Associations of Bombay. Their very name, the Prayer Associations, implies the dual conception of God and Man, for the pantheistic conception does not admit of the idea of prayer any more than it admits of the other dualistic conceptions of revelation, of worship, and of sin. These movements, again, were followed in the United Provinces and the North-West of India by the founding of the Ārya Samāj, or, as I have called it, the Vedic Theistic Association, also professedly theistic. Polytheism and pantheism alike, the Āryas repudiate. For the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, the founder of the Āryas declared there was no recognition in the Vedas. Demonstrable or not, that is the Ārya position. The rejection of pantheism by such a body is noteworthy, for pantheism is identified with India and the Vedanta, the most widely accepted of the six systems of Indian philosophy, and the Ārya Samāj is nothing if not patriotic. It is above all pro-Indian and pro-Vedic. Their direct repudiation of pantheism may not be apparent to Western minds. Āryas predicate three eternal entities, God, the Soul, and Matter,[77] and this declaration
of the reality of the soul and of matter is a direct denial of the pantheistic conception, its very antithesis. One pantheistic formula is: "Brahma is reality, the world unreality" (Brahma satyam, jagan mithyā). The Pantheist must declare, and does declare in his doctrine of Maya or Delusion, that the soul and matter are illusions.
The progress of monotheism seen in the Text-book of Hindu Religion.
A very striking illustration of the present insufficiency of the pantheistic conception of God and of the movement of educated India towards theism is to be found where one would least expect it—in connection with the Hindu Revival. In 1903 an Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion and Ethics was published by the Board of Trustees of the Hindu College, Benares, a body representing the movement for a revival of Hinduism. It was a heroic undertaking to reconcile, in the one Text-book, Vedic, philosophic, and popular Hinduism, to harmonise all the six schools of philosophy, to embrace all the aspects of modern Hinduism, and lastly to satisfy the monotheistic opinions of modern enlightened Hindus.
What is Pantheism?
To appreciate the testimony of the Text-book, we must enter more fully into the orthodox
Hindu theological position. Pantheism, or the doctrine that God is all and all is God—what does it imply? Pantheism is a theory of creation, that God is all, that there are in truth no creatures, but only unreal phantasies appearing to darkened human minds, because darkened and half-blind. As such, its nearest Christian analogue would be the thought that in every phenomenon we have God's fiat and God's reason, and that "in Him we live and move and have our being." Pantheism is a theory of spiritual culture, that our individuality is ours only to merge it in His, although on this line, the Christian soon parts company with the Indian pantheistic devotee, who seeks to merge his consciousness in God, not to train himself into active sonship. Pantheism is a theory of God's omnipresence, and may be little more than enthusiastic feeling of God's omnipresence, such as we have in the 139th psalm, "Whither shall I go from Thy presence? and whither shall I flee from Thy spirit?" That Oriental mysticism and loyalty to an idea we can allow for. It is in that aspect that pantheism is in closest contact with the belief of the new educated Hindu. But in brahmanical philosophy, pantheism is nothing else than the inability to pass beyond the initial idea of infinite
preexistent, unconditioned, Deity. To the pantheist, let us remember, there is Deity, but there are no real deities; there is a Godhead, but there are no real persons in the Godhead. In the view of the pantheist, when we see aught else divine or human than this all-embracing Deity or Godhead, it is only a self-created mist of the dim human eye, in which there play the flickering phantasms of deities and human individuals and things. "In the Absolute, there is no thou, nor I, nor God," said Ramkrishna, a great Hindu saint who died in 1886.[78] In Hindu phraseology, every conception other than this all-comprehending Deity is Maya or delusion, and salvation is "saving knowledge" of the delusion, and therefore deliverance from it. The perception of manifoldness is Maya or illusion, says a modern pro-Hindu writer. And again, "To India, all that exists is but a mighty curtain of appearances, tremulous now and again with breaths from the unseen that it conceals."[79]
Maya is implied in Pantheism.
The outcome of Maya.