The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1893-10-22

The Serene Calm of the Oriental
Mind Is Due to Its View of Death.

Edwin Arnold.
AS to this aspect of the question. Asia
from which you have derived all your past
religious ideas, and from which you have
many more to learn--is far in advance of
our o.! West st. Paufs great declaration,
THE things seen are temporal; the things
not seen are eternal'-accepted here tim
idly by the pious, but regarded as a mere
phrase by materialists-is in India a COM
monplace of daily certainty.
Nobody there doubts the continuity of life,
any more than he doubts that the setting
row. L have heard Mahratta woman,
while chiding her child for splitting milk.
exclaim, You must have been very bad
girl in your last life!' The popular rea-
why lIindoo widows do not remarry is
because the loss of a betrOthed or welded
husband is looked upon as the fatal expia-
ton for some extreme offense in a previ-
Gus existence, to be borne with patient con-
Thence in this one; on which condition the
family of the deceased husband will faith
fully maintain the widow, as still belonging
to the dead man, and to be surely reunited
with him.
The East is saturated with the mental
and social results of this universal accept
ance of the notion that individual life is
inextinguishable. A dignifed calm spreads
throughout the Oriental populationS-a per-
manent uninquiring placidity-noticeable by
the most careless or prejudiced eye. India
would never indeed have invented the loco
motive or the Calling gun, but her poorest
peasants, by inheritance from profound
philosophers, and by the religious atmos--
phere OF their land, stand at a point of
view far beyond the labored subtleties of
Priestley or a Hegel. And if they could be
familiar, as you are, with the splendid
ern science they would not any the more
abandon their fixed faith in the unseen and
unknown. Rather would they think 1T odd
that Western savants should teach the
laws of the conservation of forces, to
abandon it when the. highest and most
elaborated of all forces come into question;
that they should study cell-life under their
microscopes and not perceive that the
same protamoeba they examine-that
shapeless jelly-has been living 10000 years
as certainly forty minutes; that an illus
trious chemist like Professor Dewar should
compress the air we breathe into sky
blue liquor and when he lets 1t loose again
fail to suggest to his audience that what
their eyes see of the real life and furni-
ture of the universe is next to nothing.
boggled, like ours. over that silly word
supernatural The Upanishad says:
What is in the visible exists also in the
invisible. and what. is in Brahms world.
that is also here" The ultimate, albeit
perceived unreachable, is real to the
Asatic mind as rice; and in the Bhagavad
hold the embodied Infinite.
Indeed, it is rather this present exist
ence which India regards as the illusion.
the Maya. To see the stars we must wait
for night, and to live we must die.
i do not presume to say that Asia is
wiser than Europe or than our illus
her children live more happily and die
more easily; Since it is not the eye eye
self behind those instruments, they be-
lieve in that SELF and discount by peace
it's assured perpetuity. Masters of meta
physics, they sweep the puzzle of being
aside with decisive maxim: Never
can the thought know the thinker" OF
that which daunts and troubles us, the
boIfndlesS mystery of the universe, their
quiet genius has made a daily delight,
congenial to the limited powers but illmit-
able desires of the ever-awaiting soul.
They have perceived, without seeking to ex-
plain, the two supreme celestial laws that
govern the COSmuS-Dnarma, which is love,
and karma, which is justice. By light of
these they have partly discerned how, un-
der an immutable and sometimes seeming
ly pitiless equity all things will advance
best until il be time for new and higher
order
"Ahinsa," therefore. 1.-The doing no in
jury" is their central commandment, as it
was that of Christ in the golden rule
and as it is the last word of Hafiz in his
Persian verse:
do one wrong, and then do what thou
wilt;
My statutes recognize no other guilt
They await death not as some of US do,
ike complaining prisoners under a tyran-
meal sentence without appeal. attending
with gloomy courage the last day in this
condemned cell, the flesh, but rather glad
children of a great mother whose will is
sweet and good whose ways wise,
and who will lull them to the kind, brief
sleep of death, by the bye, in order that
they may wake ready for happier life i'm
the new sunshine of another and larger
daylight.