III. THE CONCLUSIONS OF HINDU PHILOSOPHY

Decadence—Summary—Criticism—Influence

The Mohammedan invasions put an end to the great age of Hindu philosophy. The assaults of the Moslems, and later of the Christians, upon the native faith drove it, for self-defense, into a timid unity that made treason of all debate, and stifled creative heresy in a stagnant uniformity of thought. By the twelfth century the system of the Vedanta, which in Shankara had tried to be a religion for philosophers, was reinterpreted by such saints as Ramanuja (ca. 1050) into an orthodox worship of Vishnu, Rama and Krishna. Forbidden to think new thoughts, philosophy became not only scholastic but barren; it accepted its dogmas from the priesthood, and proved them laboriously by distinctions without difference, and logic without reason.¹²⁶

Nevertheless the Brahmans, in the solitude of their retreats and under the protection of their unintelligibility, preserved the old systems carefully in esoteric sutras and commentaries, and transmitted across generations and centuries the conclusions of Hindu philosophy. In all these systems, Brahmanical or other, the categories of the intellect are represented as helpless or deceptive before a reality immediately felt or seen;* and all our eighteenth-century rationalism appears to the Indian metaphysician as a vain and superficial attempt to subject the incalculable universe to the concepts of a salonnière. “Into blind darkness pass they who worship ignorance; into still greater darkness they who are content with knowledge.”¹²⁹ Hindu philosophy begins where European philosophy ends—with an inquiry into the nature of knowledge and the limitations of reason; it starts not with the physics of Thales and Democritus, but with the epistemology of Locke and Kant; it takes mind as that which is most immediately known, and therefore refuses to resolve it into a matter known only mediately and through mind. It accepts an external world, but does not believe that our senses can ever know it as it is. All science is a charted ignorance, and belongs to Maya; it formulates, in ever changing concepts and phrases, the rationale of a world in which reason is but a part—one shifting current in an interminable sea. Even the person that reasons isMaya, illusion; what is he but a temporary conjunction of events, a passing node in the curves of matter and mind through space and time?—and what are his acts or his thoughts but the fulfilment of forces far antedating his birth? Nothing is real but Brahman, that vast ocean of Being in which every form is a moment’s wave, or a fleck of froth on the wave. Virtue is not the quiet heroism of good works, nor any pious ecstasy; it is simply the recognition of the identity of the self with every other self in Brahman; morality is such living as comes from a sense of union with all things.* “He who discerns all creatures in his Self, and his Self in all creatures, has no disquiet thence. What delusion, what grief can he with him?”¹³⁰

Certain characteristic qualities which would not seem to be defects from the Hindu point of view have kept this philosophy from exercising a wider influence in other civilizations. Its method, its scholastic terminology, and its Vedic assumptions handicap it in finding sympathy among nations with other assumptions or more secularized cultures. Its doctrine of Maya gives little encouragement to morality or active virtue; its pessimism is a confession that it has not, despite the theory of Karma, explained evil; and part of the effect of these systems has been to exalt a stagnant quietism in the face of evils that might conceivably have been corrected, or of work that cried out to be done. None the less there is a depth in these meditations which by comparison casts an air of superficiality upon the activistic philosophies generated in more invigorating zones. Perhaps our Western systems, so confident that “knowledge is power,” are the voices of a once lusty youth exaggerating human ability and tenure. As our energies tire in the daily struggle against impartial Nature and hostile Time, we look with more tolerance upon Oriental philosophies of surrender and peace. Hence the influence of Indian thought upon other cultures has been greatest in the days of their weakening or decay. While Greece was winning victories she paid little attention to Pythagoras or Parmenides; when Greece was declining, Plato and the Orphic priests took up the doctrine of reincarnation, while Zeno the Oriental preached an almost Hindu fatalism and resignation; and when Greece was dying, the Neo-Platonists and the Gnostics drank deep at Indian wells. The impoverishment of Europe by the fall of Rome, and the Moslem conquest of the routes between Europe and India, seem to have obstructed, for a millennium, the direct interchange of Oriental and Occidental ideas. But hardly had the British established themselves in India before editions and translations of the Upanishads began to stir Western thought. Fichte conceived an idealism strangely like Shankara’s;¹³² Schopenhauer almost incorporated Buddhism, the Upanishads and the Vedanta into his philosophy; and Schelling, in his old age, thought the Upanishads the maturest wisdom of mankind. Nietzsche had dwelt too long with Bismarck and the Greeks to care for India, but in the end he valued above all other ideas his haunting notion of eternal recurrence—a variant of reincarnation.

In our time Europe borrows more and more from the philosophy of the East,* while the East borrows more and more from the science of the West. Another world war might leave Europe open again (as the break-up of Alexander’s empire opened Greece, and the fall of the Roman Republic opened Rome)—to an influx of Oriental philosophies and faiths. The mounting insurrection of the Orient against the Occident, the loss of those Asiatic markets that have sustained the industry and prosperity of the West, the weakening of Europe by poverty, faction and revolution, might make that divided continent ripe for a new religion of celestial hope and earthly despair. Probably it is prejudice that makes such a dénouement seem inconceivable in America: quietism and resignation do not comport with our electric atmosphere, or with the vitality born of rich resources and a spacious terrain. Doubtless our weather will protect us in the end.