17 THE HINDU ASCETICS

Chapter 17 THE HINDU ASCETICS

ALL the travelers and tourists who have recorded their experiences of India mention the strange, fantastic, ochre habited ascetics who are met with in town and village, by the roadside and at fairs nay, even in the modern railway station, where they seem strangely out of place. But few have cared to cultivate their more intimate acquaintance; they have little in them that is attractive to the Western eye, and often appear absolutely repulsive. Yet, to a missionary at least, there is a fascination about them. They embody the religious ideals of the East, and carry one back to the hoary past, long before Alexander marched into India, when the same enigmas of life were puzzling the mystical mind of the East, and the same Sadhus were seeking their solution in her trackless jungles and beside her mighty rivers. Sadhus, I say, because then there were no faqirs. Faqirs are of comparatively recent origin, dating from the time of the Muhammadan invasions, about the tenth century of our era. Now the distinction is often lost sight of. The word " faqir " is an Arabic one, and denotes a Muhammadan ascetic; while the word " Sadhu " is Sanskrit, and is best retained for the Hindu ascetic. The Muhammadan faqir is altogether different from the Hindu Sadhu in his motives, his ideals, his habits, his dress in fact, in nearly everything; yet contact with the Hindu Sadhus has had a profound effect upon him, and their philosophies have colored his religious ideas. The Hindus have, on their part too, not been unaffected by the influx oi Muhammadans, bringing their new monotheistic ideas, and some of the Hindu orders appear to be attempts to graft the Muslim monotheism on to the mystical Hindu pantheism. This is seen most developed in the Kabir Panthis and the various orders originating from Guru Nanak. A desire to propitiate and attract their Muhammadan conquerors was probably not wanting in the moulding of these new orders; indeed, Kabir and Guru Nanak seem to have had visions of elaborating a creed in which Muhammadan and Hindu could unite together. The Indian religious ideal has always been ascetic and despondent: ascetic, perhaps, because life seemed sad and hopeless. On the other hand, the Western ideal is an altruistic and optimistic one. The young missionary, who very likely appeared to his sympathetic friends in England to be making great sacrifices in order to go " to preach the Gospel to the heathen," sometimes ignorantly imagines that the people round him in India will recognize what he has denied himself in order to come among them, and will respect him in due proportion. Poor deluded man! The modern Christian in England has not even learnt the alphabet of austerities and self-denials practiced in the name of religion, of which the Indians are past masters. He appears to them as one of the ruling race,surrounded by the comforts and luxuries of a house, many servants, books, flowers, photographs, pictures, and the various little creations of civilization, which custom has made the Western no longer to look on as superfluous articles of luxury! Their ideal has been nearer that of the Swami, who had so overcome the bonds of the flesh that he required neither clothes nor viands, but sat nude and impassive, maintaining his vitality on an occasional banana or mango ! Should the missionary try to accommodate himself to the Eastern ideal, and forego many things that are lawful to him in order to gain more influence with the people for his message? Every Indian missionary has probably asked himself this question at some period of his career. At one time such questionings forced themselves on me with great importunity. There seemed such a gulf between myself, in my comfortable house, surrounded by so many conveniences, and the poor people around me. The multitudinous administrative duties of the missionary in charge of a station seemed to leave so little time for spiritual dealings with inquirers, and at the end of a long day weariness made it difficult to maintain that very essential equipment of every missionary, "a heart at leisure from itself to soothe and sympathize."

Then I had a desire to learn more about these men, who might be supposed to represent the embodiment of the religious ideals of the East. The best way seemed to be to adopt their dress and habits, and travel about among them for a time. A young Afghan, who was a pupil of mine and a Muhammadan student in the school, begged to be allowed to accompany me as a chela, or disciple. As the time at my disposal was limited, it would not have been possible to visit many of the places where Sadhus most do congregate had we confined ourselves to the more orthodox method of progression on foot, so we decided to ride our bicycles. This did not seem to affect the reception we met with from the fraternity in fact, it is not at all uncommon to see Sadhus riding; often pious Hindus seek to gain merit for themselves by providing them with the means for doing so. When we left Bannu, we took no money with us ; but we seldom were in want, as we received ungrudging hospitality from Hindus, Muhammadans, and Christians alike. The ochre-colored garments are sufficient passport all over India, and people give alms and offer hospitality without requiring further evidence of the genuineness of the claims of the applicant on their charity. In fact, unless the Sadhu is of known bad character, the Hindu would gain his end that of acquiring merit by almsgiving as much by giving to one as another ; and he would be very unhappy were he not afforded these opportunities of keeping up the credit side of his account, all the more if his gains are ill-gotten, or he is conscious of some underhand dealings which require corresponding acts of merit to balance them.

One of the most interesting places we visited was Hardwar, the holy bathing-place on the Ganges, which is visited by tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims from every part of India every year, and the neighbouring Sadhu colony of Rishikes. The latter is a village inhabited only by the Sanzasis and other Sadhus, who have built themselves grass huts in a very picturesque spot, where the Ganges River emerges from the Himalaya Mountains, and commences its long course through the densely-populated plains of India. It is at Hardwar that the great Ganges Canal, one of the great engineering feats of the British rule, has been taken from the river to vivify thousands of acres of good land in the United Provinces to the south, and supply their teeming populations with bread. A little above the town of Rurki a massive aqueduct carries the whole volume of the canal high above a river flowing beneath, and yet higher up two river-beds are conducted over the canal, which passes beneath them. The uniqueness of this piece of engineering is dependent on two other factors the crystalline limpidity of the blue water and the glorious scenery which forms a setting to all.

I no longer needed to inquire why the common consent of countless generations of Hindus had made this neighborhood their Holy Land ; the appropriateness of it flashed on my mind the moment the glorious vista opened before me. There beyond me were the majestic Himalayas, the higher ranges clothed in the purest dazzling white, emblem of the Great Eternal Purity, looking down impassive on all the vicissitudes of puny man, enacting his drama of life with a selfish meanness so sordid in contrast with that spotless purity ; and yet not unmoved, for is there not a stream of life-giving water ever issuing from those silent solitudes, without which the very springs of man’s existence would dry up and wither ? And then, in the nearer distance, the lower ranges clothed in the richest verdure of the primeval forest, vast tracts not yet subdued by the plough of man, where the religious devotee can strive to rise from Nature to Nature’s God, amid those solitudes and recesses where no handiwork of man distracts the soul from the contemplation of the illimitable and mysterious First Cause.

While looking down from the elevation of the canal, there was spread out at our feet a bucolic scene of peace and plenty, where villages and hamlets, surrounded by green fields and cultivation, lay scattered among sylvan glades, drinking in vivifying streams which had journeyed down by chasm and defile, through valley and meadow, from those distant solitudes.

How natural it seemed that in those early Vedic ages, when the reverence for the forces of Nature was still unsullied by the man-worship engendered by the development of his inventive genius, this vast cathedral of God’s own architecture should have been made the chosen place of worship of the race, where the more devout spirits strove not only to worship and adore, but to shake off the trammels of a mere mundane corporal existence, till the spirit was as free as the birds in the air around, as clear from earthly dross as the limpid waters below, and as integral a part of the great eternal whole as Nature around, so diverse in its manifestations, yet knitted together in one congruous whole by a pervading and uniform natural law. But facilis descensus Averni! How often the most glorious inspirations are dragged down and down till they sub-serve the basest instincts of man ! So here a little farther on at Hardwar we were to have the spiritual elation engendered by the natural scene cruelly shattered by a sight of the vileness and sordidness of the most repulsive aspects of humanity, and by realizing how the most Divine conceptions can be dragged down and abased to pander to all that is brutal and evil in man. Not, of course, that all the Sadhus at Hardwar and Rishikes have debased their holy profession. Many among them, as I shall shortly describe, are as earnest seekers after Divine illumination as could be met with in any country; but, by one of those strange paradoxes so common in the East, they live side by side with the basest charlatans and the most immoral caricatures of their own ideals without evincing any consciousness of the impropriety of it, or resentment at their profession being thus debased before the public eye. The individualistic idea eclipses that of the public weal, and each is so intent on perfecting his own salvation, and drawing himself nearer, step by step, to his goal of absorption in the Eternal Spirit, that he has come to forget that man has a duty to those around him from which he cannot absolve himself. St. Paul tells us, "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself." The Sadhu says each unit is only concerned in building up its own karma, or balance of good and evil actions, whereby it must work out its own destiny regardless of the weal and woe of those around. The Hindu idea connects the soul with those other souls before and behind it in a long concatenation of births; the Christian idea connects the soul with the other souls around it, contemporaneous with its own corporeal existence, and linked with it by the good and evil vibrations of its own vitality. Thus the vista of the Sadhu is always introspective, even to a vesting of the natural vital functions of the body with spiritual significations, which require the most laborious practisings and purifications to make them all sub-serve his great ideal of absolute subjection of the body to the spirit. The vista of the Christian missionary and philanthropist is extrospective, seeking to make his own life a means for elevating spiritually and materially the lives of those around him, and disciplining his own body and soul rather, that he may thereby more effectually further this end. " For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified." A constant stream of pilgrims is ever passing through the bazaar of Hardwar to and from that particular part of the river, the water of which is supposed to possess a superlative sanctity. Here they bring the calcined bones and ashes of their dead relations, and there is ever a stream of pious Hindus bringing these doleful relics for consignment to the sacred stream. As I looked down into the crystal waters I could see the fragments of white bones lying about on the pebbles beneath, with the fish playing in and out among them. Strange commingling of life and death ! And this has been going on at this spot for three thousand years, for woe to the Hindu who has no son to perform his funeral rites, no relative to bring his ashes to the cleansing waters of the mighty Ganges ! His soul will wander about restlessly, and the sequence of its reincarnations leading to its ultimate absorption in the Eternal Spirit, will be hampered and retarded! There they fill the glass bottles of all sizes, which they have brought for the purpose, and then place them in wicker baskets on the two ends of a bamboo pole, which is balanced over the shoulder, and with which they will often travel hundreds of miles on foot till they reach their destination. If the Hindu for whom the water is being obtained is well-to-do, he will have the water fetched with great pomp and ceremony, ringing of bells, playing of instruments, and chanting of mantras, while the baskets containing the water are gorgeously decorated, and a servant is deputed to fan the aqueous god as he is borne along. Probably the Hindu would grudge a tenth part of the cost to purify or amplify the water-supply of his own village !

Naturally the town drives a thriving trade in the bamboo rods, baskets, bottles, and all appurtenances of the mighty pilgrimage. The bazaar is crowded with monkeys, the feeding of which affords boundless opportunities to pious Hindus for accumulating merit. These favors the monkeys repay by surreptitiously snatching sweetmeats and fruits from the open shop-fronts and darting off with the booty to the roofs of the shops opposite, where they devour them in quiet with sly winks and leers at the luckless shopkeeper. Though inwardly wrathful, he cannot retaliate on the sacred animals, lest he be dubbed a heretic and his trade depart. Here, too, we see everywhere exemplified the irrepressible faculty of the Hindu for worshiping anything which can possibly be made into an object of veneration.

Probably all the world through, no race is to be found so bent on turning all the events and circumstances of life into religious acts of worship. If anything or anyone is preeminently good or pre-eminently bad, or has any particular quality, good or evil, developed to excess, or is a monstrosity in any way, then he or it is sure to become an object of worship. A Hindu addicted to wine-bibbing will sometimes turn his drinking orgy into an act of religious worship, in which the wine-bottle is set up on a pedestal and duly garlanded, apostrophized, and adored. A Sadhu may be a notoriously bad man, but if his vices have given him a preeminence over his fellow-men, he will find multitudes of Hindus, men and women, who will regard them only as so many proofs of his divinity, and worship him accordingly. It is not that the Hindu does not recognize or reprobate vice, he does both; but, then, he holds the idea that spirit is eternally pure and good, and matter eternally gross and evil, and that if a Sadhu attains the stage where spirit has triumphed over body, his actions become divorced from ethics, and are no longer to be judged as though his spirit was capable of contamination from the acts of its earthly tabernacle.

Hence it is that the stories of the Hindu divinities, which seem to us distinctly immoral, do not strike the pantheistic Hindu mind as such, for ethics have ceased to be a concern to one whose austerities have won for him union with the Divine Essence. Here in Hardwar was a weird collection of bovine monstrosities cows with three horns, one eye, or a hideous tumor; calves with two heads or two bodies. These were paraded forth by their fortunate possessors, who reaped a good harvest of coins from the devout visitors, who worshiped them as illustrations of the vagaries of divinity, and hoped, by offering them alms, to propitiate their destinies.

Rishikes, the city of the Sadhus, is eighteen miles higher up the river from Hardwar, and the road lies through a dense forest. The road is only a rough track, but pious Hindus have erected temples and rest-houses at short intervals, where travelers can spend the night and get refreshment. After proceeding some distance through the forest I met a Brahman journeying the same way with a heavily-laden pony. The pony was obstreperous, and the luggage kept falling off, so the Brahman gladly accepted the offer of my assistance, and after repacking the luggage in a securer manner we got along very well. The Brahman beguiled the time by telling me histories of the past glories of the Rishis of the Himalayas, and how the spread of infidelity and cow-killing was undermining the fabric of Hinduism. False Sadhus and Sanyasis from the lower non-Brahman castes were crowding into their ranks for the sake of an easier living, till it was almost impossible to distinguish the true from the false, and a bad name was brought upon all.

Any Hindu of the three upper castes may become a Sadhu, and should, according to Manu’s code, become a Sanyasi in his later years. But he does not thereby attain to the sanctity of a Brahman, and the Brahnians have many stories to relate to show how many have undergone extreme austerities and bodily afflictions in order to obtain spiritual power, and have thereby gained great gifts from the gods, but without attaining the coveted sanctity of the born Brahman. The sun had already set, and the forest path was becoming difficult to follow in the gathering gloom when we reached a clearing with a temple and a few cottages built round it, so we decided to spend the night there. Through the kind offices of the Brahman, I was given a small room adjoining the temple, on the stone floor of which I spread my blanket, and prepared to make myself comfortable for the night. I had consumed my supper of bread and pulse, and given the remnants to the temple cow, and settled myself to sleep, when I was roused by a fearful din. The temple in which I had found refuge was dedicated to Vishnu and Lakshmi, and their full-size images, dressed up in gaudy tinsel, were within. The time for their evening meal had arrived, but the gods were asleep, and the violent tomtoming and clashing of cymbals which awoke me so suddenly was really intended to make the drowsy gods bestir themselves to partake of the supper which their worshipers had reverently brought them. When the gods were thoroughly roused, and the dainty food had been set before them, the priest proceeded to fan them with some peacocks’ feathers while the meal might be imagined to be in course of consumption, and meanwhile the worshipers bowed themselves on the floor before them, prostrating themselves with arms and legs extended on the stones and foreheads in the dust, the more zealous continuing their prostrations as long as the meal lasted. In these prostrations eight parts of the body have to touch the ground the forehead, breast, hands, knees, and insteps and I have seen pilgrims traveling towards a holy place some hundreds of miles distant by continuous prostrations of this kind, the feet being brought up to where the hands were, and the prostration repeated, and thus the whole distance measured out by interminable prostrations. This formidable austerity may take years, but will gain the performer great sanctity and power with the gods whose shrine he thus visits. The meal over, the worshipers knelt reverently in line, and received a few drops each of the water left over, and a few grains of corn that had been sanctified by being part of the meal of the gods, taking them from the priest in their open palm, and drinking the water and eating the corn with raptures of pleasure and renewed prostrations. One could not but be forcibly reminded of a somewhat ceremonious celebration of the Christian Eucharist. This over, the worshipers departed, the gods were gently fanned to sleep, the priest and the most substantial part of the dinner were left alone, and I became oblivious. The next morning the Brahman and I were up betimes, and girded ourselves for the accomplishment of the nine miles of forest which still lay between us and our destination, before reaching which we had to ford several small rivers. However, the rays of the sun had scarcely become pleasantly warm when we found ourselves elbowing our way through the Sadhus and pilgrims who were crowding the small but striking bazaar of Rishikes. This place has so little in common with the world in general, is so diverse from all one’s preconceived notions and ideas, its mental atmosphere departs so far from the ordinary human standard, that it is hard to know whether to describe it in the ordinary terms of human experience, or whether to look on it as a weird dream of the bygone ages of another world. As for myself, I had not been wandering among its ochre-habited devotees for a quarter of an hour before my mind involuntarily reverted to a time, many years past, when I was a student of mental disease in Bethlem Hospital, and to a dream I had had at that time, when I imagined I found myself an inmate, no longer as a psychological student, but with the indescribably uncanny feeling, "I am one of them myself. Now these madmen around me are only counterparts of myself." So now, as some of these forms of voluntary self-torture and eccentricity, nudity, or ash-besmeared bodies, aroused feelings of abhorrence, I had to check myself with the thought: " But you yourself are one of them too : these weird Sadhus are your accepted brothers in uniform." And so the illusion continued so long as I moved among them, and when finally I left Rishikes behind me, it was like waking from some nightmare.

Accompany me round the imaginary wards, and we will first visit that for imbeciles. We find most of them sitting out in the jungle under trees or mats, avoiding the proximity of their fellow-creatures, recoiling from any intrusion on their privacy, preserving a vacuous expression and an unbroken silence, resenting any effort to draw them into conversation or to break into the impassivity of their abstraction. They do not look up as you approach ; they offer you no sign of recognition; whether you seat yourself or remain standing, they show no consciousness of your presence. Flies may alight on their faces, but still their eyes remain fixed on the tip of their noses, and their hands remain clasping their crossed legs. They have sought to obtain fusion with the Eternal Spirit by cultivating an ecstatic vacuity of mind, and have fallen into the error of imagining that the material part of their nature can be etherealized by merely ignoring it, until the process of atrophy from disuse often proceeds so far that there is no mind left to be etherealized at all, and there is little left to distinguish them from one of those demented unfortunates who have been deprived by disease of that highest ornament of humanity.

Leaving these, let us proceed to the ward set apart for delusional insanity. The first Sadhu tells you that he is possessed by a spirit which forbids him to eat except every third day. Another avers that he is in reality a cow in human form, and therefore must eat nothing but grass and roots. A third I found sitting in nudity and arrogance on his grass mat, and repeating sententiously time after time : " I am God, I am God !" I remember a patient at Bethlem whose delusion was that he was himself the superintendent of the asylum, the one sane man among all the mad, and he went round the ward pointing out to me each patient with the remark : " He is mad quite mad. He, too, he also is mad," and so on. But I was much surprised to meet the same gentleman here. He was in the form of a Bengali Babu, a B.A. of the Calcutta University, and had held high posts under Government ; but now, in later life, in dissatisfaction with the world at large, had thrown it all up and sought in the garb of a Sanyasi recluse at Rishikes for that peace which an office and Babudom can never afford.

Recognizing me as a novice, he took me by the arm, saying in English (which in itself seemed strange and out of place amid these surroundings) : " Come along ; I explain to you jolly well all the show." We strolled in and out among the various groups of Sadhtis, and at each new form of Sadhuism he would deliver himself after this manner . " See this man he is a humbug, pure humbug. See that man lying on all the sharp stones he is a humbug. Look at these here humbugs ! There, that man, reciting the mantras he pure humbug. All these humbugs !" and so on.

Here is the section for the study and practice of hypnotism. These yogis maintain that by a knowledge of the spiritual states engendered by various samadhs or contorted positions of the body and legs, and by elaborate breathing exercises, they are able to subdue the unruly and material currents of the bodily senses and the brain, and tap that inner source of spiritual knowledge and divinity which makes them ipso facto masters of all knowledge, able to commune at will with the Deity Himself. The contortions into which they are able to thrust their limbs, and the length of time that they are able to sit impassive and imperturbable in what appear to be the most painfully constrained postures, show that years of practice, commenced when the joints and sinews are supple, must be required for the attainment of this ecstatic state. There can be no doubt, I think, that masters do exercise the power of hypnotism on their clielas, and are thereby able to perform painful operations on them (such as piercing various parts of their anatomy with iron skewers) without their wincing or showing visible signs of pain. Other practices which these yogis have been carrying on for centuries in their haunts in the Himalayas remind one forcibly of the modus operandi of the Western hypnotist, and no doubt both attain success through a knowledge, empirical though it may be, of the same psycho-physiological laws.

Leaving these, let us examine some of the cases of mania a few of them acute, others more or less chronic, or passing on into a drivelling dementia. Here is a man quite naked, except for the white ashes rubbed over his dusky body, who, with long dishevelled locks and wild expression, hurries up and down the bazaar barking like a dog, and making it his boast never to use intelligible language. Another, after painting his naked body partly white and partly black, has tied all the little bits of rag he has picked up in the road to various parts of his person. A third has adorned his filthy, mud-covered body with wild-flowers, whose varying beauty, now withering in the noonday sun, seems a picture of how his mind and conscience, once the glory of his manhood, have now faded into a shadow. Another is lying by choice in the mud by the roadside, to be fouled by the dust of the passers-by, and almost trampled on by the cows, hoping by this abject affectation of humility to be thought the greater saint. For, by a curious paradox, it is often those who make the greatest display of humility and subjection of the passions who show the greatest sensitiveness to public opinion of their sanctity, and quite fail in concealing their jealousy when some other Sadhu outdoes them, and gains the greater meed of public admiration.

There is another man to be seen wandering aimlessly about and picking up bits of filth and ordure, and putting them in his mouth and chewing them. But to give a further account of these caricatures of humanity would be loathsome to the reader, as their contemplation became to me the more so as the thought kept recurring to my mind, " And you are one of them, too, now "; and who knows to what point the imitative faculty of man, that contagion of the mind, may not raise or lower him ? By this time, however, the long fast and the fresh, keen air from the Ganges made me begin to wonder how I was going to satisfy a call from within. It was now close on midday, and I saw the Sadhus collecting round certain houses with bowls, gourds, and other receptacles. These were the kitchens established by pious Hindus of various parts of India with the object of acquiring sufficient merit to counterpoise their demerits the bribery, chicanery, and lying of their offices, or the more covert sins of their private life. A rich Hindu may establish a kitchen in his own name alone, but more often a number unite together to form a guild to keep the kitchen going, and the merit is portioned out like the dividends of a joint-stock company to its shareholders. There were some twenty or more of such kitchens here, in each of which three chapattis and a modicum of dal, potatoes, greens, or some other vegetable were given ; and there was nothing to debar a Sadhu from going to as many kitchens as he desired in fact, he knew he was conferring a benefit on the shareholders by consuming their victuals and supplying them thereby with merit. The gnawing pangs of hunger made me mingle with the shoving, jostling throng, and hurry from kitchen to kitchen till I had accumulated nine chapattis, and vegetables in proportion. Modesty then made me withdraw, but not so most of my companions. One of these who rejoined me a little later had been to eight kitchens, and brought a supply of twenty -four chapattis, and a large bowl of dal, potatoes, and other vegetables. The custom of the place then required me to descend to the margin of the Ganges, and, squatting on a stone which was lapped by its pellucid waters, to consume my portion with draughts of the holy water. But not without a preliminary ceremony, for while the Sadhus had been collecting round the kitchens, the cows and bulls had been collecting on the banks of the river, and it was de rigueur first to set aside three portions, and give one to these holy animals, a second portion to the birds in the air, and a third to the fish in the river, after which the remainder, whether one chapatti or twenty, might be consumed with an easy conscience and a courageous digestion.