BY T. R. VENKATARAMA. SASTRI, C.I.E.

The volume before us is a collection of addresses by our illustrious countryman, Dr. Sir S. Radhakrishnan.¹ All except the last were delivered to Western audiences and yet they are as full of lessons for the East as for the West. They touch on a variety of topics. They are in the free flowing style which we have learnt to associate with the author’s written and extempore discourses to popular audiences. No student interested in the study of religion and its many phases in the East and in the West should miss or overlook it.

The first topic is comparative religion. Comparative religion is a profitable study. It is not however for all. It is not for the ardent devotee of any one religion. It may interest scientific minds that view religion from outside as a sociological phenomenon. It may even interest deeply religious minds of a certain type. It cannot interest those to whom the final truth is given by their own religion and there can be nothing gained by a study of the various forms in which the religious mind has expressed itself in different parts of the world. That there may be many approaches to truth and that what may be missed in one might have found expression in another will not be allowed by those who rest on final and infallible revelations, to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away.

Those who can allow the value of comparative religion in the interests of religion itself must be able to say to themselves:

‘Truth is one. Truth is infinite and has many facets. Not all of it can be seen in all its bearings by any one of woman born. The age and clime in which a person is born, the country and community to which he belongs and his own inner equipment and calibre set limits to the facets of truth that he can see. Even the mystics who claim to see the Truth, whole and entire, show a variety in their vision. Humility and wisdom alike enforce a due sense of our limitations in the perception of truth.’

This sense and the tolerance of temper which it enforces towards those who differ are not easy to persons who are deeply attached to their own religion as the final expression of religious truth. The thoroughly organised, aggressive, propagandising monotheistic religions have little room for tolerance. They were, in the not very distant past, so anxious to save the souls of men from the hell fires of the next world that they saw nothing wrong in flaying them alive in this. But even in these days when ‘our spiritual good manners’ have been vastly improved, the intolerance is carefully kept out of sight but is not wholly absent. The aggressive propaganda of the past has yielded place to what is described as the sharing of the good message with others less fortunately circumstanced. Occasionally, very occasionally, is impatience allowed to be seen. The desire to uplift the heathen is still there. In their minds it is all giving and no receiving. They have everything to teach and nothing to learn.

Two recent experiences brought it clearly to my mind. In the International Fellowship there was a suggestion, by an Indian Christian secretary, of a ‘federation of religions.’ However imperfectly expressed, the idea was clear that the higher minds of all religions should unite and put forth their combined effort in working for definite ends. The assertion of equality involved in the suggestion and the implication of mutual influence immediately roused opposition. At another concourse of friends, a missionary asserted that there was an idea that all religions at bottom were one and had a common source, but to his mind, speaking wholly impartially, it seemed impossible to sustain it. (It reminded me of the mild ironical satire of Kalidasa in making the dancing master say that it was natural that each man should think highly of his own vidya, but was he in that category when he claimed for dancing a premier place among arts?) But with great urbanity he stopped all controversy by adding that so it seemed to him and it was not his desire to discuss or raise a controversy.

It is possible to maintain that East and West are different in their ways. It is possible to show parallelisms in matters of religion in East and West and maintain that, despite apparent differences, they are essentially alike and under stress of similar circumstances have produced similar conceptions and solutions. It is possible nevertheless to contrast them. Religion in the East largely is the cultivation of inner life. Religion in the West is connected with life in the community, with churches and congregations. Neither statement is intended to be taken as literally and wholly true. But in a tough manner of speaking it is intended to express the idea that the East and the West lay more stress on the individual and the social aspect of religion. For some time, and more vividly since I read this volume, it is increasingly borne in upon me that

‘Blind darkness enter they that do homage to Avidya. Even greater darkness enter they that are attached to Vidya. From Vidya one result flows and from Avidya another. So we hear from the wise who expounded it to us. Whoso knows Vidya and Avidya together, he crosses death by Avidya and wins the immortal by Vidya.’

Vidya is knowledge, the inner realisation of the truth. Avidya is, by contrast, activity. Vidya belongs to the world of the inner spirit. Avidya belongs to the world of action, life in the community. Without Vidya, action lacks informing purpose, and is ill-directed and ineffective. Vidya without action is worse. Action uninspired by true aim may yet achieve something if not very much. Knowledge of true aim can achieve nothing without action under its guidance. Ignorance may have its excuses. Knowledge has responsibility and no excuse for its deficiencies in the ordering of life. Knowledge and action yoked together will win the highest. Apart, they fail of effect.

You close your eyes and try to realise what the ideal means to you. You open your eyes and look at the world around. You do not find it the embodiment of your dream. You speak to the stranger and ask him for his dreams. He explains. You tell yourself that dreamer’s world must be a poor thing at the best, at any rate far inferior to your own. You go into his world and find it is not so bad; in fact it is better in some, in many, respects. The world of the active social worker is not perfect but the world of the pure idealist is even less perfect. With more active endeavour in the one case and with greater insight in the other, far greater results may be reached.

It is possible to have an excess of a good quality or rather it is possible to misapply a good principle. It is possible to have too much patience, too much tolerance. A little impatience, a little intolerance, not with men but with abuses, may be useful. If steady unremitting effort to remove them is impatience and intolerance, much impatience and intolerance is required. In the name of tolerance we have left ignorance alone. We have left superstition alone; we have left squalor and misery and uncleanness alone; we have made no effort to eradicate them. We have avoided dissemination of correct ideas as a possible source of disturbance to the internal and external peace of men and society. We quote in defence ‘Na buddhi-bhedam janayet’ etc. It was not always thus that we thought. We carried our message and our light even into other countries, not indeed on the point of the bayonet, but in the full faith that it is inherent in the quality of light that it should sooner or later attract all human minds towards itself. Intolerance has to be avoided, but is there no escape from ‘the doubtful result that all sorts of foreign cults and superstitious beliefs are to be found within the pale of our religion’? ‘Doubtful result’ is a mild description of the chaos we allow without any effort to check it. That some of our best men should not only not put their religious household in order but, in what they conceive to be defence of true Hinduism, be driven to maintain that a large section of the Hindu population is not Hindu at all in religion, is the measure of our toleration and acquiescence in this doubtful result.

We have become suspicious of reason. We must not think, we must not reason. We must simply obey. All the thinking has been done long ago and crystallised into texts. The wisdom of the ages is there. We must only interpret and obey them. And the orthodox custodians of the science and art of exegesis should in each generation find confirmation for their practices and prejudices, however they might vary from generation to generation. You need fresh thought and intense effort to realise it.

That which distinguishes man from the brute is his capacity ‘to look before and after and pine for what is not.’ It is not pining and languishing and dying, but pining and therefore working for and creating what is not, that the poet has in mind. The Tapas, intense creative effort, is in the old stories described as generating heat invading the three worlds and disturbing even the gods out of their repose.

Throughout the book there are striking thoughts strikingly expressed. They do not deal merely with religious topics in the abstract; they deal with topics of everyday life and with present day problems, and with facts and results of deep varied human experience.

Dr. S. Radhakrishnan is a master in the art of presenting even familiar facts in such striking language that they acquire a new significance and power of moving the human mind. The mind of the Hindu community has to be moved, and the faith that moves mountains and overcomes all obstacles has to be generated. Thinkers of the author’s type have a part in the creation of this new faith. There is ample evidence in the recent utterances and activities of Dr. Sir S. Radhakrishnan that he is not oblivious of his duty in this respect.