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Letter to a Hindou
- Leo Tolstoy
Introduction by M.K. Gandhi
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| The letter printed below is a translation
of Tolstoy's letter written in Russian in reply to one from
the Editor of Free Hindustan. After having passed from hand to
hand, this letter at last came into my possession through a
friend who asked me, as one much interested in Tolstoy's
writings, whether I thought it worth publishing. I at once
replied in the affirmative, and told him I should translate it
myself into Gujarati and induce others' to translate and
publish it in various Indian vernaculars. |
| The letter as received by me was a
type-written copy. It was therefore referred to the author,
who confirmed it as his and kindly granted me permission to
print it. |
| To me, as a humble follower of that great
teacher whom I have long looked upon as one of my guides, it
is a matter of honour to be connected with the publication of
his letter, such especially as the one which is now being
given to the world. |
| It is a mere statement of fact to say
that every Indian, whether he owns up to it or not, has
national aspirations. But there are as many opinions as there
are Indian nationalists as to the exact meaning of that
aspiration, and more especially as to the methods to be used
to attain the end. |
| One of the accepted and 'time-honoured'
methods to attain the end is that of violence. The
assassination of Sir Curzon Wylie was an illustration of that
method in its worst and most detestable form. Tolstoy's life
has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for
removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of
non-resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in
violence by love expressed in self-suffering. He admits of no
exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love.
He applies it to all the problems that trouble
mankind. |
| When a man like Tolstoy, one of the
clearest thinkers in the western world, one of the greatest
writers, one who as a soldier has known what violence is and
what it can do, condemns Japan for having blindly followed the
law of modern science, falsely so-called, and fears for that
country 'the greatest calamities', it is for us to pause and
consider whether, in our impatience of English rule, we do not
want to replace one evil by another and a worse. India, which
is the nursery of the great faiths of the world, will cease to
be nationalist India, whatever else she may become, when she
goes through the process of civilization in the shape of
reproduction on that sacred soil of gun factories and the
hateful industrialism which has reduced the people of Europe
to a state of slavery, and all but stifled among them the best
instincts which are the heritage of the human
family. |
| If we do not want the English in India we
must pay the price. Tolstoy indicates it. 'Do not resist evil,
but also do not yourselves participate in evil - in the
violent deeds of the administration of the law courts, the
collection of taxes and, what is more important, of the
soldiers, and no one in the world will enslave you',
passionately declares the sage of Yasnaya Polyana. Who can
question the truth of what he says in the following: 'A
commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred
millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he
will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean
that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and
ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of
vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people? Do not the
figures make it clear that not the English, but the Indians,
have enslaved themselves ?' |
| One need not accept all that Tolstoy
says-some of his facts are not accurately stated-to realize
the central truth of his indictment of the present system,
which is to understand and act upon the irresistible power of
the soul over the body, of love, which is an attribute of the
soul, over the brute or body force generated by the stirring
in us of evil passions. |
| There is no doubt that there is nothing
new in what Tolstoy preaches. But his presentation of the old
truth is refreshingly forceful. His logic is unassailable. And
above all he endeavours to practise what he preaches. He
preaches to convince. He is sincere and in earnest. He
commands attention. |
| ¡¡ |
| [19th November, 1909.] M. K. GANDHI
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14 décembre 1908
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| All that exists is One. People only call
this One by different names. THE
VEDAS. |
| God is love, and he that abideth in love
abideth in God, and God abideth in him. I JOHN iv.
16. |
| God is one whole; we are the
parts. EXPOSITION OF THE
TEACHING OF THE VEDAS BY VIVEKANANDA. |
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| Do not seek quiet and rest in those
earthly realms where delusions and desires are engendered, for
if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through the rough
wilderness of life, which is far from Me. Whenever thou
feelest that thy feet are becoming entangled in the interlaced
roots of life, know that thou has strayed from the path to
which I beckon thee: for I have placed thee in broad, smooth
paths, which are strewn with flowers. I have put a light
before thee, which thou canst follow and thus run without
stumbling. KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| I
have received your letter and two numbers of your periodical,
both of which interest me extremely. The oppression of a
majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably
resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me
and has done so most particularly of late. I will try to
explain to you what I think about that subject in general, and
particularly about the cause from which the dreadful evils of
which you write in your letter, and in the Hindu periodical
you have sent me, have arisen and continue to
arise. |
| The reason for the astonishing fact that
a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who
control their labour and their very lives is always and
everywhere the same-whether the oppressors and oppressed are
of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the
oppressors are of a different nation. |
| This phenomenon seems particularly
strange in India, for there more than two hundred million
people, highly gifted both physically and mentally, find
themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien
to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in
religious morality. |
| From your letter and the articles in
Free Hindustan as well as from the very interesting
writings of the Hindu Swami Vivekananda and others, it appears
that, as is the case in our time with the ills of all nations,
the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching
which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme
law for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more
than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science
with the immoral conclusions deduced from them and commonly
called 'civilization'. |
| Your letter, as well as the articles in
Free Hindustan and Indian political literature
generally, shows that most of the leaders of public opinion
among your people no longer attach any significance to the
religious teachings that were and are professed by the peoples
of India, and recognize no possibility of freeing the people
from the oppression they endure except by adopting the
irreligious and profoundly immoral social arrangements under
which the English and other pseudo-Christian nations live
to-day. |
| And yet the chief if not the sole cause
of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies
in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the
guidance for conduct which should flow from it - a lack common
in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England
and America alike. |
| ¡¡ |
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| 0 ye, who see perplexities over your
heads, beneath your feet, and to the right and left of you;
you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves until ye become
humble and joyful as children. Then will ye find Me, and
having found Me in yourselves, you will rule over worlds, and
looking out from the great world within to the little world
without, you will bless everything that is, and find all is
well with time and with you.
KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| To make my thoughts clear to you I must
go farther back. We do not, cannot, and I venture to say need
not, know how men lived millions of years ago or even ten
thousand years ago, but we do know positively that, as far
back as we have any knowledge of mankind, it has always lived
in special groups of families, tribes, and nations in which
the majority, in the conviction that it must be so,
submissively and willingly bowed to the rule of one or more
persons-that is to a very small minority. Despite all
varieties of circumstances and personalities these relations
manifested themselves among the various peoples of whose
origin we have any knowledge; and the farther back we go the
more absolutely necessary did this arrangement appear, both to
the rulers and the ruled, to make it possible for people to
live peacefully together. |
| So it was everywhere. But though this
external form of life existed for centuries and still exists,
very early-thousands of years before our time-amid this life
based on coercion, one and the same thought constantly emerged
among different nations, namely, that in every individual a
spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that
exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with
everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim
through love. This thought appeared in most various forms at
different times and places, with varying completeness and
clarity. It found expression in Brahmanism, Judaism, Mazdaism
(the teachings of Zoroaster), in Buddhism, Taoism,
Confucianism, and in the writings of the Greek and Roman
sages, as well as in Christianity and Mohammedanism. The mere
fact that this thought has sprung up among different nations
and at different times indicates that it is inherent in human
nature and contains the truth. But this truth was made known
to people who considered that a community could only be kept
together if some of them restrained others, and so it appeared
quite irreconcilable with the existing order of society.
Moreover it was at first expressed only fragmentarily, and so
obscurely that though people admitted its theoretic truth they
could not entirely accept it as guidance for their conduct.
Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a society based
on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner,
namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this
truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes
unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite
foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence. Thus the
truth-that his life should be directed by the spiritual
element which is its basis, which manifests itself as love,
and which is so natural to man-this truth, in order to force a
way to man's consciousness, had to struggle not merely against
the obscurity with which it was expressed and the intentional
and unintentional distortions surrounding it, but also against
deliberate violence, which by means of persecutions and
punishments sought to compel men to accept religious laws
authorized by the rulers and conflicting with the truth. Such
a hindrance and misrepresentation of the truth-which had not
yet achieved complete clarity-occurred everywhere: in
Confucianism and Taoism, in Buddhism and in Christianity, in
Mohammedanism and in your Brahmanism. |
| ¡¡ |
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| My hand has sowed love everywhere, giving
unto all that will receive. Blessings are offered unto all My
children, but many times in their blindness they fail to see
them. How few there are who gather the gifts which lie in
profusion at their feet: how many there are, who, in wilful
waywardness, turn their eyes away from them and complain with
a wail that they have not that which I have given them; many
of them defiantly repudiate not only My gifts, but Me also,
Me, the Source of all blessings and the Author of their being.
KRISHNA. |
| I tarry awhile from the turmoil and
strife of the world. I will beautify and quicken thy life with
love and with joy, for the light of the soul is Love. Where
Love is, there is contentment and peace, and where there is
contentment and peace, there am I, also, in their midst.
KRISHNA. |
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The aim of the sinless One consists in
acting without causing sorrow to others, although he could
attain to great power by ignoring their
feelings.
The aim of the sinless One lies in not
doing evil unto those who have done evil unto
him.
If a man causes suffering even to those
who hate him without any reason, he will ultimately have grief
not to be overcome.
The punishment of evil doers consists in
making them feel ashamed of themselves by doing them a great
kindness.
Of what use is superior knowledge in the
one, if he does not endeavour to relieve his neighbour's want
as much as his own?
If, in the morning, a man wishes to do
evil unto another, in the evening the evil will return to
him.
THE HINDU KURAL. |
| ¡¡ |
| Thus it went on everywhere. The
recognition that love represents the highest morality was
nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was so
interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which
distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but words.
It was taught that this highest morality was only applicable
to private life-for home use, as it were-but that in public
life all forms of violence-such as imprisonment, executions,
and wars-might be used for the protection of the majority
against a minority of evildoers, though such means were
diametrically opposed to any vestige of love. And though
common sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is
to be subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of
others, these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn,
arrive at a similar conclusion with regard to those who have
employed violence to them, and though the great religious
teachers of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and above all of
Christianity, foreseeing such a perversion of the law of love,
have constantly drawn attention to the one invariable
condition of love (namely, the enduring of injuries, insults,
and violence of all kinds without resisting evil by evil)
people continued-regardless of all that leads man forward-to
try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what
is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by
violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner
contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people
who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same
time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not
merely to torture but even to kill one
another. |
| For a long time people lived in this
obvious contradiction without noticing it. But a time arrived
when this contradiction became more and more evident to
thinkers of various nations. And the old and simple truth that
it is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not
to torture and to kill one another, became ever clearer, so
that fewer and fewer people were able to believe the
sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had been made
so plausible. |
| In former times the chief method of
justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law
of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the
Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But
the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this
peculiar, God-given right of the ruler. That belief withered
in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and
the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian
spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to
prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and
the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly,
and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and
immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other
people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what
is contrary not only to their interests but also to their
moral sense. And so one might suppose that having lost
confidence in any religious authority for a belief in the
divinity of potentates of various kinds, people would try to
free themselves from subjection to it. But unfortunately not
only were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings,
benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result
of the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine
beings, ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and
established themselves around them, and under an appearance of
governing took advantage of the people. And when the old
deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority had
dwindled away these men were only concerned to devise a new
one which like its predecessor should make it possible to hold
the people in bondage to a limited number of
rulers. |
| ¡¡ |
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| Children, do you want to know by what
your hearts should be guided? Throw aside your longings and
strivings after that which is null and void; get rid of your
erroneous thoughts about happiness and wisdom, and your empty
and insincere desires. Dispense with these and you will know
Love.
KRISHNA. |
| Be not the destroyers of yourselves.
Arise to your true Being, and then you will have nothing to
fear. KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| New justifications have now appeared in
place of the antiquated, obsolete, religious ones. These new
justifications are just as inadequate as the old ones, but as
they are new their futility cannot immediately be recognized
by the majority of men. Besides this, those who enjoy power
propagate these new sophistries and support them so skilfully
that they seem irrefutable even to many of those who suffer
from the oppression these theories seek to justify. These new
justifications are termed 'scientific'. But by the term
'scientific' is understood just what was formerly understood
by the term 'religious': just as formerly everything called
'religious' was held to be unquestionable simply because it
was called religious, so now all that is called 'scientific'
is held to be unquestionable. In the present case the obsolete
religious justification of violence which consisted in the
recognition of the supernatural personality of the
God-ordained ruler ('there is no power but of God') has been
superseded by the 'scientific' justification which puts
forward, first, the assertion that because the coercion of man
by man has existed in all ages, it follows that such coercion
must continue to exist. This assertion that people should
continue to live as they have done throughout past ages rather
than as their reason and conscience indicate, is what
'science' calls 'the historic law'. A further 'scientific'
justification lies in the statement that as among plants and
wild beasts there is a constant struggle for existence which
always results in the survival of the fittest, a similar
struggle should be carried on among human beings-beings, that
is, who are gifted with intelligence and love; faculties
lacking in the creatures subject to the struggle for existence
and survival of the fittest. Such is the second 'scientific'
justification. |
| The third, most important, and
unfortunately most widespread justification is, at bottom, the
age- old religious one just a little altered: that in public
life the suppression of some for the protection of the
majority cannot be avoided-so that coercion is unavoidable
however desirable reliance on love alone might be in human
intercourse. The only difference in this justification by
pseudo-science consists in the fact that, to the question why
such and such people and not others have the right to decide
against whom violence may and must be used, pseudo-science now
gives a different reply to that given by religion-which
declared that the right to decide was valid because it was
pronounced by persons possessed of divine power. 'Science'
says that these decisions represent the will of the people,
which under a constitutional form of government is supposed to
find expression in all the decisions and actions of those who
are at the helm at the moment. |
| Such are the scientific justifications of
the principle of coercion. They are not merely weak but
absolutely invalid, yet they are so much needed by those who
occupy privileged positions that they believe in them as
blindly as they formerly believed in the immaculate
conception, and propagate them just as confidently. And the
unfortunate majority of men bound to toil is so dazzled by the
pomp with which these 'scientific truths' are presented, that
under this new influence it accepts these scientific
stupidities for holy truth, just as it formerly accepted the
pseudo-religious justifications; and it continues to submit to
the present holders of power who are just as hard- hearted but
rather more numerous than before. |
| ¡¡ |
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| Who am I? I am that which thou hast
searched for since thy baby eyes gazed wonderingly upon the
world, whose horizon hides this real life from thee. I am that
which in thy heart thou hast prayed for, demanded as thy
birthright, although thou hast not known what it was. I am
that which has lain in thy soul for hundreds and thousands of
years. Sometimes I lay in thee grieving because thou didst not
recognize me; sometimes I raised my head, opened my eyes, and
extended my arms calling thee either tenderly and quietly, or
strenuously, demanding that thou shouldst rebel against the
iron chains which bound thee to the earth. KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| So matters went on, and still go on, in
the Christian world. But we might have hope that in the
immense Brahman, Buddhist, and Confucian worlds this new
scientific superstition would not establish itself, and that
the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus, once their eyes were opened
to the religious fraud justifying violence, would advance
directly to a recognition of the law of love inherent in
humanity, and which had been so forcibly enunciated by the
great Eastern teachers. But what has happened is that the
scientific superstition replacing the religious one has been
accepted and secured a stronger and stronger hold in the
East. |
| In your periodical you set out as the
basic principle which should guide the actions of your people
the maxim that: 'Resistance to aggression is not simply
justifiable but imperative, nonresistance hurts both Altruism
and Egotism.' |
| Love is the only way to rescue humanity
from all ills, and in it you too have the only method of
saving your people from enslavement. In very ancient times
love was proclaimed with special strength and clearness among
your people to be the religious basis of human life. Love, and
forcible resistance to evil-doers, involve such a mutual
contradiction as to destroy utterly the whole sense and
meaning of the conception of love. And what follows? With a
light heart and in the twentieth century you, an adherent of a
religious people, deny their law, feeling convinced of your
scientific enlightenment and your right to do so, and you
repeat (do not take this amiss) the amazing stupidity
indoctrinated in you by the advocates of the use of
violence-the enemies of truth, the servants first of theology
and then of science-your European teachers. |
| You say that the English have enslaved
your people and hold them in subjection because the latter
have not resisted resolutely enough and have not met force by
force. |
| But the case is just the opposite. If the
English have enslaved the people of India it is just because
the latter recognized, and still recognize, force as the
fundamental principle of the social order. In accord with that
principle they submitted to their little rajahs, and on their
behalf struggled against one another, fought the Europeans,
the English, and are now trying to fight with them
again. |
| A
commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred
millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he
will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean
that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and
ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous,
clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures
make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the
Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved
themselves? |
| When the Indians complain that the
English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained
that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have
enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking,
but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they
cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up
their energy. Is it not the same thing with the millions of
people who submit to thousands' or even to hundreds, of
others-of their own or other nations? |
| If the people of India are enslaved by
violence it is only because they themselves live and have
lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of
love inherent in humanity. |
| ¡¡ |
| Pitiful and foolish is the man who seeks
what he already has, and does not know that he has it. Yes,
Pitiful and foolish is he who does not know the bliss of love
which surrounds him and which I have given him.
KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| As soon as men live entirely in accord
with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed
to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and
therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence-as
soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to
enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to
enslave a single individual. Do not resist the evil- doer and
take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the
administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or
above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able
to enslave you. |
| ¡¡ |
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| 0 ye who sit in bondage and continually
seek and pant for freedom, seek only for love. Love is peace
in itself and peace which gives complete satisfaction. I am
the key that opens the portal to the rarely discovered land
where contentment alone is found. KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| What is now happening to the people of
the East as of the West is like what happens to every
individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and
from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his
life and lives without direction, not having found a new
standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of
occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert
his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life.
Such a condition may last a long time. |
| When an individual passes from one period
of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in
senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to
understand that although he has outgrown what before used to
direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any
reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for
himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and
having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way
a similar time must come in the growth and development of
humanity. I believe that such a time has now arrived-not in
the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but that the
inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an
extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the
consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on
the other the existing order of life which has for centuries
occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of
life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on
the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the
solution will evidently not be favorable to the outlived law
of violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of
men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is
in accord with the nature of man. |
| But men can only recognize this truth to
its full extent when they have completely freed themselves
from all religious and scientific superstitions and from all
the consequent misrepresentations and sophistical distortions
by which its recognition has been hindered for
centuries. |
| To save a sinking ship it is necessary to
throw overboard the ballast, which though it may once have
been needed would now cause the ship to sink. And so it is
with the scientific superstition which hides the truth of
their welfare from mankind. In order that men should embrace
the truth- not in the vague way they did in childhood, nor in
the one-sided and perverted way presented to them by their
religious and scientific teachers, but embrace it as their
highest law-the complete liberation of this truth from all and
every superstition (both pseudo-religious and
pseudo-scientific) by which it is still obscured is essential:
not a partial, timid attempt, reckoning with traditions
sanctified by age and with the habits of the people - not such
as was effected in the religious sphere by Guru-Nanak, the
founder of the sect of the Sikhs, and in the Christian world
by Luther, and by similar reformers in other religions-but a
fundamental cleansing of religious consciousness from all
ancient religious and modern scientific
superstitions. |
| If only people freed themselves from
their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and
their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in
Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from
belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs
of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from
belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles,
Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed
themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific
teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in
all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their
movements and origin, as well as from faith in the
infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at
present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the
law of struggle and survival, and so on-if people only freed
themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises
of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the
'Sciences', and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of
histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics,
jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies-their name is
legion-and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupifying
ballast-the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to
all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of
itself become clear and obligatory. |
| ¡¡ |
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| Children, look at the flowers at your
feet; do not trample upon them. Look at the love in your midst
and do not repudiate it. KRISHNA. |
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There is a higher reason which transcends
all human minds. It is far and near. It permeates all the
worlds and at the same time is infinitely higher than
they.
A man who sees that all things are
contained in the higher spirit cannot treat any being with
contempt.
For him to whom all spiritual beings are
equal to the highest there can be no room for deception or
grief.
Those who are ignorant and are devoted to
the religious rites only, are in a deep gloom, but those who
are given up to fruitless meditations are in a still greater
darkness.
UPANISHADS, FROM
VEDAS. |
| ¡¡ |
| Yes, in our time all these things must be
cleared away in order that mankind may escape from self-
inflicted calamities that have reached an extreme intensity.
Whether an Indian seeks liberation from subjection to the
English, or anyone else struggles with an oppressor either of
his own nationality or of another-whether it be a Negro
defending himself against the North Americans; or Persians,
Russians, or Turks against the Persian, Russian, or Turkish
governments, or any man seeking the greatest welfare for
himself and for everybody else -they do not need explanations
and justifications of old religious superstitions such as have
been formulated by your Vivekanandas, Baba Bharatis, and
others, or in the Christian world by a number of similar
interpreters and exponents of things that nobody needs; nor
the innumerable scientific theories about matters not only
unnecessary but for the most part harmful. (In the spiritual
realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful is harmful.)
What are wanted for the Indian as for the Englishman, the
Frenchman, the German, and the Russian, are not Constitutions
and Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses,
nor the many ingenious devices for submarine navigation and
aerial navigation, nor powerful explosives, nor all sorts of
conveniences to add to the enjoyment of the rich, ruling
classes; nor new schools and universities with innumerable
faculties of science, nor an augmentation of papers and books,
nor gramophones and cinematographs, nor those childish and for
the most part corrupt stupidities termed art-but one thing
only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth
which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by
religious and scientific superstitions-the truth that for our
life one law is valid-the law of love, which brings the
highest happiness to every individual as well as to all
mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous
imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once
the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense
that has been smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth
inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great
religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make
its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has
obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the
evil from which humanity now suffers. |
| ¡¡ |
| Children, look upwards with your
beclouded eyes, and a world full of joy and love will disclose
itself to you, a rational world made by My wisdom, the only
real world. Then you will know what love has done with you,
what love has bestowed upon you, what love demands from
you.
KRISHNA. |
| ¡¡ |
| YASNAYA POLYANA.
December 14th, 1908. |
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