Gleanings

CHILDHOOD’S GLORY

Any slight variation from the usual or the normal standards, any special aptitude or capacity for glowing emotion, is generally looked upon by some with suspicion and deep distrust. Great minds have always rebelled at the idea of mere conformity to conventions. The courage of doing what they believe in, is an attribute of the strong. Like some insects which seek shelter in their colour being the same as their surroundings, the weak of heart are content to repress their individuality and merge with the crowd for fear of being noted and criticised. The calculating spirit seldom permits freedom of thought or action in us. Some of us have a strange habit of even discouraging children at home if they should evince any special taste for music or painting or dance. The worst happens, alas, when a child with more than the normal capacity for affection is stifled, as showing a tendency to become soft and unfit for the hard and strenuous life ahead. Short-sighted these people are, for they know not what they do. They choke the springs of sympathy, love, and wonder in the child, which would otherwise course down the years and contribute to the making of great humanitarians, poets and philosophers.

The capacity to grasp the psychology of the child-mind is really one of the tests of the schoolmaster. His contact with the child being the earliest from outside, his task is rendered all the more difficult. The co-operation of the parent is indeed necessary for the fulfillment of the child’s training and the master’s labours. Do we realise the delight of children when they are induced to relate the stories they know? Imagination and power of expression are greatly encouraged by such an experiment. I do not claim originality for this idea. There have been similar attempts made at Shantiniketan with the happy result that some of the latent potentialities have been discovered in the young. The art of story-telling is not foreign to the Indian mind at all. Only, it is growing less and less with the modern child having to pick up almost everything from the printed page. Perhaps also with the loosening of the grandmother’s hold on the family, the children in our homes are getting starved for a human source from which they could garner the tales of wonder and prowess of kings and heroes, so very pleasing to their rich imagination. I remember at this age some of the marvelous stories from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhakta-Mala, that I have heard from an old uncle of my father who could not only clothe them in grandeur of language and give them a picturesque setting, but induce us, children of the house, to narrate to him stories that we knew. And the reward to the best story-teller in the young group was always a fine ripe fruit plucked from the tree in our garden. Indeed nothing else lingers so vividly in our memory today as some of the innocent joys and indelible impressions created by the power of graphic narration in the stories we were fed upon. Let not my critical friends at once apprehend that I am exalting the imagination at the cost of precision and the reasoning faculty. The one need not be standing in the way of the other. When we grow up, and are asked to handle public affairs, imagination more than anything else is needed to deal with men. All our intellectual powers and reason might run to waste without the ability on our part to evince timely sympathy and imagination to know other points of view.

-K. Chandrasekharan (From The Commemoration Address at the P. S. High School, Madras).

THE PLAY OF LIFE

There is no conception of life which I find as satisfying as that of the Lila–that life is the Play of Brahman. This play or Lila is described as Brahman’s contemplation of his own nature. It is symbolized by the Dance of Shiva, by the music of Sri Krishna’s flute. It is a creation in bliss and joy as the artist creates, a making manifest of that which existed potentially. Why else should He who possesses all things within himself manifest? Life is not a chaos but always the expression in form of a plan or idea. An apple seed produces according to that form of the Lila inherent within it, or to use another Hindu term of great significance, according to its dharma, the law of its development. Similarly men, gods, and the solar systems work out their destinies–a Lila guided by the conscious force of Shakti. It is the nature of Brahman to outbreathe and inbreathe the worlds–even as it is the nature of the bird to sing. The highest reach of thought sees this world as his divine play. As we become more awakened we shall enter into the bliss of that Lila. How can we fail to see this play and to be aware of the player when we contemplate the vast and ordered cosmos, witnessing solar systems and the birth, evolution and destruction of the worlds, or when we study any of the natural sciences? What is matter but a mere something which the supreme consciousness produces and uses as its instrument of expression?

–E. H. Brewster in The Aryan Path, Bombay. (April)

INDIA AND CHINA

Unlike the Indians, the Chinese are first and foremost a practical people. The ascetical ideal of the Sadhu, or the meta-physical speculations about the Atman-Brahman unity, would be meaningless to a Chinese. His thoughts centre round more material objects. His ideal is nothing higher than a contented life in harmony with nature and its laws, together with a rigid observance of the ancestral customs or Rites (Li). Hence the pessimistic view of the world taken by the Indian ascetic, and his logical attempt to fly from it, is an attitude of mind altogether foreign to the Chinese. He takes the world gladly as he finds it, and worries little about the realities on the other side of the grave, except in as far as they influence his life on this side. He knows these realities exist: his ancestor-and spirit-worship sufficiently testifies to this, but his notions about them are of the vaguest. His ancestor-worship, for instance, is rather a prolongation of the honour due to parents while alive, in accordance with the rites and in order to secure his own happiness here below, than a means of intercession for their happiness after death.

For the Chinese, the universe is some sort of a gigantic machine, whose parts are closely interrelated and move in rhythmical harmony. Let one element be disturbed, and the whole machinery is upset. An eclipse darkens the sun: it is due to the Emperor misbehaving. Let the Emperor and Heaven be disunited, and the people will suffer, rebellions break out, monsters appear, inundations and famine ruin the provinces. These are not conceived as punishments from God–for God has little place in their philosophy; they are the automatic, one might say the mechanical, outcome of a disturbance of the universe. A cog has been tampered with; the whole machine is out of order.

–C. De Moor in The New Review, Calcutta. (April)