Or now Beatific Vision.
The acute Indian mind, with its disposition to analyse and its tenderness towards all manifestations of religion, has noted three different paths of salvation, or more strictly three stages in the path. The last only really leads to salvation, the other two paths are tolerant recognition of the well-meaning religious efforts of those who have not attained to understanding of the true and final path of salvation. For convenience sake we may roughly designate the three ways as Saving Works, and Saving Faith, and Saving Knowledge, placing the elementary stage first. One of the Tantras or ritual scriptures of Modern Hinduism, the Mahanirvāna Tantra, thus explains the three stages in the path and their respective merits: "The knowledge that Brahma alone is true is the best expedient; meditation is the middling [= the means?]; and (2) the chanting of glories and the recitation of names is the worst; and (3) the worship of idols is the worst of the worst.[128] Of the pantheist's "saving knowledge," perhaps enough has been said. But again, it is the piercing of the
veil of Maya or Delusion which hides from the soul that God is the One and the All. It is the transformation of the consciousness of "I" into that of the "One only, without a second." It is the ability to say "Aham Brahman," i.e. I am Brahma. In the Life of Dr. Wilson, the Scottish Missionary at Bombay, we read that in 1833, Dr. Wilson went with a visitor to see a celebrated jogi who was lying in the sun in the street, the nails of whose hands were grown into his cheek, and on whose head there was the nest of a bird. The visitor questioned the jogi, "How can one obtain the knowledge of God?" and the reply of the jogi was, "Do not ask me questions; you may look at me, for I am God." "Aham Brahman," very probably was his reply. That is pantheistic salvation, mukti, or deliverance from further human existences and their desires and delusions. At last the spirit is free, and the galling chains of the lusting and limited body are broken. But as pantheism is declining, such cases are growing fewer, and for the educated Hindus, now largely monotheists, the saving knowledge is rather a beatific vision of the Divine, only vouchsafed to minds intensely concentrated upon the quest and thought of God, and cut off from mundane
distractions. This is the union with God which is salvation to many of the modern monotheistic Hindus.
The quest of the beatific vision still implies the dissociation of religion and active life.
An unproductive religious ideal.
What concerns us here is that in the conception of the beatific vision, we still find ourselves in a different religious world from ours—religion exoteric for the vulgar, and religion esoteric for the enlightened; religion not for living by, but for a period of retirement; a religion of spiritual self-culture, not of active sonship and brotherhood. Far be it from me to say that at this point the West may not learn as well as teach, for how much thought does the culture of the spirit receive among us? How little! However that may be, this conception of the religious life is deeply rooted in educated India. The impersonal pantheistic conception of the Deity may be passing into the theistic, and even into Christian theism; the doctrine of transmigration may be little more than the current orthodox explanation of the coming of misfortune; the doctrine of Maya or the illusory character of the phenomena of our consciousness, it may be impossible to utter in this new practical age; and Jesus Christ may be the object of the highest reverence; but still the instinctive thought of the educated Hindu is that there is a period of
life for the world's work, and a later period for devotion to religion. When dissatisfaction with himself or with the world does overtake him, instinctively there occur to him thoughts of retirement from the world and concentration of his mind, thereby to reach God's presence. Very few spiritually minded Hindus past middle life pass into the Christian Church, as some do at the earlier stages of life. Under the sway of the Hindu idea of salvation, by knowledge or by intense intuition, they withdraw from active life to meditate on God, with less or more of the practice of religious exercises. Painful to contemplate the spiritual loss to the community of a conception of religion that diverts the spiritual energy away from the community, and renders it practically unproductive, except as an example. Once more we recall as typical the jogi, not going about doing good, anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power, but fixed like a plant to its own spot, and with inward-looking eyes. Time was that there were jogis and joginis (female jogis) in Europe; but even of St. Theresa, at one period of her life a typical jogini, we read that not long after her visions and supernatural visitations, she became a most energetic reformer of the convents.
The jogi, not the brahman, is the living part of present-day Hinduism.
That quest for the beatific vision or for union with God, is the highest and the most living part of present-day Hinduism, whether monotheistic or pantheistic. Not the purohit brahman (the domestic celebrant), or the guru brahman (the professional spiritual director), conventionally spoken of as divine, but the jogi or religious seeker is the object of universal reverence. And rightly so. The reality of this aspect of Hinduism is manifest in the ease with which it overrides the idea of caste. In theory brahmans are the twice-born caste, the nearest to the Deity and to union with Him. A man of lower caste, in his upward transmigrations towards union with God or absorption into Deity, should pass through an existence as a brahman. In the chapter on Transmigration we found that the upward steps of the ladder up to the brahman caste had been clearly stated in an authoritative Hindu text-book. The word brāhman, the name of the highest caste, is itself in fact a synonym for Deity. But as a matter of fact, men of any caste, moved by the spirit, are found devoting themselves to the jogi life. "He who attains to God is the true brāhman," is the current maxim, attributed to the great Buddha.