It has been a perpetual sunshine of kindness for me all through my travels in this country. While it delights me, it makes me feel embarrassed. What have I to give to these people? What have they received from me? But the fact is, they are waiting for the day-break after the orgies of night, and they have their expectation of light from the East.
Do we feel in the soul of India that stir of the morning which is for all the world? Is the one string of her ektara being tuned, which is to give the keynote to the music of a great future of Man—the note which will send a thrill of response from shore to shore? Love of God in the hearts of the mediæval saints of India—like Kabir and Nanak—came down in showers of human love, drowning the border-lines of separation between Hindus and Musalmans.
They were giants, not dwarfs, because they had the spiritual vision, whose full range was in the Eternal—crossing all the barriers of the moment. The human world in our day is much larger than in theirs; conflicts of national self-interest and race-traditions are stronger and more complex; the political dust-storms are blinding; the whirlwinds of race antipathy are fiercely persistent; the sufferings caused by them are world-wide and deep. The present age is waiting for a divine word, great and simple, which creates and heals. What has moved me profoundly is the fact that suffering man in Europe has turned his face to the East. It is not the man of politics, or the man of letters, but the simple man whose faith is living. Let us believe in his instinct; let his expectation guide us to our wealth. In spite of the immense distractions of our latter day degeneracy, India still cherishes in her heart the immortal mantram of Peace, of Goodness, of Unity—
Shantam, Shivam, Advaitam.
The message of the One in the All which had been proclaimed in the shade of India’s forest solitude is waiting to bring reconciliation to the men who are fighting in the dark, who have lost the recognition of their brotherhood.
Of all the men in Modern India, Ram Mohan Roy was the first and the greatest who realised this truth. He held up high the pure light of the Upanishads, that shows the path whereby ‘the conquerors of the self’ enter into the heart of the all’—the light which is not for rejection but for comprehension.
Musalmans had come to India with a culture which was aggressively antagonistic to her own. But in her saints, the spirit of the Upanishads worked in order to attain the fundamental harmony between things that were apparently irreconcilable. In the time of Ram Mohan Roy, the West had come to the East with a shock that caused panic in the heart of India. The natural cry was for exclusion. But this was the cry of fear, the cry of weakness, the cry of the dwarf. Through the great mind of Ram Mohan Roy, the true spirit of India asserted itself and accepted the West, not by the rejection of the soul of India, but by the comprehension of the soul of the West.
The mantram which gives our spiritual vision its right of entrance into the soul of all things, is the mantram of India, the mantram of Peace, of Goodness, of Unity—Shantam, Shivam, Advaitam. The distracted mind of the West is knocking at the gate of India for this. And is it to be met there with a hoarse shout of exclusion? *