India's Problem, Krishna or Christ

by John P. Jones

Religious Mendicants.

(a) Study his prepossessions and then alone can you appreciate his heritage. Though he may not be a scholar or a philosopher, he is nevertheless fortified by a host of religious beliefs and prejudices. A thousand dogmas and prepossessions, the inherited treasures of thirty centuries, are his. He drank them in with his mother's milk; he has breathed them in as an essential part of his daily environment. They are more than second nature to him and constitute largely the world of his thought. His ideas of God, of himself, of sin, of salvation, of human life—all are far removed from ours and are peculiarly his own. He feels himself to be in the toils of an iron destiny which slowly grinds him to powder. His conception of God brings him no ray of comfort, or hope of release. His idea is that his sin and suffering of [pg 117] today are the inflictions, by some unknown power, for the sins of supposed former births. So that he must, through countless ages, work out his own salvation—a salvation which indeed means eternal rest; but it is a rest from all thought, emotion, self-consciousness and separate existence as well as from all work.

Within the mighty fascination of this Vedantism the people have been held through the centuries. And it is a doctrine which renders the highest morality impossible and has proved the mightiest soporific to the conscience. A few years ago a murderer in South India was being led from the court of justice to prison where, soon, he was to be executed for his crime. As he was struggling in the street with the police, a missionary accosted him, urging him to confess his sin against God and to seek his peace. Whereupon the man replied, “I did not commit the murder; it was the work of God Himself, in whose hands I am and of whom I am part.” To this the missionary replied that this was neither true nor worthy, and that he would soon suffer the full penalty of the law for his crime. “Ah, yes,” he exclaimed, “the god who wrought this in me and through me, will put me to death. It is all his and I am he.”

Such is the line of thought which passes through the mind of the orthodox Hindu devotee under all circumstances, be they pleasant or disagreeable. And it is one of the most difficult things for him, under these circumstances, to cultivate a true sense of responsibility and a genuine conception of sin as a moral act.

(b) See again his ideals. He has many such which influence him largely in his life. Much depends upon what a man regards as the Summum Bonum of life. The supreme blessing which the Hindu ever holds before his eyes, as the highest and last attainment, is union with God. Not a union of sympathy, but a metaphysical oneness with Brâhm. To lose himself entirely in the Divine Being and thus to cease having separate thought or existence, and to pass out of the turmoil and restlessness of human life into the calm of the passionless bosom of the Eternal—this, to him, is the ideal which alone is worthy of human attainment.

Again; we, Christians, look forward to a complete self-realization, to a perfect manhood and a full rounded character as our ideal. The opposite ideal is the Hindu's. He seeks the loss of all that we hold best—the elimination of every ambition and desire, the eradication of all love and altruism, the cessation of all activity—good as well as evil. His ideal is not greatness and goodness of heart, but the renunciation of all that animates and inspires. To him the highest virtue in its noblest activity has no charms; for he claims that he looks above and beyond all this to that absolute equilibrium of soul when passion, and when all desire, shall have been killed through self-mortification and self-abnegation and he shall have attained mental poise and repose rather than a perfect character. Thus, in its last analysis, his ideal is an intellectual, rather than a moral, one; for it is again absorption into the Divine Soul; and that he conceives to be the Supreme Intelligence rather than the Perfect Will. This difference of ideal between [pg 119] the two faiths is fundamental and must work for very diverse results.

In harmony with this is the other thought that the body, yea each and every body with which the soul may clothe itself, is an unmitigated evil because it is the highway to suffering and defers the final consummation. Hence, the Hindu has no respect for the body and longs for the day of final emancipation from flesh and all its ills.

How then shall the soul be freed from its many births so that it may pass out of this bondage into the final freedom of Sayutcha, or emancipation? To him Yoga, the way of meditation, represents the highest way of release. To wean the mind, through this process, from all desire and ambition and thus to reach absolute equilibrium of soul is the object of Yoga. This indeed is the only condition whereby the soul can rise above any future contact with earthly bodies.

Consequently the Hindu has, for many centuries, looked to the monastery and the wilderness as the only places where this ideal can be safely and speedily attained. To live among men, and thus to be subjected to corroding cares and to the swaying passions of human society, renders the attainment of beatification impossible. Under these circumstances the soul finds no way of emancipation. Therefore the watchword of the Hindu is, “flee from the world rather than overcome it.” For the attainment of those qualities which ensure final repose he immures himself in a mutt or he flees into the forest where, apart from men, he gives himself to self-mortification and meditation that he may speedily find the desired [pg 120] release. At the root of this idea, as its animating motive, lies the worthy ambition of living a better life than the environments of a corrupt society favour. And with this desire is coupled the idea that a full rounded life and a perfected character are not only possible in the solitude of a wilderness but are nowhere else attainable. And thus it is, with many, a silent acknowledgment of failure and of the belief that in the rush and struggle of public life a godly, heavenly-minded character is impossible. According to the Hindu conception, a man may be successful in business matters, but he cannot be holy or fit for the highest communion with God unless he spend his time in separation from all his kind. Therefore the so-called pious and holy men of that land are ascetics. They eschew human society and seek to renounce all human good and every earthly ambition.