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THE DANCE OF §IVA.

Cosmic I3anco of Natarajfi. Rrahnianical bronze. Soutli Ttulian. 12th Century,

Madras Museum.

THE DANCE OF SIVA

FOURTEEN INDIAN ESSAYS

BY

ANANDA COOMARASWAMY

V

THE SUNWISE TURN, INC.

2 EAST 3 1ST STREET NEW YORK 1918

COPYRIGHT, 1918 THE SUNWISE TURN, lac

Art Library

C78ci CONTENTS

PAGE

What Has India Contributed to Human Welfare? 1

Hindu View of Art: Historical 18

Hindu View of Art: Theory of Beauty ........ 30

That Beauty is a State 38

Buddhist Primitives 46

The Dance of Siva 56

Indian Images With Many Arms 67

Indian Music 72

Status of Indian Women 82

Sahaja 103

Intellectual Fraternity 112

Cosmopolitan View of Nietzsche 115

Young India , . 122

Individuality, Autonomy and Function 137

h

1235083

LIST OF PLATES

BETWEEN PAGES

Frontispiece — Cosmic Dance of Nataraja, 12th Century.

I. Figure a. — Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, 8th Century. Figure b. — Siva and Parvati on Mt. Kailasa, 8th Cen- tury 24-25

II. Figure a. — Deer. Mamallapuram. 8th Century.

Figure b. — Elephants, Mamallapuram, 8th Century . 26-27

III. Krishna Disguised as a Milkmaid, 17th Century . . 28-29

IV. Ajanta Fresco, 6th or 7th Century 40-41

V. Figure a. — Temple at BadamI, 8th Century.

Figure b. — Monkey family. Mamallapuram, 8th Cen- tury 42-43

VI. Figure a — Seated Buddha, Gandhara, 1st century, A.D. Figure b. — Dryad, SanchI, 2nd century, B.C. Figure c. — Lay Worshippers at a Buddha Shrine, 2nd

Century 46-47

VII. Buddha in Samadhi 48-49

VIII. Standing Bodhisattva, 2nd Century, A. D. . . . 50-51

IX. Standing Buddha, Ceylon, 2nd Century, A. D. . . 52-53

X. Standing Buddha, 2nd century, A.D 52-53

XI. Standing Images of Buddha, 2nd Century, A. D. . . 54-55

XII. Brahma, Elephanta, 8th Century 66-67

XIII. Durga as Chandi slaying Mahista, 11th Century . . 68-69

XIV. Death of Hiranyakasipu. Elura, 8th Century . . . 70-71

XV. 'Chamber-music of an aristocratic society,' 18th Cen- tury 72-73

XVI. Ratan Devi 74-75

XVII. TodI Ragini (a musical mode), 16th Century . . . 76-77

XVIII. Madhu-madhavl Ragini (a musical mode), 16th Cen- tury '. 78-79

XIX. Todi Ragini (a musical mode), 18th Century . . . 80-81

XX. A Hindu lady at her toilet, 18th Centur>- .... 84-85

XXI. Chand Bibi, called Chand Sultan, 18th Century . . 86-87

XXII. Hindu Marriage, about 1600 A. D. . ' 88-89

XXIII. Radha in her kitchen, Krishna at the window, 1st Cen-

tur>' 90-91

XXIV. "Where each is both," 8th Century 104-105

XXV. A School of Philosophy, 18th Century 130-131

XXVI. Figure a. — One of the gates of Jaipur.

Figure b. — Laying a warp in Madura 132-133

XXVII. The Bathing Ghat at Benares 134-135

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED TO HUMAN WELFARE?^

Each race contributes something essential to the world's civilization in the course of its own self-expression and self- realization. The character built up in solving its own problems, in the experience of its own misfortunes, is itself a gift which each offers to the world. The essential contribution of India, then, is simply her Indianness ; her g^eat humiliation would be to substitute or to have substituted for this own character (sva- hhava) a cosmopolitan veneer, for then indeed she must come before the world empty-handed.

If now we ask what is most distinctive in this essential contri- bution, we must first make it clear that there cannot be anything absolutely unique in the experience of any race. Its peculiarities will be chiefly a matter of selection and emphasis, certainly not a difference in specific humanity. If we regard the world as a family of nations, then we shall best understand the position of India by recognizing in her the elder, who no longer, it is true, possesses the virility and enterprise of youth, but has passed through many experiences and solved many problems which younger races have hardly yet recognized. The heart and essence of the Indian experience is to be fotmd in a constant intuition of the unity of all life, and the instinctive and ineradicable conviction that the recognition of this unity is the highest good and the uttermost freedom. All that India can offer to the world pro- ceeds from her philosophy. This philosophy is not, indeed, unknown to others — it is equally the gospel of Jesus and of Blake, Lao Tze, and Rumi — but nowhere else has it been made the essen- tial basis of sociology and education.

Every race must solve its own problems, and those of its own day. I do not suggest that the ancient Indian solution of the special Indian problems, though its lessons may be many and valuable, can be directly applied to modern conditions. What I do suggest is that the Hindus grasped more firmly than others the fundamental meaning and purpose of life, and more deliber-

1 First published in the 'Athenaeum,' London, 1915.

2 WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

ately than others organized society with a view to the attainment of the fruit of Ufe; and this organization was designed, not for the advantage of a single class, but, to use a modern formula, to take from each according to his capacity, and to give to each according to his needs. How far the rishis succeeded in this aim may be a matter of opinion. We must not judge of Indian society, especially Indian society in its present moment of decay, as if it actually realized the Brahmanical social ideas; yet even with all its imperfections Hindu society as it survives will appear to many to be superior to any form of social organization attained on a large scale anywhere else, and infinitely superior to the social order which we know as "modern civilization," But even if it were impossible to maintain this view — and a majority of Euro- peans and of English-educated Indians certainly believe to the contrary — what nevertheless remains as the most conspicuous special character of the Indian culture, and its greatest signifiance for the modern world, is the evidence of a constant effort to understand the meaning and the ultimate purpose of life, and a purposive organization of society in harmony with that order, and with a view to the attainment of the purpose.^ The Brah- manical idea is an Indian "City of the gods" — as devanagari, the name of the Sanskrit script, suggests. The building of that city anew is the constant task of civilization; and though the details of our plans may change, and the contours of our building, we may learn from India to build on the foundations of the religion of Eternity.

Where the Indian mind differs most from the average mind of modern Europe is in its view of the value of philosophy. In Europe and America the study of philosophy is regarded as an

1 Lest I should seem to exaggerate the importance which Hindus attach to Adhydtmd-vidya, the Science of the Self, I quote from the * Bhagavad Gita,' ix. 2 : "It is the kingly science, the royal secret, sacred surpassingly. It supplies the only sanction and support to righteousness, and its benefits may be seen even with the eyes of the flesh as bringing peace and perma- nence of happiness to men " ; and from Manu, xii. 100 : "Only he who knows the Vedasastra. only he deserves to be the Leader of Armies, the Wielder of the Rod of Law, the King of Men, the Suzerain and Overlord of Kings."

The reader who desires to follow up the subject of this essay is strongly recommended to the work of Bhagavan Das. ' The Science of Social Organization,' London and Benares, 1910.

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED? 3

end in itself, and as such it seems of but little importance to the ordinary man. In India, on the contrary, philosophy is not regarded primarily as a mental gj'mnastic, but rather, and with deep religious conviction, as our salvation (moksha) from the ignorance (avidyd) which for ever hides from our eyes the vision of reality. Philosophy is the key to the map of life, by which are set forth the meaning of life and the means of attaining its goal. It is no wonder, then, that the Indians have pursued the study of philosophy with enthusiasm, for these are matters that con- cern all.

There is a fundamental difference between the Brahman and the modern view of politics. The modern politician considers that idealism in politics is unpractical; time enough, he thinks, to deal with social misfortunes when they arise. The same out- look may be recognized in the fact that modem medicine lays greater stress on cure than on prevention, i. e., endeavours to protect against unnatural conditions rather than to change the social environment. The Western sociologist is apt to say : "The teachings of religion and philosophy may or may not be true, but in any case they have no significance for the practical reformer." The Brahmans, on the contrary, considered all activity not directed in accordance with a consistent theory of the meaning and purpose of life as supremely unpractical.

Only one condition permits us to excuse the indifference of the European individual to philosophy; it is that the struggle to exist leaves him no time for reflection. Philosophy can only be known to those who are alike disinterested and free from care; and Europeans are not thus free, whatever their political status. Where modern Industrialism prevails, the Brahman, Kshattriya, and §udra alike are exploited by the Vaishya,^ and where in this way commerce settles on every tree there must be felt continual anxiety about a bare subsistence; the victim of Industry must confine his thoughts to the subject of to-morrow's food for him- self and his family; the mere Will to Life takes precedence of the Will to Power. If at the same time it is decided that every man's voice is to count equally in the councils of the nation, it follows naturally that the voice of those who think must be

^ Brahman, Kshattriya, Vaishya, Sudra — the four primary types of Brahmanical sociology, vie, philosopher and educator, administrator and soldier, tradesman and herdsman, craftsman and labourer.

4 WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

drowned by that of those who do not think and have no leisure. This position leaves all classes alike at the mercy of unscrupulous individual exploitation, for all political effort lacking a philo- sophical basis becomes merely opportunist. The problem of modem Europe is to discover her own aristocracy and to learn to obey its will.

It is just this problem which India long since solved for her- self in her own way. Indian philosophy is essentially the cre- ation of the two upper classes of society, the Brahmans and the Kshattriyas. To the latter are due most of its forward move- ments; to the former its elaboration, systematization, mythical representation, and application. The Brahmans possessed not merely the genius for organization, but also the power to enforce their will; for, whatever may be the failings of individuals, the Brahmans as a class are men whom other Hindus have always agreed to reverence, and still regard with the highest respect and affection. The secret of their power is manifold; but it is above all in the nature of their appointed dhartna, of study, teach- ing, and renunciation.

Of Buddhism I shall not speak at great length, but rather in parenthesis ; for the Buddhists never directly attempted to organ- ize human society, thinking that, rather than concern himself with polity, the wise man should leave the dark state of life in the world to follow the bright state of the mendicant.* Buddhist doctrine is a medicine solely directed to save the individual from burning, not in a future hell, but in the present fire of his own thirst. It assumes that to escape from the eternal recurrence is not merely the summum bonum, but the whole purpose of life; he is the wisest who devotes himself immediately to this end; he the most loving who devotes himself to the enlightenment of others.

Buddhism has nevertheless deep and lasting effects on Indian state-craft. For just as the Brahman philosopher advised and guided his royal patrons, so did the Buddhist ascetics. The senti- ment of friendliness (metteya), through its effect upon individual character, reacted upon social theory.

It is difficult to separate what is Buddhist from what is Indian generally; but we may fairly take the statemanship of the great

^ Dhammapada, 87; also the J&takamala of Aiya Sura, xix, 27.

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED? 5

Buddhist Emperor Asoka as an example of the effect of Buddhist teaching upon character and pohcy. His famous edicts very well illustrate the little accepted truth that "in the Orient, from ancient times, national government has been based on benevolence, and directed to securing the welfare and happiness of the peo- ple."^ One of the most significant of the edicts deals with "True Conquest." Previous to his acceptance of the Buddhist dharma Asoka had conquered the neighbouring kingdom of the Kalingas, and added their territory to his own; but now, says the edict. His Majesty feels "remorse for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered in- volves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people. That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty . . . His Sacred Majesty desires that all animate beings should have security, self-control, peace of mind, and joyousness. . . .My sons and grandsons, who may be, should not regard it as their duty to conquer a new conquest. If perchance they become engaged in a conquest by arms, they should take pleasure in patience and gentleness, and regard as (the only true) conquest, the conquest won by piety. That avails both for this world and the next."

In another edict "His Sacred and Gracious Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or house- holders." Elsewhere he announces the establishment of hos- pitals, and the appointment of officials "to consider the case where a man has a large family, has been smitten by calamity, or Is advanced in years"; he orders that animals should not be killed for his table; he commands that shade and fruit trees should be planted by the high roads; and he exhorts all men to "strive hard." He quotes the Buddhist saying, "All men are my children." The annals of India, and especially of Ceylon, can show us other Buddhist kings of the same temper. But it will be seen that such effects of Buddhist teaching have their further consequences mainly through benevolent despotism, and the moral order established by one wise king may be destroyed by his suc- cessors. Buddhism, so far as I know, never attempted to

1 Viscount Torio in The Japan Daily Mail, November 19th-20th, 1890. The whole essay, of which a good part is quoted in Lafcadio Hearn's ' Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan/ is a searching criticism of Western polity, regarded from the standpoint of a modern Buddhist.

6 WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

formulate a constitution or to determine the social order. Just this, however, the Brahmans attempted in many ways, and to a great extent achieved, and it is mainly their application of religi- ous philosophy to the problems of sociology which forms the subject of the present discussion.

The Kshattriya-Brahman solution of the ultimate problems of life is given in the early Upanishads,^ It is a form of absolute (according to ^ankaracharya) or modified (according to Ramanuja) Monism. Filled with enthusiasm for this doctrine of the Unity or Interdependence of all life, the Brahman-Utopists set themselves to found a social order upon the basis provided. In the great epics^ they represented the desired social order as having actually existed in a golden past, and they put into the mouths of the epic heroes not only their actual philosophy, but the theory of its practical application — this, above all, in the long discourses of the dying Bhishma. The heroes themselves they made ideal types of character for the guidance of all subsequent generations; for the education of India has been accomplished deliberately through hero-worship. In the 'Dharmasastra' of Manu' and the * Arthasastra'* of Chanakya — perhaps the most remarkable sociological documents the world possesses — they set forth the picture of the ideal society, defined from the standpoint of law. By these and other means they accomplished what has not yet been eflfected in any other country in making religious philosophy the essential and intelligible basis of popular culture and national polity.

^ Deussen, The Philosophy of the Upanishads, translated by A. S. Geden, London, 1906.

2 The ' Mahabharata ' and ' The Ramayana.' These can be studied in the prose translations by P. C. Ray and M. N. Dutt, published in Calcutta.

3 This most important document is best expounded by Bhagavan Das, The Science of Social Organisation, London and Benares, 1910; also translated in full in the "Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxv. "Herein," says Manu (i. 107, 118), "are declared the good and evil results of various deeds, and herein are expounded the eternal principles of all the four t>T)es of human beings, of many lands, nations, tribes, and families, and also the ways of evil men."

*N. N. Law, Studies in Ancient Hindu Polity, London, 1914. The following precept may serve as an example of the text: that the king who has acquired new territory " should follow the people in their faith, with which they celebrate their national, religious, and congregational festivals and amusements."

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED? 7

What, then, is the Brahman view of hfe? To answer this at length, to expound the Science of the Self (Adhydtmd-vidyd) , which is the religion and philosophy of India, would require con- siderable space. We have already indicated that this science recognizes the unity of all life — one source, one essence, and one goal — and regards the realization of this unity as the highest good, bliss, salvation, freedom, the final purpose of life. This is for Hindu thinkers eternal life; not an eternity in time, but the recognition here and now of All Things in the Self and the Self in All. "More than all else," says Kabir, who may be said to speak for India, "do I cherish at heart that love which makes me to live a limitless life in this world." This inseparable unity of the material and spiritual world is made the foundation of the Indian culture, and determines the whole character of her social ideals.

How, then, could the Brahmans tolerate the practical diversity of life, how provide for the fact that a majority of individuals are guided by selfish aims, how could they deal with the problem of evil? They had found the Religion of Eternity (Nirguna Vidyd) ; what of the Religion of Time {Saguna Vidyd) ?

This is the critical point of religious sociology, when it remains to be seen whether the older idealist (it is old souls that are idealistic, the young are short-sighted) can remember his youth, and can make provision for the interest and activities of spiritual immaturity. To fail here is to divide the church from the every- day life, and to create the misleading distinction of sacred and profane; to succeed is to illuminate daily life with the light of heaven.

The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve — an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life. The outward movement on this curve — Evolution, the Path of Pursuit — the Pravritti Mdrga — is char- acterized by self-assertion. The inward movement — Involution, the Path of Return — the Nivritti Mdrga— is characterized by increasing Self-realization.^ The religion of men on the outward

^ It is a common convention o£ Indianists to print the wodd "self" in lower case when the ego (jivdtman) is intended, and with a capital when the higher self, the divine nature {paramatman) , is referred to. Spiritual freedom — the true goal — is the release of the self from the ego concept.

8 WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

path is the Religion of Time; the rehgion of those who return is the Religion of Eternity. If we consider life as one whole, certainly Self-realization must be regarded as its essential pur- pose from the beginning; all our forgetting is but that we may remember the more vividly. But though it is true that in most men the two phases of experience interpenetrate, we shall best understand the soul of man — drawn as it is in the two opposite, or seeming opposite, directions of Affirmation and Denial, Will and Will-surrender — by separate consideration of the outward and the inward tendencies. Brahmans avoid the theological use of the terms "good" and "evil," and prefer to speak of "knowl- edge" and "ignorance" {vidyd and avidya), and of the three qualities of sattva, rajas, and tamas. As knowledge increases, so much the more will a man of his own motion, and not from any sense of duty, tend to return, and his character and actions will be more purely sdttvic. But we need not on that account condemn the self-assertion of the ignorant as sin; for could Self-realiza- tion be where self-assertion had never been? It is not sin, but youth, and to forbid the satisfaction of the thirst of youth is not a cure; rather, as we realize more clearly every day desires sup- pressed breed pestilence. The Brahmans therefore, notwithstand- ing the austere rule appointed for themselves, held that an ideal human society must provide for the enjoyment of all pleasures by those who wish for them; they would say, perhaps, that those who have risen above the mere gratification of the senses, and beyond a life of mere pleasure, however refined, are just those who have already tasted pleasure to the full.

For reasons of this kind it was held that the acquisition of wealth (artha) and the enjoyment of sense-pleasure (katna), subject to such law (dharnta^) as may protect the weak against the strong, are the legitimate preoccupations of those on the outward path. This is the stage attained by modem Western society, of which the norm is competition regulated by ethical restraint. Beyond this stage no society can progress unless it is subjected to the creative will of those who have passed beyond the stage of most extreme egoism, whether we call them heroes,

^Dharma is that morality by which a given social order is protected. " It is by Dharma that civilization is maintained " (Matsya Purana, cxlv. 27). Dharma may also be translated as social norm, moral law, order, duty, righteousness, or as religion, mainly in its exoteric aspects.

A

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

guardians, Brahmans, Samurai, or simply men of genius.

Puritanism consists in a desire to impose the natural asceticism of age upon the young, and this position is largely founded on the untenable theories of an absolute ethic and an only true theology. The opposite extreme is illustrated in industrial society, which accepts the principles of competition and self-assertion as a mat- ter of course, while it denies the value of philosophy and dis- cipline. Brahman sociology, just because of its philosophical basis, avoided both errors in adopting the theory of sva-dharma, the "own-morality" appropriate to the individual according to his social and spiritual status, and the doctrine of the many forms of isvara, which is so clumsily interpreted by the missionaries as polytheistic. However much the Brahmans held Self-realization to be the end of life, the summum bonum, they saw very clearly that it would be illogical to impose this aim immediately upon those members of the community who are not yet weary of self- assertion. It is most conspicuously in this understanding toler- ance that Brahman sociology surpasses other systems.

At this point we must digress to speak briefly of the doctrine of reincarnation, which is involved in the theory of eternal recur- rence. This doctrine is assumed and built upon by Brahman sociologists, and on this account we must clearly understand its practical applications. We must not assume that reincarnation is a superstition which, if it could be definitely refuted (and that is a considerable "if"), would have as a theory no practical value. Even atoms and electrons are but symbols, and do not repre- sent tangible objects like marbles, which we could see if we had large enough microscopes; the practical value of a theory does not depend on its representative character, but on its efficacy in resuming past observation and forecasting future events. The doctrine of reincarnation corresponds to a fact which everyone must have remarked; the varying age of the souls of men, irre- spective of the age of the body counted in years. "A man is not an elder because his head is grey" (Dhammapada, 260). Sometimes we see an old head on young shoulders. Some men remain irresponsible, self-assertive, uncontrolled, unapt to their last day; others from their youth are serious, self -controlled, talented, and friendly. We must understand the doctrine of reincarnation at any rate as an artistic or mythical representation of these facts. To these facts the Brahmans rightly attached

lO WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

great importance, for it is this variation of temperament or inheri- tance which constitutes the natural inequality of men, an inequality that is too often ignored in the theories of Western democracy.

We can now examine the Brahmanical theory a little more closely. An essential factor is to be recognized in the dogma of the rhythmic character of the world-process. This rhythm is determined by the great antithesis of Subject and Object, Self and not-Self, Will and Matter, Unity and Diversity, Love and Hate, and all other "Pairs." The interplay of these opposites constitues the whole of sensational and registrateable existence, the Eternal Becoming (samsdra), which is characterized by birth and death, evolution and involution, descent and ascent, srishti and samhara. Every individual life — mineral, vegetable, animal, human, or personal god — has a beginning and an end, and this creation and destruction, appearance and disappearance, are of the essence of the world-process and equally originate in the past, the present, and the future. According to this view, then, every individual ego (jlvatman), or separate expression of the general Will to Life {ichchha, trishna), must be regarded as hav- ing reached a certain stage of its own cycle {gati). The same is true of the collective life of a nation, a planet, or a cosmic system. It is further considered that the turning point of this curve is reached in man, and hence the immeasurable value which Hindus (and Buddhists) attach to birth in human form. Before the turning point is reached — to use the language of Christian theology — the natural man prevails ; after it is passed, regenerate man. The turning point is not to be regarded as sudden, for the two conditions interpenetrate, and the change of psychological centre of gravity may occupy a succession of lives ; or if the turn- ing seems to be a sudden event, it is only in the sense that the fall of a ripe fruit appears sudden.

According to their position on the great curve, that is to say, according to their spiritual age, we can recognize three prominent types of men. There is first the mob, of those who are pre- occupied with the thought of I and Mine, whose objective is self- assertion, but are restrained on the one hand by fear of retaliation and of legal or after-death punishment, and on the other by the beginnings of love of family and love of country. These, in the main, are the "Devourers" of Blake, the "Slaves" of Nietzsche. Next there is a smaller, but still large number of thoughtful and

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED? H

good men whose behaviour is largely determined by a sense of duty, but whose inner life is still the field of conflict between the old Adam and the new man. Men of this type are actuated on the one hand by the love of power and fame, and ambition more or less noble, and on the other by the disinterested love of man- kind. But this type is rarely pan-human, and its outlook is often simultaneously unselfish and narrow. In times of great stress, the men of this type reveal their true nature, showing to what extent they have advanced more or less than has appeared. But all these, who have but begun to taste of freedom, must still be guided by rules. Finally, there is the much smaller number of great men — heroes, saviours, saints, and avatars — who have defi- nitely passed the period of greatest stress and have attained peace, or at least have attained to occasional and unmistakeable vision of life as a whole. These are the "Prolific" of Blake, the "Masters" of Nietzsche, the true Brahmans in their own right, and partake of the nature of the Superman and the Bodhisattva. Their activity is determined by their love and wisdom, and not by rules. In the world, but not of it, they are the flower of humanity, our leaders and teachers.

These classes constitute the natural hierarchy of human society. The Brahman sociologists were firmly convinced that in an ideal society, i. e., a society designed deliberately by man for the fulfil- ment of his own purpose (purushdrtha) ,^ not only must oppor- tunity be allowed to every one for such experience as his spiritual status requires, but also that the best and wisest must rule. It seemed to them impossible that an ideal society should have any other than an aristocratic basis, the aristocracy being at once intellectual and spiritual. Being firm believers in heredity, both of blood and culture, they conceived that it might be possible to constitute an ideal society upon the already existing basis of occupational caste. "If," thought they, "we can determine natural

'^ Purushdrtha. This is the Brahmanical formula of utility, forming the standard of social ethics. A given activity is useful, and therefore right, if it conduces to the attainment of dharma, artha, kdma and moksha (function, prosperity, pleasure, and spiritual freedom), or any one or more of these without detriment to any other. Brahmanical utility takes into account the whole man. Industrial sociologists entertain a much narrower view of utility: "It is with utilities that have a price that political economy is mainly concerned " (Nicholson, Principles of Politi- cal Economy^ ed. 2. p. 28).

12 WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

classes, then let us assign to each its appropriate duties {sva- dharma, own norm) and appropriate honour; this will at once facilitate a convenient division of necessary labour, ensure the handing down of hereditary skill in pupillary succession, avoid all possibility of social ambition, and will allow to every individual the experience and activity which he needs and owes." They assumed that by a natural law, the individual ego is always, or nearly always, bom into its own befitting environment. If they were wrong on this point, then its remains for others to discover some better way of achieving the same ends. I do not say that this is impossible; but it can hardly be denied that the Brah- manical caste system is the nearest approach that has yet been made towards a society where there shall be no attempt to realise a competitive equality, but where all interests are regarded as identical. To those who admit the variety of age in human souls, this must appear to be the only true communism.

To describe the caste system as an idea or in actual practice would require a whole volume. But we may notice a few of its characteristics. The nature of the difference between a Brahman and a ^iidra is indicated in the view that a Sudra can do no wrong,^ a view that must make an immense demand upon the patience of the higher castes, and is the absolute converse of the Western doctrine that the King can do no wrong. These facts are well illustrated in the doctrine of legal punishment, that that of the Vaishya should be twice as heavy as that of the §udra, that that of the Kshattriya twice as heavy again, that of the Brahman twice or even four times as heavy again in respect of the same offence ; for responsibility rises with intelligence and status. The 5udra is also free of innumerable forms of self-denial imposed upon the Brahman ; he may, for example, indulge in coarse food, the widow may re-marry. It may be observed that it was strongly held that the Sudra should not by any means outnumber the other castes; if the §udras are too many, as befell in ancient Greece, where the slaves outnumbered freemen, the voice of the least wise may prevail by mere weight of numbers.

Modem craftsmen interested in the regulation of machinery will be struck by the fact that the establishment and working of large machines and factories by individuals was reckoned a grievous

^Manu, X. 126.

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED? 13

sin; large organizations are only to be carried oil in the public

interest.^

Given the natural classes, one of the good elements of what is now regarded as democracy was provided by making the castes self-governing; thus is was secured that a man should be tried by his peers (whereas, under Industrial Democracy, an artist may be tried by a jury of tradesmen, or a poacher by a bench of squires). Within the caste there existed equality of opportunity for all, and the caste as a body had collective privileges and responsibilities. Society thus organized has much the appearance of what would now be called Guild Socialism.

In a just and healthy society, function should depend upon capacity; and in the normal individual, capacity and inclination are inseparable (this is the 'instinct of workmanship'). We are able accordingly to recognize, in the theory of the Syndicalists, as well as in the caste organization of India, a very nearly ideal com- bination of duty and pleasure, compulsion and freedom; and the words vocation or dharma imply this very identity. Individual- ism and socialism are united in the concept of function.

The Brahmanical theory has also a far-reaching bearing on the problems of education. "Reading," says the Garuda Purana, "to a man devoid of wisdom, is like a mirror to the blind." The Brahmans attached no value to uncoordinated knowledge or to unearned opinions, but rather regarded these as dangerous tools in the hands of unskilled craftsmen. The greatest stress is laid on the development of character. Proficiency in hereditary apti- tudes is assured by pupillary succession within the caste. But

^ Manu, xi. 63, 64, 66.

A truly progressive society is only possible where there is unity of pur- pose. How rapidly the social habit can then be changed is well illustrated by the action of many of the Allied Governments in taking con- trol of several departments of industrial production. It is only sad to reflect that it needed a great disaster to compel so simple an act as the limitation of profits. In the same way vast sums are now spent on caring for the welfare of an army of soldiers who would be, and will again be, left to the tender mercies of the labour market in times of peace. If the nation were as united in peace by a determination to make the best of life how much could not be accomplished at a fraction of the cost of war? If a nation can co-operate for self-defence, why not also for self-development?

14

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

it is in respect of what we generally understand by higher educa- tion that the Brahman method differs most from modern ideals ; for it is not even contemplated as desirable that all knowledge should be made accessible to all. The key to education is to be found in personality. There should be no teacher for whom teaching is less than a vocation (none may "sell the Vedas"), and no teacher should impart his knowledge to a pupil until he finds the pupil ready to receive it, and the proof of this is to be found in the asking of the right questions. "As the man who digs with a spade obtains water, even so an obedient pupil obtains the knowledge which is in his teacher."^

The relative position of man and woman is also ver}' note- worthy. Perhaps the woman is in general a younger soul, as Paracelsus puts it, "nearer to the world than man." But there is no war of words as to which is the superior, which inferior ; for the question of competitive equality is not considered. The Hindu marriage contemplates identity, and not equality.^ The pri- mary motif of marriage is not merely individual satisfaction, but the achievement of Purushartha, the purposes of life, and the wife is spoken of as sahadharmachdrinl, "she who cooperates in the fulfillment of social and religious duties." In the same way for the community at large, the system of caste is designed rather to unite than to divide. Men of different castes have more in common than men of different classes. It is in an Industrial Democracy, and where a system of secular education prevails, that groups of men are effectually separated ; a Western professor and a navvy do not understand each other half so well as a Brahman and a Sudra. It has been justly remarked that "the lowest pariah hanging to the skirts of Hindu society is in a sense as much the disciple of the Brahman ideal as any priest himself." ^

It remains to apply what has been said to immediate problems. I have suggested that India has nothing of more value to offer to the world than her religious philosophy, and her faith in the application of philosophy to social problems. A few words may

1 Manu. ii. 218.

2 Manu, ix. 45. " The man is not the man alone ; he is the man, the woman, and the progeny. The Sages have declared that the husband is the same as the wife."

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

IS

be added on the present crisis^ and the relationship of East and West. Let us understand first that what we see in India is a co- operative society in a state of decay. Western society has never been so highly organized, but in so far as it was organized, its disintegration has proceeded much further than is yet the case in India. And we may expect that Europe, having sunk into in- dustrial competition first, will be the first to emerge. The seeds of a future co-operation have long been sown, and we can clearly recognize a conscious, and perhaps also an unconscious, effort towards reconstruction.

In the meantime the decay of Asia jroceeds, partly of internal necessity, because at the present moment the social change from co-operation to competition is spoken of as progress, and because it seems to promise the ultimate recovery of political power, and partly as the result of destructive exploitation by the Industrial- ists. Even those European thinkers who may be called the prophets of the new age are content to think of a development taking place in Europe alone. But let it be clearly realized that the modem world is not the ancient world of slow communi- cations; what is done in India or Japan to-day has immediate spiritual and economic results in Europe and America. To say that East is East and West is West is simply to hide one's head in the sand.^ It will be quite impossible to establish any

1 1 do not mean the present war. as such, but civilization at the parting of the ways.

2 I should like to point out here that Mr. Lowes Dickinson's return to this position ('An Essay on India, China, and Japan,' and 'Appearances,' both 1914), is very unfortunate. He says the religion of India is the Religion of Eternity, the religion of Europe the Religion of Time, and chooses the latter. These phrases, by the way, are excellent renderings of Pravritti dharma and Nivritti dharma. So far as Mr. Dickinson's dis- tinction is true, in so far that is as India suffers from premature vairdgya, and Europe from excessive activity, so far each exhibits an excess which each should best be able to correct. But an antithesis of this sort is only conceptually possible, and no race or nation has ever followed either of the religions exclusively. All true civilization is the due adjustment of the two points of view. And just because this balance has been so con- spicuously attained in India, one who knows far more of India than Mr. Dickinson remarks that she " may yet be destined to prepare the way for the reconciliation of Christianity with the world, and through the practical identification of the spiritual with the temporal life, to hasten the period of that third step forvvard in the moral development of human-

l6 WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

higher social order in the West so long as the East remains in- fatuated with the, to her, entirely novel and fascinating theory of laissez-faire.

The rapid degradation of Asia is thus an evil portent for the future of humanity and for the future of that Western social idealism of which the beginnings are already recognizable. If, either in ignorance or in contempt of Asia, constructive European thought omits to seek the co-operation of Eastern philosophers, there will come a time when Europe will not be able to fight Industrialism, because this enemy will be entrenched in Asia. It is not sufficient for the English colonies and America to protect themselves by immigration laws against cheap Asiatic labour; that is a merely temporary device, and likely to do more harm than good, even apart from its injustice. Nor will it be possible for the European nationalist ideal that every nation should choose its own form of government, and lead its own life,^ to be realized, so long as the European nations have, or desire to have, possessions in Asia. What has to be secured is the conscious co-operation of East and West for common ends, not the sub- jection of either to the other, nor their lasting estrangement. For if Asia be not with Europe, she will be against her, and there may arise a terrible conflict, economic, or even armed, between an idealistic Europe and a materialized Asia.

To put the matter in another way, we do not fully realize the debt that Europe already owes to Asiatic thought, for the dis- covery of Asia has hardly begun. And, on the other hand, Europe has inflicted terrible injuries upon Asia in modem times.* I do not mean to say that the virus of "civilization" would not have spread through Asia quite apart from any direct European at- tempts to effect such a result — quite on the contrary ; but it can- ity, when there will be no (iivisions of race, creed, or class, or nationality between men, by whatsoever name they may be called, for they will all be one in the acknowledgment of their common Brotherhood " (Sir George Birdwood, Sva^ p. 355).

^ The ideal of self-determination (sva-rdj) for which the Allies claim to be fighting.

2 For example — and without the least ill-will — the English in India who unconsciously created social confusion simply because they could not understand what they saw, and endeavoured to fit a co-operative structure into the categories of modern political theory.

WHAT HAS INDIA CONTRIBUTED?

17

not be denied that those who have been the unconscious instru- ments of the degradation of Asiatic society from the basis of dharma to the basis of contract have incurred a debt.

The "clear air" of Asia is not merely a dream of the past. There is idealism, and there are idealists in modern India, even amongst those who have been corrupted by half a century of squalid education. We are not all deceived by the illusion of progress, but, like some of our European colleagues, desire "the coming of better conditions of life, when the whole world will again learn that the object of human life is not to waste it in a feverish anxiety and race after physical objects and comforts, but to use it in developing the mental, moral, and spiritual powers, latent in man." ^ The debt, then, of Europe, can best be paid — and with infinite advantage to herself — by seeking the co-operation of modern Asia in every adventure of the spirit which Europe would essay. It is true that this involves the hard surrender of the old idea that it is the mission of the West to civilize the East; but that somewhat Teutonic and Imperial view of kultur is already discredited. What is needed for the com- mon civilization of the world is the recognition of common prob- lems, and to co-operate in their solution. If it be asked what inner riches India brings to aid in the realization of a civilization of the world, then, from the Indian standpoint, the answer must be found in her religions and her philosophy, and her constant application of abstract theory to practical life.

1 S. C. Basu. The Daily Practice of the Hindus, 2nd ed., p. 4.

HINDU VIEW OF ART:

1. HISTORY OF ESTHETIC

The earliest Indian art of which we have any information or concerning which we are able to draw reasonably certain infer- ences, we may designate as Vedic, since we can hardly undertake here the discussion of the perhaps contemporary culture of the early Dravidians. Vedic art was essentially practical. About painting and sculpture we have no knowledge, but the carpenter, metal-worker and potter and weaver efficiently provided for man's material requirements. If their work was decorated, we may be sure that its 'ornament' had often, and perhaps always, a magical and protective significance. The ends of poetry were also prac- tical. The Vedic hymns were designed to persuade the gods to deal generously with men:

"As birds extend their sheltering wings. Spread your protection over us."

(Rigveda.)

Much of this poetry is descriptive; it is nature-poetry in the sense that it deals with natural phenomena. Its most poetical quality is its sense of wonder and admiration, but it is not lyrical in any other sense. It has no tragic or reflective elements, except in some of the later hymns, and there is no question of 'aesthetic contemplation,' for the conception of the sympathetic con- stantly prevails. The poet sometimes comments on his own work, which he compares to a car well-built by a deft craftsman, or to fair and well-woven garments, or to a bride adorned for her lover; and this art it was that made the hymns acceptable to the gods to whom they were addressed. Vedic Esthetic consisted essentially in the appreciation of skill.

The keynote of the age of the Upanishads (800 b. c.) and Pali Buddhism (500 b. c.) is the search for truth. The ancient hymns had become a long-established institution, taken for granted; ritual was followed solely for the sake of advantage in this world or the next. Meanwhile the deeper foundations

HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL

19

of Indian culture were in process of determination in the mental struggle of the 'dwellers in the forest/ The language of the Upanishads combines austerity with passion, but this passion is the exaltation of mental effort, remote from the common life of men in the world. Only here and there we find glimpses of the later fusion of lyric and religious experience, when, for example, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the bliss of atman-intuition, or the intuition of the Self, is compared with the happiness of earthly lovers in self -forgetting dalliance. In general, the Upani- shads are too much preoccupied with deeper speculations to ex- hibit a conscious art, or to discuss the art of their times; in this age there is no explicit Esthetic.

When, however, we consider the Indian way of regarding the Vedas as a whole, we shall find implicit in the word 'sruti' a very important doctrine ; that the Veda is eternal, the sacred books are its temporal expression, they have been 'heard.' This is not a theory of 'revelation' in the ordinary sense, since the audition depends on the qualification of the hearer, not on the will and active manifestation of a god. But it is on all fours with the later Hindu view which treats the practice of art as a form of yoga, and identifies aesthetic emotion with that felt when the self perceives the Self.

In Pali Buddhism generally, an enthusiasm for the truth, unsurpassed even in the Upanishads, is combined with monastic institutionalism and a rather violent polemic against the joys of the world. Beauty and personal love are not merely evanes- cent, but are snares to be avoided at all costs; and it is clearly indicated that the Early Buddhist Esthetic is strictly hedonistic. The indications of this point of view are summed up in the fol- lowing pages of the Visuddhi Magga : "Living beings on account of their love and devotion to the sensations excited by forms and the other objects of sense, give high honour to painters, musicians, perfumers, cooks, elixir-prescribing physicians, and other like persons who furnish us with objects of sense."

In the Upanishads on the one hand, and in the teachings of Buddha on the other, the deepest problems of life were pene- trated; the mists of the Vedic dawn had melted in the fire of austerity (tapes), and life lay open to man's inspection as a thing of v/hich the secret mechanism was no more mysterious. We can scarcely exaggerate the sense of triumph with which the

20 HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL

doctrines of the Atman or Self and the gospel of Buddha per- meated Indian society. The immediate result of the acceptance of these views appeared in an organized and deliberate endeavour to create a form of society adapted for the fulfilment of the purposes of life as seen in the light of the new philosophies. To the ideal of the saint in retirement was very soon added that of the man who remains in the world and yet acquires or possesses the highest wisdom — "It w^as with works that Janaka and others came imto adeptship" ( Glta, iii. 20) . There was now also evolved the doctrine of union by action (^karma-yoga) set forth in the Bhagavad Gitd, as leading even the citizen on the path of sal- vation. The emergence of a definitely Brahmanical rather than a Buddhist scheme of life is to be attributed to the fact that the practical energies of Buddhists were largely absorbed within the limits of its monasticism; the Buddhists in the main regard Nir- vana not merely as the ultimate, but as the sole object of life. But the Brahmans never forgot that this life is the field alike of Pursuit and Return. Their scheme of life is set forth at great length in the Sutra literature, the Dhartna Sastras and the Epics (in general, 4th — 1st centuries b. c).

This literature yields sufficient material for an elucidation of the orthodox view of art. But notwithstanding the breadth of the fourfold plan, we find in this literature the same hedonistic --Esthetic and puritanical applications as are characteristic of Pali Buddhism. Thus, Manu forbids the householder to dance or sing or play on musical instruments, and reckons architects, actors and singers amongst the unworthy men who should not be invited to the ceremony of offerings to the dead. Even Chanakya, though he tolerates musicians and actors, classes them with courtesans. The hedonistic theory still prevailed. In later times the 'defence' of any art, such as poetry or drama, was characteristically based on the fact that it could contribute to the achievement of all or any of the Four Aims of Life. '

Meanwhile the stimulus of discovered truth led not only to this austere formulation of a scheme of life (typically in Manu), but also to the development of yoga as a practice for the attain- ment of the desired end ; and in this development an almost equal part was taken by Brahmans and Buddhists (typically in Patafi- jali and Nagarjuna).

We shall digress here, and partially anticipate, to discuss briefly

HINDU VIEW OF ART : HISTORICAL 21

the important part once played in Indian thought by the concept of Art as Yoga, a subject sufficient in itself for a whole volume. It will be remembered that the purpose of Yoga is mental concentration, carried so far as the overlooking of all distinction between the subject and the object of contempla- tion ; a means of achieving harmony or unity of consciousness.

It was soon recognized that the concentration of the artist was of this very nature ; and we find such texts as Sukracharya's :

"Let the imager establish images in temples by meditation on the deities who are the objects of his devotion. For the successful achievement of this yoga the lineaments of the image are described in books to be dwelt upon in detail. In no other way, not even by direct and immediate vision of an actual object, is it possible to be so absorbed in contemplation, as thus in the making of images."

The manner in which even the lesser crafts constitute a practice (achdrya) analogous to that of (samprajndtd) yoga is indicated incidentally by Sankaracharya in the commentary on the Brahma Sutra, 3, 2, 10. The subject of discussion is the distinction of swoon from waking ; in swoon the senses no longer perceive their objects. Sankaracharya remarks, "True, the arrow-maker per- ceives nothing beyond his work when he is buried in it; but he has nevertheless consciousness and control over his body, both of which are absent in the fainting person." The arrow-maker seems to have afforded, indeed, a proverbial instance of single- minded attention, as we read in the Bhdgavata Purdna.

"I have learned concentration from the maker of arrows."

A connection between dream and art is recognized in a passage of the Agni Purdna,'^ where the imager is instructed, on the night before beginning his work, and after ceremonial purification, to pray, "O thou Lord of all the gods, teach me in dreams how to carry out all the work I have in my mind." Here again we see an anticipation of modern views, which associate myth and dream and art as essentially similar and representing the dramatisation of man's innermost hopes and fears.

The practise of visualisation, referred to by Sukracharya, is identical in worship and in art. The worshipper recites the

1 Agni Purdiia, ch. xllii. Cf. Patanjali, Yoga Sutra, 1, 38. For the theory of dreams see also Katlia Upanishad, v. 8, and Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, iv. 3, 9-14 and 16-18.

22 HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL

dhydna mantram describing the deity, and forms a corresponding mental picture, and it is then to this imagined form that his prayers are addressed and the offerings are made. The artist follows identical prescriptions, but proceeds to represent the mental picture in a visible and objective form, by drawing or modelling. Thus, to take an example from Buddhist sources:^

The artist (^sddhaka, mantrin, or yogin, as he is variously — and significantly — called), after ceremonial purification, is to proceed to a solitary place. There he is to perform the "Sevenfold Office," beginning with the invocation of the hosts of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and the offering to them of real or imaginary flowers. Then he must realize in thought the four infinite moods of friendliness, compassion, sympathy, and impartiality. Then he must meditate upon the emptiness (sunyatd) or non-existence of all things, for "by the fire of the idea of the abyss, it is said, there are destroyed beyond recovery the five factors" of ego- consciousness.^ Then only should he invoke the desired divinity by the utterance of the appropriate seed- word (blja) and should identify himself completely with the divinity to be represented. Then finally on pronouncing the dhydna mantram, in which the attributes are defined, the divinity appears visibly, "like a reflec- tion," or "as in a dream" and this brilliant image is the artist's model.

This ritual is perhaps unduly elaborated, but in essentials it shows a clear understanding of the psychology of the imagina- tion. These essentials are the setting aside the transformations of the thinking principle^; self-identification with the object of

^Condensed from Foucher. Iconographie Bouddhiqtie, 11, 8-11.

2 Similar views are met with again and again in modern aesthetic. Goethe perceived that he who attains to the vision of beauty is from himself set free: Riciotto Canudo remarks that the secret of all art is self- f orgetfulness : and Laurence Binyon that "we too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath (Ideas of Design in East and West, Atlantic Monthly, 1913).

^ Wagner speaks of " an internal sense which becomes clear and active •when all the others, directed outward, sleep or dream" (Combarieu, Music, its Laws and Evolution, p. 63). That God is the actual theme of all art is suggested by Sankaracharya in the commentary on the Brahma Sutra, i, i, 20-21. where he indicates the Brahman as the real theme of secular as well as spiritual songs : and according to Behmen, "It is nought indeed but thine own hearing and willing that do hinder thee, so that thou dost not see and hear God {Dialogues on the Supersensual Life.)

HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL 23

the work;^ and vividness of the final image.^

There are abundant literary parallels for this conception of art as yoga. Thus Valmiki, although he was already familiar with the story of Rama, before composing his own Rdmdyana sought to realize it more profoundly, and "seating himself with his face tov/ards the East^ and sipping water according to rule (i. e. cere- monial purification), he set himself to yoga-contemplation of his theme. By virtue of his yoga-power he clearly saw before him Rama, Lakshmana and Sita, and Dasaratha, together with his wives, in his kingdom laughing, talking, acting and moving as if in real life ... by yoga-power that righteous one beheld all that had come to pass, and all that was to come to pass in the future, like a nelli f ruit^ on the palm of his hand. And having truly seen all by virtue of his concentration, the generous sage began the setting forth of the history of Rama." *

Notice here particularly that the work of art is completed before the work of transcription or representation is begun.' "The mind of the sage," says Chuang Tzu, "being in repose, be- comes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation." Croce is entirely correct when he speaks of "the artist, who never makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination" and remarks that the externalisation of a work of art "implies a vigilant will, which persists in not allowing certain visions, intuitions, or representations to be lost."*

1 Cf . the phrase "Devam hhutva, devatn yajet" : to worship the god become the god. That which remains for us object, remains unknown.

2 He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments," said Blake, "and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all."

3 Phyllanthus emhlica, the round fruit of which is about the size of an ordinary marble. The simile is a common Indian formula for clear insight.

* Rdmayana, Balakandam.

^ Cf. Coomaraswamy and Duggirala, The Mirror of Gesture, Introduc- tion, p. 3. So Vasubandhu speaks of the poet as seeing the world, like a jujube fruit, lying within the hollow of his hands (Vdsavadatta, invo- cation.) "It seems to me." William Morris wrote, "that no hour of the day passes that the whole world does not show itself to me": and Mag- nusson records of him, referring to Sigurd the Volsung and other poems, that "in each case the subject matter had taken such a clearly definite shape in his mind, as he told me, that it only remained to write it down."

^ Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 162. 168.

24 HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL

It should be understood that yoga ('union') is not merely a mental exercise or a religious discipline, but the most practical preparation for any undertaking whatever. Hanuman, for ex- ample, before searching the Asoka grove for Sita, "prayed to the gods and ranged the forest in imagination till be found her"; then only did he spring from the walls of Lanka, like an arrow from a bow, and enter the grove in the flesh. Throughout the East, wherever Hindu or Buddhist thought have deeply pene- trated, it is firmly believed that all knowledge is directly accessible to the concentred and 'one-pointed' mind, without the direct intervention of the senses. Probably all inventors, artists and mathematicians are more or less aware of this as a matter of personal experience. In the language of psycho-analysis, this concentration preparatory to undertaking a specific task is "the willed introversion of a creative mind, which, retreating before its own problem and inwardly collecting its forces, dips at least for a moment into the source of life, in order there to wrest a little more strength from the mother for the completion of its work," and the result of this reunion is "a fountain of youth and new fertility."^

We have spoken so far of yoga, but for the artist this was rather a means than an end. Just as in Mediaeval Europe, so too, and perhaps even more conspicuously in India, the impulse to iconolatry derived from the spirit of adoration — the loving and passionate devotion to a personal divinity, which we know as bhakti. Patanjali, in the Yoga Sutra, mentions the Lord only as one amongst other suitable objects of contemplation, and without the use of any image being implied; but the purpose of the lover is precisely to establish a personal relation with the Beloved, and the plastic symbol is created for this end. A purely ab- stract philosophy or a psychology like that of Early Bud- dhism does not demand aesthetic expression; it was the spirit of worship which built upon the foundations of Buddhist and Vedantic thought the mansions of Indian religion, which shelter all those whom purely intellectual formulae could not satisfy — the children of this world who will not hurry along the path of Release, and the mystics who find a foretaste of freedom in the love of every cloud in the sky and flower at their feet.

1 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. 330, 336.

INDIAN SCULPTURE.

PLATE I

Figure a. Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva. Buddhist bronze. Ceylon, 8th Century. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure b. Siva and Parvati on Mt. Kailasa. Brahmanical stone sculpture, Elura,

8th Century.

HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL 25

This was indeed a return to superstition, or at any rate to duality ; but what in this world is not a dream and a superstition ? — certainly not the atoms of science. And for all those who are not yet idealists there are, as there must be, idols provided. The superstitions of Hinduism, like those of Christianity, accom- lished more for the hearts of men than those of modern material- ism. It may well be doubted if art and idolatry, idolatry and art, are not inseparable.^

Let us observe here that the purpose of the imager was neither self-expression nor the realisation of beauty. He did not choose his own problems, but like the Gothic sculptor, obeyed a hieratic canon.^ He did not regard his own or his fellows' work from the standpoint of connoisseurship or aestheticism — not, that is to say, from the standpoint of the philosopher, or aesthete, but from that of a pious artisan. To him the theme was all in all, and if there is beauty in his work, this did not arise from aesthetic intention,^ but from a state of mind which found unconscious expression. In every epoch of great and creative art we observe an identical phe- nomenon— the artist is preoccupied with his theme. It is only in looking backward, and as philosophers rather than artists — or if we are also artists, a rare combination, then with the philosophic and not the aesthetic side of our minds — that we perceive that the quality of beauty in a work of art is really quite independent of its theme. Then we are apt to forget that beauty has never been reached except through the necessity that was felt to deal with the particular subject. We sit down to paint a beautiful picture, or stand up to dance, and having nothing in us that we feel must be said and said clearly at all costs, we are surprised that the result is insipid and lacks conviction; the subject may be

1 " The lineaments of images," says Sukracharya, "are determined by the relation which subsists between the adorer and the Adored." Cf. the Saiva invocation "Thou that dost take the forms imagined by thy wor- shippers."

2 We cannot assert this too strongly of orthodox or classic (sdstriya) Hindu art. Rajput painting is more romantic, but even there the theme is pre-determined in literature, and the pictures, though they are not illustrations in the representative sense of the word, are pictures for verses just as much as the Ajanta paintings or the reliefs of Borobodur.

3 " Even the misshapen image of a god," says Sukracharya, " is to be preferred to the image of a man, however charming " : in full accord with our modern view, that prefers conviction to prettiness.

26 HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL

lovely, the dancer may be ravishing, but the picture and the dance are not rasavant. The theory of beauty is a matter for philosoph- ers, and artists strive to demonstrate it at their own risk.

The Indian imager was concerned with his own problem. It is in- teresting to see the kind of man he was expected to be. According to one of the Silpa Sastras "The Silpan (artificer) should under- stand the Atharva Veda, the thirty-two Silpa Sastras, and the Vedic mantras by which the deities are invoked. He should be one who wears a sacred thread, a necklace of holy beads, and a ring of kusa grass on his finger ; delighting in the worship of God, faithful to his wife, avoiding strange women, piously acquiring a knowledge of various sciences, such a one is indeed a crafts- man."^ Elsewhere it is said "the painter must be a good man, no sluggard, not given to anger; holy, learned, self-controlled, devout and charitable, such should be his character."* It is added that he should work in solitude, or when another artist is present, never before a layman.

In this connection it is very important to realize that the artisan or artist possessed an assured status in the form of a life contract, or rather an hereditary office. He was trained from childhood as his father's disciple, and followed his father's calling as a matter of course. He was member of a guild, and the guilds Vv^ere recognized, and protected by the king. The artificer was also protected from competition and undercutting; it is said: "That any other than a Silpan should build temples, towns, seaports, tanks or wells, is comparable to the sin of murder."^ This was guild socialism in a non-competitive society.*

The earliest impulses of Indian art appears to have been more or less practical and secular, and it is perhaps to this fact that we may partly trace the distrust of art exhibited by the early hedo-

* From a Tamil version of a ^ilpa Sastra, quoted by Keams, Indian Antiquary, vol. v., 1876.

* Griinwedel, Mythologie des Buddhismus, p. 192. Cf. Cezanne, " I have never permitted anyone to watch me while I work. I refuse to do anything before anyone" (quoted W. H. Wright. Modern Painting, p. 152).

3 Keams, loc. cit.

* The Sociology is discussed more fully in Sir George Birdwood's Industrial Arts of India, and Sva, and my Mediaeval Sinhalese Art and The Indian Craftsman.

INDIAN SCULPTURE.

PLATE II

Figure a. Deer, Mamallapuram, 8lh Century'.

Figure b. Elephants, Mamallapuram, Nth LiiUiir}-.

HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL 27

nists. On the other hand, the dominant motifs governing its evolution from the third century B.C. onwards, and up to the close of the eighteenth century, are devotion (bhakti) and reunion (yoga). Neither of these is peculiar to India, but they exhibit there a peculiar character which leaves its mark on every- thing Hindu or Buddhist. Let us now follow these traces in a very summary reference to actual documents.

I have discussed in another chapter the beginnings of Buddhist art.^ It is in the southern primitives at AmaravatI and Anura- dhapura rather than in the semi-Roman figures of the North-west that we can best observe the development of an art that is distinctively Indian. This is the main stream; and it is these types from which the suave and gracious forms of Gupta sculp- ture derive, and these in turn became the models of all Buddhist art in China. In India proper, they grow more and more mouvemente, more dramatic and vigorous, in the classic art of Elura and Elephanta, Mamallapuram and Ceylon, and form the basis of the immense developments of colonial Buddhist and Hindu art in Java and Cambodia. Gupta and classic painting £re preserved at Ajanta.

The tender humanism and the profound nature sympathies which are so conspicuous in the painting of Ajanta and the sculpture of Mamallapuram are recognizable equally in the work of poets like Asvaghosha and Arya §ura and dramatists like Kalidasa. Asvaghosha says of Prince Siddhartha that one day as he was riding in the country "he saw a piece of land being ploughed, with the path of the plough broken like waves of the water. . . .And regarding the men as they ploughed, their faces soiled by the dust, scorched by the sun, and chafed by the wind, and their cattle bewildered by the burden of drawing, the All-noble One felt the uttermost compassion; and alighting from the back of his horse, he passed slowly over the earth, overcome with sorrow — pondering the birth and destructioh proceeding in the world, he grieved." Nor can anything be more poignant than Santi Deva's expression of his sense of the eternal movement and unsubstantiality of life — "Who is a kinsman, and who a

^ The beginnings of Hindu art also go back to the second or third century B. C, but apart from a few coins. little or nothing has been pre- served of earlier date than the third or fourth century A. D.

a8 HINDU VIEW OF ART : HISTORICAL

friend, and unto whom?" The Hterature of love is no less remarkable. We recognize here, just as in the painting and sculpture, what is eternal in all art, and universal — impassioned vision based on understanding, correlated with cloudless thought and devoid of sentimentality. There is every reason to believe too that this was the time of highest attainment in music. Lastly, this was a time of progress in the field of pure science, especially mathematics and astronomy. From the fourth to the end of the eighth century we must regard as the golden age of Indian civilization. This was the period of Wei and T'ang in China; Eastern Asia represented then to all intents and purposes the civilization of the world.

After the ninth or tenth century there is a general, though cer- tainly not universal, decline in orthodox art, of which the formulae were rapidly stereotyped in their main outlines, and rendered florid in their detail. Classical Sanskrit literature also came to an end in a forest of elaborate embroidery. But great forces (sometimes grouped under the designation of the Pau- ranic Renaissance) had long been at work preparing the way for the emergence of the old cults of Siva and Vishnu in forms which gave renewed inspiration to art — sculpture and poetry in the South, and poetry and painting in the North. In these devotional faiths was completed the cycle of Indian spiritual evolution from pure philosophy to pure mysticism, from knowl- edge to love. The inner and outer life were finally unified — a development entirely analogous to that of Zen Buddhism in the Far East. The transparency of life so clearly expressed in the paintings of Ajanta is indicated with a renewed emphasis — above all in the Radha-Krishna cults — and in all the Northern Vaish- nava poetry and painting — the tradition in which Rabindranath Tagore is the latest singer, and of which the theory is plainly set forth in his song:

Not my way of salvation, to surrender the world !

Rather for me the taste of Infinite Freedom

While yet I am bound by a thousand bonds to the wheel . . .

In each glory of sound and sight and scent

I shall find Thy infinite joy abiding:

My passion shall bum as the flame of salvation,

The flower of my love shall become the ripe fruit of devotion.

INDIAN PAINTING.

PLATE III

Krishna disguised as a milkmaid. Rajput Painting, 17th Centurj-. Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston.

HINDU VIEW OF ART: HISTORICAL 29

But such a theory is now rather a survival of all that was uni- versal in Indian religion, rather than a new point of departure. The current Esthetic of 'educated' India — a product of a wide miscomprehension of Western culture and a general surrender to Noncomformist ethics — is again realistic and hedonistic, and perhaps for the first time illustrative, personal, and sentimental.

HINDU VIEW OF ART:

II. THEORY OF BEAUTY

We have so far discussed the Hindu view of art mainly from the internal evidence of the art itself. There remains, what is more exactly pertinent to the title of these chapters, to discuss the Hindu Esthetic as it is expressly formulated and elaborated in the abundant Sanskrit and Hindi literature on Poetics and the Drama. We shall find that general conclusions are reached which are applicable, not only to literature, but to all arts alike.

The discussion begins with the Defence of Poesy. This is summed up in the statement that it may contribute to the achieve- ment of all or any of the Four Ends of Life. A single word rightly employed and understood is compared to the 'cow of plenty,' yielding every treasure; and the same poem that is of material advantage to one, may be of spiritual advantage to an- other or upon another occasion.

The question follows : What is the essential element in poetry ? According to some authors this consists in style or figures, or in suggestion {vyanjand, to which we shall recur in discussing the varieties of poetry). But the greater writers refute these views and are agreed that the one essential element in poetry^ is what they term Rasa, or Flavour. With this term, which is the equiva- lent of Beauty or Esthetic Emotion' in the strict sense of the philosopher, must be considered the derivative adjective rasavant

1 Especially Visvanatha in the Sahitya Darpana, ca. 1450 A. D. (trans. Bibliotheca Indica, Ballantyne). Also in the Agtii Purdna, and the Vyakti Viveka.

2 As remarked by W. Rothenstein, " What is written upon a single work should enable people to apply clear principles to all works they may meet with" (Two Drawings by Hok'sai, 1910). Also Benedetto Croce, " laws relating to special branches are not conceivable " {Aesthetic, p. 350).

3 Such words as saundarya and rupa should be translated as loveliness or charm.

No one suggests that metre makes poetry. This error was hardly to be expected in a country where even the dryest treatises on law and logic are composed in metre. Metrical poetry is padya kavya, prose poetry is gadya kdvya, but it is rasa that makes them poetry.

HINDU VIEW OF ART: THEORY OF BEAUTY 31

'having rasa/ applied to a work of art, and the derivative sub- stantive rasika, one who enjoys rasa, a connoisseur or lover, and finally rasdsvadana, the tasting of rasa, i. e., aesthetic contempla- tion.

A whole literature is devoted to the discussion of rasa and the conditions of its experience. The theory, as we have remarked, is worked out in relation to poetry and drama, especially the classic drama of Kalidasa and others. When we consider that these plays are essentially secular in subject and sensuous in ex- pression, the position arrived at regarding its significance will seem all the more remarkable.

Aesthetic emotion — rasa — is said to result in the spectator —

rasika — though it is not effectively caused, through the operation

of determinants (vibhava), consequents {anubhava), moods

(bhdva) and involtmtary emotions {sattvabhava) .^ Thus:

Determinants: the aesthetic problem, plot, theme, etc., viz: the

hero and other characters and the circumstances of time and

place. In the terminology of Croce these are the "physical

stimulants to aesthetic reproduction."

Consequents : deliberate manifestations of feeling, as gestures,

etc. Moods: transient moods (thirty-three in number) induced in the characters by pleasure and pain, e. g., joy, agitation, im- patience, etc. Also the permanent (nine), viz: the Erotic, Heroic, Odious, Furious, Terrible, Pathetic, Wondrous and Peaceful. Involuntary Emotions: emotional states originating in the inner nature; involuntary expressions of emotion such as horripilation, trembling, etc. (eight in all). In order that a work may be able to evoke rasa one^ of the permanent moods must form a master-motif to which all other expressions of emotion are subordinate.^ That is to say, the first essential of a rasavant work is unity —

As a king to his subjects, as a guru to his disciples. Even so the master-motif is lord of all other motifs.*

1 Dhanamjaya, Dasarupa, iv. 1. - Or any two rasas combined.

3 Dasarupa, iv, 46.

4 Bharata, Ndtya Sastra, 7, 8.

32

HINDU VIEW OF ART: THEORY OF BEAUTY

If, on the contrary, a transient emotion is made the motif of the whole work, this "extended development of a transient emo- tion tends to the absence of rasa,"^ or as we should now say, the work becomes sentimental. Pretty art which emphasizes passing feelings and personal emotion is neither beautiful nor true: it tells us of meeting again in heaven, it confuses time and eternity, loveliness and beauty, partiality and love.

Let us remark in passing that while the nine permanent moods correspond to an identical classification of rasas or flavours as nine in number, the rasa of which we speak here is an absolute, and distinct from any one of these. The 'nine rasas 'are no more than the various colourings of one experience, and are arbitrary terms of rhetoric used only for convenience in classification : just as we speak of poetry categorically as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc., without implying that poetry is anything but poetry. Rasa is tasted — beauty is felt — only by empathy, 'einfiihlung' (sddhar- ana) ; that is to say by entering into, feeling, the permanent motif ; but it is not the same as the permanent motif itself, for, from this point of view, it matters not with which of the permanent motifs we have to do.

It is just here that we see how far Hindu Aesthetic had now departed from its once practical and hedonistic character: the Dasarupa declares plainly that Beauty is absolutely independent of the sympathetic — "Delightful or disgusting, exalted or lowly, cruel or kindly, obscure or refined, (actual) or imaginary, there is no subject that cannot evoke rasa in man."

Of course, a work of art may and often does afford us at the same time pleasure in a sensuous or moral way, but this sort of pleasure is derived directly from its material qualities, such as tone or texture, assonance, etc., or the ethical peculiarity of its theme, and not from its aesthetic qualities : the aesthetic experience is independent of this, and may even, as Dhanamjaya says, be derived in spite of sensuous or moral displeasure.

Incidentally we may observe that the fear of art which prevails

1 Dasarupa, iv. 45.

Blake, too, says that "Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is not to be acquired. It is bom with us." And as P'u Sung-ling remarks: "Each interprets in his own way the music of heaven; and whether it be discord or not, depends upon antecedent causes" (Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, p. xvii).

HINDU VIEW OF ART: THEORY OF BEAUTY 33

amongst Puritans arises partly from the failure to recognize that aesthetic experience does not depend on pleasure or pain at all: and when this is not the immediate difficulty, then from the dis- trust of any experience which is "beyond good and evil" and so devoid of a definitely moral purpose.

The tasting of rasa — the vision of beauty — is enjoyed, says Visvanatha, "only by those who are competent thereto" : and he quotes Dharmadatta to the effect that "those devoid of imagina- tion, in the theatre, are but as the wood-work, the walls, and the stones." It is a matter of common experience that it is possible for a man to devote a whole life time to the study of art, without having once experienced aesthetic emotion: "historical research" as Croce expresses it, "directed to illumine a work of art by plac- ing us in a position to judge it, does not alone suffice to bring it to birth in our spirit," for "pictures, poetry, and every work of art produce no effect save on souls prepared to receive them." Vis- vanatha comments very pertinently on this fact when he says that "even some of the most eager students of poetry are seen not to have a right perception of rasa." The capacity and genius nec- essary for appreciation are partly native ('ancient') and partly cultivated ('contemporary') : but cultivation alone is useless, and if the poet is born, so too is the rasika, and criticism is akin to genius.

Indian theory is very clear that instruction is not the purpose of art. On this point Dhanamjaya is sufficiently sarcastic :

"As for any simple man of little intelligence," he writes, "who says that from dramas, which distil joy, the gain is knowledge only, as in the case of history and the like (mere statement, nar- rative, or illustration) — homage to him, for he has averted his face from what is delightful."^

The spectator's appreciation of beauty depends on the effort of his own imagination, "just as in the case of children playing with clay elephants."^ Thus, technical elaboration (realism) in art is not by itself the cause of rasa : as remarked by Rabindra-

^ Dasarupa, 1, 6.

^Dasarupa, IV. 50, Cf. Goethe, "He who would work for the stage . . . should leave Nature in her proper place and take careful heed not to have recourse to anything but what may be performed by children with puppets upon boards and laths, together with sheets of cardboard and linen" — quoted in 'The Mask,' Vol. v. p. 3.

34

HINDU VIEW OF ART; THEORY OF BEAUTY

nath Tagore "in our country, those of the audience who are appreciative, are content to perfect the song in their own mind by the force of their own feehng."^ This is not very different from what is said by Sukracharya with reference to images : "the defects of images are constantly destroyed by the power of the virtue of the worshipper who has his heart always set on God." If this attitude seems to us dangerously uncritical, that is to say dangerous to art, or rather to accomplishment, let us remember that it prevailed everywhere in all periods of great creative activ- ity : and that the decline of art has always followed the decline of love and faith.

Tolerance of an imperfect work of art may arise in two ways : the one uncritical, powerfully swayed by the sympathetic, and too easily satisfied with a very inadequate correspondence between content and form, the other creative, very little swayed by con- siderations of charm, and able by force of true imagination to complete the correspondence of content and form which is not achieved or not preserved in the original. Uncritical tolerance is content with prettiness or edification, and recoils from beauty that is 'difficult': creative tolerance is indifferent to prettiness or edification, and is able from a mere suggestion, such as an awkward 'primitive' or a broken fragment, to create or recreate a perfect experience.

"Also, "the permanent motif becomes rasa through the rasika's own capacity for being delighted — not from the character of the hero to be imitated, nor because the work aims at the production of aesthetic emotion."^ How many works which have "aimed at the production of aesthetic emotion," that is to say, which were intended to be beautiful, have failed of their purpose !

The degrees of excellence in poetry are discusesd in the Kavya Prakdsa and the Sdhitya Darpana. The best is where there is a deeper significance than that of the literal sense. In minor poetry the sense overpowers the suggestion. In inferior poetn,'-, significantly described as 'variegated' or 'romantic' (chitra), the only artistic quality consists in the ornamentation of the literal sense, which conveys no suggestion beyond its face meaning. Thus narrative and descriptive verse take a low place, just as portraiture does in plastic art : and, indeed, the Sdhitya Darpana

^ Jthan-smriti, pp. 134-S. 2 Dasarupa, iv., 47.

HINDU VIEW OF ART : THEORY OF BEAUTY 35

excludes the last kind of poetry altogether. It Is to be observed that the kind of suggestion meant is something more than implica- tion or double entendre: in the first case we have to do with mere abbreviation, comparable with the use of the words et cetera, in the second we have a mere play on words. What is understood to be suggested is one of the nine rasas.

It is worth noting that we have here a departure from, and I think, an improvement on Croce's definition 'expression is art.' A mere statement, however, completely expressive, such as: "The man walks/' or (a+b)^ = a^+2ab+b^ is not art. Poetry is indeed a kind of sentence^: but what kind of sentence?" A sentence ensouled by rasa,^ i. e., in which one of the nine rasas is implied or suggested: and the savouring of this flavour, ras- asvadana, through empathy, by those possessing the necessary sen- sibility is the condition of beauty.

What then are rasa and rasdsvddana, beauty and aesthetic emo- tion ? The nature of this experience is discussed by Visvanatha in the Sdhitya Darpana^: "It is pure, indivisible, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free of admixture with any other perception, the very twin brother of mystic experi- ence {Brahmdsvddana sahodarah), and the very life of it is supersensuous (lokottara) wonder."* Further, "It is enjoyed by those who are competent thereto, in identity,' just as the form of God is itself the joy with which it is recognized."

For that very reason it cannot be an object of knowledge, its perception being indivisible from its very existence. Apart from perception it does not exist. It is not on that account to be regarded as eternal in time or as interrupted: it is timeless. It is again, supersensuous, hyperphysical (alaukika), and the only proof of its reality is to be found in experience"

Religion and art are thus names for one and the same experi-

* The likeness of aesthetic to linguistic is indicated in Dasarupa, iv. 46.

2 Vdkyam rasdtmakam vacakam — Sahitya Darpana, 3.

3vv. 33. 51, 53. 54. " '

■* Wonder is defined as a kind of expanding of the mind in 'admiration.'

' The expression rasasvddana is fictitious, because rasasvadana Is rasa, and vice versa. In aesthetic contemplation, as In perfect worship, there is Identity of subject and object, cause and eflfect.

'The rasika Is therefore unable to convince the Philistine by argu- ment : he can but say, Taste and see that It Is good — for / know in what I have believed.

36 HINDU VIEW OF ART: THEORY OF BEAUTY

ence — an intuition of reality and of identity. This is not, of course, exclusively a Hindu view: it has been expounded by many others, such as the Neo-platonists, Hsieh Ho, Goethe, Blake, Schopenhauer and Schiller. Nor is it refuted by Croce. It has been recently restated as follows :

"In those moments of exaltation that art can give, it is easy to believe that we have been possessed by an emotion that comes from the world of reality. Those who take this view will have to say that there is in all things the stuff out of which art is made — reality. The peculiarity of the artist would seem to be that he possesses the power of surely and frequently seizing reality (generally behind pure form), and the power of expressing his sense of it, in pure form always !"^

Here pure form means form not clogged with unaesthetic mat- ter such as associations.

It will be seen that this view is monistic: the doctrine of the universal presence of reality is that of the immanence of the Abso- lute. It is inconsistent with a view of the world as absolute mdya, or utterly unreal, but it implies that through the false world of everyday experience may be seen by those of penetrating vision (artists, lovers and philosophers) glimpses of the real substrate. This world is the formless as we perceive it, the unknowable as we know it.

Precisely as love is reality experienced by the lover, and truth is reality as experienced by the philosopher, so beauty is reality as experienced by the artist: and these are three phases of the Absolute. But it is only through the objective work of art that the artist is able to communicate his experience, and for this purpose any theme proper to himself will serve, since the Abso- lute is manifested equally in the little and the great, animate and inanimate, good and evil.

We have seen that the world of Beauty, like the Absolute, cannot be known objectively. Can we then reach this world by rejecting objects, by a deliberate purification of art from all asso- ciations ? We have already seen, however, that the mere intention to create beauty is not sufficient: there must exist an object of devotion. Without a point of departure there can be no flight and no attainment: here also "one does not attain to perfection

1 CUve Bell. Art. p. 54.

w

^m by mer

HINDU VIEW OF ART: THEORY OF BEAUTY 37

by mere renunciation. "^ We can no more achieve Beauty than we can find Release by turning our backs on the world: we cannot find our way by a mere denial of things, but only in learning to see those things as they really are, infinite or beau- tiful. The artist reveals this beauty wherever the mind attaches itself: and the mind attaches itself, not directly to the Absolute, but to objects of choice.

Thus we return to the earth. If we supposed we should find the object of search elsewhere, we were mistaken. The two worlds, of spirit and matter, Purusha and Prakriti, are one: and this is as clear to the artist as it is to the lover or the philosopher. Those Philistines to whom it is not so apparent, we should speak of as materialists or as nihilists — exclusive monists, to whom the report of the senses is either all in all, or nothing at all. The theory of rasa set forth according to Visvanatha and other sesthe- ticians, belongs to totalistic monism ; it marches with the Vedanta. In a country like India, where thought is typically consistent with itself, this is no more than we had a right to expect.

^Bhagavad GUd. 111. 14.

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE

It is very generally held that natural objects such as human beings, animals or landscapes, and artificial objects such as fac- tories, textiles or works of intentional art, can be classified as beautiful or ugly. And yet no general principle of classification has ever been found: and that which seems to be beautiful to one is described as ugly by another. In the words of Plato "Everyone chooses his love out of the objects of beauty accord- ing to his own taste."

To take, for example, the human type: every race, and to some extent every individual, has an unique ideal. Nor can we hope for a final agreement : we cannot expect the European to pre- fer the Mongolian features, nor the Mongolian the European. Of course, it is very easy for each to maintain the absolute value of his own taste and to speak of other types as ugly; just as the hero of chivalry maintains by force of arms that his own beloved is far more beautiful than any other. In like manner the various sects maintain the absolute value of their own ethics. But it is clear that such claims are nothing more than statements of preju- dice, for who is to decide which racial ideal or which morality is "best" ? It is a little too easy to decide that our own is best ; we are at the most entitled to believe it the best for us. This rela- tivity is nowhere better suggested than in the classic saying attrib- uted to Majnun, when it was pointed out to him that the world at large regarded his Laila as far from beautiful. "To see the beauty of Laila," he said, "requires the eyes of Majnun."

It is the same with works of art. Different artists are inspired by different objects ; what is attractive and stimulating to one is depressing and unattractive to another, and the choice also varies from race to race and epoch to epoch. As to the appreciation of such works, it is the same; for men in general admire only such works as by education or temperament they are predisposed to admire. To enter into the spirit of an unfamiliar art demands a greater effort than most are willing to make. The classic scholar starts convinced that the art of Greece has never been equalled or surpassed, and never will be ; there are many who think, like Michelangelo, that because Italian painting is good, therefore

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE 39

good painting is Italian. There are many who never yet felt the beauty of Egyptian sculpture or Chinese or Indian painting or music: that they have also the hardihood to deny their beauty, however, proves nothing.

It is also possible to forget that certain works are beautiful: the eighteenth century had thus forgotten the beauty of Gothic sculpture and primitive Italian painting, and the memory of their beauty was only restored by a great effort in the course of the nineteenth. There may also exist natural objects or works of art which humanity only very slowly learns to regard as in any way beautiful; the western aesthetic appreciation of desert and mountain scenery, for example, is no older than the nineteenth century; and it is notorious that artists of the highest rank are often not understood till long after their death. So that the more we consider the variety of human election, the more we must admit the relativity of taste.

And yet there remain philosophers firmly convinced that an absolute Beauty (rasa)^ exists, just as others maintain the con- ceptions of absolute Goodness and absolute Truth. The lovers of God identify these absolutes with Him (or It) and maintain that He can only be known as perfect Beauty, Love and Truth. It is also widely held that the true critic (rasika) is able to decide which works of art are beautiful (rasavant) and which are not ; or in simpler words, to distinguish works of genuine art from those that have no claim to be so described. At the same time we must admit the relativity of taste, and the fact that all gods (devas and Isvaras) are modelled after the likeness of men.

It remains, then, to resolve the seeming contradictions. This is only to be accomplished by the use of more exact terminology. So far have I spoken of 'beauty' without defining my meaning, and have used one word to express a multiplicity of ideas. But we do not mean the same thing when we speak of a beautiful girl and a beautiful poem ; it will be still more obvious that we mean two different things, if we speak of beautiful weather and a beauti- ful picture. In point of fact, the conception of beauty and the ad- jective "beautiful" belong exclusively to aesthetic and should only be used in aesthetic judgment. We seldom make any such judg- ments when we speak of natural objects as beautiful; we gen-

^ Rasa, rasavant and rasika are the principal terms of Indian aesthetics, explained in the preceding chapter.

40

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE

erally mean that such objects as we call beautiful are congenial to us, practically or ethically. Too often we pretend to judge a work of art in the same way, calling it beautiful if it represents some form or activity of which we heartily approve, or if it attracts us by the tenderness or gaiety of its colour, the sweet- ness of its sounds or the charm of its movement. But when we thus pass judgment on the dance in accordance with our sympa- thetic attitude towards the dancer's charm or skill, or the mean- ing of the dance, we ought not to use the language of pure aesthetic. Only when we judge a work of art aesthetically may we speak of the presence or absence of beauty, we may call the work rasavant or otherwise; but when we judge it from the standpoint of activity, practical or ethical, we ought to use a corresponding terminology, calling the picture, song or actor "lovely," that is to say lovable, or otherwise, the action "noble," the colour "brilliant," the gesture "graceful," or otherwise, and so forth. And it will be seen that in doing this we are not really judging the work of art as such, but only the material and the separate parts of which it is made, the activities they represent, or the feelings they express.

Of course^ when we come to choose such works of art to live with, there is no reason why we should not allow the sympathetic and ethical considerations to influence our judgment. Why should the ascetic invite annoyance by hanging in his cell some repre- sentation of the nude, or the general select a lullaby to be per- formed upon the eve of battle? When every ascetic and every soldier has become an artist there will be no more need for works of art : in the meanwhile ethical selection of some kind is allow- able and necessary. But in this selection we must clearly under- stand what we are doing, if we would avoid an infinity of error, culminating in that type of sentimentality which regards the useful, the stimulating and the moral elements in works of art as the essential. We ought not to forget that he who plays the villain of the piece may be a greater artist than he who plays the hero. For beauty — in the profound words of Millet — does not arise from the subject of a work of art, but from the necessity that has been felt of representing that subject.

We should only speak of a work of art as good or bad with reference to its aesthetic quality ; only the subject and the material of the work are entangled in relativity. In other words, to say

INDIAN PAINTING.

PLATE IV

Ajanta fresco: right, Bodhisattva; left, coronation. Buddhist Painting of 6th

or 7th Century.

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE 4I

that a work of art is more or less beautiful, or rasavant, is to define the extent to which it is a work of art, rather than a mere illustration. However important the element of sympathetic magic in such a work may be, however important its practical applications, it is not in these that its beauty consists.

What, then, is Beauty, what is rasa, what is it that entitles us to speak of divers works as beautiful or rasavant f What is this sole quality which the most dissimilar works of art possess in common? Let us recall the history of a work of art. There is (1) an aesthetic intuition on the part of the original artist, — the poet or creator; then (2) the internal expression of this intuition, — the true creation or vision of beauty, (3) the indication of this by external signs (language) for the purpose of communication, — the technical activity ; and finally, (4) the resulting stimulation of the critic or rasika to reproduction of the original intuition, or of some approximation to it.

The source of the original intuition may, as we have seen, be any aspect of life whatsoever. To one creator the scales of a fish suggest a rhythmical design, another is moved by certain land- scapes, a third elects to speak of hovels, a fourth to sing of palaces, a fifth may express the idea that all things are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured in terms of the General Dance, or he may express the same idea equally vividly by saying that "not a spar- row falls to the ground without our Father's knowledge." Every artist discovers beauty, and every critic finds it again when he tastes of the same experience through the medium of the external signs. But where is this beauty? We have seen that it cannot be said to exist in certain things and not in others. It may then be claimed that beauty exists everywhere ; and this I do not deny, though I prefer the clearer statement that it may be discovered anywhere. If it could be said to exist everywhere in a material and intrinsic sense, we could pursue it with our cameras and scales, after the fashion of the experimental psychologists: but if we did so, we should only achieve a certain acquaintance with average taste — we should not discover a means of distinguishing forms that are beautiful from forms that are ugly. Beauty can never thus be measured, for it does not exist apart from the artist himself, and the rasika who enters into his experience.^

1 Cf. "The secret of art lies in the artist himself"— Kuo Jo Hsu, (12th century), quoted in The Kokka, No. 244.

42 THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.

Did you think it was in the white or grey stone? or the lines of the

arches and cornices? All music is what awakes in you when you are reminded of it by the

instruments, It is not the violins and the cornets . . . nor the score of the baritone

singer It is nearer and further than they.^

When every sympathetic consideration has been excluded, how- ever, there still remains a pragmatic value in the classification of works of art as beautiful or ugly. But what precisely do we mean by these designations as applied to objects? In the works called beautiful we recognize a correspondence of theme and ex- pression, content and form: while in those called ugly we find the content and form at variance. In time and space, however, the correspondence never amounts to an identity: it is our own activity, in the presence of the work of art, which completes the ideal relation, and it is in this sense that beauty is what we "do to" a work of art rather than a quality present in the object. With reference to the object, then "more" or "less" beautiful will imply a greater or less correspondence between content and form, and this is all that we can say of the object as such: or in other words, art is good that is good of its kind. In the stricter sense of completed internal oesthetic activity, however, beauty is absolute and cannot have degrees.

The vision of beauty is spontaneous, in just the same sense as the inward light of the lover (bhakta). It is a state of grace that cannot be achieved by deliberate effort; though perhaps we can remove hindrances to its manifestation, for there are many witnesses that the secret of all art is to be found in self-forget- fulness.^ And we know that this state of grace is not achieved in the pursuit of pleasure; the hedonists have their reward, but they are in bondage to loveliness, while the artist is free in beauty.

It is further to be observed that when we speak seriously of works of art as beautiful, meaning that they are truly works of art, valued as such apart from subject, association, or technical charm, we still speak elliptically. We mean that the external

iWalt Whitman.

2 E. G. Riciotto Canudo : "It is certain that the secret of all art . . . lies in the faculty of self-oblivion" — (Music as a Religion of the Future).

PLATE V

INDIAN ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE.

■rqr-s:

Figure a. Temple at Badanil, Sth Century.

Figure u. Ai^^uKi:> LcUiiii\. :5iinie >-cuipLuic. MamallapuraiTi, 8th Ccntury.

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE 43

signs — poems, pictures, dances, and so forth — are effective re- minders. We may say that they possess significant form. But this can only mean that they possess that kind of form which reminds us of beauty, and awakens in us aesthetic emotion. The nearest explanation of significant form should be such form as exhibits the inner relations of things; or, after Hsieh Ho, "which reveals the rhythm of the spirit in the gestures of living things." All such works as possess significant form are linguistic ; and, if we remember this, we shall not fall into the error of those who advocate the use of language for language's sake, nor shall we confuse the significant forms, or their logical meaning or moral value, with the beauty of which they remind us.

Let us insist, however, that the concept of beauty has originated with the philosopher, not with the artist: he has been ever con- cerned with saying clearly what had to be said. In all ages of creation the artist has been in love with his particular subject — when it is not so, we see that his work is not 'felt' — he has never set out to achieve the Beautiful, in the strict aesthetic sense, and to have this aim is to invite disaster, as one who should seek to fly without wings.

It is not to the artist that one should say the subject is imma- terial : that is for the philosopher to say to the philistine who dis- likes a work of art for no other reason than that he dislikes it.

The true critic (rasika) perceives the beauty of which the artist has exhibited the signs. It is not necessary that the critic should appreciate the artist's meaning — every work of art is a kamadhenu, yielding many meanings — for he knows without reasoning whether or not the work is beautiful, before the mind begins to question what it is "about." Hindu writers say that the capacity to feel beauty (to taste rasa) cannot be acquired by study, but is the reward of merit gained in a past life ; for many good men and would-be historians of art have never perceived it. The poet is bom, not made ; but so also is the rasika, whose genius differs in degree, not in kind, from that of the original artist. In western phraseology we should express this by saying that experience can only be bought by experience ; opinions must be earned. We gain and feel nothing merely when we take it on authority that any particular works are beautiful. It is far better to be honest, and to admit that perhaps we cannot see their beauty. A day may come when we shall be better prepared.

44

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE

The critic, as soon as he becomes an exponent, has to prove his case; and he cannot do this by any process of argument, but only by creating a new work of art, the criticism. His audience, catching the gleam at second-hand — but still the same gleam, for there is only one — has then the opportunity to approach the original work a second time, more reverently.

When I say that works of art are reminders, and the activity of the critic is one of reproduction, I suggest that the vision of even the original artist may be rather a discovery than a creation. If beauty awaits discovery everywhere, that is to say that it waits upon our recollection (in the sufi sense and in Wordsworth's) : in aesthetic contemplation as in love and knowledge, we momen- tarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality.

There are no degrees of beauty; the most complex and the simplest expression remind us of one and the same state. The sonata cannot be more beautiful than the simplest lyric, nor the painting than the drawing, merely because of their greater elabo- ration. Civilized art is not more beautiful than savage art, merely because of its possibly more attractive ethos. A mathematical analogy is found if we consider large and small circles; these differ only in their content, not in their circularity. In the same way, there cannot be any continuous progress in art. Immediately a given intuition has attained to perfectly clear expression, it remains only to multiply and repeat this expression. This repe- tition may be desirable for many reasons, but it almost invariably involves a gradual decadence, because we soon begin to take the experience for granted. The vitality of a tradition persists only so long as it is fed by intensity of imagination. What we mean by creative art, however, has no necessary connection with novelty of subject, though that is not excluded. Creative art is art that reveals beauty where we should have otherwise over- looked it, or more clearly than we have yet received. Beauty is sometimes overlooked just because certain expressions have be- come what we call "hackneyed"; then the creative artist dealing with the same subject restores our memory. The artist is challenged to reveal the beauty of all experiences, new and old.

Many have rightly insisted that the beauty of a work of art is independent of its subject, and truly, the humility of art, which finds its inspiration everywhere, is identical with the humility of Love, which regards alike a dog and a Brahman — and of

THAT BEAUTY IS A STATE 45

Science, to which the lowest form is as significant as the highest. And this is possible, because it is one and the same undivided all. "If a beauteous form we view, 'Tis His reflection shining through."

It will now be seen in what sense we are justified in speaking of Absolute Beauty, and in identifying this beauty with God. We do not imply by this that God (who is without parts) has a lovely form which can be the object of knowledge; but that in so far as we see and feel beauty, we see and are one with Him. That God is the first artist does not mean that He created forms, which might not have been lovely had the hand of the potter slipped: but that every natural object is an immediate realization of His being. This creative activity is comparable with aesthetic expression in its non-volitional character; no element of choice enters into that world of imagination and eternity, but there is always perfect identity of intuition-expression, soul and body. The human artist who discovers beauty here or there is the ideal guru of Kabir, who "reveals the Supreme Spirit wherever the mind attaches itself."

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

The Early Buddhist view of art is strictly hedonistic. Just as little as Early Buddhism dreamed of an expression of its char- acteristic ideas through poetry, drama, or music, so little was it imagined that the arts of sculpture and painting could be anything but worldly in their purpose and effect. The arts were looked upon as physical luxuries, and loveliness as a snare. "Beauty is nothing to me," says the Dasa Dhamma Sutta, "neither the beauty of the body nor that that comes of dress." The Brethren were forbidden to allow the figfures of men and women to be painted on monastery walls, and were permitted only representa- tions of wreaths and creepers.^ The psychological foundation of this attitude is nowhere more clearly revealed than in a passage of the Visuddhi Magga, where we find that painters, musicians, perfumers, cooks, and elixir-prescribing physicians are all classed together as purveyors of sensuous luxuries, whom others honour "on account of love and devotion to the sensations excited by forms and other objects of sense." This is the characteristic Hlnayana position throughout, and it is, of course, conspicuous also in the Jaina system, and in certain phases of Brahmanical thought, particularly in the period contemporary with early Buddhism.

It is only in the third and second centuries b. c. that we find the Buddhists patronizing craftsmen and employing art for edifying ends. From what has just been said, however, it will be well understood that there had not at this time come into being any truly Buddhist or Brahmanical idealistic art; and thus "Early Buddist" art was necessarily the popular Brahmanical art and animistic art of the day, adapted to Buddhist requirements. The only exception to this rule is that special phase of Early Buddhist art which is represented by the capital of the Asoka columns, of which the forms are not merely non-Buddhist, but of extra-Indian origin.^

The Indian non-Buddhist art that we have evidence of in the age

1 Cullavagga, vi, 3, 2.

2 Visvakarma, SO. SI.

PLATE VI

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES.

Figure a. Seated Buddha, Gandhara, Figure b. Dryad, SanchI, 2nd century, 1st century, A.D. B.C.

Figure c. Lay worshippers at a Buddha Shrine. AmaravatT, 2nd century, A.D.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES 47

of Asoka and in the period immediately following Asoka, is chiefly concerned with the cult of nature-spirits — the Earth God- dess, the Nagas or Serpent kings of the waters, and the Yaksha kings who rule the Four Quarters. The Maurya types are rep- resented by the well-known free-standing female figure at Besna- gar/ and the Parkham figure^ now in the Mathura Museum. The early Buddhist art of SanchI and Bharhut, probably slightly later, reflects the prevalence of the animistic cults in placing low- relief figures of the Yaksha, guardians of the Four Quarters, as protectors of the entrance gateways.^ That the nature-spirits should thus act as guardians of Buddhist shrines reflects the essential victory of Buddhism, precisely as the story of the Naga Muchalinda, who, in the literary tradition, shelters the Buddha during the week of storms.

Besides the Guardians of the Quarters we find at Sanchi figures of beautiful Yakshinis or dryads, whose function may be partly protective, but is also in large degree honorary and decorative. The Yakshini figure here reproduced [Plate VI, b] is typical of all that is best in the art of SanchI; but in what different world this happy dryad moves from that of the Pali Suttas, where orthodox Buddhism tries to prove that "as the body when dead is repulsive, so also is it when alive" ! Buddhist monasticism — to use the language of Blake — sought consistently to bolt "and bar the "Western Gates" : but our Sanchi dryad rather seems to say "the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled."

The art of SanchI is essentially pagan, and this appears not only in its fearless happiness, untinged by puritan misgiving or by mystic intuition, but also in the purely representative and real- istic technique. It was in the main a later Mahayana and Vaish- nava achievement of the Indian lyric spirit to discover that the two worlds of spiritual purity and sensuous delight need not, and perhaps ultimately cannot, be divided.

In any case the SanchI art is plainly not an expression of Early Buddhist feeling: and so also it is not primitive, but, on the con- trary, it is the classic achievement of an old popular art already long practised in less permanent materials. If there is at this

^ Visvakarmd, 64. 2 Visvakarma, 26.

^ A much later example of the same arrangement is illustrated in Visvakarma, 75.

48 BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

time any Buddhist art that can be fairly called primitive, it is only to be recognized in architecture, where the simple forms of the early stupas, and their undecorated railings, and the severe design of the early excavated chaitya-hsilh truly reflect the intellectual and austere enthusiasm of Early Buddhism.

Another part of the art of the Bharhut railing and the Sanchi gateways is devoted to the illustration of edifying legends, partic- ularly stories of the former lives of the Buddha, and of the last incarnation. The work is delicately executed in low relief — we know from a contemporary inscription that amongst the crafts- men who contributed to the decoration of the Sanchi toranas were the "ivory-workers of Bhilsa" — and affords us a remarkable record of Indian life, with its characteristic environment, manners and cults set out with evident realism and a wealth of circum- stantial detail. But for all their interest these reliefs, too, arc essentially illustrations of edifying anecdotes, and only to a limited extent — less, for example, than the similar, but, of course, very much later^ illustrations at Borobodur — directly express the Early Buddhist view of life and death.

There is, however, one respect in which that view is perfectly reflected; in the fact that the figure of the Master himself is nowhere represented. Even in the group of episodes which illustrate the Great Renunciation — Prince Siddhattha's departure from home, riding upon the back of the horse Kanthaka, and attended by the groom Channa — Kanthaka's back is bare, and we see only the figures of the Devas who lift up the feet of the horse lest men should be roused by the sound of his hoofs, while the presence of the Prince is only indicated by the parasol of dominion borne beside the horse. In other compositions the Buddha is represented by symbols such as the Wisdom Tree or the conventionally represented footprints, the "Feet of the Lord" [Plate VI, c]. It will be realized at once that the absence of the Buddha figure from the world of living men — where, however, there yet remain the traces of his ministry, literally footprints on the sands of time — is a true artistic rendering of the Master's guarded silence respecting the after-death state of those who have attained Nirvana: "the Perfect One is released from this, that his being should be gauged by the measure of the corporeal world," he is released from "name and form." In the omission of the figure of the Buddha, the Early Buddhist art is truly Budd-

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

PJ.ATE VII

Buddha in Samadhi. Stone sculpture, Ceylon, 2nd century, A. D.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES 49

dhist : for the rest, it is an art about Buddhism, rather than Bud- dhist art.

Changes were meanwhile proceeding in the material of Bud- dhist belief. This belief is no longer merely intellectual, but has undergone an emotional development akin to that which finds expression in the bhakti doctrine of the Bhagavad Gitd:

Even they that be born of sin. even women, traffickers, and serfs, if they turn to Me, come to the Supreme Path: be assured, O son of Kuntl. that none who is devoted to Me is lost.

Similarly we find, even in so early a text as the Majjhima Nikdya that those who have not yet even entered the Paths, "are sure of heaven if they have love and faith towards Me." Gradu- ally the idea of Buddhahood replaces that of Arahatta : the orig- inal agnosticism is ignored, and the Buddha is endowed with all the qualities of transcendental godhead as well as with the physical peculiarities or perfections of the Superman (mahd-purusha). The Buddha thus conceived, together with the Bodhisattvas or Buddhas-to-be, presently engaged in the active work of salvation, became the object of a cult and was regarded as approachable by worship. In all this we see not merely an internal develop- ment of metaphysics and theology, but also the influence of the lay community: for a majority of men, and still more the majority of women, have always been more ready to worship than to know.

At Amaravati we still find that the Buddha is represented by symbols, but it may be clearly seen from the passionate devotion of those who worship at the symbol-shrines — and many of these are women, as in the case of the fragment here reproduced in Plate VI, c — that the One adored must have been conceived in others terms than those of a purely intellectual psychological analysis. Even before the Buddha figure is represented in official Buddhist art, the Buddha had become an object of adoration, a very personal god: and it cannot surprise us that the Master's figure should soon appear wherever Buddhist piety erected shrines and monuments. We know that images of Hindu gods were already in use in the second century, b. c, and it is highly probable that Buddha figures were in similar private use long before they took their place in a public cult.

Before, however, we speak of the Buddha images, we must refer to a second phase of religious experience, which plays a

so BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

great part alike in the development of Buddhism and Hinduism. This is the practice of Yoga, whereby enlightenment and emanci- pation are sought to be attained by meditation calculated to release the individual from empirical consciousness. Even in the earliest Buddhist praxis it would be difficult to exaggerate the part which these contemplative exercises play in the spiritual history of the Brethren, and to a lesser extent of laymen, for while the most abstract meditations lead to the attainment of Nirvana and the station of "No-return," the lesser no less certainly led to rebirth in the higher heavens. It is just for purposes of medita- tion that lonely places and roots of trees are so highly praised in the Buddhist literature, and of this the classic example is that of the Buddha himself, who reached the final enlightenment while seated in yogi-fashion at the foot of the Wisdom-tree. The essence of the method lies in the concentration of thought upon a single point, carried so far that the duality of subject and object is resolved into a perfect unity — "when," in the words of Schelling, "the perceiving self merges in the self-perceived. At that moment we annihilate time and the duration of time ; we are no longer in time, but time, or rather eternity itself, is in us." A very beautiful description of the yogi is given as follows in the Bhagavad Gitd,^ and as quoted here in a condensed form applies almost equally to Buddhist and Brahmanical practice, for the yoga is a praxis rather than a form of sectarian belief : —

Abiding alone in a secret place, without craving and without pos- sessions, he shall take his seat upon a firm seat, neither over-high nor over-low, and with the working of the mind and of the senses held in check, with body, head and neck maintained in perfect equi- poise, looking not round about him, so let him meditate, and thereby reach the peace of the Abyss: and the likeness of one such, who knows the boundless joy that lies beyond the senses and is grasped by intuition, and who swerves not from the truth, is that of a lamp in a windless place that does not flicker.

Long before the Buddha image became a cult object, the familiar form of the seated yogi must have presented itself to the Indian mind in inseparable association with the idea of a mental discipline and of the attainment of the highest station of

1 Bhagavad Gitd. vi. 10-21 — omitting the theistic elements.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES.

PLATE VIII

Standing Bodhisattva. Stone sculpture. Ceylon, 2nd century. AD.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

51

self-oblivion; and when the development of imagery followed there was no other form which could have been made a uni- versally recognized symbol of Him-wlio-had-thus-attained.

This figure of the seated Buddha-yogi, wuth a far deeper content, is as purely monumental art as that of the Egyptian pyramids ; and since it represents the greatest ideal which Indian sculpture ever attempted to express, it is well that we find pre- served even a few magnificent examples of comparatively early date. Amongst these the colossal figure at Anuradhapura is almost certainly the best [Plate VII]. The same ancient Bud- dhist site affords examples of a Bodhisattva, here reproduced on Plate VIII, and of two standing Buddhas, illustrated in Plates IX and X, while nearly related to these are the standing figures of Buddhas lately excavated at Amaravati, reproduced on Plate XL To all these works we may fairly assign the honoured name of primitives, since their massive forms and austere outline are immediately determined by the moral grandeur of the thesis and the suppressed emotion of its realiza- tion, without any intrusion of individuality or parade of skill. The fulness of the modelling expresses a high degree of vitality, but does not yet show the conscious elegance and suavity of Gupta types.

We are not in position to precisely date these Buddhist primi- tives of Anuradhapura and Amaravati, but they may not be earlier than the first or second century a. d. and can hardly be later than the third or fourth. In describing these works as primitive, it is not, of course, suggested that they are the earliest or nearly the earliest of Buddha figures extant, nor that all of them are absolutely free from any element of western formulation, but merely that in them the primitive inspiration is better pre- served than anywhere else, I have already suggested that the figures of the seated Buddha, if not the standing types, probably came into use as cult objects a good deal earlier, perhaps in the second century b. c. ; and if these were generally made in wood or other impermanent materials, this would be in accord with all that we know of the general development of Indian plastic art and architecture. In any case, as M. Foucher points out,* the

^ Foucher (A.), L'Origine grecque de I'Image du Bouddha, Paris, 1913. p. 31.

52

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

conventional character of the Buddha figure of the Kanishka reliquary

denote un art deja stereotype, et . . . suffit pour reporter d'au moins cent ans en arriere et faire par suite remonter au I®*" siecle avant notre ere la creation du type plastique du Bienheureux.

The same may be said of the Bodhisattvas. Indra and Brahma were perhaps the types from which the sculptural representations of Avalokitesvara and Maitreya were evolved, and Mr. Spooner has recorded his view that this evolution "was an accomplished fact prior to any form of the Gandhara school with which we are yet familiar," pointing out here too that "the forms of both are stereotyped" already in the earliest examples from Gandhara.^

We have so far left out of account the abundant and well- known Graeco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, dating from the 1st to the 4th century a. d., as well as the school of Mathura, which in part derives from the older art of Sanchi and Bharhut, and is partly dependent upon Gandhara. This omission is not, as M. Foucher would suggest, "par engouement d'estheticien ou ran- cune de nationaliste,"^ but because we are here concerned to discover the sources of inspiration of Buddhist imagery and to learn how this inspiration was first and most fully expressed. That many western formulae were absorbed into Indian art through Gandhara does not touch the question of feeling; we must avoid the common error of confusing "Formensprache" with "Geist." It is even easy to exaggerate the importance of the western formulae, as such, for whatever else in Buddhist art is borrowed, the cross-legged figure seated upon a lotus throne is entirely Indian in form as well as in idea ; and besides this seated figure, the standing Buddha and the images of all the Buddhist gods are but of secondary importance.

For several reasons^ it seems probable that the actual Gand- hara sculptures are mainly the work of western craftsmen em- ployed by the Gandhara kings to interpret Buddhist ideas, rather than Indian workmen under western guidance; and if some of the workmen were Indian by birth, they nevertheless did not give expression to Indian feeling. We have the parallel modem

* Spooner, D. B. Archaeological Survey of India, Ann. Rep., 1907-8 (1911), p. 144. 2 Foucher (A.), loc. cit., p. 41.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES.

PLATE IX

STANDING BUDDHA. Stone sculpture, Ceylon, 2nd century, A.D.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES.

PLATE X

Standing Buddha. Stone .sculpture, Ceylon, 2nd century, A.D.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES 53

example of the late Raja Ravi Varma, who, despite the nominally Indian subject matter of his paintings, entirely fails to reflect the Indian spirit.

The manner in which the western formulae have been gradually Indianized, alike in the northwest and in the school of Mathura, and thus, as Professor Oskar Miinsterberg remarks, "first de- veloped under national and Buddhist inspiration into a new and genuine art,"^ has been studied in considerable detail by many scholars ; but what is equally or more significant for our enquiry is the manner in which certain Indian formulae and Indian ideas are misrepresented at Gandhara, for misrepresentation necessarily implies the pre-existence of a type to be misinterpreted. The plainest case is afforded by the Buddha figure seated on a "lotus throne" (padmasana). In Gandhara sculpture the seated figure is uncomfortably and unstably balanced on a lotus flower that is far too small, and with its pointed petals, like an artichoke,^ sug- gests a seat of penance rather than of ease (Plate VI, a). The true sense of the padmasana is, of course, to indicate spiritual purity or divinity, and the symbol is only appropriately combined with that of the seated yogi, when this function is fulfilled with- out detracting from the one essential quality of repose. It is specially emphasized in yoga texts that the seat of the yogi is to be firm and easy, "sthira-sukha," and where this condition is overlooked, it is impossible to recognize an immediate expression of the original thesis.

The foregoing argument supports the view already men- tioned, that the seated Buddha image in the age of Kanishka was "deja stereotype." It takes us, however, somewhat further, for in connection with the far stronger, though to archaeologists less convincing, aesthetic evidence, it shows plainly that Gandhara sculpture is not primitive Buddhist art. When, then, are we to look for the proto- type of the seated figure thus "deja stereotype?" Can we postulate a Roman yogi, seated on a lotus throne, and with hands in the dhydni mudra, to set beside the Lateran Sophocles of which the influence is evident in standing images? The sug- gestion is sufficiently absurd to need no refutation. The seated

* A characteristic example may be studied in Vincent Smith, History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, Plate xxiv. 2 Miinsterberg (O.), Chinesische Kunstgeschichte, p. 117, n.

54 BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

Buddha, as we have already suggested on d priori grounds, can only be of Indian origin; and this being so, it will be seen how great an exaggeration is involved in speaking of the "Greek Origin of the Image of Buddha."

It has been sufficient for our purpose to explain in what senses Gandhara sculpture cannot be regarded as primitive and autoch- thonous Buddhist art ; it has not been necessary to emphasize also how little the smug and complacent features of the Gandhara Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and their listless and eflFeminate ges- tures, reflect the intellectual vigour or the devotional passion of Buddhist thought. For the benefit of M. Foucher, however, and of other scholars who may suppose, with him, that Mr. Havell, Professor Munsterberg, and I, have cared more for Indian art than for art, I may point out that our estimate of Gandhara sculpture as of small aesthetic significance must not be taken as evidence of any prejudice against the art of Europe; it simply indicates concurrence in the view that "in the long sands and flats of Roman realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever." To admire Gandhara art, as art, is not a compliment to the greatness of the Greeks, but only shows how far that great- ness has been misunderstood. If it is possible for a European critic to write of the mosaics of the Galla Placidia at Ravenna that they are "still coarsely classical," and that "there is a nasty, woolly realism about the sheep, and about the good shepherd more than a suspicion of the stodgy, Graeco-Roman Apollo,"^ then surely we may criticize the sculptures of Gandhara in the same terms without incurring charges of bad faith.

To resume : Early Buddhist art is popular, sensuous and ani- mistic Indian art adapted to the purposes of the illustration of Buddhist anecdote and the decoration of Buddhist monuments; Gandhara art is mixed, and misinterpreted equally both eastern and western formulae, which must be older than itself, while it is not Buddhist in expression; the earliest Indian primitives of Buddhist art properly so-called are probably lost. In northern India the absence of primitives is partly to be accounted for by the fact that Buddhist inspiration was there absorbed, not in direct creation, but in adapting Grseco-Roman motifs to its own spiritual ends. In southern India and Ceylon the same energy

iBell (Give), ^r/, p. 128.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES.

PLATE XT

'if'*. ^ ' '/

Standing images of Buddha. Stone sculpture, 2nd century. A. D. Amaravati.

BUDDHIST PRIMITIVES

55

working in greater isolation found a more direct expression ; and though the earliest masterpieces may be lost, there are still pre- served at Anuradhapura and AmaravatI magnificent works, which we may fairly speak of as Buddhist primitives.*

1 Early Buddhist art in China and Japan is also "primitive" in the aesthetic sense, precisely as Christian art in Europe preserved its primi- tive inspiration for six hundred years, because "some new race was always catching the inspiration and feeling and expressing it with primitive sensibility and passion."

THE DANCE OF SIVA

"The Lord of Tillai's Court a mystic dance performs; what's that, my dear?" — Tiruvagagam, XII, 14.

Amongst the greatest of the names of Siva is Nataraja, Lord of Dancers, or King of Actors. The cosmos is His theatre, there are many different steps in His repertory, He Himself is actor and audience —

When the Actor beateth the drum. Everybody cometh to see the show; When the Actor collecteth the stage properties He abideth alone in His happiness.

How many various dances of Siva are known to His worship- pers I cannot say. No doubt the root idea behind all of these dances is more or less one and the same, the manifestation of primal rhythmic energy. Siva is the Eros Protogonos of Lucian, when he wrote :

"It would seem that dancing came into being at the beginning of all things, and was brought to light together with Eros, that ancient one, for we see this primeval dancing clearly set forth in the choral dance of the constellations, and in the planets and fixed stars, their interweaving and interchange and orderly har- mony."

I do not mean to say that the most profound interpretation of Siva's dance was present in the minds of those who first danced in frantic, and perhaps intoxicated energy, in honour of the pre- Aryan hill-god, afterwards merged in Siva. A great motif in religion or art, any great symbol, becomes all things to all men ; age after age it yields to men such treasure as they find in their own hearts. Whatever the origins of Siva's dance, it became in time the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of. Of the various dances of Siva I shall only speak of three, one of them alone forming the main subject of interpretation. The first is an evening dance in the Hima- layas, with a divine chorus, described as follows in the Siva Pradosha Stotra:

THE DANCE OF SIVA 57

"Placing the Mother of the Three Worlds upon a golden throne, studded with precious gems, Sulapani dances on the heights of Kailasa, and all the gods gather round Him:

"Sarasvati plays on the vlnd, Indra on the flute, Brahma holds the time-marking cymbals, Lakshml begins a song, Vishnu plays on a drum, and all the gods stand round about:

"Gandharvas, Yakshas, Patagas, Uragas, Siddhas, Sadhyas, Vidyadharas, Amaras, Apsarases, and all the beings dwelling in the three worlds assemble there to witness the celestial dance and hear the music of the divine choir at the hour of twilight."

This evening dance is also referred to in the invocation preced- ing the Katha Sarit Sdgara.

In the pictures of this dance, ^iva is two-handed, and the co- operation of the gods is clearly indicated in their position of chorus. There is no prostrate Asura trampled under Siva's feet. So far as I know, no special interpretations of this dance occur in Saiva literature.

The second well known dance of Siva is called the Tdndava, and belongs to His tdmasic aspect as Bhairava or Vira-bhadra. It is performed in cemeteries and burning grounds, where Siva, usually in ten-armed form, dances wildly with Devi, accompanied by troops of capering imps. Representations of this dance are common amongst ancient sculptures, as at Elura, Elephanta, and also Bhuvanesvara. The tdndava dance is in origin that of a pre-Aryan divinity, half-god, half-demon, who holds his midnight revels in the burning ground. In later times, this dance in the cremation ground, sometimes of Siva, sometimes of Devi, is interpreted in Saiva and Sakta literature in a most touching and profound sense.

Thirdly, we have the Nadanta dance of Nataraja before the assembly (sabha) in the golden hall of Chidambaram or Tillai, the centre of the Universe, first revealed to gods and rishis after the submission of the latter in the forest of Taragam, as related in the Koyil Purdnam. The legend, which has after all, no very close connection with the real meaning of the dance, may be summarised as follows:

In the forest of Taragam dwelt multitudes of heretical rishis, following of the Mimamsa. Thither proceeded Siva to confute them, accompanied by Vishnu disguised as a beautiful woman, and Ati-Seshan. The rishis were at first led to violent dispute

58 THE DANCE OF SIVA

amongst themselves, but their anger was soon directed against Siva, and they endeavoured to destroy Him by means of incanta- tions. A fierce tiger was created in sacrificial fires, and rushed upon Him; but smiling gently, He seized it and, with the nail of His little finger, stripped off its skin, and wrapped it about Him- self like a silken cloth.^ Undiscouraged by failure, the sages renewed their offerings, and produced a monstrous serpent, which however, Siva seized and wreathed about His neck like a gar- land. Then He began to dance; but there rushed upon Him a last monster in the shape of a malignant dwarf, Muyalaka. Upon him the God pressed the tip of His foot, and broke the creature's back, so that it writhed upon the ground; and so, His last foe prostrate, Siva resumed the dance, witnessed by gods and rishis.

Then Ati Seshan worshipped Siva, and prayed above all things for the boon, once more to behold this mystic dance ; Siva prom- ised that he should behold the dance again in sacred Tillai, the centre of the Universe.

This dance of Siva in Chidambaram or Tillai forms the motif of the South Indian copper images of Sri Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance. These images vary amongst themselves in minor details, but all express one fundamental conception. Before pro- ceeding to enquire what these may be, it will be necessary to describe the image of Sri Nataraja as typically represented. The images then, represent Siva dancing, having four hands, with braided and jewelled hair of which the lower locks are whirling in the dance. In His hair may be seen a wreathing cobra, a skull, and the mermaid figure of Ganga ; upon it rests the crescent moon, and it is crowned with a wreath of Cassia leaves. In His right ear He wears a man's earring, a woman's in the left ; He is adorned with necklaces and armlets, a jewelled belt, anklets, bracelets, finger and toe-rings. The chief part of His dress consists of tightly fitting breeches, and He wears also a fluttering scarf and a sacred thread. One right hand holds a drum, the other is uplifted in the sign of do not fear: one left hand holds fire, the other points down upon the demon Muyalaka, a dwarf holding a cobra ; the left foot is raised. There is a lotus pedestal, from which springs an encircling glory (tiruvdsi), fringed with flame, and touched within by the hands holding drum and fire.

* A similar story is elsewhere related about an elephant ; and these legends account for the elephant or tiger skin, which Siva wears.

THE DANCE OF SIVA 59

The images are of all sizes, rarely if ever exceeding four feet in total height.

Even without reliance upon literary references, the interpreta- tion of this dance would not be difficult. Fortunately, however, we have the assistance of a copious contemporary literature, which enables us to fully explain not only the general significance of the dance, but equally, the details of its concrete symbolism. Some of the peculiarities of the Nataraja images, of course, belong to the conception of Siva generally, and not to the dance in particu- lar. Such are the braided locks, as of a yogi : the Cassia garland: the skull of Brahma : the figure of Ganga, (the Ganges fallen from heaven and lost in Siva's hair) : the cobras: the different earrings, betokening the dual nature of Mahadev, 'whose half is Uma' : and the four arms. The drum also is a general attribute of Siva, belonging to his character of Yogi, though in the dance, it has further a special significance. What then is the meaning of Siva's Nadanta dance, as imderstood by Saivas? Its essential signifi- cance is given in texts such as the following :

"Our Lord is the Dancer, who, like the heat latent in firewood, diffuses His power in mind and matter, and makes them dance in their turn."^

The dance, in fact, represents His five activites (Paiicakritya) , viz: Srishti (overlooking, creation, evolution), Sthiti (preserva- tion, support), Samhara (destruction, evolution), Tirohhava (veiling, embodimjent, illusion, and also, giving rest), Anugraha (release, salvation, grace). These, separately considered, are the activities of the deities Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Mahesvara and Sadasiva.

This cosmic activity is the central motif of the dance. Further quotations will illustrate and explain the more detailed symbol- isms. Uninai Vilakkam, verse 36, tells us :

"Creation arises from the drum : protection proceeds from the hand of hope : from fire proceeds destruction : the foot held aloft

* Kadavul Mamunivar's Tiruvatavurdr Puranam, Puttaraivatil, Venra- carukkam, stanza 75, translated by Nallasvami Flllai, Sivajnanahodhatn, p. 74. This could also be rendered:

Like heat latent in firewood, he fills all bodies ; Our Father dances, moving all souls into action, know ye! Compare Eckhart, "Just as the fire infuses the essence and clearness into the dry wood, so has God done with man."

6o THE DANCE OF SIVA

gives release." It will be observed that the fourth hand points to this lifted foot, the refuge of the soul.

We have also the following from Chidambara Mummani Kovai:

"O my Lord, Thy hand holding the sacred drtun has made and ordered the heavens and earth and other worlds and innumerable souls. Thy lifted hand protects both the conscious and uncon- scious order of thy creation. All these worlds are transformed by Thy hand bearing fire. Thy sacred foot, planted on the ground, gives an abode to the tired soul struggling in the toils of causality. It is Thy lifted foot that grants eternal bliss to those that approach Thee. These Five-Actions are indeed Thy Handiwork."

The following verses from the Tirukuttu Darshana (Vision of the Sacred Dance), forming the ninth tantra of Tirumular's Tirumantram, expand the central motif further:

"His form is everywhere: all-pervading in His Siva-Sakti:

Chidambaram is everywhere, everywhere His dance :

As Siva is all and omnipresent,

Everywhere is Siva's gracious dance made manifest.

His five-fold dances are temporal and timeless.

His five-fold dances are His Five Activties.

By His grace He performs the five acts,

This is the sacred dance of Uma-Sahaya.

He dances with Water, Fire, Wind and Ether,

Thus our Lord dances ever in the court.

Visible to those who pass over Maya and Mahamaya (illusion and super-illusion)

Our Lord dances His eternal dance.

The form of the Sakti is all delight —

This united delight is Uma's body:

This form of Sakti arising in time

And uniting the twain is the dance"

His body is Akas, the dark cloud therein is Muyalaka,

The eight quarters are His eight arms.

The three lights are His three eyes.

Thus becoming, He dances in our body as the congregation." This is His dance. Its deepest significance is felt when it is realised that it takes place within the heart and the self. Every- where is God : that Everywhere is the heart. Thus also we find another verse :

THE DANCE OF SIVA 6l

"The dancing foot, the sound of the tinkhng bells.

The songs that are sung and the varying steps,

The form assumed by our Dancing Gurupara —

Find out these within yourself, then shall your fetters fall away."

To this end, all else but the thought of God must be cast out of the heart, that He alone may abide and dance therein. In Unmai Vilakkam, we find:

"The silent sages destroying the threefold bond are established where their selves are destroyed. There they behold the sacred and are filled with bliss. This is the dance of the Lord of the assembly, 'whose very form is Grace'."

With this reference to the 'silent sages' compare the beautiful words of Tirumular:

"When resting there they (the yogis who attain the highest place of peace) lose themselves and become idle. . . . Where the idlers dwell is the pure Space. Where the idlers sport is the Light. What the idlers know is Vedanta. What the idlers find is the deep sleep therein."

§iva is a destroyer and loves the burning ground. But what does He destroy ? Not merely the heavens and earth at the close of a world-cycle, but the fetters that bind each separate soul.^ Where and what is the burning ground ? It is not the place where our earthly bodies are cremated, but the hearts of His lovers, laid waste and desolate. The place where the ego is destroyed sig- nifies the state where illusion and deeds are burnt away: that is the crematorium, the burning-ground where 5ri Nataraja dances, and whence He is named Sudalaiyadi, Dancer of the burning- ground. In this simile, we recognize the historical connection between Siva's gracious dance as Nataraja, and His wild dance as the demon of the cemetery.

This conception of the dance is current also amongst Saktas, especially in Bengal, where the Mother rather than the Father- aspect of Siva is adored. Kali is here the dancer, for whose

^ Cf . Marcel Schwob. Le Livre de Monelle.

"This is the teaching: Destroy, destro}'', destroy. Destroy within your- self, destroy all around you. Make room for your soul and for other souls. Destroy, because all creation proceeds from destruction .... For all building up is done with debris, and nothing in the world is new but shapes. But the shapes must be perpetually destroyed . . . Break every cup from which you drink."

62 THE DANCE OF SIVA

entrance the heart must be purified by fire, made empty by renun- ciation. A Bengali Hymn to Kali voices this prayer :

"Because Thou lovest the Burning-ground,

I have made a Burning-ground of my heart —

That Thou, Dark One, haunter of the Burning-ground,

Mayest dance Thy eternal dance.

Nought else is within my heart, O Mother :

Day and night blazes the funeral pyre:

The ashes of the dead, strewn all about,

I have preserved against Thy coming,

With death-conquering Mahakala neath Thy feet

Do Thou enter in, dancing Thy rhythmic dance,

That I may behold Thee with closed eyes."

Returning to the South, we find that in other Tamil texts the purpose of diva's dance is explained. In Sivajnana Siddhiyar, Supaksha, Sutra V, 5, we find,

"For the purpose of securing both kinds of fruit to the count- less souls, our Lord, with actions five, dances His dance." Both kinds of fruit, that is Iham, reward in this world, and Param, bliss in Mukti.

Again, Untnai Vilakkam, v. 32, 37, 39 inform us

"The Supreme Intelligence dances in the soul . . . for the purpose of removing our sins. By these means, our Father scatters the darkness of illusion {m&ya), burns the thread of causality {karma), stamps down evil {mala, anava, avidyS), showers Grace, and lovingly plunges the soul in the ocean of Bliss {ananda). They never see rebirths, who behold this mystic dance."

The conception of the world process as the Lord's pastime or amusement {llld) is also prominent in the Saiva scriptures. Thus Tirumijlar writes, "The perpetual dance is His play." This spon- taneity of Siva's dance is so clearly expressed in Skryabin's Poem of Ecstasy that the extracts following will serve to explain it better than any more formal exposition — what Skryabin wrote is precisely what the Hindu imager moulded : "The Spirit {purusha) playing. The Spirit longing.

The Spirit with fancy {yoga-maya) creating all. Surrenders himself to the bliss {ananda) of love . . .

THE DANCE OF SIVA 63

Amid the flowers of His creation (prakriti), He lingers in a

kiss. . . . Blinded by their beauty, He rushes, He frolics. He dances,

He whirls. . . . He is all rapture, all bliss, in this play (Md) Free, divine, in this love struggle. In the marvellous grandeur of sheer aimlessness. And in the union of counter-aspirations In consciousness alone, in love alone. The Spirit learns the nature (svabhava) of His divine

being. . . . * O, my world, my life, my blossoming, my ecstasy ! Your every moment I create

By negation of all forms previously lived through : I am eternal negation (neti, neti). . . .' Enjoying this dance, choking in this whirlwind. Into the domain of ecstasy, He takes swift flight. In this unceasing change (samsdra, nitya bhava), in this

flight, aimless, divine The Spirit comprehends Himself, In the power of will, alone, free, Ever-creating, all-irradiating, all-vivifying, Divinely playing in the multiplicity of forms. He compre- hends Himself. . . . ' I already dwell in thee, O, my world. Thy dream of me — 'twas I coming into existence. . . . And thou art all — one wave of freedom and bliss. . . .' By a general conflagration (mahd-pralaya) the universe

(samsara) is embraced The Spirit is at the height of being, and He feels the tide

unending Of the divine power (sakti) of free will. He is all-daring: What menaced, now is excitement. What terrified, is now delight. ... And the universe resounds with the joyful cry I am."* This aspect of Siva's immanence appears to have given rise to the objection that he dances as do those who seek to please the eyes of mortals: but it is answered that in fact He dances to

^ From the translation by Lydia L. Pimenoff Noble, published in the Boston Symphony Orchestra Programme, October 29, 1917.

64 THE DANCE OF §IVA

maintain the life of the cosmos and to give release to those who seek Him. Moreover, if we understand even the dances of human dancers rightly, we shall see that they too lead to free- dom.^ But it is nearer the truth to answer that the reason of His dance lies in His own nature, all his gestures are own-nature- born (svabhdva-jah) , spontaneous, and purposeless — for His be- ing is beyond the realm of purposes.

In a much more arbitrary way the dance of Siva is identified with the Pancdkshara, or five syllables of the prayer Si-va-ya-na- ma, 'Hail to 5iva.' In Unmai Vilakkam we are told: "If this beautiful Five-Letters be meditated upon, the soul will reach the land where there is neither light nor darkness, and there Sakti will make it One with Sivam."^

Another verse of Unmai Vilakkam explains the fiery arch {tiruvasi) : The Panchakshara and the Dance are identified with the mystic syllable *Om,' the arch being the kombu or hook of the ideograph of the written symbol : "The arch over Sri Nata- raja is Omkara; and the akshara which is never separate from the Omkara is the contained splendour. This is the Dance of the Lord of Chidambaram."

The Tiru-Arul-Payan however (Ch. ix. 3) explains the tiruvdsi more naturally as representing the dance of Nature, contrasted with Siva's dance of wisdom.

"The dance of nature proceeds on one side: the dance of en- lightenment on the other. Fix your mind in the centre of the latter."

I am indebted to Mr. Nallasvami Pillai for a commentary on this:

The first dance is the action of matter — material and individual energy. This is the arch, tiruvdsi, Omkara, the dance of Kali. The other is the Dance of Siva — the akshara inseparable from the Omkara — called ardhamdtra or the fourth letter of the Pra- nava — Chaturtam and Turiyam. The first dance is not possible unless Siva wills it and dances Himself.

The general result of this interpretation of the arch is, then, that it represents matter, nature, Prakriti ; the contained splen- dour, Siva dancing within and touching the arch with head, hands and feet, is the universal omnipresent Spirit (Picrusha).

^ See Nandikesvara, The Mirror of Gesture^ translated by Coomara- swamy and Duggirala, p. 11.

THE DANCE OF SIVA 65

Between these stands the individual soul, as ya is between Si-va and na-ma.

Now to summarize the whole interpretation we find that The Essential Significance of Siva's Dance is threefold: First, it is the image of his Rhythmic Play as the Source of all Movement within the Cosmos, which is Represented by the Arch: Secondly, the Purpose of his Dance is to Release the Countless souls of men from the Snare of Illusion: Thirdly the Place of the Dance, Chidambaram, the Centre of the Universe, is within the Heart.

So far I have refrained from all aesthetic criticism and have endeavoured only to translate the central thought of the con- ception of Siva's dance from plastic to verbal expression, with- out reference to the beauty or imperfection of individual works. But it may not be out of place to call attention to the grandeur of this conception itself as a synthesis of science, religion and art. How amazing the range of thought and sympathy of those rishi- artists who first conceived such a type as this, affording an image of reality, a key to the complex tissue of life, a theory of nature, not merely satisfactory to a single clique or race, nor acceptable to the thinkers of one century only, but universal in its appeal to the philosopher, the lover, and the artist of all ages and all countries. How supremely great in power and grace this danc- ing imiage must appear to all those who have striven in plastic forms to give expression to their intuition of Life!

In these days of specialization, we are not accustomed to such a synthesis of thought; but for those who 'saw' such images as this, there could have been no division of life and thought into water-tight compartments. Nor do we always realize, when we criticise the merits of individual works, the full extent of the creative power which, to borrow a musical analogy, could dis- cover a mode so expressive of fundamental rhythms and so pro- foundly significant and inevitable.

Every part of such an image as this is directly expressive, not of any mere superstition or dogma, but of evident facts. No artist of today, however, great, could more exactly or more wisely create an image of that Energy which science must postulate behind all phenomena. If we would reconcile Time with Eter- nity, we can scarcely do so otherwise than by the conception of alternations of phase extending over vast regions of space and great tracts of time. Especially significant, then, is the phase

66 THE DANCE OF SIVA

alternation implied by the drum, and the fire which 'changes/ not destroys. These are but visual symbols of the theory of the day and night of Brahma.

In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Siva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fulness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and g^ves new rest. This is poetry ; but none the less, science.

It is not strange that the figure of Nataraja has commanded the adoration of so many generations past: familiar with all scepticisms, expert in tracing all beliefs to primitive supersti- tions, explorers of the infinitely great and infinitely small, we are worshippers of Nataraja still.

r

PLATE XII

IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS.

k

Brahma. Brahmanical stone sculpture, Elephanta, 8th Century.

INDIAN IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS

Certain writers, speaking of the many-armed images of Indian art, have treated this pecuUarity as an unpardonable defect. "After 300 A.D.," says Mr. Vincent Smith, "Indian sculpture properly so-called hardly deserves to be reckoned as art. The figures both of men and animals become stiff and formal, and the idea of power is clumsily expressed by the multiplication of members. The many-headed, many-armed gods and goddesses whose images crowd the walls and roofs of madiaeval temples have no pretentions to beauty, and are frequently hideous and grotesque."^ Mr. Maskell speaks of "these hideous deities with animals' heads and innumerable arms."^ Sir George Birdwood considers that "the monstrous shapes of the Puranic deities are unsuitable for the higher forms of artistic representation; and this is possibly why sculpture and painting are unknown as fine arts in India."' Quotations of this kind could be multiplied, bur enough has been given to show that for a certain class of critics there exists the underlying assumption that in Indian art the multiplications of limbs or heads, or addition of any animal at- tributes, is in itself a very grave defect, and fatal to any claim for merit in the works concerned.

In reply to criticisms of this kind it would be useless to cite examples of Greek art such as the Victory of Samothrace or the head of Hypnos: of Egyptian, such as the figures of Sekhet or other animal divinities: of Byzantine or mediaeval angels: or modern works such as some of M. Rodin's. For it is clear that all these, if the critics be consistent, must suffer equal condem- nation.

Let me digress at this point to class the critics : for I fear that

* Imperial Gazetteer of India. 1910, vol. II.

^Ivories, 1915. p. 332.

^Industrial Arts of India, 1880, p. 125. If the fine arts were until recently "unknown in India," perhaps this can be explained by the remark of B. H. Baden-Powell, who says that "In a country like this we must not expect to find anything that appeals to mind or deep feeling." For "unknown" to Sir George Birdwood or Mr. Baden- Powell need not imply anything more than "unrecognized."

It is fair to say that Mr. Vincent Smith's opinions have been con- siderably modified since 1910.

68 INDIAN IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS

I ought to apologise for putting forward in this chapter what is obvious. The difficuhy is one that has been raised exclusively by philologists and historians : in a considerable experience I have never heard these objections raised by artists or by connoisseurs. These notes are dedicated, then, only to the philologist and the historian, and may be neglected by all others.

The condemnations quoted are certainly to be justified if we are to agree to find the final aim of art in representation: then let us seek the most attractive models and carefully copy them.

But this test of verisimilitude has never been anything more than the result of a popular misunderstanding. Let us submit the Indian, Greek or Egyptian figures to recognized standards, and to criticism a little more penetrating than is involved in merely counting heads or arms.

Leonardo says that that figure is most worthy of praise which by its action best expresses the passion that animates it.

Hsieh Ho demands that the work of art should exhibit the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of living things.

Mr. Holmes suggests that a work of art must possess in some degree the four qualities of Unity, Vitality, Infinity and Repose.

In other words, a work of art is great in so far as it expresses its own theme in a form at once rhythmic and impassioned: through a definite pattern it must express a motif deeply felt.

From this point of view it would seem that we must take each work of art upon its own merits. To apply the simplest tests just quoted — I wish to speak with the greatest possible simplicity — an image with many arms or heads may be called an inferior work of art, or inartistic, if it lacks any one of the four qualities demanded by Mr. Holmes, or as we may say, if it is not ' felt.' But if it has such qualities, if it is felt, need we further concern ourselves with arithmetic?

The artist does not choose his own problems: he finds in the canon instruction to make such and such images in such and such a fashion — for example, an image of Nataraja with four arms (Frontispiece), of Brahma with four heads, Plate XII, of Mahisha-mardinI with ten arms, Plate XIII, or of Ganesa with an elephant's head. Our critics are bold enough to assert that in obeying these instructions he cannot create a work of art. It would have been fairer and more moderate to suggest that the

IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS. PLATE XIII

.JJj^.SSK/KTT- :'^'?«^.«.,-^

Durga as Chandl slaying Mahisha. Brahmanical bronze. Java. 11 th Century.

INDIAN IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS 69

problems propounded are often very difficult ; this would have left open the way to recognize a successful effort, if such could be found. To have overcome the difficulties would then be a proof of artistic capacity — and I suppose it should be the aim of the historian of art to discover such proofs.

The accompanying illustration, Plate XIII, shows a Javanese figure of Mahisha-mardini with ten arms, slaying the demon Ma- hisha. She is here an dread avenging power: yet she is neither cruel nor angry, but rather sad with the sadness of those who are wise, playing an inevitable part, though at heart no more than the spectator of a drama. This entire figure, damaged as it is, shows what tenderness may be expressed, even in rajasic images. And this peace and tenderness find expression in the movement of the whole figure, and not by any arbitrary means: no part of the whole is at war with any other, and this is what we mean by unity. It would indeed be futile to condemn an image such as this because it has ten arms. Or take the Nataraja image of the primal rhythmic energy underlying all phenomenal appear- ances and activity: here is perpetual movement, perpetually poised — the rhythm of the spirit.

The death of Hiranyakasipu, Plate XIV, is a work that may be called grotesque. We have long learnt however that this cannot be used as a mere term of abuse. It would be difficult to imagine a more splendid rendering of the well known theme of the impious king who met his death at the hands of the avenging deity in man- lion form. The hand upon the shoulder, the shrinking figure with the mocking smile that has had no time to fade — what could be more terrible ? These are figures expressing by their action their animating passions: or if not so, then none have ever been. It would be unkind to contrast a work such as this with the 'truth to nature' of the Laokoon.

In these figures we cannot speak of the many arms as 'addi- tional members' because in a human being they might appear to be such. We have here a work of art which is, or is not a unity. If the work is a unity we can no more speak of added elements, than we can speak of ornament in a work of art as something added to an expression that would not otherwise be beautiful. It is not by addition or removal that we create. Before these works we can only ask, are these, or are they not, clear and im- passioned expressions o.f their subject matter? All unprejudiced

yo INDIAN IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS

and competent observers would then agree that amongst Indian images there are some of which we can say that they are such adequate expressions, and of others that they are not: but to recognize those and these requires a rather more subtle approach than that involved in the arithmetical process of counting arms or heads.

Certain developments in the most modem art could be quoted in comparison with the Indian complex figures, and, indeed, the method of these is more than modern. Some painters of the present day have sought by many strange devices to create a synthetic and symphonic art representing a continuity of thought or action, and an interpretation of ideas belonging to more than a single phase of personality — an art of interpretation. And if, as we now realise, even the human personality is compound, we should understand that this must be even more true of a cosmic divinity, who is, indeed, able by a division of upadhis, to func- tion in many places at one time. To reflect such conceptions in art demands a synthetic rather than a representative language. It might well be claimed, then, that this method adopted some- times in India, sometimes in Egypt, sometimes in Greece, and still employed, has proved successful from the practical point of view, of pure expression, the getting said what had to be said: and this is after all the sure and safe foundation of art.

These forms remain potentially equally satisfactory, too, whether as philosophers we regard them as purely abstract ex- pressions, or with the artists themselves regard them as realistic presentations of another order of life than our own, deriving from a deva-loka, other than the world we are familiar with, but not necessarily unknowable or always invisible. The distinc- tion in any case is slight, for the images equally belong to a world of their own, however we regard them.

The criticism of the philologists ultimately resolves itself into a complaint that the art is not always representative ('true to nature'). I have tried to show that it is true to experience and feeling. But aside from that, whatever in a work of art is ostensibly representative must be judged according to the logic of the world it represents — even if that world be no other than the idea-world of the sadhanas and dhydna mantrams. All worlds are idea-worlds of one kind or another, and we should also remem- ber that 'recognition' does not necessarily imply any real knowl-

IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS. PLATE XIV

Death of Hiranyakasipu. Brahmanical stone sculpture. Elura, 8th Century.

INDIAN IMAGES WITH MANY ARMS 71

edge of things in themselves — we do not know that men have really two arms, that is merely an 'intelligible representation.' It is no criticism of a fairy tale to say that in our world we meet no fairies: we should rather, and do actually, condemn on the score of insincerity, a fairy tale which should be so made as to suggest that in the writer's world there were no fairies. It is no criticism of a beast-fable to say that after all animals do not talk English or Sanskrit. Nor is it a criticism of an Indian icon to point out that we know no human beings with more than two arms.

To appreciate any art, moreover, we ought not to concentrate our attention upon its peculiarities — ethical or formal — but should endeavour to take for granted whatever the artist takes for granted. No motif appears bizarre to those who have been familiar with it for generations: and in the last analysis it must remain beyond the reach of all others so long as it remains in their eyes primarily bizarre.

If circumstances then compel the philologist and the historian to classify the extant materials for the study of Indian art, their studies will be the more valuable the more strictly they are con- fined to the archaeological point of view. For those should not air their likes and dislikes in Oriental art, who when they speak of art mean mere illustration : for there they will rarely meet with what they seek, and the expression of their disappointment be- comes wearisome.

INDIAN MUSIC

Music has been a cultivated art in India for at least three thousand years. The chant is an essential element of Vedic ritual ; and the references in later Vedic literature, the scriptures of Buddhism, and the Brahmanical epics show that it was already highly developed as a secular art in centuries preceding the begin- ning of the Christian era. Its zenith may perhaps be assigned to the Imperial age of the Guptas — from the fourth to the sixth century A. D. This was the classic period of Sanskrit literature, culminating in the drama of Kalidasa; and to the same time is assigned the monumental treatise of Bharata on the theory of- music and drama.

The art music of the present day is a direct descendant of these ancient schools, whose traditions have been handed down with comment and expansion in the guilds of the hereditary musicians. While the words of a song may have been composed at any date, the musical themes communicated orally from master to disciple are essentially ancient. As in other arts and in life, so here also India presents to us the wonderful spectacle of the still surviving consciousness of the ancient world, with a range of emotional experience rarely accessible to those who are pre- occupied with the activities of over-production, and intimidated by the economic insecurity of a social order based on competition.

The art music of India exists only under cultivated patron- age, and in its own intimate environment. It corresponds to all that is most classical in the European tradition. It is the chamber- music of an aristocratic society, where the patron retains music- ians for his own entertainment and for the pleasure of the circle of his friends: or it is temple music, where the musician is the servant of God. The public concert is unknown, and the liveli- hood of the artist does not depend upon his ability and will to amuse the crowd. In other words, the musician is protected. Under these circumstances he is under no temptation to be any- thing but a musician; his education begins in infancy, and his art remains a vocation. The civilizations of Asia do not afford to the inefficient amateur those opportunities of self-expression

PLATE XV

INDIAN MUSIC.

Chamber-music of an aristocratic society.' Late Mughal painting, ISth century.

INDIAN MUSIC 73

which are so highly appreciated in Europe and America. The arts are nowhere taught as a social accomplishment; on the one hand there is the professional, proficient in a traditional art, and on the other the lay public. The musical cultivation of the public does not consist in "everybody doing it," but in appreciation and reverence.

I have indeed heard the strange objection raised that to sing the music of India one must be an artist; and this objection seems to voice a typically democratic disapproval of superiority. But it would be nearly as true to say that the listener must respond with an art of his own, and this would be entirely in accord with Indian theories of aesthetic. The musician in India finds a model audience — technically critical. Out somewhat indifferent to voice production. The Indian audience listens rather to the song than to the singing of the song: those who are musical, perfect the rendering of the song by the force of their own imagination and emotion. Under these conditions the actual music is better heard than where the sensuous perfection of the voice is made a sine qua non: precisely as the best sculpture is primitive rather than suave, and we prefer conviction to prettiness — "It is like the outward poverty of God,^ whereby His glory is nakedly revealed." None the less the Indian singer's voice is sometimes of great intrinsic beauty, and isometimes used with sensitive intelligence as well as skill. It is not, however, the voice that makes the singer, as so often happens in Europe.

Since Indian music is not written, and cannot be learnt from books, except in theory, it will be understood that the only way for a foreigner to learn it must be to establish between himself and his Indian teachers that special relationship of disciple and master which belongs to Indian education in all its phases: he must enter into the inner spirit and must adopt many of the outer conventions of Indian life, and his study must continue until he can improvise the songs under Indian conditions and to the satisfaction of Indian professional listeners. He must possess not only the imagination of an artist, but also a vivid memorj' and an ear sensitive to microtonal inflections.

The theory of scale is everywhere a generalisation from the

1 Mahesvara, who wanders through the world a penniless and naked ascetic.

74

INDIAN MUSIC

facts of song. The European art scale has been reduced to twelve fixed notes by merging nearly identical intervals such as D sharp and E flat, and it is also tempered to facilitate modulation and free change of key. In other words, the piano is out of tune by hypothesis. Only this compromise, necessitated in the development of harmony, has made possible the triumphs of modern orchestration. A purely melodic art, however, may be no less intensely cultivated, and remains the advantages of pure intonation and modal colouring.

Apart from the keyed instruments of modem Europe there scarcely exists an absolutely fixed scale: at any rate, in India the thing fixed is a group of intervals, and the precise vibration value of a note depends on its position in a progression, not on its relation to a tonic. The scale of twenty-two notes is simply the sum of all the notes used in all the songs — no musician sings a chromatic scale from C to C with twenty-two stopping places, for this would be a mere totir de force.

The 'quarter-tone' or sruti is the microtonal interval between two successive scale notes: but as the theme rarely employs two and never three scale notes in succession, the microtonal interval Is not generally conspicuous except in ornament.

Every Indian song is said to be in a particular rdga or rdgini — raginl being the feminine of raga, and indicating an abridge- ment or modification of the main theme. The raga, like the old Greek and the ecclesiastical mode, is a selection of five, six, or seven notes, distributed along the scale; but the raga is more particularized than a mode, for it has certain characteristic pro- gressions, and a chief note to which the singer constantly returns. None of the ragas employs more than seven substantive notes, and there is no modulation: the strange tonality of the Indian song is due to the use of unfamiliar intervals, and not to the use of many successive notes with small divisions.

The raga may be best defined as a melody-mould or the ground plan of a song. It is this ground plan which the master first of all communicates to the pupil; and to sing is to improvise upon the theme thus defined. The possible number of ragas is very large, but the majority of systems recognise thirty-six, that is to say six ragas, each with five raginis. The origin of the ragas is various: some, like Pahari, are derived from local folk-song, others, like Jog, from the songs of wandering ascetics, and still

INDIAN MUSIC.

PLATE XVJ

Ratan Devi, singer of Indian songs in America (Photograph by Arnold Genthe.)

INDIAN MUSIC

75

others are the creation of great musicians by whose names they are known. More than sixty are mentioned in a Sanskrit-Tibetan vocabulary of the seventh century, with names such as 'With-a- voice-like-a-thunder-cloud/ 'Like-the-god-Indra/ and 'Delighting- the heart.' Amongst the raga names in modern use may be cited 'Spring/ Evening beauty/ 'Honey-flower/ 'The swing/ 'Intoxi- cation/

Psychologically the word raga, meaning colouring or passion, suggests to Indian ears the idea of mood ; that is to say that pre- cisely as in ancient Greece, the musical mode has definite ethos. It is not the purpose of the song to repeat the confusion of life, but to express and arouse particular passions of body and soul in man and nature. Each raga is associated with an hour of the day or night when it may be appropriately sung, and some are associated with particular seasons or have definite magic effects. Thus there is still believed the well-known story of a musician whose royal patron arbitrarily insisted on hearing a song in the Dipak raga, which creates fire: the musician obeyed under protest, but as the song proceeded, he burst into flames, which could not be extinguished even though he sprang into the waters of the Jamna. It is just because of this element of magic, and the association of he ragas with the rhythmic ritual of daily and seasonal life, that their clear outlines must not be blurred by modulation: and this is expressed, when the ragas are personi- fied as musical genii, by saying that 'to sing out of the raga' is to break the limbs of these musical angels. A characteristic story is related of the prophet Narada, when he was still but a learner. He thought that he had mastered the whole art of music; but the all-wise Vishnu, to curb his pride, revealed to him in the world of the gods, a spacious building where there lay men and women weeping over their broken arms and legs. They were the ragas and raginis, and they said that a certain sage of the name of Narada, ignorant of music and unskillful in performance, had sung them amiss, and therefore their features were distorted and their limbs broken, and until they were sung truly there would be no cure for them. Then Narada was humbled, and kneeling before Vishnu prayed to be taught the art of music more per- fectly: and in due course he became the great musician priest of the gods,

Indian music is a purely melodic art, devoid of any harmonised

yd INDIAN MUSIC

accompaniment other than a drone. In modern European art, the meaning of each note of the theme is mainly brought out by the notes of the chord which are heard with it; and even in unaccompanied melody, the musician hears an implied harmony. Unaccompanied folk-song does not satisfy the concert-goer's ear ; as pure melody it is the province only of the peasant and the specialist. This is partly because the folk-air played on the piano or written in staff notation is actually falsified; but much more because under the conditions of European art, melody no longer exists in its own right, and music is a compromise between melodic freedom and harmonic necessity. To hear the music of India as Indians hear it one must recover the sense of a pure intonation and must forget all implied harmonies. It is just like the effort which we have to make when for the first time, after being accustomed to modern art, we attempt to read the language of early Italian or Chinese painting, where there is expressed with equal economy of means all that intensity of experience which nowadays we are accustomed to understand only through a more involved technique.

Another feature of Indian song — and so also of the instru- mental solo — is the elaborate grace. It is natural that in Europe, where many notes are heard simultaneously, grace should appear as an unnecessary elaboration, added to the note, rather than a structural factor. But in India the note and the microtonal grace compose a closer unity, for the grace fulfils just that func- tion of adding light and shade which in harmonised music is attained by the varying degrees of assonance. The Indian song without grace would seem to Indian ears as bald as the European art song without the accompaniment which it presupposes.

Equally distinctive is the constant portamento, or rather, glissando. In India it is far more the interval than the note that is sung or played, and we recognize accordingly a continuity of sound : by contrast with this, the European song, which is verti- cally divided by the harmonic interest and the nature of the keyed instruments which are heard with the voice, seems to un- accustomed Indian ears to be "full of holes."

All the songs, except the 'alaps' are in strict rhythms. These are only difficult to follow at a first hearing because the Indian rhythms are founded, as in prosody, on contrasts of long and short duration, while European rhythms are based on stress, as

INDIAN MUSIC.

PLATE XVII

TodI Ragini (a musical mode). Rajput paiuting, 16th century Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston.

/

INDIAN MUSIC yy

in dance or marching. The Indian musician does not mark the beginning of the bar by accent. His fixed unit is a section, or group of bars which are not necessarily ahke, while the Euro- pean fixed unit is typically the bar, of which a varying number constitute a section. The European rhythm is counted in mul- tiples of 2 or 3, the Hindu in sums of 2 or 3. Some of the countings are very elaborate: Ata Tala, for example, is counted as 5 plus 5 plus 2 plus 2. The frequent use of cross rhythms also complicates the form. Indian music is modal in times as well as melody. For all these reasons it is difficult to grasp immediately the point at which a rhythm begins and ends, although this is quite easy for the Indian audience accustomed to quanti- tative poetic recitation. The best way to approach the Indian rhythm is to pay attention to the phrasing, and ignore pulsation.

The Indian art-song is accompanied by drums, or by the instru- ment known as a tambura, or by both. The tambura is of the lute tribe, but without frets : the four very long strings are tuned to sound the dominant, the upper tonic twice, and the octave below, which are common to all ragas: the pitch is adjusted to suit the singer's voice. The four strings are fitted with simple resonators — shreds of wool between the string and the bridge — which are the source of their 'life' : and the strings are continu- ously sounded, making a pedal point background very rich in overtones, and against this dark ground of infinite potentiality the song stands out like an elaborate embroidery. The tambura must not be regarded as a solo instrument, nor as an object of separate interest like the piano accompaniment of a modem song: its soimd is rather the ambient in which the song lives and moves and has its being,

India has, besides the tambura, many solo instruments. By far the most important of these is the vlnd. This classic instru- ment, which ranks with the violin of Europe and the koto of Japan, and second only to the voice in sensitive response, differs chiefly from the tambura in having frets, the notes being made with the left hand and the strings plucked with the right. The delicate nuances of microtonal grace are obtained by deflection of the strings, whole passages being played in this manner solely by a lateral movement of the left hand, without a fresh plucking. While the only difficulty in playing the tambura is to maintain an even rhythm independently of the song, the vlnd presents all

78 INDIAN MUSIC

the difficulties of technique that can be imagined, and it is said that at least twelve years are required to attain proficiency.

The Indian singer is a poet, and the poet a singer. The dominant subject matter of the songs is human or divine love in all its aspects, or the direct praise of God, and the words are always sincere and passionate. The more essentially the singer is a musician, however, the more the words are regarded merely as the vehicle of the music: in art-song the words are always brief, voicing a mood rather than telling any story, and they are used to support the music with little regard to their own logic — precisely as the representative element in a modem painting merely serves as the basis for an organisation of pure form or coulour. In the musical form called alap — an improvisation on the raga theme, this preponderance of the music is carried so far that only meaningless syllables are used. The voice itself is a musical instrument, and the song is more than the words of the song. This form is especially favoured by the Indian virtuoso, who naturally feels a certain contempt for those whose first interest in the song is connected with the words. The voice has thus a higher status than in Europe, for the music exists in its own right and not merely to illustrate the words. Rabindranath Tagore has written on this :

When I was very young I heard the song, 'Who dressed you like a foreigner?', and that one line of the song painted such a strange picture in my mind that even now it is sounding in my memory. I once tried to compose a song myself under the spell of that line. As I hummed the tune, I wrote the first line of the song, 'I know thee, thou stranger,' and if there were no tune to it, I cannot tell what meaning would be left in the song. But by the power of the spell of the tune the mysterious figure of that stranger was evoked in my mind. My heart began to say, 'There is a stranger going to and fro in this world of ours — her house is on the further shore of an ocean of mystery — sometimes she is to be seen in the autumn morning, sometimes in the flowery midnight — sometimes we receive an intima- tion of her in the depths of our heart — sometimes I hear her voice when I turn my ear to the sky.' The tune of my song led me to the very door of that stranger who ensnares the universe and appears in it, and I said:

'Wandering over the world

I come to thy land :

I am a guest at thy door, thou stranger.*

One day, many days afterwards, there was someone going along the road singing:

'How does that unknown bird go to and away from the cage? Could I but catch it, I would set the chain of my mind about its feet!'

INDIAN MUSIC.

PLATE XVIII

Madhu-madhavi Kagini (a musical mode). 'The sweet, sweet rumbling of thunder is heard. ' Rajput painting, 16th centurj^. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

INDIAN MUSIC

79

I saw that that folk-song, too, said the very same thing! Sometimes the unknown bird comes to the closed cage and speaks a word of the limitless unknown — the mind would keep it forever, but cannot. What but the tune of a song could report the coming and going of that unknown bird? Because of this I always feel a hesitation in publish- ing a book of songs, for in such a book the main thing is left out.

This Indian music is essentially impersonal: it reflects an emotion and an experience which are deeper and wider and older than the emotion or wisdom of any single individual. Its sorrow is without tears, its joy without exultation and it is passionate without any loss of serenity. It is in the deepest sense of the words all-human. But when the Indian prophet speaks of inspira- tion, it is to say that the Vedas are eternal, and all that the poet achieves by his devotion is to hear or see: it is then Sarasvati, the goddess of speech and learning, or Narada, whose mission it is to disseminate occult knowledge in the sound of the strings of his Vina, or Krishna, whose flute is forever calling us to leave the duties of the world and follow Him — it is these, rather than any human individual, who speak through the singer's voice, and are seen in the movements of the dancer.

Or we may say that this is an imitation of the music in heaven. The master musicians of India are always represented as the pupils of a god, or as visiting the heavenworld to learn there the music of the spheres — that is to say, their knowledge springs from a source far within the surface of the empirical activity of the waking consciousness. In this connection it is explained why it is that human art must be studied, and may not be identi- fied with the imitation of our everyday behaviour.* When Siva expounds the technique of the drama to Bharata — the famous author of the Ndtya Sastra — he declares that human art must be subject to law, because in man the inner and outer life are still in conflict. Man has not yet found Himself, but all his activity proceeds from a laborious working of the mind, and all his virtue is self-conscious. What we call our life is uncoordinated, and far from the harmony of art, which rises above good and evil. It is otherwise with the gods, whose every gesture immediately reflects the affections of the inner life. Art is an imitation of that perfect spontaneity — the identity of intuition and expression in those who are of the kingdom of heaven, which is within us.

* This is like the principle of ' conscious control ' advanced by F. M. Alexander in Man's Supreme Inheritance.

8o INDIAN MUSIC

Thus it is that art is nearer to Hfe than any fact can be; and Mr. Yeats has reason when he says that Indian music, though its theory is elaborate and its technique so difficult, is not an art, but life itself.

For it is the inner reality of things, rather than any transient or partial experience that the singer voices. "Those who sing here," says ^ankaracharya, "sing God" : and the Vishnu Purdna adds, "All songs are a part of Him, who wears a form of sound."* We could deduce from this a metaphysical interpretation of technique. In all art there are monumental and articulate ele- ments, masculine and feminine factors which are unified in perfect form. We have here the sound of the tambura which is heard before the song, during the song, and continues after it: that is the timeless Absolute, which as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. On the other hand there is the song itself which is the variety of Nature, emerging from its source and returning at the close of its cycle. The harmony of that undivided Ground with this intricate Pattern is the unity of Spirit and Matter. We see from this why this music could not be improved by harmonisation, even if harmonisation were pos- sible without destroying the modal bases: for in breaking up the ground into an articulate accompaniment, we should merely create a second melody, another universe, competing with the freedom of the song itself, and we should destroy the peace on which it rests.

This would defeat the purpose of the singer. Here in this ego-conscious world we are subject to mortality. But this mor- tality is an illusion, and all its truths are relative: over against this world of change and separation there is a timeless and space- less Peace which is the source and goal of all our being — "that noble Pearl," in the words of Behmen, "which to the World appears Nothing, but to the Children of Wisdom is All Things." Every religious teacher offers us those living waters. But the way is hard and long: we are called upon to leave houses and lands, fathers and mothers and wives to achieve an end which in our imperfect language we can only speak of as Non-existence. Many of us have great possessions, and the hardest of these to surrender are our own will and identity. What guarantee have we that the reward will be commensurate with the sacrifice ?

^ Ci. the Granth Sahib (Japjl xxvii) : "How many musicians, how many ragas and raginls and how many singers sing Thee?"

INDIAN MUSIC.

PLATE XIX

Todi Rilgiiii (a nui>ical mode). Rajput painting, ISth century. Calcutta >cii()ol

of Art.

INDIAN MUSIC 8l

Indian theory declares that in the ecstasies of love and art we already receive an intimation of that redemption. This is also the katharsis of the Greeks, and it is found in the aesthetic of modern Europe when Goethe says

For beauty they have sought in every age

He who perceives it is from himself set free

aus sich entriickt. We are assured by the experience of aesthetic contemplation that Paradise is a reality.

In other words the magical effects of a song in working mere miracles are far surpassed by its effects upon our inner being. The singer is still a magician, and the song is a ritual, a sacred ceremony, an ordeal which is designed to set at rest that wheel of the imagination and the senses which alone hinder us from contact with reality. But to achieve this ordeal the hearer must cooperate with the musician by the surrender of the will, and by drawing in his restless thought to a single point of con- centration: this is not the time or place for curiosity or admira- tion. Our attitude towards an unknovm art should be far from the sentimental or romantic, for it can bring us nothing that we have not already with us in our own hearts: the peace of the Abyss which underlies all art is one and the same, whether we find it in Europe or in Asia.

STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN

In the Mahabharata there is reported a conversation between Siva and Uma. The Great God asks her to describe the duties of v^^omen, addressing her, in so doing, in terms which acknowl- edge her perfect attainment of the highest wisdom possible to man or god — terms which it would be hard to parallel anywhere in western literature. He says:

"Thou that dost know the Self and the not-Self, expert in every work: endowed with self-restraint and perfect same-sightedness towards every creature: free from the sense of I and my — thy power and energy are equal to my own, and thou hast practised the most severe discipline. O Daughter of Himalaya, of fairest eyebrows, and whose hair ends in the fairest curls, expound to me the duties of women in full."

Then She, who is queen of heaven, and yet so sweetly human, answers :

"The duties of woman are created in the rites of wedding, when in presence of the nuptial fire she becomes the associate of her Lord. for the performance of all righteous deeds. She should be beautiful and gentle, considering her husband as her god and serving him as such in fortune and misfortune, health and sickness, obedient even if commanded to unrighteous deeds or acts that may lead to her own destruction. She should rise early, serving the gods, always keeping her house clean, tending to the domestic sacred fire, eating only after the needs of gods and guests and servants have been satisfied, devoted to her father and mother and the father and mother of her husband. Devotion to her Lord is woman's honour, it is her eternal heaven; and O Mahesvara,"

she adds, with a most touching human cry,

"I desire not paradise itself if thou are not satisfied with me!"

"She is a true wife who gladdens her husband," says Raja- sekhara in the Karpura Manjarl. The extract following is from the Laws of Manu :

"Though destitute of virtue, or seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, a husband must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife ... If a wife obeys her husband, she will for that reason alone be exalted in heaven."

STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN 83

"The production of children, the nurture of those born, and the daily life of men, of these matters woman is visibly the cause."

"She who controlling her thoughts, speech and acts, violates not her duty to her Lord, dwells with him after death in heaven, and in this world is called by the virtuous a faithful wife."

Similar texts from a variety of Indian sources could be indefi- nitely multiplied.

If such are the duties of women, women are accorded corres- ponding honour, and exert a corresponding influence upon society. This power and influence do not so much belong to the merely young and beautiful, nor to the wealthy, as to those who have lived — mothers and grandmothers — or who follow a religious discipline — widows or nuns. According to Manu: 'A master exceedeth ten tutors in claim to honour; the father a hundred masters ; but the mother a thousand fathers in right to reverence and in the function of teacher.' When Rama accepted Kaikeyi's decree of banishment, it was because * a mother should be as much regarded by a son as is a father,' Even at the present day it would be impossible to over-emphasize the influence of Indian mothers not only upon their children and in all household affairs, but upon their grown-up sons to whom their word is law. Ac- cording to my observation, it is only those sons who have received an 'English' education in India who no longer honour their fathers and mothers.

No story is more appropriate than that of Madalasa and her son Vikranta to illustrate the position of the Indian mother as teacher. As Vikranta grew up day by day, the Markandeya Pur ana relates, Madalasa 'taught him knowledge of the Self^ by ministering to him in sickness ; and as he grew in strength and there waxed in him his father's heart, he attained to knowledge of the Self by his mother's words.' And these were Madalasa's words, spoken to the baby crying on her lap:

"My child, thou art without a name or form, and it is but in fantasy that thou hast been given a name. This thy body, framed of the five elements, is not thine in sooth, nor art thou of it. Why dost thou weep? Or, maybe, thou weepest not; it is a sound self -bom that cometh forth from the king's son. . . .In the body

* 'Knowledge of the Self — the Adhyatmavidya referred to above, p. 7.

84 STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN

dwells another self, and therewith abideth not the thought that 'This is mine/ which appertaineth to the flesh. Shame that man is so deceived!"

Even in recent times, in families where the men have received an English education unrelated to Indian life and thought, the inheritance of Indian modes of thought and feeling rests in the main with women; for a definite philosophy of life is bound up with household ritual and traditional etiquette and finds expres- sion equally in folk-tale and cradle-song and popular poetry, and in those pauranic and epic stories which constitute the household Bible literature of India. Under these conditions it is often the case that Indian women, with all their faults of sentimentality and ignorance, have remained the guardians of a spiritual culture which is of greater worth than the efficiency and information of the educated.

It is according to the Tantrik scriptures, devoted to the cult of the Mother of the World, that women, who partake of her nature more essentially than other living beings, are especially honoured; here the woman may be a spiritual teacher (guru), and the initation of a son by a mother is more fruitful than any other. One doubts how far this may be of universal application, believing with Paracelsus that woman is nearer to the world than man, of which the evidence appears in her always more personal point of view. But all things are possible to women such as Madalasa.

The claim of the Buddhist nun — 'How should the woman's nature hinder us?' — has never been systematically denied in India. It would have been contrary to the spirit of Indian culture to deny to individual women the opportunity of saintship or learning in the sense of closing to them the schools of divinity or science after the fashion of the Western academies in the nineteenth century. But where the social norm is found in mar- riage and parenthood for men and women alike, it could only have been in exceptional cases and under exceptional circum- stances that the latter specialised, whether in divinity, like Auvvai, Mira Bal, or the Buddhist nuns, in science, likeLTlavatT, or in war, like Qiand Bib! or the Rani of JhansT. Those set free to cultivate expert knowledge of science or to follow with undivided allegi- ance either religion or any art, could only be the sannydsini or devotee, the widow, and the courtesan. A majority of women

PLATE XX

INDIAN WOMEN.

A Hindu lady at her toilet. Rajput drawing. 18th century. Collection of

the author.

STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN 85

have always, and naturally, preferred marriage and motherhood to either of these conditions. But those who felt the call of reli- gion, those from whom a husband's death removed the central motif of their life, and those trained from childhood as expert artists, have always maintained a great tradition in various branches of cultural activity, such as social service or music. What we have to observe is that Hindu sociologists have always regarded these specializations as more or less incompatible with wifehood and motherhood ; life is not long enough for the achieve- ment of many different things,

Hinduism justifies no cult of ego-expression, but aims con- sistently at spiritual freedom. Those who are conscious of a sufficient inner life become the more indifferent to outward ex- pression of their own or any changing personality. The ultimate purposes of Hindu social discipline are that men should unify their individuality with a wider and deeper than individual life, should fulfil appointed tasks regardless of failure or success, distinguish the timeless from its shifting forms, and escape the all-too-narrow prison of the 'I and mine.*

Anonymity is thus in accordance with the truth; and it is one of the proudest distinctions of the Hindu culture. The names of the 'authors' of the epics are but shadows, and in later ages it was a constant practise of writers to suppress their own names and ascribe their work to a mythical or famous poet, thereby to gain a better attention for the truth that they would rather claim to have 'heard' than to have 'made/ Similarly, scarcely a single Hindu painter or sculptor is known by name; and the entire range of Sanskrit literature cannot exhibit a single autobiography and but little history. Why should women have sought for modes of self-advertisement that held no lure even for men? The governing concept of Hindu ethics is vocation (dharma) ; the highest merit consists in the fulfilment of 'one's own duty,' in other words, in dedication to one's calling. Indian society was highly organized ; and where it was considered wrong for a man to fulfil the duties of another man rather than his own, how much more must a confusion of function as between woman and man have seemed wrong, where differentiation is so much more evident. In the words of Manu : 'To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers men ;' and he adds significantly 'therefore are religious sacraments ordained in the Veda to be

86 STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN

observed by the husband together with the wife.'*

The Asiatic theory of marriage, which would have been per- fectly comprehensible in the Middle Ages, before the European woman had become an economic parasite, and which is still very little removed from that of Roman or Greek Christianity, is not readily intelligible to the industrial democratic consciousness of Europe and America, which is so much more concerned for rights than for duties, and desires more than anything else to be released from responsibilities — regarding such release as freedom. It is thus that Western reformers would awaken a divine discontent in the hearts of Oriental women, forgetting that the way of ego- assertion cannot be a royal road to realisation of the Self. The industrial mind is primarily sentimental, and therefore* cannot reason clearly upon love and marriage; but the Asiatic analysis is philosophic, religious and practical.

Current Western theory seeks to establish marriage on a basis of romantic love and free choice; marriage thus depends on the accident of 'falling in love.' Those who are 'crossed in love' or do not love are not required to marry. This individualistic position, however, is only logically defensible if at the same time it is recognized that to fall out of love must end the marriage. It is a high and religious ideal which justifies sexual relations only as the outward expression demanded by passionate love and re- gards an intimacy continued or begun for mere pleasure, or for reasons of prudence, or even as a duty, as essentially immoral ; it is an ideal which isolated individuals and groups have constantly upheld; and it may be that the ultimate development of idealistic individualism will tend to a nearer realisation of it. But do not let us deceive ourselves that because the Western marriage is nomi- nally founded upon free choice, it therefore secures a permanent unity of spiritual and physical passion. On the contrary, perhaps in a majority of cases, it holds together those who are no longer 'in love'; habit, considerations of prudence, or, if there are chil- dren, a sense of duty often compel the passionless continuance of a marriage for the initiation of which romantic love was felt to be a sine qua non. Those who now live side by side upon a basis

^ Jahangir observes in his 'Memoirs' that the Hindu woman 'is the half of a man. and his companion in religious ceremonies.' Cf. the Prema Sagcra, ch. xxiv: 'without a wife a sacrifice is not fruitful.'

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Chand Bibi, called Chand Sultan. Defender of Ahmadnagar against Akbar, 1695. Rajput painting, 18th century. Collection of Lady Herringham.

STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN 87

of affection and common interest would not have entered upon marriage on this basis alone.

If the home is worth preserving under modern conditions — and in India at any rate, the family is still the central element of social organization, then probably the 'best solution' will always be found in some such compromise as is implied in a more or less permanent marriage ; though greater tolerance than is now usual must be accorded to exceptions above and below the norm. What are we going to regard as the constructive basis of the normal marriage ?

For Hindu sociologists marriage is a social and ethical relation- ship, and the begetting of children the payment of a debt. Ro- mantic love is a brief experience of timeless freedom, essentially religious and ecstatic, in itself as purely antisocial as every glimpse of Union is a denial of the Relative; it is the way of Mary. It is true the glamour of this experience may persist for weeks and months, when the whole of life is illimiined by the partial merg- ing of the consciousness of the lover and beloved ; but sooner or later in almost every case there must follow a return to the world of unreality, and that insight which once endowed the beloved with innumerable perfections fades in the light of commonsense. The lovers are fortunate if there remains to them a basis of com- mon interest and common duty and a mutuality of temperament adequate for friendship, affection and forbearance; upon this chance depends the possibility of happiness during the greater part of almost every married life. The Hindu marriage differs from the marriage of sentiment mainly in putting these considera- tions first. Here, as elsewhere, happiness will arise from the ful- filment of vocation, far more than when immediate satisfaction is made the primary end. I use the term vocation advisedly ; for the Oriental marriage, like the Oriental actor's art, is the fulfil- ment of a traditional design, and does not depend upon the acci- dents of sensibility. To be such a man as Rama, such a wife as Sita, rather than to express 'oneself,' is the aim. The formula is predetermined ; husband and wife alike have parts to play; and it is from this point of view that we can best understand the meaning of Manu's law, that a wife should look on her husband as a god, regardless of his personal merit or demerits — it would be beneath her dignity to deviate from a woman's norm merely because of the failure of a man. It is for her own sake and for

88 STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN

the sake of the community, rather than for his alone, that life must be attuned to the eternal unity of Purusha and Prakriti.

Whatever the ultimate possibilities of Western individualism, Hindu society was established on a basis of group morality. It is true that no absolute ethic is held binding on all classes alike; but w^ithin a given class the freedom of the individual is subordi- nated to the interest of the group, the concept of duty is para- mount. How^ far this concept of duty trenches on the liberty of the individual may be seen in Rama's repudiation of Sita, subse- quent to the victory in Lanka and the coronation at Ayodhya; although convinced of her perfect fidelity, Rama, who stands in epic history as the mirror of social ethics, consents to banish his wife, because the people murmur against her. The argument is that if the king should receive back a wife who had been living in another man's house, albeit faithful, popular morality would be endangered, since others might be moved by love and par- tiality to a like rehabilitation but with less justification. Thus the social order is placed before the happiness of the individual, whether man or woman. This is the explanation of the greater peace which distinguishes the arranged marriage of the East from the self-chosen marriage of the West; where there is no deception there can be no disappointment. And since the conditions on which it is founded do not change, it is logical that Hindu mar- riage should be indissoluble; only when social duties have been fulfilled and social debts paid, is it permissible for the householder to relinquish simultaneously the duties and the rights of the social individual. It is also logical that when the marriage is childless, it is permissible to take a second wife with the consent — and often at the wish — of the first.

It is sometimes asked, what opportunities are open to the Ori- ental woman? How can she express herself? The answer is that life is so designed that she is given the opportunity to be a woman — in other words, to realise, rather than to express herself. It is possible that modern Europe errs in the opposite direction. We must also remember that very much which passes for edu- cation nowadays is superficial ; some of it amounts to little more than parlor tricks, and nothing is gained by communicating this condition to Asia, where I have heard of modern parents who desired that their daughters should be taught 'a little French' or 'a few strokes on the violin.* The arts in India are professional and

INDIAN WOMEN.

PLATE XXII

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Hindu marriage. From a Mughal painting, about 1600.

STATUS OF INDIAN WOMEN 89

vocational, demanding undivided service; nothing is taught to the amateur by way of social accomplishment or studied super- ficially. And woman represents the continuity of the racial life, an energy which cannot be divided or diverted without a corres- ponding loss of racial vitality ; she can no more desire to be some- thing other than herself, than the Vaishya could wish to be known as a Kshattriya, or the Kshattriya, as a Brahman.

It has been shown in fact, some seventy-five per cent, of West- ern graduate women do not marry; and apart from these, if it be true that five-sixths of a child's tendencies and activities are already determined before it reaches school age, and that the habits then deeply rooted cannot be greatly modified, if it be true that so much depends on deliberate training while the instincts of the child are still potential and habits unformed, can we say that women whose social duties or pleasures, or self-elected careers or unavoidable wage slavery draws them into the outer world, are fulfilling their duty to the race, or as we should say, the debt of the ancestors ? The modern suffragist declares that the state has no right to demand of woman, whether directly or indirectly, by bribe or pressure of opinion, that she consider her- self under any obligation, in return for the protection afforded her, to produce its future citizens. But we are hardly likely to see this point of view accepted in these days when the right of society to conscript the bodies of men is almost universally con- ceded. It is true that many who do not acquiesce in the existing industrial order are prepared to resist conscription in the military sense, that is to say, conscription for destruction; but we are becoming accustomed to the idea of another kind of conscription, or rather co-operation, based on service, and indeed, according to either of the two dynamic theories of a future society — the syndicalist and the individualistic — it must appear that without the fulfilment of function there can exist no rights. From the co- operative point of view society has an absolute right to compel its members to fulfil the functions that are necessary to it; and