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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY The desire of India is to be freed from the cycle of rebirths, and the dread of India is reincarnation. The rest that most of the spiritual seek through their faith is a state of profound and deathlike trance, in which all their powers shall have ceased to move or live, and from which they shall never again be awakened to undergo rebirth in this toil. some and troubled world.
If, therefore, we would try reverently and sympathetically to grasp the inner meaning of an Indian faith, we must put aside all thought of the perfectly developed personality which is our ideal, and of the joy and zest that come from progress made and powers exercised, and, turning our thoughts backwards, face for a while another goal, in which death, not life, is the prize, cessation not development the ideal.
In Indian religions as in ours asceticism has its place, but we must remember the different connotation which that word bears to Indian minds. To the Christian, asceticism is only a means to an end, the eager, glad decision of the athlete to refuse the lower, if it clash with the higher, good. Far different is the Indian ideal, for in India asceticism has been born of fear, fear of future rebirths no less than of present ills. To Indian thinkers asceticism is the beginning in this life of the cessation they crave, and their hope is that thus one by one their powers and talents, with all that leads to and results from action, may drop off, burnt away in the glow of austerity, till only a stump of character remains, from which the soul may easily free itself. The unused gifts shrivel up the quicker if their owner be a professed ascetic, for the more limited the sympathies and the
