India, Its Life and Thought

by John P. Jones

They are great thinkers and wonderful metaphysicians, but they are not historians. The meagre history of India which has come down to us was not written by the people themselves. Not until recently, and then under the influence of western training, did any reliable book of history emanate from the brain and hand of a native of this land. All that we know of the ancient history of India comes to us in two ways. It is known indirectly through the language and literature and ancient inscriptions of the past. Historians of to-day have to study the science of language, and especially the growth of the Sanscrit tongue; and, through an intimate knowledge of the same, they arrive approximately at the time in which many of the most important books of the land have been written and at the dates of the events narrated in them. Or they may be helped, to some extent, to learn this history by a study of the teachings of the books themselves, which may indicate the time in which they were written. A few inscriptions and coins give the dates of certain reigns, which thus bring us directly and briefly into the correct era of certain important events.

But the bulk of the history of India comes through foreigners. At different periods in the history of the land men of other nationalities visited India and then recorded their observations concerning the country and the people. The Greeks were great travellers and keen observers in ancient times. They came to India and left in their books such statements about the land as assist us to understand its condition at that period. Then the Chinese, in the early centuries of the Christian era, visited this land and recorded in their works much of interest about the social and religious condition of the people. Later, the Mohammedan conquest brought many foreigners into India, and some of the writers of Islam give us further insight into the affairs of the country. From the fifteenth century the Romish missionaries have conveyed, through their reports to Rome, much of information concerning the people and their life. And thus the history of India has largely depended upon the keen and careful observations and statements of men of other lands who came here for travel, trade, or religion. But Indians themselves have, at no time, contributed to this most important department of literature. We may search in vain for even one volume of reliable history out of the myriad tomes of embellished narratives which have emanated from the fertile brains of the men of India. How shall we account for this strange and very striking fact? It must be, in part, owing to the innate passion of India at all times for poetic embellishment and exaggeration. A cool, scientific, unadorned statement of a fact or of an event has never satisfied the soul of the children of the tropics. Hence, the history of the past becomes legend, human heroes are painted as divine, and epochs and eras are lengthened out to almost eternal proportions.

Now the most serious result of all this is that the people have come firmly to believe that these wild exaggerations, which were written by some dreamy poets of the past, are the sane and cool expressions of simple historic fact; and thus they have largely lost the true sense of historic perspective, are unable to distinguish between fact and fancy, and are strangers to the lessons of the past. For it must be remembered that the teachings of former ages, and especially the life-lessons and character-influences of those generations of men, have less and less of significance to us the farther we throw them back into the dim and hazy realm of the prehistoric and legendary. The near past, with its familiar voices and its heroes of real flesh and blood, brings to us an appeal to life and noble endeavour to which we are always glad to respond; while the remote characters of myth and of legend neither impress us with their reality nor inspire us to a higher and better life.

And, in the same way, these immensely drawn-out æons of the past make it impossible for those who believe in them rightly to appreciate the significance and importance of the present. One's presence in the world and the value of his best activity for the world's good can mean something to him if he appreciate the fact that there is no great distance to the very beginning of human history. Though his span of life is small, it nevertheless has a definite relationship to the whole of history, and there is some encouragement for a man to work for the good of his race. But this encouragement dwindles into nothingness when a man believes in those many æons of human life, each æon being in itself an immense reach of billions of years.

II

The Cyclic Character of Hindu Chronology

A very unique thing about this chronology is that it revolves in cycles. Each maha-yuga is composed of four yugas, and these are ever the same series and of the same character. We pass on through the long vista of Kritha, Tretha, Dwapara, and Kali only to begin once more on the same series; and thus forever we move in this four-arc circle without ever getting outside of it. It is claimed that this cycle of yugas has already revolved about twenty million times and will go on spinning twenty million times more, attaining nothing and going nowhere. It is enough to make one dizzy to think of this mighty chronological wheel, spending 4,320,000 years for every one of its forty million revolutions, with nothing to vary the monotony of these ever recurring epochs!

The first question which one would naturally ask, after assuming the truth of this breathlessly long system, is whether it could forever return upon itself after this fashion. Is there no progress in time? Is it true, in this sense also, that "there is nothing new under the sun"? While other people are refreshed by the sense that they are moving forward and upward in the fulfilment of some great destiny, are ever adding new increments to their wisdom, and are rising higher upon "their dead selves" to ever nobler achievements, is it right that the people of this great land should be doomed to think that there is no permanent advance for India, but that she alone must forever return whence she started and repeat the weary cycle of the past?

As a matter of fact, no people can be thus tied down to any mechanical order of time. Every race and nation is either making for progress or for degeneracy. It will never return to its old moorings. The past has told upon it. It has accumulated some wealth of knowledge, of experience, of character, which, as the centuries roll, brings it farther on in its career. It is true that a nation, like a man, may have lapses by which it may fall down a step or more in the ladder of its upward progress. But this cannot be a necessity of its nature or a relentless law of its being.

This chronological system also accounts for much of the pessimism that pervades the minds and depresses the heart of the people of India to-day. It is everywhere claimed that the best things of India were found in the remote past. But, you ask, will not the Sattia yuga—the golden age—return again? Oh, yes, it is next in the procession, we are told. But we must not forget that there are about 427,000 long years before this Kali yuga comes to an end. Even supposing that the doctrine of transmigration is true, and that the soul of man must pass through many reincarnations; who can be expected to hold on to courage and hope through nearly half a million years of dreary existence? What India sorely needs to-day is a conviction that she is moving onward—that there is but one yuga in her calendar, and that that is the yuga of opportunity to rise to higher things. Thus alone can she be stimulated to her best efforts and most worthy activity.