THE READERS WHO come with a kindly attitude to these chapters do not come with a prepared one. It is to be feared that some propositions must have startled them and others must have alarmed them. But the teachings which are yet to be set down will come as a surprise to those who have relished the writer’s narratives of yogic adventure or accounts of mystic experience. Let them bear patiently, however, for in the end they will find that all the real gold in religion and mysticism will not be lost and that full assay value will be returned for their patience. All that is admirable in religion and well serves toiling mankind shall here be well respected too; all that makes mysticism a boon to struggling individuals shall receive the favourable evaluation it merits. Our scales are just. Nevertheless they cannot be deceived. They will not accept the spurious along with the genuine or the fictitious with the factual. Nor will they permit the detrimental to crowd into their pans under the shelter of the beneficial.
Although the appeal of these pages shall be made only to rational understanding and not to sentimental faith and credulity, nor even to easily stirred imagination, such is the distinctive amplitude of truth that it covers all things with its comprehensiveness. An undreamed-of unity, a sublime synthesis bringing together the Real, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, awaits them at the end. The endless wars of doctrine and the bestial hatreds of men here find their last grave.
The relation of philosophy to religion has been considered and its relation to mysticism has been freely hinted at. The interrelations of all three are such that if religion be regarded as the vestibule of mysticism, the latter will occupy the same position with reference to philosophy. However, it is here necessary to bring out more clearly the relationship of the hidden philosophy toward what is frequently but often erroneously termed philosophy in both the West and the East. This demands some preliminary reflection upon the general meaning of the term.
No tortured animal has ever asked with benignant Buddha why universal suffering existed, or has ever gone behind momentary appearances and asked what larger meaning underlay the enigma of life. Man alone of all living species has done this.
The monkey is the animal most nearly like man, yet the ethical conflicts of religion, the aesthetic appreciation of art, and the tormenting questions of philosophy have never entered its head. What then is the most marked difference between the mind of a man and the mind of a monkey? Most animals certainly have thoughts and retain memories, while many undoubtedly possess intelligence. Some, like the Indian elephant, possess an extremely high degree of intelligence. But there is one thing which no animal can ever do, and that is to use its intelligence in the abstract. It cannot reason theoretically nor bring reflection to transcend its physical environment. Its actions are invariably determined by the concrete conditions which surround it.
A further mental activity which lies beyond the intelligence of the most intelligent animal in the world is to think impersonally. No animal has ever been known to attempt to communicate with another animal dwelling on a different and remote continent, because none feels the need of troubling about those who do not touch its immediate environment or are unlikely to touch it at some time. This implies that it cannot rise beyond individuality into impersonality, the cause being its inability to bring an isolated item of its experience into proper relation with the universe. It cannot stand away from its own body and contemplate with complete selfless detachment the character, nature, and life of another beast moving a hundred yards away, let alone the stars overhead when they appear at night. For every beast the primordial needs of the body are its chief concern. The hub of its universe around which everything revolves is and forever remains itself, and all other creatures are reacted to according to their relation to its own fears, desires, et cetera. Life is a simple fact for such a creature, whereas the intellect of man is fated to create problems and then torture itself trying to solve them.
Man alone has deemed it worthwhile to agitate his mind and do all these things. He alone is provoked by the universe into posing questions and seeking their answers, which proves that he possesses distinctive mental faculties which are denied to animals. And the sum of those faculties is nothing more than the thinking power developed not only to a higher degree but also to an abstract impersonal level. Man’s intellect may rise into purely theoretical activity; it may engage itself in the most impersonal studies like astronomy and trace the movements of remote planets; it may disdain the exigencies of cramping material surroundings and soar aloft into questions concerning the cause and course of the entire structure of the universe; while it can take the facts and items of experience and by constant reflection relate them into rational connections, finally weaving them into a comprehensive and systematic pattern of explanation. When we seek the significance of all this we have to conclude that an opportunity has been vouchsafed to man alone to possess the capacity of arousing interest in, inquring into, reflecting upon, and perhaps eventually understanding the truth about his own life, as well as the surrounding universe. No insect, no plant, no animal possesses this unique and lofty privilege of seeking truth and reflecting upon it. Vasishta, an ancient Indian sage, exclaimed: “Better the rock-bound toad, better the crawling earthworm, better the blind cave-serpent, than the man without inquiry.” Such inquiry is called philosophy.
But let nobody think that philosophy is something to be chosen by a man when it so pleases him; on the contrary, it chooses him! The very fact that he is a human and not an animal being has perforce made him a philosopher, albeit an unconscious one. True he did not ask for this distinction, but he cannot escape it! The first few crude disjointed thoughts about his environment which floated through the mind of the earliest savage, the primitive odd pieces of knowledge about himself and other men which he picked up during brief hazy reflections, the wonderment and adoration which the advent of the morning sun always stirred in him—these were the beginnings of a mental life which distinguished man from beast and marked his early unwitting steps in that quest of wisdom to whose last and final stage he one day awakens and affixes the name of philosophy. Then his attitude becomes a conscious and reasoned one; then it attains high rank. Henceforth his movements are no longer slow, groping, and blundering, but quick and direct. By asking abstract questions, by inquiring deeply into universal existence, he shows how far he has travelled beyond the brutes. But the quest is really a unity, even though it may be divided into these two clearly defined stages.
Everybody therefore is something of an actual philosopher even if he be an imperfect, inarticulate, and inchoate one. It has already been explained why religion is an elementary initiation into an inferior form of philosophy, and hence every religious person likewise comes under this category. Only he prefers parables where the intelligentsia demand reasoned explanations. The business man who is too busy to trouble his head with such barren and worthless intellectual fabrication as he deems philosophy to be nevertheless possesses his own outlook on life, his own views as to what he is here for and how far matter is real. He may believe that there is no meaning in the cosmic masquerade, that the essential purpose of his incarnation is solely an economic one. He may regard the chair in which he sits as being possessed of a materiality which is so obvious as to be beyond a single moment’s consideration or question. Whether these views are correct or not is beside the point, for the mere act of holding them proves that he too, like the academic metaphysician whom he contemptuously despises or ignores, has a philosophy. Moreover, it influences his conduct and possesses a practical bearing on his life just as much as the other man’s.
Thus we arrive at the little-known truth that the ordinary man’s criticism that philosophical reflection is utterly useless and that the points at issue with which philosophers struggle are meaningless and trivial is itself the outcome of philosophical reflection! He is using the same method which the philosophers use, albeit crudely. The barrenness of practical results and the lack of settled conclusions of which he complains in philosophy are partly due to the fact that philosophers are much more cautious in approach, much less hasty in procedure, much more clear-seeing in mentality to be willing to arrive at the premature judgments which please him. Even the very wording of his own criticism itself constitutes a conclusion reached by generalized logical thinking upon given facts—which is precisely the method used by philosophy. Therefore his judgment against philosophy is itself invalidated by the way in which it is obtained! Moreover, he has to think about life whether he likes to or not and whether he wants to or not, because the most commonplace facts and circumstances of his personal existence demand some thought, however little, about them and their meaning. The difference between him and the philosopher is that he reflects casually and superficially, whereas the latter reflects deliberately and deeply, never ceasing to ask questions until all is quite clear to him.
It is an oft-heard plaint that philosophy will not fill the kitchen larder. People nowadays say, “Let us put our economic house in order, or our political house in order, and then we shall have time to philosophize.” The old Romans said very much the same thing in their proverb: “First one must live, then one may philosophize.” People were making the same plaint when Nebuchadnezzar ruled in sultry Babylon, and they will go on making it when the architectural colossi of New York City are but thin phantoms of the past.
Every man is perfectly free, therefore, to ignore the stupendous problem which life silently sets him and nobody will care to reproach him for neglecting it. Twentieth-century existence is difficult enough with its stress, strain, and struggle to justify a man looking only to his immediate wants and deferring all consideration of such apparently remote questions as philosophy raises. This he usually does. He relegates the whole subject to a few academic hermits who have no better business to attend to than to indulge in such abstruse speculations on an abstract Ultimate. Such is his first and superficial glimpse of the place of philosophy. But like many first glimpses it is quite a questionable one and open to revision with time.
The general objection carries the implication that the world can get on quite well without philosophy. It does not occur to the world that those who first decide whither they may best journey before mounting their horses may arrive at a better place than the others who leap on their steeds and rush off they know not where. According to all reports the world is still trying to extricate itself from the widespread difficulties into which such a “practical” but unreflective policy has brought it. Its distresses are melancholy attestation to the absence of philosophy from its midst.
The particular plaint that it is easier for a rich man to indulge in this study than a poor man, and for a free man than an enslaved one, is certainly true. But the law of compensation starts working here and renders it easier for a poor man to practise philosophy than for a rich one! This truth will become more apparent later.
It is also justifiable to say that some amount of free leisure is needed to carry on this study as well as to reflect upon its points, and some amount of educational background is demanded for its understanding. So far as the latter point is concerned biography is full of instances where men without means have practically educated themselves rather than submit to cultural defeat, and so far as the former is concerned those who complain that time for study cannot be found have only to steal it from their sleep. In this way they can get at least one hour daily. This will not cause them any suffering, for it is little and given in a good cause. But there are others who could make the time more easily. They have too many irons in the fire and should take a few out. They need not neglect essential duties nor cancel existing relationships in order to accomplish this adjustment. But when they have found a way to fit in the study-period they will find their reward with it. Thus the final truth is that the aspiring and the ambitious will always bestir themselves while others moan.
If none of us then can escape being a philosopher, why should it seem a puerile request to ask that we learn to philosophize correctly, consciously, systematically, and with open eyes instead of faultily, sleepily, and blindly; in short, to be a real philosopher and not a drifting fool? Our endeavour to deny the supremacy of such generalized directed thought by ignoring it will always be in vain. It cannot be a stupid nor a useless pursuit, but rather an indispensable one which would have us lift the whole of our life-activity from the level of groping effort to that of a deliberate one. Life presents us with its own educational curriculum in the shape of painful and pleasurable experiences, but the conscious quest of truth is an item which we must ourselves insert.
The thoughts that are habitual lead to their consequences in action. The ordinary man’s general outlook will always determine the course of his actions just as much as will the philosopher’s. But whereas he is usually blown by the wind of circumstance, and hence afflicted by uncertainty, the philosopher has the advantage that he has long reflected and brought to light certain principles of sound action. A man who has never asked fundamental questions, who has never worked out a reasoned attitude of his own, will find himself gripped by doubt or darkness when the first big crisis of his life occurs. On the other hand, he who has mastered true philosophy will be quietly ready in all situations, all eventualities. The lack of predetermined principles leads unwary man to acts detrimental not only to his own well-being but also to that of others. And yet the man of the world is impatient with philosophers!
People are even frightened away by the mere sound of the name philosophy. Even Plutarch could glorify only public men, warriors, and politicians in his Parallel Lives. Thus he praised Lycurgus and sneered at Plato for being a philosopher, for “while the first stabilized and left behind him a constitution the other left behind him only words and written books.” Nevertheless philosophy played a leading part in the old Corinthian culture. The Greeks had some regard for right thinking. But the attitude of a jazz-minded age is, “Why should we fret our foreheads with such problems?” Most of the men and women of our time prefer the crude chatter which passes for conversation and they are satisfied to slip from cradle to grave with both eyes closed. These intellectual incapables have little use for a climb to the mountaintops of thought and a soliloquy in that rarer atmosphere. In the average person’s imagination the subject is a dry, dead, and barren tree, a monotonous and colourless weaving of thoughts. There is some good ground for his mental image because much dubious matter passes for philosophy which is nothing of the kind, but when we inquire a little more deeply into the basis of his fear and dislike we are likely to discover that they arise out of his ignorance rather than out of his acquaintance with the subject. He rightly thinks, however, that it is going to lift his mind from the familiar ground of concrete reality into unfamiliar altitudes of life, and so, like many elderly persons prior to their first flight in an aeroplane, he fears it. And when he happens to meet a desiccated human being who calls himself a philosopher he adds irritation to his fear because the man seems to be wandering about in a deserted wilderness where nothing that is fruitful and nothing that is edible can be found.
Our scientific friends add to this dismal chorus of complaint. They sneer in disdain at the barren results of the world’s three thousand years of recorded philosophizing; they point with pride to the immense encyclopaedia of ascertained and agreed facts which science has attained in less than three hundred years. They utter the ancient joke about the philosopher being like a blind man searching in a dark room for a black cat, which is not there, although the twentieth century has brought the joke up to date by adding a theologian to the philosopher and announcing that he succeeds in finding the cat! He who is so bold as to talk of a philosophy of truth must surely be an ignoramus, unacquainted with philosophical history, and raising hopes in himself and others which are foredoomed to vanish dismally.
These plaints are just ones. The story of philosophical exploration is a fascinating account of inconclusive adventures in futility. All history shows that the philosophers have no settled platform of knowledge upon which they can stand in agreement, and that they are still in the realm of conjecture when they attempt to interpret the meaning of the world.
What one philosopher built up so convincingly was torn down so cogently by the next; what the eighteenth century thought to be a fine discovery was disproved and rejected with contempt by the nineteenth; the venerated systems of one people were thrown into the lumber room by another. Countless pages of innocent paper have been deluged with black ink by eager thinkers, but still the shape of truth remains unseen. Certainly those grave discussions whether life has a graveyard goal or not are as tormentingly unsettled as they ever were. The answers of philosophers to the questions they posed themselves have been as different and opposite to each other as are the North and South Poles. The importance of being frivolous is impressed upon readers every time they take up many of these stilted ponderous pages. They may indeed finally be reduced to exclaim, in Anatole France’s flippant and ironic words: “Things have diverse appearances and we know not even what they are … my opinion is to have no opinion!”
It has already been observed that this same demon of self-contradiction haunts the houses of mysticism and religion too. Is no escape possible from it then? Is Herbert Spencer right in declaring that absolute truth is to be relegated to the domain of the unreachable? Do the religious, the mystical, and the philosophical seekers journey along a path which is but a blind endless maze without discernible starting point and without attainable goal?
The wonder is that men have not ceased to philosophize altogether. What is it that urges them to construct and reconstruct, to criticize and to destroy, the theories of their predecessors and the speculations of their contemporaries? Why do they not abandon in irritation this vain pursuit and thus follow the example of gifted Persian Omar Khayyam, who
… when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about, but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.
The fact is that they are ceasing, and with increasing tempo, to philosophize. She who once sat in regal enthronement over the empirical sciences is today a neglected Cinderella. Those who care for the study of philosophy as the pursuit of Truth are rapidly diminishing in number. The process of decline in prestige and disappearance in interest is going on all over the world. Germany, which a single century ago could claim to be the home of European philosophy, now scorns that subject as useless and derides it as a mere game of intellectual marbles. India, which, a thousand years ago, maintained universities like that of Nalanda, where none could obtain admittance save those who could answer the most abstruse metaphysical questions, and where ten thousand students were once to be found despite this difficult initial bar—India, which has fed all the other Asiatic lands with her thoughts, cannot today find sufficient college students to form more than ridiculously small classes in the same subject. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that several colleges have now abolished the chair in philosophy. It has in fact suffered a severe downfall and its systems have become everywhere in the world a collection of desolate antiques, with its professors busy as melancholy curators of this metaphysical museum! The modern mood is usually irritated by any attempt to entice it into the cobwebbed parlours of metaphysical speculation.
Such criticism is justifiable only where so-called philosophy leads away from action and not to it, where it runs around in a vicious circle and remains forever inconclusive, and where it starts its movement of thought with mere fancies instead of with ascertained facts, although even in these cases it may be useful to those who want to enjoy the intellectual stimulus of mental gymnastics. But all this has nothing to do with the hidden philosophy.
The worldwide error which has jumbled personal fancy with philosophy or opinionative theology with metaphysics makes it necessary to utter the warning that the philosophy of truth as revealed in India must not be confused with such philosophical speculation on truth. If half-philosophy and pseudo-philosophy have now run their course and been dismissed, then the way is left open for true philosophy. The former soars into realms of fancy like a free bird, whereas the latter is strictly chained to facts. It begins with them so far as they are available and refuses to outrun them. It takes nothing for granted, starts with no assumptions, no dogmas, no beliefs of any kind. It proceeds solely by the use of strict reasoning upon these facts, the acutest and sharpest reasoning ever practised by the human mind, and it concludes by applying the test of all human experience. Many famous metaphysicians have exhausted their ingenuity in imagining, for instance, a hypothetical Noumenon, Substance, Spirit, Absolute, et cetera, underlying the world-appearance, but the philosophy of truth does not permit either its exponents or its students to seek a single fancy nor accept it without inquiry as true. Spirit may indeed exist, but it has to find out its existence by investigation and not start by assuming it. Fact is its sole foundation and actuality its superstructure.
Academic philosophy presents a picture of conflicting opinion chiefly because of the diverse standpoints taken up by philosophers. Only one standpoint is possible to the true philosopher, and that the highest. Such a standpoint must be based on the facts of all experience. Therefore all assumptions, all dogmas, all blind faith, all surrender to sentiment, all dreams of the unseen and unknown, are immediately ruled out of court. Wherever philosophy has failed its failure has partly been due to violation of this factor. Life can never be satisfactorily interpreted by studying our fancies in place of its facts.
To this extent, therefore, genuine philosophy must embrace science, must start with it, must walk by its side, even though it will later outstrip it because it is more venturesome. Science is indeed a part, albeit the preliminary part, of the philosophy of truth. And by science is meant principally the scientific method, the scientific approach, the vast collection of verified facts, but not the fluctuating guesses and opinions of individual scientists.
To many a Western person metaphysical speculation is a hobby or game for dilettantes, or at best an exercise in intellectual ghost-hunting. Genuine philosophy is an infinitely more serious and fruitful occupation than that. It regards this life of ours as a precious opportunity to gain eternal profit out of its seeming transiency. Consequently it cannot afford to waste time on vain or useless efforts, which are foredoomed to end disappointingly in emptiness. It uses the method of philosophical inquiry not to find excuses for living less fully but to find guidance for living more so, not to attenuate human interests but to expand them, and not to pursue fleeting spectres but to seek the enduring Real.
We shall consider in a later chapter a further special characteristic of the higher philosophy which is its actual justification (where all other philosophies fail to do so) of the claim to provide an all-comprehensive world examination and connected synoptic view of Life. Its success in proving its claim explains why Indian minds should have succeeded in fully penetrating the world-darkness where Western minds still regard the task either as impossible or as set for possible completion in a remote future.
We have already seen that the explanations of religion are excellent for simple or timid folk but too elementary and too adverse to the conscience and common sense of cultured ones. We have also learnt that the tenets and practices of mysticism are ampler and better, but they too are insufficient because they yield only a partial view of life. It is the claim of the hidden philosophy of truth—which will henceforward be named by the single word “philosophy” in this book, partly as a verbal convenience and partly because the derivation of the word points to truth and not to the mere speculation into which it has frequently degenerated—that it alone seeks to inquire into every phase of total universal existence, leaving nothing out, and it alone strives to get the fullest explanation and the final one; moreover, it not only starts to inquire but pushes on with iron determination until it successfully reaches the goal.
From this statement it may be gathered that true philosophy is no monochrome but is so rich that it must not only embrace the methods used by religion, mysticism, science, and art, for instance, as well as all the results achieved by them; it must not only take within its scope of examination such diverse matters as business, industry, warfare, marriage and maternity, bright dreams and base drudgery, because they form a part of human life; it must not only include the vast array of animals and plants and rivers and mountains within its examination because they belong to universal existence; but it must even turn back critically upon itself, for, after all, every inquiry—whether it be religious, mystic, scientific, or philosophic—is made with the mind. Hence philosophy seeks also to discover why the mind wants to know all these things, why it takes up the quest of truth, and what is its own nature, what are the limits of its capacity to know truth, how it comes to know the world, and what in short is the ultimate truth of all the truths that we already know. It demands truth in its entirety, not half- or quarter-truths.
Philosophy values the contributions of the departments of fact or faith already named, and indeed of all others, while escaping from their restricted specialism because it refuses either to pause at any single one of them or to limit its inquiry to it. Science, however valuable it be in providing us with a reasonable approach to life and in organizing our knowledge of the world, is obviously limited. It deals in fragments. The average scientist cannot be expected to understand the significance of music, for example. He works, like all specialists, with blinkers, for he keeps within a certain department and has to accept both the limitations and the constricted views of that department. Every specialist is unconsciously influenced by the emphasis placed upon the particular aspect of life with which he concerns himself. The consequence is that he forces his notion of truth within the confining walls of a compartmental outlook and ignores the goal of truth as it is when freed of such limitation. However workable this be for practical purposes, it becomes a hindrance when the wider objective of ultimate, universal, and uncontradictable truth is set up.
It is hard to know how to place so remarkable a mental attitude, for it is too up-to-date to be antique, too rational to be medieval, and too historic to be modern. Such is the paradox of the world’s most archaic wisdom, which is still so far in advance of contemporary knowledge that we are only now beginning to catch up with it! Such is the uniqueness of a philosophy which is a courageous endeavour to get at the meaning of existence, to use man’s loftiest faculty of intelligence for the loftiest imaginable aim, and to discover an adequate criterion for ethics, an unassailable canon of truth and wisdom for the sustenance of social action. Only the superficial dare doubt its practical utility and marked advantage, but admittedly such an endeavour does not belong to the everyday life of the crowded plains. It must necessarily belong to distant mountain trails. The plain-dweller is entitled to refuse to forego his comforts and travel to this unfamiliar region, but let him not despise those who put fear aside and essay the climb. They will find no dullness there, but on the contrary a fascinating and stimulating adventure. It is really engrossing and, when its full practical bearing appears on the horizon of study, will be found to hold vital human interest. Henceforth the episodes of their everyday personal lives will be seen against a perspective of growing grandeur.
We have seen how the approach to truth arranges itself in a graded series, and have followed it to the end of its second phase. This is in accord with the ancient Indian teaching, which postulates three stages of evolution through which the mind of man must pass, three progressive attitudes toward life. The first is religion and is based on faith; the second, mysticism, is controlled by feeling; and the third, philosophy (which is inclusive of science), is disciplined by reason. Nor can it be otherwise, for man’s understanding of the world must necessarily grow parallel to his mental capacity. His outlook is invariably and inevitably limited by the degree of his intelligence. Hence it is impossible for all men to answer life’s queries in the same way.
We must stand now at the door of the third degree in the archaic temple of wisdom and knock hopefully. If we are to reach our optimum development we must cross this threshold and learn what lies beyond it. Over the lintel we may behold deeply carved in dignified lettering four words, The Philosophy of Truth; while above them the figure of Minerva’s owl is solemnly staring at us. For this peculiar bird becomes active when the shades of night are falling, and it clearly sees varied objects where man sees only sable darkness.
But who has ever heard of such an unlabelled philosophy? We have heard of German philosophy, Greek philosophy, Indian philosophy; we remember as from a remote past some of the world’s most unintelligible volumes, written by the world’s most intelligent men, marring our student days with tormenting emotions of confusion, despair, and final bafflement; we recollect having fuddled our brains by reading a spate of tedious books on the subject, but instead of advancing us into clearer light the contradictory theories and speculations carried us back into greater darkness; we believed ironically what seemed to be a general rule in philosophical discussion that the more trivial the point at issue the graver became the argument; we have picked up a little of the lingo of the system of Spinoza, the system of Anaxagoras, the system of Immanuel Kant, but we have never found, nor do we know of anyone who has ever found, a philosophy which represented more than the views of one man or one school.
There exist a few, however, who have thoroughly explored the twilit lands of religion, mysticism, and metaphysics and not merely coasted along their shores, who know also what science can say about the world, and who possess no such pessimism. Their initial wonder has waxed into the desire to know, and this again into the passion to understand, and that finally into the search after reality. They feel that this all-engrossing search which has driven them onward and upward reacts in response to something that is. An inextinguishable hope lures them. For what they had half believed with religion, fully felt with mysticism, rationally suspected with science, and speculatively argued with metaphysics is that some ultimate essence exists as the true nature of things and men, that this essence, being ever and everywhere present, bestows the highest possible significance on the universe, and consequently the first and highest human duty is personally to know it. But they perceive that before it can be finally and certainly known in any way it must first be intellectually and speculatively known for what it is and certainly for what it is not. Hence they realize the need of a fitting philosophy—not the philosophy of this or that school, person or country, but solely the philosophy of truth. Such a philosophy, if discovered, would act as an indispensable map with which the explorer could then set out to discover the truth for himself.
But why should not the hope of these unconventional few be nothing more than self-deception, an illusion created by personal desire masquerading as profound intuition? Only one answer is possible to this just complaint, but it is an answer which will raise surprised eyebrows and curl sneering lips in Western circles suffering from superiority complexes justifiable perhaps by sheer ignorance of what men have been doing and thinking in the other hemisphere for the past few thousand years. However, it possesses as much right to our ear as any other, as will be amply demonstrated during the course of this book. It is the bold declaration that the hope of a few has been converted, at infrequent intervals however, into the tested realization of uncommon individuals, and that whatever the public archives of world-thought may say, both the unwritten and written records of India indicate that the truth which the West deems unattainable has already been attained by such individuals in the past and may even now be attained by those who prize it enough to pay its high cost.
When we have witnessed the wonders which the human mind has achieved in changing the earth’s face, are we to be so hopeless as to believe that the whole of Nature fears the unveiling of truth and has cunningly plotted to prohibit man from ever understanding the ultimate significance of his life on this planet? And if anyone asserts that this significance is quite unknowable, then he is unconsciously affirming that he is already aware of what future generations may or may not succeed in knowing—an entirely unjustifiable and unprovable assumption. But why can we not condescend to learn from the ancients what we cannot learn from the moderns?
An Indian recondite doctrine, which constitutes this philosophy of truth and is placed on a level higher than those of religion and mysticism, has existed during a period which scholars admit cannot be less than five thousand years in extent, but is in fact very much older, for its origin disappears into historically untraceable epochs. It was the traditional possession of a few initiates who formed a closed exclusive circle and who guarded it with great care as being the acme of all their country’s wisdom, permitting none save qualified aspirants to have access to it. (Indeed, until the dawn of the modern era a Brahmin who dared reveal that the truth which lies latent in religion becomes actual only in philosophy was liable to be punished.) They transmitted it from generation to generation, but kept it so firmly secret in the process that the stray echoes which floated accidentally or surreptitiously into the larger world quickly became queerly distorted ones. Self-styled and self-deceived representatives appeared in public later and turned the few echoes of pure philosophy which they had heard into religious scholasticism in some cases or into theological mysticism in others. Miscomprehension led to mutilation, and thus converted a grandly universal into a shrunken tribal truth. Nevertheless, even when its true and faithful living representatives all but died out or disappeared from this earth, it maintained an immortal existence in a few rare neglected writings and fragmentarily in several more popular ones. However, erroneous interpretations invariably result from their being read without the proper personal elucidation by a competent teacher, which is indispensable.
It is therefore to be expected that several of the explanations which are being given in these chapters may be denied as unauthentic by most of the learned scholars of present-day India or abused as perversions by the generality of her conventional mystics and yogis or denounced as atheistic by the majority of her religious authorities. Let it be so. We do not address ourselves to them or their numerous followers but to strictly truth-seeking minds. The truth may be hidden from view for countless ages, for it depends on the secret suffrages of a rare few, but it is unkillable; it will outlive like the vast ocean the froth of mortal opinion and the foam of prejudiced interests. Although our unconventional presentation of this knowledge is a modern and Western one, its original source is an ancient and Indian one. Both silent texts and living voices which have informed our writing are mostly Indian, supplemented by some Tibetan documents and a personal Mongolian esoteric instruction. A million men may gainsay the tenability of the tenets unfolded here, but none can gainsay the fact that they are Indian tenets, albeit little known, without twisting the most authoritative ancient documents to suit their mediocre minds. If we do not quote those texts here it is because our readers are primarily Western and we do not wish to burden them with the troublesome necessity of exploring exhaustive glossaries for unfamiliar Sanskrit names. Indeed, the very failure to use more than two Sanskrit philosophical terms in this book will be an added charge against it, because it is claimed that certain Indian philosophical ideas are not only incomprehensible to the West but also inexpressible in any traditional Western language. It is quite correct that we have here to deal with ideas that are expressed in Sanskrit by a single word, whereas a string of English words is often required to equate their meaning. But truth existed before the mesmerism of Sanskrit was born; it will surely endure long after that language has vanished. Men must have found or invented expressive terms before it appeared, and as the need presses them perhaps they may do so again.
There will also be vociferous denial and personal opposition from those narrow circles in both the West and East which assume the title of “esoteric” and claim the possession of “occult” wisdom. The confusion and misunderstanding among these half-informed people is pardonable. They believe, and believe rightly, that some of the renowned world-teachers taught a secret doctrine to their closest disciples. They also believe, but believe wrongly, that this doctrine consisted largely of magic and marvel, thaumaturgy and theology. These great masters had better work to do than that. The ultimate purpose of the Indian esotericism was to lead men to detect the essential meaning of human life, to help them gain insight into the real structure of the universe, and to point out the grand sun of absolute truth shining on the horizon of all existence.
Even before the victorious wanderings of Alexander brought Oriental and Hellenistic thought into fertilizing contact, fragments of this doctrine had been brought back to Europe by enterprising travellers like Apollonius of Tyana and Pythagoras. In our own epoch fragmentary proofs of the existence of this hidden teaching have crept into the outer world as the growing band of Western Orientalists have given to the world the harvest of their century-long search through India’s cultural treasure. They have broken down the walls of secrecy and exclusiveness which have kept the most important books in the possession of a small number of Brahmins. Whoever cares to rummage through them may find for himself numerous indications of a guarded teaching which was hidden from all save those who could fulfil certain difficult conditions and who possessed certain rare qualifications of character and capacity, as well as constant references to the fact that full knowledge could only be obtained personally from a competent teacher. Such verification may be found not only in the ancient rule that initiated Brahmins who revealed their knowledge to unqualified outsiders were liable to be punished, but in the English translations now available of Sanskrit texts like the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, the Commentaries of Shankara thereon, Vivekachudamani, Brahma Sutras, Panchadasi, et cetera.
With these statements we may match the following words of the Buddha, taken from the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra:
Superior men of wise understanding guard the doctrine, guard the mystery, and do not reveal it.… That knowledge is difficult to understand; the simple, if hearing it suddenly, would be perplexed.… I speak according to their reach and capacity; by means of different significances I accommodate my doctrine (to them).
We have already seen how, according to this hidden teaching, there are progressive stages of development through which the seeker after reality must pass. This is plainly stated by the sage Gaudapada in his very ancient book already mentioned in the following words:
There are three stages of life corresponding to three powers of comprehension—the lower, the middle, and the high.… It (the yoga of the uncontradictable) is hard to be attained by the yogis who are devoid of the knowledge prescribed in the higher philosophy … those other yogis who are also traversing the path but who possess inferior or middling understanding.
Commenting on these sentences the great teacher Shankara observes: “The orders of mankind are also three in number. How? It is because they are endowed with three grades of understanding, i.e., low, middle, and high.”
Pythagoras, who travelled all the way to India and succeeded in obtaining initiation into the secret wisdom of the Brahmins, divided men into three classes, placing those who loved philosophy in the highest class. It was indeed in this connection that he coined and used the word philosophy, and was thus the first European to do so. Ammonius, who founded an important mystical and philosophical school at Alexandria, also divided his disciples into three grades, placing them under oath not to reveal his higher philosophical teachings. His rules were copied from the more ancient Grecian mysteries of Orpheus, who, according to the historian Herodotus, brought them from India.
It should not be thought that the strong secrecy with which this teaching was once enveloped was entirely wilful. It developed out of four prime factors. The first was a clear perception that if the real truth of religion was made commonly known the whole fabric of public morality would be seriously endangered. The indiscriminate publication of a teaching which described God as He really is and repudiated God as He is commonly imagined to be, and which revealed all rites and sacrifices and priesthoods as purely provisional aids, would soon destroy the influence of institutional religion among the others who need it, and with this destruction would vanish its dependent ethical restraints and moral disciplines. The confused masses of uneducated people would then turn against their accepted idols, but could not grasp the undoubted benefits of higher philosophy in exchange, for the latter would be rejected by them as being too remote. They would be left with a mental vacuum, or at best with a bewildering misconstruction, with the consequence that society would be thrown into bewilderment and social life might revert to the ruthless law of the jungle. It would be harmful to unsettle the minds of the mentally adolescent masses by removing their faith in traditional religion when nothing which they could assimilate could be offered to replace it. Hence the sages therefore carefully and wisely kept their knowledge and confined to the select few who were ready for it, who had become dissatisfied with orthodox religion and wanted something more rational. In addition to the mentally ripe, initiation was also given to kings, statesmen, generals, Brahmin High Priests, and others charged with the responsibility of guiding a people’s life; thus they were better equipped to carry out their tasks wisely and effectively.
The second factor rested in the aristocratic nature of this philosophy. It was not fit for the sheep equally as for the lions. It could not be carried into the caves and huts of unlettered men and there hope for an understanding welcome. It was so mentally abstruse and so ethically advanced that it lay far beyond popular reach. If it could have found easy acceptance it would have achieved that soon after it was first formulated. It was also self-condemned to obscurity by the law which renders it useless to impose upon the many ideals which only the few can obey. Its tenets could only be mastered by persons with well-developed intellects and noble characters they were too subtle and therefore too incomprehensible to unripe minds, to the dull and stupid, the petty and the selfish. The early populations chiefly consisted of peasants who laboriously toiled in the fields from dawn till dusk or herdsmen who mechanically followed their flocks. Both classes could not easily develop minds able and willing to consider for long periods the most impersonal abstract topics, which were seemingly quite remote from field and home, but they could give credence to simple tales. Therefore they were quite content to take the easy path of believing in whatever their parents had believed. The masses generally were illiterate and uneducated while they lived in a world where they had perforce to be quite busy for their livelihood, in order to attend to their immediate physical wants, where the giant octopus of personal activity and family responsibility held them tightly in its tentacles, so tightly that they had neither the will nor the leisure left to explore the subtler significance of their own existence, let alone ultimate knowledge of the more remote universal one. To work, to suffer, to propagate their species, and to die made up their limited horizon. They hardly suspected and hardly cared what they were here for in the higher sense. How then could it be rightly hoped that they should understand tenets and appreciate values which were as beyond their orbit as postgraduate university lectures are beyond that of elementary school pupils? The young popular mind must be given time to grow, and it could not be expected in those early times to judge matters which were often beyond the capacity of the cleverest.
Moreover, “Many are called but few are chosen” of the New Testament text has its Hindu equivalent in the sentence “Out of the thousands one man, perchance, struggles to realize truth,” of the Bhagavad Gita. There is no arbitrary exclusiveness here, but one based on human limitations, for the latter book also says, “I do not reveal myself to all and sundry, most people having their vision clouded by illusion.”
The third factor of such secrecy was that the few sages who had mastered this doctrine usually dwelt in small forest hermitages or obscure mountain retreats. This mode of living away from the multitude was not chosen for their own personal need, for they had attained a rock-like impregnability of mind and character which could pass unaffected through the mingled activities of crowded cities, as in the case of Shankara,4 or could remain unchanged amid the gilded grandeur of royal courts, as in that of Janaka.5 Such seclusion was chosen for the benefit of those who needed it, i.e., for the restricted handful of pupils who were ripe for such special tuition. The sustained concentration and profound reflection demanded by the goddess of hidden wisdom from her votaries for several years found the least opposition and the least interruption in her last outposts amid the wild solitudes of beautiful forests or the immense grandeur of lonely mountains. So much was this tendency to resort to such places for study recognized that the old texts used by these teachers in their expositions were and are still called The Forest Doctrines. It would be a profound error, however, to confuse such deliberate withdrawal by a few from the world for the sake of becoming better equipped through severe study to understand and afterward usefully serve mankind, with the cheap asceticism which prevails in most of the large, present-day populous caricatures of these tiny vanished hermitages. Sterile lethargy and superstitious speculation now take the place of mental effort and disciplined study. The ancient students in the third degree were men who realized that too long had they been busy like ants without understanding what they were busy about, and that too long had they danced in mad haste like puppets upon the world stage to the tune of someone else’s making. They had come to the point when they wanted to know what it all meant, why they were here on this earth at all, and whither was the fated compulsion of life leading them and others. They felt that they must find some place in their programme for the study of philosophy. Life totally devoid of deeper thought was reckoned unworthy of a man, since it brought him to resemble an animal. In short, they wanted to know truth. Hence they withdrew from the busy world for a time and played the runaways, not in emotional disappointment but in consecration to a serious intellectual task. Such prolonged absence from society, although intended to be a temporary means and not a permanent end, inevitably if gradually withdrew the knowledge gained from the common cultural tradition of society until the very word in Sanskrit which means “the forest doctrine” came also to mean “the hidden doctrine.” Not that the sages always kept themselves hidden, but when they did venture into public notice they taught people only what suited them, i.e., pure religion in most cases and pure mysticism in others.
The fourth factor has already been mentioned. It was the danger that the traditional texts would be misinterpreted and misunderstood, so that gradually falsity would pass as truth and actually be labelled as such by later generations. Those who were ethically and mentally unprepared and undisciplined would assign their own meanings to the texts, would imagine interpretations to suit their personal tastes or temperaments. And this danger was very real, for the texts were highly condensed and needed discursive explanation.
Thus esotericism first arose as a natural phenomenon, although, with the deteriorating effect of time, it was later pushed to extreme limits by human selfishness on the part of the few, and by human indifference on the part of the many. The materials for a history of this slow declension would be not a little instructive concerning departments quite other than that of philosophy, could they only be secured.
Two questions will now come naturally to the lips of the Western critic. Firstly, if such a philosophy has existed in India for so long a time, why has it failed to lift Indian culture to the pinnacle of world esteem? The reply is that, as already explained, those Indians who possessed this knowledge were too few at all times and well-nigh nonexistent in recent times to make much mark on the culture of a vast subcontinent. Yet although their immediate influence was limited to a select and influential circle, their ultimate and indirect influence has nevertheless been immense.
The material and linguistic difficulties of cultural communication between India and Europe until the last century or two, together with the esoteric character of this philosophy, accounted for its lack of world influence, as is proved by the fact that in the rest of Asia with which communication was much more constant and frequent Indian wisdom was always held in the highest esteem. Nevertheless it is a significant thing that the man who introduced the word “philosophy” into European usage was the first noted Greek to adventure forth as far as India in quest of wisdom. Pythagoras was well repaid for the hazards of his long journey. He brought back new and higher conceptions of truth to the West.
The second question which might reasonably be asked is why, if this doctrine was kept scrupulously hidden from the masses for so many centuries, it should now be brought forward so openly and made plain to the populace. This may be met with a threefold answer. The revelation is not a new one at all, because it has been going on ever since the force of British arms prepared the way for British, French, and German scholars as long ago as the eighteenth century. Text after text has been taken by them, in the early days as part of military loot, but since then by orderly purchase from the exclusive Brahminical circles which had hitherto jealously guarded the books. These have now been made available for the benefit of a wider world. Numerous villages have been combed by purchasing agents and numerous manuscripts hidden away for centuries through fear of destructive Muslim conquerors or neglected through sheer inability to understand them have been brought to light from their boxes or burrows of concealment. Some of these texts have been translated into European languages and can be studied by anyone, while most have been carefully gathered and preserved in their original condition in excellent libraries like those of the Secretary of State for India, the Mysore, Baroda, and Travancore State Oriental Collections, the Royal Asiatic Society, and so on, where they are now accessible to scholars. Two hundred years ago few of these works could be got at by anyone who did not belong to a small elite of Indian intelligentsia. Today several hundred different ancient philosophical works can be got at quite freely by European or American students. No new revelation is here being made, therefore, but a revelation which began one-and-three-quarter centuries ago is being continued. The presentation which is being offered here will, however, probably be regarded by most readers as a new and essentially modern restatement and certainly as an unconventional one. Nevertheless what is a novel element in these pages is that its principles are partly based on a few books which the floodtide of Western Oriental scholarship has flowed past and ignored, because of their special importance and difficult meaning were not grasped, and partly on a personal instruction which is perhaps unique in the whole of present-day India.
The further reply to the critic’s question is that the chief prohibition of the unveiling of the hidden philosophy in former times was accounted for by its danger to the authority of orthodox religion, and consequently of morality. Since those days so many agencies have been at work undermining this authority that it fulfils its functions of protecting morality somewhat feebly. Conditions are different from the days when Socrates could be put to death for weakening religious faith. The minds of the people are now unsettled and their religious supports damaged. The position today is so altered as to be somewhat paradoxical, for the hidden philosophy, instead of destroying what is left of religion, could save it through its symbolical exegesis and through its justification to educated minds of the place and purpose of institutional religion. Its revealment now would hardly affect the masses because they would ignore it as they ignore all abstract philosophy, or where they did not ignore it they would fail to understand its subtleties.
The third factor which has provided the occasion for a franker, bolder, fuller, and freer explication of the higher philosophy than ever before is quite exceptional and the most important of all. Since the days when its teachings were first formulated and concealed the world has greatly changed and mankind with it. The details of such changes as affect the position of this philosophy have been fully given in the opening pages of this book.