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CHAPTER XX DEATH, DESIRE AND INCAPACITY In the beginning all was ed by Hunger that is death; that made for itself so that it might attain to possession of self. Brihadaranyaka Unpunished This Force has the multitude of its desires that it may establish’ the All ; it seeks the taste of all foods and builds his home for the being. Rig Veda. ARGUMENT
[Life is the same whatever its workings and its terms need not be limited to those proper to physical existence. Life is a final operation of divine conscious-force for individualising existence ; it is the energy-aspect of Mind when that creates and relates itself to form of substance .-it has all the universal conscious-force of existence behind it and is not a separate entity or movement. Life in us must become conscious of this divine Force behind it in order to become divine.—Life, at first darkened, ignorant, divided and helplessly subject, seeks as it develops to become master and enjoyer, to grow in Power; but until it escapes from the bonds of individuality it must be subject to its three badges of limitation, Death , Desire and Incapacity.—The nature of physical life imposes death because all life exists by a mutual devouring; and struggle and Life
Page-449 itself feeds upon the forms it creates ; but the fundamental justification of Death is the necessity of a constant variation of experience in succession of Time, the soul seeking thus to enlarge itself and move towards the realisation of its own infinity.—The process of Death results inevitably from the division of substance. ; life’s attempt to aggrandise its being thus divided and limited translates itself into the hunger that devours. This hunger is the crude form of Desire, and Desire is the necessary lever for self-affirmation; but eventually Desire has to grow out of the law of Hunger into the law of Love. —Desire itself is the result of the limitation of capacity which is the consequence of divided Life working as the energy of ignorant mind. all-force being only possible to all-knowledge. Therefore growth by struggle is the third Law of Life. This strife again has to divinise itself and become the clasp of Love. Until then Death, Desire and Strife are and must be the triple mask of the divine Life-principle in its cosmic self-affirmation.]
In our last chapter we have considered Life From the point of view of the material existence and the appearance and working of the vital principle in Matter and we have reasoned from the data which this evolutionary terrestrial existence supplies. But it is
evident that wherever it may appear and however it may work, under whatsoever conditions, this principle must be everywhere the same Life is universal Force working so as to create,
energies, maintain and modify even to the extent of dissolving and reconstructing substantial forms with mutual play and interchange of energy as its fundamental character. In the material world we inhabit Mind is involved and subconscious in Life, just as Supermind is involved and subconscious in Mind, and this Life instinct with subconscious Mind is again involved in Matter. Therefore Matter is here the basis and the apparent beginning ; in the language of the Upanishads, Prithivi the Earth-principle is our foundation. The material universe
straits from the formal atom surcharged with energy, instinct with subconscious desire, will, intelligence. Out of this Matter apparent Life manifests and it deliver* out of itself by means
Page-450 of the living body the Mind it contains imprisoned within it ; and Mind also has still to deliver out of itself’ the Supermind concealed in its workings. But we can conceive a world otherwise constituted in which Mind consciously uses its innate energy to create substantial forms and not, as here, only subconsciously. Still though the working of such a world would be quite different from ours, the operation of that energy would always be Life. The thing itself would be the same, even if the process were entirely reversed.
But then it appears immediately that as Mind is only a final operation o!
Supermind, so Life is only a final operation of the Conscious-Force of which Real Idea is the form and creative agent. Consciousness that is Force is the nature of Being and this conscious Being manifested as a
creative Knowledge-Will is the Real-Id^a or Super-mind. Knowledge-Will is Consciousness-Force rendered operative for the
citation of
terms of being in an ordered harmony to which we give the name of world or universe; so also Mind and Life are the same Consciousness-Force, the same Knowledge-Will operating for the maintenance of distinctly individual forms in a sort of demarcation, opposition and interchange in which the soul in each form of being works out its own mind and life as if they were separate
from the others though in reality they are never separate but are the play of the one Soul, Mind, Life in different forms. In other words, as Mind is the final individualising operation of the all-comprehending and all-apprehending Supermind, the process by which its consciousness works individualised in each form from the standpoint proper to it and with the cosmic relations which
proceed from that standpoint, so Life is the final operation by which the Force of Conscious-Being acting through the all-possessing and all-creative Will of the universal Supermind maintains and
energies, constitutes and reconstitutes individual forms and acts in them as the basis of all the activities of the soul thus embodied. Life is the energy of the Divine continually generating
itself in
forms as in a dynamo and not only playing with the outgoing battery of it shocks on
Page-451 surrounding forms of things but receiving itself the incoming shocks of all life around as they pour in upon and penetrate the form from outside. Thus Life appears to be simply the form of energy of consciousness appropriate to Mind ; in a sense, it may be said to be the energy aspect of Mind when it creates and relates itself to forms of substance. But it must immediately be added that just as Mind is not a separate entity, but has all Supermind behind it and it is Supermind that creates with Mind only as its final individualising operation, so Life also is not a separate entity or movement but has all conscious-Force behind it in every one of its workings and it is that Conscious-Force alone which exists and acts in created things. Life is only its final operation intermediary between Mind and Body. All that we say of Life must therefore be subject to the qualifications arising from this dependence. We do not really know Life whether in its nature or its process unless and until we are a-ware and grow conscious of that Conscious-Force working in it of which it is only the external aspect and instrumentation. Then only can we perceive and execute with knowledge as individual soul-forms and mental and bodily instruments of the Divine the will of God in Life; then only can Life and Mind proceed in paths and movements of an ever-increasing straightness of the truth in ourselves and things by a constant diminishing of the crooked perversions of the Ignorance. Just as Mind has to unite itself consciously with the Supermind from which it is separated by the action of Avidya, so Life has to become aware of the Conscious-Force which operates in it for ends and with a meaning of which the life in us, because it is absorbed in the mere process of living as our mind is absorbed in the mere process of mentalist life and matter, is unconscious in its darkened action so that it serves them blindly and ignorantly and not, as it must and will in its liberation and fulfilment, luminously or with a self-fulfilling knowledge, power and bliss.
In fact, our Life being
subservient to the darkened and dividing operation of Mind, is itself darkened
and divided Page-452 and undergoes all that subjection to death, limitation, weakness, suffering, ignorant functioning of which the bound and limited creature-Mind is the parent and cause. The original source of the perversion was, we have seen, the self-limitation of the individual soul bound to self-ignorance because it regards itself by an exclusive concentration as a separate self-existent individuality and regards all cosmic action only as it presents itself to its own individual consciousness, knowledge, will, force, enjoyment and limited being instead of seeing itself as a conscious form of the One and embracing all consciousness, all knowledge, all will, all force, all enjoyment and all being as its own. The universal life in us obeying this direction of the soul imprisoned in mind itself becomes imprisoned in an individual action. It exists and acts as a separate life with a limited working helplessly undergoing and not freely embracing the shock and pressure of all the cosmic life around it. Thrown into the constant cosmic interchange of Force in the universe as a poor, limited, individual existence Life at first helplessly suffers and obeys the giant interplay with only a mechanical reaction upon all that attacks, devours, enjoys, uses, drives it. But as consciousness develops, as the light of its own being emerges from the inert darkness of the evolutionary sleep, the individual becomes dimly aware of the power in it and seeks first nervously and then mentally to master, use and enjoy the play. This awakening to the Power in it is the gradual awakening to self. For Life is Force and Force is Power and Power is Will and Will is the working of the Master-consciousness. Life in the individual becomes more and more aware that it too is the Will-Force of Sachchidananda which is master of the universe and it aspires itself to be individually master of its own world. To realise its own power and to master as well as to know its world is therefore the increasing impulse of all individual life; that impulse is an essential feature of the growing self-manifestation of the Divine in cosmic existence.
But though Life is Power and the growth of individual life means the growth of the individual Power, still
Page-453 the mere fact of its be ing a divided individualised life and force prevents it from really becoming master of its world. For that would mean to be master of the All-Force and it is impossible for a divided and individualised consciousness with a divided, individualised and therefore limited power and will to be master of the All-Force ; only the All-Will can be that and the individual only, if at all, by becoming again one with the All-Will and therefore with the All-Force. Otherwise, the individual life in the individual form must be always subject to the three badges of its limitation, Death, Desire and Incapacity. Death is imposed on the individual life both by the conditions of its own existence and by its relations to the All-Force which manifests itself in the universe. For the individual life is a particular play of energy specialised to constitute, maintain, energies and finally to dissolve when its utility is over one of myriad forms which all serve, each in it own place, time and scope, the whole play of the universe. The energy of life in the body has to support the attack of the energies external to it in the universe; it has to draw them in and feed upon them and is itself being constantly devoured by them. All Matter according to the Upanishad is food, and the formula of the material world is that "the eater eating is being constantly eaten." The life organised in the body is constantly ex. posed to the possibility of being broken up by the attack of the life external to it or, its devouring capacity being insufficient or not properly served or there being no right balance between the capacity of devouring and the cape . city or necessity of providing food for the life outside, it is unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and therefore wasted away.
Not only so but, again in the language of the Upanishad, the life-force is the food of the body and the body of the life-force ; in other words, the life-energy in us both supplies the material by which the form is built up and constantly maintained and renewed and is at the same time constantly using up the substantial form of itself
which it
Page-454 between these two operations is imperfect or is disturbed or if the ordered play of the different currents of life-force is thrown out of gear, then disease and decay intervene and commence the process of disintegration. And the very struggle for conscious raster and even the growth of mind make the maintenance of’ the life more difficult. For there is an increasing demand of the life-energy on the form, a demand which is in excess of the original system of supply and disturbs the original balance of supply and demand, and before a new balance can be established, many disorders are introduced inimical to the harmony and to the length of maintenance of the life ; in addition the attempt at mastery creates always a corresponding reaction in the environment which is full of forces that also desire fulfilment and are therefore intolerant of, revolt against and attack the existence which seeks to master them. There too a balance is disturbed, a more intense struggle is generated, and, however strong the mastering life, unless either it is unlimited or else succeeds in establishing a new harmony with its environment, it cannot always resist and triumph but must one day be overcome and disintegrated.
But apart from all these necessities there is the one fundamental necessity of the nature and object of embodied life itself, which is to seek infinite experience on a finite basis; and since the form, the basis by its very organisation limits the possibility of experience, this can only be done by dissolving it and seeking new forms. For the soul having once limited itself by concentrating on the moment and the field, is driven to seek its infinity again by the principle of succession, by adding moment to moment and thus storing up a Time-experience which it calls its past ; in that Time it moves through successive fields, successive experiences or lives, successive accumulations of knowledge, capacity, enjoyment , and all this it holds in subconscious or
super conscious memory as its fund of past acquisition in Time. To this process change of form is essential , and for the soul involved in individual body change of form means dissolution of the body in subjection to the law and compulsion of the All-life in the material
Page-455 universe , its law of supply of the material of form and demand on the material, its principle of constant inters hock and the struggle of the embodied life to exist in a world of mutual devouring. And this is the law of Death. This then is the necessity and justification of Death not as a denial of Life, but as a process of Life ; because eternal change of form is the sole immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire and eternal change of experience the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in living body can attain. This change of form cannot be allowed to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form-type such as constitutes our bodily life between birth and death ; for unless the form-type is changed and the experiencing mind is thrown into’ new forms in new circumstances of time, place and environment, the necessary variation of experience which the very nature of existence in Time and Space demands, cannot be effectuated. And it is only the process of Death by dissolution and by the devouring of life by Life, it is only the absence of freedom, the compulsion, the struggle, the pain, the subjection to something that appears to be Not-Self which makes this necessary and salutary change appear terrible and undesirable to our mortal mentality. It is the sense of being devoured, broken up, destroyed or forced away which is the sting of Death and which even the belief in personal survival of death cannot wholly abrogate.
But this process is a necessity of that mutual devouring which we see to be the initial law of Life in Matter. Life says the Upanishad, is Hunger who is Death, and by this Hunger who is Death,
Açanâyâ Mrityu, the material world has been created. For Life here assumes as its mould material substance, and material substance is Being infinitely divided and seeking infinitely to aggregate itself ; between these two impulses of infinite division and infinite aggregation the material existence of the universe is constituted. The attempt of the individual, the atom to maintain and aggrandise itself is the whole sense of Desire; a physical, vital, moral, mental increase by a more and more all-bracing experience, a more and more all-embracing possession,
Page-456 absorption, assimilation, enjoyment is the inevitable le, fundamental, ineradicable impulse of Existence once divided and individualised, yet ever secretly conscious of its all embracing, all-possessing infinity. The impulse to realise that secret consciousness is the spur of the cosmic Divine, the lust of the embodied Self within every, individual creature; and it is inevitable, just, salutary that it should seek for realise it first in the terms of life by an increasing growth and expansion. In the physic 1 world this can only be done by feeding on the environment, by aggrandising one self through the absorption of others or of what is possessed by others ; and this necessity is the universal justification of Hunger in all its forms. Still what devours, must also be devoured ; for the law of interchange, of action and location, of limited capacity and therefore of a final exhaustion and succumbing governs all life in the physical world.
In the conscious mind that which was still only a vital hunger in subconscious life, transforms itself into higher forms; hunger in the vital parts becomes craving of Desire in the mentalised life, straining of Will in the intellectual or-thinking life. This movement of desire must and ought to continue until the individual has grown sufficiently so that he can now at last become master of himself and by increasing union with the Infinite possessor of his universe. Desire is the lever by which the divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the
universe and the attempt to extinguish it in the interests of inertia is a denial of the divine Life-principle, a Will-not-to-be which is necessarily ignorance ; for one cannot cease to be individually except by being infinitely. Desire too can only cease rightly by
becoming the desire of the infinite and satisfying itself with a supernal
fulfilment and an infinite satisfaction in the all-possessing bliss of the Infinite. Meanwhile it has to progress from the type of a mutually devouring hunger to the type of a mutual giving, of an
increasingly) ‘joyous sacrifice of interchange ;—the individual gives himself to other individuals and receives them back in exchange; the lower give itself to the higher and the higher to the lower so that they maybe
fulfilled in each other; the human
Page-457 gives itself to the Divine and the Divine to the human ; the All in the individual gives itself to the All in the universe and receives its realised universality as a divine recompense. Thus the law of Hunger must give place progressively to the law of Love, the law of Division to the law of Unity, the law of Death to the law of Immortality. Such is the necessity, such the justification, such the culmination and self-fulfilment of the Desire that is at work in the universe.
As this mask of Death which Life assumes results from the movement of the finite seeking to affirm its immortality, 90 Desire is the impulse of the
force of Being individualised in Life to affirm progressively in the terms of succession in Time and of self-extension in Space, in the framework of the finite, its infinite Bliss, the Ananda of Sachchidananda. The mask of Desire which that impulse assumes comes directly from the third phenomenon of Life, its law of incapacity. Life is an infinite Force working in the terms of the finite ; and therefore throughout its overt individualised action in the finite its omnipotence must appear and act as a limited capacity and a
partial impotence, although behind every act of the individual however weak, however futile, however stumbling there must be the whole super conscious and subconscious presence of infinite omnipotent Force; without that presence behind it no least single movement in the cosmos can happen ; into its sum of universal action each single act and movement falls by the fiat of the omnipotent omniscience which works as the Supermind inherent in things. But the
individualities life-force is to its own consciousness limited and full of incapacity ; for it has to work not only against the mass of other environing individualised life-forces, but also subject to control and denial by the infinite Life itself with whose total will and trend its own will and trend may not immediately agree. Therefore limitation of force, phenomenon of incapacity is the third of the three characteristics of individualised and divided Life On the other hand, the impulse of self-enlargement and all-possession remains and it does’ not and is not meant to m
assure or limit
Page-458 itself by the limit of its present force or capacity. Hence from the gulf between the impulse to possess and the force of possession desire arises ; for if there were no such discrepancy, if the force could always take possession of its object, always attain securely its end, desire would not come into existence but only a calm and self-possessed Will without craving such as is the Will of the Divine.
If the individualised force were the energy of a mien free from ignorance, no such limitation, no such necessity of desire would intervene.
for a mind not separated from Supermind, a mind of divine knowledge would know the intention, scope and inevitable result of its every act and would not crave or struggle but put forth an assured force self-limited to the immediate object in view. It would, even in stretching beyond the present, even in
understanding movements not intended to succeed immediately, yet not be subject to
desire or limitation. For the failures also of the Divine are acts of its omniscient omnipotence which know the right time and circumstance for the incipience, the vicissitudes, the immediate and the final results of all its cosmic undertakings. The mind of knowledge being in unison with the divine Supermind would
participate in this science and this all-determining power. But, as we have seen, individualised life-force is an energy of individualising and ignorant Mind, Mind that has fallen from the knowledge of its own Supermind. Therefore incapacity is necessary to its relations in Life and inevitable in the nature of things, the practical omnipotence of an ignorant force even in a limited sp
she being unthinkable, since in that sphere such a force would set itself against the working
of the divine and omniscient omnipotence and unfix the fixed purpose of things, — an impossible cosmic situation. The struggle of limited forces
increasing their capacity by that struggle under the driving impetus of instinctive or conscious desire is therefore the first law of Life. As with desire, so with this strife ; it must rise into a mutually helpful trial of strength, a conscious wrestling of brother forces in which the victor and vanquished or rather that which influences by action
from above and that Which influences by retort of
Page-459
action from below must equally gain and increase. And this again has eventually to become the happy shock of divine interchange, the strenuous clasp of Love replacing the convulsive clasp of strife. Still, strife is the necessary and salutary beginning. Death, Desire and Strife arc the trinity of divided living, the triple mask of the divine Life-principle, in its first essay of cosmic self-affirmation.
Page-460 CHAPTER XVI CONCENTRATION Along with purity and as a help to bring it about, concentration. Purity, and concentration are indeed two aspects, feminine and masculine, passive and active, of the same status of being ; purity is the condition in which concentration becomes entire, rightly effective, omnipotent; by concentration purity does its works and without it would only lead to a state of peaceful quiescence and eternal repose. Their opposites are also closely connected ; for we have seen that impurity is a confusion of dharma, a lax, mixed and mutually entangled action of the different parts of the being; and this confusion proceeds from an absence of right concentration of its knowledge on its energies in the embodied Soul. The fault of our nature is first an inert subjection to the impacts of things * as they come in upon the mind pell-mell without order or control and then a haphazard imperfect concentration managed fitfully, irregularly with a more or less chance emphasis on this or on that object according as they happen to interest not the higher soul or the judging and discerning intellect, but the restless, leaping, fickle, easily tied, easily distracted lower mind which is the chief enemy of our progress. In such a condition purity, the right working
* Báhyasparsha
Page-461 of the functions, the clear, unstained and luminous order of the being is an impossibility ; the various workings, given over to the chances of the environment and external influences, must necessarily run into each other and clog, divert, distract, pervert. Equally, without purity the complete, equal, flexible concentration of the being in right thought, right will, right feeling or secure status of spiritual experience is not possible. Therefore the two must proceed together, each helping the victory of the other, until we arrive at that eternal calm from which m lee proceed some partial image in the human being of the eternal, omnipotent and omniscient activity.
But in the path of knowledge as it is practiced in India concentration is used in a special and more limited sense. It means that removal of the thought from all distracting activities of the mind and that concentration of it on the idea of the One by which the soul rises out of the phenomenal into the one Reality. It is
by
the thought that we dissipate our. selves in the phenomenal ; it is by the gathering back of the thought into itself that we must draw ourselves back into the
Leal. Concentration has three powers by which this aim can be effected. By concentration on anything whatsoever we are able to know that thing, to make it deliver up its concealed secrets ; we must use this power to know not things, but the one Thing-in-itself. By concentration again the whole will can be gathered up for the acquisition of that which is still un-grasped, still beyond us ; this power, if it is sufficiently trained, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently sincere, sure of itself, faithful to itself alone, absolute in faith, we can use for the acquisition of any object whatsoever ; but we ought to use it not for the acquisition of the many objects which the
world offers to us, but to grasp spiritually that one object worthy of
pursuit which is also the one subject worthy of knowledge. By concentration of our whole being on one status of itself, we can become whatever we choose; we can became, for instance, even if we were before a mass of weaknesses and fears, a mass instead of strength and courage, or we can become all a great purity, holiness and Page-462 peace or a single universal soul of Love ; but we ought, it is said, to use this power to become not even these things, high as they may be in comparison with what we now are, but rather to become that which is above all things and free from all action and attributes, the pure and absolute Being. All else, all other concentration can only be valuable for preparation, for previous steps, for a gradual training of the dissolute and self-dissipating thought, will and being towards their grand and unique object. This use of concentration implies like every ether a previous purification ; it implies also in the end a renunciation, a cessation and lastly an ascent into the absolute and transcendent state of Samadhi from which if it culminates, if it endures, there is, except perhaps for one soul out of many thousands, no return. For by that we go to the "supreme state of the Eternal whence souls revert not" into the cyclic action of Nature ;* and it is into this Samadhi that the Yogin who aims at release from the world seeks to pass away at the time of leaving his body. We see this succession in the discipline of the Rajayoga. For first the Rajayogic must arrive at a certain moral and spiritual purity ; he must get rid of the lower or downward activities of his mind, but afterwards he must stop all its activities and concentrate himself in the one idea that leads from activity to the quiescence of status. The Raja-yogic concentration has several stages, that in which the object is seized, that in which it is held, that in which the mind is lost in the status which the object represents or to which the concentration leads, and only the last is termed Samadhi in the Raja yoga although the word is capable, as in the Gita, of a much wider sense. But in the Rajayogic Samadhi there are different grades of status,— that in which the mind, though lost to outward objects, still muses, thinks, perceives in the world of thought, that in which the mind is still capable of primary thought-formations and that in which, all out-darting of the mind even within itself having ceased, the soul rises beyond thought
* Yato naiva invariant tad dhâma paramam mama. Page-463 into the silence of the Incommunicable and Ineffable. In all Yoga there are indeed many preparatory objects of the might-concentration, forms, verbal formulas of thought, significant names, all of which are supports* to the mind in this movement, all of which have to be used and transcended ; the highest support according to the Upanishads is the mystic syllable AUM, whose three letters represent the Brahman or Supreme Self in its three degrees of status, the Waking Soul, the Dream Soul and the Sleep Soul, and the whole potent sound rises towards that which is beyond status as beyond activity †For of all Yoga of knowledge the fi final goal is the Transcendent. We have, however, conceived as the aim of an integral Yoga something more complex and les s exclusive — less exclusively positive of the highest condition of the soul, less exclusively negative of its divine radiations. We must aim indeed at the Highest, the Source of all, the Transcendent but not to the exclusion of that which it transcends, rather as the source of an established experience and supreme state of the soul which shall transform all other states and remould our consciousness of the world into the form of its secret Truth. We do not seek to excise from our being all consciousness of the universe, but to realise God, Truth and Self in the universe as well as transcendent of it. We shall seek therefore not only the Ineffable, but also His manifestation as infinite being, consciousness and bliss embracing the universe and at play in it. For that triune infinity is His supreme manifestation and that we shall aspire to know, to share in and to become ; and since we seek to realise this Trinity not only in itself but in its cosmic play, we shall aspire also to knowledge of and participation in the universal divine Truth, Knowledge, Will, Love which are His secondary manifestation, His divine becoming. With this too we shall aspire to identify ourselves, towards this too we shall strive
* Avalambana † Mandukya Upanishad Page-464 to rise and, when the period of effort is passed, allow it by our renunciation of all egoism to draw us up into itself in our being and to descend into us and embrace us in all cur becoming. This not only as a means of approach and passage to His supreme transcendence, but as the condition, even when we possess and are possessed by the Transcendent, of a divine life in the manifestation of the cosmos. In order that vie may do this, the terms concentration and Samadhi must assume for us a richer and profound meaning. All cur concentration is merely an image of the divine Tapas by which the Self dwells gathered in itself, by which it manifests within itself, by which it maintains and possesses its manifestation, by which it draws back from all manifestation into its supreme oneness. Being enwalling in consciousness upon itself for bliss, this is the divine Tapas; and a Knowledge-Will dwelling in force of consciousness on itself and its manifestations is the essence of the divine concentration, the Yoga of the Lord of Yoga. Given the self-differentiation of the Divine in which we dwell, concentration is the means by which the individual soul identifies itself with and enters into any form, state or psychological self-mini ft station (bhava) of the Self. To use this means for unification with the Divine is the condition for the attainment of divine know* ledge and the principle of all Yoga of knowledge.
This concentration proceeds by the Idea, using though*^ form and name as keys which yield up to the concentrating mind the Truth that lies concealed behind all thought , form and name ; for it is through the Idea that the mental being rises beyond all expression to that’ which is expressed, to that of which the Idea it ell is only the instrument!. By concentration upon the Idea the mental existence which at present we are breaks open the
barer of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the state of being, the state of power of
conscious being and bliss of conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and
of which it is the symbol, movement and rhythm. Concentration by the Idea is, then, only a me ins, a key to open to us this superconscient planes of our
existence ; a certain se f-gathered state of our I6A
Page-465 whole existence lifted into that superconscient truth, unity and infinity of self-aware, self-blissful existence is the aim and culmination ; and that is them reining we shall give to the term Samadhi. Not merely a state withdrawn from all consciousness of the outward, wit lid, awn even from all consciousness of the inward into that which exists beyond both whether as seed of both or trans ceding even of their seed-state ; but a settled existence in the One and Infinite, united and identified with it, and this status to remain whether we abide in the waking condition in which we are conscious of the forms of things or we withdraw into the inward activity which dwells in the play of the principles of things, the play of their names and type forms or we soar to the condition of static inwardness where we arrive at the principles themselves and at the principle of all precepts, the seed of name and form. * For the soul that has arrived at the essential Samadhi and is settled in it (samadhistha) in the sense the Gita attaches to the word, has that which is fundamental to all experience and cannot fall from it by any experience however distracting to one who has not yet ascended the summit. It can nab. ace all in the scope of its being without being bound by any or deluded or limited. When we arrive at this state, all our being and consciousness being concentrated, the necessity of concentration in the Idea ceases. For there in that supra mental state the whole position of things is reversed. The mind is a thing that dwells in diffusion , in succession ; it can only concentrate on one thing at a time and when not concentrated runs from one thing to another very much at random. Therefore it has to concentrate on a single idea, a single subject of meditation, a single object of contemplation, a single object of will in order to possess or master it, and this it must do to at least the temporary exclusion of all others. But that which is beyond the mind and into which we seek to rise is superior to the running process of the thought, superior to the division of ideas. The Divine is
* The Waking, Dream and Sleep slates of the sou1.
Page-466 centered in itself and when it throws out ideas and activities does not divide itself or imprison itself in them, but holds them and their movement in its infinity ; undivided, its whole self is behind each Idea and each movement and at the same time behind all of them together. Held by it, each spontaneously works itself out, not through a separate act of will, but by the general force of consciousness behind it; if to us there seems to be a concentration of divine Will and Knowledge in each, it is a multiple and equal and not an exclusive concentration, and the reality of it is rather a free and spontaneous working in a self-gathered unity and infinity. The soul which has risen to the divine samadhi participates in the measure of its attainment in this reversed condition of things,—the true condition, for that which is the reverse of our mentality is the truth. It is for this reason that, as is said in the ancient books, the man who has arrived at Self-possession attains spontaneously without the need of concentration in thought and effort the knowledge or the result which the Idea or the Will in him moves out to embrace. To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single subject and this it must do undistracted by all lures and alien calls on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to keep the mind ; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker of knowledge must effect. Nor must it be merely the consecutive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted so much as a dwelling so far as possible
* In the elementary stages of internal debate and judgment, vitarka and Dictiara, Page-467 on the fruitful essence of the idea which by the insistence of the soul’s will upon it must yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the id a o! God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestation of the divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the sadhaka. The thought may come first and the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held till it becomes a constant experience and finally the dharma or law of the being. This is the process of concentrated meditation;, but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of" the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this -process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation o the object or by a merging into it in an inner Samadhi. If this be the process-followed, then subsequently t) estate into which we rise must still be called down to take possession of the lower being, to shed its light) power and bliss on our ordinary consciousness. ‘For otherwise we may possess it, as many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi, but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into the contacts of the world ; and this truncated possession is not the aim. of an integral Yoga.
A third process is neither at first to concentrate in a strenuous meditation on the one subject nor in a strenuous contemplation of the. one object of thought-vision, but .first to still the mind altogether. This may be done by various ways ; one is to stand back from the mental action altogether not participating in but simply watching it until, tired of its unsanctioned leaping and running, it falls into an increasing and finally an absolute quiet. Another is to reject the thought-suggestions, to cast them away Page-468 to the peace of the being which really and always exists behind the trouble and riot of the mind. When this secret peace is unveiled, a great calm settles on the being and there comes usually with it the perception and experience of the all-pervading silent Brahman, everything else at first seeming to be mere form and eidolon. On the basis of this calm every thing else may be built up in the knowledge and experience no longer of the external phenomena of things but of the deeper truth of the divine manifestation. Ordinarily, once this state is obtained, strenuous concentration will be found no longer necessary. A free con. castration of will* using thought me rely for suggestion and the giving of light to the lower members will take its place. This Will then insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman. By swifter or slower degrees according to the previous preparation and purification of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that eventually the knowledge of the D vine takes possession of our consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is formed in our human existence even as it was dories by the old Vedic Sadhaka. For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and powerful discipline.
* This subject will be dealt, with meter in detail when we come to the Yoga of self-perfection. Page-469 XI The thought of the Upanishad, as expressed in its first chapter in the brief and pregnant sentences of the Upanishad style , amounts then to this result that the life of the mind, senses, vital activities in which we dwell is not the whole or the chief part of our existence, not the highest, not self-existent, not master of itself. It is an outer fringe, a lower result, an inferior working of something beyond ; a superconscient Existence has developed, supports and governs this partial and fragmentary, this incomplete and unsatisfying consciousness and activity of the mind, life and senses. To rise out of this external and surface consciousness towards and in to that super conscient is our progress, our goal, our destiny of completeness and satisfaction.
The Upanishad does not assert the unreality, but only the incompleteness and inferiority of our present existence. All that we follow after here is an imperfect representation, a broken and divided functioning of what is eternally in an absolute perfection on that higher plane of existence. This mind of ours
unprocessed of its object, groping, purblind, besieged by error and incapacity, its action founded on an external vision of things, is only the shadow thrown by a
superconscient Knowledge which possesses, creates and securely uses the truth of things because nothing is external to it, nothing is other than itself, nothing is divided or at war within its all-comprehensive self-awareness. That is the Mind of our mind. Our speech, limited, mechanical, Page-470 imperfectly interpretative of the outsides of things, restricted by the narrow circle of the mind, based on the appearances of sense is only the fact-off and feeble response, the ignorant vibration returned to a creative and revelatory Word which has built up all the forms which our mind and speech seek to compre’ and express. Our sense, a movement in stuff of consciousness vibratory to outward impacts, attempting imperfectly to grasp them by laboured and separately converging reactions, is only the faulty image of a supreme Sense which at once, fully, harmoniously unites itself with and enjoys all that the supreme Mind and Speech create in the self-joyous activity of the divine and infinite existence. Our life, a breath of force and movement and possession attached to a form of mind and body and restricted by the form, limited in its force, hampered in its movement, besieged in its possession and therefore a thing of discords at war with itself and its environment , hungering and unsatisfied, moving inconstantly from object to object and unable to embrace and retain their multiplicity, devouring its objects of enjoyment and therefore transient in its enjoyments is only a broken movement of the one, undivided, infinite Life which is all-possessing and ever satisfied because in all it enjoys its eternal self un-imprisoned by the divisors of space, unoccupied by the moments of Time, undiluted by the successions of Cause and Circumstance. This supereconscient Existence, one, conscious of itself, conscious both of its eternal peace and its omniscient and omnipotent force is also conscious of our cosmic existence which it holds in itself, inspires secretly and omni potently governs. It is the Lord of the Isha Upanishad who inhabits all the creations of His Force, all form of movement in the ever mobile principle of cosmos. It is our self and that of which and by which we are constituted in all our being and activities, the Brahman. The mortal life is a dual representation of That with two conflicting elements in it, negative and positive. Its negative elements of death, suffering, incapacity, strife, division, limitation are a dark figure which conceal and serve the development of Page-471 that which its positive elements cannot yet achieve,—immortality hiding itself from life in the figure of death, delight hiding itself from pleasure in the figure of suffering, infinite force hiding itself from finite effort in the figure of incapacity, fusion of love hiding itself from desire in the figure of strife, unity hiding itself from acquisition in the figure of division, infinity hiding itself from growth in the figure of limitation. The positive elements suggest what the Brahman is, but never are what the Brahman is, although their victory, the victory of the gods is always the victory of the Brahman over its own self-negations, always the self-affirmation of His vastness against the denials of the dark and limiting figure of things. Still, \t is not this vastness merely, but the absolute infinity which is Brahman itself. And therefore, within this dual figure of things we cannot attain to our self, our Highest ; we have to transcend in order to attain. Our pursuit of the positive elements of this existence, our worship of the gods of the mind, life, sense is only a preparatory to the real travail of the soul, and we must leave this lower Brahman and know that Higher if we are to fulfil ourselves. We pursue, for instance, our mental growth, we become mental beings full of an accomplished thought-power and thought-acquisition, dhîrâh, in order that we may by thought of mind go beyond mind itself to the Eternal. For always the life of mind and senses is the jurisdiction of death and limitation ; beyond is the immortality. The wise, therefore, the souls seated and accomplished in luminous thought-power put away from them the dualities of our mind, life and senses and go forward from this world ; they go beyond to the unity and the immortality. The word used for going forward is that which expresses the passage of death ; it is also that which the Upanishad uses for the for ward movement of the Life-force yoked to the car of embodied mind and sense on the paths of life. And in this coincidence we can find a double and most pregnant suggestion.
It is not by abandoning life on earth in Older to pursue immortality on other more
favourable planes of existence
Page-472 that the great achievement becomes possible. It is here, Shaiva, in this mortals lift and body that immortality must be won, here in this lower Brahman and by this embodied soul that the Higher must be known and possessed. " If here one find it not, great is the perdition." This life-force in u: is led forward by the attraction of the supreme Life on its path of constant acquisition through types of the Bahrain until it reaches a point where it has to go in tiredly forward, to go across out of the mortal life, the mortal vision of things to some Beyond. So long as death is not entirely conquered, this going beyond is rep. esented in the terms of death and by a passing into other worlds where death is not present, where a type of immortality is tasted corresponding to that which we have found here in our soul-experience ; but the attraction of death and limitation is not over passed because they still conceal something of immortality and infinity which we have net yet achieved; therefore there is a necessity of return, an insistent utility of farther life in the mortal body which we do not overcome until we have passed beyond all types to the very being of the In fin tee, One and Immortal. The worlds of which the Upanishad speaks are essentially soul-conditions and not geographical divisions of the cosmos. This material universe is itself only existence as we tee it when the soul dwells on the plane of material movement and experience in which the spirit involves itself in form, and therefore all the framework of things in which it moves by the life and which it embraces by the consciousness is determined by the principle of infinite division and aggregation proper to Matter, to substance of form. This becomes then its world or vision of things. And to whatever soul-condition it climbs, its vision of things will change and correspond to that condition, and in that framework it will move in its living and embrace it in its consciousness. These are the worlds of the ancient tradition.
But the soul that has entirely realised immortality passes beyond all worlds and is free
from frameworks. It enters
Page-473
into the being of the Lord ; like this supreme superconscient Self and Brahman,
it is not subdued to life and death. It is no longer subject to the necessity of
entering into the cycle of rebirth, of travelling continually between the
imprisoning dualities of death and birth, affirmation and negation ; for it has
transcended name and form. This victory, this supreme immortality it must
achieve here as an embodied soul in the mortal framework of things. Afterwards,
like the Brahman, it transcends and embraces the cosmic existence without being
subject to it. Personal freedom, personal fulfilment is then achieved by the
liberation of the soul from imprisonment in the form of this changing
personality and its by ascent to the One that is the All. If afterwards there is
any assumption of the figure of mortality, it is an assumption and not a subjection, a help brought to the world and not a help to hi derived from it, a descent of the
ensued
super on scent existence not from any personal necessity, but from the universal need in the cosmic labour for those yet un free and unfulfilled to be helped and strengthened by the force that has already described the path up to the goal in its experience and achieved under the same conditions the Work and the Sacrifice, Page-474 THE TENTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OP THE SPLENDID SOULS WHO ATTAIN [The Rishi prays to the divine Flame to work in him by the triple force of Power, Knowledge and Delight. He speaks of the splendid souls of knowledge in our humanity who attain to the Truth and Vastness ; they are the burning and overpowering flame-rays of this transcendent Conscious-Force of the Divine that is at work in us to climb to divine mastery. Some have become such souls, others are still hampered but growing. He desires the increasing affirmation of Agni so that all may advance to a rich and all-comprehending universality. ] 1. O Flame, O Ray in our limited existence, bring for us an illumination full of utter energy, by an all-encompassing felicity cleave forward our path towards the plenitude. 2. O Flame, thou supreme and wonderful thing, it is thou who by force of will becomes in us the greatness of discerning power ; in thee the all-harmonising Friend 1 in the sacrifice accomplishes the work and climbs to divine mastery. 2
1. Mitra, the Lord of Love, who introduces the principle of harmony into the workings of the divine effort in us and thus combines all the line? of our advance, all the strands of our sacrifice until the work is accomplished in the supreme unity of Knowledge, Power and Delight. 2. Asuryam, the god-power, the mastering force of the Lord, the divine " Asura " in us. Page-475 3. Thou, O Strength, increase the advancing 3 and the growth of these who are splendid souls of knowledge that by their affirmations of thee attain to our full nesses. 4. These are they, O Strength, O Delight, who have a happy richness of the swift forces of life and turn to a happy light the words of the thought, souls puissant with hero-puissance’s, for whom even in heaven 4 is the Vastness ; of itself its perfect working awakes to knowledge for these. 5. These are thy flaming rays, O Strength, that go blazing violently and are like lightnings that run over all the quarters and are like a resonant chariot that speeds towards the plenitude. 6. Now, O Strength, a like may those that are beset and hampered attain to expansion and the soul’s riches and may these our splendid souls of knowledge traverse all the regions 5 and beyond. 7. O Strength, O Soul of Puissance, when thou art affirmed and in thy affirming, bring to us, O priest of the offering, felicity 6 of an all-pervading force-fullness for all that affirm thee and for thy affirmation again. March with us in our battles that we may grow.
3. Or attainment. 4.. That is to stay, on the heights of the pure mentality where it meets with and passes into the vastness of the supereonscient. 5. The regions of the heavens of the mental existence which have all to be embraced in our consciousness and over passed. 6. That richness and abundance in the soul full of divine possessions which is its spiritual prosperity or felicity, an image of the infinite store of the divine Bliss and by which it advances to an ever greater and more richly-equipped wideness of it being. Page-476 A. HYMN TO THE DIVINE PRIEST AND SACRIFICIAL FLAME [The Rishi hymns the birth of the wakeful and discerning sacrificial Flame who is vision and will-power, the seer whose passion of effort turns into a divine knowledge, in the heavens of mind. This seer-will the inspired words the of Thought have to increase. It is a thing of puissance, the Son of Force, and found by the ancient Souls of luminous puissance concealed in the growths of earth, in all the experiences that the soul here seeks to enjoy. ] 1. The protector of the creature is born, the Flame that is wakeful and perfect in discernment, for a new march to felicity. His front is of the clarities, luminously he shines wide so that the vastness of him touches the heavens, he is pure for the bringers of the riches. 2. Men have kindled high in the triple world 1 of the session the Flame supreme to be vision in the sacrifice and the vicar set in front; he comes in one chariot with the God Mind and ^he divine Powers and sits on the seat of sacrifice, the Priest of the oblation perfect in will-power for the sacrificing. 3. Unovercome and pure 2 thou art born from thy mothers twain ; thou hast risen up a rapturous seer from the all-luminous sun ; they have Increased thee with the clarity, O Flame, and the passion-smoke of thee becomes vision when it reaches and lodges in the heavens.
1. The triple world of mind, life and body in which the session of our sacrifice takes place or in which the work of self-perfection proceeds. 2. Or, pure without cleansing. Page-477 4. May the Flame come to our sacrifice with power to accomplish ; the Flame men carry into every room of their dwelling – place ; the Flame has become our messenger and the bearer of our offering ; when men accept the Flame into themselves, it is the seer-will that they accept. 5. For thee, O Flame, this Word fraught fullest with the honey, 3 for thee this Thought and may it be the peace and bliss in thy heart. For the words of the Thought satisfy and increase thee as those great fostering streams 4 fill and increase that ocean 6. O Flame, the souls of puissance 5 discovered thee hidden in the secret place, 6 lodging in every object of delight ; by our pressure on thee thou art born, a mighty force ; the Son of Force they have called thee, O Puissance.
3. The honeyed Soma-wine, out flowing of the principle of Delight in things. 4. The seven rivers or movements which descend from the supereonscient being and fill the conscious ocean of our existence. They are called the Mothers, the fostering Cows, the Mighty Ones of Heaven, the Waters of Knowledge, the streams of the Truth, etc. 5. The :even ancient seers or fathers, the Angiras Rishis, sons of Agni and divine or human types of the seer-will. 6. The sub conscient heart in things. , Page-478 THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH CONTEMPLATION 1 Whoever applies himself intelligently to profound meditation, soon finds joy in what is good ; he becomes conscious that beauty and riches are transient 2 things and wisdom the fairest ornament. — He thinks actively, he opens his heart, he gathers up his internal illuminations. 3 How can he be long in peace who troubles himself with foreign cares, who seeks to diffuse himself into the outward and withdraws little or rarely into himself ? 4 —Without contemplation there is no tranquility and without tranquility how shall there Le happiness ? The mind that orders itself according to the motions of the senses, carries away\ay the intelligence as the wind carries away a ship on the sea. Therefore only he whose senses are drawn back from the objects of sense, has a firmly seated wisdom. 5 Let him destroy by deep meditation the qualities 6 that are opposed to the divine nature. — As in a house with a sound roof the rain cannot penetrate, no in a mind where meditation dwells passion cannot enter. 7 Having attained to that unalterable calm which nothing can trouble one can afterwards meditate and form an assured judgment on the essence of things*,
Fo-shoibing-tsan-king-2) Lao Tse.— 3) Imitation of Christ 11.7. 4) Bhagavad Gita II.
66-68-5).— 6) Laws of Manu VI. 72,— dhammapada.— 7) Ramakrishm. Page-479 when one has meditated and formed a sure judgment on the essence of things, afterwards one can attain to the desired state of perfection. 8 One who during his contemplation is entirely inconscient of all external things to such a point that if birds made a nest in his hair he would not know it, 9 has acquired the perfection of meditation. — He will go from doubt to certitude, from the night of error to the light of the Guidance ; he will see with the eye of knowledge and begin to converse in secret with 10 the Well-beloved. — " To him who is perfect in meditation salvation is near " is an old saying. Do you know when a man is perfect in meditation ? When as soon as he sits to meditate, he is surrounded with the divine atmosphere and his soul communes with the Ineffable. * * * 11 Meditate on the Eternal either in an unknown nook or in the solitude of the forests or in the solitude 12 of thy own mind. — Silence thy thoughts and fix all thy attention on the Master within whom thou seest 13 not yet, but of whom thou hast a presentiment .—His form stands not within the vision of any, none seethe Him with the eye. By the heart and the thought and the mind He is experienced ; who seize this with the 14 knowledge, they become immortal.— He is not sized by the eye, nor by the speech, nor by the other gods, nor by the austerity of force, nor by action ; when a man’s being has been purified by a calm clarity of knowledge, he meditating beholds that which 15 has not parts nor members. — One who has not ceased from evil living or is without peace or without concentration or whose mind has not been tranquillised, 16 cannot attain to Him by the intelligence. — This self can always be won by truth and austerity, by purity and by entire knowledge.
8) Ramakrishna.— 9) Baha-ullah : The Seven Valleys.— 10)
Ramakrishna.— 11) id.– 12) The Book of Golden Precepts.— 13) Katah Upanishad. VI 9. 14)
Mundaka Upanishad III. 1-8.— 101 Katha
Upanishad II. 16) Mundaka Upanishad 111. 1-0.
Page-480 17 When thy understanding shall stand immovable and unshakeable in concentration, then thou shalt attain to the divine Union. 18 Those who pursue attentively their contemplation, have no sorrow to fear, nor can any vicissitude of Fate affect them . They contemplate this history written in ourselves to guide us in the execution of the divine laws which, equally, are engraved in our hearts.
17) Bhagavad Gita 11. 53.— 18) Giordano Bruno. Page-481 CHAPTER XVI THE VICTORY OF THE FATHERS The hymns addressed by the great Rishi Vamadeva to the divine Flame, to the Seer-Will, Agni are among the most mystic in expression in the Rig-Veda and though quite plain in their sense i f we hold firmly in our mind the system of significant figures employed by the Rishis, will otherwise seem only a brilliant haze of images baffling our comprehension. The reader has at every moment to apply that fixed notation which is the key to the sense of the hymns ; otherwise he will be as much at a loss as a reader of me to .physics who has not mastered the sense of the philosophical terms that are being constantly used or, let us say, one who tries to read Paine’s Sutras without knowing the peculiar System of grammatical notation in which they are expressed. We have, however, already enough light upon this system of images to understand well enough what Vamadeva has to tell us about the great achievement of the human forefathers.
In order to hold clearly in our minds at the strait what that great achievement was v>e may put before ourselves the clear and sufficient formulas in which
Paratpara Çaktya expresses them. " Our fathers broke open the firm and strong places by their words, yea, the Angirases broke open the hill by their cry ; they made in us the path to the great heaven ; they found the Day and Swar and vision
Page-482 and the luminous Cows." chakrurr diva bri’hato gâtum asme, ahah svar vividuh ketum usrâh, ( I. 71-2.). This path, he tells us, is the path which leads to immortality ; "they who entered into all things that bear right fruit formed a path towards the immortality ; earth stood wide for them by the greatness and by the Great Ones, the mother Aditi with her sons came (or, manifested herself) for the upholding." (I. 72. 9).* That is to say, the physical being visited by the greatness of the infinite planes above’ and by the power of the great godheads who reign on those planes breaks its limits, opens out to the Light and is upheld in its new wideness by the infinite Consciousness, mother Aditi., and her sons, the divine Powers of the supreme Dove. This is the Vedic immortality. The means of this finding and expanding are also very succinctly stated by Paraçara in his mystic, but still clear and impressive style. " They held the truth, they enriched its thought; then indeed, aspiring souls (aryah), they, holding it in thought, bore it diffused in all their being, dadhann r’itam dhanayann asya dhîtim, âd id ‘aryo didhishvo vibhr’itrâh, I. 71. 3). The image in vibhr’itrah suggests the upholding of the thought of the Truth in all the principles of our being or, to put it in the ordinary Vedic image, the seven-headed thought in all the seven waters, apsu dhiyam dhishe, as we have seen it elsewhere expressed in almost identical language ; this is shown by the image that immediately follows, — " the doers of the work go towards the untwisting ( waters ) which increase the divine births by the satisfaction of delight," atrishyantîr apaso yanti achchâ, devân janma prayasâ vardhayantîh. The sevenfold Truth-consciousness in the satisfied sevenfold Truth-being increasing the divine births in us by the satisfaction of the soul’s hunger for the Beatitude this is the growth of immortality. It is the manifestation of that trinity of divine being, light and bliss which the Vedantist afterwards called Sachchidananda.
* A ye viçvâ svapatyâni tasthuh kr’in’vânaso amritatvâya gâtum; Mahnâ mahadbhih Prithivi vi tasthe, Mâta putrair aditir dhâyesa veh. Page-483 The sense of this universal diffusion of Truth and the birth and activity of all the godheads in us assuring an universal and immortal life in place of our present limited mortality is made yet clearer by Paraçara in I. 68. Agni the divine Seer-Will, is described as ascending to heaven and unrolling the veil of the nights from all that is stable and all that is mobile, " when he becomes the one God encompassing all these godheads with the greatness of his being. Then indeed all accept and cleave to the Will (or the Work ) when, O godhead, thou art born a living soul from the dryness ( i. e from the material being, the desert, as it is called, unwatered by the streams of the Truth ) ; all enjoy godhead attaining to the truth and the immortality by their movements, bhajanta viçve devatvam nâma, r’itam sapanto amr’itam evaih. The impulse of the Truth, the thinking of the Truth becomes a universal life, (or per. vades all the life) and in it all fulfil their workings," r’itasya preshâ r’itasya dhîtir, viçvâyur viçve apânsi chakruh.
And in order that we may not, haunted by the unfortunate misconstruction of the Veda which European scholarship has imposed on the modern mind, carry with us the idea of the seven
earthly rivers of the Punjab into the super-terrestrial achievement of the human forefathers, we will note what Paragara in his clear and illuminating fashion tells us about the seven rivers. " The fostering cows of the Truth (dhenavah,
an image applied to the rivers, while gâvah or
usrâh expresses the luminous cows of the Sun) nourished him, lowing, with happy udders, enjoyed in heaven ; obtaining right thinking as a boon from the supreme (plane) the rivers flowed wide and evenly over the hill; r’itasya hi
dhenava vâvaçânâh, smadûdhnih pîpayanta dyubhaktâh ; pirâvatah sumatim bhikshamânâ, vi sindhavah samayâ
sasrur adrim, (I. 73.6). And in I. 72.8, speaking of them in a phrase which is applied to the rivers in other hymns, he says "The seven mighty ones of heaven, placing aright the thought, knowing the Truth, discerned in knowledge the doors of felicity; Sarama found the fastness, the wide-ness of the luminous cows ; thereby the
human creature enjoys the bliss, "svaâdhyo diva
â sapta yahvîh, râyo duro
Page-484 vi r’itanâ ajânan ; vidad gavyam saramâ dr’idham ûrvam, yenâ nu kam mânushi bhojate vit’. These are evidently not the waters of the Punjab, but the rivers of Heaven, the streams of the Truth,* goddesses like Saraswati, who possess the Truth in knowledge and open by it the doors of the beatitude to the human creature. We see here too what I have already insisted on, that there is a close connection between the finding of the Cows and the out flowing of the Rivers ; they are parts of one action, the achievement of the truth and immortality by men, r’itam sapanto am-r’itam evaih. It is now perfectly clear that the achievement of the Angirases is the conquest of the Truth and the Immortality, that Swar called also the great heaven, br’ihat dyauh, is the plane of the Truth above the ordinary heaven and earth which can be no other than the ordinary mental and physical being ; that the path of the great heaven, the path of the Truth created by the Angirases and followed by the hound Sarama is the path to the Immortality, amr’itatvâya gatum ; that the vision ( ketu ) of the Dawn, the Day won by the Angirases, is the vision proper to the Truth-consciousness ; that the luminous cows of the Sun and Dawn wrested from the Panis are the illuminations of this truth-consciousness which help to form the thought of the Truth, r’itasya dhîtih, complete in the seven-headed thought of Ayasya; that the Night of the Veda is the obscured consciousness of the mortal being in which the Truth is subconscient, hidden in the cave of the hill; that the recovery of the lost sun lying in this darkness of Night is the recovery of the sun of Truth out of the darkened subconscient condition ; and that the down flowing earthward of the seven rivers must be the out streaming action of the sevenfold principle of our being as it is formulated in the Truth of the divine or immortal existence. Equally
* Note that in I. 32 Hiranyastupa Angirasa describes the waters released from Vritra as "ascending the mind", manoruhân’ âh. and elsewhere they are railed the waters that have the knowledge, âpo vichetaauh- Page-485 then must the Panis be the powers that prevent the Truth from emerging out of the subconscient condition and that constantly strive to steal its illuminations from man and throw him back in to the Night, and Vritra must be the power that obstructs and prevents the free movement of the illumined rivers of the Truth, obstructs the impulsion of the Truth in us, r’itasya presha, the luminous impulsion, jyotirmayîm isham, which carries us beyond that Night to the Immortality. And the gods, the sons of Aditi, must be on the contrary the luminous divine powers, born of the infinite consciousness Aditi, whose formation and activity in our human and mortal being are necessary for our growth into the godhead, into the being of the Deva (devatvam) which is the Immortality. Agni, the truth-conscious seer-will, is the principal god had who enables us to effect the sacrifice ; he leads it on the path of the Truth, he is the warrior of the battle, the doer of the work, and his unity and universality in us comprehending in itself all the other godheads is the basis of the Immortality. The plane of the Truth to which we arrive is his own home and the own home of the other gods, and the final home also of the soul of man. And this immortality is described as a beatitude, a state of infinite spiritual wealth and plenitude, ratna, rayi, vâja, râdhas, etc ; the opening doors of our divine home are the doors of the felicity, râyo durah, the divine doors which swing wide open to those who increase the Truth (r’itâvr’idhah) and which are discovered for us by Saraswati and her sisters, by the seven Rivers, by Sarama; to them and to the wide pasture (kshetra) in the unobstructed and equal infinities of the vast Truth Brihaspati and Indra lead upward the shining Herds. With these conceptions clearly fixed in our minds we shall be able to understand the verses of Vamadeva which only repeat in symbolic language the substance of the thought expressed more openly by Paraçara. It is to Agni the Seer-Will that Vamadeva opening hymns are addressed. He is hymned as the friend or builder of man’s sacrifice who awakes him to the vision, the knowledge ( ketu ), sa chetayan manusho yajnabandhuh ( IV. 1. ‘.) ) ; so Page-486 doing, " he dwells in the gated hones of this being, accomplishing ; he, a god, has come to he the means of accomplishment of the mortal," sa ksheti asya duryâsu sâdhan, devo martyasya sadhanitvam âpa. What is it that he accomplishes ? The next verse tells us. " May this Agni lead us in his knowledge towards that bliss of him which is enjoyed by the gods, that which by the thought all the immortals created and Diaspora the father out-pouring the Truth "; sa no agnier nayatu Prajânana, achchhâ ratnam devabhaktam yard asya ; dhiyâ yad viçve amr’itâ akr’in’van dyaushpitâ janitâ satyam ukshan. This is Para Para’s beatitude of the Immortality created by all the powers of the immortal godhead doing their work in the thought of the Truth and in its impulsion, and the out-pouring of the Truth is evidently the out-pouring of the waters as is indicated by the word ukshan, Para9ara’s equal diffusion of the seven rivers of the truth over the hill. Vamadeva then goes on to tell us of the birth of this great, first or supreme force, Agni, in the Truth, in its waters, in its original home. " He was born, the first, in the waters, in the foundation of the vast world ( Swar ), in its womb, (i. e. its seat and birthplace, its original home ) ; without head and feet, concealing his two extremities, setting himself to his work in the lair of the Bull." The Bull is the Deva or Purusha, his lair is the plane of the Truth, and Agni the Seer-Will, working in the truth-consciousness, creates the worlds ; but he conceals his two extremities, his head and feet ; that is to say, his workings act between the superconscient and the subconscient in which his highest and his lowest states are respectively concealed, one in an utter light, the other in an utter darkness. From that he goes faith as the first and supreme force and is born to the Bull or the Lord by the action of the seven powers of the Bliss, the seven Beloved. " He went forward by illumined knowledge as the first force, in the seat of the Truth, in the lair of the Bull, desirable, young, full in body, shining wide; the seven Beloved bore him to the Lord."
The Rishi then, comes to the achievement of the
Page-487
human fathers, asmâkam atra pitaro
manushyâ, abhi pra sedur r’itam
âçushân’âh: " here our human fathers seeking possession of the Truth went forward to it ; the bright cows in their covering prison, the good
milers whose pen is in the rock they drove upward (to the Truth), the Dawns answered their call. They rent the hill asunder and made them bright ; others all around them declared wide this (Truth) of theirs; drivers of the herds they sang the hymn to the doer of works (Agni), they found the light, they shone in their thoughts (or, they
accomplice shed the work by their thoughts). They with the mind that seeks the light ( the cows,
gavyatâ manasâ ) rent the firm and compact hill that environed the luminous cows; the souls that desire opened by the divine word,
vachasâ daivyena, the firm pen full of the kine." These are the ordinary images of the Angiras legend, but in the next verse Vamadeva uses a still more mystic language. ”They conceived in mind the first name of the fostering cows, they found the thrice seven supreme (seats) of the Mother; the females of the herd knew that and they followed after it; the ruddy one was manifested by the victorious attainment (or, the splendour) of the cow of Light
tee manvata prathamam nâma dhenos, trih sapta mâtuh paramâni vindan
taj jânatîr abhyanûshata vrâ,
âvirbhtivad arunîr yaçasâ goh. The Mother here is Aditi, the infinite consciousness, who is the Dhenu or fostering Cow with the seven rivers for her sevenfold streaming as well as Gau the Cow of Light with the Dawns for her children ; the Ruddy One is the divine Dawn and the herd or rays are her dawning
illuminations. The first name of the Mother with her thrice seven supreme seats, that which the dawns or mental illuminations know and move towards, must be the name or deity of the supreme Deva, who is infinite being and infinite consciousness and infinite bliss, and the seats are the three divine worlds, called earlier in the hymn the three supreme births of Agni, Satya Tapas and Jana of the Puranas, which correspond to these three infinities of the Deva and each fulfil in its own way the sevenfold principle of our existence: thus we get the series of thrice Page-488 seven seats of Aditi manifested in all her glory by the opening out of the Dawn of Truth.* Thus we see that the achievement of the Light and Truth by the human fathers is also an assent to the Immortality of the supreme and divine status, to the first name of the all-creating in- -finite Mother, to her thrice seven supreme degrees of this ascending existence, to the highest levels of the eternal hill ( sânu, adri ). This immortality is the beatitude enjoyed by the gods of which Vamadeva has already spoken as the thing which Agni has to accomplish by the sacrifice, the supreme bliss with its thrice seven ecstasies (I. 20.’,). For he proceeds ; " Vanished the darkness, shaken in its foundation ; Heaven shone out (rotate dyauh, implying the manifestation of the three luminous worlds of Swar, divo rochanâni ) ; upward rose the light of the divine Dawn ; the Sun entered the vast fields (of the Truth ) beholding the straight things and the crooked in mortals. Thereafter indeed they awoke and saw utterly ( by the sun’s separation of the straight from the crooked, the truth from the falsehood )-, then indeed they held in them the bliss that is enjoyed in heaven, ratnam dhârayanta dyubhaktam. Let all the gods bus in all our homes, let there be the truth for our thought, O Mitra, O Varuna ;" viçvé viçvâyu duryâsu devâ. Mitra dhiye varun’a satyam. astu. This is evidently the same idea as has been expressed in different language by Paracra Çaktya, the pervasion of the whole existence by the thought and impulse of the Truth and the working of all the godheads in that thought and impulsion to create in every part of our existence the bliss and the immortality. The hymn closes thus: ,: May I speak the word towards Agni shining pure, the priest of the offering greatest in sacrifice who brings to us the all ; may he press out both the pure udder of the Cows of Light and the purified
* The same idea is expressed by Medhatithi Kanwa ( 1. 20. 7 ) as the thrice seven ecstasies of the Beatitude, trih saptâni, or more lug. really, the ecstasies in their three series of seven, each of which the Ribhus bring out in their separate and complete expression, ekam ekam suçastibhah. Page-489 food of the plant of delight (the Soma ) poured out ever}" where. He is the infinite being of all the lords of sacrifice (the gods ) and the guest of all human beings ; may Agni, accepting into himself the increasing manifestation of the gods, knower of the births, be a giver of happiness." In the second hymn of the fourth Mandala we get very clearly and suggestively the parallelism of the seven Rishis who are the divine Angirases and the human fathers. The passage is preceded by four verses, IV. 2. 11-14, which bring in the idea of the human seeking after the Truth and the Bliss. " May he the knower discern perfectly the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the wide levels and the crooked that shut in mortals; and, O God, for a bliss fruitful in offspring, lavish on us Diti and protect Aditi." This eleventh verse is very striking in its ignorance. We have the." opposition of the Knowledge and the Ignorance familiar to Vedanta ; and the Knowledge is likened to the wide open levels which are frequently referred to in the Veda; they are the large levels to which those ascend who labour in the sacrifice and they find there Agni seated self-blissful (V.7.5);they are the wide bring which lie makes for his own body (V. 4. 6), the level wideness, the unobstructed vast. It is therefore the infinite being of the Deva to which we arrive on the plane of the Truth, and it contains the thrice seven supreme seats of Aditi the Mother, the three supreme births of Agni within the Infinite, anante antah (IV. 1. 7 ). The Ignorance on the other hand is identified with the crooked or uneven levels* which shut in mortals and it is therefore the limited, divided mortal existence. Moreover it is evident that the Ignorance is the Diti of the next half-verse, ditim cha râsva adytum urushya, and the Knowledge is Aditi. Diti, called also Dana, means division anal the obstructing powers or Vritra are her
* Chittim achittim ckinavad vi vidvânt, Prithivi vita urn ijina cha tartan. vrijina means crooked, send is used in the Veda to indicate t he crookedness of the falsehood as opposed to the open straightness of the Truth, but the poet has- evidently in his mind the verbal sense of visit, to separate, screen off. and it. is this verbal sense in the objective Iliad governs mart&n, Page-490 children, Danes, Donavan, Deity’s, while Aditi is exist acne in its infinity and the mother of the gods. The Rishi daisies a bliss fruitful in offspring, that is in divine works and their results and this is to be effected through the conquest of all the riches held in itself by our divided mortal being but kept from us by the Vritra and Panis and through the hoi ling of them in the infinite divine being. The latter is to be in us protected from the ordinary tendency of our human existence, from subjection to the sons of Dana or Diti. The idea is evidently identical with that of the Isha Upanishad which declares the possession of the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the unity and the multiplicity in the one Brahman as the condition for the attainment of Immortality.
We then come to the seven divine seers. ;‘ The seers unconquered declared the Seer (the Deva, Agni) holding him within in the homes of the human being; thence (from this embodied human being )
Mayst thou, O Agni, aspiring by the work ( aryah ), behold by thy advancing movements these of whom thou must have the vision, the transcendent ones ( the godheads of the Deva)"; kavim
çaçâsuh kavayo adabdhâh, nidhârayanto duryâsu âyoh; atas
tvam dri’çyan agna etân, padibhih paçyer adbhutân arya evaih. This is again the
journey to the vision of the Godhead. " Thou, O Agni, youngest power, art the perfect guide (on that journey) to him who sings the word and offers the Soma and orders the sacrifice : bring to the illumined who accomplishes the work the bliss with its vast delight for his increasing, satisfying the doer of the work ( or, the man, charshan’iprâh ). Now, O , Agni, of all that we have done with our hands and our feet and our bodies the right thinkers ( the Angirases ) make as it were thy chariot by the work of the two arms ( Heaven and Earth, bhurijoh ); seeking to possess the Truth they have worked their way to it ( or won control of it)," r’itam yemuh sudhya
âçushan’âh. " Now as the seven seers of Dawn the Mother the supreme disposers ( of the
sacrifice), may we beget for, ourselves the gods ; may we become the Angirases,
sons of Haven, betaking open the wealth-filled hill, shining in
Page-491 purity." We have here very clearly the seven divine Seers as the supreme ordainers of the world-sacrifice and the idea of the human being " becoming " these seven Seers, that is to say, creating them in himself and growing into that which they mean, just as he becomes the Heaven and Earth and the other gods or, as it is otherwise put, begets or creates or forms (Jan, kr’i, tan ) the divine births in his own being. Next the example of the human fathers is given as the original type of this great becoming and achievement. ‘Now also, even as our supreme ancient fathers, O Agni, seeking to possess the Truth, expressing the Word, travelled to the purity and the light ; breaking open the earth (the material being ) they uncovered the toddy ones (the Dawns, the Cows) ; perfected in works and in light, seeking the godheads, gods, forging the Births like iron (or, forging the divine births like iron ), making Agni a pure flame, increasing Indra, they attained and reached the wideness of the Eight (of the Cows, gavyam ûrvam). As if herds of the Cow in the field of riches, that was manifested to vision which is the Births of the Gods within, O puissant One ; they both accomplished the wide enjoyments (or, longings) of mortals and worked as aspirers for the increase of the higher being ; â. yûtheva kshumati paçvo, akhyad devânâm yaj janimâni anti ugra ; martânâm chid ûrvaçîr akr’ipran, vr’idhe chid arya uparasya âyoh. Evidently, this is a repetition in other language of the double idea of possessing the riches of Diti, yet safeguarding Aditi. " We have done the work for thee, we have become perfect in works, the wide-shining Dawns have taken up their home in the Truth ( or, have robed themselves with the Truth ), in the fullness of Agni and his manifold delight, in the shining eye of the god in all his brightness.”
The Angirases are again mentioned in IV. 3. 11, and some of the expressions which lead up to this verse, are worth noting ;
for it cannot be too often repeated that no verse in the Veda can be properly understood except by
celeriac to its context, to its place in the thought of the Page-492 sukta, to all that precedes and all that follows. The hymn opens with a call to men to create Agni who sacrifices in the truth, to create him in his form of golden light (hiran’ya-rûpam, the gold being always the symbol of the solar light of the Truth, r’itam jyotih ) before the Ignorance can form itself, purâ tanayitnor achittât. The god is asked to awaken to the work of man and the truth in him as being himself «’ the Truth-conscious who places aright the thought", r’itasya bodhi r’itachit svâdhîh, — for all falsehood is merely a wrong placing of the Truth. He is to refer all fault and sin and defect in man to the various godheads or divine powers of the Divine Being so that it may be removed and the man declared finally blameless before the Infinite Mother—aditaye anâgasah, or for the infinite existence, as it is elsewhere expressed.
Then in the ninth and tenth verses we have, expressed in various formulas, the idea of the united human and
divine existence, Diti and Aditi, the latter founding, controlling and flooding with itself the former. " The Truth controlled by the Truth I desire, (i.e. the human by the divine ), together the unripe things of the Cow and her ripe and honeyed yield ( again the imperfect human and the perfect and blissful divine fruits of the universal consciousness and existence) ; she ( the cow ) being black (the dark and divided existence, Diti ) is nourished by the shining water of the foundation, the water of the companion streams
(jâmaryen’a prayasâ). By the Truth Agni the Bull, the Male, sprinkled with the water of its levels, ranges unquivering, establishing wideness (wide space or manifestation ) ; the dappled Bull milks the pure shining teat." The symbolic opposition between the shining white purity of the One who is the source, seat, foundation and the variegated colouring of the Life manifested in the triple world is frequent in the Veda ; this image of the dappled Bull and the pure-bright udder or source of the waters only repeats therefore, like the other images, the idea of the multiple manifestations of the human life purified, tranquillised in its activities, fed by the waters of the Truth and the Infinity. Page-493
Finally the Rishi proceeds to the coupling, which we so repeatedly find, or the luminous Cows and the Waters. "By the Truth the Angirases broke open and hurled asunder the hill and came to union with the Cows; human souls, they took up their dwelling in the blissful Dawn, Swar became manifest when Agni was born. By Truth the divine immortal waters,
upon pressed,
with their honeyed floods, O Agni, like a horse breasting forward in its gallopings ran in an eternal flowing." These four verses in fact are meant to give the preliminary conditions for the great achievement of the Immortality. They are the symbols of the grand My thus, the my thus of the Mystics in which they hid their supreme spiritual experience from the profane and, alas ! effectively .enough from their posterity. That they were secret symbols, images meant to reveal the truth which they protected but only to the initiated, to the knower, to the seer, Vamadeva himself tells us in the most plain and emphatic language in the last verse of this very hymn ; "All these are .secret words that I have uttered to thee who knowest, O Agni, O Disposer, words of leading, words of seer-knowledge that express their meaning to the seer, — I have spoken them illumined in my words and my
thinking;" ctâ viçvâ vidushe tûbhyam vedho, nîthâni agne nin’yâ vachânsi ; nivachanâ
kavaye kâvyâni, açansisham matibhir vipra ukthaih. Secret words that have kept indeed their secret ignored by the priest, the ritualist, the grammarian, the pandit, the historian, the mythologist, to whom they have been words of darkness or seals of confusion and not what they were to the supreme ancient forefathers and their illumined posterity,
ninn’yâ vachânsi nîthâni nivachanâ kâvyâni.
Page-494 SANSKRIT RESEARCH The appearance of this Anglo-Sanskrit Quarterly " devoted to research work in all fields of Indian Antiquity" is a welcome sign of the recent development towards a wider culture, a more flexible and strenuous scholarship and a more original thinking which promises to lift the Indian mind out of the rut of secondhand provincialism and sterile repetition of commonplaces into which the vices of its school and university education had betrayed it and to equip it for the important contribution we may expect it to make to the world’s increasing stock of knowledge. There has been a considerable expansion in this country, both in English and the vernaculars, of that ordinary periodical literature which caters for the popular mind and supplies it with snippets of knowledge, facile information and ready but not always very valuable opinions on all sorts of subjects. But there has been hitherto little or nothing corresponding to those more serious publications common in every European country which appeal to a more limited audience but succeed in popularising within those limits a more serious and original thinking and a more thorough knowledge in each branch of human enquiry. Attempts have been made but, outside the field of religion and philosophy, they have usually foundered in their inception for want of adequate support; they have not found, as they would have found elsewhere, an interested
* An Anglo-Sanskrit Quarterly, conducted by the Sanskrit Academy of India, Han galore, and edited by Pundit Ligancy Mahâbhâgawat.
We regret that this review comes out very l. elated as it had to he held over last month for want of spare.
Page-495 circle of readers. Now, however, there ought to be a sufficient number of cultivated minds interested and competent in Sanskrit scholarship and the research into Indian antiquity to ensure an adequate support and an increasing usefulness for this new Quarterly. The second (October) number of the Quarterly is before me and its sound editing and the value and interest of its contents promise well for its future. There are especially two very solid articles, one by Mr. Tilak on " A Missing Verse in the Sankhya Karikas," and another by Professor R. D. Ranade of the Ferguson College headed *’ Greek and Sanskrit: a Comparative Study," but there is no article without its interest and value. I note that in this number all the contributors, with one exception, are either from Maharashtra or the Madras Presidency. It is to be hoped that the editor will be able to secure the cooperation of Sanskrit scholars in the north so that this Review may become an All-India organ of Indian research.
Mr. Tilak’s article shows all the thoroughness and acuteness which that great scholar brings to his work great or small whether he is seeking for the original home of the Aryans in the cryptic mass of the Rig Veda or restoring with his rare powers of deduction a lost verse in the Karikas. The point he seeks to establish, though apparently a small one, has really a considerable importance. He points out that there is a consensus of authority for the existence of 70 verses in Ishwarakrishna’s
Sankhya Karikas, but, if we exclude the last three which do not belong to the doctrinal part of the text, we have both in the Indian text and in the Chinese version only 6 9 ; at the same time he shows that both Gaudapada’s Bhashya and the commentary in the Chinese version contain a passage
developing refutation of four possible subtler causes of the world Ishwara, Purusha, Kala and Swabhava ( God, the Soul, Time and Nature) rejected by the Sankhyas, a refutation which logically ought to be but is not found in the text itself. From the passage in the Bhashya he seeks to reestablish the sense and even the language of the missing verse. It seems to me that he has established both the fact of the missing verse and its substance. But the interesting point is the reason assigned by him for the loss of the verse; it was, he Page-496 thinks, no accident, but a deliberate suppression made at a time when the Sankhya philosophy was being re-explained by thinkers like Vijnanabhikshu in a Vedantic sense. If so, the point made sheds a very interesting light on the historic course of philosophical thought in India. The general line which that development followed arises more indirectly from an interesting and carefully reasoned article by Mr. Y. Sub barrio on the question of the originality of Shankara’s philosophy. Mr. Subbarao seeks to establish his point that it was no new system of thought which Shankara created, but only the re-statement perhaps in a more developed form of a very ancient school of Vedantic interpretation. Certainly, it cannot be supposed that Shankara invented a new philosophy out of his own brain; he believed h-himself to be establishing against attack the real sense of the Vedantic philosophy founded on the original texts of its canon and supported by the best tradition. Nor does any greater thinker real by invent a system new-born from his own intellect; what he does is to take up the material available to-him in the past history of thought, to choose, select, reject;, to present new lights on old ideas, to develop latent suggestions, to bring into prominence what was before less prominent or not so trenchant and definite, to give a fresh, striking and illuminating sense to old terms, to combine what was before not at all or else ill-combined ; in doing so he creates ; his philosophy, though not new in its materials, is new in the whole effect its produces and the more powerful light that in certain directions it conveys to the- thinking mind. The question is whether Shankara’s system was not new in this sense and, though the previous material still subsisting is insufficient to decide the question, it must, I think, be answered provisionally in the affirmative. Adwaitavada undoubtedly existed before, but it was the form Shankara gave it which made it a clear, well-thought-out and powerfully tern . chant philosophy and put his name at the head of Indian metaphysicians.
Mr. Subbarao admits that it is impossible to establish an exclusive Adwaitavada, much less the Mayavada, from the Veda, Upanishads, Brahmasutras or the Gita. It is impossible not because the great thinkers who gave us these writings
thought confusedly or without a clear grasp of principles, but
Page-497 because theirs was an entirely different method. India began with a synthetic and intuitive manner of thinking based not upon logical distinctions and verbal oppositions, but upon the facts of spiritual experience and vision. In such synthetic and intuitive philosophies truths are arranged according to the place of each in the actual fact of things, as different laws and generalisations are arranged in Science, each positive in its own field and each having its proper relation to the others. The perfection of this method is to be found in the Upanishads and the Gita ; and that is the reason why all attempts to interpret these great works by the methods of logical debate and the rigorous exclusions dear to the analytic metaphysician always fail even in the strongest hands ; they raise questions about the sense of these works which cannot be conclusively solved, but must necessarily lead to eternal debate, because the method is wrong and the original work itself never intended to cause or con ten dance such discussions. Only a synthetic method of interpretation can explain a synthetic and intuitive philosophy.
The analytical tendency began with the gradual divisions which ended in the establishment of the six philosophical schools. Each of them claims to be justified by the Veda and from its own point of view each is quite in the right, for the primary data of each are there in the sacred writings. It is where they press to exclusive conclusions and deny and refute each other that they can no longer truly claim Vedic authority, liven the Buddhists could, if they had chosen, have based themselves on the Veda, for there are passages which, it taken by themselves, seem to deny the Atman and attribute all to Karma or to assert the Non-Existent
as the source of things. The perfect resort to the analytical method came later;
it was employed with great effect though often rather naively by the Buddhists, but it was Shankara who applied rigorously the analytical method of the
intellectual reason in all its trenchant clearness and force to metaphysics. Hence the greatness of his position in the history of Indian thought. From his time forward Indian metaphysic was bound to the wheels of the analytical and intellectual
Page-498 mind. Still, it is to be noted that while The philosophers thus split the catholicity of the ancient Truth into warring schools, the general Indian mind was always overpoweringly attracted by the synthetically tendency. The Gita seems to be in part the expression of such a synthetic reaction, the Puranas show constantly the same tendency and even into the philosophical schools it made i1s entry. Prof. Ranade’s article on Greek and Sanskrit carries us into another field, that of Comparative Philology. His object is in a brief scope to establish the identical origin of Greek and Sanskrit in that which is most essential in the growth of a language, its grammatical forms and syntactical peculiarities. He has had to allow himself only a very small space for so large and important a subject, hut within these narrow limits he has done his work with great thoroughness and, subject to a few minor reservations, with a minute accuracy. This is to be regretted that by printing the Greek words in their proper character instead of in Roman type Mr. Ranade has made this interesting essay unintelligible to all but a very few Indian readers. He lays down the principle that the words of each language should he printed in its own type and that anyone who wishes to study Comparative Philology must take the trouble to familiarise himself with the original alphabets. This is a counsel of perfection which is not practicable in India, nor indeed on any large scale in Europe either. If for instance a scholar were dealing with the philology of the Aryan languages and had to cite largely verbal forms both from the European tongues and from Sanskrit and its Indian descendants he would be compelled on this principle to require at least nine different types from the Press to which he entrusted his work. No Press would be able to meet the demand and very few even of his learned readers but would be baffled by the variety. Mr. Ranade himself gives us German words and a German sentence, but not in the Gothic character which alphabetical purism would demand.
There are three or four statements in the article to which objection can be taken and, since in philology even the smallest details are of importance, the learned writer will not object to my pointing them out with
seem emphasis ; in
Page-499
one case at last he has fallen into a serious error by correcting which he may add an interesting and not unimportant subsection to his array of grammatical and syntactical identities between the two languages. I do not understand in the first place what is
meant by the statement that " in Greek no difference is made between the dentals and the
lingula and they are fused together." If it is meant that the Greek language possessed both dental and lingual sounds but expressed them by the same characters, I do not think this can be correct. The? distribution of dentals and
Lingula in the various languages is one of the most curious phenomena in the historv of linguistic phonetics and deserves a closer inquiry than has been accorded to it. The Latin and Celtic languages reject the lingual and use only the dental ; English on the other hand prefers the
Lingula, though it uses occasionally the dental t, the and d, all of which it represents by the, as in with, thin, though.—a desperately clumsy device thoroughly in keeping with the chaotic wildness of English or the
grapey. Every one in India knows the difficulty an Englishman finds in pronouncing the Indian dentals; he turns then resolutely into
Lingula. On the contrary a Frenchman who has not educated himself into the right English pronunciation, will turn the English lingual in
to a dental ; he will say feasth instead of feast, troth instead of not and pronounce do as if it were the English though. A similar peculiarity is one of the chief features of the brogue, the Irish mispronunciation of English speech ; for the natural Irish tongue cannot manage the hard lingual sound in such words as Peter and shoulder, it mollifies them into true dentals. I have noticed the same peculiarity in the pronunciation of a Spanish actress playing in English on a London stage ; otherwise perfect, it produced a strange impression by its invariable transformation of the harder English into the softer Latin sound. Now Greek must certainly have belonged to the Latin Celtic group in this phonetic peculiarity ; otherwise the difference would have been too striking to escape the sensitive ear of the ancient poets and scholars. It seems to me therefore that in the comparative scheme of the two alphabets the Sanskrit
Lingula should be marked as absent 1 n the Greek and, not as Mr. Ranade represents them, Page-500 correspondent equally with the dentals to the Greek the, theta, and delta. In the comparison of the declensions Mr. Ranade asserts that Greek feminine nouns in long alike chord correspond in the ironings to Sanskrit nouns of the type of bhâryâ and Greek nouns in long e like tîmê to Sankrit nouns of the type of dâsî. Surely this is an error. The writer has fallen into it because he was looking only at the Attic dialect, but the Attic is only one variation of the Greek language and it is misleading to study it by itself. As a matter of fact, this d and this ii both represent the same original sound which must have been the feminine termination in d ; only the Doric dialect prefers always the original d, the Ionic modifies it into &, and the Attic standing between the Doric and the Ionic belts makes a compromise. In the Attic when this feminine d is preceded by a vowel it remains unmodified, as also usually when it is preceded by r, but if it is preceded by a consonant it becomes e. ; thus philiâ, chôrâ, but tîmê*, kômê. Ionic will say philiê and not philiâ ; Doric tîmâ and not timid. This is enough to negative Mr. Ranade’s identification of this Attic ê with the Sanskrit feminine i. Certainly there are cases in which Sanskrit uses this î termination where Attic has the as in chaturthî and tetartê ; but this simply means that the Greek has rejected the Sanskrit deviation into the i form and kept to the more regular d which here too will appear in its pure form in the Doric. * In the comparison of tenses Mr. Ranade makes the rather curious assertion that the Sanskrit Conditional does not occur in any other language except perhaps German ; but surely if the German " wurden getodet worden sein" corresponds to the Sanskrit abhavishyat, the French conditionals e. g. auraient été tués and the English "would have been killed " ought equally to be considered as parallel syntactical constructions ; they have the same sense and with a Finally, Mr. Remade tells us that there are no such compounds in Greek as in Sanskrit and again that there are no
* This phonetic variation is a general rule in the dialects and not confined to
the feminine termination. Page-501 dwandwa, karmadharaya and bahuvrihi compounds in Greek, although there are verbs compounded with prepositions. T am at a loss to understand how so sound a scholar can have come to make a statement so contrary to all the facts. The power of the Greek language to make compounds is one of its most notable characteristics and its rich though never intemperate use is one of the great beauties of the Greek poetical style. When the Romans came into contact with Greek literature, their earlier poets tried to introduce this faculty ‘into Latin and even Virgil describes the sea as velivolum, sail-flying, i.e. with sails flying over it like the wings of birds through the air, but the usage v. as too contrary to the Latin genius to succeed. Not only did the Greek compound prepositions with its verbs, but it compounded nouns and verbs together. Thus from nau-archos, ship-ruler, i.e. admiral, they made nau-archein, to be an admiral; nor did they hesitate be-fore such forms as paido-poiein, to beget children, paido-trib-ein, to train boys, mnêsikakein, to remember wrongs, neotto-tropheisthai, to be brought up like the young of a bird. In fact with the exception of nominal dwandwas the Greek illustrates all the main varieties of the Sanskrit compound. For it is capable of such compounds as pseudo-martyr, a false witness, pseudo-christens, a false Christ, chauno-polites, a silly cit ; as andro-phonos, man-killing, paid oletor, a destroyer of one’s children, phusi-zoos, life-producing, koruth-aiolos, helmet-glancing, lao-kataratos, cursed by the people, thumo-leon, heart-lion, as , anabadên and katabadên answering to the Sanskrit avyayibhâva; as oxu-thumos, sharp-pensioned, oxu-schoinos, having sharp reeds, polu-teknos, having many children, io-str-phanos, violet-crowned. The language indeed pullulates with compounds. It is true that they are usually composed of two members only, but compounds of three members are found, as tris-kako-daimon, thrice 1-fated and Aristophanes even perpetrates such forms as glischr-antilog-exepitriptos and sphra-gid-onuch-argo-kometes.
I have dwelt on these points because they leap to the eye in the perfection otherwise complete of an admirable essay which, I hope, is only the first sketch of a more important treatise. But with the exception of the last they are minor points and do not seriously detract from the
complete"-
Page-502 ness of the exposition. Especially new and interesting are the parallel between Greek and Vedic accents and the rearrangement of Greek conjugations according to the Sanskrit classification. The common origin of Greek and Sanskrit is apparent enough, but like other philologists Mr. Ranade is far too sure of the conclusion he draws from it. I believe him to be right in thinking that the Indian Aryans and the Greeks came from one stock, but when he says that this has been proved beyond dispute by the discoveries of the philologist he is going much too fast. Common origin of language or even common language does not prove common ethnic ore. gin. The French and Spaniards are not Latinos nor the Irish of Dublin and Munster Anglo-Saxons. From the possible causes of linguistic similarity which the writer has given he has omitted one, conquest and cultural pressure. According to the theory of the Italian ethnologist, Serge, all the Mediterranean races of Northern Africa and Southern Europe belong to one " Mediterranean " stock ancient and highly civilized which was conquered by Aryan savages and this accounts for their " Aryan " languages. It is the same theory that now prevails in a different form with regard to the Aryan conquest of a highly civilized Dravidian India. Philology can bring no sufficient argument to contradict it.
Mr. Ranade deprecates the scorn of the linguistically ignorant for philology, but we must not forget that in Europe it is not the ignorant alone who feel this contempt, but the scientists, and that there is a certain justification for their contempt ; this was admitted by so great a philological scholar as Renan when in the evening of his days he had to
apologies for his favourite pursuits as "our petty conjectural sciences."
Philology is in fact not yet a science, but rather far too largely a structure
of ingenuities and plausible conjectures. It set out with the hope of
discovering the origin of language and the scientific laws of its development,
but it has failed entirely ; and it failed not because they are undiscoverable, — I believe the clue is there lying ready to our hands in the Sanskrit language,-—but because it strayed off to the facile pursuit of obvious similarities and identities instead of delving patiently and scrupulously, as all true Science must do, behind the outward appearances of things
Page-503 to get back at origins and embryonic indices. And on its scanty and uncertain data it began to build up enormous structures of theory such as the common origin of Aryan-speaking races, their original habitat, their common form of culture before separation, etc. Such facile play of an ingenious imagination is still the failing of the scholar and justifies to a certain extent the scorn of the patient, accurate and scrupulous physical scientist for the freaks and pretensions of the " philology." Not altogether is it justified, for philology has made several interesting and useful discoveries, established a few minor generalisations and, above all, substituted a sounder though not yet entirely sound critical method for the fantastic license of the old unscientific philology which, once it left the sure ground of grammar, was capable of anything and everything however absurd or impossible. But much has to be learned and a great deal more unlearned before we can measure ourselves with the physical scientist or deserve his approval. It is here that much is to be hoped from the Indian intellect which is mote accustomed than the European to move with a penetrating subtlety and accuracy in the things of the mind. But to justify the hope it must first get rid on one side of its-attachment to the methods of the Pundit and his subservience to traditional authority and on the other not give itself bound hand and foot to the method of the European scholar or imitate too freely that swiftly leaping ingenious mind of his which gives you in a trice a Scythian or a Persian Buddha, identifies conclusively Murghab and Maurya, Mayasura and Ahura Mazda and generally constructs with magical rapidity the wrong animal out of the wrong bone. We hove to combine the laboriousness of the Pundit, the slow and patient conscientiousness of the physical scientist abhorrent of a too facile conclusion and the subtlety of the psychologist in order to deserve the same success in these other sciences and to lift them beyond the shifting field of conjecture.
Sanskrit Research gives us Sanskrit articles as well as English with the laudable object of bringing together with a view to mutual helpfulness the old and the new scholarship. Sanskrit ought still to have a future as a language of the.
Page-504
learned and it w-ill not be a good day for India when the ancient tongue ceases entirely to be written or spoken. But if it is to survive, it must get rid of the
curie of the heavy pedantic style contracted by it in its decline with the lumbering impossible compounds and the overweight of
hair-splitting erudition. The Sanskrit articles in this number are learned and laborious, but they suffer heavily from this defect of style. If the contact established by the Sanskrit Research can teach the new scholarship the patient thoroughness of the old and the old the
flexibility and penetrating critical sense of the new, it will have done to both a great and much-needed service.
Page-505 VII The problem of a federal empire founded on the sole firm foundation, the creation of a true psychological unity between heterogeneous elements, resolves itself into two different factors, the question of the form and the question of the reality which the form is intended to serve. The former is of great practical importance, but the latter alone is vital. A form of unity may lender possible, may favour or even help actively to create the corresponding reality, but it can never replace it. And, as we have seen, the tine reality is in this older of Nature the psychological, since the mere physical fact of political and administrative union may be nothing more than a temporary and artificial creation destined to collapse irretrievably as soon as its immediate usefulness is over or the circumstances favouring its continuance are radically or even seriously altered. The first question, then, that we have to consider is what this reality may be that it is intended to create in the form of a federal empire and especially whether it is to be merely an enlargement of the nation-type of human aggregate already evolved by Nature or rather a new type of aggregate which is to exceed and must tend to supersede the nation, as that has replaced the tribe, the clan and the city or regional State.
The first natural idea of the human mind in facing such a problem is to favour the idea which most flatters and seems to continue its familiar notions. For the human mind is, in the mass, averse to a. radical change of conception and accepts it most easily what n it veils itself behind a habitual form of things or else a ceremonial, legal, intellectual or sentimental fiction. It is such a fiction that some think to create as a bridge from the nation-idea to the empire-idea of natural unity. That which unites men most securely now is the physical unity of a common country to live in and
eleven, a common economical life dependent on that geographical oneness and the sentiment of the motherland which grows up around the physical
Page-506 and economical fact and either creates a political and administrative unity or keeps it to a secure permanence on :e it has been created. Let us then extend this powerful sentiment by a fiction; let us demand of the heterogeneous constituents of the empire that each shall regard not his own physical motherland but the empire as the mother or at least, if he clings to the old sentiment, lean to regard the empire first and foremost as the greater mother. A variation of this idea is the French notion of the mother country, France ; all the other possessions of the empire, although in English phraseology they would rather be classed as dependencies in spite of the large share of political rights conceded to them, are to be regarded as colonies of the mother-country, grouped together in idea as France beyond the seas and educated to centre their national sentiments around the greatness, glory and love able ness of France, the common mother.". It is a notion natural to the Celt Latin temperament though alien to the Teutonic and it is supported by a comparative weakness of the race and colour prejudice and by that remarkable power of attraction and assimilation which the French share with all the Celtic nations.
The power, the often miraculous power of such fictions ought not for a moment to be ignored. They constitute Nature’s most common and effective method when she has to deal with her own ingrained resistance to change in her mentalised animal, man. Still, there are conditions without which a fiction cannot succeed ; it must in the first place be based on a plausible
superficial
resemblance; secondly, it must lead to a realisable fact strong enough either to
replace the fiction itself or eventually to justify it ; thirdly, this
realisable fact must progressively realise itself and not remain too long in the
stage of the formless nebula. There was a time when these conditions were less
insistently necessary, a time when the mass of men were more imaginative,
unsophisticated, satisfied with a sentiment or an appearance ; but as the race
advances, it becomes more mentally alive, self-conscious, critical and quick to seize dissonances between fact and
pretension
Page-507 Moreover, the thinker is abroad ; his words are listened to and understood to an extent unprecedented in the known history of mankind ; and the thinker tends to become more and more an inquisitor, a critic, an enemy of fictions. Is, then, this fiction based upon a realisable parallel, — in other words, is it true that the true imperial unity when realised will be only an enlarged national unity ? or, if not, what is the realisable fact which this fiction is intended to prepare ? There have been plenty of instances in history of the composite nation and, if the former idea is to be preferred, it is such a composite nation on a large scale which it is the business of the federal empire to create. We must, therefore, cast a glance at the most typical instances of the successful composite nation and see how far the parallel applies and whether there are difficulties in the way which point rather to the necessity of a new evolution than to the variation of an old success. To have a just idea of the difficulties may help us to see how they can be overcome.
The instance most before our eyes both of the successfully evolved composite or heterogeneous nation and of the fortunately evolving heterogeneous empire is that of the British nation in the past and the British empire in the present, — successfully, but with a qualification, fortunately, but subject to the perils of a mass of problems yet unsolved . The British nation has been composed of an English-speaking Anglo-Norman England, a Welsh-speaking
Cambric Wales, a half-Saxon, half Gaelic English-speaking Scotland and very imperfectly, very partially of a Gaelic Ireland with a dominant Saxon-Norman colony holding it by force to the united body but unable to compel a true union. Ireland was, until recently, the element of failure in this formation and it is only now and under other circumstances to its other members that her psychological unity with the whole is becoming possible and beginning to realise itself. What were the determining circumstances of this general. success and this partial failure and what light do the}- shed on the possibilities of the larger problem ?
Page-508 In building up her human aggregates Nature has followed in general principle the same law that she observes in her physical aggregates. She has provided first a natural body, secondly a common life and vital interest for the constituents of the body, thirdly a conscious sentiment of unity and a centre or governing organ through which that common ego-sense can realise itself and act. There must be in her ordinary process either a common bond of descent and past association enabling like to adhere to like and distinguish itself from unlike or else a common habitation, a country, so disposed that all who inhabit within its natural boundaries are under a sort of geographical necessity to unite. In earlier times when communities were less firmly rooted to the soil, the first of these conditions was the more important; in settled modern communities the second predominates; but the unity of the race, pure or mixed—for it need not have been one in its origin, —remains a factor of importance and strong disparity and difference may easily create serious difficulties in the way of the geographical necessity imposing itself. In order that it may impose itself, there must be a considerable force of the second natural condition, that is to say, a necessity of economical unity or habit of common sustenance and a necessity of political unity or habit of common vital organisation for survival, functioning and aggrandizement. And in order that this second condition may fulfil itself in complete force there must be nothing to depress or destroy the third in its creation or its continuance; that is to say, nothing most be done which will have the result of emphasizing disunity in sentiment or perpetuating the feeling of separateness from the totality of the rest of the organism and thus making the centre or governing organ psychologically unrepresentative of the whole and therefore not a true centre of its ego-sense. Separatism, we must always understand, is not the absence of particularize, but the sentiment of the impossibility of true union.
The geographical necessity of union was obviously present in the forming of the British nation; the conquest of Wales and Ireland and the union with Scotland were Page-509 historical events which merely represented the working of this necessity; but the unity of race and past association were wholly absent and had with greater or less difficulty to be created. It w is effected successfully with Wales rend Scotland in a greater or less lapse or time, not at all with I. eland. Geographical necessity is only a relative force’; it can be overridden by a powerful sentiment of disunion when nothing is done effectively to dissolve the disintegrating impulsion; so this even when the union has been politically effected, it tends to be destroyed, especially when there is within the geographical unity a physical barrier or line of division sufficiently strong to be the base of conflicting economic interests,—as in that which divides Belgium and Holland, Sweden and Norway, Ireland and Great Britain. In the case of Ireland the British rulers not only did nothing to bridge over or dissolve this line or economical division and counteract the sentiment of a separate body, a separate physical country in the Irish mind, but by a violent miscalculation of cause and effect they emphasised both in the strongest possible manner.
In the first place, the economical life and prosperity of Ireland were deliberately crushed in the interests of British
lade and commerce. After that it was of little use to bring about by means which one
sininks
from scrutinising the political " union " of the two islands in a common legislature, a common governing organ; for that governing organ was not a centre of psychological unity.
White the most vital interests were not only different, but in conflict, it could only represent the continued control and assertion
of the interests of the " predominant partner" and the continued subjection and denial of the interests of the
foreign body bound by legislative fetters to the larger mass but not united through a real fusion. The famine which depopulated
Iceland while En. ‘land throve and prospered was Nit ire’s terrible testimony to the sinister character of
this *’ union " which was not unity but the sharpest opposition of the most essential interests; and the Irish movements of Home Rule and separatism were the natural and inevitable expression of the will to
survive; they
Page-510 amounted to nothing more than the instinct of self-preservation divining and insisting on the one obvious means of self-preservation. In human life economic interests are those which are, ordinarily, violated with the least impunity; for they arc bound up with the life itself and the persistent violation of them, if it does not destroy the oppressed organism, provokes necessarily the bitterest revolt and end in one of Nature’s inexorable retaliation?. But in the third order of natural conditions also B. it is h statesmanship in Ireland committed an equally radical mistake in its attempt to got rid by violence of all elements of Lash particularize. Wales like Ireland was acquired conquest, but no such elaborate attempt was made to assimilate it; after the first unease that follows a process of violence, after one or two abortive attempts at resistance, Wales was left to undergo the peaceful pressure of natural conditions and its preservation of its own race and language have been no obstacle to the gradual union of the Cambric race and the Saxon in a common British nationality. A similar non-interference, apart from the minor problem of the Highland clans, has resulted in a still more aped fusion of the Scotch race with the English. There is now in the island of Great Britain a composite British race with a common country bound together by the community of mingled blood, by a settled past association in oneness, by got graphical necessity, by a common political and economic interest, by the realisation of a common ego. The opposite process in Ireland, the attempt to substitute an artificial process where the working of natural conditions with a little help of management and conciliation would have sufficed, the application of old-world methods to a new set of circumstances has resulted in the opposite effect. And when the error was discovered, the result of the past Karma had to be recognised and the union has had to bit effected through the method demand eel by Irish interests and Irish particularistic sentiments, by Home Rule and not under a complete legislative union.
This result has reached beyond itself; it has created
Page-511
the necessity of an eventual remodelling not only of the British Empire but of the whole Anglo-Celtic nation on new lines with the principle of federation at the base. For Wales and Scotland have not been fused into England with the same completeness as Breton, Alsatian, Basque and Provencal were fused into the indivisible unity of France. Although no economical interest, no pressing physical necessity demands the application of the federative principle to Wales and Scotland, yet a sufficient, though minor
particularistic sentiment lemans to feel the repercussion of the Irish settlement and to awake to the satisfaction and convenience of a similar recognition for the provincial separateness of these two Celtic countries. And this sentiment is hound to receive fresh strength and encouragement by the practical working out of the federative principle in the now inevitable reorganisation of the colonial empire hitherto governed by Great Britain on the basis of Home Rule without federation. The peculiar circumstances both of the national and the colonial formation and expansion of the races inhabiting the British isles have indeed been such as to make it almost appear that this empire has throughout been intended and prepared by Nature in her workings to be the great field of experiment for the creation of this new type in the history of human aggregates, the heterogeneous
lateral empire.
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