บทที่ บทที่ 3 · THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why

there is imperfection, or, in other words, why there is creation

at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be

otherwise; that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and

that it is futile to ask the question, Why we are?

But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this

imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate? The

river has its boundaries, its banks, but is a river all banks? or

are the banks the final facts about the river? Do not these

obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion? The

towing rope binds a boat, but is the bondage its meaning? Does

it not at the same time draw the boat forward?

The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could

have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries

which restrain it, but in its movement, which is towards

perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and

sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order,

beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that man has

in his being is the wonder of all wonders. He has felt in the

depths of his life that what appears as imperfect is the

manifestation of the perfect; just as a man who has an ear for

music realises the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only

listening to a succession of notes. Man has found out the great

paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits;

it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every

moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness;

finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but

completeness manifested in parts, infinity revealed within

bounds.

Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in

our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with

it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of

creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go

through the history of the development of science is to go

through the maze of mistakes it made current at different times.

Yet no one really believes that science is the one perfect mode

of disseminating mistakes. The progressive ascertainment of

truth is the important thing to remember in the history of

science, not its innumerable mistakes. Error, by its nature,

cannot be stationary; it cannot remain with truth; like a tramp,

it must quit its lodging as soon as it fails to pay its score to

the full.

As in intellectual error, so in evil of any other form, its

essence is impermanence, for it cannot accord with the whole.

Every moment it is being corrected by the totality of things and

keeps changing its aspect. We exaggerate its importance by

imagining it as a standstill. Could we collect the statistics of

the immense amount of death and putrefaction happening every

moment in this earth, they would appal us. But evil is ever

moving; with all its incalculable immensity it does not

effectually clog the current of our life; and we find that the

earth, water, and air remain sweet and pure for living beings.

All statistics consist of our attempts to represent statistically

what is in motion; and in the process things assume a weight in

our mind which they have not in reality. For this reason a man,

who by his profession is concerned with any particular aspect of

life, is apt to magnify its proportions; in laying undue stress

upon facts he loses his hold upon truth. A detective may have

the opportunity of studying crimes in detail, but he loses his

sense of their relative places in the whole social economy. When

science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence

that is going on in the kingdom of life, it raises a picture in

our minds of "nature red in tooth and claw." But in these mental

pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really

evanescent. It is like calculating the weight of the air on each

square inch of our body to prove that it must be crushingly heavy

for us. With every weight, however, there is an adjustment, and

we lightly bear our burden. With the struggle for existence in

nature there is reciprocity. There is the love for children and

for comrades; there is the sacrifice of self, which springs from

love; and this love is the positive element in life.

If we kept the search-light of our observation turned upon the

fact of death, the world would appear to us like a huge

charnel-house; but in the world of life the thought of death has, we

find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is

the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of

life; just as, in spite of the fact that we shut our eyelids

every second, it is the openings of the eye that count. Life as

a whole never takes death seriously. It laughs, dances and

plays, it builds, hoards and loves in death's face. Only when we

detach one individual fact of death do we see its blankness and

become dismayed. We lose sight of the wholeness of a life of

which death is part. It is like looking at a piece of cloth

through a microscope. It appears like a net; we gaze at the big

holes and shiver in imagination. But the truth is, death is not

the ultimate reality. It looks black, as the sky looks blue; but

it does not blacken existence, just as the sky does not leave its

stain upon the wings of the bird.

When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless

failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our

observation within a narrow space of time, the sight would be

cruel. But we find that in spite of its repeated failures there

is an impetus of joy in the child which sustains it in its

seemingly impossible task. We see it does not think of its falls

so much as of its power to keep its balance though for only a

moment.

Like these accidents in a child's attempts to walk, we meet with

sufferings in various forms in our life every day, showing the

imperfections in our knowledge and our available power, and in

the application of our will. But if these revealed our weakness

to us only, we should die of utter depression. When we select

for observation a limited area of our activities, our individual

failures and miseries loom large in our minds; but our life leads

us instinctively to take a wider view. It gives us an ideal of

perfection which ever carries us beyond our present limitations.

Within us we have a hope which always walks in front of our

present narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the

infinite in us; it will never accept any of our disabilities as a

permanent fact; it sets no limit to its own scope; it dares to

assert that man has oneness with God; and its wild dreams become

true every day.

We see the truth when we set our mind towards the infinite. The

ideal of truth is not in the narrow present, not in our immediate

sensations, but in the consciousness of the whole which give us a

taste of what we _should_ have in what we _do_ have. Consciously

or unconsciously we have in our life this feeling of Truth which

is ever larger than its appearance; for our life is facing the

infinite, and it is in movement. Its aspiration is therefore

infinitely more than its achievement, and as it goes on it finds

that no realisation of truth ever leaves it stranded on the

desert of finality, but carries it to a region beyond. Evil

cannot altogether arrest the course of life on the highway and

rob it of its possessions. For the evil has to pass on, it has

to grow into good; it cannot stand and give battle to the All.

If the least evil could stop anywhere indefinitely, it would sink

deep and cut into the very roots of existence. As it is, man

does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that

violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite

torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it

can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is

far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the

violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of

perfection outweighs actual contradictions. No doubt there have

been people who asserted existence to be an absolute evil, but

man can never take them seriously. Their pessimism is a mere

pose, either intellectual or sentimental; but life itself is

optimistic: it wants to go on. Pessimism is a form of mental

dipsomania, it disdains healthy nourishment, indulges in the

strong drink of denunciation, and creates an artificial dejection

which thirsts for a stronger draught. If existence were an evil,

it would wait for no philosopher to prove it. It is like

convicting a man of suicide, while all the time he stands before

you in the flesh. Existence itself is here to prove that it

cannot be an evil.

An imperfection which is not all imperfection, but which has

perfection for its ideal, must go through a perpetual

realisation. Thus, it is the function of our intellect to

realise the truth through untruths, and knowledge is nothing but

the continually burning up of error to set free the light of

truth. Our will, our character, has to attain perfection by

continually overcoming evils, either inside or outside us, or

both; our physical life is consuming bodily materials every

moment to maintain the life fire; and our moral life too has its

fuel to burn. This life process is going on--we know it, we have

felt it; and we have a faith which no individual instances to the

contrary can shake, that the direction of humanity is from evil

to good. For we feel that good is the positive element in man's

nature, and in every age and every clime what man values most is

his ideals of goodness. We have known the good, we have loved

it, and we have paid our highest reverence to men who have shown

in their lives what goodness is.

The question will be asked, What is goodness; what does our moral

nature mean? My answer is, that when a man begins to have an

extended vision of his self, when he realises that he is much

more than at present he seems to be, he begins to get conscious

of his moral nature. Then he grows aware of that which he is yet

to be, and the state not yet experienced by him becomes more real

than that under his direct experience. Necessarily, his

perspective of life changes, and his will takes the place of his

wishes. For will is the supreme wish of the larger life, the

life whose greater portion is out of our present reach, most of

whose objects are not before our sight. Then comes the conflict

of our lesser man with our greater man, of our wishes with our

will, of the desire for things affecting our senses with the

purpose that is within our heart. Then we begin to distinguish

between what we immediately desire and what is good. For good is

that which is desirable for our greater self. Thus the sense of

goodness comes out of a truer view of our life, which is the

connected view of the wholeness of the field of life, and which

takes into account not only what is present before us but what is

not, and perhaps never humanly can be. Man, who is provident,

feels for that life of his which is not yet existent, feels much

more that than for the life that is with him; therefore he is

ready to sacrifice his present inclination for the unrealised

future. In this he becomes great, for he realises truth. Even

to be efficiently selfish one has to recognise this truth, and

has to curb his immediate impulses--in other words, has to be

moral. For our moral faculty is the faculty by which we know

that life is not made up of fragments, purposeless and

discontinuous. This moral sense of man not only gives him the

power to see that the self has a continuity in time, but it also

enables him to see that he is not true when he is only restricted

to his own self. He is more in truth than he is in fact. He

truly belongs to individuals who are not included in his own

individuality, and whom he is never even likely to know. As he

has a feeling for his future self which is outside his present

consciousness, so he has a feeling for his greater self which is

outside the limits of his personality. There is no man who has

not this feeling to some extent, who has never sacrificed his

selfish desire for the sake of some other person, who has never

felt a pleasure in undergoing some loss or trouble because it

pleased somebody else. It is a truth that man is not a detached

being, that he has a universal aspect; and when he recognises

this he becomes great. Even the most evilly-disposed selfishness

has to recognise this when it seeks the power to do evil; for it

cannot ignore truth and yet be strong. So in order to claim the

aid of truth, selfishness has to be unselfish to some extent. A

band of robbers must be moral in order to hold together as a

band; they may rob the whole world but not each other. To make

an immoral intention successful, some of its weapons must be

moral. In fact, very often it is our very moral strength which

gives us most effectively the power to do evil, to exploit other

individuals for our own benefit, to rob other people of their

rights. The life of an animal is unmoral, for it is aware only

of an immediate present; the life of a man can be immoral, but

that only means that it must have a moral basis. What is immoral

is imperfectly moral, just as what is false is true to a small

extent, or it cannot even be false. Not to see is to be blind,

but to see wrongly is to see only in an imperfect manner. Man's

selfishness is a beginning to see some connection, some purpose

in life; and to act in accordance with its dictates requires

self-restraint and regulation of conduct. A selfish man

willingly undergoes troubles for the sake of the self, he suffers

hardship and privation without a murmur, simply because he knows

that what is pain and trouble, looked at from the point of view

of a short space of time, are just the opposite when seen in a

larger perspective. Thus what is a loss to the smaller man is a

gain to the greater, and _vice versa_.

To the man who lives for an idea, for his country, for the good

of humanity, life has an extensive meaning, and to that extent

pain becomes less important to him. To live the life of goodness

is to live the life of all. Pleasure is for one's own self, but

goodness is concerned with the happiness of all humanity and for

all time. From the point of view of the good, pleasure and pain

appear in a different meaning; so much so, that pleasure may be

shunned, and pain be courted in its place, and death itself be

made welcome as giving a higher value to life. From these higher

standpoints of a man's life, the standpoints of the good,

pleasure and pain lose their absolute value. Martyrs prove it in

history, and we prove it every day in our life in our little

martyrdoms. When we take a pitcherful of water from the sea it

has its weight, but when we take a dip into the sea itself a

thousand pitchersful of water flow above our head, and we do not

feel their weight. We have to carry the pitcher of self with our

strength; and so, while on the plane of selfishness pleasure and

pain have their full weight, on the moral plane they are so much

lightened that the man who has reached it appears to us almost

superhuman in his patience under crushing trails, and his

forbearance in the face of malignant persecution.

To live in perfect goodness is to realise one's life in the

infinitive. This is the most comprehensive view of life which we

can have by our inherent power of the moral vision of the

wholeness of life. And the teaching of Buddha is to cultivate

this moral power to the highest extent, to know that our field of

activities is not bound to the plane of our narrow self. This is

the vision of the heavenly kingdom of Christ. When we attain to

that universal life, which is the moral life, we become freed

from the bonds of pleasure and pain, and the place vacated by our

self becomes filled with an unspeakable joy which springs from

measureless love. In this state the soul's activity is all the

more heightened, only its motive power is not from desires, but

in its own joy. This is the _Karma-yoga_ of the _Gita_, the way

to become one with the infinite activity by the exercise of the

activity of disinterested goodness.

When Buddha mentioned upon the way of realising mankind from the

grip of misery he came to this truth: that when man attains his

highest end by merging the individual in the universal, he

becomes free from the thraldom of pain. Let us consider this

point more fully.

A student of mine once related to me his adventure in a storm,

and complained that all the time he was troubled with the feeling

that this great commotion in nature behaved to him as if he were

no more than a mere handful of dust. That he was a distinct

personality with a will of his own had not the least influence

upon what was happening.

I said, "If consideration for our individuality could sway nature

from her path, then it would be the individuals who would suffer

most."

But he persisted in his doubt, saying that there was this fact

which could not be ignored--the feeling that I am. The "I" in us

seeks for a relation which is individual to it.

I replied that the relation of the "I" is with something which is

"not-I." So we must have a medium which is common to both, and

we must be absolutely certain that it is the same to the "I" as

it is to the "not-I."

This is what needs repeating here. We have to keep in mind that

our individuality by its nature is impelled to seek for the

universal. Our body can only die if it tries to eat its own

substance, and our eye loses the meaning of its function if it

can only see itself.

Just as we find that the stronger the imagination the less is it

merely imaginary and the more is it in harmony with truth, so we

see the more vigorous our individuality the more does it widen

towards the universal. For the greatness of a personality is not

in itself but in its content, which is universal, just as the

depth of a lake is judged not by the size of its cavity but by

the depth of its water.

So, if it is a truth that the yearning of our nature is for

reality, and that our personality cannot be happy with a

fantastic universe of its own creation, then it is clearly best

for it that our will can only deal with things by following their

law, and cannot do with them just as it pleases. This unyielding

sureness of reality sometimes crosses our will, and very often

leads us to disaster, just as the firmness of the earth

invariably hurts the falling child who is learning to walk.

Nevertheless it is the same firmness that hurts him which makes

his walking possible. Once, while passing under a bridge, the

mast of my boat got stuck in one of its girders. If only for a

moment the mast would have bent an inch or two, or the bridge

raised its back like a yawning cat, or the river given in, it

would have been all right with me. But they took no notice of my

helplessness. That is the very reason why I could make use of

the river, and sail upon it with the help of the mast, and that

is why, when its current was inconvenient, I could rely upon the

bridge. Things are what they are, and we have to know them if we

would deal with them, and knowledge of them is possible because

our wish is not their law. This knowledge is a joy to us, for

the knowledge is one of the channels of our relation with the

things outside us; it is making them our own, and thus widening

the limit of our self.

At every step we have to take into account others than ourselves.

For only in death are we alone. A poet is a true poet when he

can make his personal idea joyful to all men, which he could not

do if he had not a medium common to all his audience. This

common language has its own law which the poet must discover and

follow, by doing which he becomes true and attains poetical

immortality.

We see then that man's individuality is not his highest truth;

there is that in him which is universal. If he were made to live

in a world where his own self was the only factor to consider,

then that would be the worst prison imaginable to him, for man's

deepest joy is in growing greater and greater by more and more

union with the all. This, as we have seen, would be an

impossibility if there were no law common to all. Only by

discovering the law and following it, do we become great, do we

realise the universal; while, so long as our individual desires

are at conflict with the universal law, we suffer pain and are

futile.

There was a time when we prayed for special concessions, we

expected that the laws of nature should be held in abeyance for

our own convenience. But now we know better. We know that law

cannot be set aside, and in this knowledge we have become strong.

For this law is not something apart from us; it is our own. The

universal power which is manifested in the universal law is one

with our own power. It will thwart us where we are small, where

we are against the current of things; but it will help us where

we are great, where we are in unison with the all. Thus, through

the help of science, as we come to know more of the laws of

nature, we gain in power; we tend to attain a universal body.

Our organ of sight, our organ of locomotion, our physical

strength becomes world-wide; steam and electricity become our

nerve and muscle. Thus we find that, just as throughout our

bodily organisation there is a principle of relation by virtue of

which we can call the entire body our own, and can use it as

such, so all through the universe there is that principle of

uninterrupted relation by virtue of which we can call the whole

world our extended body and use it accordingly. And in this age

of science it is our endeavour fully to establish our claim to

our world-self. We know all our poverty and sufferings are owing

to our inability to realise this legitimate claim of ours.

Really, there is no limit to our powers, for we are not outside

the universal power which is the expression of universal law. We

are on our way to overcome disease and death, to conquer pain and

poverty; for through scientific knowledge we are ever on our way

to realise the universal in its physical aspect. And as we make

progress we find that pain, disease, and poverty of power are not

absolute, but that is only the want of adjustment of our

individual self to our universal self which gives rise to them.

It is the same with our spiritual life. When the individual man

in us chafes against the lawful rule of the universal man we

become morally small, and we must suffer. In such a condition

our successes are our greatest failures, and the very fulfilment

of our desires leaves us poorer. We hanker after special gains

for ourselves, we want to enjoy privileges which none else can

share with us. But everything that is absolutely special must

keep up a perpetual warfare with what is general. In such a

state of civil war man always lives behind barricades, and in any

civilisation which is selfish our homes are not real homes, but

artificial barriers around us. Yet we complain that we are not

happy, as if there were something inherent in the nature of

things to make us miserable. The universal spirit is waiting to

crown us with happiness, but our individual spirit would not

accept it. It is our life of the self that causes conflicts and

complications everywhere, upsets the normal balance of society

and gives rise to miseries of all kinds. It brings things to

such a pass that to maintain order we have to create artificial

coercions and organised forms of tyranny, and tolerate infernal

institutions in our midst, whereby at every moment humanity is

humiliated.

We have seen that in order to be powerful we have to submit to

the laws of the universal forces, and to realise in practice that

they are our own. So, in order to be happy, we have to submit

our individual will to the sovereignty of the universal will, and

to feel in truth that it is our own will. When we reach that

state wherein the adjustment of the finite in us to the infinite

is made perfect, then pain itself becomes a valuable asset. It

becomes a measuring rod with which to gauge the true value of our

joy.

The most important lesson that man can learn from his life is not

that there _is_ pain in this world, but that it depends upon him

to turn it into good account, that it is possible for him to

transmute it into joy. The lesson has not been lost altogether

to us, and there is no man living who would willingly be deprived

of his right to suffer pain, for that is his right to be a man.

One day the wife of a poor labourer complained bitterly to me

that her eldest boy was going to be sent away to a rich relative's

house for part of the year. It was the implied kind intention of

trying to relieve her of her trouble that gave her the shock, for

a mother's trouble is a mother's own by her inalienable right of

love, and she was not going to surrender it to any dictates of

expediency. Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but

it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the

trouble an element in his joy. It can be made so only when we

realise that our individual self is not the highest meaning of our

being, that in us we have the world-man who is immortal, who is

not afraid of death or sufferings, and who looks upon pain as only

the other side of joy. He who has realised this knows that it is

pain which is our true wealth as imperfect beings, and has made us

great and worthy to take our seat with the perfect. He knows that

we are not beggars; that it is the hard coin which must be paid

for everything valuable in this life, for our power, our wisdom,

our love; that in pain is symbolised the infinite possibility of

perfection, the eternal unfolding of joy; and the man who loses all

pleasure in accepting pain sinks down and down to the lowest depth

of penury and degradation. It is only when we invoke the aid of

pain for our self-gratification that she becomes evil and takes her

vengeance for the insult done to her by hurling us into misery.

For she is the vestal virgin consecrated to the service of the

immortal perfection, and when she takes her true place before the

altar of the infinite she casts off her dark veil and bares her

face to the beholder as a revelation of supreme joy.