Page:Love in Hindu Literature.djvu/71

 LOVE IN HINDU LITERATURE. 57

in his History of Philosophy, " by sympathy with the universal life, nor yet by the contemplation of the eternal Intelligence. He sought,- and was believed by his friends on several occasions to have attained, a union with the ultimate principle, the highest God of all Union with the highest can be attained only in a state in which all sense of distinction is lost, a state of ecstasy or rapture." This is nothing short of Indian Voga, the monism of Hindu thinkers, "of whom a recent representative was Vivek-ananda.

Take the following from Chuangtsze, the Chinese mystic of the fourth century B.C.: " Be free yourself from subjective ignorance and individual peculiarities, find the universal Tao in your own being, and you will be able to find it in others, too, because the Tao cannot be one in one thing and another in another. The Tao must be the same in every existence, because ' I ' and the ' ten thousand beings ' grow from the selfsame source, and in this oneness of things we can bury all our opinions and contradictions." The extract is from Suzuki's History of Chinese Philosophy.

The Sufism of mediaeval Persia, the Zen {dhydn)- ism of mediaeval Japan, the Yogaism of Mediaeval India, the transcendentalism or romanticism of Young Germany, and Carlylean mysticism, are all birds of a feather. They may difter only in the emphasis laid on certain incidents or particulars, but have a family likeness. Just as love is one and the same all the world over, so is mysticism one and the same everywhere. It is a certain type of mentality and may flourish in any part of the globe.

Burns is a mystic because he has the Sufi tempera-