[Article approved by Sri Aurobindo and first
published in Mother India on May 27,
1950]
Recently a well-known leader of the scheduled
classes, announced his desire to embrace Buddhism because of the lot of the “untouchables”
in Hindu society - a lot which seemed to him a pointer to a lack in Hinduism of
the sense of human brotherhood. He also declared that if Hinduism bore the
caste system for several centuries it had failed “to yield anything substantive”.
According to him, Buddhism stands in striking contrast to this religion.
What
shall we say to these highly “allergic” criticisms? The institution of
untouchability was indeed a stain on the social scheme that had got established
in India. But with the advent of the modem age the conscience of the best
Hindus has always rebelled against it. As far back as the days of Ram Mohan Roy
the progressive movement started and reform organisations like the Brahmo-Samaj
and the Arya-Samaj fought untouchability for decades on end. The biggest uproar
against it came from a Hindu - Gandhi. And the Indian Constitution which
expresses a good deal of the contemporary Hindu mind has abolished untouchability.
It is absurd to claim that untouchability is part and parcel of Hinduism. It is
certainly no part of those foundational scriptures of the Hindus: the Vedas,
the Upanishads and the Gita. In ancient India the castes were guilds for
different crafts and professions, with no odious distinctions or taboos. Later
they got rigid. In the days of India’s decline they became more and more obnoxious,
particularly by thrusting several millions outside the pale. But even when we
condemn the injustice to so many it is well to remember that injustice of this
type in general is not something peculiarly associated with Hindu society. Will
Durant, the famous American writer on civilisation and culture, pointedly asks:
“Does the attitude of a Brahmin to a Pariah differ, except in words, from that
of a British lord to a navvy, or a Park Avenue banker to an East Side huckster,
or a white man to a negro, or a European to an Asiatic?” What is clear from
Durant’s question is that there is a deplorable tendency in human nature
towards unjust discrimination. And a social structure with Buddhism as the religious
ingredient of it is as likely as a Hindu or a Christian society to become
gradually stratified and to develop superiorities and inferiorities. If Buddha
preached brotherhood, so did Christ and so did the ancient Hindu seers and
saints. In fact the essential oneness of all things, the basic equality of all
creatures was never so forcefully declared as by the mystics of Hinduism who
saw the Divine everywhere.
The Genuine and the Spurious in
Hinduism
In
viewing historical India, both past and present, It is necessary to distinguish
between the genuine and the spurious in the Hindu religion. Opposed to the
fear-infested, delusion darkened hotchpotch that is the masses’ spurious
Hinduism, there is the splendid many-sided unity of the genuine one, a grand harmony
of a thousand truths. Its fundamental tenet is the old Rig Vedic formula: “The
One whom the sages call by many names.” Unity and multiplicity, simplicity and
complexity, the supra-cosmic and the cosmic, the universal and the individual -
all these are blended together in Hinduism and express themselves in the large number
of aspects our country’s culture and social life possess. A million gods
revealing and concretising a million facets of the inexhaustible Divine and of the
infinite Eternal, a supreme trinity in - unity personalising the creative, preservative
arid destructive qualities of the Supra-cosmic putting forth the cosmos and incarnating
Himself again and again in the world, an ultimate Mother-force or Shakti
bringing out for manifestation the secrets of the one Lord and Master of all
existence - this is Hinduism. And it is also Hinduism that man can experience
and realise the Divine, become unified with the Infinite, act as a channel of
the Eternal, for man is in essence the Supreme and man’s nature can be through
Yoga a form of the Supreme’s dynamic. Hinduism recognises three Yogas to suit
the three types of men - the intellectual, the emotional, the kinetic - and the
Bhagwad Gita combines the three Yogas in a synthesis. What is more, it throws the
synthesis open to all without distinction. To realise the One everywhere and
see the One in the Many as well as the Many in the One is the goal of the Hindu
mystic, the climax of the Hindu religious experience. And Sri Krishna in the
Gita declares that even a Chandala, a scavenger, can become a knower of God and
stand with the highest.
In the
face of such a declaration and doctrine it is difficult to understand how
anybody could identify genuine Hinduism with an inflexible as well as tyrannous
caste system and the belief in untouchability. Beverley Nichols committed an
indeed mountainous “howler” when he said, after talking of reforming Hinduism,
that if by reform you knocked the caste system and untouchability out of it you
would find that there was nothing left to reform. But regrettably enough some
Hindus themselves have made too much of a song about the evil of untouchability.
The most well-known of them said: “I would rather that Hinduism perished than
untouchability survived.” This amounts to making Hinduism stand or fall by
pariahdom. In other words, one would be satisfied even if there were no such
spiritual inspiration in the country as breathed and lived in a Vasishtha or a
Yajnavalkya, a Chaitanya or a Mirabai, a Tukaram or a Tulsidas, a Ramakrishna or
a Vivekananda - provided there were no scheduled classes! One may inquire what
sort of life would there be on earth without the rishis, the saints, the
mystics, the yogis. Man would be just a higher kind of brute or, rather, a
worse kind of brute, since he would have nothing of the innocence of the
animals but only their ferocity developed and gilded by a soulless reasoning
ingenuity. Admittedly, religion which gives birth to the Beatific Vision in some
may also degenerate in others to cruel bigotry and hidebound superstitious
caste-ridden orthodoxy: we have to be on guard and strive ever for its pure and
clear and luminous manifestation, but to be prepared to throw away its higher
reaches merely because it has also lower ones that accommodate things like
untouchability is to be victimised by a hysteria of humanism. Humanism is a very
worthy sentiment and creed, yet it cannot be balanced against spiritual
experience, against God-realisation, against concrete communion with the
Eternal. Hinduism stands or falls primarily and essentially by its ability to
produce embodiments of such experience, realisation and communion. Although a vast
brotherhood, a profound parity as between all classes, is indeed one of its
tenets, this brotherhood and parity is a tenet not of mere sociology but of a
spirituality which is rooted in the universal Self of selves or the single Lord
whose undying sparks are all evolving souls. To be ready to forego this
spirituality just because the social structure within which it first flourished
and still flourishes has become decadent in many respects and is resistant in
many ways to the influence of spirituality - to value more the abolition of untouchability
than the existence of the God-knowers and God-lovers who open up for man the
possibilities of a further evolution: this is a capital mistake, a loss of
right proportion, a blurring of correct perspective, a depreciation of the force
that alone can in the long run put a radical rather than a superficial and
therefore temporary end to the iniquities that in different shapes are the sad
lot of millions not only in India but also abroad and even in countries where
Buddhism is practised. It is another form of the heresy that if
Hinduism bore the caste system for several centuries it has failed “to yield
anything substantive”.
Buddhism
and Hinduism
Here
we may remind our recent critic that in the very religion he wished to embrace,
in Buddhism itself, it is not Buddha’s humanism that is the living core: the
heart of his message is Nirvana, the direct experience of an undifferentiated
superhuman infinity and permanence beyond all phenomena - an experience, by the
way, which is nothing essentially new to ancient Hinduism. “As the taste of
water from all the seas is salt,” said Buddha, “so too the taste of all my
teachings is Nirvana.” Remove Nirvana from Buddhism and you rob Buddha’s own
life of its central significance. Buddha did not come merely to state the
equality of human beings: his chief mission was to inculcate and irradiate a spiritual
realisation lifting us far beyond humanity and his very emphasis on human
equality was born of his mystical perception of the limitless immutable
Presence in which earth and life and man can be submerged and the cycles of
time transcended. If Buddhism has yielded “anything substantive”, the main
proof according to Buddha would lie not in whether it has yielded the savour of
a society without the caste-system but in whether it has yielded the taste of
Nirvana. The main proof, under different appearances, is exactly the same as in
the Hinduism that has been castigated.
However,
as we have said, there is a subtle trend among Hindus themselves to exaggerate
social values and thus play into the hands of critics of Hinduism. In one sense
we may say the trend is towards Buddhism, for Buddhism is more prone than any other
religion to be interpreted, in spite of its founder’s aim and teaching, as a
secular system. It does away with all metaphysical inquiry
and discourages every metaphysical statement. It is a spiritual
version of what has become known in the present-day West as Operationalism.
According to the Operationalist canon, we stick only to that which can be
demonstrated by a series of experimental operations, an employment of laboratory
techniques, a manipulation of scientific apparatus. No assertions are to be made
about ultimate reality since scientifically we cannot go beyond the evidence of
physical instruments that measure phenomena. Similarly in Buddhism a
psychological technique is provided: shedding of desire, rejection of the
ego-sense, equanimity in face of all beings and happenings, practice of
universal compassion, inner meditative detachment from both mental and bodily
processes. This technique is spirituality and what it gives is liberation from
sorrow and ignorance. The liberation should be described by no positive labels
like Brahman, Atman or Ishwara: it can be labelled only in a negative manner as
Nirvana which means cessation or absence of the interminable Becoming which is
the world. The primal facts to be reckoned with are, in Buddha’s view, world and
non-world. The splendours of mystical nomenclature, the sublime entities of
spiritual scripture, the metaphysical ultimates of religious hymnody and
liturgy are absent and in their place is a super-pragmatism. In reality, of course,
Buddha under the Bo Tree or moving amidst his monks or preaching to the
populace is enhaloed by a mystical light, fused with a spiritual Ineffable, himself
an embodiment of a deathless freedom that is beyond the world. But the formula and
method of Buddhahood are severely practical and “operational”. And just one step
more after the refusal to commit oneself to any metaphysics, even while being spiritual,
is to ignore the implicit metaphysics altogether and concentrate on a self-discipline
in altruism serving an ordered society: the spirituality shades off into social
ethicism and secular morality and we have merely the ideal s of truthfulness and
non-violence, integrity and fraternity. The nameless peace of Nirvana becomes the
happiness-giving principles of kindness and concord. Hinduism is hard to divest
of its divine mysteries, difficult of secularisation in the modem meaning of
the term: emphasis on humanism. It
can be made secular only in the sense
of a God-realisation countenancing no narrow religiosity and encouraging a turn
to this-worldly work: it can never be separated from the superhuman Presence. Certain
sections of modern India, unable to break away wholly from that Presence yet wanting
increasingly, under the influence of the West, to be secular, have found in Buddhist
gestures and symbols a means of striking some kind of balance. They have brought
about the adoption of the Dharma Chakra for the national flag and the Lion of
Sarnath for the State Seal. This choice is due to a particular turn of the Zeitgeist
and not because Buddhism is a religion superior to Hinduism. Our critic is
therefore quite off the mark when he uses it to bolster up the religion which
he prefers. Also the choice is due rather to a defect in the modem Indian temperament
than to any special merit in the Buddhist creed, or to any true appreciation of
that creed by this temperament. To overlook Nirvana - Nirvana without which
Buddha would have regarded his teaching as worthless - is scarcely to appreciate
Buddhism. And a religion which allows with some ease its deepest meaning to be
overlooked can certainly not be considered grander or more effective. Ancient India
could not permanently embrace Buddhism partly because of this ambiguity, this weakness,
arising from a negative approach which has two undesirabl e effects. First, it
frustrates the mind ‘s swabhava to make philosophical formulations and
give justifiable patterns for the life-force to follow. Second, it leaves the
world without any strong supporting truth of itself in the Ultimate Reality:
that Reality becomes more the world’s annulment than its fulfilment and the
world naturally acquires a tendency to fall away from thought of it. The
glorious personality of Buddha and the great experience he embodied remained
stamped on the Indian mind, so much so that he was included in the list of the
Avatars and put beside Sri Rama and Sri Krishna, but after a few glowing centuries
the religion he had propagated lost its grip and died out.
The Hindu View and Way of
Life
The
inclusion of Buddha among the Avatars and at the same time the rejection of his
religion as unfit for wholesale acceptance are facts that can be taken as clues
to special qualities in Hinduism which have escaped completely the mind of the
critic but which answer to the Indian soul’s need and against which Buddhism
could not stand long. Buddhism could never have taken into its scheme Sri Rama
or Sri Krishna. It is, like most other religions, a one-track move towards the
Eternal. Hinduism is multitudinous and multifarious, catholic and synthetic, a
cosmos of creeds and experiences. It
is a gigantic diversity driving, by a secret
similarity within each variant, towards the same yet manifold Godhead. Its
culture too is myriad-aspected: no line of thought anywhere, no scheme of
ethics; no system of worship, no style of art, but finds here its place in the
wondrous whole. The wideness and variety that are held together in a loose yet
living and interlinked combination by the Hindu view and way of life are responsible
for the almost utter lack of religious intolerance we observe in Indian
history. Vivekananda was but voicing the Hinduism of the ages when he said that
there should be as many religions as there are individuals; and we may add that
every one of these religions could be called Hindu! Not that there is in Hinduism
a welter of doctrines: there is only a recognition of the infinite
possibilities of the omnipotent divine nature and the extreme multiplicity of
frail aspiring human nature. All that Hinduism asks is: Can you in any manner
realise the Supreme Being who is at once transcendent, universal and individual
and whose modes of manifestation are myriad? Without the least violation of its
own character it can take the essence of the religion of Buddha to its bosom, even
as it can take that of Christianity or Mohammedanism. Each of them can be a
note in the complex harmony of its heavenward cry. But neither Buddhism nor Christianity
nor Mohammedanism can take Hinduism into itself. They are intent on converting
all souls to one type and to confine the illimitable and protean Spirit to a single
formula and a solitary revelation. None of them, therefore, can truly satisfy, or
gain wholesale acceptance from, the Indian consciousness which wants spiritual life
abundant. Life abundant, whether spiritual or secular, cannot exist for long in
a one-track scheme.
It is also in the instinctive surge of the
genuine Indian consciousness toward s a complex harmony that we find the
original raison d’etre of the caste system which our critic
falls foul of. The caste system has been for centuries a sore on the body of
this fair country, but the fact that Hinduism evolved the caste system and that
Buddhism is devoid of it is not to the credit of the latter. What, after all, is
the basis of the system? It is a recognition of the non-uniformity of human
nature rooted in the multi-aspectedness of the Divine’s being and action and an
attempt to make the non-uniformity work with the utmost efficiency. Human
nature falls into four main functions: the seeking of knowledge , inner and outer,
and the giving of form and body to the truths of the universe - the seeking to exercise
strength and power and the capacity to attack and defend, to lead and rule - the
seeking to produce wealth , promote trade, secure the physical well-being of
society the seeking to serve and obey and exercise the capacity to do manual
labour. The four functions are crystallised in the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the
Vaishya, the Sudra . Of course, no human being is entirely one-functioned and
room must be left in any social system for passage from one group to another.
But a clear division too is, under certain circumstances, required to stabilise
society and promote the intensest development of each function by means of a
conducive environment, association and training. In ancient India a rare
combination of flexibility with fixity was nearly achieved, but as such a combination
is very difficult to maintain a decline took place and when the national life was
in danger owing to internal decadence and external invasion the strata or classes
or castes grew rigid not only as a result of an ebb in the true spirit of
Indian civilisation but also in consequence of conditions threatening Indian society
with chaos. The caste system as it lingered on up to now was more or less a harmful
and superficial institution, but in its origin as a number of guilds it was a creation
of much wisdom and also carried a spiritual colour which at the same time infused
the highest values into every stratum and rendered different classes equal in essential
status by that infusion . Even the sub-Sudras who took up the most servile labour,
the work of scavenging, and who in course of time became the outcasts, the
untouchables, had their own dignity and spiritual significance and were never debarred
from getting into the higher strata, even into the highest, by showing a
capacity at variance with their environment, association and training. Modern conditions
do not favour clear divisions and today Hinduism is striving to drop them, especially
as they have become a mockery of their old selves, but in the ages when they were
laid down they were a really fruitful and “substantive achievement” and even now
their essential truth has to be brought into play in a new revolutionary fashion
rather than denied, denounced and neglected.
Hinduism, however, does not need for its own justification any
kind of defence of the caste system. Were this system a total blunder Hinduism
would still not stand condemned. Human nature is such a mélange that a
mighty truth and a huge mistake can exist side by side, and the mightier the
truth the more danger there can be of misgrowths occurring on levels where a truth
is likely to get perverted in proportion to its being vast and rich and
multifoliate. Whatever the results, we have to move in the direction of vastness
and richness and multifoliateness, for these alone can provide us with the
final key to life’s riddle and challenge. These are qualities that not only
cope with the tremendous diversity on a basis of unity that is the cosmic play,
but also afford lebensraum for new developments, adventurous advances, undreamt-of
discoveries. Most religions catch hold of certain aspects of the Divine to suit
a particular penchant of the human mind. They may show a remarkable intensity
engendered by the stress and the limit under which they work, but immensity
gets sacrificed. Hinduism aspires to mingle the immense with the intense and, though
the fusion is not always complete and there is a preponderance one way or the
other, it succeeds in carrying both in some sort of alliance and in keeping the
path open for some future fusion. Not dominantly the logic of the dividing intellect
under the Spirit’s inspiration but a spiritually inspired intuitive logic which
welcomes divisions only to unify them and which tends secretly towards some
novel integral harmony of the utmost unity with the utmost multiplicity - this
is the motive power behind the millennial quest of the Absolute which began
with the Vedic rishis. Infinite vistas stretch out to be explored, startling
possibilities of evolution remain to be compassed - essential Hinduism has its
doors flung wide to ever-new surprises of the inexhaustible will of the single yet
manifold Being who is the ultimate reality. It
is through these doors that the soul of
man will pass into a future of supreme fullness.
Amal Kiran (K.D.
Sethna)
The Indian Spirit and the
World’s Future (2004), pp 77-86
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