This I readily accepted, and in two years, 1890 to 1892, a new, and I hope more correct edition, was issued from the Press at Oxford in four large volumes. The Mahârâjah paid to the Press not less than £4,000. I found out afterwards that this Indian nobleman was by no means a student, an antiquarian, or a theologian; but, on the contrary, a man of the world, very fond of racing and hunting. He distinguished himself on one occasion, as I was told, by riding up the staircase to the very roof of his palace. When in one of my last letters I asked him what had induced him to spend so large a sum on the Rig-Veda, he replied that India wanted its Bible, and he added, “It may benefit me hereafter.” That hereafter has come sooner than he expected. He died a comparatively young man, and as long as the Veda lives his name will certainly not be forgotten. The Veda has lived now for four thousand years, or, according to Indian ideas, it has existed from all eternity. Four thousand years is but a small slice of eternity, but are there many books that have lasted or will last four thousand years? I ought to add that his liberality did not stop at paying the expenses of the work, but that he placed a large number of copies at my disposal, which was more than I expected or deserved. Are there many Mahârâjahs or Zemindârs in Europe who would have spent so large a sum on a new edition of the Bible, or, in fact, of any other important book? Would any scholar even think of appealing to the millionaires of England or America to help him in bringing out an old forgotten book, if it “benefited them hereafter” only? Anyhow, I came to learn that Hindus are not simply grandiloquent, but that they can do grand things also, when the opportunity offers.
If I finish here the list of my Indian friends, it is not because I have no more names to add. We have lately had a book called “Representative Indians,” by C. P. Pillai, 1897, containing biographical sketches of thirty-six distinguished Hindus and Parsis. Many of them I have known or corresponded with, but of their sentiments, their hopes and disappointments, I know but little. The undercurrent of their life, the deeper motives of their actions, are under a kind of purdah, and we hardly ever get either autobiographical confessions or outspoken memoirs. This is a pity, and naturally deprives reminiscences of Indian friends of much of that human interest which everybody feels when catching glimpses of the more intimate life of distinguished persons. We seldom hear of a good or smart saying from a Hindu, such as we have in large numbers from English, German, or French statesmen or poets. The people of India are still a deep secret to us, and if I have succeeded in withdrawing the curtain from only a small portion of their inmost thoughts and feelings, if, here and there, I have helped to change mere curiosity about them into a warm human sympathy with them, my reminiscences will have fulfilled their true object. In some respects, and particularly in respect to the greatest things (τὰ μέγιστα), India has as much to teach us as Greece and Rome, nay, I should say more. We must not forget, of course, that we are the direct intellectual heirs of the Greeks, and that our philosophical currency is taken from the capital left to us by them. Our palates are accustomed to the food which they have supplied to us from our very childhood, and hence whatever comes to us now from the thought-mines of India is generally put aside as merely curious or strange, whether in language, mythology, religion, or philosophy. But however foreign Indian thought may appear to us, it has filled an important place in the growth of the human race, and that growth is important, whether it took place on the borders of the Ilissos or on the shores of the Ganges. In India we still see, as it were, the last traces of the primordial surprise at this world. Their earliest thinkers seem still to feel strange in it, while Greeks and Romans are thoroughly at home in their little world. No doubt the Greeks as well as the Indians saw the riddles of the world, were perplexed by them, and tried to solve them. But while Greeks and Romans, and later on the leading races of Europe also, settled down to their practical work in life, the Indians, at least the leading thinkers among them, never felt quite at ease even in their beautiful forests, by the side of their mighty rivers, or under the shadow of their gigantic snow-mountains in the north. They never cared so intensely for this span of life on earth as the Greeks did. Hence they never brought political life to its full development, like the Greeks and Romans; they never strove to conquer what was not theirs, or to govern the world which they had conquered; nor did they, like the Hebrews, look upon the exact fulfilment of the law as the highest object of their life on earth. Even while passing through this world, their eyes were for ever fixed on the Beyond. They strove to pierce through the dark roof of their forests, to travel to the distant sources of their rivers, and to transcend even the snowy peaks of the Himâlaya Mountains. Their hearts would never forget the life that lay behind them, and their minds were for ever set on the life that was to come.
The old questions of Whence? Why? and Whither? fascinated and enthralled their thoughts. They may have but little of practical wisdom to teach us, for they paid but small attention to the arts of peace and war. But, though they fell in consequence an easy prey to their neighbours, they had something nevertheless which their barbarous conquerors had not. They had their own view of the world, and this view, different as it is from our own, deserves to be looked at carefully and seriously by us. Whatever we may think of the world which they had built up for themselves, and in which they lived, their idea of the Godhead is certainly higher, purer, and more consistent than that of Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. They passed through polytheism, henotheism, and monotheism, and they arrived at last at what is generally called pantheism, but a pantheism very different from vulgar pantheism. They started with the firm conviction that what we mean by God must be a Being without a second, without beginning or end, without limitations of any kind. Whatever there is or seems to be, call it mind or matter, man or nature, can have one substance only, one and the same, whatever we name it, God, or Brahman, the Absolute, or the Supreme Being. They never say, like other pantheists, that everything in this phenomenal world is God, but that everything has its being in God.
How the change from the real to the phenomenal came about, or, as we say, how the world was created, they can tell us as little as we can tell them. They simply point to the fact that it has come about, that it is there, that it is and can be nothing but phenomenal to us, but that the phenomenal could not even seem to be without the real behind it. In order to restore the phenomenal world to its reality, they hold that all that is wanted is knowledge or philosophy, which destroys that universal Nescience which makes us all take the phenomenal for the real, the objective for the subjective. Their philosophy is chiefly the Vedânta, though other systems also pursue the same object. Each man is in substance or in self identical with God, for what else could he be? If they say that each man is God, that would, no doubt, offend us, but that man and everything else has its true being in the Godhead is a very different kind of pantheism. To regain that full self-consciousness or God-consciousness, to return to God, to break down the artificial wall that seemed to separate man from God, is the highest object of Indian philosophy, and in some form or other these thoughts have gradually leavened all classes of society from the highest to the lowest.
In order to be able to appreciate the true value of the Vedânta, we have to study its growth in the Upanishads, and in the minute disquisitions of the Vedânta-Sûtras and their commentaries. No doubt these are sometimes very tedious, and to us, in this age of the world, may often appear childish and useless. And yet the Vedânta view of the world has a right to claim the same attention as that of Heraclitus, Plato, Spinoza, or Kant. It is as true and as untrue as any of these philosophical intuitions, but it possesses an attraction of its own which has held the best minds of India captive for generations, and will continue to do so for ages to come.
Nay, as we have always had among us Platonists, Spinozists, and Kantians, the time will come, nay, has come already, when European philosophers will try to look at the world through the glasses of the Vedânta also. It is well known that Schopenhauer, no mean thinker of modern times, declared the Vedânta as taught in the Upanishads “the product of the highest wisdom” (Ausgeburt der höchsten Weisheit). May not these words make other philosophers pause before they reject as childish a philosophy which Schopenhauer placed above the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, Malebranche, and Spinoza?
India should be known, not from without, but from within, and it will require a long time and far abler hands than mine before we really know what India was meant to be in the development of mankind. Heinrich Simon remarked very truly, “Our history is miserable because we have no biographies.... If a man’s life lies open before me from day to day in all his acts and all his thoughts, so far as they can be represented externally, I gain a better insight into the history of the time than by the best general representation of it.” What we want to know is, how the prominent men of India imbibed the Vedânta, and how the principles they had imbibed from that source influenced their lives, their acts, and their thoughts. With us philosophy remains always something collateral only. Our mainstay is formed by religion and ethics. But with the Hindus, philosophy is life in full earnest, it is but another name for religion, while morality has a place assigned to it as an essential preliminary to all philosophy. Most of our greatest philosophers and of their followers seem to lead two lives, one as it ought to be, the other as it is. One of our greatest philosophers, Berkeley, knew quite well what the world is, but he lived as a bishop, unconcerned about the unreal character of all with which he had to deal. There have been cases of true Vedântists, also, who have led useful, active lives as ministers and organisers of states, but he who has grasped the highest truths of the Vedânta, or has been grasped by them, is driven at once into the solitude of the forests, waiting there for the solution of all riddles, for perfect freedom, and in the end for the truest freedom of all, for death—Θανοῦμαι καὶ ἐλευθερήσομαι.
MY INDIAN FRIENDS.
IV.
The Veda.
We live no longer in times when the head of a great publishing firm would ask a scholar who offered a translation of the Veda, as I know the late Professor H. H. Wilson was asked, “But what in all the world is the Veda, or what you call the Rig-Veda?” But nevertheless in spite of the years that have passed since, I am still asked from time to time much the same question, and I confess I cannot answer it in two words.