There is an immensity of weariness and disillusionment in such an interpretation of life, which needs no comment. But the Eastern mind is subtle and speculative, possessing a peculiar penetrating power; and, for the want of any other field in which to act, it turned in upon itself.
Chesterton has both hit and missed the immense difference between the East and the West in one of his brilliant paragraphs.[64] "No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards; the Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things."
[64] "Orthodoxy," p. 243.
But to follow Chesterton's own method, the saint with the open eyes may still be blind while the saint with his eyes shut may really see a vast deal, and the East has seen much. Whether what it sees be true or not, is another matter, but there is no denying the range of his conjecture. The Eastern saint has sought to answer for himself and in his own way those compelling questions which lie behind all religion—Whence? and Whither? and Why? He, too, has sought to come into right relations with the power which manifests itself in the universe and he has sought, with an intensity of effort to which the West is strange, for a real communion with the power he has discovered. And above all, he has sought deliverance.
Why the West Questions the East
He has not been so conscious of the need of forgiveness, since forgiveness plays no great part in his understanding of the sequences of life, but he is anxious enough to be set free from pain and weariness and at his best he has traced the relation of moral cause and effect far more analytically than his Western brother. He has, indeed, introduced greatly speculative elements in his balancing of life's accounts, but the West has done that also, for the accounts of life persistently refuse to be balanced unless something beyond ordinary experience is taken into account. The longing of the East for deliverance has, on the whole, however, been less theological and more simple than the longing of the West. The West has been led to turn to the East for teaching and deliverance through a combination of forces. I have noticed already the very direct way in which New Thought, once committed to free speculation about life and God, found congenial guidance in the Eastern cults, but other elements enter. The West has begun to share something of the disillusionment of the East; so many things which promised to deliver us have seemingly failed us. Our sciences have immeasurably enlarged our knowledge and increased our power; they have added to our material well-being; they have worked their miracles for us; but they have brought us neither peace nor true happiness. They have instead added their own disturbances to our other perplexities and they have ultimately simply extended the frontiers of the mysterious and given a new and vaster quality to our problems.
Our democracies and our humanitarian movements have shown us that the keys both to liberty and progress are still in human nature and not in forms of organization and government. As our civilizations have grown older and particularly as they have wasted themselves in war, some shadow of the age-old weariness of the East has begun to fall across our Western world. We have also reacted strongly against materialism in thought and life; we have begun to see, as has been said, how the need and force of personality have the right to assert themselves against the dominance of things. We are beginning to recognize the right of religion and philosophy to suggest terms to science, and all these tendencies have combined to produce a considerable group of people who, having found, for one reason or another, no real satisfaction in their inherited Christianity, have welcomed the Eastern solution of the problems of life, or else have positively turned to the East in the hope of discovering what Western Christianity has not been able to give them. One should add also that the pure love of speculation which is one of the phases of modern thought has made an opening in the West for the East. If unlimited speculation is the main business of life, the East has certainly everything to offer us, and for warning, as we shall presently see, as well as for guidance.
Pantheism and Its Problems
The older Eastern religions are, to begin with, Pantheistic. We have seen how religion generally in its development takes form and content from its governing conception of God. We have seen also that there are three governing conceptions of God: He is conceived as Transcendent or Immanent, or else He is simply identified with the range and force of the universe. Pantheism is generally the creation of brooding wonder and uncritical thought; Pantheism feels rather than thinks; it accepts rather than seeks to explain. It may be devout enough but its devotion is passive rather than active. Pantheism is never scientific in the accepted sense of that term; it has little concern for law; it explains by personalizing the forces with which it has to deal; it is akin to the temper which finds some animating spirit in all natural phenomena. The flow of waters, the growth of things, the drift of clouds across the sky are all, for Pantheism, simply the revelation of the action of some indwelling spirit or other, without which they could neither exist nor go on.
At its worst Pantheism issues in a grotesque mythology and an inconceivable multiplication of divinity; the gods in the Hindu Pantheon are numbered by the thousands. At its best Pantheism issues in a kind of mystic poetry and creates a devotee sensitive as Tagore to the fugitive gleams of beauty through the murk of things, voicing his prayers and insights in rare phrases which are, on the whole, in arresting contrast to the actuality of life about him. Western devotion has been caught by the mystic and poetical character of Pantheism and is, on the whole, strangely blind to its actual outcome in the life of its devotees.