Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/340

192 often carved over the entrance doorway. The temple sculptors succeeded in investing his grotesque figure with much monumental dignity and sphinx-like mystery, as will be seen in the fine sculpture from Java (Pl. LXX, ).

Hanumān, the monkey-god, doubtless another aboriginal totem raised to a higher plane of thought by Hindu teachers and made one of the heroes of the Rāmāyana, takes the same place among Vaishnavas as Ganēsha does among the devotees of Siva. He is Rāma's faithful ally and messenger, the symbol of loyal devotion to the path of duty (karma-marga), which neither reasons nor questions, whether it leads to death and glory on the battle-field, or only to the dull drudgery of common daily life.

This was the spiritual ideal which Chaitānya and other great Vaishnava teachers opposed to the philosophic "way of knowledge," arguing that, as the love of God transcends all the wisdom which man can acquire, so unselfish devotion to God's service, both in the higher and lower walks of life, is the surest way to salvation, or liberation of the soul. "Whatsoever I do, with or without my will, being all surrendered to Thee, I do it as impelled by Thee."

This bhakti, the spiritual link which joins man and beast, effaces distinctions of class or caste and makes all humanity free:

"The same am I to all beings: there is none hateful to Me, nor dear. They verily who worship Me with bhakti, they are in Me and I in them" (Bhagavad Gīta IX, 29).

The illustration Pl. LXXI,, is from a bronze in the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum.