Oriental Culture in Modern Pedagogics.
The sciences of "specialists" have been every day passing into the A, B, C of the man in the street. The trade-secrets of yesterday are the common-sense of mankind to-day.
Drawing is no longer the subject exclusively meant for those who would join the guild of artists in life. The natural and objective sciences are not deemed to-day proper studies only for those who would devote themselves to the investigation of the truths of the physical world. Manual training and discipline of the senses are no more the foundation solely for architects and engineers. All these are now integral parts of every scheme of general culture, and included in the irreducible minimum of school-syllabuses. Thus has modern pedagogics enlarged the meaning and scope of education.
1. Asia in Liberal Culture.
It is in conformity with the trend of these modern postulates of liberal education that the place of Oriental culture among the subjects of instruction in schools and universities has to be adjusted. Absence of interest regarding the Oriental races, whether as to their achievements in the past or movements and tendencies in the present, should be treated as a vestige of medievalism, an anachronism in the light of the progress already made in educational therapy and practice.
It may be said, however, that the East is nowadays not the terra incognita that it used to be even about two decades ago. The developments among the Oriental peoples in politics and culture have been compelling the attention of the larger world since the beginning of the present century, especially since 1905. But that attention, so far as it is serious, is still practically confined to a body of specialists. First, there are the missionaries, to whom the Orient has always appealed as the land of heathens who should be introduced to the Christian God. Secondly, there are the pioneers of commerce, who are on the lookout for a wider market or industrial exploitation in the undeveloped regions of the globe. And lastly, there are the philologists, archeologists and anthropologists, who explore the Orient as a vast museum of human paleontology, of fossils, curios, arrested growths and abnormal types of mentality, in any case, "inferior" specimens of human culture.
To the journalists Oriental interest means interest in the picturesque or scenic side of Japan, China, India, Persia and Egypt. The laymen and women of Europe and America' have thus learned to think of the Orient as something fundamentally different from the Occident, and they associate it with the thousand and one oddities, absurdities and unintelligible mental and moral traits. And they read and hear of the Orient only as long as it is presented as the land of queer superstitions, impossible social conventions and "wonder"-exciting institutions.
It is now time that this state of things should cease. The Orient has to be approached from a thoroughly new angle. It has to be planted firmly as an ingredient in the intellectual consciousness of men and women. Modern pedagogics has to recognize ancient and medieval Oriental culture as well as the voice of the modern Orient among the necessary items in the equipment of every educated mind. In other words, Oriental lore must no longer be the trade-secret of the "Orientalists," those specialists in things Oriental, but must be laicized for the general mass of mankind.
Specialized studies need not be minimized, nor the scholarly work of comparative philologists and antiquarians underestimated. Probably even more work has to be done along these very lines. But the most important problem for pedagogists to-day is to see that school boys and girls and university students do not grow up and finish their academic life with the idea that Chinese, Hindu, Japanese or Mohammedan topics can be safely neglected as belonging to the class of uninteresting "electives." This prejudice against a knowledge of Oriental topics is, however, bound to obtain until and unless its exclusive character as the monopoly of the Oriental departments of universities is removed by the pioneers of educational reform. And this would involve a considerable overhauling, not so much of the curriculum of studies, as of the pedagogic apparatus and the art of teaching in presenting the various subjects of instruction.
2. Chinese Poetry.
Let us see what China can teach us through her poetry. We know how,—
"Dante once prepared to paint an angel:
Whom to please? You whisper Beatrice.
"Rafael made a century of sonnets,
Made and wrote them in a certain volume
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil;
Else he only used to draw Madonnas,
These the world might view—but One, the volume.
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you."
This is how Robert Browning imagines the pen trying to be the brush, and the brush the pen. How is such a transformation possible? asks the poet in his usual self-questioning fashion. The great secret here is Love. Says he:
"Ay, of all the artists living, loving,
None but would forego his proper dowry,—
Does he paint? He fain would write a poem,
Does he write? He fain would paint a picture;
* * * * *
Put to proof art alien to the artist's
Once and only once, and for One only,
So to be the man and leave the artist."
But in China for the painter to be poet and for the poet to be painter is nothing extraordinary. The Dantes of China were. Rafaels and Rafaels Dantes,—and this almost invariably. Probably the greatest of such Dante-Rafaels was Wang Wei of the Tang period. Wang is well known to art historians as the founder of the so-called "southern school" of Chinese painting. The medium of this school is simple ink. Wang has had a tremendous influence on medieval Japanese art of the "black and white" style.
Wang's compatriots did not live in a world apart. The spiritual currents which called into being the masterpieces of these painterpoets and poet-painters of the Far East were not in any sense distinctive of the "Middle Kingdom." The more we come in touch with the élan de la vie of China, the more we are impressed by the universal elements in her fine arts and mores such as the modern world has at last learned to appreciate in the mankind of pharaonic Egypt.
We have some very absurd notions about China's culture. Somehow or other we have been taught by ethnologists to believe that because the Chinese belong to the Mongolian race they possess a mentality not easily conceivable to the people of the IndoEuropean races. This sort of pseudo-anthropological generalization is utterly baseless.
Let us have a bit of China's mind, say, of the second century B. C. We shall reproduce here a few extracts from a poem which was addressed by a general to his wife on the evening of his expedition against the Huns of Central Asia. The verses read in English as follows:
"Awake, my dearest, for the stars have set,
The grief of parting must be bravely met;
And yet the dreary marches weight my mind
As thro' defiles and desert plains they wind."And then at last, the awful battle field,
Where I must fight and naught to foemen yield,
But, Oh! the bitter paralyzing pain,
To think that we must never meet again."But courage, we will think of young love's day,
And all the pleasures which therein did stay,
And this shall cheer me on the toilsome road,
And help you here to bear your weary load."Then with what joy we shall renew our life,
When I return safe from the dreadful strife,
But if, alas, the Fates should death decree,
My spirit shall forever live with thee."1
Each stanza is the picture of a conflict of emotions; and altogether the poem exhibits an artistic blend of affection and duty, of hope and fear, of life and death, which is to be found few and far between in the whole range of world's poetry. We notice how the two master-passions, viz., love and war, have rendered this little lyric into a crystal of the eternal man's joys and sorrows.
3. China's Paintings.
To-day in the twentieth century, whenever the Eur-American connoisseurs think of Asian art, they envisage Hokusai's Fuji scenes and Utamaro's genre pictures. Indeed since the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh started the craze à la japonaise, modern art itself has been profoundly influenced by the Japanese masters. This practical appreciation of Old Japan by the West, sincere as it is, has of course been greatly accelerated by the political impact of the New Japan on international relations. It is through such art affinities and cultural ententes, however, that the rapprochement between the East and the West will undoubtedly be facilitated to no mean extent. Young Asia's debt to Japan in this regard is certainly of a vast magnitude.
But now that the achievements of Japan are well established in modern art-consciousness it is only meet that we should enter deeply into the workmanship of the Asian creators of the things of beauty. In the first place, Japanese themselves are aware and students of the history of civilization have learned from the publications of the Kokka, the art journal of Tokyo, that the foundations of Japanese pictorial art lie in the executions and accomplishments of China's painters. But it is not merely this historical fact of Chinese masters being the inspirers and teachers of Japan that we have need to acknowledge. For in the second place, the absolute merits of Chinese art-work stand on a thoroughly independent basis. In many instances it is high time for art-criticism to admit that Japanese color prints, howsoever clever in themselves, are but child's play by the side of the stately Kakemonos wrought by Chinese hands.
We are prepared to go further and assert that until the appearance of chiaroscuro in Europe, there was nothing in the world's art that could compare with the profound color masses and noble grouping of figures executed by the great men of Cathay. Take the Byzantine, Italian or the Renaissance masterpieces. Let us forget, for the time being, and as non-Christians, we are bound to ignore the fact that these are representations of holy scenes, chapters of religious books, so. to speak. Stripped of their ecclesiastical setting, the appeal of these tapestries is very frequently anything but aesthetic. We must make exceptions, however, in favor of the Fra Angelicos, Massaccios, Francescas, and Giottos. But generally speaking, what is the value of this religious art as art? To modern eyes, especially to the de-christianized standpoint and non-christian outlook, the Titian-red, the golden orbs, and the oval or round faces of the Virgin are the very reverse of beauty and holiness. How few of these performances have a consistent architecture of forms! How few of their color constructions convey pleasure to the sense of sight!
The Christian arts live to-day as all religious arts everywhere live, like quite a few of those for instance in Hindustan— only because they are propped up by a superstition or a traditional lip-service to the name of some divinity. Thus do the vested interests of an organized religion place a damper on the free exercise of creative imagination by perpetuating a reverence for techniques which could not stand by themselves in the ever-recurring process of transvaluation of values.
But in travelling through the realm of China's glories, we seem at every step to hit upon the very essentials of artistic greatness, viz., the artist's mastery over the geometry of forms and the "personality" of color. In Chinese paintings we can afford to eliminate the religious themes without a sense of loss. Here indeed the themes count virtually for nothing, the workmanship stands on its naked dignity. The encyclopedia of art will not be impoverished in China as it is sure to be in Russia, Italy or India, and for that matter, in almost all old countries, if the hieratic elements were removed. There will be left a vast amount of non-symbolical secular beauties which can be a "joy for ever" to every man and woman on earth.
The Chinese masters do not influence us by appealing to the sense of the godhead or the after-world, to that of veneration for the holy family or scheduled saints, or to the mysteries of heaven and hell. Even in their most earthly paintings their treatment evokes in our minds the sense of majesty, awe and grandeur. The landscapes, social scenes, and portraits of Chinese art live in the aesthetic psyche thoroughly independent of their legend or story. In themselves they are the most effective inspirers of the entire gamut of passions and sentiments. Of all the ancient and medieval paintings of the world the masterpieces of China are thus the most "self-determined" in their content. This spiritual sva-râj (self-rule) or Selb-ständigkeit necessarily makes of Chinese creations the most "absolute" art, the most universal, the most human, in other words, the greatest specimens of "art for art's sake." The alphabet which all races can read with equal pleasure and instruction is then to be seen at its best in the arrangement of contours and volumes of color on the silks of the Far East.
4. A Modern Superstition.
But during the last five or six decades it has been the fashion to classify the ideals of life or systems of philosophy under two main headings: Occidental and Oriental. It is generally supposed that the Occident stands for one type of life and thought, and that the Orient stands for another type of life and thought. So that modern philosophers and statesmen consider their task "smoothly done" if they can mark or underline some items as Occidental and some other items as Oriental. This racial classification of philosophy does not stop merely at the statement of the alleged difference in outlook and standpoint. There are extreme race-culturists also to whom the dictum "East is East and West is West" is a gospel-truth.
It is the mission of philosophy and function of science to classify. Generalizations and laws are the triumphs of human intellect. But unfortunately, and it is a paradox, the more generalized a statement is and the more universal its bearing and application are supposed to be, the more distant from the concrete and the further removed from the reality it becomes. The highest generalizations are thus, practically speaking, the greatest errors, and at any rate, the most unreal entities. Not only the generalizations of Hegel and Buckle but the generalizations of almost every thinker have been found wanting when applied to the actual facts known to the human beings of flesh and blood. The race-classification of culture and philosophy is the latest of the world's pseudo-scientific generalizations, which, apparently very brilliant, have been the source of erroneous dogmatisms, superstitious slogans, and dangerous half-truths.
Let us examine the facts of the world's philosophical evolution. There is no one system of thought or ideal of life which can be called typically Occidental; there is no one type of thinking or school of philosophy which can be marked off as Oriental. There have been philosophies and philosophies both in Asia and Eur-America. Neither in the East nor in the West can we treat of philosophy in the singular number. Every inch of the world's soil has, in short, known a "pluralistic universe." Which of these thousand and one culture-types or ideals of life or schools of philosophy is to be treated as Occidental, and which as Oriental? At what bit of thought can we lay our fingers and say: "Here is Asia; this is Hindu, this is Chinese, this is Persian?" At what bit of ideal can we lay our fingers and say: "Here is Europe; this is Hellenic, this is German, this is Russian, this is American"?
5. The Pluralistic Universe.
Jakob Boehme, the greatest Occidental mystic of the sixteenth-seventeenth century was regarded by the Germans as "the typical Teutonic Philosopher." Now if a mystic be the exponent of German thought, what is Nietzsche the energist? what is Treitschke the militarist? Goethe, the author of Götz, made his debut by championing the Sturm und Drang ideal initiated by the novelist Klinger. But Goethe himself was most vehement in condemning the "storm and stress" movement when Schiller brought out his Robbers. Which of these elements in Goethe is German? Again, if Schiller the poet of "nationalism" be the embodiment of German Kultur, Goethe the friend of Napoleon is thoroughly un-German.
Germany has been the nurse and home of Europe's greatest music-masters. But if Bach and Beethoven represent German musical genius, what is Wagner the revolutionist in the technique, modes, and ideals of musical composition?
The painters of Young Germany in the early years of the nineteenth century adopted ascetic ways of life in order to be initiated in the mysteries of highest art. They came all the way to Italy and sedulously shut themselves out from the society of women and worldly-wise people in order that they might be favoured with spiritual illumination. Now if this other-worldlyism is Germanism, Bismarck the "blood and iron" statesman is certainly not a German. And would modern Germans care to recognise Schopenhauer the arch-pessimist of the world as a German, and consider him a kin of their inspiring idealists, e.g., Fichte and Pestalozzi? In fact, Germany alone during the last century has witnessed as many systems of thought and ideals of work as human life can admit of. Who would dare to generalize Germany into a single slogan or formula, and remark: "This is Germanism, here is German Kultur"?
Such is the actual fact among forty, fifty, or sixty million human beings in a single country of Europe. Is it not prima facie absurd to imagine, as is generally done, that any one idea or ideal is the exclusive characteristic of four hundred million Chinese or three hundred million Indians? It would be equally unphilosophical to hold that any system of philosophy has dominated the Hindu mind or Chinese mind for six thousand years. The facts of philosophical development in India indicate that there is no such thing as a Hindu philosophy, but that the philosophies in Hindustan have been as varied as the Platonic and Aristotelian, as the "associational" and "transcendental", and that the whole story is one of growth in diversity and pluralism. One word "Buddha" or one word Yoga (meditation) or one word Mâyâ (illusion) does not explain the whole trend of Indian thought. Similarly one word "Confucius" or one word "Taoism" does not sum up the "cycles of Cathay."
6. Hindu Synthesis.
And the most unfortunate thing is that a few postulates of the people regarding the nature and attributes of God, the metaphysics of the soul, and the creed of religious life, have been taken in Europe and America to be the whole of Hindu philosophy. A parallel instance of injustice would be if an Indian were to regard the Bible, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the Original Sin, Immaculate Conception, and other dogmas of the innumerable Christian denominations as the sole philosophy produced by the combined intellect of Europe and America.
It must be distinctly understood that Hindu philosophy is philosophy worth the name mainly because it has boldly examined every postulate of human life; i.e., mainly because it is fundamentally agnostic or rationalistic. The contributions of Hindu thought must not be regarded as lying wholly within the field of metaphysics, but have been as great in psychology as in methodology or logic. The Baconian Induction and John Stuart Mill's methods of truth-investigation have been the instruments of scientific and philosophical work among the ancient and mediaeval Hindus. The Hindu thinkers have not been mere empirics; their logic has had a long and continuous history. As for psychology, the progress of the Hindu thinkers in this field has been due to the fact that human physiology attained a high development in Hindustan. It is needless to observe that philosophical systems have been possible in India as in Europe simply because of systematic psychology and systematic logic. If the achievements of Hindu philosophy, i.e., of Hindu rationalism and positivism were historically studied, it would be found that philosophy is neither Occidental nor Oriental but that it is human.2
The successful Occidental races of the nineteenth century used to characterize the life and thought of the Hindu thus: "The people of India are devoid of energy, indolent, and full of melodramatic enthusiasm. They have no practical common sense and are addicted to other-worldly sentiments. They are indifferent to the actualities of real life, and are governed by the pessimistic philosophy of despair." Such is India through the eyes of "colonialists" and "orientalists."
And yet from the age of Chandragupta Maurya (fourth century B. C.), the first Hindu emperor of a united India, down to the epoch of Baji Rao, the great Maratha statesman-general of the eighteenth century, the Hindus had exhibited their genius in industries and commerce, martial and naval exploits, construction and management of forts, maritime and colonizing enterprise, administration of civic and other public interests, as well as in the overthrow of the country's enemies.
The evidence of India's achievements in secular endeavor had been furnished by the Europeans themselves. Portuguese, French, Italian, and English tourists and traders came to India during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. What impressions did the country and its people have upon these visitors? They whole-heartedly admired the municipal arrangements, the general health and economic prosperity of the people in town and country, as also the vast river-traffic and the excellent roads and canals. The city of Murshidabad was brighter and more sanitary than the London of those days according to Clive. Baltazar Solvyns, the French observer, wrote even so late as 1811 that the Indian sea-going vessels were more durable and elegant than those of the English and French.
It was these very Hindus who, on the other hand, wrote and annotated the Upanishads, Gîtâ, Vedânta, the Bhakti (devotion)-shâstras, and Yoga (meditation) philosophy. It was these very Hindus, masters of the material arts, who proclaimed the inferiority of a mere life in the flesh and of an existence contented with the here and the now.
The historical truth, therefore, is that the Hindus cast their eyes equally on both wings of human life,—they approached the problem of the universe with the same sympathy from both angles of vision. Hindu culture was as much the embodiment of the most intimate experience of the concrete, positive, life, as the expression also of a thorough hair-splitting analysis of the Beyond or the transcendental realities. It was in short a synthesis of the world's eternal polarities.
7. The India of Colonialists and Orientalists.
During the nineteenth century, however, the people of India were divorced perforce from the vitalizing interests and responsibilities in every field of work. They had necessarily to fall back upon the super-sensual, the non-material, "the spiritual." But what is the spiritual worth that is not grounded in the "physical basis of life," the economic and the political? It can be nothing better than a nerveless fancy, a backboneless mysticism, an imbecile subjectivism, or an idle speculation.
The Hindus of this period, therefore, entirely misunderstood the spirit of the Upanishads, Gîtâ, Vedânta, and other philosophical bequests of their forefathers. The Indians, emasculated and demoralized as they had to be by pressure of circumstances, popularized a false doctrine of mâyâ or "world as illusion" without understanding the sense or context of the original propounders. They thus helped transform the country into an asylum of incapables, a land of vegetating animalcules, or of mere stocks and stones. The wonder is that this absence of vertebral vigour was even regarded by them as a point of glory.
The Occidentals had become masters of "this world." So the Indians began to take pride in demonstrating their own superiority over the Westerners (at least in their own imagination) in some such terms as the following: "Well, the philosophy of Europe and America is rooted in the enjoyment of the senses. You Occidentals are wedded to the interests of this little thing men call earth. But Hindu philosophy is grounded in self-restraint and self-sacrifice. We cultivate other-regarding ideals, our goal is renunciation, and our interests are absorbed in the Infinite and the Hereafter." This is the psychology of the slave. It is in such speculations that a subject race is bound to seek condolence. Exactly similar conditions led Jesus to declare to his compatriots: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," and "My kingdom is not of this world." Grapes are sour indeed. Here is the proverbial "virtue of a necessity."
Thus situated, the people of India became to the Eur-American observers the standing example of slothful passivity, pessimistic indifferentism, and submissionistic tendencies. Arguing the past from the degenerate present, the scholars of Europe and America began to interpret the whole previous history and literature of the Hindus as a record of inertia, inactivity, subjectivism, other-worldliness. This misinterpretation has been perpetuated for the world in the writings, however meritorious on other grounds, of Max Müller and the indologists who have followed in his wake. The mesmerized Hindus understood that probably the West was thus eulogizing the East. The scholars of India followed suit, and interpreted the achievements of their ancestors exclusively as marvellous exploits in pacifism, ahmisâ i.e., non-killing and non-resistance, spirituality, and "self-realization!"
8. The Ideas of 1905.
Fortunately, new conditions have of late exorcised this hypnotism and nightmare of mental thraldom. The Young India of the twentieth century does not pride in the imbecility forced into the intelllectual consciousness of the last three generations by adverse circumstances. The philosophy of Vedânta is not now the gospel of dreamy inaction and invertebrate mysticism that it was alleged to be. The genuine idealism of the Upanishads, Gîtâ, Vedânta, etc., viz., transcendentalism based on (and in and through) the positive, i.e., energistic romanticism, has now been inspiring the life and activity of the Indians. The age of pseudo-Vedantism is gone; the spirit of the originators, creators, and pioneers of India's greatness has "come back." There has thus been initiated a real renaissance in modern India.
The Young India of today is, like its illustrious predecessors of mediaeval and ancient times, at once idealistic and practical. Indians are "romanticists" in so far as they have been cultivating a veneration for the past glory, proclaiming the visions of a mighty future, and instituting the Nature-cult of freedom and simplicity. Pari passu, they have been making the present, the here and the now, more lovely in a thousand and one ways. They have addressed themselves to the pressing problems of every day public life. Rural re-construction, elevation of the laboring classes, social service for the welfare of the masses, and spread of man-making education are some of the principal planks in Young India's nationalist propaganda.
On the one side, Young India is singing with Girish Chandra Ghosh:
"The stars of the sky beckon: me,
The call from breeze is 'Come, O come!'
There's something in my heart methinks
That ever prompteth 'All is thine'."
or with Rabindranath Tagore:
"I would run from peak to peak
And roll from hill to hill,
Laughing, giggling, singing, prattling,
I would clap the hands to time.
I would flow in rivulet's self,
flow and flow onward,
And speak and speak heart's longing out,
And sing and sing my songs."
or with Dwijendralal Roy:
"Goddess mine! meditation's aim!
Country mine! O heaven on earth!";
or with Satyendranath Datta:
"What the past shadowed forth is bound to be;
Futureward we cast gleeful longing glance";
or with Kumudnath Lahiri:
"Why to manhood this insult, why?
Mind not the present source of grief;
Shatter to pieces the fetters of swoon
Bold with eyes on future far."
On the other side, the energists of Young India have been organizing the centres of creative work here and there and everywhere throughout the land. These institutions are the ganglionic cells of positivism which pervade the entire body politic. Various movements have been thus set on foot to deal with the current concerns of life. These are not confined 'to any particular class of the people, but are manned by even the half-educated and the illiterate. All these—men, institutions, and movements—are embodiments of the Beyond-in-the-now, of idealism in the interest of the real.
Besides, instances of ancient Hindu achievements in secular civilization, of India's contributions to the "exact" sciences, of Indian successes in industry, politics, and warfare are being unearthed by archaeologists. During the nineteenth century the people of India used to read in their history only the record of "spiritual" advance. The Young India of the twentieth century finds in the same history the tradition of statesmanship, Bushido, humanism, materialism. The whole trend of national evolution is being presented in an altogether novel light. Indian culture is being scientifically rescued from the incubus of misrepresentation and misinterpretation.
The mentality and philosophical tendencies of this Young India, especially since the commencement of the struggle for independence in the Swadeshi, Boycott, "National Education" and Swarâj movement of 1905, are akin to what is being called "pragmatism" in the Western world. The methodology and message of the pragmatists suit very well the life and disposition of the Indians, eclectic as they are. It is according to pragmatic ideals that Young India has been moulding its future. It is alive as much to the German Eucken's Life's Basis, the French Bergson's Intuition and élan vital, or the platonism and neo-Hegelianism of the Oxford professors, as to the lines of thought initiated or popularized by the American philosophers William James and John Dewey.
Young India's attitude is practical and creative. It is utilizing the world-forces (vishva-shakti) and examining the results achieved. It does not believe in the leadership of any one individual in industry, politics, literature, or art. It does not tolerate the authority of any one institution, or the monopoly of any one movement, or the despotism of any one propaganda. It does not think of national energy in the singular number, but in terms of many leaders, diverse ideals, multiple organizations, and varied consummations.
The philosophy which interprets the world on the solid basis of actual results, which formulates truths and values according to the effects of ideas and institutions on life, which postulates the plurality and multiplicity of life's experience, which has its cornerstone in the dignity of vital function as such, and which announces the supreme sacredness of individuals (whether as persons or as facts or events) is the only philosophy that can be consonant with the spirit of Young India.
9. Human Interests of Oriental Achievements.
The Orient can thus touch the mind of men and women in the Occident at various points and mould their lives from every conceivable angle of vision. Oriental culture has a human interest as much as the Occidental. The poetry, drama, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, industrial arts, physical sciences, philosophy, metaphysics, morals and rationalism of the Orient are rooted in the fundamental human, passions and ideals which make the whole world kin. No interests that influence the spirit of man can be merely local. Every human impulse is essentially and in the long run universal. The methods and accomplishments of mankind in any age and clime in the building up of world's culture can not but have a significance to mankind in other ages and climes.
And is not one of the main criteria of liberal education the humanizing of men and women? But this humanizing and liberalizing can be hardly effected by the specialists of the Oriental departments. Educational authorities have to take note of these psychosociological facts and frame their programmes and schedules of studies accordingly.
The human aspect of the Oriental lore, the absolute as well as relative values of the theories and institutions developed among the Hindus, Islamites and Confucianists should be exhibited to growing minds through all the rungs of the educational ladder. Herein lies the responsibility of the teacher of history, the teacher of philosophy, the teacher of science and the teacher of literature, as well as of the writers of text-books for schools and colleges. The university faculties and school authorities have to understand that Oriental topics can be profitably broached along with Occidental, whether recent or past, through the departments of philosophy, science, history and arts.
No student of anatomy and physiology can, under the pedagogic scheme suggested here, remain ignorant of the Hindu researchers in medical science from the earliest times down to the eighteenth century. The facts that the exact anatomy of the human body was known to the Hindus so far back as the sixth century B.C., that surgery was an applied science in India during the early centuries of the Christian era, that the first hospitals of the world were built by the Hindu scientists and philanthropists, that the application of minerals in therapeutics is very old among the Hindu medical practitioners, that zinc was discovered in India before the time of Paracelsus, and that circulation of blood was guessed before Harvey, would, under the new conditions, be matters of as coomon knowledge in Europe and America as the principle of Archimedes and Newton's Laws of Motion.
Students of world's history would then know that the Hindus also had developed republican city-states of the Hellenic type and clan-commonwealths and village-institutions of the folk-moot type that the first most extensive and centralized empire of the world was the Hindu empire of the Mauryas (fourth to third century B.C.), that a census of the people according to social and economic status was actually undertaken in the fourth century B.C., that the Hindu generals could organize and manipulate a regular standing army of 600,000 infantry, besides a vast cavalry and an efficient camel-corps and elephant-corps, that the name of Hindu Charlemagnes, Fredericks and Napoleons is legion, that the Hindu navy commanded the Indian Ocean for centuries and facilitated the establishment of an empire of international commerce and culture, that down to the twelfth century A.C. the first-class powers of the world were the Hindus, Chinese and Saracens, that the "superior races" of the world both in arms and arts during the Dark Ages of Europe were the followers of Islam and the Buddhist Tartars or Mongols, and that there was practically nothing to choose between the educational condition, industrial processes, domestic institutions, constitutional and civic sense, international morality, and social ideals of the Europeans and those of the Asians during the age of Louis XIV., le grand monarque, Kanghi, the Manchu-Chinese "Son of Heaven," and Aurangzib, the great Moghul-Hindu.
Every student would then know that Kaildas, the Virgil of India, wrote epic, lyric and dramatic poetry in the fifth century A.C., which can feed modern mankind with the same humanism as Shakespeare's King Lear and Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, and "mystery"-playwrights of medieval Folk-India, the Hindu Dantes of the fourteenth to sixteenth century with their Beatrices, and the Schillers and Grillparzers of modern Bengali drama would also pass common in the intellectual currency of the world if once the Orient begin to be exhibited from other than the grammatical, paleontological and anthropological viewpoints. Similarly the Giottos of Hindu art would be well-known "great masters" to the students of early Renaissance painting, and the post-impressionists and futurists of Europe and America would be found to have as their comrades in new ventures and experiments the Indian painters of the modern nationalist school.
Readers of Text-books in the History of Education would then know that the Hindu University of Nalanda had a resident membership numbering 5000, that it provided free instruction, free board and room and free medical help to the whole body of alumni, and that it attracted scholars from every part of Asia during a period of seven hundred years (fifth to twelfth century A.C.). Besides, the philanthropic and social-service activities of Young India in modern times would no longer be the "single swallows which do not make a summer" in the consciousness of Eur-America's intelligent men and women, but would be taken as matters of course by the adolescents along with their lessons in civics and social welfare.
Further, the Indian Platos, Aristotles, Plotinuses, Machiavellis, Boehmes, etc., would swell the list of world's philosophers and thinkers, and have a natural place in every calendar of Who's Who. And the contributions of the Indians to inductive logic, methods of truth-investigation, and differential calculus would be facts of common knowledge to the school-going world.
10. Expansion of the Mind.
It would be clear to the most ordinary mind that the progress of the nineteenth century and the two decades of the twentieth in discoveries and inventions is a unique phenomenon in the history of six millenniums. But the West as well as the East had been equally primitive, or pre-"scientific" and pre-"industrial" down to nearly the end of the eighteenth century, if judged by the standard of to-day. The economic, political, military, social and domestic polities of the West prior to the industrial revolution did not differ, except superficially and in a few trifling incidents, from the contemporary institutions obtaining in Asia.
The time-sense and space-sense of the learners would thus be materially widened, and the whole intellectual horizon and mental outlook acquire an expansion, when the bounds of human knowledge are extended beyond its traditionally recognized limits, when "new men, strange faces, other minds" are treated as cooperators in the quest of truth and in the service of humanity. The liberalization produced thereby would be not only an important achievement in itself but have a far-reaching practical significance as well.
The "comparative method" in school and university instruction is sure to bring in its train a toleration of views, sanity of temperament, and a "transvaluation of values," leading necessarily to the overthrow of prejudices, superstitions and "idolas." The so-called "Oriental Question" would then appear to be, what it really is, a foster-child of ignorance and misunderstanding. If the solution of "race problems" of the complicated international questions affecting the relations between the East and the West, is ever to be effective at all, it can be achieved only by such a thorough-going liberalization of pedagogics as is being suggested here. For, taking human nature as it is, Occidental "sympathy" and charity, which occasionally embody themselves in the founding of schools, libraries and hospitals in the Orient, however well-meaning they be, can at best but add insult to injury, and remain a grievous wound in the heart of helpless but now self-conscious Young Asia.
The peculiar "logic" of the Occident with regard to the Orient, which has been engendered in the nineteenth century by the natural and pardonable vanity of success since the industrial revolution, has to be entirely changed. Eur-American mind must be trained to receive Oriental culture on the only terms which ensure the dignity of the Orientals as colleagues of the Occidentals in the past, and as collaborators with them in the future advancement of the human race. There is no greater and more serious problem than this to which the science of education has to address itself at the present day. The maintenance of world's peace will depend ultimately upon the schoolmaster and university professor.
11. A Call to Cosmopolitanism.
It is this sentiment of Young Asia that the delegate from Japan voiced at the Congress of Versailles by categorically demanding the recognition of the principle of race-equality in international relations. Behind this claim of Japan's lies the moral support of the entire Orient from Tokio to Cairo. Indeed, Japanese statesmen have only brought to the forefront in political sphere what Young Asia claims in all spheres of human activity, cultural and social, as well as economic and political. Thus has formally been issued what is virtually Asia's challenge and ultimatum to the combined intelligence, diplomacy, and foresight of the western world for the next quarter of a century.
The New Asia wants the New Europe and the New America to admit, as principle, that their peoples must not by any means command greater privileges in the Orient than the oriental peoples can possibly possess within the bounds of the Occident. In other words, Asians must by law be entitled to enjoy the same rights in Eur-America as Eur-Americans have been enjoying in Asia. This doctrine of international reciprocity is the first article of faith in the gospel of Young Asia. And it should not seem strange to Christendom, accustomed, as it professes to be, to the "golden rule" enunciated by St. Luke.
It is notorious, however, that during the nineteenth century and the past few years of the twentieth both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat of Eur-America had been misguided by the overbearing logic of the "white man's burthen" as manifest in their treatment of the Orient. They had lorded it over on the false pretension that the occidental races are not only different from but superior to the oriental. Nay, they had proceeded so far on the ground of alleged unassimilability as to enact discriminative and humiliating legislation maliciously excluding Asians from Eur-American colonies and homelands. Too long has oriental humanity submitted to all this injustice perpetrated by the dominant "albinocracy." The world is in need of a revolution in morals, manners and sentiments, an ethical and psychological risorgimiento that would purge the Occident of its superstition and race-prejudice. It is to supply this want of Europe and America that the militant nationalism of Young Asia has been evolving a new philosophy of world-culture and new organon of social science.
Young Asia wants Eur-America to remember the historical fact that the duration and extent of oriental aggressions into Europe have been greater than those of European into Asia.
Young Asia wants Eur-America to realize that democratic emotions and ideals are not the monopoly of occidental race-psychology. Mohammedans learn from their Koran that "the hand of God is with the multitude." Chinese have their Rousseau in Mencius who declared that "the most important element in the state is the people, next come the altars of the national gods, least in importance is the king." And the Hindu mind nurtured on the tradition of the Mahâbhârata, the "Great Epic," is bent on active resistance to arbitrary rulers, not stopping short of the execution of the tyrant. It is well known, besides, that during the age of Periclean Athens there were no nationalities in Europe more democratic than the Sakiya, Republic, the United States of the Vajjians, and several other republican communities organized by the people of India.
Young Asia wants Eur-America to ponder over the facts that the sciences of arithmetic and algebra, without which no secondary education can be complete in the Occident are the finished products of the oriental brain and that the Orient was never more superstitious than Christendom with its alchemistic hocus-pocus, physiological humors, barber-surgeons, talismans, charms, prayers and fetishes that are said to counteract disease.
Young Asia wants Eur-America to understand, further, that today the "ideas of 1789" and 1848, the socialistic economics of Karl Marx and Louis Blanc, the philosophic radicalism of John Stuart Mill, the nationalistic idealism of Joseph Mazzini, nay, the Bolshevistic politics of Lenin and Trotzky are not more active in the West than in the East as liberalizing forces, and finally, that spiritual fathers of the New Orient like Saiyed Jamaluddin of Persia (the inspirer of Pan-Islam), Kang Yu-wei (the St. John the Baptist of Chinese constitutionalism), Prince Ito (the Bismarck of modern Japan,) and Mohandas Gandhi (the Napoleon of Revolutionary India) have achieved as great a result in making the world tend towards and aspire after political emancipation, economic freedom, and social justice as would be possible for the greatest and ablest Western agitator, propagandist, organizer, or statesman under the same milieu of alien rule or "sphere of influence" and foreign exploitation.
In approaching the problems, movements and methods of the East, therefore, the Western liberals and lovers of liberty, justice and truth should not feel as if they were going to tackle altogether unknown phenomena, totally different from their own standpoints and attitudes, but proceed according to the dictum of Lowell's "true man." The soul-inspiring words of this Yankee prophet are well known. Here follows one verse:
"Where'er a human heart doth wear
Joy's myrtle-wreath or sorrow's gyves,
Where'er a human spirit strives
After a life more true and fair,
There is the true man's birthplace grand
His is a world-wide fatherland!"
It is only when this spirit prevails that the chauvinistic idolas of "colonialism" will become things of the past.
12. The Message of Equality.
We are not going to claim for the Asians the credit for initiating all the factors of human progress, or the monopoly of all the great discoveries which have made civilization what it is. We do not claim for the people of Asia, whether historically or psychologically, greater intellectuality or greater spirituality than for the rest of mankind.
Our claims are not so pretentious or absurd. The sole thesis is that the Orientals have served mankind with the same idealism, the same energy, the same practical good sense, and the same strenuousness, as have the Greeks, Romans and Eur-Americans, that the Orientals have been as optimistic, active and aggressive in promoting social well-being and advancing spiritual interests as have the other races, that the Orientals have developed ideas, ideals and institutions which are analogues, if not, in many cases, almost duplicates or replicas of the ideas, ideals, and institutions of the rest of humanity, and that superstitious ceremonies and observances have had the same pragmatic significance for the folks of the Christian Occident as of the "heathen" Orient. Asian culture, again, is not all original creation of indigenous Oriental intellect, but, to a great extent, the result also of conscious adaptation, imitation or assimilation from extra-Asian sources, like other culture-systems of the world. Lastly, the animality or materialism of the Asians has not been less in intensity or extensity than that of the Europeans and Americans.
In short, the Orientals are men; their successes and failures are the successes and failures of human beings. They should therefore be judged by the same standard by which the tribulations, lapses, weaknesses, falterings, and triumphs of Eur-American humanity are measured. That is, they are to be tried not by an impossible static standard of the ideal conditions in a utopia, but by the dynamic historical standard which suits the conditions of the ever-varying, ever-struggling, ever-failing, ever-succeeding, part-brute, part-god animal called Man. The culture-anthropologist must have to be honest enough to say with Walt Whitman:
"In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them."