CHAPTER VII
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MOVEMENTS
I. The most prominent characteristic of the long series of religious movements we have dealt with is the steady advance of the ancient faiths. The earlier organizations were very radical indeed in the treatment they proposed for the troubles of the time, and adopted great masses of Christian thought and practice. But as the years passed, men found courage to defend an ever larger amount of the old theology, until a number undertook to prove every scrap of the ancient structure good. Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism each leaped up into new vigorous activity, every prominent sect experiencing a mysterious awakening. Finally, under the impulse of national feeling, the tables were completely turned: not only the religions but everything Oriental was glorified as spiritual and ennobling, while everything Western received condemnation as hideously materialistic and degrading. An immense quantity of literature pours from the press, and considerable sums of money are subscribed for defence purposes, above all for sectarian education.
Hence the Hindu, the Jain, the Buddhist, the Parsee and the Muslim are to-day filled with overflowing confidence each in his own religion; a confidence which tends to be hostile to spiritual life as well as to a reasonable estimate of the old faiths. Many a man has a pride in his tone, and shews an arrogance towards outsiders, which are scarcely characteristic of health, whether religious or intellectual. The Modern Review, perhaps the best and most representative of the monthlies at present, frequently contains a good deal of bombast; and the youthful graduates who speak and write on Hinduism have usually far too much of Vivekānanda’s swagger about them. Hundreds of men of the student class, under Dayānanda’s influence, believe that the ancient Hindus were as far advanced in the natural sciences1 as modern Europeans are, and that they had invented not only firearms and locomotives but telegraphs and aeroplanes as well.
Yet the arrival of the new spirit was necessary for the health of the country. The long decades during which not only the European but the cultured Hindu looked down upon the religion, philosophy and art of India effectually opened the door to the influence of the West, without which the Awakening would have been impossible; but they as effectually depressed the Indian spirit to a point at which the doing of the best work was impossible. Hence the return of self-respect was sorely needed; and that has come since the twentieth century opened.
II. But there is another aspect of the situation which requires to be clearly realized. The triumphant revival of the old religions, with their growing body-guard of defence organizations, has been accompanied by continuous and steadily increasing inner decay. This most significant of all facts in the history of these movements seems to be scarcely perceived by the leaders. They believe that the danger is past. This blindness arises largely from the fact that they draw their apologetic and their inspiration almost entirely from Rāmakṛishṇa, Vivekānanda, Sister Niveditā, Dayānanda and Mrs. Besant; and it is clear that neither capable thinking nor clear-eyed perception can be bred on such teaching as theirs.
We shall here attempt only a very brief statement of the evidence for this inner decay in the case of Hinduism. While the apologists have been busy building their defences these last forty years, Western influence has been steadily moulding the educated Hindu mind and rendering it altogether incapable of holding the ideas which form the foundation of the religion. Hence we have many defences of idolatry but no faith in it. In spite of all that has been said in favour of the Hindu family, no educated Hindu has found any religious basis for pre-puberty marriage, for widow-celibacy, for polygamy, for the zenāna. The modern man simply cannot believe that his dead father’s spirit comes and eats the rice-cake offered at the śrāddha, far less that his place in heaven is dependent on it. Much has been said to make caste seem a most reasonable form of social organization; yet thinking Hindus no longer hold that which is the foundation of the system, the doctrine that each man’s caste is an infallible index of the stage of spiritual progress his soul has reached in its transmigrational journey. The Depressed Classes Mission is clear proof that Hindus no longer believe that the Outcaste is a soul whose past record is so foul that physical contact with him is spiritually dangerous to the caste Hindu. What student believes that that is true of the European Principal and Professors of his college? Yet, if these things are incredible, caste has no religious basis left. Then the Vedic Schools are dying. Asceticism is clearly dying. The great Śaṅkarāchārya founded four monasteries, at Śṛiṅgeri in Mysore, at Dvārikā in Kathiawar, at Badrinārāyaṇa in the Himalayas, and at Puri. In February last, at Rajkot, Kathiawar, I had a personal interview with the Śaṅkara who is the head of the Dvārikā monastery. Instead of a fine company of intelligent men studying the Vedānta, he has only some half a dozen boys of six or seven years of age as his disciples. They came marching into the verandah where we were seated, each little fellow dressed in a rough brown blanket and carrying the wand of a brahmachārī, and saluted the āchārya. He also informed me that the Badrinārāyaṇa monastery is now extinct.¹
III. The causes which have combined to create the movements are many. The stimulating forces are almost exclusively Western, viz. the British Government, English education and literature, Christianity, Oriental research, European science and philosophy, and the material elements of Western civilization; but the beliefs and the organization of the ancient faiths have been moulding forces of great potency. The Ārya Samāj is an interesting example of the interaction of rationalism and modern inventions with belief in transmigration and the inerrancy of the Vedic hymns. The Deva Samāj shews us Western evolutionary science in unstable combination with Hindu guru-worship. Theosophy is a new Gnosticism which owes its knowledge to Western Orientalists but takes its principles from Buddhism and its fireworks from occultism.
IV. While the shaping forces at work in the movements have been many, it is quite clear that Christianity has ruled the development throughout. Christianity has been, as it were, a great searchlight flung across the expanse of the religions; and in its blaze all the coarse, unclean and superstitious elements of the old faiths stood out, quite early, in painful vividness. India shuddered; and the earlier movements were the response to the revelation. But the same light which exposed all the grossness gradually enabled men to distinguish the nobler and more spiritual elements of the religions. Consequently the Hindu, the Jain, the Parsee and the Muḥammadan set these in the foreground, crushed out the worst as far as possible, and sought to build up fresh organizations which should be able to bear the searching glare continually flung on them by the great Intruder from the West. Hence, while most of the material used in the reconstruction is old, Christian principles have guided the builders. In every case the attempt is made to come up to Christian requirements. Frequently the outcome is extremely slender; yet the purpose can be seen. Christianity has been the norm; and no part of the most orthodox movement is fully comprehensible except when seen from the Christian point of view.
Christianity has made men feel that the only possible religion is monotheism. The Brāhma, Prārthanā and Ārya Samājes declare themselves as truly monotheistic as Christianity. Parsees and Muḥammadans make the same claim. All the Řaiva and Vaishṇava sects, and also the Sikhs, urge that they are true monotheists; yet their teaching recognizes the existence of all the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Various forms of pantheism (for example, Theosophy, and the systems taught by Rāmakṛishṇa, the Rādhā Soāmġs and the Smārtas of the South) demand recognition as monotheistic, on the ground that monotheism and pantheism should be reckoned as synonyms.¹ Why should theological terms be used with pedantic strictness? Finally, even in the case of atheistic forms of thought (for example, Jainism, the Buddhism of Ceylon and the teaching of the Deva Samāj) the vogue of monotheism is clear. People shrink from the word atheist. Individual Jains and Deva Samājists will affirm that all they mean is that they cannot see the necessity for a Creator; while in Ceylon theistic phraseology is very common in all revival literature.
When this idea of the one spiritual God is held intelligently, it necessarily excludes polytheism, mythology, idolatry and man-worship. Face to face with this powerful conception, the modern religious movements of India fall into three groups. The first of these contains the Brāhma, Prārthanā and Ārya Samājes. All these have been so deeply influenced by the idea that they hold it in comparative purity, and, along with the Parsees and the Muḥammadans, summon all men to give up these degrading superstitions. Next come the Rādhā Soāmis, the Chet Rāmīs, and the members of the Deva Samāj, who, though they have given up polytheism and mythology, have succumbed to man-worship, and will doubtless be led on by it to idolatry. In the case of nearly all the other movements, there is a desire to remain orthodox : so that polytheism, mythology, idols and guru-worship are all retained. Yet the effect of Christian criticism is very noticeable. In most of the groups guru-worship, at least in its most degrading aspects, is carefully concealed. The modern thinking man is ashamed of it. Vivekānanda and his fellow-disciples worshipped Rāmakṛishṇa, but Christian influence led them to minimize it : “We offer him worship bordering on divine worship.” In the case of idols, the need of an apologetic is seriously felt, and numerous attempts have been made to reach a reasonable defence, attempts about as successful as Aaron’s explanation of how the golden calf came into existence. No thinking man to-day can accept a phallic symbol as a worthy representation of the God of the whole earth ; so Vivekānanda asserted, without a vestige of evidence, that the liṅga is no phallus but a model of a sacred hill. The most pitiful allegorizations are put forward as defences of the mythology. In every case the apologetic confesses, in form, if not in words, that it is the Christian spirit which has to be faced.
436 MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN INDIA
The Christian doctrine that God is the Father of men and that every man is a child of God, with its corollary, that all men are brothers, is accepted with practical unanimity in all the movements. In the Brahma and Prārthana Samājes, and by Sivanarayana, these doctrines are seriously accepted and made the basis of a new life. But the force and pervasiveness of the teaching are seen still more clearly in the fact that in the case of all the other movements (with the exception of those which deny the existence of God) the doctrine is accepted and taught, even though other parts of the theology are radically inconsistent with it. The Saiva and Vaishnava sects claim the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man as Hindu doctrines, and yet hold hard by the Hindu doctrine of the essential inferiority of woman and the Caste system with its inhuman laws for Outcasies and Mlecchas. Theosophists, Rādhā Soāmis and Smartas, though they make the Supreme impersonal and unknowable, yet find themselves driven to call Him the Heavenly Father. The Christian doctrine of the love of God, which is a necessary element in the Fatherhood, passed into the teaching of the Brahma and Prārthana Samājes, and has deeply influenced most of the other movements. It has led to increased emphasis being laid on the doctrine of bhakti. The belief, that all men, as children of God, are brothers, and that morality may be summed up in the word brotherliness, has also worked wonders. Here is the secret of the strange fact that men who still hold by the doctrine of transmigration and karma feel increasingly that caste is wrong, and are being gradually driven, by their consciences, first to acknowledge that the untouchable Outcastes are their brothers, and then, more slowly and reluctantly, to receive them as such. The same belief has given Indians a truer idea of the value of the human personality and shows itself in the convic-tion that an Indian of any class is as great and valuable as a European, and in the new attitude to women and children. This fresh way of looking at every human being is implied in all the activities of the new Nationalism. Another implicate of the Fatherhood has made a tremendous impression. Every modern religious movement in India calls itself the religion for all men. What a striking result this is in India becomes clear only when one recollects what an extremely exclusive religion orthodox Hinduism is. Yet even the superlatively orthodox Bhārata Dharma Mahāmaṇḍala makes the claim of universalism, and offers to sell to any one the books which, according to Hindu law, must be seen by no woman and by no man outside the three twice-born castes. How is it that no such claim was ever made until Christianity appeared on the scene? On the basis of human brotherhood Christ insists vehemently on the duty of kindly philanthropic service, and no part of His teaching has produced larger results in India. Feeble attempts are made here and there to trace the teaching to Hinduism; but all well-informed men recognize that it was introduced into India by Christian missions. This mighty force shews itself in every element of the social reform movement, but above all things in what Christians have done for the Outcastes, and in the rise of the movement among Hindus.
The righteousness of God, as taught by Jesus, has also exercised a profound influence. The conception necessarily involves the Christian ideas of repentance, forgiveness, the transformation of character, the holy life and the passion for saving men. All these in their fulness were adopted by Keshab Chandra Sen; those who follow him, both in Bengal and Bombay, still preach them; and most of them may be traced in the exquisite cadences of Gitanjali. In all the other movements there has been a serious clinging to the conceptions of the old religion. Yet, modern men could not but seek to get rid of the filth, superstition and corruption revealed by the searchlight of Christ. Many of these things are exposed in the writings of Ram Mohan Ray, of Śivanārāyaṇa and of Dayānanda. There has been a serious attempt, on the part of the orthodox, to destroy, to drive underground or to deny the worst features of Left-hand Śāktism, temple-prostitution, temple-miracles, priestly fraud and corruption, and unclean superstition. Even Vivekānanda acknowledges the presence of masses of superstition in Hinduism:
The old ideas may be all superstition, but within these masses of superstition are nuggets of gold and truth.
Mrs. Besant alone has had the courage to defend many of the gross superstitions which the honest Hindu is heartily ashamed of. On the other hand, it is now universally recognized that no religion is worth the name that does not work for spiritual ends and produce men of high and noble character. Hindus lay all the stress nowadays on the best parts of Hinduism, and make as little as possible of law, custom and ritual. There is no movement that does not set the Upanishads and the Gītā in the foreground. So keenly is this felt in Jainism and Islam that, where the laws of the religion are external and old-world, modern apologists tell us that we must follow not the literal commands but the spirit of Jainism, the spirit of Islam; and there is many an orthodox Moulvie in India to-day who denies that the Koran allows slavery, polygamy or the killing of men who refuse to accept Islam. It is very significant that the Deva Samāj and Madame Blavatsky unite in proclaiming to the world how many hardened criminals their particular doctrine has saved.¹
- Christianity insists that the worship of God must be spiritual, and therefore that animal and vegetarian sacrifices, ceremonial bathing, pilgrimage and self-torture ought to be given up. For the same reason worship ought to be conducted in the vernacular, so that it may be understood by the people; otherwise it has little or no value for them. The Brāhma, Prārthanā and Ārya Samājes have responded very fully to these ideals; and the Rādhā Soāmi Satsaṅg, the Deva Samāj and Śivanārāyaṇa have not fallen far short of them. A sort of simple non-conformist service in the vernacular has been the norm for all these bodies. Sacrifice, pilgrimage and ceremonial bathing have been completely given up. The spirituality of true worship also finds powerful expression in Gitanjali. The conviction that prayer ought to be in the vernacular has led to fresh proposals among both Parsees and Muslims, although little result has followed. There have been a few attempts made to transform sacrifice to spiritual uses. Thus Keshab allegorized the homa sacrifice and the ceremonial waving of lights, called Āratī. In the Ārya Samāj and in the teaching of Śivanārāyaṇa we find fire-sacrifice retained, not as part of the worship of God but as a means of purifying the air! The other movements cling to old Hindu worship practically without change; but cultured men are more than half ashamed of it; the defences offered are very half-hearted; and the details are frequently condemned by individuals.
The Christian contention that sacred books can be of no value, unless they are understood by the people, has led all the movements, Jain, Sikh, Parsee and Muslim, as well as Hindu, to produce translations of the sacred books they use and to write all fresh books in the vernaculars.
- The Christian doctrine of the Person of Christ has been adopted in a modified form in a number of the movements. Keshab Chandra Sen is the most noteworthy instance; but, besides him, we note, in the Hindu sphere, the Chet Rāmīs and the Īsāmoshipanthīs, and among Muhammadans, the Ahmadīyas and the Nazarenes.
But much more important than these cases of direct acceptance of certain aspects of the Person of Christ is the indirect influence the doctrine has exerted. The most striking case of all is the prophecy of the Coming Christ which has caused such an upheaval in Theosophy. Next in importance is the increased emphasis laid during recent years on the Vishnuite doctrine of divine incarnations, and the altered form it has taken. The old animal incarnations are dropped out of sight, and all the stress is laid on Rāma and Krishṇa, above all on Krishṇa. The reason for his prominence is to be found in his place in the Gītā. Krishṇa and the Gītā can thus be put forward as a satisfactory Hindu substitute for Christ and the Gospels. Hence, in order to make it possible to place Krishṇa on an equality with Christ, numerous attempts have been made to whitewash his character as it is represented in the Epic and the Purāṇas, and many books have been written to prove the historicity of his life as it appears in the Mahābhārata. A similar motive led a Calcutta Hindu to publish a little devotional volume called The Imitation of Shri Krishna. It is worth noting also that the Rādhā Soāmīs call their Sant Satguru the Son of God.
The most characteristic and vital of all Hindu doctrines is transmigration and karma. It is also more anti-Christian than any other aspect of the religion; for it involves not only the theory that each individual passes through many lives and deaths, but also the doctrines that a man’s place in society is an infallible index of the stage of soul-progress he has reached; that the suffering he undergoes is strictly equivalent to his past sins; that women are born women because of former sin, and widows are widowed for the same reason; that to seek to ameliorate the social condition of an individual or a tribe is futile, since the exact amount of the misery or happiness each man will suffer or enjoy is inevitably fixed by his karma; that Caste is the only right form of society, because social grades are divinely proportioned to human desert; that divine forgiveness is impossible; and that, since God stands apart from karma, He is necessarily actionless. So powerful and pervasive is the doctrine that there is scarcely a part of the religion that has not been modified by it. How potent then has Christianity been in controlling the religious thought of the past century! The doctrine has been expelled completely from the teaching of the Brāhma and Prārthanā Samājes; and everywhere else it has been deeply wounded. Every aspect of the social reform movement is a direct attack upon it; and indeed each of the social implications of the doctrine is rapidly losing its hold. Men revere the doctrine to-day but do not understand it. To them it is merely an explanation of the inequalities of life; but no educated Hindu is ready to follow even that line to the end.
In all the movements we trace a strong desire that their leaders should be like missionaries, that their priests and teachers should be men of training, of high moral character and spiritual power. Each body desires to give its teachers a modern training in theology, so that they may be able to teach the people and to defend the system from outside attack. The great majority of sādhus, priests and gurus are recognized as being worse than useless. Apart from the Brāhma and Prārthanā Samājes, very few of the movements have been able to secure trained leaders. One hears everywhere that there is great difficulty in getting good preachers. All the clever young men want to enter secular employment. The sectarian movements have organized examinations and offered prizes to stimulate study; while the Parsees, the Jains and the Muḥammadans are making serious attempts to organize modern systems of theological training.
A peculiarly arresting proof that Christianity has ruled the whole religious development of the last century is to be found in the Social Reform Movement. From beginning to end the ideas that have led to reform have been purely Christian, and have had to win their way in face of the deepest conceptions of Hindu theology and social organization. Buddhist and Jain teaching are quite as hostile, and Islam also, in most cases. All this shines out so conspicuously in our sixth chapter that we need say no more here.
The dominance of Christianity in the religious development of the last hundred years may be clearly seen in this that, almost without exception, the methods of work in use in the movements have been borrowed from missions. This is the more noticeable since India, in the past, had the genius to produce a series of methods of religious propaganda unmatched in the history of the world.
The schools of the priests, which at quite an early date were thrown open to the three twice-born castes, is the first method of Hinduism. In them arose most of the greatest literature of the religion; and, for well-nigh three thousand years they dominated the mind of India. When the passion for release from transmigration awakened the early Hindus to philosophic inquiry, there appeared the second method, groups of wandering monks (and nuns also), who practised and taught their respective ascetic theories of release. All the forms of Hindu philosophy were propagated in this way. The same is true of Buddhism and Jainism, except that in these movements monasteries appeared at an early date, and greatly eased the rigours of asceticism. In mediaeval days there appeared the third method, the wandering monk with his commen-tary on the Vedānta-sūtras, challenging to debate any one who had a rival theory of the Vedānta, or a rival philosophy and retiring from time to time to a monastery to study and write. Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja and Madhva are the best examples. The fourth method appeared very early in the Tamil South, an emotional devotee, poet, musician and singer, wandering from shrine to shrine, using only the vernacular, singing and dancing in ecstasy, or swooning away in rapture before the idol which he adored. Rāmānanda was the creator of the fifth method, which proved very successful in North India, the wandering preacher and theologian, fit to meet scholars, but ready to preach to the people in their own tongue, and always ready to put his prayers and meditations into pithy vernacular verse. This type, known as the Bhagat (i.e. the Bhāgavata, the devotee of the Lord, Bhagavān), might be a monk, like Rāmānanda, or a married man, like Nānak or Tulsī Das. Chaitanya was a Brāhman, who had been a brilliant figure in the schools ; but he introduced into the North the ecstatic singing and dancing of the South.
It is very remarkable that no single movement in our days uses these remarkable methods. We have seen no new Sanskrit commentary on the Vedānta-sūtras. No vernacular poet moves from shrine to shrine dancing and singing, followed by crowds of enraptured devotees. Dayānanda and Rāmakrishna were monks ; but in neither case did any organized movement appear until monastic modes of effort had given place to missionary methods. Keshab introduced Chaitanya’s dancing and singing into the Brāhma samāj, but they are of no service to-day as modes of propaganda. Only modern forms of effort are efficient. The occultism of the new Theosophy is the one outstanding method at present in use which is not missionary in origin, and, as far as one can see, it is not Indian either.
On the other hand, every sort of missionary method and organization has been copied. A modern movement belonging to whatever religion is in almost every detail a replica of a mission. Many of the methods are old, having been long in use in Europe and America, but many are quite fresh, developed to meet the peculiar circumstances of modern India. We shall merely give a list of the more notable of the methods copied, and leave readers to carry the inquiry farther themselves. The modes of congregational worship, the educated ministry, preaching, lecturing, pastoral work, prayer meetings, itinerancy, conferences, make the first group. Sunday schools, Bible classes, Young People’s Societies, Bands of Hope, social gatherings and other forms of work for young people make another. The principles and methods of the mission school and college, girls’ schools, boarding schools, hostels, industrial and technical schools, schools for the blind, the deaf and dumb, orphanages, widows’ homes and zenāna visitation, form the educational group. All forms of medical work, and also the Christian leper asylum, have been copied. Work among the Outcastes and the wild tribes is one of the most noticeable of all cases. Literature of every type, in English and the vernaculars, for men, young men, women and children, forms another group. Philanthropy and social service can escape no one’s notice. Every movement has copied the Y. M. C. A., and a few have tried to reproduce the Salvation Army. The very names used by Christians are adopted and used by non-Christians. The whole movement is a Revival; the work is conducted by Hindu, Ārya or Muslim Missionaries; and on many of them the title Reverend is conferred; Vivekānanda organized a mission, and many others have followed him; Gītā Classes are conducted; Prayer Meetings are held; and Young Men’s Hindu (or Ārya, Jain, Muslim, Buddhist) Associations are organized; and the language of the Bible and of Christian prayer is on every lip.
V. After the evidence we have already adduced none need be gathered to show that Christ’s parable of the leaven is proving itself true in India. Sir Narayana Chandavarka of Bombay, in the following words, speaks out what many recognize to-day:
The ideas that lie at the heart of the Gospel of Christ are slowly but surely permeating every part of Hindu society and modifying every phase of Hindu thought.
VI. Every student will notice how remarkably close the parallel is between the revival of the ancient religions of the Roman Empire in the early Christian centuries and these movements in India in our own days. The similarity is far greater than we have been able to bring out in our pages, since our studies run on other lines. A number of the salient points have been already touched on in fugitive papers by different writers; but the subject is well worth working up into a monograph.
Footnotes
P. 116, above. ↩︎