New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century by John Morrison (best ereader for graphic novels txt) 📕
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How is it so? I say nothing of the climate of tropical India as a contributory cause. The way in which Hindu learning was and is transmitted, is itself almost sufficient explanation of the independence and the fluidity of religious doctrine. Hinduism has no recognised Theological Faculties as training schools for the priesthood. Buddhist monasteries of the early Christian centuries we do read of, institutions corresponding to our universities, to which crowds of students resorted, and where many subjects were taught; but the Hindu lore is transmitted otherwise. Beside or in his humble dwelling, the learned Hindu pandit receives and teaches and shares his poverty with his four, five, or it may be twenty disciples, who are to be the depositaries of his lore, and in their turn its transmitters. Such an institution is a Sanscrit tol, where ten to twenty years of the formative period of a young pandit's life may be spent. Without printed books and libraries and intercourse with kindred minds, there may be as many schools of thought as there are teachers. And all this study, be it remembered, has no necessary connection with the priesthood. Tols have no necessary connection with temples, or temples with tols. Hereditary priests are independent of Theological Schools. Recently, indeed, in Bengal these tols have been taken up by the Education Department, and their studies are being directed to certain fixed subjects.
Another feature of the organisation of Hinduism, hitherto insufficiently noticed, has a still closer connection with this freedom of thought and fixity of practice. The Indian mind is open to new religious ideas, while the religious customs of India remain almost unaffected, because the priesthood of Hinduism is two-fold. One set of priests, called purohits, are merely the celebrants at worship and ceremonies; the second set, called gurus, theoretically more highly honoured, are or were the religious teachers of the people. Among Mahomedans there is a somewhat similar two-fold priesthood, although among them doctrine is not divorced from religious worship and ritual. But in Christianity we have not specialised so far. A Christian clergyman, as we know, holds both offices; he is both the religious teacher and the celebrant at sacraments, etc. In Hinduism, with these two sets of priests entirely separate, it is evident that a change may take place in the creed without the due performance of the Hindu ritual being affected. A striking instance of the divergence of guru from purohit is given by Sir Monier Williams in another connection. In India, he says, no temples are more common than those containing the symbol of the God Siva—there are said to be thirty million symbols of Siva scattered over India—yet among gurus there is scarcely one in a hundred whose vocation is to impart the mantra (the saving text) of Siva.[69] It has already been explained how the creed of Hinduism is dissolving while its practices remain; to restate the fact otherwise now—The hereditary purohits continue to be employed many times a year in a Hindu household, as worship, births, deaths, marriages, and social ceremonies recur, but the hereditary gurus as religious teachers have become practically defunct.[70] Literally, the one duty of a guru has come to be to communicate once in a lifetime to each Hindu his saving mantra or Sanscrit text; periodically thereafter, the guru may visit his clients to collect what dues they may be pleased to give. The place of religious teacher in Hinduism is vacant, and Christianity and modern thought are taking the vacant place. The modern middle-class Hindu is in need of a guru. For mere purohits, as such, he has a small and a declining reverence; but holy men, as such, his instinct is to honour—one of the pleasing features of Hinduism. We can understand it all when we remember how in the Christian Church, in a crisis like that from which the Church is now emerging, many come to be married by the clergyman who have practically lapsed from the faith.
CHAPTER XIV THE NEW THEISM "The idea of God is the productive and conservative principle
of civilisation; as is the religion of a community, so will be
in the main its morals, its laws, its general history."
Vico and Michelet (Prof. Flint's Philosophy of History).
In some measure, then, we understand how Hindu polytheism, theism, and pantheism are related to each other; we realise in some measure the openness of the Indian mind, and we now ask ourselves how far the Christian doctrine of God has impressed itself upon that open mind. Of the polytheistic masses it has already been pointed out that intelligent individuals will now readily acknowledge that there is truly one God only. Further, that the polytheistic idolatry which is now associated with the masses once extended far higher up the scale, is evident to anyone reading the observations made early in the nineteenth century. Early travellers in India, like the French traveller Tavernier of the seventeenth century, speak of the Indians without distinction as idolaters, contrasting them with the Mahomedans of India. In the Calcutta Gazette of 1816, Raja Rammohan Roy, the learned opponent of Hindu idolatry, the Erasmus of the new era, is called the discoverer of theism in the sacred books of the Hindus. Rammohan Roy himself disclaimed the title, but writing in 1817, he speaks of "the system of idolatry into which Hindus are now completely sunk."[71] Many learned brahmans, he says in the same pamphlet, are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idol worship, indicating that the knowledge belonged only to the scholars. His own object, he said, was to declare the unity of God as the real thought of the Hindu Scriptures. Across India, on the Bombay side, we find clear evidence of the state of opinion among the middle class in 1830, from the report of a public debate on the Christian and Hindu religions. The antagonists were, on the one side, the Scottish missionary Dr. John Wilson and others, and on the other side two leading officials of the highest Government Appellate Court, men who would now rank as eminent representatives of the educated class. One of these demanded proof that there was only one God.[72]
Returning to Bengal, it would seem from Rammohan Roy's evidence that in 1820 the standpoint of the learned at that time was exactly what we have called the standpoint of an intelligent individual among the masses to-day, namely, a plea that the multitude of gods were agents of the one Supreme God. "Debased and despicable," he writes, "as is the belief of the Hindus in three hundred and thirty millions of gods, they (the learned) pretend to reconcile this persuasion with the doctrine of the unity of God, alleging that the three hundred and thirty millions of gods are subordinate agents assuming various offices and preserving the harmony of the universe under one Godhead, as innumerable rays issue from one sun."[73] Turning to testimony of a different kind, we find Macaulay speaking about the polytheistic idolatry he knew between 1834 and 1838. "The great majority of the population," he writes, "consists of idolaters." Macaulay's belief was that idolatry would not survive many years of English education, and we shall now take note how in the century the sphere of idolatry and polytheism has been limited. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may now say that Indian Hindu society consisted of a vast polytheistic mass with a very thin, an often invisible, film of pantheists on the top. The nineteenth century of enlightenment and contact with Christianity has seen the wide acceptance of the monotheistic conception by the new-educated India. The founding of the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association in 1828 by Rammohan Roy has already been called the commencement of an indigenous theistic church outside the transplanted theism of Indian Christianity and Indian Mahomedanism. Strictly rendered, the divine name Brahmā, adopted by the Brāhmas, expresses the pantheistic idea that God is the One without a second, not the theistic idea of one personal God; but what we are concerned with is, that it was in the monotheistic sense that Rammohan Roy adopted the term. To him Brahmā was a personal God, with whom men spoke in prayer and praise. As a matter of fact the pantheistic formula, "One only, no second," occurs in the creeds of all three new monotheistic bodies, Brāhmas, Prārthanā Samājists, and Āryas, but in the same monotheistic sense. The original Sanscrit of the formula (Ekam eva advityam), three words from the Chhāndogya Upanishad, is regularly intoned (droned) in the public worship of Brāhmas. Like a wedge between the polytheism of the masses below and the pantheism of the brahmanically educated above, there came in this naturalised theism, a body of opinion ever widening as modern education enlarges its domain. It is one of the events of Indian history. Now, pantheistic in argument and polytheistic in domestic practices as educated Hindus still are, they never call themselves pantheists, and would resent being called polytheists; they call themselves theists. "Every intelligent man is now a monotheist," writes the late Dr. John Murdoch of Madras, an experienced observer.[74] "Many" (of the educated Hindus), says a Hindu writer, "—I may say most of them—are in reality monotheists, but monotheists of a different type from those who belong to the Brāhma Samāj. They are, if we may so call them, passive monotheists.... The influence of the Hindu environment is as much perceptible in them as that of the Christian environment."[75] Professor Max Müller and Sir M. Monier Williams are of the same opinion. "The educated classes look with contempt upon idolatry.... A complete disintegration of ancient faiths is in progress in the upper strata of society. Most of the ablest thinkers become pure Theists or Unitarians."[76] That change took place within the nineteenth century, a testimony to the force of Christian theism in building up belief, and to the power of the modern Indian atmosphere to dissipate irrational and unpractical beliefs. For, in contact with the practical instincts of Europe, the pantheistic denial of one's own personality—a disbelief in one's own consciousness, the thought that there is no thinker—was bound to give way, as well as the irrational polytheism. Very unphilosophical may have been Lord Byron's attitude to the idealism of Berkeley: "When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, 'twas no matter what he said." But that represents the modern atmosphere which New India is breathing, and it is fatal to pantheism.
It is interesting to note how monotheism spread. The Brāhma Samāj of Madras was founded in 1864, theistic like the mother society, the Brāhma Samāj of Bengal. Three years later the first of similar bodies on the west side of India was founded, the Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer 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
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