A Cameo of a Cosmopolite

“There goes a Greek!”

Thus, many years ago, said a friend to me as, one evening in Benares, we sat under a spacious canopy, waiting for the scheduled speaker to arrive and commence his address on the place and purpose of Beauty in the plan of Life. But I was rather surprised, for, looking at the lecturer to whom my friend pointed out, I saw a gentleman who was every inch an Indian, in his complexion, in his clothes and in the cultural content he carried about him.

And so I asked my friend, a little annoyed at what I considered his erroneous impression-cum-appellation, “What do you mean?”

He answered, however, with the calmness of the wise, “You will know what exactly I imply after you have heard the speaker.”

Then, for nearly an hour, the audience listened to an exposition on the pivotal principle of aesthetics and its application in every dimension of the human personality and in all the detail of its varied work. And afterwards, as my friend and I returned to our room in the quarters reserved for the delegates to the annual convention of the Theosophical Society, held during Christmas holidays in the age-long heart of Hindu civilisation, (Benares), I exclaimed, “Indeed, an Aristotle come to life again!”

Now I have no first-hand knowledge of the Law of Reincarnation, but somehow the feeling has ever been very strong in me that Shri C. Jinarajadasa, the newly-elected President of the Theosophical Society,–the lecturer of the evening alluded to above,–is a Greek in his spiritual responses to the inner as well as outer beauty of the universe. Could it be, then, that this characteristic of his he has inherited from the time when he lived physically, centuries ago, in the vicinity of the Temple at Delphi, in Greece? It is advisedly that I do not say that he has a Greek soul, for the soul has no caste or creed, it being an arc of the over soul that is without any insignia of exclusiveness. What I do suggest, however, is that Shri Jinarajadasa is a soul that, at one time or another, had perhaps baptism also at the hands of the visible and invisible creators of what passes muster as Greek culture.

But to see Shri Jinarajadasa in his present incarnation is to be convinced intuitively that he is a younger brother of the Buddha-to-be. For, often, while watching him from a distance, the serenity of his face has conjured up before me a vision of the Buddha seated under the Bodhi tree. It has about it the imperturbability of the Himalayas.

But he himself is anything but static or statuesque. If, as they say, architecture is “frozen music,” the architectonics of his idealism are a rhythm in release. For, every act of his is only another are in the rainbow of his Self-realisation, one more contribution to the orchestration of his individuality in the center and spirit of Beauty that is Truth. The deft hand of the divine artist in him can decorate his doorstep with simple, unadorned earthenware in a manner, which will put into shade the prettiness of the drawing-room of a proud plutocrat.

Something similar to this evocation of beauty from the commonplace, Shri Jinarajadasa also essays and achieves when any young person comes into contact with him. With just a few touches–ah! but those are the inimitable touches of an arch-artist!–of his radiant self he succeeds in arousing the awareness of the growing entity into cosmic consciousness and consequent cultivation, on his part, of the intuition of humanity as against  the intellection of the individualist.

Shri Jinarajadasa, however, loves children and flowers more than anything else in the world; maybe, they are to him signs and symbols of the Eternal Ever-New, to which every seeker of the Supreme Reality makes obeisance as he ascends the spiralway of search. But it may be also that they are to him reminiscent of the world of archetypes–in the act of unfoldment.

He is an occultist. Now precisely what such a type signifies, I cannot say, for I am but an humble dweller in this outer court of the Queen of Nature and her liege and lord, “Nature’s God”. But at times I have thought of an occultist as a kind of a mystical intellectual or an intellectual mystic. At least Shri Jinarajadasa does answer, in some respects, to this description.

And so it has come to pass that he is at home in the multiple world of the Divine, which is vibrant with the beauty of love and luminous with the truth of beauty. He is, therefore, in the resultant an amalgam of the artist and the philosopher. And for him the Word or Vision, whether recorded in speech or in song or in some other shape of significance and splendour, is “of God and with God” as the Christian in Shri Jinarajadasa (being a theosophist, he is a Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Moslem, all in one, in as much as he has acquired the uniqueness of pursuit and purpose in each of e different faiths of the world) would say.

Beauty being a universal language, Shri Jinarajadasa has tried to in-corporate this sense of universality even in his apparatus of self-expression. He is, accordingly, a master of several tongues, so unlike a world-tourist who is a twister of tongues! In the English knowing countries, he speaks writes like an Englishman; in Ceylon, like a Pali scholar; in Greece, like one who sings his litany of love in Greek or Latin; in Italy, in the language of Michael Angelo; in Spain, in the tongue of Cervantes, that idea list of the spirit; in France, with the polish and profundity of Pascal; while, in an assembly of Sanskrit pundits, he has a ready recognition as one who understands that language of the gods!

In short, he has in him the spirit of the Oriental but the style of the “Occidental, who refuses to believe that “East is East and West is West”, and so “the twain shall never meet”. On the contrary, he is an illustration of the ultimate truth:

Be it South, North, East or West,
In me there’s, of each, the best.

Shri Jinarajadasa is thus one of the evolving originals–not a carbon copy–of the chaste cosmopolite in the wide and varied world of God.