The Hindoos are more serenely and thoughtfully religious
than the Hebrews. They have perhaps a purer, more independent and impersonal
knowledge of God. Their religious books describe the first inquisitive and
contemplative access to God; the Hebrew bible a conscientious return, a grosser
and more personal repentance. Repentance is not a free and fair highway to God.
A wise man will dispense with repentance. It is shocking and passionate. God
prefers that you approach him thoughtful, not penitent, though you are the
chief of sinners. It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to him.
The calmness and gentleness with which the Hindoo
philosophers approach and discourse on forbidden themes is admirable.
What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the
light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through
a purer stratum,- free from particulars, simple, universal. It rises on me like
the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far summer stratum
of the sky.
The Vedant teaches how, "by forsaking religious
rites," the votary may " obtain purification of mind."
One wise sentence is worth the state of Massachusetts many
times over.
The Vedas contain a sensible account of God. The religion
and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting
the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of the Hindoos.
Man flows at once to God as soon as the channel of purity,
physical, intellectual, and moral, is open.
With the Hindoos virtue is an intellectual exercise, not a
social and practical one. It is a knowing, not a doing.
I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I
have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and
partial and puerile distinctions
between one man's faith or form of faith and another's,-as Christian and
heathen. I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration,
bigotry. To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma,
Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God.
from The Journals of Henry David Thoreau
No comments:
Post a Comment