(b) See again his ideals. He has many such which influence him largely in his life. Much depends upon what a man regards as the Summum Bonum of life. The supreme blessing which the Hindu ever holds before his eyes, as the highest and last attainment, is union with God. Not a union of sympathy, but a metaphysical oneness with BrÂhm. To lose himself entirely in the Divine Being and thus to cease having separate thought or existence, and to pass out of the turmoil and restlessness of human life into the calm of the passionless bosom of the Eternal—this, to him, is the ideal which alone is worthy of human attainment.

Again; we, Christians, look forward to a complete self-realization, to a perfect manhood and a full rounded character as our ideal. The opposite ideal is the Hindu's. He seeks the loss of all that we hold best—the elimination of every ambition and desire, the eradication of all love and altruism, the cessation of all activity—good as well as evil. His ideal is not greatness and goodness of heart, but the renunciation of all that animates and inspires. To him the highest virtue in its noblest activity has no charms; for he claims that he looks above and beyond all this to that absolute equilibrium of soul when passion, and when all desire, shall have been killed through self-mortification and self-abnegation and he shall have attained mental poise and repose rather than a perfect character. Thus, in its last analysis, his ideal is an intellectual, rather than a moral, one; for it is again absorption into the Divine Soul; and that he conceives to be the Supreme Intelligence rather than the Perfect Will. This difference of ideal between [pg 119] the two faiths is fundamental and must work for very diverse results.

In harmony with this is the other thought that the body, yea each and every body with which the soul may clothe itself, is an unmitigated evil because it is the highway to suffering and defers the final consummation. Hence, the Hindu has no respect for the body and longs for the day of final emancipation from flesh and all its ills.

How then shall the soul be freed from its many births so that it may pass out of this bondage into the final freedom of Sayutcha, or emancipation? To him Yoga, the way of meditation, represents the highest way of release. To wean the mind, through this process, from all desire and ambition and thus to reach absolute equilibrium of soul is the object of Yoga. This indeed is the only condition whereby the soul can rise above any future contact with earthly bodies.

Consequently the Hindu has, for many centuries, looked to the monastery and the wilderness as the only places where this ideal can be safely and speedily attained. To live among men, and thus to be subjected to corroding cares and to the swaying passions of human society, renders the attainment of beatification impossible. Under these circumstances the soul finds no way of emancipation. Therefore the watchword of the Hindu is, “flee from the world rather than overcome it.” For the attainment of those qualities which ensure final repose he immures himself in a mutt or he flees into the forest where, apart from men, he gives himself to self-mortification and meditation that he may speedily find the desired [pg 120] release. At the root of this idea, as its animating motive, lies the worthy ambition of living a better life than the environments of a corrupt society favour. And with this desire is coupled the idea that a full rounded life and a perfected character are not only possible in the solitude of a wilderness but are nowhere else attainable. And thus it is, with many, a silent acknowledgment of failure and of the belief that in the rush and struggle of public life a godly, heavenly-minded character is impossible. According to the Hindu conception, a man may be successful in business matters, but he cannot be holy or fit for the highest communion with God unless he spend his time in separation from all his kind. Therefore the so-called pious and holy men of that land are ascetics. They eschew human society and seek to renounce all human good and every earthly ambition.

With this purpose, ostensibly, in view there are, as we saw, about 5,500,000 men in India who have given up all earthly employment, who live apart as ascetics and spend their time in roaming around the country as religious mendicants. These people are, in the main, doubtless possessed of the laudable ambition to be holy and to prepare themselves for union with BrÂhm. And yet, as a matter of fact, they are the most pestilential in their morals of all the people of the land. Many of them, at the same time, both regard themselves and are regarded by their co-religionists as the acme of piety. Nevertheless, they daily trample under foot every command of the decalogue. It is true that a few of them are different from the mass, and genuinely seek the higher life [pg 121] for the cultivation of which they have separated themselves. But into their ideal of life altruism hardly enters at all. It is not to do good unto others, but to escape contamination from others which is the concern of the Hindu devotee. At the basis of his higher aspirations concern for self is supreme, thoughts of others are absent.

A notable illustration of a high realization of the Eastern ideal we see in the famous Hindu ascetic Swamiji Bhaskara Nanda Sarasvati, of Benares, who recently died and to whom Dr. Fairbairn has referred so cordially. For many years he had given himself to devotion and meditation. He had subdued the body by the rigours of asceticism and had attained preËminence in self-restraint and in the highest wisdom of yoga culture. He had therefore retired from the world, spurned all its allurements, denied all its claims and devoted himself exclusively to thought and meditation. Thus immured within temple walls in the great city of Benares he was utterly oblivious to the sin and sorrow of the swarming multitudes of that city and did nought to relieve the suffering, or to improve the lives, of his fellow-beings. He died, and over his remains has been erected a shrine to which the thousands go for worship and for inspiration to attain unto that ideal of life which they believe him to have realized.

This ideal has, for centuries, taken possession of the Hindu mind, and never before did it rule with more absolute sway than it does at present.

Another ideal of life with the Hindu is the so-called “path of works.” At present this term is synonymous with a life of ceremonialism. In modern parlance [pg 122] “works” means to the Hindu, ceremonial observance. His life is hedged in on all sides by a host of ceremonies and is permeated through and through with a most complicated ritual. There is nothing in the life of a Hindu devotee, whether it be eating, sleeping, bathing or travelling, which is not religiously prescribed both as to time and method. And utterly regardless of the significance of these rites or the appropriateness of them to his life, he deems their observance as essential to his salvation and finds in their daily keeping the highest satisfaction and completest assurance of his spiritual progress.

The Hindu is no rationalist in his religion. He obeys implicitly, and without question, the ritual of his ancestors and finds no interest in the scrutiny or analysis of them.

So, to the ordinary Hindu, especially to him to whom the way of meditation in the wilderness seems impossible, ceremonialism becomes a matter of supreme concern. No other religion has furnished to its followers a more elaborate and pervasive system of observances than this. These rites exercise their influence upon the mind and are wielding today a most potent influence upon Hindu character. A man may think nothing of, nor have any ambition to attain unto, the spiritual aspect of his faith; he may give no time whatever to any of its teachings or spiritual instruction; but if he maintain its ritual with ordinary care he flatters himself with the thought that he has attained a perfection corresponding to his estate.

Moreover, the Hindu is a thorough fatalist. He believes that his destiny is “written upon the forehead.” [pg 123] Nothing which he may do can affect this destiny. Nor does it seem to be a part of the divine purpose. So far as he is concerned it is an irrevocable fate. This belief manifests itself largely in his life and conduct. It is one of the inconsistencies of the Hindu's thinking that he, at the same time, worships a tribal god in whose hands he believes his affairs to be, and through whom prosperity can flow into his life for time and eternity; and yet he holds, with equal, yea with greater, persistence, the law of Karma, that is, the law of works, according to which law alone future life, both to himself and to all men, must be wrought out even to the last detail. It is strange that a man whose pantheon is so crowded as that of the Hindu, and who believes in such constant divine guidance and interference, should, also, at the same time, maintain a theory of life which practically dispenses with all divine action and makes human life the product of a blind and grinding fate. Nothing is more marked as a characteristic of Hindu thought today than a possession by the people of these mutually conflicting and contradictory views of life.

(c) Looking at the Hindu from a social standpoint we see him largely affected by the caste system. Not only is his life in bondage to this system, his view of life, too, is thoroughly coloured by his caste sentiments.

Just as ceremonialism covers all his personal life, even so caste observance defines for him all his social relations. There is not a tie or an influence which binds man to man that is not, to the Hindu, a part of the great and all-embracing caste system. So all-pervasive [pg 124] is this social tyranny that a man dare not withstand it; yea, more, he has learned to look at it as the prime necessity of his social being and therefore invariably regards it as the highest good. He may indeed believe that, in the abstract, caste is an evil and that it has been a curse to the people of the land. But he nevertheless maintains that, as it is an ancient part, and a most important part, of his ancestral faith, it must be submitted to in all obedience and regarded as the ideal of life.

The Bhagavad-Gita is regarded today not only as the gem of all Hindu literature; it is also held up by educated Hindus as the highest authority among their Shastras. Concerning caste duties this “Divine Song” speaks as follows:

Therefore the Hindu has come to regard caste observance as the supreme claim of his faith. As we have seen, a man may believe or disbelieve any doctrine he please; that does not affect his status as a Hindu so long as he is loyal to caste rules and observances. As one has aptly remarked, the seat of other religions may be in the mind; the seat of Hinduism is preËminently in the stomach. It is not [pg 125] what he thinks but what and how and with whom he eats that gives him his religious status.

The Hindu regards himself as socially devoid of any right of initiative and choice; he has no will of his own. His social conscience is in the keeping of his caste. This has gained its rules from the past and exercises no discretion or judgment of its own in the social direction of its members; but it insists upon implicit obedience, by every one, to past customs which have crystallized into irrevocable laws. And to these laws the Hindu is always and everywhere a willing and an abject slave. To violate any of them is, he well knows, to be recreant to his faith and to be an outcaste among his people.

(d) The Hindu is not strong in character, as Westerners regard strength. As we have seen, his religion is not favourable to the highest development of conscience. Hence, sincerity and truthfulness are not among his strong points. Not only does pantheism undermine conscience, the example of the most prominent gods of the Hindu pantheon, leads men to prevaricate and encourages all forms of duplicity. Under these circumstances it were strange if the Hindu were conspicuous in honesty and in loyalty to the truth. And in like manner he is wanting largely in those convictions which, in the West, are so inseparably associated with earnestness, integrity and lofty purpose. If, to the Hindu devotee, religion is not a system of truth to be believed and loyally followed, but a series of ceremonies to be observed and of caste rules to be obeyed, then loyalty to truth becomes a very secondary matter and integrity of mind will be regarded by him as of no great moment. [pg 126] Therefore it is that hollowness is so often found at the core of their life. Lying and stealing are all but universal. It is said in our District in South India that the regular price of a court witness is two annas (four cents); and he stands ready to perjure himself to any extent for this paltry sum. The ordinary Hindu seems too often to have a predilection for falsehood and uses truth with rare economy! There, dishonesty and petty larceny are foibles too frequently condoned because too generally practiced. Even among the higher classes—the cultured and Élite—open-faced and open-handed frankness and sincerity are too rare. Hypocrisy and duplicity are too often cultivated as a fine art. It seems to be the pride and pleasure of an Oriental to conceal his mind and purpose and to say and do things by the greatest indirection possible.

India has been extolled as a land where there is no profanity. This is true and she should have the credit for this abstinence. And one never feels like giving her this credit more than when he returns from that country to this and is compelled to endure the coarse profanity which pervades our streets as a terrible stench.

Yet one can hardly see how the Hindu could find interest in, and a strong grip upon, profanity, so long as the gods of his pantheon have so little of his respect and enter so rarely into the serious compacts of his life. Moreover it should not be forgotten that obscenity fulfills in India the function of profanity in the West. The bursts of passion which find expression here through taking the name of God in vain gain utterance there in language unspeakably bad of [pg 127] the other kind. And this is only a part of the larger subject of the prevalence of social immorality in India—an evil which is largely fostered under the protection of the religion of the land. When Lord Dalhousie, the Viceroy of India, was considering an act for the suppression of obscenity in the country, he was compelled by Hindu sentiment to exempt all temples and religious emblems from the operation of the act! What better commentary could one desire upon the source and prevalence of this vice in that land? When such an evil is intrenched behind the religion of the people and is symbolized and fostered by its emblems and ceremonies—when tasies, or women dedicated to the Hindu gods and temple worship (there are 12,000 of these in South India alone), constitute the public characters of the land—then the hope for the purification of life is at the lowest ebb.

It is also very rare that one finds a Hindu whose convictions and loyalty to certain beliefs are such that he is willing to suffer in their behalf. That masculine vigour and manly persistence under difficulty in maintaining what he believes to be right and true is not germane to the Hindu character.

On the other hand, the Hindu is strong in the so-called passive virtues. In harmony with his religious beliefs, patience and meekness and endurance of evil have become second nature to him. This side of his character has, indeed, received undue emphasis during the many centuries of his history. He cannot understand the rush and impatience, the push and aggressiveness of the Westerner any more than he of the West can understand the Hindu's cool, [pg 128] quiet, patient, bearing under most trying and adverse circumstances. He has a large lesson to teach us in the art of self-control and in the ability to endure with complacency evils which cannot be remedied.

Thus as we look at the Hindu from the various standpoints of life and character we see how strange a compound he is, and how unlike the man of the West at nearly all points in our examination. He is preËminently weak where we are strong, and he manifests strength where we seem to need it most. His religion has developed within him traits and tendencies which, through these many centuries, have wonderfully wrought in his life and character, and have largely made him what he is today.

Moreover all this enables us to see what a serious problem Christianity has in hand in India today, namely the conversion of 230,000,000 people so far removed in life and sentiment from those who have gone to preach Christ to them. Yea, more, we have seen what mighty influences and forces Christianity has to overcome, what hosts of prejudices to destroy, before she can lay her hand in power upon that great land and claim it as her own.