Gentlemen,
We love to read a book which we have never read before. We are anxious to gather whatever information is contained in it, and with such acquirement, our curiosity stops. This mode of study prevails amongst a great number of readers, who are great men in their own estimation as well as in the estimation of those who are of their own stamp. In fact, most readers are mere repositories of facts and statements made by other people. But this is not study. The student is to read facts with a view to create and not with the object of fruitless retention. Students, like satellites, should reflect whatever light they receive from authors and not imprison facts and thoughts just as the magistrates imprison convicts in the jail. Thought is progressive. The author’s thought must have progress in the reader in the shape of correction or development. He is the best critic who can show the further development of an old thought, but a mere denouncer is the enemy of progress and consequently of nature. «Begin anew», says the critic, «because the old masonry does not answer at present. Let the old author be buried because his time is gone.» These are shallow expressions. Progress certainly is the law of nature, and there must be corrections and developments with the progress of time. But progress means going further or rising higher. Now, if we are to follow our foolish critic, we are to go back to our former terminus and make a new race, and when we have run half the race, another critic of his stamp will cry out: «Begin anew, because the wrong road has been taken!» In this way our stupid critics will never allow us to go over the whole road and see what is in the other terminus. Thus the shallow critic and the fruitless reader are the two greatest enemies of progress. We must shun them.
The true critic, on the other hand, advises us to preserve what we have already obtained, and to adjust our race from that point where we have arrived in the heat of our progress. He will never advise us to go back to the point whence we started, as he fully knows that in that case there will be a fruitless loss of our valuable time and labour. He will direct the adjustment of the angle of the race at the point where we are. This is also the characteristic of the useful student. He will read an old author and will find out his exact position in the progress of thought. He will never propose to burn the book on the ground that it contains thoughts which are useless. No thought is useless. Thoughts are means by which we attain our objects. The reader who denounces a bad thought does not know that a bad road is even capable of improvement and conversion into a good one. One thought is a road leading to another. Thus the reader will find that one thought which is the object today will be the means of a further object tomorrow. Thoughts will necessarily continue to be an endless series of means and objects in the progress of humanity. The great reformers will always assert that they have come out not to destroy the old law but to fulfill it. Valmiki, Vyas, Plato1, Jesus2, Mohammed, Confucius, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu assert the fact either expressly or by their conduct.
The Bhagavat, like all religious works, philosophical performances, and writings of great men, has suffered from the imprudent conduct of useless readers and stupid critics. The former have done so much injury to the work that they have surpassed the latter in their evil consequence. Men of brilliant thoughts have passed by the work in quest of truth and philosophy, but the prejudice which they imbibed from its useless readers and their conduct prevented them from making a candid investigation. Not to say of other people, the great genius of Raja Ram Mohan Ray, the founder of the sect of Brahmoism, did not think it worth his while to study this ornament of the religious library. He crossed the gate of the Vedanta, as set up by the mayavad construction of Sankar Acharya, the chosen enemy of the Jains, and preferred to chalk his way out to the unitarian form of the Christian faith, converted into an Indian appearance.
Raja Ram Mohan Ray was an able man. He could not be satisfied with the theory of illusion contained in the mayavad philosophy of Sankar. His heart was full of love for nature. He saw through the eye of his mind that he could not believe in his identity with God. He ran out from the bounds of Sankar to those of the Koran. There even he was not satisfied. He then studied the pre-eminently beautiful precepts and history of Jesus, first in the English translations and at last in the original Greek, and took shelter under the holy banners of the Jewish reformer. But Ram Mohan Ray was also a patriot. He wanted to reform his country in the same way as he reformed himself. He knew it fully that truth does not belong exclusively to any individual man or to any nation or particular race. It belongs to God, and man, whether in the poles or on the equator, has a right to claim it as the property of his Father. On these grounds he claimed the truths inculcated by the Western saviour as also the property of himself and his countrymen, and thus he established the samaj of the Brahmos independently of what was in his own country in the beautiful Bhagavat.3 His noble deeds will certainly procure him a high position in the history of reformers. But then, to speak the truth, he would have done more if he had commenced his work of reformation from the point where the last reformer in India left it. It is not our business to go further on this subject. Suffice it to say that the Bhagavat did not attract the genius of Ram Mohan Ray. His thought, mighty though it was, unfortunately branched like the Ranigunj line of the parent railway from the barren station of Sankar Acharya and did not attempt for an extension from the terminus station of the great Bhagavat expounder of Nadia. We do not doubt that the progress of time will correct the error, and by a further extension the branch line will lose itself somewhere in the main line of progress. We expect such attempts in abler reformer of the followers of Ram Mohan Ray.
The Bhagavat has suffered alike from shallow critics both Indian and foreign. That book has been accursed and denounced by a great number of our young countrymen, who have scarcely read its contents and pondered over the philosophy on which it is founded. It is owing mostly to their imbibing an unfounded prejudice against it when they were in school. The Bhagavat, as a matter of course, has been held in derision by those teachers who are generally of an inferior mind and intellect. This prejudice is not easily shaken off when the student grows up unless he candidly studies the book and ruminates on the doctrines of Vaisnavism. We are ourselves witnesses of the fact. When we were in college, reading the philosophical works of the West and exchanging thought with the thinkers of the day, we had contracted a hatred towards the Bhagavat. That great work looked like a repository of wicked and stupid ideas, scarcely adapted to the nineteenth century, and we hated to hear any arguments in its favor. With us then, a volume of Channing, Parker, Emerson, or Newman had more weight than the whole lot of the Vaisnava works. Greedily, we poured over the various commentaries of the Holy Bible and of the labours of the Tattva Bodhini Sabha containing extracts from the Upanisads and the Vedanta, but no work of the Vaisnavas had any favor with us. But when we advanced in age and our religious sentiment received development, we turned out in a manner unitarian in our belief and prayed as Jesus prayed in the garden. Accidentally, we fell in with a work about the great Chaitanya, and on reading it with some attention in order to settle the historical position of that mighty genius of Nadia, we had the opportunity of gathering His explanations of the Bhagavat given to the wrangling Vedantists of the Benares school. The accidental study created in us a love for all of the works which we find about our Eastern saviour. We gathered with difficulties the famous kadachas in Sanskrit, written by the disciples of Chaitanya. The explanations that we got of the Bhagavat from these sources were of such a charming character that we procured a copy of the Bhagavat complete and studied its texts (difficult of course to those who are not trained up in philosophical thoughts) with the assistance of the famous commentaries of Sridhar Swami. From such study it is that we have at last gathered the real doctrines of the Vaisnavas. Oh! What a trouble to get rid of prejudices gathered in unripe years!
As far as we can understand, no enemy of Vaisnavism will find any beauty in the Bhagavat. The true critic is a generous judge, void of prejudices and party spirit. One who is at heart the follower of Mohammed will certainly find the doctrines of the New Testament to be a forgery by the fallen angel. A Trinitarian Christian, on the other hand, will denounce the precepts of Mohammed as those of an ambitious reformer. The reason simply is that the critic should be of the same disposition of mind as that of the author, whose merits he is required to judge. Thoughts have different ways. One, who is trained up in the thoughts of the Unitarian Society or of the Vedanta of the Benares school will scarcely find piety in the faith of Vaisnavas. An ignorant Vaisnava, on the other hand, whose business it is to beg from door to door in the name of Nityananda will find no piety in a Christian. This is because the Vaisnava does not think in the way in which the Christian thinks of his own religion. It may be that both the Christian and the Vaisnava will utter the same sentiment, but they will never stop their fight with each other only because they have arrived at their common conclusion by different ways of thought. Thus a great deal of ungenerousness enters into the arguments of the pious Christians when they pass their imperfect opinion on the religion of the Vaisnavas.
Subjects of philosophy and theology are like the peaks of large, towering, and inaccessible mountains standing in the midst of our planet inviting attention and investigation. Thinkers and men of deep speculation take their observations through the instruments of reason and consciousness. But they take different points when they carry on their work. These points are positions chalked out by the circumstances of their social and philosophical life, different as they are in the different parts of the world. Plato looked at the peak of the spiritual question from the West, and Vyas made the observation from the East; so Confucius did it from further East, and Schlegel, Spinoza, Kant, and Goethe from further West. These observations were made at different times and by different means, but the conclusion is all the same in as much as the object of observation was one and the same. They all hunted after the Great Spirit, the unconditioned Soul of the universe. They could not but get an insight into it. Their words and expressions are different, but their import is the same. They tried to find out the absolute religion, and their labours were crowned with success, for God gives all that He has to His children if they want to have it. It requires a candid, generous, pious, and holy heart to feel the beauties of their conclusions.
Party spirit — that great enemy of truth — will always baffle the attempt of the enquirer, who tries to gather truth from religious work of his own nation and will make him believe that absolute truth is nowhere except in his old religious book. What better example could be adduced than the fact that the great philosopher of Benares will find no truth in the universal brotherhood of man and the common fatherhood of God? The philosopher, thinking in his own way of thought, can never see the beauty of the Christian faith. The way in which Christ thought of his own Father was love absolute, and so long as the philosopher will not adopt that way of thinking, he will ever remain deprived of the absolute faith preached by the Western saviour. In a similar manner, the Christian needs to adopt the way of thought which the Vedantist pursued before he can love the conclusions of the philosopher. The critic, therefore, should have a comprehensive, good, generous, candid, impartial, and sympathetic soul.
«What sort of a thing is the Bhagavat?», asks the European gentleman newly arrived in India. His companion tells him with a serene look that the Bhagavat is a book which his Oriya bearer daily reads in the evening to a number of hearers. It contains a jargon of unintelligible and savage literature of those men who paint their noses with some sort of earth or sandal and wear beads all over their bodies in order to procure salvation for themselves. Another of his companions, who has traveled a little in the interior, would immediately contradict him and say that the Bhagavat is a Sanskrit work claimed by a sect of men, the Goswamis, who give mantras, like the Popes of Italy, to the common people of Bengal and pardon their sins on payment of gold enough to defray their social expenses. A third gentleman will repeat a third explanation. A young Bengali, chained up in English thoughts and ideas and wholly ignorant of the pre-Mohammedan history of his own country, will add one more explanation by saying that the Bhagavat is a book containing an account of the life of Krishna, who was an ambitious and an immoral man! This is all that he could gather from his grandmother while yet he did not go to school! Thus the great Bhagavat ever remains unknown to the foreigners like the elephant of the six blind men who caught hold of the several parts of the body of the beast!4 But Truth is eternal and is never injured but for a while by ignorance.
1 Plato: «Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth.»
2 Jesus Christ: «Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destory but to fulfill.»
3 This is gathered from what Ram Mohan Ray told the public in the prefaces to the three dissertations which he wrote about the precepts of Jesus as compiled by him from the Gospels and in answer to Dr. Marshman, the Serampore missionary.
4 The Blind Men and the Elephant by John G. Saxe:
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined
Who went to see the elephant
(Though all of them were blind)
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.
The first approached the elephant
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side
At once began to bawl:
«God bless me! but the elephant
Is very like a wall!»
The second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, «Ho, what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an elephant
Is very like a spear!»
The Third approached the animal
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands
Thus boldly up and spake:
«I see,» quoth he, «The elephant
Is very like a snake!»
The fourth reached out an eager hand
And felt about the knee
«What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain!» quoth he:
«’Tis clear enough the elephant
Is very like a tree!»
The fifth, who chanced to touch the ear
Said: «E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most:
Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an elephant
Is very like a fan!»
The sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope
Than seizing of the swinging tail
That fell within his scope
«I see,» quoth he, «the elephant
Is very like a rope!»
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong
Though each was partly in the right
And all were in the wrong!
So oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what the others mean
And prate about an elephant
Not one of them has seen!