escape from birth and death, or samsara. History is the working out of a purpose, and we are getting nearer and nearer to its fulfilment. Moksa is the realisation of the purpose of each individual. On the attainment of perfection the historical existence terminates. When one individual completes his purpose, he develops the universality of outlook characteristic of perfection, but retains his individuality as a centre of action. When the whole universe reaches its consummation, the liberated individuals lapse into the stillness of the Absolute. Those great forces which seem to be making silently and surely for the destruction of this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck will reach their true destination. The world fulfills itself by self-destruction. Einstein’s theory of relativity with its assumption that the spatio-temporal system is limited and measureable is not unfavourable to such a dissolution of the world. But this does not take away from the free being of God who is omnipotent or infinite possibility. The curtain will drop on this world, but another possibility, another plot, another drama may commence and go on for ages.
To some it may appear that such a collapse of the world is a poor termination to all our struggles, and so they picture to us an eternal heaven or even eternal hell, but the implication of these eternal states is one of eternal idleness. As Herbert Spencer put it, deviation from perfection or the perfect adjustment of the organism to the environment is decay. The state of perfection is a condition of absolute stillness, stagnation, death. There are thinkers, both in the East and the West, who look upon Paradise as a state of activity where we sign the praises of God, and he has no end of patience in listening to his own glory. The only useful work which the liberated souls do is to help struggling humanity. So long as there are individuals who are unredeemed and so stand in need of saving knowledge, the liberated have some work to do. But if we allow that the world purpose is achieved, that all individuals have attained their perfection, there is nothing to be done. Aristotle says, “Endless duration makes good no better, nor white any whiter.” There is no creative process without travail, and the attainment of perfection for all means the end of creative activity. “Nothing that is perfectly real moves,” according to Bradley. Activity is a characteristics of the historical process, and perfection is not historical. It lacks nothing and it cannot have any activity in it.
It is sometimes argued that the world process is infinite and so there will always be work to be done. In other words, there will never come a time when all individuals will reach their perfection. But this will be a frustration of the purpose of God. So long as the world process continues, the liberated souls retain their individualities, which they lose in the event of the liberation of all, or sarvamukti.
It is not fair to represent Samkara’s view as an illusionism. Samkara repudiates the subjectivism of Vignanavadins and affirms the extra-mental reality of objects. His theory is not drsti-srsti-vada, that objects rise into being when we perceive them and disappear when we do not. We perceive objects and do not simply contemplate apparitions. Samkara distinguishes dreams from waking experiences and warns us against a confusion between the two. The experiences of waking life are not contradicted by anything else in our logical knowledge. He is a realist so far as our experience goes. Things control thought. Samkara’s theory of avidya also confirms this view. For avidya is not a private profession of this or that individual mind; it is common to all minds, being the cosmic principle of finiteness. It is the cause of the whole empirical world (prthivyadiprapanca); common to all (sarvasadharana). Moksa or release of any one individual does not bring about the destruction of the world but only the displacement of a false outlook by a true one, avidya by vidya. When the illusion of the mirage is dissipated by scientific knowledge, the illusion stands there though it is no longer able to tempt us. The world is not so much denied as reinterpreted.
Samkara believes that the logical dualism between subject and object is not final. It rests on a monism. Subject and object are phases of spirit. They have no existence apart from Brahman. “There are in the world many universals with their particulars – both conscious and unconscious. All these universals in their graduated series are included and comprehended in one great universal, that is, Brahman as a mass of intelligence. Samkara does not assert an identity between God and the world but only denies the independence of the world. As the Tikakara says: “The world is not identical with Brahman; only it has no separate being independent of its ultimate source.” When Samkara denies the reality of effects, he qualifies his denial by some such phrase as “independent of the cause” or “independent of God”.
If we raise the question as to how the finite rises from out of the bosom of the infinite, Samkara says that it is an incomprehensible mystery, maya. We know that there is the absolute reality, we know that there is the empirical world, we know that the empirical world rests on the Absolute, but the how of it is beyond our knowledge. They hypothesis of creation is a weak one, and it assumes that God lived alone for some time and then suddenly it occurred to him to have company, when he put forth the world. The theory of manifestation is not more satisfying, for it is difficult to know how the finite can manifest the infinite. If we say that God is transformed into the world, the question arises whether it is the whole of God that is transformed or only a part. If it is the whole, then there is no God beyond the universe and we lapse into the lower pantheism. If it is only a part, then it means that God is capable of being partitioned. We cannot keep one part of God above and another part below. It would be like taking half a fowl for cooking, leaving the other half for laying eggs. Samkara believes that it is not possible to determine logically the relation between God and the world. He asks us to hold fast both ends. It does not matter if we are not able to find out where they meet.
The history of philosophy in India as well as Europe has been one long illustration of the inability of the human mind to solve the mystery of the relation of God to the world. The greatest thinkers are those who admit the mystery and comfort themselves by the idea that the human mind is not omniscient. Samkara in the East and Bradley in the West adopt this wise attitude of agnosticism. We have the universe with its distinctions. It is not self-sufficient. It rests on something else, nd that is the Absolute. The relation between the two is a mystery. The idea expressed in the statement “And God saw everything that He had made and behold it was very good” does not solve the problem. It assumes that the world is “very good” and we have our doubts about it. Unable to believe that a good God could be responsible for the horrors of nature, Plato held that the goodness of God was made somewhat ineffective by the intractableness of nature which he tried in vain to control. The Gnostics strove to express the idea that God was trying to redeem a world created by the devil. Augustine from this worked out his view of “total depravity” and the scheme of salvation. Some still clung to the idea of the omnipotence of God by paying him the doubtful compliment, as J.S. Mill says, of making him the creator of the devil. Leibniz argues that even if this world is in many ways defective, it is the best of all possible worlds; but this view implies an uncomplimentary reflection on the power of God. Hegelian absolutism is unable to account for the lapse of the perfect into the imperfect. Bergson emphasises the conflict of matter and life in the world and believes that the two are the negative and positive phases of one primal consciousness, but he is not able to account for the rise of the two tendencies from the first principle. Croce arrives at the different forms of spirit, theoretical and practical, but he does not give us any metaphysical deduction of these forms from the one spirit. If the forms are all, then there is no Absolute, and if there is no Absolute, it seems to be a sort of dissolute Absolute.
A wise agnosticism is more faithful to the situation. But the logical mind of man is not willing to admit defeat. It cannot rest in the idea that the Absolute is incomprehensible and that the world hangs on it somehow. It makes the Absolute determinate and relates the world to this determinate principle as its expression. In view of the weakness of the human mind Samkara allows these metaphors. The perfection of God overflows into the world. The world is the outflow of the surplus energies of God, the supreme artist, Lila or sport brings out the rationality, the freedom and the joyous exercise of spontaneity involved in the art of creation. We look upon God as a personal lord, and endow him with the power of self-expression and self-communication. A sterile perfection is an inconceivability. The principle of self-expression is also called maya. It also stands for the principle of objectivity by interaction with which the subject self is able to express himself. But these attempts are devices to understand the nature of the relation of God to the world.
However that may be, no theory has ever asserted that life is a dream and all experienced events are illusions. One or two later followers of Samkara lend countenance to this hypothesis, but it cannot be regarded as representing the main tendency of Hindu thought.
The next objection goes to the opposite extreme. To the Hindu ethical rules are meaningless because the world is divine. Everything is God, and there is no excuse for our interfering with the sacred activities of the pickpocket and the perjurer. The critic believes that he refutes the theory of divine immanence associated with all forms of Indian thought when he exclaims, Is Piccadilly Circus God? Is Hyde Park Corner God? The Hindu view rebels against the cold and formal conception of God who is external to the world, and altogether remote and transcendent. The natural law of the world is but a working of God’s sovereign purpose. The uniformity of nature, the orderliness of the cosmos, and the steady reaching forward and upward of the course of evolution proclaim not the unconscious throbbing of a soulless engine, but the directing mind of an all-knowing spirit. The indwelling of God in the universe doe not mean the identity of God with the universe. According to the latter view God is so immanent in everything that we have only to open our eyes to see God in it, but also there is nothing of God left outside the whole of things. God lies spread out before us. The world is not only a revelation, but an exhaustive revelation of God.
Hindu thought takes care to emphasise the transcendent character of the Supreme. “He bears the world but is by no means lost in it.” The world is in God and not God in the world. In the universe we have the separate existence of the individuals. Whether the divine spark burns dimly or brightly in the individual, the sparks are distinct from the central fire from which they issue. Hindu thought admits that the immanence of God is a fact admitting of various degrees. While there is nothing which is not lit by God, God is more fully revealed in the organic than in the inorganic, more in the conscious than in the unconscious, more in man than in the lower creatures, more in the good man than in the evil. But even the worst of the world cannot be dismissed as completely undivine, fit only to be cast into hell fire. While Hinduism believes in the divine indwelling and declares that there is no escaping from the divine presence, it does not say that everything is God as we find it. Piccadilly is not God, thought even Piccadilly cannot be unless it is allowed by divine activity. There are divine potentialities in even the worst of men, the everlasting arms of God underneath the worst sinners. No one is really beyond hope. The worst sinner has a future even as the greatest saint has had a past. No one is so good or so bad as he imagines. The great souls of the world address themselves to the task of rousing the divine possibilities in the publicans and the sinners.
The doctrine of Karma is sometimes interpreted as implying a denial of human freedom, which is generally regarded as the basis of all ethical values. But when rightly viewed the law does not conflict with the reality of freedom. It is the principle of science which displaces belief in magic or the theory that we can manipulate the forces of the world at our pleasure. The course of nature is determined not by the passions and prejudices of personal spirits lurking behind it but by the operation of immutable laws. If the sun pursues his daily and the moon her nightly journey across the sky, if the silent procession of the seasons moves in light and shadow across the earth, it is because they are all guided in their courses by a power superior to them all. “Verily O Gargi, at the command of that Imperishable, the sun and the moon stand apart, the earth and the sky stand apart … the moments, the hours, the days, the nights, the fortnights, the months, the seasons and the years stand apart. Verily O Gargi, at the command of that Imperishable, some rivers flow from the snowy mountains to the east, others to the west in whatever direction each flows. There is the march of necessity everywhere. The universe is lawful to the core.
The theory of Karma recognises the rule of law not only in outward nature, but also in the world of mind and morals. Rita manifests itself equally in nature and in human society. We are every moment making our characters and shaping our destinies.” There is no loss of any activity which we commence nor is there any obstacle to its fulfilment. Even a little good that we may do will protect us against great odds”. What we have set our hearts on will not perish with this body. This fact inspires life with the present sense of eternity.
At a time when people were doing devil’s work under divine sanction and consoling themselves by attributing everything to God’s will, the principle of Karma insisted on the primacy of the ethical and identified God with the rule of law. All’s law, yet all’s God. Karma is not a mechanical principle but a spiritual necessity. It is the embodiment of the mind and will of God. God is its supervisor, karmadhyaksah. Justice is an attribute of God. Character of God is represented by St James as one “with whom can be no variation neither shadow that is cast by turning”. Every act, every thought is weighed in the invisible but universal balance-scales of justice. The day of judgement is not in some remote future, but here and now, and none can escape it. Divine laws cannot be evaded. They are not so much imposed from without as wrought into our natures. Sin is not so much a defiance of God as a denial of soul, not so much a violation of law as a betrayal of self. We carry with us the whole of our past. It is an ineffaceable record which time cannot blur nor death erase.
There is room for repentance and consequent forgiveness on this scheme. The critic who urges that belief in Karma makes religious life, prayer and worship impossible has not a right understanding of it. In his opinion God has abdicated in favour of his law. To pray to God is as future a superstition as to bid the storm give us strength, or the earthquake to for us our sins. Of course the Hindu does not look upon prayer as a sort of Aladdin’s lamp to produce anything we want. God is not a magician stopping the sun in its course and staying the bullet in its march. But his truth and constancy, his mercy and justice find their embodiment in the implacable working of the moral law. Forgiveness is not a mitigation of God’s justice but only an expression of it. We can insist with unflinching rigour on the inexorability of the moral law and yet believe in the forgiveness of sins. Spiritual growth and experience are governed by laws similar to those which rule the rest of the universe. If we sow to the flesh we shall of the flesh reap corruption. The punishment for a desecrated body is an enfeebled understanding and a darkened soul. If we deliberately fall into sin, shutting our eyes to moral and spiritual light, we may be sure that in God’s world sin will find us out and our wilful blindness will land us in the ditch. A just God cannot refuse to any man that which he has earned. The past guilt cannot be wiped away by the atoning suffering of an outward substitute. Guilt cannot be transferred. It must be atoned for through the sorrow entailed by self-conquest. God cannot be bought over and sin cannot be glossed over.
The principle of Karma reckons with the material or the context in which each individual is born. While it regards the past as determined, it allows that the future is only conditioned. The spiritual element in man allows him freedom within the limits of his nature. Man is not a mere mechanism of instincts. The spirit in him can triumph over the automatic forces that try to enslave him. The Bhagavadgita asks us to raise the self by the self. We can use the material with which we are endowed to promote our ideals. The cards in the game of life are given to us. We do not select them. They are traced to our past Karma, but we can call as we please, lead what suit we will, and as we play, we gain or lose. And there is freedom.
What the individual will be cannot be predicted beforehand, through there is no caprice. We can predict an individual’s acts so far as they are governed by habit, that is, to the extent his actions are mechanical and not affected by choice. But choice is not caprice. Free will in the sense of an undetermined, unrelated, uncaused factor in human action is not admitted, but such a will defies all analysis. It has nothing to do with the general stream of cause and effect. It operates in an irregular and chaotic way. If human actions are determined by such a will, there is no meaning in punishment or training of character. The theory of Karma allows man the free to use the material in the light of his knowledge. Man controls the uniformities in nature, his own mind and society. There is thus scope for genuine rational freedom, while indeterminism and chance lead to a false fatalism.
The universe is not one in which every detail is decreed. We do not have a mere unfolding of a pre-arranged plan. There is no such thing as absolute prescience on the part of God, for we are all his fellow-workers. God is not somewhere above us and beyond us, he is also in us. The divine in us can, if utilised, bring about even sudden conversions. Evolution in the sense of epigenesis is not impossible. For the real is an active developing life and not a mechanical routine.
The law of Karma encourages the sinner that it is never too late to mend. It does not shut the gates of hope against despair and suffering, guilt and peril. It persuades us to adopt a charitable view towards the sinner, for men are more often weak than vicious. It is not true that the heart of man is desperately wicked and that he prefers evil to good, the easy descent to hell to the steep ascent to heaven.
Unfortunately, the theory of Karma became confused with fatality in India when man himself grew feeble and was disinclined to do his best. It was made into an excuse for inertia and timidity and was turned into a message of despair and not of hope. It said to the sinner, “Not only are you a wreck, but that is all you ever could have been. That was your preordained being from the beginning of time.” But such a philosophy of despair is by no means the necessary outcome of the doctrine of Karma.
Let us now turn to the practical side of Hinduism. Hinduism is more a way of life than a form of thought. While it gives absolute liberty in the world of thought it enjoins a strict code of practice. The theist and the atheist, the sceptic and the agnostic may all be Hindus if they accept the Hindu system of culture and life. Hinduism insists not on religious conformity but on a spiritual and ethical outlook in life. “The performer of the good – and not the believer in this or that view – can never get into an evil state.” In a very real sense practice precedes theory. Only by doing the will does one know the doctrine. Whatever our theological beliefs and metaphysical opinions may be, we are all agreed that we should be kind and honest, grateful to our benefactors and sympathetic to the unfortunate. Hinduism insists on a moral life and draws into fellowship all who feel themselves bound to the claims which the moral law makes upon them. Hinduism is not a sect but a fellowship of all who accept the law of right and earnestly seek for the truth.
Dharma is right action. In the Rg Veda, rta is the right order of the universe. It stands for both the satya or the truth of things as well as the dharma or the law of evolution. Dharma formed from the root dhr, to hold, means that which holds a thing and maintains it in being. Every form of life, every group of men has its dharma, which is the law of its being. Dharma or virtue is conformity with the truth of things; adharma or vice is opposition to it. More evil in disharmony with the truth which encompasses and controls the world.
Desires constitute the springs of human action. The life of man centres round certain basic cravings, each distinct from the other in its object and each stimulating men to a particular mode of activity in order to satisfy it. If the several desires were independent of one another and never crossed or modified one another, then their different expressions would be separate and uncoordinated. Family life will have little to do with economic pursuits. Industrial relations will be ethically colourless. Religious activities my be indifferent to the secular sides of life. But man is a whole, and so all his activities have an overarching unity. Each individual has in him the sex and the parental instincts, love of power and wealth, desire for the common good and a hunger for communion with the unseen. These different activities react upon and modify one another. They function an interdependence in man’s life. If life is one, then there is one master science of life which recognises the four supreme ends of dharma or righteousness, artha or wealth, kama or artistic and cultural life, and moksa or spiritual freedom. The Hindu code of practice links up the realm of desires with the perspective of the eternal. It binds together the kingdoms of earth and heaven.
Hinduism does not believe in any permanent feud between the human world of natural desires and social aims and the spiritual life with its discipline and aspiration on the other. It condemns only natural existence which is unrelated to the background. Such a life which concentrates on this world and its good things is not satisfying, for the greatest prosperity comes to its end, dissolving into emptiness. The world and all else on which we pin our faith will desert us in the moment of our triumph. The Hindu thinker dwells o the evanescence of the world and its pitiful futility if its connection with the eternal is snapped.
All worldly relationships have their end, but they cannot be ignored. To behave as if they do not exist simply because they do not persist is to court disaster. The eternal is manifested in the temporal, and the latter is the pathway to the former. Truth in the finite aspect leads us to infinite truth. Renunciation is the feeling of detachment from the finite as finite and attachment to the finite as the embodiment of the infinite. The two are bound to each other and to separate them is ruinous. The Upanisad says: “In the darkness they who worship the infinite alone. He who accepts both saves himself from death by the knowledge of the former and attains immortality by the knowledge of the latter.”
Artha takes note of the economic and the political life of man, the craving for power and property. The urge which gives rise to property is something fundamental in human nature. Unless we change the constitution of the human mind, we cannot eradicate the idea of property. For most men property is the medium for the expression of personality and intercourse with others.
While the pursuit of wealth and happiness is a legitimate human aspiration, they should be gained in ways of righteousness (dharma), if they are to lead ultimately to the spiritual freedom of man (moksa). Each one of these ends requires ethical discipline. Freedom can be obtained only through bonds of discipline and surrender of personal inclination. To secure the freedom to acquire and to enjoy we have to limit ourselves and bind our will in certain ways. The countries which are politically free are largely bound in thought and practice. Political freedom is not possible without a large curtailment of freedom of thought and action. In the interests of spiritual freedom Hindu society regulated the most intimate details of daily life, and they are the rules of dharma. These rules are not the same in all parts of the country or in all period of Hindu history. The Hindu legislators accepted the bewildering variety of customs professed by the tribes in India as the civilisation spread from the Indus to the Cape. The law books recognise the variety, though they try to refine whatever seems to be morally objectionable. While recognising them all an ideal standard is enjoined which imperceptibly brings about a refinement of the customs. According to the Taittiriya Upanisad, the young man is asked in cases of doubt to take as his authority what is done in similar circumstances by the Brahmins “competent to judge, apt and devoted but not harsh, lovers of virtue”. Manu urges that the conduct of good people (sadbhih) and righteous souls of the regenerate classes (dharmikais ca dvijatibhih) may be regarded as consistent (aviruddham) with the customs of all countries, families and castes.
Moksa is spiritual realisation. The Hindu Dharma says, Man does not live by bread alone, nor by his work, capital, ambition or power or relations to external nature. He lives or must live by his life of spirit. Moksa is self-emancipation, the fulfilment of the spirit in us in the heart of the external. This is what gives ultimate satisfaction, and all other activities are directed to the realisation of this end.
As to the methods of obtaining freedom, the Hindu thinker adopted a very catholic attitude. “As the birds fly in the air, as the fish swim in the sea, leaving no traces behind, even so is the pathway to God traversed by the seeker of spirit.”
The different pathways have been broadly distinguished into the three types of jnana, wisdom, bhakti or devotion, karma or service. The three are not exclusive, but emphasise the dominant aspects. Wisdom (jnana) does not mean intellectual acumen or dialectical power. Jnana is realised experience. We are saved from sin only when we live in the presence of God. If we have true insight, right action will take care of itself. Truth cannot but act rightly. The way of devotion is the most popular one. Sinners as well as saints, ignorant as well as learned, foolish as well as wise find it easy. Prayer and petition, fasting and sacrifice, communion and self-examination, all are included in the life of devotion. In its highest flights, bhakti coincides with jnana, and both these issue in right karma or virtuous life.
While the individual and the social sides of karma are inseparably intertwined, the theory of varna or caste emphasises the social aspect, and that of asrama or stages of life the individual aspect. The four stages of brahmacarya or the period of training, grhastha or the period of work for the world as a householder, vanaprasthya or the period of retreat for the loosening of the social bonds, and samnyasa or the period of renunciation and expectant awaiting of freedom indicate that life is a pilgrimage to the eternal life through different stages.
The first period is that of training and discipline of body and mind. Plastic youth is moulded to a life of duty. The student is required to live for a fixed period in the house of his teacher, where he is taught the arts and sciences which would be useful to him after life. Women were also entitled to brahmacarya. They were given the training of their classes, and thus enabled to take up the functions of the caste in the emergencies of life. Restrictions regarding Vedic study were introduced when women of other racial stocks with different customs were accepted in marriage.
The second stage is that of the householder or the grhastha. A human being is not ordinarily self-sufficing. The God of Aristotle may enjoy his solitary existence, but not the men and women of the world. These are as a rule encouraged to enter the married life. India has known for centuries what Freud is popularising in Europe, that repressed desires are more corrupting in their effects than those exercised openly and freely. Monastic tendencies were discouraged until one had a normal expression of natural impulses. He who runs back from marriage is in the same boat with one who runs away from battle. Only failures in life avoid occasions for virtue. Marriage is regarded as sacred. The very gods are married. When the Hindu descends from the adoration of the Absolute and takes to the worship of a personal god, his god has always a consort. He does not worship a bachelor or a virgin. Siva is ardhanarisvara, and his image signifies the cooperative interdependent, separately in complete but jointly complete masculine and feminine functions of the supreme being. There is nothing unwholesome or guilty about the sex life. Through the institution of marriage it is made the basis of intellectual and moral intimacies. Marriage is not so much a concession to human weakness as a means of spiritual growth. It is prescribed for the sake of the development of personality as well as the continuance of the family ideal. Marriage has this social side. Every family is a partnership between the living and the dead. The Straddha ceremony is intended to impress the idea of the family solidarity on the members. At the end of the ceremony the performer asks, “Let me, O fathers! have a hero for a son.” The Hindu ideal emphasises the individual and the social aspects of the institution of marriage. Man is not a tyrant nor is woman a slave, but both are servants of a higher ideal to which their individual inclinations are to be subordinated. Sensual love is sublimated into self-forgetful devotion. Marriage for the Hindu is a problem and not a datum. Except in the pages of fiction we do not have a pair agreeing with each other in everything, tastes and temper, ideals and interests. Irreducible peculiarities there will always be, and the task of the institution of marriage is to use these differences to promote a harmonious life. Instincts and passions are the raw material which are to be worked up into an ideal whole. Though there is some choice with regard to our mates, there is a large element of chance in the best of marriages. Carve as we will that mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny or chance, whatever we may call it, appears again and again in it. That marriage is successful which transforms a chance mate into a life companion. Marriage is not the end of the struggle, it is but the beginning of a strenuous life where we attempt to realise a larger ideal by subordinating our private interests and inclinations. Service of a common ideal can bind together the most unlike individuals. Love demands its sacrifices. By restraint and endurance, we raise love to the likeness of the divine.
In an ideal marriage the genuine interests of the two members are perfectly reconciled. The perfectly ethical marriage is the monogamous one. The relation of Rama and Sita, or Savitri and Satyavan, where the two stand by each other against the whole world, is idealised in the Hindu scriptures. In the absence of absolute perfection we have to content with approximations. Weed not, however, confound the higher with the lower. Eight different kinds of marriages are recognised in the Hindu law books. Manu did not shut his eyes to the practices of his contemporaries. He arranges the different kinds of marriages in an order. While marriages in which personal inclination is subordinated rank high, those by mutual choice (gandharva), force (raksasa), purchase (asura) come lower. The lowest is paisaca. When the lover ravishes a maiden without her consent, when she is asleep, or intoxicated or deranged in mind, we have a case of paisaca marriage. It is a very low kind of marriage, but admitted as valid with the laudable motives of giving the injured women the status of wives and their offspring legitimacy.
Insistence on the interests of the family led to a compromise of the monogamous ideal. While the monogamous ideal is held up as the best, polygamy was also tolerated. When you have no male offspring, or when, by mistake or chance, you seduce a woman when you are married, it is your duty to protect her from desertion and from public scorn, save her from a life of infamy and degradation, and protect her children who are in no way responsible for the ways of their parents; in such cases polygamy is permissible. The story of the epic Ramayana has for one of it chief lessons the evils of polygamy. The palace of Dasaratha was a centre of intrigue, and Rama, the hero of the story, stands up for the monogamous ideal.
A system which looks upon marriage as compulsory for all has its own weaknesses, though it does not develop large numbers of unmarried women who see no meaning in life. It is obliged to discountenance the remarriage of widows. It unconsciously tends to lower the marriageable age of girls. It is necessary for the leaders to remember the Hindu ideals and bring about a more satisfactory state of affairs.
The recognition of the spiritual ideal of marriage requires us to regard the marriage relation as an indissoluble one. So long as we take a small view of life and adopt for our guide the fancy or feeling of the moment, marriage relation cannot be regarded as permanent. In the first moments of infatuation we look upon our partners as angels from heaven, but soon the wonder wears away, and if we persist in our passion for perfection, we become agitated and often bitter. The unrest is the effect of a false ideal. The perfect relation is to be created and not found. The existence of incompatibility is a challenge to a more vigorous effort. To resort to divorce is to confess defeat. The misfits and the maladjustments are but failures.
Modern conditions are responsible for the large numbers of divorces and separations. Life has become too hurried. We have no time to understand one another. To justify our conduct, we are setting up exaggerated claims on behalf of the individual will and are strongly protesting against discipline. We are confusing self-expression and self-development with a life of instincts and passions. We tend to look upon ourselves as healthy animals and not spiritual beings. We have had sin with us from the beginning of our history, but we have recently begun to worship it. It is not very modern for a man or woman who is sick of his or her partner to take to another, but what is really modern is the new philosophy in justification of it. Disguised feeing is masquerading as advanced thought. The woman who gives up her husband for another is idealised as a heroine who has had the courage to give up the hypocritical moral codes and false sentiments, while he who clings to her husband through good report and bad is a cowardly victim of conventions. Sex irregularities are becoming less shocking and more popular.
Though we have had our share of exaggerating the wickedness of women, and though we have some texts which regard the woman as the eternal temptress of the man Adam, a snare of perdition, ad Donaldson expressed it, “a fireship continually striving to get alongside the male man-of-war and blow him up into pieces”, the general Hindu view of woman is an exalted one. It regards the woman as the helpmate of man in all his work, sahadharmini. The Hindu believes in the specialty of the contribution which woman makes to the world. She has special responsibilities and special duties. Even such an advanced thinker as Mrs Bertrand Russell allows that “each class and sex has that to give to the common stock of achievement, knowledge and thought which it alone can give, and robs itself and the community by inferior imitation.” So long as children cannot be shaken from heaven, but have to be built within their mothers’ bodies, so long will there be a specific function for women. As the bearing and rearing of children take a good deal of their time and attention, women were relieved of the economic responsibilities for the family. While man is expected to take to the worldly pursuits (yajnapradhanya), woman is capable of great heights of self-control and self-denial (tapahpradhanya). The stricter code of morality applied to women is really a compliment to them, for it accepts the natural superiority of the women. But the modern woman, if I may say so, is losing her self-respect. She does not respect her own individuality and uniqueness, but is paying an unconscious tribute to man by trying to imitate him. She is fast becoming masculine and mechanical. Adventurous pursuits are leading her into conflict with her own inner nature.
The third stage arises when the responsibilities of home are given up. The wife accompanies the husband to the forest, if she share his spiritual aims. According to Manu, one must enter the third stage when one becomes a grandfather, or one’s skin begins to show wrinkles or one’s hair turns grey. When one’s bodily powers wane, it is time to depart to the forest and prepare oneself for the true life of the spirit. The main objective of this stage is to escape from the bustle of life into the solitude of the forest to meditate on the higher problems.
The stature of man is not to be reduced to the requirements of the society. Man is much more than the custodian of its culture or protector of his country or producer of its wealth. His social efficiency is not the measure of his spiritual manhood. The soul which is our spiritual life contains our infinity within it. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul? A Sanskrit verse reads: “For the family sacrifice the individual; for the community the family; for the country the community, and for the soul the whole world.” Family and country, nation and the world cannot satisfy the soul in man. Each individual is called upon at a certain stage of his life to give up his wife and children and his caste and work. The last part of life’s road has to be walked in single file.
The aim of the samnyasin is not to free himself from the cars of outward life, but to attain a state of spiritual freedom when he is not tempted by riches or honour, and is not elated by success or depressed by failure. He develops a spirit of equanimity and so “bears patiently improper words and does not insult anyone; he does not hate anyone for the sake of his physical body”. These free men are solitary souls who have not any personal attachments or private ambitions, but embody in their own spirit the freedom of the world. They take on the wideness of the whole earth, dwell in love and walk in righteousness. The social order regards the samnyasin as a parasite since he does not contribute to it materially and doe not care for its forms. The state looks on him with suspicion as he does not profess any loyalty to any family or church, race or nation. He does not function in any industrial factory, social system or political machine. These samnyasins do not serve our policies that make the world unsafe for human life, do not promote our industries that mechanise persons, and do not support our national egoisms that provoke wars. Patriotism is not enough for these fine souls. Life, and not India’s life or England’s life, demands their devotion. They look upon all men and all groups as equal (samata sarvasmin).
While some forms of Christianity and Buddhism judge the life of the world to be inferior to the life of the monk, and would have loved to place the whole of mankind at one swoop in the cloister, Hinduism while appreciating the life of the samnyasin refrained from condemning the state of the householder. Every state is necessary, and in so far as it is necessary it is good. The blossom does not deny the leaf and the leaf does not deny the stalk nor the stalk the root. The general rule is that we should pass from stage to stage gradually.
The liberated soul is not indifferent to the welfare of the world. Renunciation is the surrendering of the notions of I and mine, and not the giving up of the work enjoined by the scriptures. It is related of the Buddha that when he was on the threshold of nirvana he turned away and took the vow never to cross it so long as a single being remained subject to sorrow and suffering. The same idea comes out in the sublime verse of the Bhagavata: “I desire not the supreme state (of bliss) with its eight perfections, nor the cessation of rebirth. May I take up the sorrow of all creatures who suffer and enter into them so that they may be made free from grief.” Mahadeva the prince of ascetics drank poison for the sake of the world. Freedom on the highest level of existence expresses itself on the lower as courage to suffer, sacrifice, and die.
This fourfold plan of life yet dominates the Hindu mind. The general character of a society is not always best expressed by the mass of its members. There exists in every community a natural elite, which better than all the rest represents the soul of the entire people, its great ideals, its strong emotions and its essential tendency. The whole community looks to them as their example. When the wick is ablaze at its tip, the whole lamp is said to be burning.