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		<b><font face="Times New Roman"><i>Humanism and Humanism</i></font></b></p>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">&nbsp;</p>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found
Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in
what is called &quot;humanism.&quot;1 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 denned and under-
stood in the West is an unknown thing in India, yet that need
not necessarily be taken as a sign of inferiority or deficiency.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.2 It 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 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 rather to the
Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Humanism proper was born—or reborn—with the Renaissance. 
It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its</font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font size="2" face="Times New Roman">1<b>.</b> Only the other day I found a critic in <i>The Manchester Guardian</i> referring to <i>The
Gita as</i> something frigid (and confused)!<br>
2 <i>Humoni nihil</i> a <i>me alienum puto.—</i>Terence.</font><font size="2">
</font>
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Page 160<hr>

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

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Graeco-Latin culture was essentially and predominantly
humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture also, in spite of its
theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the
religion itself, as has been pointed out, is 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.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Indian outlook, it is said, is at a double remove from this
type of humanism. It has not the pagan Graeco-Roman
humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity.
Its spirit can be rendered in the vigorous imagery of Blake:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">it surrounds itself with cold floods of abstraction and the forests
of solitude.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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; and even his love for the bird,
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 human heart, only refined and widened; there
is no change in kind.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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
man of the world. Still there is a difference. And the critics
have felt it, if not understood it rightly. The Indian <i>bhutadaya
</i>and Christian charity do not spring from the same source—I
do not speak of the actual popular thing but of the ideal—even
when their manner of expression is similar or the same, 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 or he may not; and when he</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">Page 161</font><hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">does work, the spirit is not that of benevolence or philanthropy.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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—
men. and animals, the sentient or the insentient, the entire
creation in fact—is one of identity in the One Self. And there-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 Vedantist 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 Rishi is—what may appear very egoistic and inadmissible 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 thing but for the sake of the self,
for the sake of oneself that is in the object which one seems to
love.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external
emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with 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, the abstract feeling of a wide
commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; There is indeed a gradation in the humanistic attitude that
rises from grosser and more concrete forms to those that are
less and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in
form and nature is what is called <i>altruism,</i> or <i>philanthrope,</i> that
is to say, doing good to others, some good that is tangible and
apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world generally.
In altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no longer a
matter chiefly of doing but of feeling, from a more or Less
physical and material give and take we rise into a vital and
psychological sympathy and intercommunion, we have what is</font>
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Page 162<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">humanism proper. Humanism is transfigured into something
still higher and finer when from the domain of personal or
individual feeling 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, <i>karuna.</i></font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And yet there can be a status even beyond. For beyond the
cosmic reality, lies the transcendent reality. It is the Absolute, <i>neti, neti,</i> into which individual and cosmos, all disappear 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;</font>&nbsp;
<font face="Times New Roman">but in the status of the transcendent Selfhood humanism is
totally transcended and transmuted, one dwells then in the
Bliss that passeth all feeling.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Upanishadic summit is not suffused with humanism or
touched by it, because it is supra-human, not because there is
a lack or want or deficiency in the <i>human</i> feeling, but because
there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness
and being. To man, to human valuation, the Boddhisattwa
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 viewpoint, that of particular or local interest.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 we may ask if it is egoism and selfishness to seek delight 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 that one loves this or that but for the sake of the
self that one loves this or that.</font>&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <font face="Times New Roman">The fact of the matter is that here we enter a domain in</font>

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Page 163<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman"><b>&nbsp;</b>which the notion of egoism or selfishness has no <i>raison d'etre.
</i>It is only when one has transcended not only selfishness but
egoism and sense of individuality that one becomes ready to
enter the glory and beatitude of the Self, or Brahman or
Shunyam. 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;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">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 phraseology. The
Personal and the Impersonal are two co-ordinates of the same
supreme Reality—some choose (or are chosen by) the one and
others choose (or are chosen by) the other, perhaps as the
integral Play or the inscrutable Plan demands and determines,
but neither is intrinsically superior to the other—although, as
I have already said, from an interested human standpoint, one
may seem more immediately profitable or nearer than the
other; but from that standpoint there may be other truths
that are still more practically useful, still closer to the earthly
texture of humanity.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The humanism, known to Europe generally, both in its
profane and religious aspects, is all &quot;human—too human&quot; as Nietzsche 
pronounced it; 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 civilisation, of being and consciousness as we would say.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indian spirituality precisely envisages such a transcendence.
According to it, the liberated soul, one who lives in and with
the Brahman or the Supreme Divine is he who has discarded
the inferior human nature and has taken up the superior divine
nature.<b> </b> He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The
liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that
constitute the <i>apara prakrti.</i> Human intelligence, human feeling,
human sentiment, human motive do not move him. Humanism
generally has 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</font>

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Page 164<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">does 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 Divine Will that makes him be and do
whatever it chooses, human or not.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; There is, however, a type of humanism that is specially
known in 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 of as such a Human Person—for the norm
of the human personality is an eternal verity in the divine
consciousness.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the
Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaishnava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human.
In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down
the divinity nearer to the human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other the human has been uplifted and made
into an archetypal reality where the human terms have been
more or less symbols and figures having not merely human
but a supra-human significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila
passes not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world
of consciousness—<i>cinmaya—</i>behind all earthly (and human)
manifestation and expression.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the
v mystic truth that <i>man</i> is greater than all and surpasses 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 at all the human man, as modern humanists
of our country would like&quot; to have. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if
they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the
divinised type, the archetype that is eternal in the super consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts upon earth he
does so in manner and measure that do not belong to this plane.</font>
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