Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921
Section I: Rebirth and Karma
Karma
One finds an unanswerable truth in the theory of
Karma,– not necessarily in the form the ancients gave to it, but in the idea at
its centre,– which at once strikes the mind and commands the assent of the
understanding. Nor does the austerer reason, distrustful of first impressions
and critical of plausible solutions, find after the severest scrutiny that the
more superficial understanding, the porter at the gateways of our mentality, has
been deceived into admitting a tinsel guest, a false claimant into our mansion
of knowledge. There is a solidity at once of philosophic and of practical truth
supporting the idea, a bedrock of the deepest universal undeniable verities
against which the human mind must always come up in its fathomings of the
fathomless; in this way indeed does the world deal with us, there is a law here
which does so make itself felt and against which all our egoistic ignorance and
self-will and violence dashes up in the end, as the old Greek poet said of the
haughty insolence and prosperous pride of man, against the very foundation of
the throne of Zeus, the marble feet of Themis, the adamantine bust of Ananke.
There is the secret of an eternal factor, the base of the unchanging action of
the just and truthful gods, devānāṃ dhruvāṇi vratāni,
in the self-sufficient and impartial law of Karma.
This truth of Karma has been always recognised in the
East in one form or else in another; but to the Buddhists belongs the credit of
having given to it the clearest and fullest universal enunciation and the most
insistent importance. In the West too the idea has constantly recurred, but in
external, in fragmentary glimpses, as the recognition of a pragmatic truth of
experience, and mostly as an ordered ethical law or fatality set over against
the self-will and strength of man: but it was clouded over by other ideas
inconsistent with any reign of law, vague ideas of
some superior caprice or of some divine jealousy,– that was a notion of the
Greeks,– a blind Fate or inscrutable Necessity, Ananke, or, later, the
mysterious ways of an arbitrary, though no doubt an all-wise Providence. And all
this meant that there was some broken half-glimpse of the working of a force,
but the law of its working and the nature of the thing itself escaped the
perception,– as indeed it could hardly fail to do, since the mental eye of the
West, absorbed by the passion of life, tried to read the workings of the
universe in the light of the single mind and life of man; but those workings are
much too vast, ancient, unbrokenly continuous in Time and all-pervading in
Space,– not in material infinity alone, but in the eternal time and eternal
space of the soul’s infinity,– to be read by so fragmentary a glimmer. Since the
Eastern idea and name of the law of Karma was made familiar to the modern
mentality, one side of it has received an increasing recognition, perhaps
because latterly that mentality had been prepared by the great discoveries and
generalisations of Science for a fuller vision of cosmic existence and a more
ordered and majestic idea of cosmic Law. It may be as well then to start from
the physical base in approaching this question of Karma, though we may find at
last that it is from the other end of being, from its spiritual summit rather
than its material support that we must look in order to catch its whole
significance – and to fix also the limits of its significance.
Fundamentally, the meaning of Karma is that all
existence is the working of a universal Energy, a process and an action and a
building of things by that action,– an unbuilding too, but as a step to farther
building,– that all is a continuous chain in which every one link is bound
indissolubly to the past infinity of numberless links, and the whole governed by
fixed relations, by a fixed association of cause and effect, present action the
result of past action as future action will be the result of present action, all
cause a working of energy and all effect too a working of energy. The moral
significance is that all our existence is a putting out of an energy which is in
us and by which we are made and as is the nature of the energy which is put
forth as cause, so shall be that of the energy which returns as effect, that
this is the universal law and nothing in the
world can, being of and in our world, escape from its governing incidence. That
is the philosophical reality of the theory of Karma, and that too is the way of
seeing which has been developed by physical Science. But its seeing has been
handicapped in the progress to the full largeness of its own truth by two
persistent errors, first, the strenuous paradoxical attempt – inevitable and
useful no doubt as one experiment of the human reason which had to have its
opportunity, but foredoomed to failure – to explain supraphysical things by a
physical formula, and a darkening second error of setting behind the universal
rule of law and as its cause and efficient the quite opposite idea of the cosmic
reign of Chance. The old notion of an unintelligible supreme caprice,–
unintelligible it must naturally be since it is the working of an unintelligent
Force,– thus prolonged its reign and got admission side by side with the
scientific vision of the fixities and chained successions of the universe.
Being is no doubt one, and Law too may be one; but it
is perilous to fix from the beginning on one type of phenomena with a
predetermined will to deduce from that all other phenomenon however different in
its significance and nature. In that way we are bound to distort truth into the
mould of our own prepossession. Intermediately at least we have rather to
recognise the old harmonious truth of Veda – which also came by this way in its
end, its Vedanta, to the conception of the unity of Being,– that there are
different planes of cosmic existence and therefore too of our own existence and
in each of them the same powers, energies or laws must act in a different type
and in another sense and light of their effectuality. First, then, we see that
if Karma be a universal truth or the universal truth of being, it must be
equally true of the inly-born mental and moral worlds of our action as in our
outward relations with the physical universe. It is the mental energy that we
put forth which determines the mental effect,– but subject to all the impact of
past, present and future surrounding circumstance, because we are not isolated
powers in the world, but rather our energy a subordinate strain and thread of
the universal energy. The moral energy of our action determines similarly the
nature and effect of the moral consequence, but
subject too – though to this element the rigid moralist does not give sufficient
consideration,– to the same incidence of past, present and future surrounding
circumstance. That this is true of the output of physical energy, needs no
saying nor any demonstration. We must recognise these different types and
variously formulated motions of the one universal Force, and it will not do to
say from the beginning that the measure and quality of my inner being is some
result of the output of a physical energy translated into mental and moral
energies,– for instance, that my doing a good or a bad action or yielding to
good or to bad affections and motives is at the mercy of my liver, or contained
in the physical germ of my birth, or is the effect of my chemical elements or
determined essentially and ultimately by the disposition of the constituent
electrons of my brain and nervous system. Whatever drafts my mental and moral
being may make on the corporeal for its supporting physical energy and however
it may be affected by its borrowings, yet it is very evident that it uses them
for other and larger purposes, has a supraphysical method, evolves much greater
motives and significances. The moral energy is in itself a distinct power, has
its own plane of karma, moves me even, and that characteristically, to override
my vital and physical nature. Forms of one universal Force at bottom – or at top
– these may be, but in practice they are different energies and have to be so
dealt with – until we can find what that universal Force may be in its highest
purest texture and initial power and whether that discovery can give us in the
perplexities of our nature a unifying direction.
Chance, that vague shadow of an infinite possibility,
must be banished from the dictionary of our perceptions; for of chance we can
make nothing, because it is nothing. Chance does not at all exist; it is only a
word by which we cover and excuse our own ignorance. Science excludes it from
the actual process of physical law; everything there is determined by fixed
cause and relation. But when it comes to ask why these relations exist and not
others, why a particular cause is allied to a particular effect, it finds that
it knows nothing whatever about the matter; every actualised possibility
supposes a number of other possibilities that
have not actualised but conceivably might have, and it is convenient then to say
that Chance or at most a dominant probability determines all actual happening,
the chance of evolution, the stumblings of a groping inconscient energy which
somehow finds out some good enough way and fixes itself into a repetition of the
process. If Inconscience can do the works of intelligence, it may not be
impossible that chaotic Chance should create a universe of law! But this is only
a reading of our own ignorance into the workings of the universe,– just as
prescientific man read into the workings of physical law the caprices of the
gods or any other name for a sportive Chance whether undivine or dressed in
divine glories, whether credited with a pliant flexibility to the prayers and
bribes of man or presented with an immutable Sphinx face of stone,– but names
only in fact for his own ignorance.
And especially when we come to the pressing needs of
our moral and spiritual being, no theory of chance or probability will serve at
all. Here Science, physical in her basis, does not help except to point out to a
certain degree the effects of my physicality on my moral being or of my moral
action on my physicality: for anything else of just illumination or useful
purpose, she stumbles and splashes about in the quagmire of her own nescience.
Earthquake and eclipse she can interpret and predict, but not my moral and
spiritual becoming, but only attempt to explain its phenomena when they have
happened by imposing polysyllables and fearful and wonderful laws of pathology,
morbid heredity, eugenics and what not of loose fumbling, which touch only the
draggled skirts of the lowest psycho-physical being. But here I need guidance
more than anywhere else and must have the recognition of a law, the high line of
a guiding order. To know the law of my moral and spiritual being is at first and
last more imperative for me than to learn the ways of steam and electricity, for
without these outward advantages I can grow in my inner manhood, but not without
some notion of moral and spiritual law. Action is demanded of me and I need a
rule for my action: something I am urged inwardly to become which I am not yet,
and I would know what is the way and law, what
the central power or many conflicting powers and what the height and possible
range and perfection of my becoming. That surely much more than the rule of
electrons or the possibilities of a more omnipotent physical machinery and more
powerful explosives is the real human question.
The Buddhists’ mental and moral law of Karma comes in
at this difficult point with a clue and an opening. As Science fills our mind
with the idea of a universal government of Law in the physical and outward world
and in our relations with Nature, though she leaves behind it all a great
unanswered query, an agnosticism, a blank of some other ungrasped Infinite,–
here covered by the concept of Chance,– the Buddhist conception too fills the
spaces of our mental and moral being with the same sense of a government of
mental and moral Law: but this too erects behind that Law a great unanswered
query, an agnosticism, the blank of an ungrasped Infinite. But here the covering
word is more grandly intangible; it is the mystery of Nirvana. This Infinite is
figured in both cases by the more insistent and positive type of mind as an
Inconscience,– but material in the one, in the other a spiritual infinite zero,–
but by the more prudent or flexible thinkers simply as an unknowable. The
difference is that the unknown of Science is something mechanical to which
mechanically we return by physical dissolution or laya,
but the unknown of Buddhism is a Permanent beyond the Law to which we return
spiritually by an effort of self-suppression, of self-renunciation and, at the
latest end, of self-extinction, by a mental dissolution of the Idea which
maintains the law of relations and a moral dissolution of the world-desire which
keeps up the stream of successions of the universal action. This is a rare and
an austere metaphysics; but to its discouraging grandeur we are by no means
compelled to give assent, for it is neither self-evident nor inevitable. It is
by no means so certain that a high spiritual negation of what I am is my only
possible road to perfection; a high spiritual affirmation and absolute of what I
am may be also a feasible way and gate. This nobly glacial or blissfully void
idea of a Nirvana, because it is so overwhelmingly a negation, cannot finally
satisfy the human spirit, which is drawn
persistently to some highest positive and affirmation of itself and only uses
negations by the way the better to rid itself of what comes in as an obstacle to
its self-finding. To the everlasting No the living being may resign itself by an
effort, a sorrowful or a superb turning upon itself and existence, but the
everlasting Yes is its native attraction: our spiritual orientation, the
magnetism that draws the soul, is to eternal Being and not to eternal Non-Being.
Nevertheless certain essential and needed clues are
there in the theory of Karma. And first, there is this assurance, this firm
ground on which I can base a sure tread, that in the mental and moral world as
in the physical universe there is no chaos, fortuitous rule of chance or mere
probability, but an ordered Energy at work which assures its will by law and
fixed relation and steady succession and the links of ascertainable cause and
effectuality. To be assured that there is an all-pervading mental law and an
all-pervading moral law, is a great gain, a supporting foundation. That in the
mental and moral as in the physical world what I sow in the proper soil, I shall
assuredly reap, is a guarantee of divine government, of equilibrium, of cosmos;
it not only grounds life upon an adamant underbase of law, but by removing
anarchy opens the way to a greater liberty. But there is the possibility that if
this Energy is all, I may only be a creation of an imperative Force and all my
acts and becomings a chain of determination over which I can have no real
control or chance of mastery. That view would resolve everything into
predestination of Karma, and the result might satisfy my intellect but would be
disastrous to the greatness of my spirit. I should be a slave and puppet of
Karma and could never dream of being a sovereign of myself and my existence. But
here there comes in the second step of the theory of Karma, that it is the Idea
which creates all relations. All is the expression and expansion of the Idea,
sarvāṇi vijñāna-vijṛmbhitāni. Then I can by the will, the energy of the
Idea in me develop the form of what I am and arrive at the harmony of some
greater idea than is expressed in my present mould and balance. I can aspire to
a nobler expansion. Still, if the Idea is a thing in itself, without any base
but its own spontaneous power, none originating
it, no knower, no Purusha and Lord, I may be only a form of the universal Idea
and myself, my soul, may have no independent existence or initiation. But there
is too this third step that I am a soul developing and persisting in the paths
of the universal Energy and that in myself is the seed of all my creation. What
I have become, I have made myself by the soul’s past idea and action, its inner
and outer karma; what I will to be, I can make myself by present and future idea
and action. And finally, there is this last supreme liberating step that both
the Idea and its Karma may have their origin in the free spirit and by arriving
at myself by experience and self-finding I can exalt my state beyond all bondage
of Karma to spiritual freedom. These are the four pillars of the complete theory
of Karma. They are also the four truths of the dealings of Self with Nature.
some superior caprice or of some divine jealousy,– that was a notion of the
Greeks,– a blind Fate or inscrutable Necessity, Ananke, or, later, the
mysterious ways of an arbitrary, though no doubt an all-wise Providence. And all
this meant that there was some broken half-glimpse of the working of a force,
but the law of its working and the nature of the thing itself escaped the
perception,– as indeed it could hardly fail to do, since the mental eye of the
West, absorbed by the passion of life, tried to read the workings of the
universe in the light of the single mind and life of man; but those workings are
much too vast, ancient, unbrokenly continuous in Time and all-pervading in
Space,– not in material infinity alone, but in the eternal time and eternal
space of the soul’s infinity,– to be read by so fragmentary a glimmer. Since the
Eastern idea and name of the law of Karma was made familiar to the modern
mentality, one side of it has received an increasing recognition, perhaps
because latterly that mentality had been prepared by the great discoveries and
generalisations of Science for a fuller vision of cosmic existence and a more
ordered and majestic idea of cosmic Law. It may be as well then to start from
the physical base in approaching this question of Karma, though we may find at
last that it is from the other end of being, from its spiritual summit rather
than its material support that we must look in order to catch its whole
significance – and to fix also the limits of its significance.
