Redemption, Hindu and Christian

Front matter

IWifKilKii

Division

Section

Preface

THIS Essay is an attempt to relate to the Christian Gospel the living forces of Hinduism. Of the inadequacy of my understanding both of Hinduism and of Christianity I am deeply conscious, but at least I have striven to deal with Hinduism as a living faith, and to speak of it with the fairness and sympathy with which we discuss the convictions of honoured friends. It is hard to express another’s faith. I have sought to make the Sacred Books speak for themselves, and in the first half of the Essay have tried to illustrate the three great doctrines of Hinduism, karma , bhakti , and redemption, in a way that shall at least be textual and to that extent authoritative. The second half of the Essay is an endeavour to relate Christianity to these Hindu doctrines. Though Christ indeed is adequate, our Christianity often is not. To answer the aspirations of Hinduism an enlarged interpretation is required. We need to affirm that, for the Christian, eternal life is a present and indubitable possession. Christianity must be proclaimed as a religion of redemption, not from sin only, but from the world.

Some sections of the Essay have already appeared in tentative form. Thus much of Chapter VII was given in the first instance as a lecture to educated Hindus at Palamcottah and afterwards appeared in the Young Men of India , and in Chapters I, V, X and XI I have utilized some articles I wrote when in India for the Madras Christian College Magazine ; whilst parts of Chapters I and XI formed the basis ot

X

PREFACE an article which appeared in the Expository Times in March and April of this year.

I have to express my thanks to the Rev. G. E. Phillips, M.A., of the United Theological College. Bangalore, for his suggestive criticisms, and to Hindu friends who helped me in my understanding of Hinduism by their confidence and candour. It is a great pleasure to inscribe to Principals Forsyth and Garvie, the teachers of my student days, a book which would probably not have been written but for their teaching and encouragement.

Henleaze,

Bristol.

CHAPTER

Contents

PAGE

I. Religions and Religion ..... i

Part I

THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ESSENTIAL HINDUISM II. The Religion of the Rigveda and the Beginnings of Brahmanic Speculation 23

III. A Study in the Upanishads 52

THE WAY OF KNOWLEDGE v

IV. The Vedanta Doctrine. . .... 76

V. The BhagavadgJta 98

VI. The Lovers of God . . . . .116

VII.

VIII.

IX.

Part II

ClassicChristianity, or the Apostolic Experience of Christ and His Gospel . . . 159

Christianity andthe DoctrineofCyclic Recompense i 79

Christianity and the Way of Devotion . . 206

Redemption : Hindu and Christian . . . 223

Quotations from the Sacred Books are from the

The Hymns of the Rigveda, translated by R. T. H. Griffith. 2nd edit. 2 vols. Benares, 1896 and 1S97.

The Hymns of the Atharvaveda, translated by R. T. H. Griffith. 2 vols. Benares, 1897.

The Bhagavadgita, translated by L. D. Barnett. London, 1905.

The Poems of Tukaram . translated by J. Nelson Fraser. Madras. From 1909.

The Ramdyana of Tulsi Dds, translated by F. S. Growse. 4 vol. edit. Allahabad. Various dates.

The Tiruvdsagam, translated by G. U. Pope. Oxford, 1900.

In the Sacred Books of the East Series, the f allowing volumes :

The Satapatha Brdhmana , translated by J. Eggeling. Vols. xii, xxvi, xli, xliii, xliv.

The Upani shads, translated by F. Max Muller. Vols. i and xv.

The Lows of Manu, translated by G. Biihler. Vol. xxv.

The Vedantasiitras , with the commentary of Sankaracharya. translated by G. Thibaut. Vols. xxxiv and xxxviii.

The Vedantasiitras, with the commentary of Ramanuja, translated by G. Thibaut. Vol. xlviii.

FOLLOWING TRANSLATIONS :

ABBREVIATIONS USED

Ait. Br.

A. V.

B. G.

Br.

Brih. Up.

Chhand. Up.

E. R. E.

Hath. Up.

Kaush. Up.

Mait. Up.

Mund. Up.

R. V.

S. B. E.

Sat. Br.

Svet. Up.

Taitt. Up Up.

Aitareya Brdhmana.

Atharvaveda.

B hagai 'adglta.

Brdhmana.

Brihadaranyka Upanishad.

Chhandogya Upanishad.

Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

Kathaka Upanishad.

Kaushitaki Upanishad.

Maitrayana Upanishati.

Mundaka Upanishad.

Rigi'eda.

Sacred Books of the East.

Satapatha Brdhmana.

Svetasvatara Upanishad.

Taittiriya Upanishad.

Upanishad.

Chapter I

It has become a commonplace to say that no great event or movement can be any longer of merely local importance. The world seems smaller now than it did to our forefathers. Humanity is like one great family whose members, in spite of estrangements and aversions, live their life in common, each influenced by each. Not even the most ignorant can identify civilization with Christendom. The great powers of the world include not only America and those that once made up the ‘ Concert of Europe’, but also the non-Christian empire of Japan. East and West, if they have not ‘ met ’, are yet far nearer to each other than before. Indian students will often know their Shakespeare and their Tennyson better than those in English colleges. An Indian poet like Rabindranath Tagore receives from the West the homage of all those who can appreciate noble emotion and exquisite expression. Science also is international. It is clear to-day that whatever is ultimately true must be universally valid.

It is not easy in this modern world for any one religion to claim for itself finality. Nowhere is such a claim more resented than in India. The culture of the East and of the West has here mingled as nowhere else, and the problems of religion are being discussed with an interest, not academic, but vital. Any one familiar to some extent with the writings of the early fathers of the Church will feel, if he lives in India, that he is living in a world surprisingly like theirs. Such books as Harnack’s Expansion of Christianity, or Glover’s

B

Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire , would, mutatis mutandis, serve, far better than any missionary reports, to describe the religious situation in India to-day. It was in its strife with Greek and Oriental religion and philosophy that Christian theology was chiefly formed. It is in its contact with Indian thought that Christianity has, as nowhere else in the non-Christian world, to face the most incisive criticism and is driven to answer the hardest questions. And of these questions none is so much discussed as that of the relative value and validity of religions, or. to put it in its more concrete form, ‘ What right has Christianity to claim to be the absolute religion ? Why is it not content to be one religion among many ? ’

I

Such -a question would have had little meaning to the pioneers of Protestant missionary enterprise. They had felt for themselves God’s infinite grace in Jesus Christ, and were assured that Christ was the world’s only Saviour. Without this faith, missionary work would not have been begun ; nor can it continue. But such men were of necessity little qualified to look for the best in the non-Christian world to which they went. Their theology was that of their time, deep but not broad. Very literally they believed that the world lay in the evil one. So in India they saw' only gross idolatry and superstition. For this they cannot well be blamed. Missionaries reflect ahvays the theology of the Church which sends them. It is unreasonable to expect them to be other than men of their own time and Church. And if we could suppose that the most tolerant and refined of modern students had been a pioneer missionary, it is not certain that he would have been more successful in discovering the best in Hindu religion. Its Sacred Books were closed to the stranger and little known to the mass of the people. Just as Christianity at the first had its hardest fight not with gross idolatry but w'ith a paganism which Christian influences had refined, so we to-day are confronted with a Hinduism very different in its emphasis from that of a century or so ago. So competent an observer as Abbe Dubois bears witness to the religious degradation of the people. Then as now men spoke much of Krishna ; but the Krishna men spoke of then was not the ideal Krishna of the Bhagavadgita , but the gross and foolish Krishna of the Bhdgavata Pnrana } In such a Hinduism it was hard to see anything but an idolatry degrading and often obscene.2 It was impossible for foreigners to discern the higher elements of Hinduism when these were unknown to the immense majority of the Hindus of that time. Even to-day in India it is the lower forms of religion that are most in evidence, and ‘ Higher Hinduism ’ is still far more limited in its influence than would be supposed by Europeans whose knowledge of Hinduism is derived from Max Muller’s lectures and a few choice anthologies.

It is with this ‘Higher Hinduism’ that we are chiefly concerned. Idolatry is doomed. True, the excuses provided for it by Theosophy may be utilized by educated men who find it convenient to have the superstitions of their women-folk defended by a pseudo-science. But such men will speak as little of idolatry as possible, and seem to know that their defence of it is clever but not convincing. One great modern

1 I can find no reference to the Gita in Dubois’s text. The word occurs once in the index of the third edition, but it refers there to a note by the modern editor (Abbe J. A. Dubois, Hindu Manners , Customs, and Ceremonies).

2 Compare the following sentence of the prayer uttered by Schwartz at the dedication of his church in Trichinopoly in 1766 — a prayer now inscribed on a marble tablet there. ‘When strangers who do not know Thy name hear of all Thy glorious doctrines and methods of worshipping Thee preached in this house, incline, oh mercifully incline, their hearts to renounce their abominable idolatry and worship Thee, O God, in the name of Christ.’ We would not so describe idolatry to-day, yet any one who knows the obscene carving at the neighbouring Vaishnavite temple of Srlrangam or has been to Tanjore, the other sphere of Schwartz’s labours, and seen on the gopuram at the entrance of the Saivite temple there, the powerful sculpture of Krishna with the (very) naked Gopis, and seen too in the cloister the 108 lingas conjoined with yonis before which worship is made, will understand Schwartz’s adjective, however much he may deplore it.

B 2 movement, the Arya-Samaj, denounces the worship of idols uncompromisingly, and denies that it ever formed part of true and primitive Hinduism. Yet this does not mean that there is a greater responsiveness to Christianity. On the contrary, the opposition offered to Christianity is more determined and articulate than it was a generation ago, and no section of Hinduism is more hostile to Christianity than the monotheistic Arya-Samaj. Men are not so content as once they were merely to claim that Hinduism is best for India although Christianity may be intrinsically superior.1 The rediscovery of the Sacred Books and their enthusiastic praise by Western scholars, have brought a new confidence and pride to men who had become bankrupt of hope. Why should the East despise what the West seemed so highly to value ? Many educated Indians are as convinced as any Hegelian that religion is only a symbol of the truth that philosophy alone can teach. Christianity is an admirable religion. Its moral code is beautiful, if impracticable, but philosophy is the supreme thing, and Hinduism has in the Vedanta the one philosophy finally true and adequate for the interpretation of the eternal. Even the moral supremacy of Christianity can no longer be spoken of as a truism. Men are aware that not all in England are Sahibs. The ‘ slums ’ there, the social vice and misery, are familiar facts. The victory of Japan did much to rehabilitate Oriental self-respect. Now, on the gigantic scale of a world war, Indians have seen not only the failure of Christianity to preserve Christendom from war, but its failure to keep war free from needless cruelty and lust. And Indians can point with pride to the equal comradeship of their troops with British on the field of battle and their proved discipline and valour.2

1 Dr. Farquhar, that most competent of observers, dates from 1870 what he calls ‘the full defence of the old religions’, and from 1895 the reinforcement of this defence by ‘ religious nationalism ’. Modern Religions Movements in India , chapters 4 and 5.

1 Before it was announced that Indian troops would go to the main theatre of war, I found my Hindu friends loyal but not enthusiastic. Afterwards they were proud and eager.

D

Even the influence of Christ’s teaching has in many cases militated against the belief in the supremacy of any one religion. Men, who themselves observe caste, and approve of the outcaste being kept in his degradation, often understand enough of Christianity to appreciate itsdoctrines of man’sessentialequality and God’s universal Fatherhood. Such men realize how unchristian is any feeling of racial superiority, and on this account also object to the assumption that the religion of the Westerners must be the best.

To a people thus sensitive and self-conscious, the claim that Christianity is the absolute religion seems often simply a piece of Western arrogance. And such resentment is largely^ justified. The missionary enterprise has used too much the language of warfare. There is a war we are called to fight with relentless zeal, but that is the war between good and evil, between truth and falsehood. We may not equate our empirical Christianity with goodness and truth. Still less can we identify Hinduism with evil and falsehood. And in using the terminology of warfare we may easily adopt war’s ethics. It is well-nigh impossible for a nation at war to appreciate the virtues of its enemy. It looks for the worst and discovers it. If a missionary is a soldier in this sense, he will see only the darker aspects of Hinduism, and he will make the Christianity for which he strives appear as an alien and hostile faith, and such a man will be regarded, not as the bearer of good tidings, but as the enemy of all that men prize, of things good, as well as evil.

In South India the very success of missions has increased the estrangement. The great mass movements have been chiefly among the outcastes. For such, religion meant devilworship, and Hinduism the system which sanctioned their degradation, and denied to them the elementary rights of manhood. A locomotive is an admirable thing, but the man pinioned beneath its wheels will not be thinking of the beauty of its mechanism. It is not surprising if those whom Hinduism has thus treated should regard the very phrase ' Higher

Hinduism ’ as an oxymoron. With no tradition from the East, they have grasped eagerly at the culture of the West. Prevented often by caste from becoming artisans, many have found in English education the effective means of social advancement. It is scarcely to be wondered at if many such outwestern any Westerners. There are Christian teachers whose illustrations are nearly all from English life, and who can scarcely preach a sermon without introducing English words. Christians themselves are often as incredulous as Hindus that Christianity will ever supersede Hinduism.1 And in our great Christian communities even men of university education are often almost incredibly ignorant and indifferent in their attitude to Hinduism.

t

It is just here that there seems to be the great contrast between the Church in India and the Church in the times of the Roman Empire. It is true that Tertullian in his fierce exuberant way denounces all philosophy. ‘ What has Athens to do with Jerusalem or the Academy with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians?. . . Away with all who attempt to introduce a mottled Christianity of Stoicism and Platonism and dialectic. . . . To be ignorant of everything outside the rule of faith, is to possess all knowledge.’ 2 Yet Tertullian was not himself thus ignorant. The very invective of his words derives its power from the training he had received in pagan rhetoric. Our Christian theology owes most to the great Greek fathers, and these were men who knew and utilized the philosophy and literature of Greece. Thus, in his Address to the Greeks , Clement of Alexandria denounces, indeed with needed severity, the immorality of many of the tales told of the gods, yet he appeals with admiration to the poets of antiquity, and summons Hesiod, Aeschylus, and

1 I have heard Christians of high character and incontestable Christian experience speak a^ if no man became a convert unless there was persecution to evade, or education to gain. On the other hand, there are in the Indian Church man)’ men whose conversion was as costly as St. Paul’s and whose zeal is as wholehearted.

2 De firacscr. vii.

Sophocles, as witnesses to the One God.1 In discussing the benefits conferred on men by Christ he can quote as freely from Homer and Aratus as from the Psalms.2 And in another book, he declares that the philosophy of the Greeks was a covenant given to them as a stepping-stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ." And in this the Greek fathers were only doing as Paul had done. In writing to Greek Churches, Paul uses freely the categories of Greek thought. He is courteous when addressing Pagans. Even at Ephesus, where idolatry was so rife and so degraded, the ‘ Town Clerk ’ can claim that neither in action nor in language has Paul failed in respect towards the many-breasted Artemis, the guardian goddess of the city.4 Such a testimony could increasingly be given to the Christian preacher in India. Yet it is possible, while refraining from all discourtesy to other religions, still to fail to recognize in them any good. Even to-day there are too many who forget God’s universal Fatherhood and speak as if, outside Christendom, men were completely orphaned of the Father’s care. Truer to the spirit of Christ is this legend of Him. Outside the gate of a city lay rotting the carcass of a dead dog. And as men passed by they turned away in disgust from the loathesomeness of the decaying flesh. But when Jesus saw it, He said, ‘ Pearls are not whiter than its teeth.’ Even in the corruption He saw the one thing beautiful. To those that have learnt from Him, the humblest record of religion may become sacred as a transcript of human experience, pathetic often in its failure, yet sublime in its prescience of a higher truth. And in the case of a religion so rich as Hinduism is with the devotion and the speculates of the past, blind indeed must that man be who can see in it only the record of perversity and folly.

1 To the Greeks, vii. 2 Op. cit. xi. 3 Stromata, vi. 8.

4 As showing the practice of a later age, it is interesting to note Chrysostom’s comment that this was a false statement made to calm the riot. Rut the Clerk was clearly appealing to well-known facts. See Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen, pp. 146-57.

II

The intolerance which refuses to recognize in other religions any truth is a folly commoner among Christians than Hindus. The question ‘ Is any religion final? ’ which, as we have seen, has offended many Christians because it assumes that there is more than one genuine religion, offends many Hindus because it appears to presuppose that one religion can claim supremacy over others. Very common among Hindus is the attitude : all religions are alike true ; let each man abide in the religious community in which he was born. The popularity of this position is sometimes due to its very great convenience. In the West, men indifferent to religion speak little of it. In India, even a College Debating Society will find in religion its most exciting theme. But in the East, as in the West, there are but few who are willing to seek truth at all costs and obey it. If all religions are true, there is clearly no certainty in religious truth. We may continue to exercise our wits upon it, but the one reality is this present life and its prosperity. We can well be content to live

‘ With ghastly smooth life dead at heart,

Tame in earth’s paddock as our prize ’-1

If the position is thus held by men whose genial tolerance is only a cloak for their intellectual indolence or moral superficiality, it is also the position of men to whom religion is life’s chief concern.

Ramakrishna declares that a truly religious man should think that other religions also are paths leading to the truth. Every man, therefore, should follow his own religion. A

1 Dr. Glovers description of Plutarch applies to many in India to-day : ‘ He will never take a firm stand ; there are always possibilities, explanations, parallels, suggestions, symbolisms, by which he can escape from facing definitely the demand for a decisive reform of religion.’ There is ‘ a radiant mist of amiability ’ in which ‘ the old myths seem capable of ever)' conceivable interpretation and everything is a symbol of everything else and all is beautiful and holy’. — The Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire , p. Iio.

Christian should follow Christianity, a Muhammadan should follow Muhammadanism, and so forth. For the Hindus the ancient path, the path of the Aryan Rishis, is the best. In Dr. Farquhar’s recent book there is reproduced a picture, painted at the order of one of Ramak Alina’s disciples, to represent his master’s Ve&vs. In the background are a Christian church, a Muhammadan mosque, and a Hincfu temple. Before thechurch is seen Ramakrishna, pointing out to Keshab Chandra Sen, the religious leaders in front of the mosque and temple. In the centre of -the picture is depicted Christ and Chaitanya,1 engaged in a religious dance. Round about stand a Confucian, a Muhammadan, a Sikh, a Parsee, an Anglican clergyman, and various Hindus, each carrying some symbol of his faith.2

Doubtless God is one, and doubtleSs He receives all honest worship to whomsoever it is addressed. But is such catholicity as Ramakrishna’s true to fact ? ’Can religion be thus independent of its objects? Thus Ramdkrishna himself worshipped an image of Kali as the Mother of the Universe, and believed in his enthusiasm that it took food from his hand. When later he desired to experience the ecstasy of Krishna’s love, he put on woman’s clothes, lived in the women’s part of the house, spoke in a woman’s voice, until at last, as Radha, Krishna’s paramour, in a trance he saw standing before him the Krishna he so passionately loved. Surely we cannot say that it makes no difference whether men see God in the dreaded Kali or in the holy Christ. A devotion to Krishna which is the ecstasy of human passion in its moment of breathless abandonment, is not the same as that quiet constant faith in Christ which means repentance, forgiveness, and a new moral ideal and power. The truly religious man will recognize and appreciate in other religions, sincerity and zeal, but, when we remember how diverse religions are, to say that all religions are alike true is impossible, unless we hold that all religions are alike false, or regard God as so unknown that it simply does not matter how

1 A Bengali religious leader of the sixteenth century.

- Modern Religious Moment ents in Itidia, pp. 1 98 and 1 99.

IO we think of Him.1 Truth after all is not a mere question of geography. Humanity is one. In religion svadeshiism is out of place. We may try to ignore religion, but its problems will not be evaded. Sooner or later, when religions meet, we are forced back yet once again to the question, Is any religion of final value? Is Christianity, for example, the absolute religion, and if so, in what sense?

Ill

As we turn to the books of the New Testament, this much at least seems clear. From its inception Christianity was proclaimed as a religion of universal significance. The Gospel is essentially a missionary message, and ‘ missions are a brutality unless undertaken with the consciousness that Christianity transcends other religions, and with the knowledge in what respects it does so \2 The Apostolic Church saw in its crucified and risen Lord not a local and temporary teacher, but the Saviour of the world. Even those who, like Harnack, for reasons which to many of us seem arbitrary and inconclusive, deny that Christ bade His disciples preach the Gospel

1 Here again Christianity is facing in India to-day the same situation as it faced in the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. Thus Dr. Lindsay’s description of Neo-Platonism would apply almost without change to the attitude of many educated Hindus. ‘If the universe of things seen and unseen be an emanation from Absolute Being, the Primal Cause of all things, the fountain from which all existence flows, and the haven to which everything that has reality in it will return when its cycle is complete, then every heathen deity has its place in this flow of existence. Its cult, however crude, is an obscure witness to the presence of the intuition of the supernatural. The legends which have gathered round its name, if only rightly understood, are mystic revelations of the divine which permeates all things.’ . . . ‘ The “ common man ” was not asked to forsake the deities he was wont to reverence.’ . . . ‘ The very conjurer was encouraged to cultivate his magic. Pantheism, that wonder child of thought and of the phantasy, included all within the wide sweep of its sheltering arms and made them feel the claim of a common kinship.’ . . . Porphyry ‘ was too noble a man not to sympathize with much in Christianity,’ but ‘ its claim to be the one religion, its exclusiveness, was hateful to him.’ — The Cambridge Mediaes'al History , vol. i, p. 94.

2 M.Reischle, in his suggestive book on T/teologieicndReligionsgescJiichte, P- 78.

ii

to the Gentiles, admit ‘that by His universal religion, which at the same time was the religion of the Son V Christ bids men come unto Him as unto one who has a perfect and certain knowledge of the Father. He presents Himself to men, and has from the first been preached by His disciples as the sole sufficient Saviour.

How can such a claim be substantiated ? Fortunately Christian scholars have by now abandoned the attempt to give ‘proofs’ of Christianity which shall be convincing to the intellect.1 2 The sciences of which mathematics is the supreme example may be studied objectively. The solutions of their problems depend not on character but on intellect. But our answers to the perennial questions of philosophy and religion depend less on our mental alertness than our moral choice. Our judgements become inevitably judgements of ‘value’: indications of what we regard as good. And it is in this way that in recent years the truth of Christianity has been very suggestively indicated. The moral self — the practical reason of Kant’s philosophy — demands for its highest good a faith in God, and an ideal for life at once personal and social. But this ‘ highest good ’ we cannot find in the world-life around us. From it we cannot gather inner peace nor power. By ‘ the inner dialectic of faith ’ 3 we are led to look for this good in history, and we find just what we need in the kingdom of God — that spiritual realm into which Christ calls men, where men know God as Father, and strive to do His will in the world with the obedience of subjects and the glad freedom of children.

1 Expansion of Christianity , i. 48.

2 The old ‘ proof’ from miracle would be almost ludicrously inappropriate in India. In the West the ‘ proof’ has been abandoned because, through the influence of science, miracles for many do not support faith but require it. In many-fabled India the ‘proof’ must always have been useless because to believe in miracles is so easy. College students assure me they have seen them. Even to ask the meaning of the name of a village or hill, will often be to hear of a miracle so portentous that the Gospel miracles seem ordinary events.

3 J. Kaftan, Die Wahrheit der Religion (p. 550), the classic statement of this proof.

Such an apologetic is full of suggestiveness. It is certainly right in its abandonment of any attempt to * prove’ Christianity intellectually, but is it right in assuming that by the moral reason a common idea may be realized ? Does this ‘ highest good ’ appeal to all men as the highest ? Thus in India ethics has always been less esteemed than metaphysics, and the highest good has been conceived not as moral activity, but as absorption into the infinite. Only if its moral ideal is recreated will India see in Christ’s proclamation of the kingdom its highest good. Yet the apologetic is so far true and useful. If Christianity be the final religion, then it must be able not only to reveal new moral needs, but to satisfy all worthy aspiration in itself. History, if it cannot prove, can disprove. Though the claim of Christianity to be the final religion cannot be proved bythe history of religion, yet, if true, it will be congruous with its data.