The Pursuit of Human Excellence

SRI SWAMI RANGANATHANANDA

Introduction

WE INDULGE in so many kinds of pur­suits in India today, of which the most important, and, to many people, the only one, is the pursuit of money-making. The pursuit of money, the pursuit of pleasure, and the pursuit of power–these three pursuits have frozen our hearts all these forty-five years of our post-in­dependence existence, and have almost destroyed the creative spirit of our people and taken the nation to the brink of despair. This evil tendency can be reversed only by a new pursuit, which will help to purify all other pursuits and destroy whatever is evil in them; and that new pursuit is the pursuit of human excellence.

The Ethical Education of our Children

A new India is coming up in our chil­dren of the present generation. They are unlike the children of the earlier generations; they have more of what our Vedanta calls the energy of rajoguna in place of the inertia of tamoguna. They arc more intelligent, more vivacious, more alert, more fearless, and more straight­forward; these are sterling character assets, and represent the early stages of man’s spiritual growth, according to Swami Vivekananda. But they are deficient in social sense, in social responsibility, and in the concern for other individuals and groups; they also exhibit more than the healthy level of crudeness, intolerance, and aggressiveness, revealing the divorce of the energy of culture from the energy of education. The result is that they have become a problem to themselves and a problem to the nation. These traits reveal a character in which, as our Vedanata puts it, rajas is till under the control of tamas; they need to go one step further in their spiritual growth by which their rajas will be brought under the control of sattva and their tamas under the control of rajas. Our older generation, with their largely feudal mental make-up, can hardly become fit exemplars for our younger generation. From the lure of a dead past, therefore, our youths have to be summoned to face the hardships and challenges of the living present and shoulder the respon­sible and creative roles of ushering in the delights of a glorious future. Their energies, now functioning destructively, like indisciplined ele­mental forces such as we experience in floods and earthquakes, need to be made creative and responsible, by self-discipline through a so­cially-oriented will.

Our scientific technology is engaged in disciplining these elemental forces of nature to enhance human happiness and welfare. We need a similar spiritual technology to discipline the energies of our youths to enhance their own and the nation’s welfare. This is the ethical education of our children, by which they are made to feel the weight of social responsibility for the rebuilding of their na­tional body-politic, by which they learn to give a creative and constructive direction to their enormous energies now expressing largely in destructive and self-canceling ways, and by which they not only cease to be the despair, but become the shining hope of the nation.

Tyaga and Seva

Human excellence was the constant theme of Swami Vivekananda. He will wel­come this spirit of rajas in our younger gen­eration today, but will also whisper the energy of his Vedantic message into everyone of them to raise his or her energies to the higher level of sattva through self-discipline and cultivation of ethical and social awareness. That energy then will find expression in a socially oriented will and purpose and dedication, with its con­stant and spontaneous mood and temper of tyaga and seva–renunciation and service.

This tyaga and seva is the first fruit of all true education and all true religion from which it issues spontaneously and naturally without the feeling of being forced to sacrifice and without expecting special external induce­ments to prop it up. Herein we see palpably the spiritual growth of man and the dynamic march of human evolution, beyond the organic level to the psycho-social level, as envisaged in twentieth-century biology. Where this dynamic evolutionary movement is absent, human life gets stuck up in worldliness and becomes stagnant. Such stagnation is spiritual death, says Vedanta; and it is more to be feared than physi­cal death, by a species so high in the scale of evolution as man. Sri Ramakrishna exhorts man to avoid this pitfall of spiritual death; says he:

“Live in samsara, or  the world; but al­low not samsara, or worldliness, to get into you; that will make you stagnant. A boat will be on the water; that is its natural place; but water should not be allowed to get into the boat; that will render it stagnant and unfit for the purpose for which it is meant”.

The Grihastha Spiritually Growing into the Citizen

In this illustrative teaching, Sri Ramakrishna has compressed the entire mes­sage of social ethics and practical religion. It envisages the grihastha, or the householder, ev­olving into the citizen; it exhorts the biologi­cally and physically conditioned man or woman to grow into the freedom and expan­siveness of the spirituality of citizenship, which manifests itself as renunciation and service, tyaga and seva. This is the type of men and women that we have to turn out in increas­ing numbers in our society today. When we do so, we lay the foundations of the new demo­cratic edifice of our nation on rock. But, today, it has only sand for its base; and it is certain that as remarked by Jesus in his parable (Mat­thew. 7, 24-27) a building built on sand cannot stand.

National Development: Economic versus Human

Today we have to ask this very ques­tion: On what base are we to build up the structure of our Indian national life? That structure is already rising here, there, everywhere, through our mighty developmental pro­grammes in the fields of educational expansion, scientific research, industrial and agricultural development, defence, and social welfare. By the end of this century, we shall have solved many of our economic and social problems, the problems relating to the external environment in which human life is set. But one problem will remain, and will become more intractable as we advance in the solution of our environ­mental problems. It relates to the great question as to what is the type of man that will come out of all this development? Is he or she going to be a clever croaky person, whose increased knowledge tends to the exploitation of other people? A worldly individual, whose centre of interest is always in his or her little self in­side, whose centre of gravity is always in the profits and pleasures outside of himself or her­self, and who has become stagnant in the world of sensate satisfactions? Or is he or she to be a dynamic person continuing his or her evolution in the psycho-social levels, who is, accord­ingly, sensitive to higher values and strives to realize them, and who has achieved, or its striving to achieve, the three-fold integra­tions referred to by the late Bertrand Russell, namely, integration between the self and society, between the self and nature out­side, and between the diverse forces within the self itself?

This central problem of society, namely, the problem of human excellence, must be tack­led from now onwards–the type of men and women that we want to see in the India that is emerging. If that India is to continue her glori­ous past into a still more glorious future, she will have to achieve a synthesis of the tested and enduring elements of her own tradition with the finest elements of the modem Western tradition. This meeting of East and West was achieved in a big way in Swami Vivekananda. Referring to Vivekananda in his Life of Vivekananda as the embodied unity of a nation con­taining a hundred different nations (p. 314), Romain Rolland says (ibid. p. 310):

“In the two words equilibrium and synthesis, Vivekananda’s constructive genius may be summed up. He embraced all the paths of the spirit: the four Yogas in their entirety, renunciation and service, art and science, reli­gion and action from the most spiritual to the most practical....He was the personification of the harmony of all human Energy.”

The Meeting of East and West in Every Citizen

Every Indian citizen today must achieve this synthesis in a measure in himself or herself. Vivekananda exhorts every Indian to strive in this direction (The Complete Works, Vol. V. Eighth Edition. P. 29-30):

“Can you become an occidental of occi­dentals in your spirit of equality, freedom, work and energy, and at the same time a Hindu to the very bone in religious culture and instincts? This is to be done and we will do it. You are all born to do it. Have faith in yourselves; great convictions are the mothers of great deeds. Onwards for ever–sympathy for the poor, the downtrodden, even unto death; this is our motto.”

This is the type of glory and greatness that should descend upon men and women in India, in general, and upon politicians and the members of the administrative services of the Centre and the States, in particular. It will make for the liberation of the spirit of serv­ice as a pervasive principle, lighting up the prevailing dark and dismal horizon of our nation and raising the spiritual quality of the life of its citizens. To go here and there to be spiritual is like going here and there to breathe. It is all here and now. We have to realize that spirituality is not miracle-mon­gering, or magic, or cheap mysticism; it is not to be sought merely in caves and forests, but that it is the birth-right of one and all, and is to be cultivated in the fields of one’s life and work, in the midst of its ups and downs.

“Better to flame forth for an instant
than to smoke away for ages!”

Our people need to be inspired by this practical, ennobling, and realizable ideal which Vivekananda has put before us in the modern age. He exhorts us that it is far better to live for an ideal for an instant than to lead the life of jelly-fish existence. In the following passage from the Mahabharata, uttered by queen Vid­ula for the benefit of her son, King Sanjaya, we find this heroic message for all our youths to­day (Udyogaparva, 131, 13):

Muhurtam jvalitam sreyo
natu dhumayitam ciram– 

“It is better flame forth for an instant
than to smoke away for ages!”

Some of the great men of India, like Sankara and Vivekananada, lived short but intense lives. Theirs was an intense dedication to God and man, to God in man; and it changed the course of human history. It is better to live intensely for an ideal and vision than to vege­tate for long years in a humdrum existence. This is a powerful sentiment that can drive away the clouds of cynicism and frustration from the sky of India. Every educated citizen has to teach himself or herself that he or she not only is in India but is also of India and for India, and is responsible for the nation’s well­being. We have to inspire ourselves with the conviction that we have been called upon to be an instrument of our nation’s purposes. What can be a greater glory for man in India today than this, that he or she is living in the most creative period of his or her nation’s long history, und that he or she is privileged to contribute to it, big or small. When cynicism and frustration lay their cold hand of death on a person, he or she is unable to respond to any higher value, and becomes suspicious of all values, except one’s own self-interest.

Conclusion

We have a long and impressive history and a very rich cultural tradition; and our great thinkers have lunged into life, and into the heart of experience, and given us visions of human excellence which can inspire any cul­ture or civilization. But, for centuries together, we failed to live up to these visions and be­came stagnant; and from that stagnation, we were rescued by our contact with the modem Western culture. As a result, for over a hundred years now, our society has been pass­ing through the tremendous experience of an awakening, a pervasive renaissance, in the course of which we have been reassessing our own inherited values and comparing them with the values which we have received from the West. A small minority of great minds in India such as Mahatma Gandhi have been able to get a grip on our great national tradition and as­similate into it the tested elements of the West­ern tradition; and they stand as the great path­finders for the rest of the Indian society, including the large number of those who have got stuck up in the weak and harmful and stag­nant elements of their own national tradition, and of those others who have become blinded by the cheap and equally harmful and stagnant elements of the modem Western tradition; for this minority has synthesized, in themselves, the finest excellences of character of both the East and the West, and demonstrated to our nation that this modem transition in India can be made purposive and fruitful, if the Indian child is given the guidance to understand the dynamic nature of the modern transition in In­dia and to assimilate these two elements in his or her character.