will know that the choosing out of the new Race, the evolving of it, the
making of a new Root Race, is a thing that takes centuries, millenniums,
sometimes hundreds of thousands of years; and that the two who are to be
its King and Priest, the Manu and the Brahmana, are at Their work
throughout the centuries, choosing the men who may be the seeds of the
new Race. In the womb of the fourth Race a choice was made out of which
the fifth was born; isolated in the Gobi desert, for enormous periods of
time, that chosen family was trained, educated, reared, till its Manu
incarnated in it, and its Teacher also incarnated in it, and the first
A'ryan family was led forth to settle in A'ryavarta. Now in the womb of
the fifth Race, the sixth Race is a choosing, and the King and the
Teacher of the sixth Race are already at Their mighty and beneficent
work. They are choosing one by one, trying and testing, those who shall
form the nucleus of the sixth Race; They are taking soul by soul,
subjecting each to many a test, to many an ordeal, to see if there be
the strength out of which a new Race can spring; and in fulness of time
when Their work is ready, then will come the Kalki Avatara, to sweep
away the darkness, to send the Kali Yuga into the past, to proclaim the
birth of the new Satya Yuga, with a new and more spiritual Race, that is
to live therein. Then will He call out the chosen, the King Moru and the
Brahmana Devapi, and give into Their hands the Race that now They are
building, the Race to inhabit a fairer world, to carry onwards the
evolution of humanity.
FOURTH LECTURE.
My brothers, there are themes so lofty that tongue of Deva would not
suffice to do full justice to that which they enclose, and when we think
of the music of Shri Krishna's flute, all human music seems as
discord amidst its strains. Nevertheless since bhakti grows by thought
and word, it is not amiss that we should come near a subject so sacred;
only in dealing with it we must needs feel our incompetency, we must
needs regret our limitations, we must needs wish for greater power of
expression than we can have down here. For, perhaps, amid all the divine
manifestations that have glorified the world, there is none which has
aroused a wider, tenderer feeling than the Avatara which we are to study
this morning.
The austerer glories of Mahadeva, the Lord of the burning ground,
attract more the hearts of those who are weary of the world and who see
the futility of worldly attractions; but Shri Krishna is the
God of the household, the God of family life, the God whose
manifestations attract in every phase of His Self-revelation; He is
human to the very core; born in humanity, as He has said, He acts as a
man. As a child, He is a real child, full of playfulness, of fun, of
winsome grace. Growing up into boyhood, into manhood, He exercises the
same human fascination over the hearts of men, of women, and of
children; the God in whose presence there is always joy, the God in
whose presence there is continual laughter and music. When we think of
Shri Krishna we seem to hear the ripple of the river, the
rustling of the leaves in the forest, the lowing of the kine in the
pasture, the laughter of happy children playing round their parents'
knees. He is so fundamentally the God who is human in everything; who
bends in human sympathy over the cradle of the babe, who sympathises
with the play of the youth, who is the friend of the lover, the blesser
of the bridegroom and the bride, who smiles on the young mother when her
first-born lies in her arms--everywhere the God of love and of human
happiness; what wonder that His winsome grace has fascinated the hearts
of men!
We are to study Him, then, this morning. Now an Avatara--I say this to
clear away some preliminary difficulties--an Avatara has two great
aspects to the world. First, He is a historical fact. Do not let that be
forgotten. When you are reading the story of the great Ones, you are
reading history and not fable. But it is more than history; the Avataras
acts out on the stage of the world a mighty drama. He is, as it were, a
player on the world's stage, and He plays a definite drama, and that
drama is an exposition of spiritual truth. And though the facts are
facts of history, they are also an allegory under which great spiritual
truths are conveyed to the minds and to the hearts of men. If you think
of it only as an allegory, you miss an aspect of the truth; if you think
of it only as a history you miss an aspect of the truth. The history of
an Avatara is an exposition of spiritual verities; but though the drama
be a real one, it is a drama with an object, a drama with distinct
outlines laid down, as it were, by the author, and the Avatara plays His
part on the stage at the same time as He is living out His life as man
in the history of the world. That must be remembered, otherwise some of
the great lessons of the Avatara will be misread.
Then He comes into the world surrounded by many who have been with Him
in former births, surrounded by celestial beings, born as men, and by a
vast body of beings of the opposing side born also as men. I am speaking
specially of the Avatara of Shri Krishna, but this is true of
any other human Avatara as well. They are not born into the world alone;
They are born with a great circle round Them of friends, and a great
host before them of apparent foes, incarnated as human beings, to work
out the world-drama that is being played.
This is most of all, perhaps, apparent in the case of the One whom we
are now studying. Because of the extremely complicated nature of the
Avatara of Shri Krishna, and the vast range that He covered as
regards His manifestations of complex human life, in order to render the
vast subject a little more manageable, I have divided this drama, as it
were, into its separate acts. I am using for a moment the language of
the stage, for I think it will make my meaning rather more clear. That
is, in dealing with His life, I have taken its stages which are clearly
marked out, and in each of these we shall see one great type of the
teaching which the world is meant to learn from the playing of this
drama before the eyes of men. To some extent the stages correspond with
marked periods in the life, and to some extent they overlap each other;
but by having them clearly in our minds we shall be able, I think, to
grasp better the whole object of the Avatara--we shall have as it were
compartments in the mind in which the different types of teaching may be
placed.
First then He comes to show forth to the world a great Object of bhakti,
and the love of God to His bhakta, or devotee. That is the aim of the
first act of the great drama--to stand forth as the Object of devotion,
and to show forth the love with which God regards His devotees. We have
there a marked stage in the life of Shri Krishna.
Then the second act of the drama may be said to be His character as the
destroyer of the opposing forces that retard evolution, and that runs
through the whole of His life.
The third act is that of the statesman, the wise, politic, and
intellectual actor on the world's stage of history, the guiding force of
the nation by His wondrous policy and intelligence, standing forth not
as king but rather as statesman.
Then we have Him as friend, the human friend, especially of the
Pandavas and of Arjuna.
The next act is that of Shri Krishna as Teacher, the
world-teacher, not the teacher of one race alone.
Then we see Him in the strange and wondrous aspect of the Searcher of
the hearts of men, the trier and tester of human nature.
Finally, we may regard Him in His manifestation as the Supreme, the
all-pervading life of the universe, who looks on nothing as outside
Himself, who embraces in His arms evil and good, darkness and light,
nothing alien to Himself.
Into these seven acts, as it were, the life-history may be divided, and
each of them might serve as the study of a life-time instead of our
compressing them into the lecture of a morning. We will, however, take
them in turn, however inadequately; for the hints I give can be worked
out by you in detail according to the constitution of your own minds.
One aspect will attract one man, another aspect will attract another;
all the aspects are worthy of study, all are provocative of devotion.
But most of all, with regard to devotion, is the earliest stage of His
life inspiring and full of benediction, those early years of the Lord as
infant, as child, as young boy, when He is dwelling in Vraja, in the
forest of Brindaban, when He is living with the cowherds and their wives
and their children, the marvellous child who stole the hearts of men. It
is noticeable--and if it had been remembered many a blasphemy would not
have been uttered--that Shri Krishna chose to show Himself as
the great object of devotion, as the lover of the devotee, in the form
of a child, not in that of a man.
Come then with me to the time of His birth, remembering that before that
birth took place upon earth, the deities had been to Vishnu in the
higher regions, and had asked Him to interfere in order that earth might
be lightened of her load, that the oppression of the incarnate Daityas
might be stayed; and then Vishnu said to the Gods: Go ye and
incarnate yourselves in portions among men, go ye and take birth amid
humanity. Great Rishis also took birth in the place where
Vishnu Himself was to be born, so that ere He came, the
surroundings of the drama were, as it were, made in the place of His
coming, and those that we speak of as the cowherds of Vraja, Nanda and
those around Him, the Gopis and all the inhabitants of that wondrously
blessed spot, were, we are told, "God-like persons"; nay more, they were
"the Protectors of the worlds" who were born as men for the progress of
the world. But that means that the Gods themselves had come down and
taken birth as men; and when you think of all that took place throughout
the wonderful childhood of the Lila[10] of Shri Krishna, you
must remember that those who played that act of the drama were the
ordinary men, no ordinary women; they were the Protectors of the worlds
incarnated as cowherds round Him. And the Gopis, the graceful wives of
the shepherds, they were the Rishis of ancient days, who by devotion
to Vishnu had gained the blessing of being incarnated as Gopis, in
order that they might surround His childhood, and pour out their love at
the tiny feet of the boy they saw as boy, of the God they worshipped as
supreme.
[Footnote 10: Play.]
When all these preparations were made for the coming of the child, the
child was born. I am not dwelling on all the well-known incidents that
surrounded His birth, the prophecy that the destroyer of Kamsa was to be
born, the futile shutting up in the dungeon, the chaining with irons, and
all the other follies with which the earthly tyrant strove to make
impossible of accomplishment the decree of the Supreme. You all know how
his plans came to nothing, as the mounds of sand raised by the hands of
children are swept into a level plain when one wave of the sea ripples over
the playground of the child. He was born, born in His four-armed form,
shining out for the moment in the dungeon, which before His birth had been
irradiated by Him through His mother's body, who was said to be like an
alabaster vase--so pure was she--with a flame within it. For the Lord Shri
Krishna was within her womb, herself the alabaster vase which was as a lamp
containing Him, the world's light, so that the glory illuminated the
darkness of the dungeon where she lay. At His birth he came as Vishnu, for
the moment showing Himself with all the signs of the Deity on Him, with the
discus, with the conch, with the shrivatsa on His breast, with all the
recognised emblems of the Lord. But that form quickly vanished, and only
the human child lay before His parents' eyes. And the father, you remember,
taking Him up, passed through the great locked doors and all the rest of
it, and carried Him in safety into his brother's house, where He was to
dwell in the place prepared for His coming.
As a babe He showed forth the power that was in Him, as we shall see,
when we come, to the second stage, the destroyer of the forces of evil.
But for the moment only watch Him as He plays in his foster mother's
house, as He gambols with children of His own age. And as He is growing
into a boy, able to go alone, He begins wandering through the fields and
through the forest, and the notes of His wondrous flute are heard in all
the groves and over all the plains. The child, a child of five--only
five years of age when He wandered with His magic flute in His hands,
charming the hearts of all that heard; so that the boys left tending the
cattle and followed the music of the flute; the women left their
household tasks and followed where the flute was playing; the men
ceased their labours that they might feast their ears on the music of
the flute. Nay, not only the men, the women and the children, but the
cows, it is said, stopped their grazing to listen as the notes fell on
their ears, and the calves ceased suckling as the music came to them on
the wind, and the river rippled up that it might hear the better, and
the trees bowed down their branches that they might not lose a note, and
the birds no longer sang lest their music should make discord in the
melody, as the wondrous child wandered over the country, and the music
of heaven flowed from His magic flute.
And thus He lived and played and sported, and the hearts of all the
cowherds and of their wives and daughters went out to that marvellous
child. And He played with them and loved them, and they would take Him
up and place His baby feet on their bosoms, and would sing to Him as the
Lord of all, the Supreme, the mighty One. They recognised the Deity in
the child that played round their homes, and many lessons He taught
them, this child, amid His gambols and His pranks--lessons that still
teach the world, and that those who know most understand best.
Let me take one instance which ignorant lips have used most in order to
insult, to try to defame the majesty that they do not understand. But
let me say this: that I believe that in most cases where these bitter
insults are uttered, they are uttered by people who have never really
read the story, and who have heard only bits of it and have supplied the
rest out of their own imaginations. I therefore take a particular
incident which I have heard most spoken of with bitterness as a proof of
the frightful immorality of Shri Krishna.
While the child of six was one day wandering along, as He would, a
number of the Gopis were bathing nude in the river, having cast aside
their cloths--as they should not have done, that being against the law
and showing carelessness of womanly modesty. Leaving their garments on
the bank they had plunged into the river. The child of six saw this with
the eye of insight, and He gathered up their cloths and climbed up a
tree near by, carrying them with Him, and threw them round His own
shoulders and waited to see what would chance. The water was bitterly
cold and the Gopis were shivering; but they did not like to come out of
it before the clear steady eyes of the child. And He called them to come
and get the garments they had thrown off; and as they hesitated, the
baby lips told them that they had sinned against God by immodestly
casting aside the garments that should have been worn, and must
therefore expiate their sin by coming and taking from His hands that
which they had cast aside. They came and worshipped, and He gave them
back their robes. An immoral story, with a child of six as the central
figure! It is spoken of as though he were a full grown man, insulting
the modesty of women. The Gopis were Rishis, and the Lord, the
Supreme, as a babe is teaching them a lesson. But there is more than
that; there is a profound occult lesson below the story--a story
repeated over and over again in different forms--and it is this: that
when the soul is approaching the supreme Lord at one great stage of
initiation, it has to pass through a great ordeal; stripped of
everything on which it has hitherto relied, stripped of everything that
is not of its inner Self, deprived of all external aid, of all external
protection, of all external covering, the soul itself, in its own
inherent life, must stand naked and alone with nothing to rely on, save
the life of the Self within it. If it flinches before the ordeal, if it
clings to anything to which hitherto it has looked for help, if in that
supreme hour it cries out for friend or helper, nay even for the Guru
himself, the soul fails in that ordeal. Naked and alone it must go
forth, with absolutely none to aid it save the divinity within itself.
And it is that nakedness of the soul as it approaches the supreme goal,
that is told of in that story of Shri Krishna, the child, and
the Gopis, the nakedness of life before the One who gave it. You find
many another similar allegory. When the Lord comes in the Kalki, the
tenth, Avatara, He fights on the battlefield and is overcome. He uses
all His weapons; every weapon fails Him; and it is not till He casts
every weapon aside and fights with His naked hands, that He conquers.
Exactly the same idea. Intellect, everything, fails the naked soul
before God.[11]
[Footnote 11: So in the _Imitation of Christ_, the work of an occultist,
it is written that we must "naked follow the naked Jesus."]
If I have taken up this story specially, out of hundreds of stories, to
dwell upon, it is because it is one of the points of attack, and because
you who are Hindus by birth ought to know enough of the inner truths of
your own religion not to stand silent and ashamed when attacks are made,
but should speak with knowledge and thus prevent such blasphemies.
Then we learn more details of His play with the Gopis as a child of
seven: how He wandered into the forest and disappeared and all went
after Him seeking Him; how they tried to imitate His own play, in order
to fill up the void that was left by His absence. The child of seven,
that He was at this time, disappeared for a while, but came back to
those who loved Him, as God ever does with His bhaktas. And then takes
place that wondrous dance, the Rasa[12] of Shri Krishna, part
of His Lila, when He multiplied Himself so that every pair of Gopis
found Him standing between them; amid the ring of women the child was
there between each pair of them, giving a hand to each; and so the
mystic dance was danced. This is another of these points of attack which
are made by ignorant minds. What but an unclean mind can see aught that
is impure in the child dancing there as lover and beloved? It is as
though He looked forward down the ages, and saw what later would be
said, and it is as though He kept the child form in the Lila, in order
that He might breathe harmlessly into men's blind unclean hearts the
lesson that He would fain give. And what was the lesson? One other
incident I remind you of, before I draw the lesson from the whole of
this stage of His life. He sent for food, He who is the Feeder of the
worlds, and some of His Brahmanas refused to give it, and sent away
the boys who came to ask for food for Him; and when the men refused, He
sent them back to the women, to see if they too would refuse the food
their husbands had declined to give. And the women--who have ever loved
the Lord--caught up the food from every part of their houses where they
could find it and went out, crowds of them, bearing food for Him,
leaving house, and husband, and household duties. And all tried to stop
them, but they would not be stopped; and brothers and husbands and
friends tried to hold them back, but no, they must go to Him, to their
Lover, Shri Krishna; He must not be hungry, the child of their
love. And so they went and gave Him food and He ate. But they say: They
left their husbands! they left their homes! how wrong to leave husbands
and homes and follow after Shri Krishna! The implication always
is that their love was purely physical love, as though that were
possible with a child of seven. I know that words of physical love are
used, and I know it is said in a curious translation that "they came
under the spell of Cupid." It matters not for the words, let us look at
the facts. There is not a religion in the world that has not taught that
when the Supreme calls, all else must be cast aside. I have seen Shri
Krishna contrasted with Jesus of Nazareth to the detriment of
Shri Krishna, and a contrast is drawn between the purity of the
one and the impurity of the other; the proof given was that the husbands
were left while the wives went to play with and wait on the Lord. But I
have read words that came from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth; "He that
loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that
loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." "And every one
that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or
mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall
receive an hundred fold, and shall inherit everlasting life." (Matt. x.
37, and xix. 29.) And again, yet more strongly: "If any man come to me
and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple." (Luke xiv. 26.) That is exactly the same idea. When Jesus
calls, husband and wife, father and mother, must be forsaken, and the
reward will be eternal life. Why is that right when done for Jesus,
which is wrong when done for Shri Krishna?
[Footnote 12: Dance.]
It is not only that you find the same teaching in both religions; but in
every other religion of the world the terms of physical love are used to
describe the relation between the soul and God. Take the "Song of
Solomon." If you take the Christian _Bible_ and read the margin you will
see "The Love of Christ for His Church"; and if from the margin you look
down the column, you will find the most passionate of love songs, a
description of the exquisite female form in all the details of its
attractive beauty; the cry of the lover to the beloved to come to him
that they might take their fill of love. "Christ and His Church" is
supposed to make it all right, and I am content that it should be so. I
have no word to say against the "Song of Solomon," nor any complaint
against its gorgeous and luxuriant imagery; but I refuse to take from
the Hebrew as pure, what I am to refuse from the Hindu as impure. I ask
that all may be judged by the same standard, and that if one be
condemned the same condemnation may be levelled against the other. So
also in the songs of the Sufis, the mystics of the faith of Islam,
woman's love is ever used as the best symbol of love between the soul
and God. In all ages the love between husband and wife has been the
symbol of union between the Supreme and His devotees; the closest of all
earthly ties, the most intimate of all earthly unions, the merging of
heart and body of twain into one--where will you find a better image of
the merging of the soul in its God? Ever has the object of devotion
been symbolised as the lover or husband, ever the devotee as wife or
mistress. This symbology is universal, because it is fundamentally true.
The absolute surrender of the wife to the husband is the type upon earth
of the absolute surrender of the soul to God. That is the justification
of the Rasa of Shri Krishna; that is the explanation of the
story of His life in Vraja.
I have dwelt specially on this, my brothers, you all know why. Let us
pass from it, remembering that till the nineteenth century this story
provoked only devotion not ribaldry, and it is only with the coming in
of the grosser type of western thought that you have these ideas put
into the _Bhagavad-Purana_. I would to God that the Rishis had
taken away the _Shrimad Bhagavata_ from a race that is unworthy to have
it; that as They have already withdrawn the greater part of the Vedas,
the greater part of the ancient books, they would take away also this
story of the love of Shri Krishna, until men are pure enough to
read it without blasphemy and clean enough to read it without ideas of
sexuality.
Pass from this to the next great stage, that of the Destroyer of evil,
shortly, very shortly. From the time when as a babe but a few weeks old
He sucked to death the Rakshasi, Putana; from the time He entered the
great cave made by the demon, and expanding Himself shivered the whole
into fragments; from the time He trampled on the head of the serpent
Kalia so that it might not poison the water needed for the drinking of
the people; until He left Vraja to meet Kamsa, we find Him ever chasing
away every form of evil that came within the limits of His abode. We are
told that when He had left Vraja and stood in the tournament field of
Kamsa with His brother, His brother and Himself were mere boys, in the
tender delicate bodies of youths. After the whole of the Lila was over
They were still children, when They went forth to fight. From that time
onwards He met, one after another, the great incarnations of evil and
crushed them with His resistless strength: we need not dwell on these
stories, for they fill His life.