Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1.11

c7.t1.11

In the sultry, moist, tropical lands of the Ganges, highly endowed by nature with rich gifts, the people who were in the prime of youthful vigour when they penetrated hither from the north, soon ceased to be young and strong. Men and peoples come rapidly to maturity in that land, like the plants of the tropical world, only just as rapidly to fall asleep both bodily and spiritually. The sea with its invigorating breeze, and the school of noble national energy, play no part in the life of the Indians. The Indian has above all, at an early stage, turned aside from that which chiefly preserves a people young and healthy, from the battle and struggle for home, country, and law. The thought of freedom with all the quickening, and, it is true, also with all the deadly powers which it brings in its train, has always been unknown and incomprehensible in India. The free will of man may not chafe against the system of Brahma, the natural law of caste, which has given the people into the power of the king and the king into the power of the priest. Well might it awaken the astonishment of the Greek to see in India the peasant calmly go forth between opposing armies to till his fields:* “He is sacred and inviolable for he is the common benefactor of friend and foe.” But in what the Greeks mention as a beautiful and sensible feature in Indian national life, there lies something more than mere soft mildness. When Hannibal came, the Roman peasant ceased to sow his fields. The Indians are wholly strangers to the highest interests and ideals which are at the basis of all healthy national life. Will and action are overgrown by thought. But when once the internal balance is disarranged and the natural relationship between the spirit and the reality of the world is disturbed, thought has no longer the power to take a wholesome grasp of what is wholesome. Whatever is, appears to the Indian worthless compared to the marginal illuminations with which his fancy surrounds it, and the images of his fancy grow in tropical luxuriance, shapeless and distorted, and turn eventually with terrific power against their creator. To him the true world, hidden by the images of his own dreams, remains an unknown, which he is unable to trust and over which he has no control: life and happiness in this world break down under the burden of excessively crushing contemplation of the hereafter.