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<font face="Times New Roman">II</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman" size=3>INDIA AND HER <i>SWADHARMA</i></font>
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<b>
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>The Spiritual Genius of India</i> </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">WHAT is it that we precisely mean when we say that <i>India
is spiritual? For,</i> that is how we are accustomed to express
India's special genius-—her backbone, as Vivekananda puts
it—the fundamental note of her culture and nature, which
distinguishes her from the rest of the world. What then are the
distinguishing marks of spirituality? How does a spiritual
collectivity live and move—<i>kim asita vrqjeta kim?</i> And do we
find its characteristic gait and feature exclusively or even<br>
chiefly in India?</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Was not Europe also in her theocratic and mediaeval ages as .
largely spiritual and as fundamentally religious as India?
Churches and cathedrals and monasteries grew like mushrooms
in every nook and corner, in all the countries of Europe; it
was the clergy who, with their almost unbounded influence
and power, moulded and guided the life and aspiration of the
people; devotion to God and love of prayer and pilgrimage
were as much in the nature of the average European of those
times as they are in any Indian of today; every family considered it a duty and an honour to rear up one child at least to
be consecrated to the service of God and the Church. The
internal as well as the external life of the men of mediaeval
Europe was steeped through and through in a religious
atmosphere.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The whole world, in fact, was more or less religious in the
early stages of its evolution; for it is characteristic of the
primitive nature of man to be god-fearing and addicted to
religious rite and ceremony. And Europe too, when she entered
on a new cycle of life and began to reconstruct herself after
the ruin of the Graeco-Latin culture, started with the religion
of the Christ and experimented with it during a long period of</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">time. But that is what was—<i>Troja fuit.</i> Europe has outgrown
her nonage and for a century and a half, since the mighty
upheaval of the French Revolution, she has been rapidly
shaking off the last vestiges of her mediaevalism. Today she
stands clean shorn of all superstition, which she only euphemistically calls religion or spirituality. Not Theology but
Science, not Revelation but Reason, not Magic but Logic, not
Fiction but Fact, governs her thoughts and guides her activities.
Only India, in part under the stress of her own conservative
nature, in part under compelling circumstances, still clings
to her things of the past, darknesses that have been discarded
by the modern illumination. Indian spirituality is nothing
but consolidated mediaevalism; it has its companion shibboleth
in the cry, &quot;Back to the village&quot; or &quot;Back to the bullock-cart&quot;!
One of the main reasons, if not the one reason why India has
today no place in the comity of nations, why she is not in
the vanguard of civilisation, is precisely this obstinate atavism,
this persistent survival of a spirit subversive of all that is modern
and progressive.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is not my purpose here to take up the cause of spirituality
and defend it against materialism. Taking it for granted that
real spirituality embodies a truth and power by far higher and
mightier than anything materialism can offer, and that man's
supreme ideal lies there, let us throw a comparing glance on
the two types of spirituality,—the one that India knows and
the other that Europe knew in the Middle Ages.</font>&nbsp;

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To say that Europe was once as religious and spiritual as
India herself is not precisely incorrect, but it is to view the
matter from too general a stand-point, almost, we may say, <i>grosso modo.</i> In order to arrive at an accurate and precise estimation, and to find out the most significant truths, we have to
look a, little more closely, observe differences in shade and
stress, make certain distinctions. For the things that the
ordinary mind indiscriminately designates as religion, spirituality<br>
and the like, do not always fall in the same category.
These names are often applied to distinct realities, each with
its particular <i>dharma,</i> norm and form, wide apart from each
other, although to the common eye they may appear to be
of the same mould and substance.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus Religion and Spirituality, two fundamental categories</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">that form one realm when held up in opposition to Materialism,
are, when considered by themselves, really very different things
and may be even contradictory to and destructive of each
other. What then is Religion? and what, on the other hand,
is Spirituality? Religion starts from and usually ends with a
mental and emotional approach to realities beyond the mind;</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">Spirituality goes straight forward to direct vision 
and communion with the Beyond. Religion labours to experience and
express the world of Spirit in and through a turn, often a twist,
given by the mental being—<i>manu—</i>in man; it bases itself upon the demands 
of the mental, the vital and the physical complex—the triple nexus that forms the ordinary human personality and seeks to satisfy them under a holier garb. Spirituality
knows the demands of the Spirit alone; it lives in a realm where<br>
the body, the life and the mind stand uplifted and transmuted
into their utter realities. Religion is the human way of approaching and enjoying the Divine; Spirituality is the divine
way of meeting the Divine. Religion, as it is usually practised,
is a special art, one—the highest it may be, still only one— among many other 
pursuits that man looks to for his enjoyment and fulfilment; but spirituality is nothing if it does not
swallow up the entire man, take in his each and every preoccupation and new-create it into an inevitable expression of
its own master truth. Religion gives us a moral discipline for
the internal consciousness, and for the external life, a code of
conduct based upon a system of rules and rites and ceremonies;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">spirituality aims at a revolution in the consciousness and in the
being.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Keeping this difference in view, we may at once point out
that Europe, when she is non-materialist, is primarily religious
and only secondarily spiritual, but India is always primarily
spiritual and only secondarily religious. The vein of real
spirituality in European culture runs underground and follows
narrow and circuitous by-paths; rarely does it appear on the
top in sudden and momentary flashes and even then only
to dive back again into its subterranean hiding-place; upon
the collective life and culture it acts more as an indirect
influence, an auxiliary leaven than as a direct and dynamic
Force. In India there is an abundance, a superfluity even, of
religious paraphernalia, but it is the note of spirituality that</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman"><b>&nbsp;</b>rings clear and high above all lesser tones and wields a power
vivid and manifest. We could say in terms of modern Biology
that spirituality tends to be a <i>recessive</i> character in European
culture, while in India, it is <i>dominant.</i></font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But when we say that India is spiritual, we do not mean
that all or most Indians, or even a very large minority among
them, are adepts in spirituality, or that the attachment to life,
the passion for earthly possessions, the sway of the six <i>ripus
</i>are in any way less prevalent in the Indian character. On the
contrary, it may well seem to the casual onlooker whose eyes
are occupied with the surface actualities of the situation, that
the Indian nature, as it is today, shut out from this world's
larger spaces, cut off from its deeper channels and movements
of greater magnitude, has been&nbsp; given over more and more to
petty worldlinesses that hardly fill the same space even in the
life of peoples who are notorious for their worldly and unspiritual temperament.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is not so much a question of concrete realisation, 
of attainment and achievement arrived at by the Indian people in their
work-a-day life, but primarily and above all a question of
ultimate valuation, of what they hold as the supreme ideal, of
what they cherish in their heart of hearts, and of the extent to
which that standard has obtained general currency among
them. It is not <i>a fact</i> with which we are concerned, but the <i>force</i> behind the fact, and the special nature, and purpose of
that force. It is the power that we discover in the general
atmosphere, or that emerges in the stress and rhythm of the
cultural life of the people, in the level of its inner consciousness,
in the expression of its highest and most wide-spread aspirations, in the particular stamp of its soul.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The psychological atmosphere in India is of a luminous
tenuity. Here, it appears, the veil between this world and the
other has so thinned away that the two meet and interpenetrate
easily and freely; immersed in one, you can at the same time
bathe in the other. Owing to the cumulative effect of the <i>sddhana</i> of her saints and sages who appeared in countless
number down countless ages, or, perhaps, owing to the grace
of a descent into her consciousness, or some immanence there,
of the breath and light of a Superior World, India has developed and possesses, already prepared, a magnetic field, a</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">luminous zone of spiritual consciousness; and to enter into it the
Indian has only to turn aside, to go round a corner, to take one
step forward. However thick and hard the crust of the Ignorance may lie upon the Indian soul, once that soul awakes and
is upon the path, it finds itself on a familiar ground; it is in a -
domain which it has the impression of having frequented often
and anon and for long.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But. in Europe the 
division between this world and the other, in the inner consciousness of the 
people, is more rigorous, a thick wall divides the two and to pass from the one 
to the other demands a violent break, a total revolution; and even when the 
Rubicon is crossed, one feels oneself in unfamiliar surroundings, moving in a shadowy world, and with the uncertain and
faltering steps of a child.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The average European has a strong basis of the earth-nature
in him; he is heavily enclosed in his physical sheath and firmly
placed upon the material world. Therefore he keeps a very
stable terrestrial equilibrium and is not easily ousted from his
earthly footing; his is not a nature easily upset from its poise,<br>
or disturbed by the currents and forces that play about him.
But the Indian, both physically, and psychically, has a more
delicate frame and' his footing upon earth is less secure. The
balance in his consciousness between the different forces—
especially between those of this world and the other—is
delicately held; and the adjustment that obtains at a given
moment is liable to be disturbed by the least change, either
in the inner consciousness, or in the outer conditions.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In other words, when we speak of the spirituality of the
Indian people, it is to the <i>disposition</i> of their psychic elements
that we refer, to the tone and temper of the soul they possess
and to a constant nearness of latent spiritual possibilities: that
may at any time materialise, and the consequent possibilities
of a spiritual impulse, that may at any time awaken.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Other peoples have other and more concrete virtues to be
proud of; but the Indian has his soul as his most characteristic
possession.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That is not to say that other peoples of the world are soulless,
and that India alone may claim to possess the treasure. But no
other people has lived so much in and from the soul, none other
has sacrificed so much for the sake of this one thing needful. The</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman"><b>&nbsp;</b>soul-consciousness in other nations lies ve ed behind the more
pressing activities and immediate occupations of the external
nature; at the most, what is characteristic in them is the soul, /
not in its pure and fundamental <i>being,</i> but expressed, and therefore encased and limited, within some particular mode of
<i>becoming.</i> In India, on the other hand, the external activities
and operations have never altogether swamped or clouded
this soul-consciousness; they have been either subjugated to it
as minor auxiliaries or totally sacrificed as obstacles. The
Indian's soul is not imbedded in some far-off region of his
unconscious nature; he has succeeded in raising it up and
bringing it forward to the level of his waking consciousness,—
as the gold-tusked Divine Boar lifted the Earth out of the dark
depths of the primeval deluge to the light of the Day.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The French, for example, have developed as a people a
special characteristic and mental turn that has set its pervading
impress upon their culture and civilisation, upon their creations ~
and activities; that which distinguishes them is a fine, clear and
subtle, rational, logical, artistic and literary mind. France, it
has often been said, is the head of modern Europe. The Indians
are not in the same way a predominantly intellectual race, in
spite of the mighty giants of intellect India has always produced,
and still produces. Nor are they a literary race, although a
rich and grandiose literature, unrivalled in its own great
qualities, is their patrimony. It was the few, a small minority,
almost a closed circle, that formed in India the <i>elite</i> whose
interest and achievement lay in this field; the characteristic
power, the main life-current of the nation, did not flow this
way, but followed a different channel. Among the ancients
the Greeks, and among the moderns the French alone, can
rightfully claim as their special genius, as the hallmark of their
corporate life, a high intellectual and literary culture. It is<b> 
</b>to<b> 
</b>this treasure,—a serene and yet vigorous and organized rational
mind, coupled with a wonderful felicity of expression in speech,
—that one turns when one thinks of the special gift that
modern France and ancient Greece have brought to the
heritage of mankind.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Again, the Japanese, as a people, have developed to a consummate degree the sense of beauty, especially as applied<b> 
</b>to<b> 
</b>life and living. No other people, not even the old-world Greeks,</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">possessed almost to a man, as do these children of the Rising
Sun, so fine and infallible an aesthetic sensibility,—not static
or abstract, but of the dynamic kind,—uniformly, successful
in making out of their work-a-day, life, even to its smallest
accessories, a flawless object of art. It is a wonder to see in
Japan how, even an unlettered peasant, away in his rustic
environment, chooses with unerring taste the site of his house,
builds it to the best advantage, arranges everything about it in
a faultless rhythm. The whole motion of the life of a Japanese
is almost Art incarnate.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Or take again the example of the British people. The
practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the
business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general
diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even
their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed
with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to
do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, or with
any laborious or subtle mental operation,—a quick or active
mind is perhaps the last thing with which the British people
can be accredited; this instinct of theirs is something spontaneous, almost aboriginal, moving with the sureness, the ruthless-
ness of nature's unconscious movements,—it is a <i>tact,</i> native
to the force that is life. It is this attribute which the English-
man draws from the collective genius of his race that marks
him out from among all others; this is <i>his forte,</i> it is this which
has created his nation and made it great and strong.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; All other nations have this one, or that other, line of self-
expression, special to each; but it is India's characteristic not
to have had any such single and definite <i>modus vivendi—</i>what
was single and definite in her case was a mode not of <i>living
</i>but of being. India looked above all to the very self in things,
and in all her life-expression it was the soul <i>per se</i> which
mattered to her,—even as the great Yajnavalkya said to his
wife Maitreyi, <i>atmanastu kamaya sarvam priyam bhavati.</i> The
expressions of the self had no intrinsic value of their own and
mattered only so far as they symbolised or embodied or pointed
to the secret reality of the Atman. And perhaps it was on this
account that India's creative activities, even in external life,
were once upon a time so rich and varied, so stupendous and
full of marvel. Because she was attached and limited to no one</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">dominating power of life, she could create infinite forms, so
many channels of power for the soul whose realisation was her
end and aim.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; There was no department of life or culture in which it 
could be said of India that she was not great, or even, in a way,
supreme. From hard practical politics touching our earth, to
the nebulous regions of abstract metaphysics, everywhere India
expressed the power of her genius equally well. And yet none
of these, neither severally nor collectively, constituted her
specific genius; none showed the full height to which she
Could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of
her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the
Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and
stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India
lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and
the most popular names in Indian history are not names of
warriors or statesmen, nor of poets who were only poets, nor
of mere intellectual philosophers, however great they might
be, but of Rishis, who saw and lived the Truth and communed with the gods, of Avataras who brought down and
incarnated here below something of the supreme realities
beyond.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The most significant fact in the history of India is the unbroken continuity of the line of her spiritual masters who never
ceased to appear even in the midst of her most dark and distressing ages. Even in a decadent and fast disintegrating India,
when the whole of her external life was a mass of ruins, when
her political and economical and even her cultural life was
brought to stagnation and very near to decomposition, this
undying Fire in her secret heart was ever alight and called in
the inevitable rebirth and rejuvenation. Ramakrishna, with
Vivekananda as his emanation in life dynamic and material,
symbolises this great secret of India's evolution. The promise
that the Divine held out in the <i>Gita</i> to Bharata's descendant
finds a ready fulfilment in India, in Bharata's land, more
perhaps than anywhere else in the world; for in India has the
Divine taken birth over and over again to save the pure in
heart, to destroy the evil-doer and to establish the Right Law
of life.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Other peoples may be the arms and the feet and the head of</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Humanity, but India is its heart, its soul—for she cherishes
always within her the Truth that lives for ever, the flaming
God-head, the Immortal awake in mortality, as say the Vedas, <i>amrto martyesu rtava.                                      </i></font>
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