CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE
the religious point of view there is all the difference in the world. For ” i f this transitory world be the Real,” says a mediaeval Vedantist, ” then there is no liberation through the Atman, the holy scriptures are without authority and the Lord speaks untruth… . The Lord who knows the reality of things has declared ‘ I am not contained in these things, nor do beings dwell in Me.’ ” *
God is the one Reality. Apart from Him, nothing exists. In comparison with Him, nothing is real. The universe only exists in so far as it is rooted and grounded in His Being.
He is the Self of our selves and the Soul of our souls. So far the Vedanta does not differ essentially from the teaching of Christian theology. The one vital distinction consists in the fact that Indian religion ignores the idea of creation and that in consequence it is faced with the dilemma that either the whole universe is an illusion—Maya—a dream that vanishes when the soul awakens to the intuition of spiritual reality, or else that the world is the self-manifestation of the Divine Mind, a conditional embodiment of the absolute Being.
Hence there is no room for a real intervention of the spiritual principle in human life. The * Vivekachudamani (attributed to Sankara), trans. C
Johnston, p. 41.
6 2
T H E CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY
Indian ethic is, above all, an ethic of flight—of deliverance from conditional existence and from the chain of re-birth. Human life is an object of compassion to the wise man, but it is also an object of scorn. ” As the hog to the trough, goes the fool to the womb,” says the Buddhist verse ; and the Hindu attitude, if less harsh, is not essentially different. ” Men are held by the manifold snares of the desires in the world of sense, and they fall away without winning to their end like dykes of sand in water. Like sesame-grains for their oil, all things are ground out in the mill-wheel of creation by the oil-grinders, to wit, the taints arising from ignorance that fasten upon them.
The husband gathers to himself evil works on account of his wife ; but he alone is therefore afflicted with taints, which cling to man alike in the world beyond and in this. All men are attached to children, wives and kin ; they sink down in the slimy sea of sorrows, like age-worn forest-elephants.” *
It is true that orthodox Hinduism inculcates the fulfilment of social duties, and the need for outward activity, but this principle does not lead to the transformation of life by moral action, but simply to the fatalistic acceptance of the established order of things. This is the * Mahabharata, xii, ch. 174, trans. L. D. Barnett.
63
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE
theme of the greatest work of Indian literature, the Bhagavad-Gita, and it involves a moral attitude diametrically opposed to that of the Western mind. When Arjuna shrinks from the evils of war and declares that he would rather die than shed the blood of his kinsfolk, the god does not commend him. He uses the doctrine of the transcendence and impassibility of true being to justify the ruthlessness of the warrior.
” Know that that which pervades this universe is imperishable ; there is none can make to perish that changeless being.
” … This Body’s Tenant for all time may not be wounded, O Thou of Bharata’s stock, in the bodies of any beings. Therefore thou dost not well to sorrow for any born beings. Looking likewise in thine own Law, thou shouldst not be dismayed ; for to a knight there is no thing more blest than a lawful strife.” *
The sacred order that is the basis of Indian culture is no true spiritualisation of human life ; it is merely the natural order seen through a veil of metaphysical idealism. It can incorporate the most barbaric and non-ethical elements equally with the most profound metaphysical truths; since in the presence of the absolute and the unconditioned all distinctions and degrees of value lose their validity.
* Bhagavad-Gita, ii., pp. 17, 30-31, trans. L. D. Barnett.
64