Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c9.86

c9.86

¹ Commenting on these hymns Maurice Maeterlinck says: "'Is it possible to find, in our human annals, words more majestic, more full of solemn anguish, more august in tone, more devout, more terrible? Where, from the depths of an agnosticism, which thousands of years have augmented, can we point to a wider horizon? At the very outset, it surpasses all that has been said, and goes farther than we shall even dare to go. No spectacle could be more absorbing than this struggle of our forefathers of five to ten thousand years ago with the Unknowable, the unknowable nature of the Causeless Cause of all Causes. But of this Cause, or this God, we should never have known anything, had He remained self-absorbed, had He never manifested Himself. 'Thus it is,' say the *Laws of Manu*, 'that, by an alternation of awakening and repose, the immutable Being causes all this assemblage of creatures, mobile and immobile, eternally to return to life and to die' [i, 57]. He exhales Himself, or expels His breath, and Spirit descends into Matter, which is only a visible form of Spirit; and throughout the Universe innumerable worlds are born, multiply, and evolve. He Himself inhales, indrawing His breath, and Matter enters into Spirit, which is but an invisible form of Matter: and the worlds disappear, without perishing, to reintegrate the Eternal Cause, and emerge once more upon the awakening of Brahma—that is, thousands of millions of years later; to enter into Him again when He sleeps once more, after thousands of millions of years; and so it has been and ever shall be, through all eternity, without beginning, without cessation, without end.