Svami Sadananda Dasa
(From The Harmonist Nov.9. 1936)
On this subject Herr E. G. Schulze alias Sadananda Das Brahmachari delivered a lecture on September 10, 1936 at the Saraswata Auditorium of Sree Gaudiya Math Calkutta Kumar Hiranya Kumar Mitter, Councillor, Calcutta Corporation, was in the chair. The lecturer, formerly a scholar for comparative History of Religion in Germany, gave an insight into the result of his comparative studies and contributed his suggestions towards the solution of the problem how a proper platform may be found where East and West can meet. He showed how historically from both sides endeavourings were made to understand each other through the medium of mutual scholastic and intellectual interest and how he thinks that in future further progress can be attained by proper investigation into the spiritual background of the Indian culture and the proper cultivation of the function of the soul in the service of the Absolute i.e., the Fountainhead of All Existence and All Ontological Relation.
He pointed out that for instance the understanding of the descriptive ontological book “Gitagovinda” by Jayadeva is impossible unless we have been uplifted to the ontological plane and are enabled to move in tune with the author himself, that the respected writer of recent articles in Roy’s Weekly who in a dilettantic way dared to charge Jayadeva for having written lascivious verses, from ignorance of the simplest rules of the hermeneutic method, supported the opinion widely spread in the West that in India dirty mundane sexuality as enjoying function is mixed with ontological erotic referenda. The West gets only very rarely authentic informations about this country and it is from there very difficult to discern what is actually going on and what is misrepresentation. After all the not very favourable conclusions which the West has drawn about religious India from writers like Kennedy, and will draw from such articles as Roy’s Weekly, will not help the solution of our problem. Friederich Rueckert who highly appreciated Jayadeva and translated his book about 100 years ago into German for the first time would be very sorry to hear that now-a-days an important Bengali is so grossly misjudging the ontological subject.
On the other hand Western scholars also must fail to understand the bearing of the problem if they take recourse to the intellectual method only. Gaudiya Math wants that everybody should do an unbiased comparison of the different creeds and understand that the fullest and unveiled, far-extended conceptions of the Divine Epistemology are really supplied by the Ontological Agent. Submission to Him does not mean that our individual freedom of research is curtailed. This would be a gross misunderstanding of the principle of Guruship. It does not mean renunciation of the scientific objectivity, it is just making the intellectual method substituted by the proper ontological method as we have, according to the rule for the method of a real sound comparative study of religion, to try to follow in practice the fact that in proportion to the degree of the own ontological as well as psychological existence, a respective insight can be obtained into the ontological as well as psychological epistemologies.
The system of democratical majorities is now much praised in this country. The noble-minded men are — the lecturer supposed — in the majority. So they should not associate themselves with those who distort their own religion in a shameful way or who actually misuse religion to justify their immoral practises. If Indians have some national spirit, they should make such silly fellows retire from their society.
Gross Anthropomorphism and wrong practices in the name of religion have since ever contributed to the number of agnostics and atheists who preferred to believe in no actual possible reference to God having seen only wrong relations and, unfortunately unable to transcend the negative side, followed a religiously suicidal course. A religion is usually judged by the behaviour of its followers; this implies the great responsibility and importance of individual conduct. No noble-minded i.e. Aryan man will appreciate a religion or religious practice dictated by the desire after prolonged or extended enjoyment in this or the next world. On this pseudo-religious platform East and West can never meet. J. G. Fichte wrote more than 100 years ago: “The system in which happiness and enjoyment is expected from a powerful entity, is the system of idolatry and idol-worship, a system which is as old as the human corruption and which in course of time changed its external form only. This powerful entity may be a bone, a feather or an omnipotent, all-present and omniscient creator of heaven and earth; if enjoyment is expected from him, then it is only an idol. The difference of both systems lies in the better selection of the terminology only; the nature of the error remains the same in both cases and with both the heart remains equally perverted“. So nobody in the East or in the West should think that eudaimonistic pseudo-religions can represent spiritual India. Nationalism as such will not lead to any permanent goal, it merely absorbs the active resources of the respective country. The nationalists in the East as well as in the West have forgotten that it is Spiritual India they have to stand for and to serve not the geographical or historical soil. But as long as India misunderstands its own true character what wonder that the West misunderstands it the more. People in this country have forgotten the teaching of the Gita that it is the eternal soul whose function is to be properly cultivated while body and mind are transitory. Bodily functions and mental processes must vary according to the different constitutions, racial dispositions, education, training, food, milieu and other factors. So on the plane of culture hardly a meeting can take place between East and West. The civilisatory adaptation, on the other hand remains absolutely on the material gross plane and no Indian should think that he ascends to a higher level by using high collar and starched shirt-front.
The spirit of India was the object of reverence in the West since the first Upanishad and Gita translations were issued, Wilhelm von Humboldt who delivered in 1826 in the Berlin Academy of Sciences a lecture on the Gita, wrote to his friend Gentz, “I am so grateful to the Lord that he has granted me such an old age as still to go through the Gita’.
The liberalistic attitude we find fog instance in the rules for the Stephanos Nirmalendu Ghosh Lectureship, Calcutta University, or, in the works and journal [unreadable], dates from the ignorance of the hermeneutic problems of the comparative History of Religion and from the over-estimation of own capacity to grasp even intellectually one, not to talk of several great psychological individualities like Goethe or Kalidas. But to the ontological plane no access is attainable by such dilettantic behaviours. We have always to keep in mind that the subject matter of any science is the content of the human consciousness only, which depends in its selective and emphatical principles entirely on the psychological structure of the individual, but never represents the unshaped vitality, the unreflected flow of life in itself. Therefore, even psychologically truth cannot be found by investigation into the secondary realities.
We require to be uplifted to the plane of the ontological subject itself which is made possible by the cultivation of our submissive attitude in the degree of which we get the chance of the service of the Absolute. From the highest category, the entological one, we shall have the chance to introspect into all lower ones not vice versa. The Grace of the Divine Agent can make us meet each other on the platform of His service if we have only the sincere desire after the genuine function of our self and are ready to renounce all heterogeneous considerations.