APPENDIX A
Letter from Satyendranath Tagore
See Vol. I, p. 348.
Ahmedabad, Guzrat, May 13, 1865.
My dear Sir,— I promised when I had the pleasure of seeing you at Oxford, to send you some information on the tenets and working of the Brahma Somaj. I am afraid that the materials which I can lay before you are too scanty to be useful or satisfactory. It is this feeling of uncertainty which has deterred me from writing to you so long. Rammohun Roy, whom the Bengal Theists regard as the great founder of their religion, has left no works from which its distinct tenets could be gathered. The fundamental principle of all his teaching was certainly Monotheism. His liberal views may be witnessed in the trust-deed in regard to a particular building, set apart for worship of the true God in accordance with the principle of the Brahma Somaj. His was, for the most part, a negative task, that of pulling down the later idolatry of the Puranas. He tried, moreover, to cull out, from the pages of the Koran, the Bible, and the Upanishads, those portions which appeared to him to contain the pure doctrine of Theism, His work called Precepts of Jesus, an Arabic work of a controversial character, is constantly dinned into our ears as his best production. His numerous treatises on the Vedas, Upanishads, &c., I think, would bear out my assertion that his leading idea was to establish the doctrine of Monotheism, but that he failed to build up a positive system of religion. The immediate followers of this great Hindu reformer endeavoured, though feebly, to uphold the Vedas, and even some of the later Vedic writings, as Revelation. The earlier Brahmas seem to have imbibed from their leader an idea that the doctrines of Theism are too pure and sublime to suit the gross ideas of the common people, and that therefore some sort of external authority is necessary to convince them. It was soon felt that the Veda, Vedanta, Upanishads, &c., containing as they do a mass of heterogeneous subjects, philosophical and unphilosophical, could not stand the test of reason in their entirety — that they must either be held to the full, or given up entirely as Revelation. Though the earlier Brahmas laid so much stress on the Vedas, yet it does not appear that any Veda scholars rose from among them. More attention, it seems, was from the beginning paid to the Upanishads. The present President and Acharya1 [Keshub Chunder Sen.] of the Brahma Somaj had his mind first awakened, and his spiritual aspirations fed, by some of the sublime portions of those wild treatises. When he first took them up (he picked up a torn leaf accidentally which excited his curiosity), and began to pore into their pages with an earnestness he never felt before, what struck him most was the complete absence of idolatry in what he read. Many of the Pantheistic doctrines contained in them were easily construed into Monotheism, and the result of the President’s studies was a collection of passages from several of the Upanishads, breathing sublime and pure sentiments towards the Supreme Being. This collection is called the Brahma Dharma, and may be considered as the textbook for the Liturgy and forms of worship of the Brahmas. It has supplied texts to the Acharya, when acting as a minister and preacher of the Somaj, for sermons in Bengali which could scarcely be surpassed anywhere in sublimity of thought and vivid representation of spiritual truths. There is another little book in Bengali, prepared by me from his oral lectures, called Doctrines and tenets of the Brahma religion.
A Brahma, before he can be recognized as such, is called upon to subscribe to a settled form of faith and practice. The cardinal points of his faith are: —
1. In the beginning there was nothing but the one true God. He it was who created the universe.
2. He is the true, the good, and the living God; present in all time, pervading all space, infinite, omnipotent, everlasting.
3. In His worship is our true happiness in this world, and only salvation in the next.
4. Our true worship consists in loving the Lord, and fulfilling the duties He has enjoined.
These are the cardinal points of faith, which every Brahma binds himself to cherish. As regards his practice, he publicly renounces idolatry, and holds himself to a daily offering of prayer and worship to the one true God. You will perceive that the four doctrinal points, as I have given them, include to the full the doctrine of Immortality. It is written that the soul’s true worship of its Maker, dependence on His absolute goodness, and fulfilling of the Law, are the means of its salvation in the world to come. Our solid hope of immortality proceeds from our consciousness of that union with the divine, which has its beginning only in this world, but which is a sure guarantee of the life everlasting and bliss undying which is reserved to the faithful, the very shadow of which supports the soul in her sorrows and trials in this world.
There have been some attempts recently made to establish some sort of ceremonial in accordance with the principles of Brahmaism. The first impetus was given to them by the respected Acharya of the Somaj on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage. It has been for a long time our Acharya’s earnest endeavour to get rid of idolatry in all its branches. He waited till all was ripe for his noble design, and on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage he succeeded in striking a deadly blow against idolatry, which has not since dared to show its face in his family. This merely negative step of breaking through idolatry created such a sensation among the Acharya’s relatives, that one and all kept themselves aloof from the wedding. To do away completely with idolatrous portions of the marriage ceremony, mere removal of the idol was not enough; some Mantras used on that occasion, and some other portions of the ceremony, had to be rejected. This improved ceremonial has since been adopted by a few Brahma families. Not only marriage, but Nama Kurana mourning and other domestic ceremonies, have been invested with a new form.
I need scarcely remark here, that although something has been done to discard idolatry, and to spread the doctrines of pure Theism in Bengal, yet much remains to be accomplished. Some of the leading Brahmas seem to forget that our religious education cannot go on isolated from our social and moral culture, that all the different parts of our inner life are intimately connected. Duty and good work are the limbs of Brahmaism, without which faith is lame and powerless. We have the mass of the people to educate and generally to elevate. We have to emancipate our ladies from the darkness of ignorance and the degrading thraldom of the zenana. We have to pull down idolatry and caste, which have enslaved the heart and intellect of millions of our flesh and blood. We have to do all this and more, before we can rear up the superstructure of a pure religion on a sound and durable basis. The social life of a Hindu is thoroughly interwoven with un- meaning forms of religion, The whole system of caste is a monstrous imposition sanctioned by religion. The Brahmana must put on his sacred thread, which is the badge of his spiritual superiority. All purely social acts have a religious sanction attached to them. A Brahmana therefore who has renounced with all his heart idolatry and Hindu superstitions, has to exert his moral courage at every step of his life’s career. The Brahmas, as I have already hinted, now admit no book-revelation. They admit, indeed, that there is some manifestation of divine will in ail revelations, inasmuch as they are utterances of souls religiously pure and noble. But the great doctrine on which the Brahmas stand, is internal revelation— revelation to individual souls. As there arise now and then in this world prodigies of intellect, towering above their fellow beings, so there are sent men gifted with religious and moral intuitions in far more than ordinary measure. They are meant as our examples. The great Being who sends to this world individuals strongly stamped with the divine, does not yet cease to inspire the world with His presence and reveal Himself to the prayer of faith. It is to Him only that we are bound to offer our tribute of worship and allegiance. The Brahmas, however, would not fail to appreciate the beauty of the moral precepts of Christ, or the sense of absolute trust and dependence on Providence, as taught by Mohammed.
In regard to the doctrine of Atonement, the Brahmas are, I am disposed to think, at variance with some of the Christians. We are told by the missionaries that we are sinners—no religion has ever doubted the fact. Then we are reminded that nothing can save us from our sins but belief in a Christ crucified. The Brahmas hold that it is God’s absolute goodness, from which alone we can hope for our salvation. We cannot undo that which we have done— all we can do is to repent for our past sins and try with all our strength to amend our future. We are not left alone, but if we pray Heaven with an earnest and lowly heart for purity and strength, God will send His blessings to us. Some of these missionaries would turn us out of God’s mercy-seat, by frightening us with the awful name of Justice, as if it is something incompatible with His goodness and mercy. If God’s mercy and justice will not and cannot save us, the Brahmas ask, what will? ‘Christ’s blood,’ is the answer. Tell us how? Christ was innocent, and, as you say, perfectly pure. He took upon Himself, it is said, all our sins, and died a torturing death. This was God’s dispensation to save sinners. We cannot reconcile this with our idea of God’s justice. Kill the innocent to save the guilty, kill him not merely in a physical sense, but throw on him all the sins of all the world, and drown him to death in an ocean of sins, that all sinners might escape! We are landed in this by the ordinary theory of atonement. We have a full faith in immortality, without which religion itself would be unmeaning. The Brahma believes in a system of rewards and punishments in a future world, and in unending progress of the soul towards perfection and happiness. What the exact nature of that world is to be, no religion has attempted to set forth without falling into fanciful absurdities. The Brahma, I may remark by the way, is horrified at the idea of eternal hell-fire, with which (the minister of) Christ so often threatens refractory individuals. It is commonly maintained that Brahmaism or Theism is too theoretical to maintain its ground. The generality of people want something more substantial to stand upon than the vague doctrines of Theism. Whether pure Theism, divested of all false forms and false revelations, which hold such marvellous ascendency in this world, will ever be anywhere dominant, I cannot pretend to say. Many physical improvements, social and moral movements to which the ancients were utter strangers, have taken a start in the modern world, and such an advent may be hoped for in regard to Theism, if it be God’s Truth. There are hopeful signs of the spread of Brahmaism in India, notwithstanding the serious obstacles which obstruct its progress.