New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century by John Morrison (best ereader for graphic novels txt) 📕
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In like manner, the new religious associations seem to feel themselves directly in the presence of God. Congregational worship, a feature new to Hindus, is a regular exercise in the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association of Bengal, the Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer Associations of Western India, and the Ārya Samāj or Vedic Theistic Association of the United Provinces and the North-West of India. When Rammohan Roy, the theistic reformer, opened his church in Calcutta in 1830, he introduced among Hindus congregational worship and united prayer, before unknown among them and confessedly borrowed from Christian worship.[124] The public worship in all these bodies is indeed not unlike many a Christian service, consisting of Prayer to God, Praise of God, and expositions of religious truth. In a small collection of hymns, "Theistic Hymns," published some years ago for the use of members of the Ārya Samāj, we find many Christian hymns expressive of this personal relationship to God. We find "My God, my Father, while I stray," and "O God, our help in ages past." Neither of these hymns, however, it must be noted, contains confession of sin. Curiously incongruous to our minds is the inclusion among these hymns of poems like "The boy stood on the burning deck," and "Tell me not in mournful numbers," and "There's a magical tie to the land of our home," etc.[125] Even among the Hindu revivalists, judged by that test of the incoming of public worship, we perceive the growth of the idea of personal relationship to God. A recent publication of that party is "Songs for the worship of the Goddess Durga." One of them, we may note in passing, is the well-known hymn, "Work, for the night is coming." All such personal relationship, we again repeat, is incompatible with pantheism, and almost equally so with the popular sacerdotalism. Not without significance do the new theists of Western India call their associations the Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer Associations, and give to the buildings in which they worship the name of Prayer Halls instead of temples. Let not men say that religion and theological belief belong to separable spheres.
Once more, the public worship and prayer attendant on the new monotheism of the new religious associations are the signs that the stage has been reached where sin will be felt and confessed. As yet, however, it cannot be said that the thought of sin is prominent. In the creeds of the Ārya Samāj and the Prārthanā Samājes, the word sin does not occur. What we find in the Brāhma Samāj is as follows. From the creed of the Southern India Brāhma Samāj, of date about 1883, we quote paragraph 7: "Should I through folly commit sin, I will endeavour to be atoned [sic] unto God by earnest repentance and reformation."[126] From the "Principles of the Sadharan [Universal or Catholic] Brāhma Samāj," set forth in the organ of the body, we quote a paragraph 8: "God rewards virtue and punishes sin, but that punishment is for our good and cannot last to eternity." From a publication by a third section of the Brāhma Samāj, the party of Keshub Chunder Sen, we quote: "Every sinner must suffer the consequences of his own sins, sooner or later, in this world or in the next; for the moral law is unchangeable and God's justice irreversible. His mercy also must have its way. As the just king, He visits the soul with adequate agonies, and when the sinner after being thus chastised mournfully prays, He as the merciful Father delivers and accepts him and becomes reconciled to him. Such reconciliation is the only true atonement."[127] Even in the last quoted, the expression "adequate agonies" shows its standpoint regarding salvation from sin to be salvation by repentance, and not the standpoint of St. Paul, "I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."
CHAPTER XX THE IDEA OF SALVATION "The slender sound
As from a distance beyond distance grew,
Coming upon me—O never harp nor horn
Was like that music as it came; and then
Stream'd thro' my cell a cold and silver beam,
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail."
TENNYSON.
Salvation does mean something to every class. The huge fabric of Brahmanism does not continue to exist without ministering to some wide-felt need of the masses. It was in obedience to some inward demand, however perverted, that children were cast into the Ganges at Saugor, that human sacrifices were offered and self-tortures like hook-swinging were endured. These have been put down by British authority, but there still remain many austerities and bloody sacrifices and strange devices to satisfy the clamant demand of our souls. Even may we not say that, along with other reasons for the disappearance of Buddhism from India, some response more satisfying to the human need must have been offered by the rival system of Hinduism. Hinduism has deities and avatars; Buddhism had none. Two of the most interesting spots in India, the most sacred in the world to Buddhists, are Budh-gaya, where under the bo tree Buddha attained to enlightenment, and Sārnāth, where he began his preaching. Yet the worship at neither place to-day is Buddhist. At the scene of Gautama's enlightenment, where he became Buddha or Enlightened, one of the conventional statues of Buddha is actually marked and worshipped as Vishnu, the Hindu deity, the Preserver in the Hindu triad. Even at that most holy shrine of Buddhism, Hinduism has supplanted it, for popular Hinduism offered salvation, while Buddhism offered extinction. Turning from the masses to the philosophical ascetic—when he cuts himself off from family life with all its variety of pleasure and interest, not to speak of the self-torture he also sometimes inflicts, he too has some corresponding demand, some adequate motive to satisfy. His is the resolute quest for salvation of the higher, older type. But we are dealing with modern, new-educated India, and now we ask ourselves: What does the modern, new-educated Indian mean by salvation? Why does the thought of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ fail to reach his heart?
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.
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.
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
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