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<b><font size="4">Divine
Humanism</font></b></p>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have
found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in
what is called 'humanism'.* So our scholars and philosophers on their
side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the
humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked, however, if
such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a
European standard of excellence to things Indian. India may have
other measures, other terms of valuation. Even if it is proved that
humanism as defined and understood in the West is an unknown thing in
India, yet that need not necessarily be taken as a sign of
inferiority or deficiency.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by
humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an
attitude, an outlook – the attitude, the outlook that views and
weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly
given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered
foreign to him. I t is the characteristic of humanism to be
interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man.
To this, however, an important corollary is to be added, that it does
not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity.
The original father of humanism was perhaps the father of European
culture itself, Socrates, whose mission it was, as he said, to bring
down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely the
genesis should be ascribed to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic
teaching.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Humanism proper was born – or reborn – with the
Renaissance. </span></P>
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-------------------</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:10pt;">* Only the other day I found a
critic in the Manchester Guardian referring to the Gita as something
frigid and confused !!</span></FONT><BR>
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Page –
163</P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its
nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other.
For its fundamental character – that which gave it its Very name –
was a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself
with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds,
with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was
humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The Gr&aelig;co-Latin culture was essentially and
predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture too, in
spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For
the religion itself, as has been pointed out, was deeply humanistic,
in the sense that it brought salvation and heaven close to the level
of human frailty – through the miracle of Grace and the humanity of
Christ – and that it envisaged a kingdom of heaven or city of
God-the body of Christ – formed of the brotherhood of the human
race in its solidarity.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The Indian outlook, it is said, is at a double remove
from this type of humanism. It has not the pagan Gr&aelig;co-Roman
humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity. Its
spirit can best be rendered in the vigorous imagery of Blake; it
surrounds itself</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">With cold floods of abstraction and</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">the forests of solitude.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;"><BR>
</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in
its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least
an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for
his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that
man has for man; even his love for an animal or an inanimate object
is also a very human feeling, transferred to another receptacle and
flowing in another direction. It is a play of the normal human heart,
only refined and widened; there is no change in kind.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It goes without saying that, in the East too, there is
no lack of such sympathy or fellow-feeling either in the saint or in
the ordinary man of the world. Still there is a difference. And the
critics have felt it, if not understood it rightly. Indian </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">bhuta </span></I></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
164</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">daya</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">
and Christian charity do not spring from the same source – I do not
speak of the actual popular thing, but of the ideal and ideology;
even when the manner of expression is similar or the same in both,
the spirit and the significance are different. In the East the
liberated man, or the man aiming at liberation, may work for the good
and welfare of the world, but also he may not; and, what is more
important, when he does so work, the spirit is not that of
benevolence or philanthropy, nor is there the ethical sense of duty.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human
way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the
human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the
Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow-beings – &shy;men and
animals, the sentient and the insentient, the entire creation, in
fact – is one of identity in the One Self. And, there&shy;fore, he
does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian
saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The
basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human
heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and
hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very
often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the
Vedantin was that he did not look upon created beings as his
brethren, but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound
teaching of the Upanishadic </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Rishi </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">is – what may appear very
egoistic and in&shy;admissible to the Christian saint – that one
loves the wife or the son or anybody or anything in the world, not
for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or that thing, but
for the sake of the self, for the sake of one's own self that is in
the object which one seems to love.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an
external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with the
creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression, the
more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it.
There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more
nobly human than, say, to have the abstract feeling of a wide
commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the
Wordsworthian way.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">There is, indeed, a gradation in the humanistic attitude
that rises from grosser and more concrete forms to those that are</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
165</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">less
and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in form and
nature is what is called </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">altruism, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">or more especially,
philanthropy, that is to say, doing good to others, some good j that
is tangible and apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world
generally. In an altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no
longer a matter primarily of doing but of feeling, when, from a more
or less physical and material give and take, we rise into a vital and
psychological sympathy and inter. communion, we have what is humanism
proper. Humanism is transfigured into something still higher and
finer when, from the domain of personal or individual feeling&quot;
and sympathy, we ascend to cosmic feeling, to self-identification
with the All, the One that is Many. This is the experience that seems
to be behind the Buddhistic compassion, </span><I><FONT FACE="Times New Roman Baltic, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">karuÄ.</span></FONT></I></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">And yet there can be a status even beyond. For, beyond
the cosmic reality lies the transcendent reality. It is the Absolute,
</span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">neti, neti, </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">into which individual and cosmos, all dis. appear
and vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and
an echo of humanism – it is perhaps one of the reasons why
Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more
congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights. But in the
status of the transcendent Self-hood, humanism is totally transcended
and transmuted; one dwells there in the Bliss that passeth all
feeling.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The Upanishadic summit is not suffused with humanism or
touched by it, because it is supra-human, not because there is a lack
or deficiency in the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">human </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">feeling, but because there is a
heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To
man, to human valuation, the Bodhisattva may appear to be greater
than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem
to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God himself –
but that is an inferior view-point, that of particular or local
interest.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It is sometimes said that to turn away from the things
of human concern, to seek liberation and annihilation in the Self and
the Beyond, is selfishness, egoism; on the contrary, to sacrifice the
personal delight of losing oneself in the Impersonal so that one may
live and even suffer in the company of ordinary humanity, in order to
succour and serve it, is the nobler aim. But one may ask, if it is
egoism and selfishness to seek delight</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
166</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">in
one's own salvation beyond, would it be less selfish and egoistic to
enjoy the pleasure of living on a level with humanity with the idea
of aiding and uplifting it? Indeed, in either case, the truth
discovered by Yajnavalkya, to which we have already referred, stands
always justified, – that it is not for the sake of this or that
thing that one loves this or that thing, but for the sake of the Self
that one loves this or that thing.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The fact of the matter is that here we enter a domain in
which the notion of egoism or selfishness has no </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">raison d'&ecirc;tre.
</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">It is only when one has transcended not only selfishness, but
egoism and all sense of individuality that one becomes ready to step
into the glory and beatitude of the Self or </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Brahman </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">or </span><I><FONT FACE="Times New Roman CE, serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Śunyam.
</span></FONT></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">One may actually and irrevocably pass beyond, or one may
return from there (or from the brink of it) to work in and on the
world – out of compassion, or in obedience to a special call or a
higher Will, or because of some other thing; but this second course
does not mean that one has attained a higher status of being. We may
consider it more human, but it is not necessarily a superior
realisation. It is a matter of choice of vocation only, to use a
mundane figure. The Personal and the Impersonal are two co-ordinates
of the same supreme Reality – some choose (or are chosen by) one
and others choose (or chosen by) the other, perhaps as the integral
Play or the inscrutable Plan demands and determines, but neither is
intrinsically superior to the other. .</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">The humanism with which Europe is familiar, both in its
profane and religious aspects, would look, from an Indian –
&shy;Vedantic – standpoint, all 'human, too human'; it was a
European who declared it so. It was for this reason that the
Promethean prophet conjured man to transcend his humanity anyhow and
rise to a superior status of culture and civilisa&shy;tion – of
being and consciousness, as we would say.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Indian spirituality envisages precisely such a
transcendence. According to it, the liberated soul, one who lives in
and with the </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Brahman </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">or the Supreme Divine, is he who has
discarded the inferior human nature and has taken up the superior
divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature,
certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The
liberated man is seated above the play of the three </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Gunas </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">that
constitute the inferior hemisphere of manifestation, </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">apara </span></I></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
167</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">prakrti,</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">
Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive,
even at their best and purest, do not move him. Humanism has
naturally no meaning for him. He is no longer human, but supra-human;
his being and becoming are the spontaneous expression of a universal
and transcendent consciousness. He may not always live and move
externally in the non-human way; but even when he appears human in
his life and action, his motives are not humanistic, his
consciousness lies anchored somewhere else, in the transcendent Will
of the Divine that makes him be and do whatever it chooses, human or
otherwise.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">And yet there is a humanism that is proper to India –
it is not 'human humanism', but, as it is called, 'divine humanism'.
That is to say, the human formula is maintained, but a new
significance, a transcendent connotation is put into it. The general
contour of the instrumentation is preserved, but the substance is
transmuted. The brain, the heart and the physical consciousness not
only change their direction, but their very nature and character. And
the Divine Himself is conceived as such a Divine Person – for the
norm of the human personality in this view is an eternal verity in
the divine consciousness.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception
of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaish&shy;nava
revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words,
as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to
human appreciation and has hurnanised it; in the other, the human has
been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human
terms are more or less symbols and figures, having not merely a human
but a supra&shy;human significance. The entire Vaishnava </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Lila
</span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">takes place not on this earth at all, but eternally in the
eternal world of the inner consciousness – cinmaya – behind all
earthly (and human) manifestation and expression.</span></P>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the
mystic truth that </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">Man </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">is greater than all and surpasses even
the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But
Man -here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm,
not the human man at all, as modern humanists of our country would
like to have it. It does not mean the glorification of man's human
attributes and movements, even 
</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
168</span></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><span style="font-size:12pt;">if
they be most </span><I><span style="font-size:12pt;">sattwic </span></I><span style="font-size:12pt;">and idealistic; it refers rather to the
divinised type, the archetype that is eternally in the
super-&shy;consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts on
earth, he does so in a manner and measure that do not belong to this
plane of humanity familiar to us.</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page –
169</span></FONT></P>
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