topics: |  essays | india | philosophy

Collection of essays, read at Harvard University, describing Indian beliefs,
philosophy and culture, often comparing with Western thought and culture.

I. The Relation of the Individual to the Universe
II: Soul Consciousness
III: The Problem of Evil
IV: The Problem of Self
V: Realisation in Love
VI: Realisation in Action
VII: The Realisation of Beauty
VIII: The Realisation of the Infinite

Tagore on education:

    I am trying hard to start a school in Santiniketan. I want it to be like
the ancient hermitages we know about. There will be no luxuries, the rich and
poor alike will live like ascetics. But I cannot find the right teachers. It
is proving impossible to combine today’s practices with yesterday’s
ideals. Simplicity and hard work are not tempting enough…We are becoming
spoilt by wasteful pleasure and the lack of self-control. Not being able to
accept poverty is at the root of our defeat.- Tagore, 1901.

Our regular type of school follows an imaginary straight line of the
average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is fond of
playing the seesaw with the line of the average.  Tagore, 1917.

There are men who think that by the simplicity of living introduced in my
school I preach the idealization of poverty which prevailed in the medieval
age. The full discussion of this subject is outside the scope of this paper,
but seen from the point of view of education, should we not admit that
poverty is the school in which man had his first lessons and his best
training?...Poverty brings us into complete touch with life and the world,
for living richly is living mostly by proxy, thus living in a lesser world of
reality. This may be good for one’s pleasure and pride, but not for one’s
education. Wealth is a cage in which the children of the rich are bred into
artificial deadening of their powers. Therefore, in my school, much to the
disgust of the people of expensive habits, I had to provide for this great
teacher – this bareness of furniture and materials – not because it is
poverty, but because it leads to personal experience of the world. Tagore,
1922.

On Music

Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of
beauty, with a form and spirit which is one, and simple, and least encumbered
with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the
infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and
visible. The evening sky, tirelessly repeating the starry constellations,
seems like a child struck with wonder at the mystery of its own first
utterance, lisping the same word over and over again, and listening to it in
unceasing joy.

When in the rainy night of July the darkness is thick upon the meadows and
the pattering rain draws veil upon veil over the stillness of the slumbering
earth, this monotony of the rain patter seems to be the darkness of sound
itself. The gloom of the dim and the dense line of trees, the thorny bushes
scattered in the bare heath like floating heads of swimmers with bedraggled
hair, the smell of the damp grass and the wet earth, the spire of the temple
rising above the undefined mass of blackness grouped around the village huts
everything seems like notes rising from the heart of the night, mingling and
losing themselves in the one sound of ceaseless rain filling the sky.

Therefore the true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in
terms of music.

They rarely use symbols of painting to express the unfolding of forms, the
mingling of endless lines and colours that goes on every moment on the canvas
of the blue sky. They have their reasons. For the man who paints must have
canvas, brush and colour-box. The first touch of his brush is very far from
the complete idea. And, then when the work is finished and the artist is
gone, the widowed picture stands alone, the incessant touches of love of the
creative hand are withdrawn.

But, the singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very
life. They are not materials gathered from outside. His idea and his
expression are brother and sister; very often they are born as twins. In
music the heart reveals itself immediately; it suffers not from any barrier
of alien material. Therefore, though music has to wait for its completeness
like any other art, yet at every step it gives out beauty to of the whole. As
the material of expression, even words are barriers, for their meaning has to
be construed or thought. But, music never has to depend upon any obvious
meaning; it expresses what no words can reveal.

What is more, music and the musician are inseparable. When the singer
departs, his singing dies with him; it is in eternal union with the life and
joy of the master. This world-song is never separated from its singer. It is
not fashioned from any outward material. It is his joy itself taking
never-ending form. It is the great heart sending the tremor of its thrill
over the sky. There is perfection in each individual strain of this music,
which is the revelation of completion in the incomplete. No one of its notes
is final, yet each reflects the infinite.

What does it matter if we fail to derive the exact meaning of this great
harmony? Is it not like the hand meeting the string and drawing out at once
all its tones at the touch? It is the language of beauty, the caress, that
comes from the heart of the world, and straightaway reaches our heart.

Last night, in the silence which pervaded the darkness, I stood alone and
heard the voice of the singer of the eternal melodies. When I went to sleep,
I closed my eyes with this last thought in my mind, that even when I remain
unconscious in slumber the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena
of my sleeping body, keeping step with the stars. The heart will throb, the
blood will leap in the veins, and the millions of living atoms of my body
will vibrate in tune with the note of the harp-string that thrills at the
touch of the master.