Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/143

 love is complete. "In love the sense of difference is obliterated, and the human soul fulfills its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself, and reaching across the threshold of the infinite."

Usually in our ignorance of the doctrines accepted by the Rishis in India, we have figured their road to perfection as one leading into the void. Buddha said, however: "It is true that I preach extinction; but only the extinction of pride, lust, evil thought and ignorance; not that of forgiveness, love, charity, and truth." Even the lower self is only purged, and in its sensual appetites extinguished, that the higher self may be delivered from what Rabindranath calls 'the thraldom of Avidyā.'" When a man lives in that thraldom, he is shut up in the close confines of the lower; his consciousness is not awake to the higher reality that surrounds him; he does not know the reality of his own soul.

"I bow to God over and over again who is in fire and in water, who permeates the whole world, who is in the annual crops as well as in the perennial trees."

The whole genius of India and the race of which Rabindranath Tagore comes tended to