Page:Works of Tagore from the Modern Review, 1909-24 Segment 2.pdf/235

Rh cause truth cannot be obtained through greed. But if I say, "I want my enjoyment rather than truth."— Well, the Rishi also says, "Enjoy." But there can be no enjoyment outside truth. What then is the truth? It is this: "All that moves in this moving world is enveloped by God." Had "all that moves in the world" been itself the ultimate truth, then to keep piling up would have been the best thing to do; and greed would have been the most efficient of man's virtues. But the truth being this, that God is there, enveloping all things, we have to enjoy this truth with our soul, and for such enjoyment renunciation is needed, not greed. During my seven months' stay in America, the land of mountain-high piles of lucre, I have watched this striving in the reverse direction. There, "all that moves in this moving world" has become prominent. God, who "envelops all things" has become obscured in the thick dust of dollars. Therefore, in America, the injunction to enjoy is not observed with the help of truth, but with the help of money. Truth gives us Unity. Money sets up separation. Furthermore, it keeps our soul empty. Therefore, it causes in us a hankering to fill that emptiness from outside, and we pursue the path of multiplying numbers in hot haste. While our desire runs at a break-neck pace, jumping from one figure to another in the multiplication table, we grow dizzy and forget that whatever else we may have been acquiring, it is not happiness.

Our Rishis have told us that satisfaction is only to be found in the One. Apples fall one after another. The truth about their falling cannot be arrived at by counting them: arithmetical progression marches on indefinitely and the mind turns away unsatisfied from each fresh enumeration, saying: "What does it all mean?" But when innumerable falls find their unity in the principle of gravitation, the intellect at last finds satisfaction and can say: "Enough, I have found the truth."

And what of the truth of Man. It is not in the Census Report, not in an interminable series of figures. Man is expressed, says the Upanishat, when he realises all creation in himself and himself in all creation. Otherwise his truth is obscured. There is a telling example of this in our history. When the Lord Buddha realised humanity in a grand synthesis of unity, his message went forth to China as a draught from the fountain of immortality. But when the modern empire-seeking merchant, moved by his greed, refused allegiance to this truth of unity, he had no qualms in sending to China the deadly opium poison, nay, in thrusting it down her throat at the cannon's mouth. What could be a better illustration of how the soul of man is revealed, and how it is obscured?

Many at the present moment will exclaim: "That is just what we were saying. How can we possibly maintain relations with those, who only know how to divide, whose rapacious maw continually opens wider and wider? They know nothing of the spirit of the Infinite which is all in all to us. They follow the cult of the finite. Must we not keep at arm's length their pernicious teaching and culture?"

But this attitude is also one of division, while it has not even the merit of worldly prudence behind it. India's ancient teaching was not this. Manu says: "Restraint cannot be practised so well by leaving the world, as by remaining in it purified by wisdom." That is because the responsibility of the material world is also on us and cannot be shirked, if we would do justice to the responsibilities of the world of the spirit. So the Upanishat says: "Rescue yourself from death by the cult of the finite, and then by the cult of the infinite you shall attain immortality." Shukra, the preceptor of the Titans, was master of the art of material existence; and in his school Kacha, the emissary of the Gods, had to gain admission in order to learn the secret of immortality.

One of the first steps in the culture of the Soul is to free it from the tyranny of matter. This is the basic effort which must be made to start with; and unless the foundation be thus well and truly laid, the powers of the majority of men will be exhausted in their struggles to stave off sheer physical starvation. It is quite true,