III
This, then, is the "Divine Lay" of the Hindu religion, the book most cherished and most highly extolled by more than two hundred and thirty million Hindus.
We are, first of all, impressed by the many contradictions which disfigure the book. Hardly a page is free from conflicting doctrines and methods of life. It could not be otherwise in any effort to harmonize the mutually contradictory teachings of the conflicting schools of religious thought and practice in this complicated faith.
On the other hand, we see in this Song an honest and an able attempt to bring the many tenets of that faith into a consistent whole. And we cannot help feeling that, while the view of God and man here presented, and the ways of salvation here enunciated, are not satisfactory, yet we find scattered through its pages gems of thought and beauties of religious conceptions and instruction which are beyond cavil, and which to-day seem to satisfy many millions of our fellow-men.
But, at the close of a careful perusal of the book, one feels that it is radically unsatisfying.
In the first place, it is wanting in any power for life. In order to feel this, one has only to compare it, for a moment, with the Gospels of Christianity. We find here philosophical disquisitions on the Divine Being which few men can understand and none can hope to harmonize. In the Gospels, on the other hand, we see presented a scheme of life which, at the same time, satisfies the highest philosophy and is perfectly intelligible to the most simple-minded. Here a bewildering number of mutually contradictory ways of life are urged upon us, not one of which can appeal in fulness and power to the common man. There do we find one clear way of salvation—the way of faith in Christ; and in order to walk in that way the power of the Divine Spirit is promised to every one, even to the humblest soul and to the greatest sinner, that he might accept the Christ and live in and through Him a holy and a righteous life.
Above all, we have here represented an incarnation the records of whose doings, in the sacred writings of the Hindus, shock us by their immorality and disgust us by their coarseness. And yet he arrogates to himself the nature and the functions, as he makes upon us the demands, of the supreme Deity. There, on the other hand, we witness the spectacle of the Christ who so lived the divine life, and whose immaculate holiness is so overwhelming, that His claim to be one with the Godhead brings no shock or sense of incongruity to any one to-day. He has so impressed men of all generations that untold millions, in all lands, have felt no hesitation in believing Him when He says, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Here do we indeed find the supreme contrast between the manual of Hindu faith and the Gospels of Christianity; and it is a contrast at the most vital point of religion.
CHAPTER VII
POPULAR HINDUISM
In the last chapter we dwelt upon what may be called the Higher Hinduism—that system of thought and religious exercise which engages the attention, attracts the thought, and invites the devotion of the thinking classes of the Hindu fold. The Bhagavad Gita is only one of many writings which seriously present to the thoughtful Hindu some of the higher conceptions and deepest yearnings of the soul. Of all the faiths of the "Far East" none dwells so much upon these profound religious realities, or engages in such lofty flights of spiritual aspiration, as does this religion of the Brahmans. And no one can study these products of the greatest minds and most sensitive religious souls of India without entertaining a great and growing admiration for them.
But it is well to remember these are not all of Hindu literature; nor do they represent the current thought or the general religious life of the people.
A Dravidian Shrine, South India
They indeed reveal the highest and the best that has ever come to light in the thought and spiritual culture of this people. For that reason, the Bhagavad Gita is worthy of the name we gave it—the Hindu bible.
In view of all these things, who would say that God did not visit this people, or left Himself without witness among them? While He was leading the Hebrews in the time of Moses, He was also stirring this people through its old rishis, or sages. While He was rebuking the degenerate Jewish people through their later prophets, He was raising and inspiring the great prophet of India, the Buddha, to protest against a debased Brahmanism.
But let it not be supposed that this literature of "Higher Hinduism" is, in any sense, popular in India. Those religious books which engage the mind of the masses are of a very different class. They are the wild legends of the Puranas, and inane dialogues and lying incantations of the Tantras—two classes of works which are both the most popular and are lowest in the range of their ideas and most demoralizing in the cults which they present.
These books were ostensibly written for the common people and for women. And the common people delight in them and are intoxicated by their religious exaggerations and excesses.
Thus the faith of the people, as a whole, is far removed, in its grovelling thought, its idolatrous practices, and its thousand-headed ritual, from the teaching of Higher Hinduism.
Above all, we must remember that the Hinduism of to-day is not the Brahmanism of thirty centuries ago. It has been the passion of that faith, from the beginning, to absorb all cults and faiths that have come into contact with it. Hinduism is an amorphous thing; it has been compared to a many-coloured and many-fibred cloth, in which are mixed together Brahmanism, Buddhism, Demonolatry, and Christianity. And all these, utterly regardless of the many contradictions which they bring together, form modern Hinduism.
This is true also of the gods of India. The earliest of the Vedic gods had elements of nobility in them. The most universally recognized of their divinities in primitive times, Varuna, is free from the vain passions and moral obliquities of more recent gods. Indeed, as one follows the course of time and the consequent multiplication of deities in India, one sees in their pantheon a steady deterioration of character, until we come to the most popular of modern Hindu deities, Krishna and Kali, the one well-called "the incarnation of lust," and the other "the goddess of blood." One is the deification of human passion, while the other is an apotheosis of brute force. And yet the cults of those two deities have attained, at the present time, the maximum of popularity throughout the land.
The same fact is manifest in connection with the customs of the people. In early Vedic times, hardly one of those institutions which now so disfigure this religion existed among the people. Idolatry, the caste system, and the many forms of degradation of women are of later growth. Never, in all the history of the country, did they exist and flourish as they do at the present time.
Thus it will be seen that, while the religion of the Brahmans in its earliest, primitive stage was merely an ethnic faith and largely the echo of the spiritual yearning of the human soul, its development has neither added to its power nor broadened its horizon. On the contrary, it grows weaker and has, age after age, added superstition to superstition, until it has reached its maximum of error and of evil at the present time.
It is wise neither to ignore nor to underestimate the best that is in a faith; nor is it fair to shut one's eyes to its achievement as revealed in the life of the common people.
Indeed, the religious life of the masses is the truest index of the real value of a religion, if it has wrought upon them many centuries, as Hinduism has, in this land.