Values in Life

Values in Life*

I –From the false to the true

My audience today consists of the teachers and scholars in Universities. One could not wish for more enlightened listeners. Nor could one have listeners more difficult to please. It is best to begin by delimiting the topic. The title is taken from a famous scriptural text. The actual words are "Asato ma sadgamaya" Guide me from what is not to what is. The function of universities is exactly that–the journey with expert leaders from nescience to knowledge. The journey’s end, if there be an end, can never be attained; the journey itself yields all the profit, and the pleasure and pain as well. Of universities, therefore, and similar bodies the need is perpetual. Neither the inculcation of knowledge nor its increase admits of stoppage or intermission. In vain is the cry of despair; no more books for mercy’s sake, no more sitting at the feet of masters who often pretend to know and violently contradict one another. Isn’t there a shortcut to salvation, some hypnotism or soul’s opiate or talisman that will transport us straight? None. The flash of inspiration, the mystic vision is for the very, very few, if any. We must tread the hard and weary road, undergo the terrifying tests and weary connings for them. But at every stage and all the way there are compensations, the pleasures of intellectual conquest, the joys of discovery–ample reward for any toil and any tribulation. Go forward, then, and mind not the croakers.

From the false to the true. The saying is to be understood anagogically, on different levels. First, in the ethical sphere, where motive and merit or demerit in the ordinary sense are the measure. Then comes the historical and scientific sphere, where truth is or ought to be objective and disinterested. Thirdly, follows the philosophical or metaphysic level at which appearance and reality, phenomenon and noumenon engage our attention. Lastly, the Supreme and our relation thereto, with which theologians are for ever engrossed and by which they are for ever baffled. In this talk let us concern ourselves with the earliest of these stages, –truth and falsehood in social affairs and with their moral consequences.

Truthfulness has two aspects in practical life, not indeed logically separable, but sufficiently distinct to deserve separate treatment. It may mean the observance of a vow, undertaking or promise. Or it may mean the utterance by speech, writing or signs of that which is, so that others learn the situation and respond with knowledge. A promise creates expectations and influences the conduct of others, so that failure is attended with inconvenience or dislocation in social relationships. Mutual trust is imperilled, and action based on calculation becomes difficult. The binding character of an undertaking, therefore, needs no emphasis. The habit of looking round carefully before incurring an obligation may, on occasions, seem unlovely and suspicious; but properly considered, it is a proof that fulfillment is intended. The man, on the contrary, who lightly takes a vow, is apt, when the consequences come into view, to repent and look round for excuses to get out of it. Those that manage clubs and societies are driven to tears when a considerable number of members fall into arrears and several swear at the bill collector. My experience in realising donations is particularly unfortunate. Friendships come under serious risks, and faith in human nature, even in educated human nature, is undermined. Some ceremonies include vows, which may escape notice at the time. Every attempt must be made to rouse the consciousness of the parties and their careful attention. Marriage vows convocation vows are common examples. Purohits and parents will do well to apprise the parties of the new obligations, though they may seem trite. The bridegroom and the bride mumble the endless mantras in an unknown tongue and too often do not even mumble them. When graduates take degrees the Chancellor demands promises of deep and solemn import, but the unheeding candidates stand silent, and I have recently known occasions when a single ‘I do promise’ was not audible. Some remedy needs to be devised by which the impressiveness of a solemn moment may be utilised for giving a good turn to young lives. Sanyasa at an early age is by some authorities discountenanced on the ground that the nature and scope of the renunciations are beyond the comprehension of the neophyte. Other orders too prescribe vows of a stringent nature which the subsequent trials of life prove to be too burdensome. Many that enter with confidence become callous, but the finer spirits suffer anguish all their days because retreat is impossible. It was deep insight which prompted our ancient sages to test aspirants for long years and with severity before initiating them. I took the vows of the Servants of India Society when I had been teacher for twenty years. Still I constantly feel I fall short of their fulfillment in spirit. When young men fail, I commiserate more than censure. Money debts were at one time more sacred than they are. Nations have begun to repudiate them, and the law provides various means of escape to individuals and corporations. What is originally meant to relieve the honest but unfortunate man becomes available to the unscrupulous and fraudulent debtor. Even among the peasant day of our land, the debts of one’s parents were once honoured as a pious duty, but modern notions have grown dangerously lax, and repudiation of family obligations is a common incident in our courts. In respectable society collusion between father and son sometimes cheats the creditor of his just dues. The late C. R. Das made himself illustrious by paying his father’s debts during many years of his own earning life. How one wishes that there were thousands and thousands more like him to revive an ancient code of honour which modern law has rendered obsolete! Even in the Ramayana it is worthy of note that Dasaratha’s vows to his young wife were generally regarded as having been wrung from him by fraud and therefore not obligatory. His younger sons to the end maintained this belief; though they submitted to Sri Rama’s iron will in this matter, they remained unconvinced. Sumitra and Sita recognised the high idealism of the hero.

We have still to treat of truth-speaking as distinguished from keeping faith. Myriad are the ways in which one may fall from rectitude and still escape detection. Often alas! One does not suspect one’s own lapse. A conscientious self-observer will convict himself many times a day of saying more or less than he meant, of misleading where he least intended harm, of suggesting thought or action to another that he should not have suggested. In some degree, slight it may be, we are all liars. And yet, if the name is applied to us, we feel insulted and are angry. This is the homage that we pay to this sovereign virtue. Unceasing vigilance must be exercised over one’s self, one’s slightest words and signs, lest a false suggestion be conveyed. But to our everlasting shame, human practice has consigned whole departments and categories of speech and writing to untruth. Testimonials and chits proclaim talents and virtues that do not exist. Commercial morality is hardly distinguishable from that advertisements and propaganda. Income-tax returns are only an extreme instance of the general inaccuracy and unreliability of a whole class information. The ages recorded by officials at the time of employment are false in eighty out of a hundred cases. Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, Dewan of Travancore, in ordering that the correct figures should be given in twelve months, has shown characteristic courage and enterprise. The language of courtesy, hospitality and formal social intercourse is debased in value by much that is not meant to be believed and that is not believed.

As agents and spokesmen of Government or of political parties, men and women will make themselves responsible for ambiguities and evasions which they will scorn in private or personal life. In courts, which are temples of justice and truth, it takes the acutest and wisest men to discover them. Life is hard, life’s demands are inexorable; temptations, pitfalls, snares, incitements to sin abound on all sides. Apostles of truth, like Mill and Morley, and other great teachers and law-givers, have found it necessary to provide exceptions, however few and guarded, to the rule of truthfulness. Even Rama could not do without white lies. Some simple minded and straight-forward commentators absolve Rama on the ground of merrymaking or other such motive. But other commentators torture Valmiki’s text and produce fantastic meanings in order to save his character from imputation of the slightest peccadillo. This is a true case of hypertrophy of pietism. The empire of truth, however, is totalitarian, it tolerates no reservations, it cannot allow exceptions. The experience of judges and legislators has found it necessary to demand of the most ignorant as well as of the most subtle witness the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Anything less opens the door wide to corruption. In highly evolved society no person should ask ‘How am I bound in these circumstances to tell the truth? If a lie will avert so much evil, why may I not tell it?"

II –From Darkness to Light

From Darkness to Light is one of the most pregnant metaphors in language. Places of learning are devoted to the dispelling of darkness and the spreading of light. It is their high function ceaselessly to increase our knowledge and make it more and more certain. Universities make the world more familiar everyday and therefore more friendly to man. We fear nature less and less. "Vidwan na bibheti kadachana" the enlightened man has no fear from any quarter. But he must be full enlightened. He must be master of human experience – religion, history, science. Imperfection in knowledge, error, superstition, from these he must be emancipated. Alchemy, astrology, magic, miracle-mongering must not tempt him from the royal road to knowledge. The human mind is subject to two opposite tendencies, which require to be rigidly controlled, if they are not to paralyse and wreck each other. The balance between them is at all times difficult to attain and often impracticable. They are the instincts to believe and question. Credulity and scepticism, faith and reason are perpetually opposed to each other, but fated to operate on the same brain. No man is wholly devoid of either faculty, though some have as strong dose of the one and some of the other. Their relative influence too varies from time to time in the same man, and not merely from time to time, but from department of knowledge to department of knowledge. I have known lawyers, accustomed to weigh the evidence of witnesses and documents in the most rigid of scales, but ready to swallow the most extravagant stories of seances, communications from the dead and spiritualistic phenomena. On the contrary, some people who subject these phenomena to exacting proofs fall easy victims to cheats, impostors and company promoters. The man is rare, one in a million, who strikes the just medium, both in human affairs and natural phenomena between caution on the one hand and receptivity on the other. To be reckoned among good-natured and lovable men, one must have a certain amount of trustfulness in dealings with others, a fixed disposition to believe good of others till they are proved unworthy and to give them further chances even after that limit. The right question to ask when your help or sympathy is sought in that sphere is ‘why not?’ To ask, ‘why should I?’ would be to betray undue harshness of judgment, if not heartlessness. In matters of scientific interest, on the contrary, where not generosity or charity is concerned, but truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, where, for instance, a so-called miracle or marvel is put forward for acceptance, it is right to insist on the evidence being produced, sifted and analysed without reference to the personalities concerned. If a trustworthy friend attests the phenomenon and is prepare to pledge his honour for its accuracy, it may incline you to make investigation, but cannot justify any relaxation in the standard of demonstration required to establish a natural phenomenon. ‘Why?’ represents the correct attitude of mind, not Why not? that the phenomenon did in point of fact occur as it is alleged to have occurred must be proved. You must not undertake to prove that it could not have occurred as it is alleged to have occurred. And yet many highly educated persons yield their credence to miracles just because it is not possible there and then prove a negative.

The opposition between these attitudes of mind, viewed in a general way, may be described as the opposition between faith and reason, faith being the attitude belauded by religion and reason the attitude championed by science. That reason is not an unfailing guide, that it is in certain circumstances impotent to discover truth must be acknowledged. Many facts have yet to be explained by reason. Nevertheless, reason has faith in itself to this extent that, as science advances; such facts will receive satisfactory explanation from natural laws. No one who surveys the state of human knowledge from time to time, beginning from our primitive days, can hold that the triumphs of reason are over, or that in the centuries in front of us many phenomena which now perplex the scientist will not yield up their secret. Our vedic philosophers long ago laid down that faith begins where reason ends. It follows that the province of faith is subject to unceasing encroachment by science. Faith claims that it can remove mountains. If this means that in the sphere of human endeavour deeds at first regarded as impossible have actually been accomplished, it is a tribute to the power of hope and persistence which reason need not grudge. But when a certain Hindu prince of the last century caused Ganges water to be sprinkled all round his fort by pious Brahmins and trusted the infidel army to be stayed outside the hallowed line, or when in my own recent experience a holy ascetic fasted and kept vigil and intoned the Gayatri for weeks together in the confident hope that the Viceroy would not give his assent to the Child Marriage Restraint Bill, they gave proof of magnificent but unavailing faith. Faith of that type governed human conduct much more in the old days, but we shall see it contracting its operation rapidly in future.

Science and scientists are accused today of abusing their knowledge and the power of their knowledge. They seem likely to destroy the very civilisation that nurtured them. The wealthy classes, the trading classes, the manufacturing classes, the publishing classes, the governing classes all have bent their energies to the work of destruction. Why scientists should be singled out for execration has always puzzled me. Do not historians falsify contemporary records before our eyes? Do not literary men write flagrantly one sided books for propaganda purposes? Do not eloquent men stir up anti-social passions? Will the State allow the men of science alone the freedom to choose how and how far they will help its projects? What would the British House of Commons say if the laboratories in the Universities had been shut up and the services of inventors and ingenious craftsmen had been denied to war-work? If war is in-human and a crime against our kind, we are all alike to blame, for we all join in it, we all give our best to its successful prosecution. It is unreasonable to expect the votaries of science to cultivate an exalted morality of their own, cut off from the other professions which are tributaries to the welfare of society.

A word or two about the spirit of scientific and historical research and teaching. The essential condition is to shake off the bondage of prejudice and prepossession and to follow where the light leads. Violence may have to be done to pet theories, to social and communal traditions, to national pride, and to the practices and beliefs of consecrated churches and holy orders. On the altar of truth all these possessions, material and immaterial, must be sacrificed, if need be. It will cost us much anguish of the soul. But the cause is worth it and more. For as the years roll on and other generations come up, a new and better world order will arise, a higher polity will evolve, and what we sacrifice with grief to-day will be replaced by institutions and practices and beliefs more in consonance with truth and more serviceable to the requirements of that time.

III-From the Fragments to the Whole

The title this time is From the Fragments to the Whole, and our business is to put the highest possible meaning upon it. To make our task easy, we shall begin by an illustration on the ordinary level. Take a Hindu joint family. At a given moment it consists of a certain set of members. But these members change from time to time, some dropping out, others coming in. The family in its compound character continues with property, rights and obligations in law of its own, and a certain place of its own in society. For many important purposes it is an entity by itself and may be considered to have a significance, independent of its components. This is not to be taken as meaning that the joint family is immortal or that, if al its members were dead, it would still live and function in society as a organism. Nevertheless, there is a sense, limited no doubt but real, which it has an existence apart from, and independent of the existence the individuals composing it. The question may conceivably be asked: Is the joint family only the sum total of its constituents or is there an element in it over and above the aggregate? Most persons would answer this question in the negative. But take the State as distinguished from citizens or subjects. A similar question in that case is not so easily answered. Some authorities maintain that the State is a reality for purposes transcending its citizens or subjects, while others cannot say anything left in it, if the property, territory, rights and obligations of its separate citizens or corporations of its citizens were subtracted or extinguished. These different views lead to startlingly different results in the practical demarcation of the authority of the State over those whom it controls. Going farther in the same direction, we encounter the problem of man. Is he just his limbs, blood, brain, feelings, tendencies, qualities compounded together, or is there anything of him that will remain after all these component parts, material and immaterial, are abstracted away in thought? A school of scientists, not so numerous as it may seem, asserts that, when an individual is buried or cremated, nothing of him or her is left except his or her memory and influence. The immense majority of mankind, however, have believed and will continue to believe, in an individual soul, surviving after the body has perished, and, in some manner not clearly known to us, experiencing the consequences of its earthly life. This existence and experience after death is in most religions described as the real life of the soul in comparison with which the life on earth is a brief episode. Though this after-life is hidden and wholly unascertainable, it is easy to see how, if it exist in reality, we are not employing a mere figure of speech in calling it the future life. Hinduism elaborates a theory of rebirth, according to which the soul of man or indeed of any form of life returns a countless number of times to function on earth, being indeed caught in the ever revolving wheel of samsara, from which release is possible only to the purified and blessed.

What is this world or prapanca, this objective universe or nature, in which our lot is cast during life? Growth and decay are its characteristics. It is under an inexorable law of change. Not only what We see and handle, not only what we don’t see, as the air, but feel, but abstract things like desires, qualities and thoughts, institutions like law, caste, dharma, justice, religion–all are subject to change. Now the ever changing, the unstable, the fleeting is not to be depended on. We ought not to fix our affections on what may betray us, we ought not to seek that which ever includes grasp, and, if grasped, soon ceases to be attractive. In other words, these have no value and are unsubstantia1, shadowy, unreal. Nor is this exaggeration. Unreality besets all nature. What do we know of an orange, so delectable to the taste and, as the doctors say, so wholesome to the body? Colour, weight, taste, assimilability, cheapness, these are attributes all liable to change and deterioration to the extent of converting orange into a piece of useless and even noxious matter. Supposing, however, these attributes remained permanent and immutable to you, are you sure they are precisely the same to me? I may be colour-blind, I may be fever and it may taste different to me, my nerves may be tired and it may seem disgusting to me, and its chemical and physiological reactions on my system may be very dissimilar to those on yours. In the case of a non-human, an orange may prove highly injurious. You and I and the non-human know of the orange only through our senses and as it affects those senses. Of its real nature we are wholly ignorant. Of the orange as it is in itself itself, we cannot know anything. What we affirm of the orange is its appearance or behaviour, not its reality. That is, our knowledge of the orange and indeed of the world is phenomenal, not noumenal. That noumenon or reality is shrouded from us. What is seen and felt and thought it about is unreal. The real cannot be seen, felt or thought about. That is a strange result of this speculation.

Let us pass on to the next stage. Is there a reality behind all this appearance or not? Some say no but many say yes. Even these latter can just affirm the existence of this reality and do no more. They are not agreed whether this reality is diverse as the appearance is diverse, or single. Now the human mind cannot rest in contentment at any point. I will not cease to worry and speculate because certain knowledge is impossible. When reason fails, it falls on faith or intuition. Scientific proof, so runs the argument, is not the only guarantee of truth. Why is this faculty of faith given to us? If you say faith fluctuates and witnesses to unintelligible and contradictory things, you are bidden to be patient and modest. Look at the vast body of genuine evidence recorded by the holy and virtuous men and women that have gone before us. Then there is scripture, Revelation, the word. What may not be understood may be worshipped and prayed to. This prapanca is not merely the sum of its fragments, though these are the only objects of our finite faculties. There is a whole which comprehends its bewildering variety and is the Universal Soul giving it coherence and significance. This Universal Soul, Scripture declares, not only contains the universe but extends beyond it. Which a way of saying that it is not merely the aggregate of its parts, but an entity in and by itself, surviving the destruction or pralaya of the fragments. In fact, it is the only Reality–eternal, changeless, indestructible. The individual soul, when it is about to be liberated, can attain to knowledge of the Universal Soul or Brahman. But let not the word ‘knowledge’ deceive you. It does not mean ordinary cognition by the brain. It is called in Sanskrit Sakshatkara–translated into English, it would integrated experience. That is the final liberation from the bondage of samsara,–no more birth and death. When samsara began or how it is impossible to say. Nor has it an end to the ordinary individual soul. That fortune is reached only by the one in a million who receives the grace of the supreme. From the fragments to the whole, then, is a journey, long arduous, and labyrinthine, but seldom successful.

*These were three Radio Talks delivered to University Teachers and Scholars on 3rd and 24th May and 19th June 1942. They are published here with the kind permission of the All India Radio Madras.