New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century Part 12

CHAPTER XIX

THE IDEAS OF SIN AND SALVATION

"Conscience does make cowards of us _all_."

--SHAKESPEARE.

[Sidenote: Recapitulation.]

[Sidenote: The new Theism.]

In the new India, as fish out of the water die, many things cannot survive. We have seen the educated Hindu dropping polytheism, forgetting pantheism, and adopting or readopting monotheism as the basis of his religious thinking and feeling. For modern enlightenment and Indian polytheism are incongruous; there is a like incongruity between Indian pantheism and the modern demand for practical reality. Likewise, both polytheism and pantheism are inconsistent with Christian thought, which is no minor factor in the education of modern India. Further, the theism that the educated Hindu is adopting as the basis of his religion approaches to Christian Theism. The doctrines of the Fatherhood of G.o.d and the Brotherhood of Man have become commonplaces in his mouth.

[Sidenote: Homage to Christ Himself]

Likewise, the educated Hindu is strongly attracted to the person of Jesus Christ, in spite of His alien birth and His a.s.sociation with Great Britain. There is a sweet savour in His presence, and the man of any spirituality finds it grateful to sit at His feet. That familiar oriental expression, hyperbolical to our ears, but ever upon the lips in India to express the relations.h.i.+p of student to trusted professor, or of disciple to religious teacher, expresses exactly the relations.h.i.+p to Jesus Christ of the educated man who is possessed of any religious instinct. To such a man the miracles, the superhuman claims, the highest t.i.tles of Jesus Christ, present no difficulty until they are formulated for his subscription in some hard dogmatic mould. Then he must question and discuss.

[Sidenote: Transmigration forgotten.]

Again, the educated Hindu finds himself employing about the dead and the hereafter not the language of transmigration, but words that convey the idea of a continuation of our present consciousness in the presence of a personal G.o.d. For life is becoming worth living, and the thought of life continuing and progressing is acceptable. This present life also has become a reality; a devotee renouncing the world may deny its reality; but how in this practical modern world can a man retain the doctrine of Maya or Delusion. It has dropped from the speech and apparently out of the mind of the educated cla.s.ses.

[Sidenote: The ideas of Sin and Salvation by faith in Jesus Christ not yet dynamical.]

I have suggested that those features of Christianity that are proving to be dynamical in India will be found to be those same that are proving to be dynamical in Britain. The converse also probably holds true, as our religious teachers might do well to note. The doctrines of Sin and Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ do not yet seem to have commended themselves in any measure in India. Positive repudiation of a Christian doctrine is rare, but the flouris.h.i.+ng new sect of the North-West, the [=A]ryas, make a point of repudiating the Christian doctrine of salvation by faith, although not explicitly denying it in their creed. Over against it they set up the Justice of G.o.d and the certainty of goodness and wickedness receiving each its meed. One can imagine that salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, the outstanding feature of Christianity, may have been unworthily presented to the [=A]rya leaders, so that it appeared to them merely as some cheap or gratis kind of "indulgences." The biographer of the Pa.r.s.ee philanthropist, Malabari, a forceful and otherwise well-informed writer, sets forth that idea of salvation by faith, or an idea closely akin. He is explaining why his religious-minded hero did not accept the religion of his missionary teachers. "The proud Asiatic," he says, "strives to purchase salvation with work, and never stoops to accept it as alms, as it necessarily would be if faith were to be his only merit." The unworthy presentation of "salvation by faith" may have occurred either in feeble Christian preaching or in anti-Christian pamphlets. Neither is unknown in India; and anti-Christian pamphlets have been known to be circulated through [=A]rya agencies.

[Sidenote: The ideas of sin incompatible with pantheism.]

To appreciate the att.i.tude of the Hindu mind to the doctrines of Sin and Salvation, we must return again to the rough division of Hindus into--first, the ma.s.s of the people, polytheists; secondly, the educated cla.s.ses, now largely monotheists; thirdly, the brahmanically educated and the ascetics, pantheists. It is only with the monotheists that we have now to deal. As already said--to the pantheist the word sin has no meaning. Where all is G.o.d, sin or alienation from G.o.d is a contradiction in terms. The conception of sin implies the _two_ conceptions of G.o.d and Man, or at least of Law and Man; and where one or other of these two conceptions is lacking, the conception of sin cannot arise. In pantheism, the idea of man as a distinct individual is relegated to the region of Maya or Delusion; there cannot therefore be a real sinner.

Does such reasoning appear mere dialectics without practical application, or is it unfair, think you, thus to bind a person down to the logical deductions from his creed? On the contrary, persons denying that we can sin are easy to find. Writes the latest British apostle of Hinduism, for the leaders of reaction in India are a few English and Americans: "There is no longer a vague horrible something called sin: This has given place to a clearly defined state of ignorance or blindness of the will."[119] I quote again also from Swami Vivekananda, representative of Hinduism in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893. It is from his lecture published in 1896, ent.i.tled _The Real and the Apparent Man_. His statement is unambiguous. "It is the greatest of all lies," he says, "that we are mere men; we are the G.o.d of the Universe.... The worst lie that you ever told yourself is that you were born a sinner.... The wicked see this universe as a h.e.l.l; and the partially good see it as heaven; and the perfect beings realise it as G.o.d Himself. By mistake we think that we are impure, that we are limited, that we are separate. The real man is the One Unit Existence."

Such is the logical and the actual outcome of pantheism in regard to the idea of sin, and such is the standpoint of Hindu philosophy.

[Sidenote: Sankarachargya, the pantheist's, confession of sins.]

Or if further ill.u.s.tration be needed of the incompatibility of the ideas of pantheism and sin, listen to the striking prayer of Sankarachargya, the pantheistic Vedantist of the eighth century A.D., with whom is identified the pantheistic motto, "One only, without a second."[120] It attracts our attention because Sankarachargya is professedly confessing sins. Thus runs the prayer: "O Lord, pardon my three sins: I have in contemplation clothed in form thee who art formless; I have in praise described thee who art ineffable; and in visiting shrines I have ignored thine omnipresence."[121] Beautiful expressions indeed, confessions that finite language and definite acts are inadequate to the Infinite, nay, contradictions of the Infinite, expressions fit to be recited in prayer by any man of any creed who feels that G.o.d is a Spirit and omnipresent!

But in a Christian prayer such expressions would only form a preface to confession of one's own _moral_ sin; after adoration comes confession.

Whether, like Sankarachargya, we think of the Deity objectively, as the formless and literally omnipresent Being, the _pure Being_ which, according to Hegel, equals nothing, or whether like Swami Vivekananda we think of man and G.o.d as really one, all differentiation being a delusion within the mind--there is _no second_, neither any second to sin against nor any second to commit the sin.

[Sidenote: The ma.s.ses and the sense of sin.]

[Sidenote: Prescriptions for sinners.]

For the ignorant ma.s.ses, the sense of sin has been worn out by the importance attached to religious and social externals and by the artificial value of the service of a hereditary monopolist priesthood.

These right, all is right in the eyes of the millions of India. When one of the mult.i.tude proposes to himself a visit to some shrine or sacred spot, no doubt the motive often is some divine dissatisfaction with himself; it is a feeling that G.o.d is not near enough where he himself lives. But what is poured into his ears? By a visit to Dwaraka, the city of Krishna's sports, he will be liberated from all his sins. By bathing in the sacred stream of the Ganges he will wash away his sins. All who die at Benares are sure to go to heaven. By repeating the Gayatri (a certain verse of the Rigveda addressed to the sun) a man is saved. "A brahman who holds the Veda in his memory is not culpable though he should destroy the three worlds"--so says the Code of Manu. The Tantras, or ritual works of modern Hinduism, abound in such prescriptions for sinners. "He who liberates a bull at the Aswamedika place of pilgrimage obtains _mukti_, that is salvation or an end of his rebirths." "All sin is destroyed by the repet.i.tion of Kali's thousand names." "The water of a guru's [religious teacher's] feet purifies from all sin." "The man who carries the guru's dust [the dust of the guru's feet] upon his head is emanc.i.p.ated from all sin and is [the G.o.d] Siva himself." "By a certain inhalation of the breath through the left nostril, and holding of the breath, with repet.i.tion of _yam_, the V[=a]yu Bija or mystical spell of wind or air, the body and its indwelling sinful self are dessicated, the breath being expelled by the right nostril."[122] And so on _ad infinitum_. Superst.i.tion, Western or Eastern, has no end of panaceas. We recall the advertis.e.m.e.nts of "Plenaria indulgenzia" on the doors of churches in South Italy. Visiting Benares, the metropolis of popular Hinduism, the conception of salvation everywhere obtruded upon one is that it is a question of sacred spots, and of due offerings and performances thereat.

[Sidenote: The signification of sacrifices to the Indian ma.s.ses.]

[Sidenote: Description of animal sacrifice.]

What to the ma.s.ses is _sacrifice_ even, the word which to western ears, familiar with the term in our Scriptures, suggests acknowledgment of sin and atonement therefor? It is a mistake to regard sacrifices in India as expiatory; they are gifts to the Deities as superior powers for boons desired or received, or they are the customary homage to the powers that be, at festivals and special occasions. Animal sacrifices are distinguished from the offerings of fruits and flowers only in being limited to particular Deities and pertaining to more special occasions.

An actual instance will show the place that sacrifices hold. In a letter from a village youth to his father, informing him how he had proceeded upon his arrival at Calcutta, whither he had gone for the University Matriculation Examination, he reports that he has offered a goat in sacrifice in order to ensure his success. What he probably does is this.

In a bazaar near the great temple of Kalighat, near Calcutta, the greatest centre of animal sacrifices in the world, he buys a goat or kid, fetches it into the temple court and hands it over to one of the priests whom he has fee'd. The priest puts a consecrating daub of red lead upon the animal's head, utters over it some mantra or sacred Sanscrit text, sprinkles water and a few flowers upon it at the actual place of slaughter, and then delivers it over again to the offerer. Then when the turn of the offerer, whom we are watching, has come, he hands over the animal to the executioner, who fixes its neck within a forked or Y-shaped stick fixed fast in the ground. With one blow the animal's head is severed from its body. The bleeding head is carried off into the shrine to be laid before the image of the G.o.ddess, and become the temple perquisite. The decapitated body is carried off by the offerer to furnish his family with a holiday meal. With his forehead ceremonially marked with a touch of the blood lying thick upon the ground, the offerer leaves the temple, his sacrifice finished. Such is animal sacrifice; if the description recalls the slaughter-house, the actual sight is certainly sickening. Yet, far as a European now feels from wors.h.i.+p in such a place, and thankful to Him who has abolished sacrifice once for all, there is no doubt religious gratification to those who go through what I have described. Our point is that, as Sir M. Monier Williams declares, in such an offering, "there is no idea of effacing guilt or making a vicarious offering for sin."[123]

[Sidenote: The educated cla.s.ses and the idea of sin.]

[Sidenote: The brahma monopoly of nearness to the Deity broken down.]

The educated cla.s.ses, breathing now a monotheistic atmosphere, although in close contact with polytheism in their homes and with pantheism in their sacred literature, have reached the platform on which the idea of sin may be experienced. A member of that cla.s.s, a pantheist no longer, is in the presence of a personal G.o.d, a Moral Being, and is himself a responsible person, with the instincts of a child of that Supreme Moral Being, our Father. With his education, he knows himself to be independent of brahmanical mediation in his intercourse with that Being.

As confirmation, it is noteworthy how many of the religious leaders of modern times, like Buddha of old, are other than brahman by caste. In a previous chapter the names of a number of these non-brahman leaders were given. Even the Hindu ascetics of these latter days are more numerously non-brahman than of old, for in theory only brahmans have reached the ascetical stage of religious development. Whatever the reason, the brahmanical monopoly of access to and inspiration from the Deity is no longer recognised by new-educated India.

[Sidenote: The wors.h.i.+p of the new sects--its significance.]

In like manner, the new religious a.s.sociations seem to feel themselves directly in the presence of G.o.d. Congregational wors.h.i.+p, a feature new to Hindus, is a regular exercise in the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j or Theistic a.s.sociation of Bengal, the Pr[=a]rthan[=a] Sam[=a]jes or Prayer a.s.sociations of Western India, and the [=A]rya Sam[=a]j or Vedic Theistic a.s.sociation 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 wors.h.i.+p and united prayer, before unknown among them and confessedly borrowed from Christian wors.h.i.+p.[124] The public wors.h.i.+p in all these bodies is indeed not unlike many a Christian service, consisting of Prayer to G.o.d, Praise of G.o.d, and expositions of religious truth. In a small collection of hymns, "Theistic Hymns," published some years ago for the use of members of the [=A]rya Sam[=a]j, we find many Christian hymns expressive of this personal relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d. We find "My G.o.d, my Father, while I stray," and "O G.o.d, 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 wors.h.i.+p, we perceive the growth of the idea of personal relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d. A recent publication of that party is "_Songs for the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ddess Durga_." One of them, we may note in pa.s.sing, is the well-known hymn, "Work, for the night is coming." All such personal relations.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sociations the Pr[=a]rthan[=a] Sam[=a]jes or Prayer a.s.sociations, and give to the buildings in which they wors.h.i.+p the name of Prayer Halls instead of temples. Let not men say that religion and theological belief belong to separable spheres.

[Sidenote: The idea of sin naturally accompanies the new monotheism.]

Once more, the public wors.h.i.+p and prayer attendant on the new monotheism of the new religious a.s.sociations 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 [=A]rya Sam[=a]j and the Pr[=a]rthan[=a] Sam[=a]jes, the word _sin_ does not occur. What we find in the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j is as follows. From the creed of the Southern India Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j, of date about 1883, we quote paragraph 7: "Should I through folly commit sin, I will endeavour to be atoned _[sic]_ unto G.o.d by earnest repentance and reformation."[126] From the "Principles of the Sadharan [Universal or Catholic] Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j," set forth in the organ of the body, we quote a paragraph 8: "G.o.d 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 Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j, 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 G.o.d'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.

[Sidenote: Hinduism superseded Buddhism because it offered salvation, not extinction.]

Salvation does mean something to every cla.s.s. The huge fabric of Brahmanism does not continue to exist without ministering to some wide-felt need of the ma.s.ses. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 S[=a]rn[=a]th, where he began his preaching. Yet the wors.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 ma.s.ses 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?

[Sidenote: Three ways of salvation in Hinduism: more strictly, three stages.]

[Sidenote: 1. Saving knowledge]

[Sidenote: Or now Beatific Vision.]

The acute Indian mind, with its disposition to a.n.a.lyse 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 Mahanirv[=a]na 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d?" and the reply of the jogi was, "Do not ask me questions; you may look at me, for I am G.o.d." "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 l.u.s.ting 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 G.o.d, and cut off from mundane distractions. This is the union with G.o.d which is salvation to many of the modern monotheistic Hindus.