It is a village poet of East Bengal who preaches in a song the philosophical doctrine that the universe has its reality in its relation to the Person, which I translate in the following lines: The sky and the earth are born of mine own eyes, The hardness and softness, the cold and the heat are lie products of mine own body, The sweet smell and the bad are of my own nostrils.
This poet sings of the Eternal Person within him, coming out and appearing before his eyes, just as THE MAN OF MY HEART the Vedic Rishi speaks of the Person, who is in him, dwelling also in the heart of the sun: I have seen the vision, the vision of mine own revealing itself, coming out from within me.
In India, there are those whose endeavour is to merge completely their personal self in an imper- sonal entity which is without any quality or defini- tion; to reach a condition wherein mind becomes perfectly blank, losing all its activities. Those who claim the right to speak about it say that this is the purest state of consciousness, it is all joy and with- out any object or content. This is considered to be the ultimate end of Yoga, the cult of union, thus completely to identify one’s being with the infinite Being who is beyond all thoughts and words. Such realization of transcendental consciousness accom- panied by a perfect sense of bliss is a time-honoured tradition in our country, carrying in it the positive evidence which cannot be denied by any negative argument of refutation. Without disputing its truth I maintain that it may be valuable as a great psychological experience but all the same it is not religion, even as the knowledge of the ultimate state of the atom is of no use to an artist who deals in images in which atoms have taken forms. A cer- tain condition of vacuum is needed for studying the state of things in its original purity, and the U5 THE RELIGION OF MAN same may be said of the human spirit; but the original state is not necessarily the perfect state. The concrete form is a more perfect manifestation than the atom, and man is more perfect as a man than where he vanishes in an original indefinite- ness. This is why the Ishopanishat says: “Truth is both finite and infinite at the same time, it moves and yet moves not, it is in the distant, also in the near, it is within all objects and without them.”
This means that perfection as the ideal is im- movable, but in its aspect of the real it constantly grows towards completion, it moves. And I say of the Supreme Man, that he is infinite in his essence, he is finite in his manifestation in us the individu- als. As the Ishopanishat declares, a man must live his full term of life and work without greed, and thus realize himself in the Being who is in all beings. This means that he must reveal in his own personality the Supreme Person by his disinterested activities.
CHAPTER VIII THE MUSIC MAKER A PARTICLE of sand would be nothing if it did not have its background in. the whole physical world. This grain of sand is known in its context of the universe where we know all things through the testimony of our senses. When I say the grain of sand is, the whole physical world stands guarantee for the truth which is behind the appearance of the sand.
But where is that guarantee of truth for this personality of mine that has the mysterious faculty of knowledge before which the particle of sand offers its credential of identification? It must be acknowledged that this personal self of mine also has for its truth a background of personality where knowledge, unlike that of other things, can only be immediate and self-revealed.
What I mean by personality is a self-conscious principle of transcendental unity within man which comprehends all the details of facts that are indi- vidually his in knowledge and feeling, wish and will and work. In its negative aspect it is limited to the individual separateness, while in its posi- THE RELIGION OF MAN tive aspect it ever extends itself in the infinite through the increase of its knowledge, love and activities.
And for this reason the most human of all facts about us is that we do dream of the limitless un- attained — the dream which gives character to what is attained. Of all creatures man lives in an end- less future. Our present is only a part of it. The ideas unborn, the unbodied spirits, tease our imagi- nation with an insistence which makes them more real to our mind than things around us. The atmos- phere of the future must always surround our present in order to make it life-bearing and sugges- tive of immortality. For he who has the healthy vigour of humanity in him has a strong instinctive faith that ideally he is limitless. That is why our greatest teachers claim from us a manifestation that touches the infinite. In this they pay homage to the Supreme Man. And our true worship lies in our indomitable courage to be great and thus to represent the human divine and ever to keep open the path of freedom towards the unattained.
We Indians have had the sad experience in our own part of the world how timid orthodoxy, its irrational repressions and its accumulation of dead centuries, dwarfs man through its idolatry of the past. Seated rigid in the centre of stagnation, it firmly ties the human spirit to the revolving wheels of habit till faintness overwhelms her. Like a slugii8 THE MUSIC MAKER gish Stream choked by rotting weeds, it is divided into shallow slimy pools that shroud their dumb- ness in a narcotic mist of stupor. This mechanical spirit of tradition is essentially materialistic, it is blindly pious but not spiritual, obsessed by phan- toms of unreason that haunt feeble minds in the ghastly disguise of religion. For our soul is shrunken when we allow foolish days to weave repeated patterns of unmeaning meshes round all departments of life. It becomes stunted when we have no object of profound interest, no prospect of heightened life, demanding clarity of mind and heroic attention to maintain and mature it. It is destroyed when we make fireworks of our animal passions for the enjoyment of their meteoric sensa- tions, recklessly reducing to ashes all that could have been saved for permanent illumination. This happens not only to mediocre individuals hugging fetters that keep them irresponsible or hungering for lurid unrealities, but to generations of insipid races that have lost all emphasis of significance in themselves, having missed their future.
The continuous future is the domain of our mil- lennium, which is with us more truly than what we see in our history in fragments of the present. It is in our dream. It is in the realm of the faith which creates perfection. We have seen the rec- ords of man’s dreams of the millennium, the ideal reality cherished by forgotten races in their ad- THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN miration, hope and love manifested in the dignity of their being through some majesty in ideals and beauty in performance. While these races pass away one after another they leave great accom- plishments behind them carrying their claim to recognition as dreamers — not so much as con- querors of earthly kingdoms, but as the designers of paradise. The poet gives us the best definition of man when he says: We are the music-makers, We are the dreamers of dreams.
Our religious present for us the dreams of the ideal unity which is man himself as he manifests the infinite. We suffer from the sense of sin, which is the sense of discord, when any disruptive passion tears gaps in our vision of the One in man, creat- ing isolation in our self from the universal humanity.
The Upanishad says, 'Ma gridah, “covet not”. For coveting diverts attention from the infinite value of our personality to the temptation of materials. Our village poet sings: “Man will brightly flash into your sight, my heart, if you shut the door of desires.”
We have seen how primitive man was occupied with his physical needs, and thus restricted him- self to the present which is the time boundary of the animal; and he missed the urge of his con- THE MUSIC MAKER sciousness to seek its emancipation in a world of ultimate human value.
Modern civilization for the same reason seems to turn itself back to that primitive mentality. Our needs have multiplied so furiously fast that we have lost our leisure for the deeper realization of our self and our faith in it. It means that we have lost our religion, the longing for the touch of the divine in man, the builder of the heaven, the music-maker, the dreamer of dreams. This has made it easy to tear into shreds our faith in the perfection of the human ideal, in its wholeness, as the fuller meaning of reality. No doubt it is won- derful that music contains a fact which has been analysed and measured, and which music shares in common with the braying of an ass or of a motor-car horn. But it is still more wonderful that music has a truth, which cannot be analysed into fractions; and there the difference between it and the bellowing impertinence of a motor-car horn is infinite. Men of our own times have analysed the human mind, its dreams, its spiritual aspirations, — ^most often caught unawares in the shattered state of madness, disease and desultory dreams — and they have found to their satisfaction that these are composed of elemental animalities tangled into various knots. This may be an important discov- ery; but what is still more important to realize is the fact that by some miracle of creation man I2I THE RELIGION OF MAN infinitely transcends the component parts of his own character.
Suppose that some psychological explorer sus- pects that man’s devotion to his beloved has at bottom our primitive stomach’s hankering for human flesh, we need not contradict him; for what- ever may be its genealogy, its secret composition, the complete character of our love, in its perfect mingling of physical, mental and spiritual asso- ciations, is unique in its utter difference from can- nibalism. The truth underlying the possibility of such transmutation is the truth of our religion. A lotus has in common with a piece of rotten flesh the elements of carbon and hydrogen. In a state of dissolution there is no difference between them, but in a state of creation the difference is immense; and it is that diflference which really matters. We are told that some of our most sacred sentiments hold hidden in them instincts contrary to what these sentiments profess to be. Such disclosures have the effect upon certain persons of the relief of a tension, even like the relaxation in death of the incessant strenuousness of life.
We find in modern literature that something like a chuckle of an exultant disillusionment is becom- ing contagious, and the knights-errant of the cult of arson are abroad, setting fire to our time- honoured altars of worship, proclaiming that the images enshrined on them, even if beautiful, are THE MUSIC MAKER THE MUSIC MAKER made of mud. They say that it has been found out that the appearances in human idealism are decep- tive, that the underlying mud is real. From such a point of view, the whole of creation may be said to be a gigantic deception, and the billions of re- volving electric specks that have the appearance of “you” or “me” should be condemned as bearers of false evidence.
But whom do they seek to delude? If it be beings like ourselves who possess some inborn criterion of the real, then to them these very appearances in their integrity must represent reality, and not their component electric specks. For them the rose must be more satisfactory as an object than its constituent gases, which can be tortured to speak against the evident identity of the rose. The rose, even like the human sentiment of goodness, or ideal of beauty, belongs to the realm of creation, in which all its rebellious elements are reconciled in a perfect harmony. Because these elements in their simplicity yield themselves to our scrutiny, we in our pride are inclined to give them the best prizes as actors in that mystery-play, the rose. Such an analysis is really only giving a prize to our own detective cleverness.
I repeat again that the sentiments and ideals which man in his process of self-creation has built up, should be recognized in their wholeness. In all our faculties or passions there is nothing which is THE RELIGION OF MAN absolutely good or bad; they all are the constitu- ents of the great human personality. They are notes that are wrong when in wrong places; our education is to make them into chords that may harmonize with the grand music of Man. The animal in the savage has been transformed into higher stages in the civilized man — in other words has attained a truer consonance with Man the divine, not through any elimination of the original materials, but through a magical grouping of them, through the severe discipline of art, the discipline of curbing and stressing in proper places, establish- ing a balance of lights and shadows in the back- ground and foreground, and thus imparting a unique value to our personality in all its com- pleteness.
So long as we have faith in this value, our energy is steadily sustained in its creative activity that reveals the eternal Man. This faith is helped on all sides by literature, arts, legends, symbols, cere- monials, by the remembrance of heroic souls who have personified it in themselves.
Our religion is the inner principle that compre- hends these endeavours and expressions and dreams through which we approach Him in whose image we are made. To keep alive our faith in the reality of the ideal perfection is the function of civiliza- tion, which is mainly formed of sentiments and the images that represent that ideal. In other words, THE MUSIC MAKER civilization is a creation of art, created for the objective realization of our vision of the spiritually perfect. It is the product of the art of religion. We stop its course of conquest when we accept the cult of realism and forget that realism is the worst form of untruth, because it contains a minimum of truth. It is like preaching that only in the morgue can we comprehend the reality of the human body — the body which has its perfect revelation when seen in life. All great human facts are surrounded by an immense atmosphere of expectation. They are never complete if we leave out from them what might be, what should be, what is not yet proven but profoundly felt, what points towards the im- mortal. This dwells in a perpetual surplus in the individual, that transcends all the desultory facts about him.
The realism in Man is the animal in him, whose life is a mere duration of time; the human in him is his reality which has life everlasting for its back- ground. Rocks and crystals being complete defi- nitely in what they are, can keep as “mute insen- sate things” a kind of dumb dignity in their stol- idly limited realism; while human facts grow un- seemly and diseased,, breeding germs of death, when divested of their creative ideal — the ideal of Man the divine. The difference between the notes as mere facts of sound and music as a truth of ex- pression is immense. For music though it compre- THE EELIGION OE MAN hends a limited number of notes yet represents the infinite. It is for man to produce the music of the spirit with all the notes which he has in his psy- chology and which, through inattention or per- versity, can easily be translated into a frightful noise. In music man is revealed and not in a noise.
CHAPTER IX THE ARTIST The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist. It claims from us a vast amount of training and experience about the necessaries of livelihood. Yet it does not cost me much to confess that the food that I have taken, the dress that I wear, the house where I have my lodging, represent a stu- pendous knowledge, practice and organization which I helplessly lack; for I find that I am not altogether despised for such ignorance and ineffi- ciency. Those who read me seem fairly satisfied that I am nothing better than a poet or perhaps a philosopher — which latter reputation I do not claim and dare not hold through the precarious help of misinformation.
It is quite evident in spite of my deficiency that in human society I represent a vocation, which though superfluous has yet been held worthy of commendation. In fact, I am encouraged in my rhythmic futility by being offered moral and mate- rial incentives for its cultivation. If a foolish blackbird did not know how to seek its food, to build its nest, or to avoid its enemies, but special- THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN ized in singing, its fellow creatures, urged by their own science of genetics, would dutifully allow it to starve and perish. That I am not treated in a similar fashion is the evidence of an immense dif- ference between the animal existence and the civil- ization of man. His great distinction dwells in the indefinite margin of life in him which affords a boundless background for his dreams and creations. And it is in this realm of freedom that he realizes his divine dignity, his great human truth, and is pleased when I as a poet sing victory to him, to Man the self-revealer, who goes on exploring ages of creation to find himself in perfection.
Reality, in all its manifestations, reveals itself in the emotional and imaginative background of our mind. We know it, not because we can think of it, but because we directly feel it. And there- fore, even if rejected by the logical mind, it is not banished from our consciousness. As an incident it may be beneficial or injurious, but as a revelation its value lies in the fact that it offers us an experi- ence through emotion or imagination; we feel our- selves in a special field of realization. This feeling itself is delightful when it is not accompanied by any great physical or moral risk, we love to feel even fear or sorrow if it is detached from all prac- tical consequences. This is the reason of our enjoy- ment of tragic dramas, in which the feeling of pain rouses our consciousness to a white heat of intensity.
ia8 THE ARTIST The reality of my own self is immediate and indubitable to me. Whatever else affects me in a like manner is real for myself, and it inevitably attracts and occupies my attention for its own sake, blends itself with my personality, making it richer and larger and causing it delight. My friend may not be beautiful*, useful, rich or great, but he is real to me; in him I feel my own extension and my joy.
The consciousness of the real within me seeks for its own corroboration the touch of the Real outside me. When it fails the self in me is de- pressed. When our surroundings are monotonous and insignificant, having no emotional reaction upon our mind, we become vague to ourselves. For we are like pictures, whose reality is helped by the background if it is sympathetic. The punish- ment we suffer in solitary confinement consists in the obstruction to the relationship between the world of reality and the real in ourselves, causing the latter to become indistinct in a haze of inactive imagination: our personality is blurred, we miss the companionship of our own being through the diminution of our self. The world of our knowl- edge is enlarged for us through the extension of our information; the world of our personality grows in its area with a large and deeper experience of our personal self in our own universe through sym- pathy and imagination.
As this world, that can be known through knowl- THE RELIGION OF MAN edge, is limited to us owing to our ignorance, so the world of personality, that can be realized by our own personal self, is also restricted by the limit of our sympathy and imagination. In the dim twilight of insensitiveness a large part of our world remains to us like a procession of nomadic shadows. According to the stages of our conscious- ness we have more or less been able to identify our- selves with this world, if not as a whole, at least in fragments; and our enjoyment dwells in that wherein we feel ourselves thus united. In art we express the delight of this unity by which this world is realized as humanly significant to us. I have my physical, chemical and biological self; my knowledge of it extends through the extension of my knowledge of the physical, chemical and bio- logical world. I have my personal self, which has its communication with our feelings, sentiments and imaginations, which lends itself to be coloured by our desires and shaped by our imageries.
Science urges us to occupy by our mind the immensity of the knowable world; our spiritual teacher enjoins us to comprehend by our soul the infinite Spirit which is in the depth of the moving and changing facts of the world; the urging of our artistic nature is to realize the manifestation of personality in the world of appearance, the reality of existence which is in harmony with the real within us. Where this harmony is not deeply felt, THE ARTIST there we are aliens and perpetually homesick. For man by nature is an artist; he never receives passively and accurately in his mind a physical representation of things around him. There goes on a continual adaptation, a transformation of facts into human imagery, through constant touches of his sentiments and imagination. The animal has the geography of its birthplace; man has his coun- try, the geography of his personal self. The vision of it is not merely physical; it has its artistic unity, it is a perpetual creation. In his country, his con- sciousness being unobstructed, man extends his relationship, which is of his own creative person- ality. In order to live efficiently man must know facts and their laws. In order to be happy he must establish harmonious relationship with all things with which he has dealings. Our creation is the modification of relationship.
The great men who appear in our history remain in our mind not as a static fact but as a living his- torical image. The sublime suggestions of their lives become blended into a noble consistency in legends made living in the life of ages. Those men with whom we live we constantly modify in our minds, making them more real to us than they would be in a bare presentation. Men’s ideal of womanhood and women’s ideal of manliness are created by the imagination through a mental grouping of qualities and conducts according to THE RELIGION OF MAN our hopes and desires, and men and women con- sciously and unconsciously strive- towards its attain- ment. In fact, they reach a degree of reality for each other according to their success in adapting these respective ideals to their own nature. To say that these ideals are imaginary and therefore not true is wrong in man’s case. His true life is in his own creation, which represents the infinity of man. He is naturally indifferent to things that merely exist; they must have some ideal value for him, and then only his consciousness fully recognizes them as real. Men are never true in their isolated self, and their imagination is the faculty that brings before their mind the vision of their own greater being.
We can make truth ours by actively modulating its inter-relations. This is the work of art; for reality is not based in the substance of things but in the principal of relationship. Truth is the in- finite pursued by metaphysics; fact is the infinite pursued by science, while reality is the definition of the infinite which relates truth to the person. Reality is human; it is what we are conscious of, by which we are affected, that which we express. When we are intensely aware of it, we are aware of ourselves and it gives us delight We live in it, we always widen its limits. Our arts and literature represent this creative activity which is fundamen- tal in man.
THE ARTIST But the mysterious fact about it is that though the individuals are separaiely seeking their ex- pression, their success is never individualistic in character. Men must find and feel and represent in all their creative works Man the Eternal, the creator. Their civilization is a continual discovery of the transcendental humanity. In whatever it fails it shows the failure of the artist, which is the failure in expression; and that civilization perishes in which the individual thwarts the revelation of the universal. For Reality is the truth of Man, who belongs to all times, and any individualistic madness of men against Man cannot thrive for long.
Man is eager that his feeling for what is real to him must never die; it must find an imperishable form. The consciousness of this self of mine is so intensely evident to me that it assumes the character of immortality. I cannot imagine that it ever has been or can be non-existent In a similar manner all things that are real to me are for my- self eternal, and therefore worthy of a language that has a permanent meaning. We know indi- viduals who have the habit of inscribing their names on the walls of some majestic monument of architecture. It is a pathetic way of associating their own names with some works of art which belong to all times and to all men. Our hunger for reputation comes from our desire to make objec- THE RELIGION OF MAN lively real that which is inwardly real to us. He who is inarticulate is insignificant, like a dark star that cannot prove itself. He ever waits for the artist to give him his fullest worth, not for any- thing specially excellent in him but for the won- derful fact that he is what he certainly is, that he carries in him the eternal mystery of being.
A Chinese friend of mine while travelling with me in the streets of Peking suddenly exclaimed with a vehement enthusiasm: “Look, here is a donkey I” Surely it was an utterly ordinary don- key, like an indisputable truism, needing no special introduction from him. I was amused; but it made me think. This animal is generally classified as having certain qualities that are not recommend- able and then hurriedly dismissed. It was obscured to me by an envelopment of commonplace associa- tions; I was lazily certain that I knew it and there- fore I hardly saw it. But my friend, who pos- sessed the artist mind of China, did not treat it with a cheap knowledge but could see it afresh and recognize it as real. When I say real, I mean that it did not remain at the outskirt of his con- sciousness tied to a narrow definition, but it easily blended in his imagination, produced a vision, a special harmony of lines, colours and life and movement, and became intimately his own. The admission of a donkey into a drawing-room is vio- lently opposed; yet there is no prohibition against THE ARTIST its finding a place in a picture which may be ad- miringly displayed on the drawing-room wall.
The only evidence of truth in art exists when it compels us to say “I see”. A donkey we may pass by in N ature, but a donkey in art we must aclmowl- edge even if it be a creature that disreputably ignores all its natural history responsibility, even if it resembles a mushroom in its head and a palm- leaf in its tail.
In the Upanishad it is said in a parable that there are two birds sitting on the same bough, one of which feeds and the other looks on. This is an image of the mutual relationship of the infinite being and the finite self. The delight of the bird which looks on is great, for it is a pure and free delight. There are both of these birds in man him- self, the objective one with its business of life, the subjective one with its disinterested joy of vision.
A child comes to me and commands me to tell her a story. I tell her of a tiger which is disgusted with the black stripes on its body and comes to my frightened servant demanding a piece of soap. The story gives my little audience immense pleasure, the pleasure of a vision, and her mind cries out, “It is here, for I see!” She knows a tiger in the book of natural history, but she can see the tiger in the story of mine.
I am sure that even this child of five knows that it is an impossible tiger that is out on its untigerly THE RELIGION OF MAN quest of an absurd soap. The delightfulness of the tiger for her is not in its beauty, its usefulness, or its probability; but in the undoubted fact that she can see it in her mind with a greater clearness of vision than she can the walls around her — the walls that brutally shout their evidence of certainty which is merely circumstantial. The tiger in the story is inevitable, it has the character of a com- plete image, which offers its testimonial of truth in itself. The listener’s own mind is the eye-wit- ness, whose direct experience could not be contra- dicted. A tiger must be like every other tiger in order that it may have its place in a book of Science; there it must be a commonplace tiger to be at all tolerated. But in the story it is uncommon, it can never be reduplicated. We know a thing because it belongs to a class; we see a thing because it belongs to itself. The tiger of the story com- pletely detached itself from all others of its kind and easily assumed a distinct individuality in the heart of the listener. The child could vividly see it, because by the help of her imagination it became her own tiger, one with herself, and this union of the subject and object gives us joy. Is it because there is no separation between them in truth, the separation being the Maya, which is creation?
There come in our history occasions when the consciousness of a large multitude becomes sud- denly illumined with the recognition of a reality THE ARTIST which rises far above the dull obviousness of daily happenings. The world becomes vivid; we see, we feel it with all our soul. Such an occasion there was when the voice of Buddha reached distant shores across physical and moral impediments. Then our life and our world found their profound meaning of reality in their relation to the central person who offered us emancipation of love. Men, in order to make this great human experience ever memorable, determined to do the impossible; they made rocks to speak, stones to sing, caves to re- member; their cry of joy and hope took immortal forms along the hills and deserts, across barren solitudes and populous cities. A gigantic creative endeavour built up its triumph in stupendous carvings, defying obstacles that were overwhelm- ing. Such heroic activity over the greater part of the Eastern continents clearly answers the question: “What is Art?” It is the response of man’s crea- tive soul to the call of the Real.
Once there came a time, centuries ago in Bengal, when the divine love drama that has made its eternal playground in human souls was vividly revealed by a personality radiating its intimate realization of God. The mind of a whole people was stirred by a vision of the world as an instru- ment, through which sounded out invitation to the meeting of bliss. The ineflfable mystery of God’s love-call, taking shape in an endless panorama of THE RELIGION OF MAN colours and forms, inspired activity in music that overflowed the restrictions of classical convention- alism. Our Kirtan music of Bengal came to its being like a star flung up by a burning whirlpool of emotion in the heart of a whole people, and their consciousness was aflame with a sense of reality that must be adequately acknowledged.
The question may be asked as to what place music occupies in my theory that art is for evoking in our mind the deep sense of reality in its richest aspect. Music is the most abstract of all the arts, as mathematics is in the region of science. In fact these two have a deep relationship with each other. Mathematics is the logic of numbers and dimen- sions. It is therefore employed as the basis of our scientific knowledge. When taken out of its con- crete associations and reduced to symbols, it re- veals its grand structural majesty, the inevitable- ness of its own perfect concord. Yet there is not merely a logic but also a magic of mathematics which works at the world of appearance, producing harmony — the cadence of inter-relationship. This rhythm of harmony has been extracted from its usual concrete context, and exhibited through the medium of sound. And thus the pure essence of expressiveness in existence is offered in music. Ex- pressiveness finds the least resistance in sound, hav- ing freedom unencumbered by the burden of facts and thoughts. This gives it a power to arouse in THE ARTIST THE ARTIST US an intimate feeling of reality. In the pictorial, plastic and literary arts, the object and our feelings with regard to it are closely associated, like the rose and its perfumes. In music, the feeling dis- tilled in sound, becoming itself an independent object. It assumes a tune-form which is definite, but a meaning which is undefinable, and yet which grips our mind with a sense of absolute truth.
It is the magic of mathematics, the rhythm which is in the heart of all creation, which moves in the atom and, in its different measures, fashions gold and lead, the rose and the thorn, the sun and the planets. These are the dance-steps of numbers in the arena of time and space, which weave the maya, the patterns of appearance, the incessant flow of change, that ever is and is not. It is the rhythm that churns up images from the vague and makes tangible what is elusive. This is maya, this is the art in creation, and art in literature, which is the magic of rhythm.
And must we stop here? What we know as in- tellectual truth, is that also not a rhythm of the relationship of facts, that weaves the pattern of theory, and produces a sense of convincingness to a person who somehow feels sure that he knows the truth? We believe any fact to be true because of a harmony, a rhythm in reason, the process of which is analysable by the logic of mathematics, but not its result in me, just as we can count the THE RELIGION OF MAN THE RELIGION OF MAN notes but cannot account for the music. The mys- tery is that I am convinced, and this also belongs to the maya of creation, whose one important, in- dispensable factor is this self-conscious personality that I represent.
And the Other? I believe it is also a self-con- scious personality, which has its eternal harmony with mine.
i4d CHAPTER X MAN’S NATURE From the time when Man became truly conscious of his own self he also became conscious of a mys- terious spirit of unity which found its manifesta- tion through him in his society. It is a subtle medium of relationship between individuals, which is not for any utilitarian purpose but for its own ultimate truth, not a sum of arithmetic but a value of life. Somehow Man has felt that this compre- hensive spirit of unity has a divine character which could claim the sacrifice of all that is individual in him, that in it dwells his highest meaning trans- cending his limited self, representing his best freedom.
Man’s reverential loyalty to this spirit of unity is expressed in his religion; it is symbolized in the names of his deities. That is why, in the begin- ning, his gods were tribal gods, even gods of the different communities belonging to the same tribe. With the extension of the consciousness of human unity his God became revealed to him as one and universal, proving that the truth of human unity is the truth of Man’s God.