New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century Part 10

"Upon the grave of Master Mahbub Shah Slept Sain Chet Earn.

A man came in a glorious form, Showing a face of mercy.

Sweet was his speech and simple his face, Appearing entirely as the image of G.o.d.

He called aloud, 'Who sleeps there?

Awake, if thou art sleeping.

Thou art distinctly fortunate, Thou art needed in the Master's presence.'

'Build a church on this very spot, Place the Bible therein.'

Then said that luminous form, Jesus, the image of Mary:

'I shall do justice in earth and heaven, And reveal the hidden mysteries.'

Astonished there alone I stood, As if a parrot had flown out of my hands.

Then my soul realised That Jesus came to give salvation.

I realised that it was Jesus G.o.d Who appeared in a bodily form."[103]

[Sidenote: The Followers of Chet Ram.]

[Sidenote: Their indefinite composite theology.]

Whence came the Christian seed of Chet Ram's vision? His master Mahbub Shah was a Mahomedan, and Jesus Christ is reckoned one of the Mahomedan prophets. But it is the Christ of Christianity, not of Mahomedanism, that Chet Ram saw in his vision of the glorious form showing the face of mercy, at once the dispenser of justice, the revealer of mysteries, and the giver of salvation. Whatever the source of the vision, Chet Ram saw and believed and began to hold up Jesus Christ before other men's eyes, and Chet Ram himself thus became the guru or religious teacher of what may be called an indigenous Christian Church. A moderate estimate reckons the Chet Ramis at about five thousand souls, the religious force of the sect being represented by the Chet Rami ascetics, who go about making their gospel known and living on alms. Chet Ram himself died in 1894, and at the headquarters of the sect at Buchhoke, near Lah.o.r.e, his ashes and the bones of his master Mahbub Shah are kept in two coffins, which the faithful visit, particularly on certain Chet Rami holy-days, on which fairs are held. In keeping with the command of the vision, several copies of the New Testament and one complete Bible were also on view when the writer of the article in _East and West_ visited the sanctuary in 1903. The _Census Report_ for 1901 sums the Chet Ramis up by saying that "the sect professes a wors.h.i.+p of Christ," and that is our present point of view. But we cannot leave them without noticing also how Indian they are in their unwillingness to define their thought, and in their readiness to enthrone a holy man and his relics. Undefined thought we see expressed in symbol. There are _four_ doors to the sanctuary at Buchhoke,--the fakiri [Chet Rami ascetics'] door, the Hindu, Christian, and Mahomedan doors--expressing the openness of the Chet Rami sanctuary to all sects. Their theology is a corresponding conglomeration. It includes a Christian trinity of Jesus Son of Mary [the Mahomedan designation of Christ], the Holy Spirit, and G.o.d; and a Hindu triad of the world's three potencies, namely, Allah, Parameswar, and Khuda, a jumble of Hindu and Mahomedan names, but representing the Hindu triad of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer.

[Sidenote: Parallel between the nineteenth century in India and the second, third, and fourth centuries in the History of the Church.]

[Sidenote: The Theosophists and the Neo-Platonists.]

[Sidenote: The Neo-Platonists and New India's homage to Christ.]

[Sidenote: The Neo-Platonists and the Hindu Revivalists.]

In respect of the phenomenon of the homage shown to Christ over against the hostility shown to His Church, the second, third, and fourth centuries in the history of the Church present a striking parallel to the nineteenth century in India. Steadily in these centuries Christianity was progressing in spite of contempt for its adherents, philosophic repudiation of the doctrines of the _superst.i.tio prava_, and official persecution unknown in British India at least. Then also, as always, Christ stood out far above His followers, lifted up and drawing all men's eyes. Such in India also, in the nineteenth century, has been the course of Christianity; parts of the record of these centuries read like the record of the religious movements in India in these latter days. Describing the Neo-Platonists of these centuries, historians tell us that at the end of the second century A.D. Ammonius of Alexandria, founder of the sect, "undertook to bring all systems of philosophy and religion into harmony, by which all philosophers and men of all religions, Christianity included, might unite and hold fellows.h.i.+p."

_There_ are the four doors of the Chet Rami sanctuary. There also we have the Theosophical Society of India, professing in its const.i.tution to be "the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, representing and excluding no religious creed." Ammonius, founder of the Neo-Platonists, was a pantheist like the present leader of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Besant, and like her too, curiously, had begun as a Christian.[104] We recall that of Indian Theosophy in general, in 1891, the late Sir Monier Williams declared that it seemed little more than another name for the "Vedanta [or Pantheistic]

philosophy." Exactly like the earlier theosophists also, Ammonius, the Neo-Platonist, held that the purified soul could perform physical wonders, by the power of Theurgy. In its const.i.tution the Theosophical Society professed "to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers latent in man." Many can remember how, in the eighties, Madame Blavatsky took advantage of our curiosity regarding such with air-borne letters from Mahatmas in Thibet. Again Ammonius, we read, "turned the whole history of the pagan G.o.ds into allegory." There we have the Neo-Krishnaites of to-day. "He acknowledged that Christ was an extraordinary man, the friend of G.o.d, and an admirable Theurgus." There we have the stand point of the educated Indians who have come under Christ's spell. For two centuries the successors of Ammonius followed in these lines. "Individual Neo-Platonists," Harnack tells us, "employed Christian sayings as oracles, and testified very highly of Christ.

Porphyry of Syria, chief of the Neo-Platonists of the third century, wrote a work "against Christians"; but again, according to Harnack, the work is not directed against Christ, or what Porphyry regarded as the teaching of Christ. It was directed against the Christians of his day and against the sacred books, which according to Porphyry were written by impostors and ignorant people. There we have the double mind of educated India,--homage to Christ, opposition to His Church. There also we have the standpoint of Sahib Mirza Gholam Ahmad of Qadian. Some, we read, being taught by the Neo-Platonists that there was little difference between the ancient religion, rightly explained and restored to its purity, and the religion which Christ really taught, not that corrupted form of it which His disciples professed, concluded it best for them to remain among those who wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.ds. There is the present Indian willingness to discover Christian and modern ideas in the Hindu Scriptures, especially in the original Vedas that the new [=A]rya sect declare to be "the Scripture of true knowledge." The practical outcome of the Neo-Platonic movement was an attempt to revive the old Graeco-Roman religion,--Julian the apostate emperor had many with him.

There we have the revival of the wors.h.i.+p of Krishna in India, and the apologies for idolatry and caste. The most recent stage of the Theosophical Society in India reveals _it_ as virtually a Hindu revival society. Finally, we read, the old philosopher Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and others were represented on the stage dressed in imitation of Christ Himself, and the Emperor Alexander Severus [A.D. 222-235] placed the figure of Christ in his lararium alongside of those of Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius. There we have the modern Indians who fully recognise Christ alongside of their own avatars. The whole parallel is complete.[105] In spite of the feebleness and, it may be, unworthiness of His Church, through the force of Christ's personality, the Roman history of the second, third, and fourth centuries has been repeating itself in India in the nineteenth and twentieth, and unless the force of Christ's personality be spent, the parallels will proceed.

From new reasonings about G.o.d, her new monotheism, New India has been brought a stage farther to actual history. From theologies she has come to the first three Gospels. New India has been introduced to Christ as He actually lived on earth before men's eyes; and to India, intensely interested in religious teachers, the personality of the Christ of the Gospels, of the first three Gospels in particular, appeals strongly. To the pessimistic mood of India He appeals as one whose companions.h.i.+p makes this life more worth living; for Christ was not a jogi in the Indian sense of a renouncer of the world. His call to fraternal service has taken firm hold of the best Indians of to-day. Of the future we know not, but we feel that the narrative of the first three Gospels naturally precedes the deeper insight of the fourth.

CHAPTER XVII

INDIAN PESSIMISM--ITS BEARING ON BELIEF IN THE HERE AND HEREAFTER

"How many births are past, I cannot tell: How many yet to come, no man can say: But this alone I know, and know full well, That pain and grief embitter all the way."

(_South-Indian Folk-song_, quoted in _Lux Christi_, by Caroline At.w.a.ter Mason.)

"When desire is gone, and the cords of the heart are broken, then the soul is delivered from the world and is at rest in G.o.d."

[Sidenote: Indian pessimism.]

Two commonplaces about India are that pessimism is her natural temperament, and that a natural outcome of her pessimism is the Indian doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The second statement will require explanation; but as regards the former, there is no denying the strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that pervades these words we have quoted, or that they are characteristic of India. In them life seems a burden; to be born into it, a punishment; and of the transmigrations of our souls from life to life, seemingly, we should gladly see the end. All the same, as new India is proving, pessimism is not the inherent temperament of India, and the hope of the end of the transmigration, and of the lives of the soul, no more natural in India than in any other land.

[Sidenote: Due to nature?]

Pessimism is natural in India, say such writers as we have in mind, because of the spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which Indians live their lives. Life is of little value to the possessor, they say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is constantly being thrust upon us. And that is so in India. Great rivers keep repeating their contemptuous motto that "men may come and men may go," and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts. Sailing up the Brahmaputra at one place in a.s.sam, the writer saw a not uncommon occurrence, the great river actually eating off the soft bank in huge slices, five or six feet in breadth at a time. Something higher up, it might have been the grounding of a floating tree, had turned the current towards the bank, and at five-minute intervals, it seemed, these huge slices were falling in. Not fifty yards back from the bank stood a cottage, whose garden was already part gone; a banana tree standing upon one of these slices fell in and was swept down before our eyes. Within an hour the cottage itself would meet the same fate, and the people were already rus.h.i.+ng in and out. Or pa.s.s to another aspect of nature. For a season every year the unveiled Indian sun in a sky of polished steel glares with cruel pitiless eye. The light is fierce. Then, arbitrarily, as it seems, the rains may be withheld, and the hard-baked, heat-cracked soil never softens to admit the ploughshare, and hundreds of thousands of the cultivators and field hands are overtaken by famine. At one time during the famine of 1899-1900, it will be remembered that six million people were receiving relief. Or, equally arbitrarily, betokening some unknown displeasure of the G.o.ds, plague may take hold of a district and literally take its t.i.the of the population. At any moment, life is liable to be terminated with appalling suddenness by cholera or the bite of a venomous serpent.

With French imagination and grace, in his _Introduction to General History_, Michelet describes the tyranny of nature--"Natura maligna"--in India. "Man is utterly overpowered by nature there--like a feeble child upon a mother's breast, alternately spoiled and beaten, and intoxicated rather than nourished by a milk too strong and stimulating for it."[106]

One cannot help contrasting the supplicating Indian villagers--of whom a University matriculation candidate told in his essay, how, when the rains were withheld, they carried out the village G.o.ddess from her temple and bathed the idol in the temple tank--with the English fisher-woman of whom Tennyson tells us, who shook her fist at the cruel sea that had robbed her of two sons. As she looked at it one day with its lines of white breakers, she shook her fist at it and told it her mind--"How I hates you, with your cruel teeth."

Can this Indian aspect of nature, one wonders, be the true explanation of the fierceness of her G.o.ddesses as contrasted with her G.o.ds, and the offering of b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices to G.o.ddesses only? Mother Nature is malignant, not benign.

[Sidenote: Indian life estimated by the economic standard of life's value.]

The value of life and the little worth of life in India may be gauged in another way. In the language of the political economist, the value of human life in any country may be estimated by the average wage, which determines the standard of comfort and how far a man is restricted to the bare necessities of bodily life. Again, judged by that standard, life is probably in no civilised country at a lower estimate than in India, where the labourer spends over 90 per. cent of his income upon the bare necessities for the sustenance of the bodies of his household.

[Sidenote: Indian pessimism only a mood.]

[Sidenote: Humanlife is rising in value]

[Sidenote: Pessimism is declining]

All that is true, and yet the conclusion is only partly true. In spite of all such reasoning, and acknowledging that the physical characteristics of India have largely made her what she is, politically, socially, and even religiously, I venture to think that the pessimism of India is exaggerated. Not a pessimistic temperament, but a mood, a mood of helpless submissiveness, a bowing to the powers that be in nature and in the world, seems to me the truer description of the prevailing "pessimism." At least, if it be the case, as I have tried to show, that during the past century in India, human life has been rising in value, the pessimistic mood must be declining. Let us observe some facts again.

In a Government or Mission Hospital, _there_ is a European doctor taking part in the offensive work of the dressing of a coolie's sores,--we a.s.sume that the doctor's touch is the touch of a true Christian gentleman. To the despised sufferer, life is gaining a new sweetness, and to the high-caste student looking on and ready to imitate his teacher, life is attaining a new dignity. That human life has been rising in value is patent. The wage of the labourer has been steadily rising--in one or two places the workers are become masters of the situation; the rights of woman are being recognised, if only slowly; the middle cla.s.ses are eager for education and advancement; the individual has been gaining in independence as the tyranny of caste and custom has declined; the sense of personal security and of citizens.h.i.+p and of nationality has come into being. Whatever the merits of the great agitation in 1905 against the part.i.tion of the Province of Bengal, and inconceivable as taking place a century ago, it is manifestly the doing of men keenly interested in the conditions under which they live. It is a contradiction of the theory of an inherent Indian pessimism.

Self-respect and a sense of the dignity and duties of manhood are surely increasing, and making our earth a place of hope and making life worth living, instead of a burden to be borne. "The Hindus," says Sir Alfred Lyall, "have been rescued by the English out of a chronic state of anarchy, insecurity, lawlessness, and precarious exposure to the caprice of despots."[107]

[Sidenote: Asceticism is declining.]

Best proof probably that pessimism is declining is the fact that asceticism is declining. The times are no longer those in which the life of a brahman is supposed to culminate in the Sannyasi or ascetic "who has laid down everything," who, in the words of the Bhagabat Gita, "does not hate and does not love anything."[108] The pro-Hindu writer often quoted also acknowledges the new pleasure in life and the religious corollary of it when she says that the recent rise in the standard of comfort in India is opposed to the idea of asceticism. Desire, indeed, is not gone, and the cords of the heart are not breaking. Says the old brahman, in the guise of whom Sir Alfred Lyall speaks: "I own that you [Britons] are doing a great deal to soften and enliven material existence in this melancholy, sunburnt country of ours, and certainly you are so far successful that you are bringing the ascetic idea into discouragement and, with the younger folk, into contempt."[109] Welcome to the new joy of living, all honour to the old ascetics, and may a still n.o.bler self-sacrifice take their place!

[Sidenote: Pessimism, asceticism, transmigration are allied ideas.]

For Western minds it is difficult to realise the close connection between the doctrine of transmigration and the mood of India, rightly or wrongly termed pessimism. _Our_ instinctive feeling is that life is sweet; while there is life there is hope, _we_ say; "_healthy_ optimism"

is the expression of Professor James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_; it is "_more life_ and fuller that we want." In keeping with this Western and human instinct, the Christian idea of the Hereafter is a fuller life than the life Here, a perfect eternal life.

To the pessimist, on the contrary [and Hindu philosophy is pessimistic, whatever be the new mood of India], the question is, "Why was I born?"

The Indian doctrine of transmigration comes with answer--"Life is a punishment: it is the bitter consequence of our past that we are working out; we must _submit_ to be born into the world again and again, until we are cleared." "Yes, until your minds are cleared," the Indian pantheist adds, "life _itself_ is a delusion, if you only knew it; life itself, your consciousness of individuality or separateness, is a delusion." But the pantheist's thought is here beside our present point.

[Sidenote: Transmigration the ant.i.thesis of eternal life.]

To the pessimistic Indian accepting the Indian view of transmigration, it is therefore no gospel to preach the continuation of life, either here or hereafter. "To be born again" sounds like a penance to be endured. _Mukti_, commonly rendered _salvation_, is not regeneration Here and eternal life Hereafter; it is _deliverance_ from further lives altogether. If, however, we accept the statement that the value of human life in India is rising, that life is becoming worth living, and that the pessimistic mood is no ingrained fundamental trait, we are prepared to believe that the hopeful Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter is finding acceptance. Rightly understood, the Christian conception is at bottom the ant.i.thesis of pessimism and its corollary, transmigration. To deny the one is almost to a.s.sert the other. The decay of the one is the growth of the other. For the Christian conception of the Here and the Hereafter--what is it? Life, eternal, in and through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Son of G.o.d. "G.o.d gave unto us eternal life, and the life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life."[110] Says Harnack in his volume _What is Christianity?_ "The Christian religion means one thing, and one thing only--eternal life in the midst of time by the strength and under the eyes of G.o.d." Not that the new idea in India is to be wholly ascribed to Christian influence. A marked change in Christian thought itself during the nineteenth century has been the higher value of this present life. Christianity has become a vitalising gospel for the life Here even more than for the Hereafter.

But a.s.suming the truth of what we have sought to show, namely, that within the past century the winning personality of Christ has come to New India, a new incentive to n.o.ble life and service, we have at least a further reason for believing that pessimism and transmigration are fading out of Indian minds. The new Advent, as that at Bethlehem, is a turning-point of time; the gloomy winter of pessimism is turning to a hopeful spring.