For Vedanta is
undoubtedly a living philosophy of life in India, a part of the mental structure of our
people. The
people of India get it not from a study of books but from tradition. It is in the air, so
to say, of India and Asia. The foreigner has to get it from books and he necessarily sees
so much subtlety in it that he may well swear that it is impossible that such a doctrine
could ever be the actual cultural basis or living spiritual principle of the daily life of
any people of modern times. Yet this is the fact in
India. The greatness of Gandhiji and the strength of his movement were entirely derived
from and rooted in Vedanta. However much foreign civilization and new aspirations might
have affected the people of India, this spiritual nutriment has not dried up or decayed or
changed.
The lives ofthe rich as well as of the poor, of the
leisured classes as of the peasants and labourers, of the illiterate and not only of the
learned, are in varying measure sweetened by the pervasive fragrance of this Indian
philosophy. Paradoxical as it may seem, even communities born to avocations deemed
dishonest and disreputable have evolved a code of honour of their own, and are Vedantins
to the extent of sincerely respecting it. |
