Sanskrit Culture - Its Value

Sanskrit Culture: Its Value

We hear so often the word culture. And it is worthwhile to investigate and find out the truth about it before we proceed to its application. Culture is not simply knowledge. For then, there should be as much culture and true civilisation in a country as there are B.A's, M.A's and Chartered Accountants. And this is not the case. Again, culture is not simply good-nature or even good conduct; for then, there should be as much culture and the consequent health, harmony and peace in a society as there are non-convicts and non-criminals, as we can only proceed on the assumption that whosoever is not bad is good. But this too does not satisfy our notions of culture. What then is culture, claimed as a supreme test of fitness alike by the Englishman and the Indian, the man with a worldwide empire at his , and the man that is no better than a slave on his own soil?

As far as we can see, culture is not the result of power or politics. On the other hand, the politics of a people may be said to be the fruit of their culture. For politics, internal, aims at the regulating and perfecting of society through the individuals that compose it, while politics, external, as when carried out of its legitimate, geographical limits, aims at appropriating to itself whatever useful accrues out of the conduct of individuals and groups of individuals on whom it is brought to bear. And here the aims that politics sets itself, the methods and means it employs for the attainment of those aims, must be the logical and inevitable outcome of its own life and manners at home, the standards and rules of conduct it inherits, in short, its cultural outfit. So then, by culture we may understand the highest and the best form of life a society has evolved for itself, the laws and regulations it has invented for perfecting its conduct, the philosophy it has brought, may be from the clouds, but reduced and turned to its work-a-day living practice. And when we remember that knowledge and virtue are the two highest principles of human conduct in the world, the conclusion is very easily reached that the measure of a people's culture must be the measure of the Truth and the Virtue that enter into its life, the degree of Beauty it has attained, on the strength of these two factors.

So then, culture is the proper commingling in conduct of the two great principles Truth and Virtue, or in their resultant, the Beautiful in conduct and. life. Here the sweetness of Virtue lends itself to Truth and Truth sheds its light around Virtue, and both together make man look like an angel, much like a God. Well, this conception of culture is nothing peculiar to one clime or country, nor is it the exclusive possession of a single people on the earth. Only it varies with various peoples and is superior or inferior according as their aims and aspirations have been high or low, according as they have striven, well or ill, to suit their means to their ends. And viewed from this standpoint, the Sanskritic culture, as I should like to call our own, is second to none in the world. Nay, judged by common standards, It must be given the first and foremost place of all. We shall presently see how.

I call our culture ‘Sanskrit’ culture, because there is no other thing we have that embodies and explains it so well as our language, Sanskrit. This is the case with any language. It tells us all about its people, at least far more than any other, say science or art. Science is the pursuit of a few at a time, and while it represents the heights scaled by a Nation's mind, does not reveal to us much of the general level of the manners of its people. Similarly, Art is a symbol less common and less easy to comprehend for the mass than literature, and therefore less cultivated and less representative. The bulk of the life of a people, the richest and minutest possible detail about it, is furnished by their literature and language; and the proper study, in order to survey a people's life, ought to be of its language and literature more than anything else. We think in words and speak our thoughts, and literature is the store-house of a people's thoughts and words, no less than a preserver and expounder of their deeds. Language tells us as much about the deeds done as of deeds undone that would have been done, and thus is the most faithful and reliable source from which to trace the culture and civilization of a people. And the dictum ‘Literature is Life,’ is nowhere better illustrated than in the case of Sanskrit, in our own country. Here is a great language which gloriously fulfilled the mission and function of ministering to the harmonious development of Ancient India in the different fields of National activity, so far as that development could be accomplished by means of intellectual instruments, literary and cultural aids. What English literature is to the growth of the English people, that was Sanskrit literature in relation to the growth of the people of India. In ancient times, however, Sanskrit was the sole medium of communication of the cultured classes and the only vehicle of higher learning and culture in the country, and thus was enjoying for ages an unchallenged monopoly in supplying the nation with all the mental and intellectual aids that were necessary for its development in the two broadly distinguished spheres of material and spiritual progress.

We must dismiss the cheap assumption widely made that Sanskrit literature is principally religious and philosophical in its character. It is of course true that the religious and philosophical branches of Sanskrit literature are the richest in the world, but this extraordinary growth in one direction should not blind us to its growth in other directions.

There is quite a rich crop of Literature hearing upon the exact and abstract sciences like arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and the concrete sciences like astronomy, medicine, anatomy, physics and chemistry. Some of the renowned books on metaphysics contain much of physics. Similarly much literature has grown round each of the 64 arts to which such constant and unmistakable reference is made in all our books. For instance, dancing as an art is treated by Kohala in several chapters in his work on Natyasastra which explains the various movements connected with the art. Kohala mentions, besides, not one but several schools of dramatic art that preceded him, each school having developed its own Literature, its own Sutras, Bhashyas, Vartikas, Niruktas, Sangrahas, (compendiums) and Karikas. It is superfluous to name the various works on Poetry, Drama and Philosophy, but from the account just given it is sufficient to have an idea of the extraordinary range of subjects dealt with in Sanskrit Literature in spite of the fact that much of that Literature has been lost, lost beyond the hope of recovery, owing to the political convulsions through which the nation has once and again passed.

Even quite recently some of the countries outside India, strange to say, have yielded their buried treasures of Sanskrit Literature, namely, the deserts of Gobi, and Taklamkan. Even China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and Mongolia are giving fresh proofs of the extraordinary volume of this Literature.

All this vastness and variety must be said to be ultimately due to the extraordinary longevity of the Literature. Even if we date its beginning with European scholars, from 1,500, B.C. which is now an exploded theory, it still presents a length of life which is hardly equaled by any other Literature in the world.

I am probably tiring the reader's patience by such longwinded encomiums of Sanskrit Language and Literature, but I do so because I think it is quite necessary for us to estimate the volume and worth of Sanskrit Literature before we can properly judge its value and utility to us in our own times. Fallen as we are politically, whatever is best in our life and Literature has been thrust into the ground, first by our rulers and then by ourselves, and you should not be surprised to learn, if I tell you from my own experience, that there is amongst our own people less knowledge of, and more prejudice against, Sanskrit than you could possibly imagine. That our fallen condition is due to our politics, no one can deny. That the culture of our political masters is opposed to our own culture, to the Sanskrit culture, no one can deny. That they sought and successfully sought to kill this culture, in order to impose upon us their own, this no one can deny. Pray, look here, Lord Macaulay, that evil genius of Modern Indian Education, speaks for himself. In writing to his father in the year 1836, he says, "the effect of this Education, that is, English Education on Hindus, is prodigious. No Hindu who has received an English Education ever remains sincerely attached to his own religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy, but many profess themselves as Deists and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief–and no man ever believed himself more than Macaulay did–that if our plans of Education are followed, there will not be a single idolater, among the respectable classes in Bengal, 30 years hence." This is the ‘holy spirit’ of English education and culture in India. According to this arch-contriver, English and English culture were calculated to make in the first place renegades of us all, fallen from our faith, and in the second to leave us doubters, if not possible converts to another faith. There is not a worse tragedy in the world's history. Macaulay combined politics with mental and moral sciences and discovered the secret of death, not of individuals merely, but of whole peoples. He was an author and an artist of the first rank and choosing the Indian mind for his subject, breathes such venom into it that you witness to-day the greatest tragedy ever enacted on a Nation's own stage–its mind overthrown. A greater prophet than Macaulay has not been born; a more effective life-killing process, on a war-scale, than this, has not been invented; and a more grievous crime against a Nation's civilisation and culture has not elsewhere been committed. The whole story stinks in the nostrils, and the less said about it the better. One thing stands out from the rest, namely that the mind of India is over-thrown. Go to the Schools and Colleges; go to the Offices and Councils; go to the farmers and the fields; go to the meetings and market-places. Truth has given place to lies, Virtue to Vice; Faith has given place to Reason, and Duties to Rights; Order to Disorder, Seriousness to Levity; Friendship to Faction, Honesty to unqualified Hoax. It is nothing but the dance of death that we see about us, and this is our new Kultur. There is only one remedy to this deadly malady, and that is to recover the mind that we have lost, that is Sanskrit. The Sanskrit culture is the culture for us, if we should continue to live as Indians. It has stood the test of ages, for it is founded, as I have already hinted, on the two great principles of life, Truth and Virtue. Its Truth is the truth of Nature and its Virtue or goodness is the goodness of the human soul. If only we can visualise to ourselves the Sanskrit society, in all its pristine purity and glory, we cannot help being impressed with the everlasting foundations on which it was built, the orderly and harmonious adjustment of its parts, the glory of its domes and turrets, the light of its interior, and the music that fills its whole space. Sanskrit culture holds in its bosom not only what was best in the past but what is best for the future. Let me illustrate my meaning by a few concrete examples.

Sanskrit culture stands by Faith, not Reason. That is, it subordinates Reason to Faith, as Reason's Reason. The modern culture, or the Western culture, taking Reason as its sole guide, finds itself on the high seas of materialism and is lost in its own bewilderment and confusion. Reason is the extension of the human mind, whereas Faith is like a silken ladder let down from Heaven, and to let go our hold on Faith is to cast ourselves to the four winds, with no rest for the foot, no shelter for the scorched head. In Sanskrit culture there is a permanent source of Faith going deeper as your Reason goes deep, and such Faith is a sheet-anchor in life's storm.

Again Sanskrit culture stands for duties, not for rights, which is simply tearing the modern world to pieces, and hunting limb against limb and part against part. The gospel of duty is evidently superior to the gospel of right, but the new world with its reason-fed egoism would stand on its full rights before everything else. We can imagine a whole world in which anyone goes on doing his duty with the maximum of profits to all, but we cannot think of two people fighting over their rights. For, rights for their own sake do not imply duties. A right on your part can only be a duty on your neighbour's part; so, that culture that upholds duty as against right as an inferior function must make for the good of the world. The Sanskrit word Dharma, which perhaps occurs in Sanskrit Literature more often than any other word, is proof positive of this theory and the world, tired very soon of its Culture of Right, must come to the Culture of Duty that Sanskrit is.

Thirdly, Sanskrit culture expands, in its own life, the first law of learning, namely order and harmony as the vital forces of social organisation and activity. A society in which any individual makes an experiment of his life, with nothing of past experience to begin with or lean upon, is going to waste, compared with a society in which the individual in ordinary circumstances finds his place and work ready for him with the least fear of erring in his choice or being overwhelmed by self-started competition. Sanskrit culture stands for an organised and well-ordered life, and the individual has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Sanskrit culture stands for the economy of the past in the making of the present, finding heredity to be a mighty and incontrovertible fact of life. Other cultures which have just come to recognise this factor in individual life have not had the courage yet to tackle it to social ends, and our culture has it as an accomplished fact.

Sanskrit culture stands for the principle of association and grouping together of individuals with similar tastes and avocations as the most natural and effective principle of social organisaton, and if the new world has not adopted it, it is simply because it has not understood the scope and purpose of such organisation. So we see in these and similar other institutions, which are the embodiments of Sanskrit culture, the highest principles of conduct yet known to man turned to social and individual ends, and here is the superiortiy of Sanskritic culture to any other. If by civilisation you mean the adaptation of means to ends with the minimum of waste and maximum of profit in the moral as in the material world, here it is for all of us to share. So then, the ‘singular importance as I understand it, that attaches itself to Sanskrit and Sanskrit culture is in its power of curing the feud of civilisation through which the world is passing. ‘Civilisation and its cure,’ the cry has no doubt started, but the cure is not yet found. It is here locked up in this treasure-chest and it is for us Sons of India and Sanskrit, first to cure ourselves through this new power and then to try it upon the chronic ills of the world. We in this country must confess we are in a whirl of life. The old order is changing giving place to new, probably much faster than we think it is, and viewing the phenomenon calmly and dispassionately, we must own we are changing for the worse. Cry hoarse as we do about our aims and aspirations in any department of life, we are caught in the slough of despond, and cut off from the past on one side and with the future thronged and blocked in its path by a mad-rushing humanity on the other, we are without a way out. At this juncture the only safety lies in pulling up in mind and body, and coming to our own. We must realise that we were good and great, and this confidence and faith in our schemes can come only through a study of our past. Without the pride of the past, burning in the Soul, patriotism is a lifeless thing, and all patriotic sacrifice is make-believe. Sacrifice is born of love, and love of knowledge. To know your great past is surely to love it, and to love the past is not only to discard and trample down the present, but to aspire and to soar into the future. Sanskrit Culture which contains in itself all the elements of national life, undoubtedly better conceived and better combined than elsewhere, will once more furnish us with the ways and means of organising ourselves for the present successfully against the contending forces, and will also give us now, as it did so splendidly in the past, the right view-point as to our march into the future. The choice is between English and English culture on the one hand, and Sanskrit and Sanskrit culture on the other. On the one side are ranged Reason, Right, Social chaos, and thirst for power and self. On the other are ranged, Duty, Faith, Order, and Search of Truth and Beauty as the ambition of life. Which is to lead and which to follow? The choice is obvious.