Books: A Letter to a Hindu
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Leo Tolstoy >> A Letter to a Hindu
If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only
because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do
not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.
__Pitiful and foolish is the man who seeks what he already has,
and does not know that he has it. Yes, Pitiful and foolish is he
who does not know the bliss of love which surrounds him and which
I have given him.__ KRISHNA.
As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love
natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes
all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all
participation in violence--as soon as this happens, not only will
hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions
will be able to enslave a single individual. Do not resist the
evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent
deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of
taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will
be able to enslave you.
VI
__O ye who sit in bondage and continually seek and pant for
freedom, seek only for love. Love is peace in itself and peace
which gives complete satisfaction. I am the key that opens the
portal to the rarely discovered land where contentment alone is
found.__ KRISHNA.
What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is
like what happens to every individual when he passes from
childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses
what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction,
not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he
invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and
stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and
senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long
time.
When an individual passes from one period of life to another a
time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and
excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has
outgrown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that
he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he
must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding
to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And
in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and
development of humanity. I believe that such a time has now
arrived--not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but
that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an
extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the
consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the
other the existing order of life which has for centuries
occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of
life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on
the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and the
solution will evidently not be favourable to the outlived law of
violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men
from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in
accord with the nature of man.
But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when
they have completely freed themselves from all religious and
scientific superstitions and from all the consequent
misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its
recognition has been hindered for centuries.
To save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the
ballast, which though it may once have been needed would now
cause the ship to sink. And so it is with the scientific
superstition which hides the truth of their welfare from mankind.
In order that men should embrace the truth--not in the vague way
they did in childhood, nor in the one-sided and perverted way
presented to them by their religious and scientific teachers, but
embrace it as their highest law--the complete liberation of this
truth from all and every superstition (both pseudo-religious and
pseudo-scientific) by which it is still obscured is essential:
not a partial, timid attempt, reckoning with traditions
sanctified by age and with the habits of the people--not such as
was effected in the religious sphere by Guru-Nanak, the founder
of the sect of the Sikhs, and in the Christian world by Luther,
and by similar reformers in other religions--but a fundamental
cleansing of religious consciousness from all ancient religious
and modern scientific superstitions.
If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds
of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas
and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in
reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference
of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above
all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of
all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and
the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a
variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and
molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote
worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the
infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at
present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law
of struggle and survival, and so on--if people only freed
themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of
our lower capacities of mind and memory called the 'Sciences',
and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories,
anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences,
cosmographies, strategies--their name is legion--and freed
themselves from all this harmful, stupifying ballast--the simple
law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all
questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and
obligatory.
VII
__Children, look at the flowers at your feet; do not trample upon
them. Look at the love in your midst and do not repudiate it.__
KRISHNA.
__There is a higher reason which transcends all human minds. It
is far and near. It permeates all the worlds and at the same
time is infinitely higher than they.__
__A man who sees that all things are contained in the higher
spirit cannot treat any being with contempt.__
__For him to whom all spiritual beings are equal to the highest
there can be no room for deception or grief.__
__Those who are ignorant and are devoted to the religious rites
only, are in a deep gloom, but those who are given up to
fruitless meditations are in a still greater darkness.__
UPANISHADS, FROM VEDAS.
Yes, in our time all these things must be cleared away in order
that mankind may escape from self-inflicted calamities that have
reached an extreme intensity. Whether an Indian seeks liberation
from subjection to the English, or anyone else struggles with an
oppressor either of his own nationality or of another--whether it
be a Negro defending himself against the North Americans; or
Persians, Russians, or Turks against the Persian, Russian, or
Turkish governments, or any man seeking the greatest welfare for
himself and for everybody else--they do not need explanations and
justifications of old religious superstitions such as have been
formulated by your Vivekanandas, Baba Bharatis, and others, or in
the Christian world by a number of similar interpreters and
exponents of things that nobody needs; nor the innumerable
scientific theories about matters not only unnecessary but for
the most part harmful. (In the spiritual realm nothing is
indifferent: what is not useful is harmful.) What are wanted for
the Indian as for the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, and
the Russian, are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts
of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingenious devices for
submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor powerful
explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the enjoyment
of the rich, ruling classes; nor new schools and universities
with innumerable faculties of science, nor an augmentation of
papers and books, nor gramophones and cinematographs, nor those
childish and for the most part corrupt stupidities termed art--but
one thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear
truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by
religious and scientific superstitions--the truth that for our
life one law is valid--the law of love, which brings the highest
happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind. Free
your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which
hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge
from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering
it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one
and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in
due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the
nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with
it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.
__Children, look upwards with your beclouded eyes, and a world
full of joy and love will disclose itself to you, a rational
world made by My wisdom, the only real world. Then you will know
what love has done with you, what love has bestowed upon you,
what love demands from you.__ KRISHNA.
YASNAYA POLYANA.
December 14th, 1908.