New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century, John Morrison [free ebook reader TXT] 📗
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CHAPTER XVIII INDIAN TRANSMIGRATION AND THE CHRISTIAN HERE AND HEREAFTER "The dew is on the lotus. Rise, good sun!
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave.
The sunrise comes!
The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.
If any teach Nirvana is to cease,
Say unto such they lie.
If any teach Nirvana is to live,
Say unto such they err."
(Buddha's teaching in Arnold's Light of Asia.)
To appreciate the impact of the Christian idea of the Here and Hereafter upon the Hindu idea of Transmigration and Absorption, the two ideas must be more fully examined. Stated briefly, the Christian idea is that after this life on earth comes an Eternity, whose character has been determined by the life on earth. The crisis of death terminates our bodily activities and renders impossible any further action, either virtuous or sinful, and ushers the soul, its ledger closed, its earthy limitations cast off, into some more immediate presence of God. If in communion with God, through its faith in Jesus Christ, the soul is in a state of blessedness; if still alien from God, the soul is in a state of utter misery, for its spiritual perception and its recollection of itself are now clear. That, at all events, seems a fair statement of the belief of many Protestants, so far as their belief is definite at all. But over against transmigration, what are the essential and distinctive features of that Christian belief? Its essentially distinctive feature, both in the case of the blessed and of the miserable, is a continuity of the consciousness in the life that now is with that which is to come. The soul in bliss or misery is able to associate its existing state with its past. Even on earth, as the modern preacher tells us, heaven and hell are already begun. Over against the Hindu idea of transmigration, accordingly, we define the Christian idea of immortality as the continuity of our consciousness, or the immortality of the individual consciousness.
Per contra, the distinguishing feature of the Hindu doctrine of transmigration or rebirth is the interruption of consciousness, the dissolution of memory, at the close of the present existence. In the next existence there is no memory of the present.
"The draught of Lethe" does "awaitThe slipping through from state to state."
The present life is a member of a series of lives; there are said to be 8,400,000 of them, each member of which is as unconscious of the preceding as you are of being I. As a seed develops into plant and flower and seed again, so the soul in each new member of the series develops a conscious life, lapses from consciousness, and hands on a germinal soul for a new beginning again. As the seed transmits the type, and also some variation from the type, so is the germinal soul transmitted through unconsciousness, ennobled or degraded by each conscious existence it has lived. At each stage the germinal soul represents the totality, the net outcome of its existences, as in each generation of a plant the seed may be said to do. So far, the doctrine of transmigration is a doctrine of the evolution of a soul, a declaration that in a sense we are all that we have been, that virtue and vice will have their reward, that in a sense "men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves." It does not leave hard cases of heathen or of reprobates to the discernment and mercy of God; it offers them, instead, other chances in subsequent lives. A not unattractive doctrine it is, even although the attractive analogy of the evolution of a plant breaks down. For in the scientific doctrine of evolution, individuals have no immortality at all; it is only the species that lives and moves on. But in Hinduism, as in Christianity, we are thinking of the continuity of the individual souls.
To proceed with the statement of the doctrine of transmigration. The climax of the transmigrations is Nirvana or extinction of the individual soul, according to the Buddhist, and union with or absorption into Deity, according to the Hindu.[111] Buddhism has gone from the land of its birth, as Christianity and even Judaism from Palestine, and I pass from the Buddhist doctrine. The Hindu climax, of absorption into Deity, is reached when by self-mastery personal desire is gone, and by profound contemplation upon Deity a pure-bred soul has lost the consciousness of separation from Deity. The distinction between I and the great Thou has vanished; the One is present in the mind not as an objective thought, but by a transformation of the consciousness itself. The words of Hindus themselves in the Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion are: The human soul (the Jivatmic seed) "grows into self-conscious Deity." Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing into self-conscious Deity: "Every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness came upon him.... He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything.... He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna.... He would say he was ... an incarnation of God Himself." Again Swami Vivekananda tells us: "From time to time Ramkrishna would entirely lose his own identity, so much so as to appropriate to himself the offerings brought for the goddess" (to the temple in which he officiated). "Sometimes forgetting to adorn the image, he would adorn himself with the flowers."[112] Transmigration is not necessarily bound up with the pantheistic view of the world, but in Hinduism, transmigration is only a ladder towards the realisation of the One.
Radical differences from Christian thought emerge. In the Hindu conception, the acme is reached only by a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent; for the common multitude there is no gospel of being born again in Christ, no guiding hand like that of Our Lord towards the Father's presence. The upward path, according to the Hindu idea, is the path of philosophical knowledge and of meditation, not the power of union with Jesus Christ to make us sons of God. Most striking difference perhaps of all—in the Hindu philosophical system there is no place for even the conceptions of heaven and hell except as temporary halting-places between two incarnations of the soul, which practical necessity requires. For the soul, this world is the plane of existence; union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the ground no longer conscious of his self. "The beatific vision of Hinduism," says a recent pro-Hindu writer, "is to be relegated to no distant future."[113] Heaven and Hell are mocked at as absurdities by the new sect of the Āryas in the United Provinces and the Punjab, who retain the doctrine of transmigration.[114]
Hindus are divided as to the existence of these temporary halting-places between the successive incarnations of the soul. The Text-book of Hindu Religion, already referred to, speaks unhesitatingly about their place in the Hindu system. The Āryas, on the other hand, hold that the instant a soul leaves its body it enters another body just born. The soul is never naked—to employ a common figure. Of course in popular Hinduism it is not surprising to find not merely the ideas of Heaven and Hell, but even that each chief Deity has his own heaven and that there are various hells. In the Tantras or ritual books of modern Hinduism, there is frequent mention of such heavens and hells, and when the idea of rebirths is also met with, the rebirths are regarded as stages towards the reward or punishment of the individual conscious souls. It is the popular idea of heaven that has given rise to the common euphemism for to die, namely, to become a deva or inhabitant of heaven.
We have observed the pessimistic mood of India yielding before the improved conditions of life, and the brahmanical pantheism before the thought of God the Father. Bound up as the idea of transmigration has been with the pessimism and pantheism of India, we are prepared to find that it too is yielding. Of that we now ask what evidence there is in the ordinary speech and writings of educated India, apart from controversy or professedly Hindu writings, in which the accepted Indian orthodoxy would probably appear.
From the ordinary speeches and writings of educated Hindus regarding the dead, no one would infer that their doctrinal standpoint was other than that of the ordinary religious Briton, namely, that the dead friend has returned to God or has been called away by God, or the like. A native judge in Bengal, one of the most distinguished leaders of the Hindu Revival, writes as follows: The beatitude which the new Radha-Krishnaites aspire to "is not the Nirvana of the Vedantists, the quiescence of Rationalism. Nirvana and quiescence are merely negatives. The beatitude [of the new Radha-Krishnaites] is a positive something. They do not aspire to unification with the divine essence. They prefer hell with its torments to such unification."[115] A few years ago, at a public meeting in Calcutta, the acknowledged leader of Hinduism, speaking of a Hindu gentleman whose death we were lamenting, said: "God has taken him to himself"—certainly not a Hindu statement of the passing of a soul. Similarly, in 1882 we find one nobleman in Bengal writing to another regarding his mother's death: "It is my prayer to God that she may abide in
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