India's Problem, Krishna or Christ

by John P. Jones

With this purpose, ostensibly, in view there are, as we saw, about 5,500,000 men in India who have given up all earthly employment, who live apart as ascetics and spend their time in roaming around the country as religious mendicants. These people are, in the main, doubtless possessed of the laudable ambition to be holy and to prepare themselves for union with Brâhm. And yet, as a matter of fact, they are the most pestilential in their morals of all the people of the land. Many of them, at the same time, both regard themselves and are regarded by their co-religionists as the acme of piety. Nevertheless, they daily trample under foot every command of the decalogue. It is true that a few of them are different from the mass, and genuinely seek the higher life [pg 121] for the cultivation of which they have separated themselves. But into their ideal of life altruism hardly enters at all. It is not to do good unto others, but to escape contamination from others which is the concern of the Hindu devotee. At the basis of his higher aspirations concern for self is supreme, thoughts of others are absent.

A notable illustration of a high realization of the Eastern ideal we see in the famous Hindu ascetic Swamiji Bhaskara Nanda Sarasvati, of Benares, who recently died and to whom Dr. Fairbairn has referred so cordially. For many years he had given himself to devotion and meditation. He had subdued the body by the rigours of asceticism and had attained preëminence in self-restraint and in the highest wisdom of yoga culture. He had therefore retired from the world, spurned all its allurements, denied all its claims and devoted himself exclusively to thought and meditation. Thus immured within temple walls in the great city of Benares he was utterly oblivious to the sin and sorrow of the swarming multitudes of that city and did nought to relieve the suffering, or to improve the lives, of his fellow-beings. He died, and over his remains has been erected a shrine to which the thousands go for worship and for inspiration to attain unto that ideal of life which they believe him to have realized.

This ideal has, for centuries, taken possession of the Hindu mind, and never before did it rule with more absolute sway than it does at present.

Another ideal of life with the Hindu is the so-called “path of works.” At present this term is synonymous with a life of ceremonialism. In modern parlance [pg 122] “works” means to the Hindu, ceremonial observance. His life is hedged in on all sides by a host of ceremonies and is permeated through and through with a most complicated ritual. There is nothing in the life of a Hindu devotee, whether it be eating, sleeping, bathing or travelling, which is not religiously prescribed both as to time and method. And utterly regardless of the significance of these rites or the appropriateness of them to his life, he deems their observance as essential to his salvation and finds in their daily keeping the highest satisfaction and completest assurance of his spiritual progress.

The Hindu is no rationalist in his religion. He obeys implicitly, and without question, the ritual of his ancestors and finds no interest in the scrutiny or analysis of them.

So, to the ordinary Hindu, especially to him to whom the way of meditation in the wilderness seems impossible, ceremonialism becomes a matter of supreme concern. No other religion has furnished to its followers a more elaborate and pervasive system of observances than this. These rites exercise their influence upon the mind and are wielding today a most potent influence upon Hindu character. A man may think nothing of, nor have any ambition to attain unto, the spiritual aspect of his faith; he may give no time whatever to any of its teachings or spiritual instruction; but if he maintain its ritual with ordinary care he flatters himself with the thought that he has attained a perfection corresponding to his estate.

Moreover, the Hindu is a thorough fatalist. He believes that his destiny is “written upon the forehead.” [pg 123] Nothing which he may do can affect this destiny. Nor does it seem to be a part of the divine purpose. So far as he is concerned it is an irrevocable fate. This belief manifests itself largely in his life and conduct. It is one of the inconsistencies of the Hindu's thinking that he, at the same time, worships a tribal god in whose hands he believes his affairs to be, and through whom prosperity can flow into his life for time and eternity; and yet he holds, with equal, yea with greater, persistence, the law of Karma, that is, the law of works, according to which law alone future life, both to himself and to all men, must be wrought out even to the last detail. It is strange that a man whose pantheon is so crowded as that of the Hindu, and who believes in such constant divine guidance and interference, should, also, at the same time, maintain a theory of life which practically dispenses with all divine action and makes human life the product of a blind and grinding fate. Nothing is more marked as a characteristic of Hindu thought today than a possession by the people of these mutually conflicting and contradictory views of life.

(c) Looking at the Hindu from a social standpoint we see him largely affected by the caste system. Not only is his life in bondage to this system, his view of life, too, is thoroughly coloured by his caste sentiments.

Just as ceremonialism covers all his personal life, even so caste observance defines for him all his social relations. There is not a tie or an influence which binds man to man that is not, to the Hindu, a part of the great and all-embracing caste system. So all-pervasive [pg 124] is this social tyranny that a man dare not withstand it; yea, more, he has learned to look at it as the prime necessity of his social being and therefore invariably regards it as the highest good. He may indeed believe that, in the abstract, caste is an evil and that it has been a curse to the people of the land. But he nevertheless maintains that, as it is an ancient part, and a most important part, of his ancestral faith, it must be submitted to in all obedience and regarded as the ideal of life.

The Bhagavad-Gita is regarded today not only as the gem of all Hindu literature; it is also held up by educated Hindus as the highest authority among their Shastras. Concerning caste duties this “Divine Song” speaks as follows: