Page:Bengali Religious Lyrics, Śākta.pdf/31

Rh beggar and forsaken. Very often his thought turns to life's finish, when his friends will leave him, bones and ashes on the burning-ground.

It is profitable to study the attitude of the remarkable poets of the people, which every century has produced, in every part of India. Indian philosophy has reasoned out certain conclusions; its typical expression, as everyone knows, is the Vedānta; and no one would deny that even the thought of the illiterate has a pantheistic tinge. This has often been pointed out. Perhaps too much has been made of it; men forget how St. Paul confidently looked to find at least this tinge, alike in the thought of idlers in the market-place at Athens and in that of Lystra peasants. If we study the folk-poets, and through them the mental outlook of the simple folk of India, we find vulgar thought often in absolute revolt from those findings of the philosophers so readily and dogmatically put forth in Europe as Indian belief. These are only one side of Indian belief. Tennyson has not expressed more incisively than Rāmprasād the rejection, by the mind that has loved, of the doctrine of loss of personal life. What is the use of salvation to me, cries Rāmprasād, if it means absorption? 'I like eating sugar, but I have no desire to become sugar.' No thought anywhere—aware as he was of Śankarachāryā's monism and in sympathy as some of his moods show him to be with pantheistic teaching—is more emphatically theistic than his normally is, or rests more decidedly upon interchange and intercourse between a personal goddess and a personal suppliant and worshipper. With the popular religious idolatry, and especially its crudities and cruelties, he has no part. He scoffs at pilgrimage, and offerings to images. 'I laugh when I hear that a worshipper of Kālī has gone to Gayā.' He is sturdily ethical, will have nothing to do with the suggestion that good and evil are the same thing, philosophically considered. He is terrified of those six passions who leap