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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter to a Hindu, by Leo Tolstoy
+#17 in our series by Leo Tolstoy
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+Title: A Letter to a Hindu
+
+Author: Leo Tolstoy
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7176]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 21, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LETTER TO A HINDU ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Chetan Jain at BharatLiterature.
+
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER TO A HINDU
+
+
+THE SUBJECTION OF INDIA--ITS CAUSE AND CURE
+
+
+__With an Introduction by__ M. K. GANDHI
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The letter printed below is a translation of Tolstoy's letter
+written in Russian in reply to one from the Editor of Free
+Hindustan.  After having passed from hand to hand, this letter at
+last came into my possession through a friend who asked me, as
+one much interested in Tolstoy's writings, whether I thought it
+worth publishing.  I at once replied in the affirmative, and told
+him I should translate it myself into Gujarati and induce others'
+to translate and publish it in various Indian vernaculars.
+
+The letter as received by me was a type-written copy.  It was
+therefore referred to the author, who confirmed it as his and
+kindly granted me permission to print it.
+
+To me, as a humble follower of that great teacher whom I have
+long looked upon as one of my guides, it is a matter of honour to
+be connected with the publication of his letter, such especially
+as the one which is now being given to the world.
+
+It is a mere statement of fact to say that every Indian, whether
+he owns up to it or not, has national aspirations.  But there are
+as many opinions as there are Indian nationalists as to the exact
+meaning of that aspiration, and more especially as to the methods
+to be used to attain the end.
+
+One of the accepted and 'time-honoured' methods to attain the end
+is that of violence.  The assassination of Sir Curzon Wylie was
+an illustration of that method in its worst and most detestable
+form.  Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of
+violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of
+non-resistance to evil.  He would meet hatred expressed in
+violence by love expressed in self-suffering.  He admits of no
+exception to whittle down this great and divine law of love.  He
+applies it to all the problems that trouble mankind.
+
+When a man like Tolstoy, one of the clearest thinkers in the
+western world, one of the greatest writers, one who as a soldier
+has known what violence is and what it can do, condemns Japan for
+having blindly followed the law of modern science, falsely
+so-called, and fears for that country 'the greatest calamities',
+it is for us to pause and consider whether, in our impatience of
+English rule, we do not want to replace one evil by another and a
+worse.  India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the
+world, will cease to be nationalist India, whatever else she may
+become, when she goes through the process of civilization in the
+shape of reproduction on that sacred soil of gun factories and
+the hateful industrialism which has reduced the people of Europe
+to a state of slavery, and all but stifled among them the best
+instincts which are the heritage of the human family.
+
+If we do not want the English in India we must pay the price.
+Tolstoy indicates it.  'Do not resist evil, but also do not
+yourselves participate in evil--in the violent deeds of the
+administration of the law courts, the collection of taxes and,
+what is more important, of the soldiers, and no one in the world
+will enslave you', passionately declares the sage of Yasnaya
+Polyana.  Who can question the truth of what he says in the
+following: 'A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two
+hundred millions.  Tell this to a man free from superstition and
+he will fail to grasp what these words mean.  What does it mean
+that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and
+ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous,
+clever, capable, freedom-loving people?  Do not the figures make
+it clear that not the English, but the Indians, have enslaved
+themselves?'
+
+One need not accept all that Tolstoy says--some of his facts are
+not accurately stated--to realize the central truth of his
+indictment of the present system, which is to understand and act
+upon the irresistible power of the soul over the body, of love,
+which is an attribute of the soul, over the brute or body force
+generated by the stirring in us of evil passions.
+
+There is no doubt that there is nothing new in what Tolstoy
+preaches.  But his presentation of the old truth is refreshingly
+forceful.  His logic is unassailable.  And above all he
+endeavours to practise what he preaches.  He preaches to
+convince.  He is sincere and in earnest.  He commands attention.
+
+[__19th November, 1909__]  M. K. GANDHI
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER TO A HINDU
+
+
+By LEO TOLSTOY
+
+
+
+__All that exists is One.  People only call this One by different
+names.__  THE VEDAS.
+
+__God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and
+God abideth in him.__  I JOHN iv. 16.
+
+__God is one whole; we are the parts.__  EXPOSITION OF THE
+TEACHING OF THE VEDAS BY VIVEKANANDA.
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Do not seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions
+and desires are engendered, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged
+through the rough wilderness of life, which is far from Me.
+
+Whenever thou feelest that thy feet are becoming entangled in the
+interlaced roots of life, know that thou has strayed from the
+path to which I beckon thee: for I have placed thee in broad,
+smooth paths, which are strewn with flowers.  I have put a light
+before thee, which thou canst follow and thus run without
+stumbling.  KRISHNA.
+
+I have received your letter and two numbers of your periodical,
+both of which interest me extremely.  The oppression of a
+majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably
+resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me
+and has done so most particularly of late.  I will try to explain
+to you what I think about that subject in general, and
+particularly about the cause from which the dreadful evils of
+which you write in your letter, and in the Hindu periodical you
+have sent me, have arisen and continue to arise.
+
+The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working
+people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and
+their very lives is always and everywhere the same--whether the
+oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India
+and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.
+
+This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there
+more than two hundred million people, highly gifted both
+physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small
+group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably
+inferior to them in religious morality.
+
+From your letter and the articles in __Free Hindustan__ as well
+as from the very interesting writings of the Hindu Swami
+Vivekananda and others, it appears that, as is the case in our
+time with the ills of all nations, the reason lies in the lack of
+a reasonable religious teaching which by explaining the meaning
+of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct
+and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-
+religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions deduced
+from them and commonly called 'civilization'.
+
+Your letter, as well as the articles in __Free Hindustan__ and
+Indian political literature generally, shows that most of the
+leaders of public opinion among your people no longer attach any
+significance to the religious teachings that were and are
+professed by the peoples of India, and recognize no possibility
+of freeing the people from the oppression they endure except by
+adopting the irreligious and profoundly immoral social
+arrangements under which the English and other pseudo-Christian
+nations live to-day.
+
+And yet the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the
+Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a
+religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which
+should flow from it--a lack common in our day to all nations East
+and West, from Japan to England and America alike.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+__O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet,
+and to the right and left of you; you will be an eternal enigma
+unto yourselves until ye become humble and joyful as children.
+Then will ye find Me, and having found Me in yourselves, you will
+rule over worlds, and looking out from the great world within to
+the little world without, you will bless everything that is, and
+find all is well with time and with you.__  KRISHNA.
+
+
+To make my thoughts clear to you I must go farther back.  We do
+not, cannot, and I venture to say need not, know how men lived
+millions of years ago or even ten thousand years ago, but we do
+know positively that, as far back as we have any knowledge of
+mankind, it has always lived in special groups of families,
+tribes, and nations in which the majority, in the conviction that
+it must be so, submissively and willingly bowed to the rule of
+one or more persons--that is to a very small minority.  Despite
+all varieties of circumstances and personalities these relations
+manifested themselves among the various peoples of whose origin
+we have any knowledge; and the farther back we go the more
+absolutely necessary did this arrangement appear, both to the
+rulers and the ruled, to make it possible for people to live
+peacefully together.
+
+So it was everywhere.  But though this external form of life
+existed for centuries and still exists, very early--thousands of
+years before our time--amid this life based on coercion, one and
+the same thought constantly emerged among different nations,
+namely, that in every individual a spiritual element is
+manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this
+spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like
+nature to itself, and attains this aim through love.  This
+thought appeared in most various forms at different times and
+places, with varying completeness and clarity.  It found
+expression in Brahmanism, Judaism, Mazdaism (the teachings of
+Zoroaster), in Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and in the
+writings of the Greek and Roman sages, as well as in Christianity
+and Mohammedanism.  The mere fact that this thought has sprung up
+among different nations and at different times indicates that it
+is inherent in human nature and contains the truth.  But this
+truth was made known to people who considered that a community
+could only be kept together if some of them restrained others,
+and so it appeared quite irreconcilable with the existing order
+of society.  Moreover it was at first expressed only
+fragmentarily, and so obscurely that though people admitted its
+theoretic truth they could not entirely accept it as guidance for
+their conduct.  Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a
+society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same
+manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of
+this truth would undermine their position, consciously or
+sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and
+additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open
+violence.  Thus the truth--that his life should be directed by
+the spiritual element which is its basis, which manifests itself
+as love, and which is so natural to man--this truth, in order to
+force a way to man's consciousness, had to struggle not merely
+against the obscurity with which it was expressed and the
+intentional and unintentional distortions surrounding it, but
+also against deliberate violence, which by means of persecutions
+and punishments sought to compel men to accept religious laws
+authorized by the rulers and conflicting with the truth.  Such a
+hindrance and misrepresentation of the truth--which had not yet
+achieved complete clarity--occurred everywhere: in Confucianism
+and Taoism, in Buddhism and in Christianity, in Mohammedanism and
+in your Brahmanism.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+__My hand has sowed love everywhere, giving unto all that will
+receive.  Blessings are offered unto all My children, but many
+times in their blindness they fail to see them.  How few there
+are who gather the gifts which lie in profusion at their feet:
+how many there are, who, in wilful waywardness, turn their eyes
+away from them and complain with a wail that they have not that
+which I have given them; many of them defiantly repudiate not
+only My gifts, but Me also, Me, the Source of all blessings and
+the Author of their being.__  KRISHNA.
+
+__I tarry awhile from the turmoil and strife of the world.  I
+will beautify and quicken thy life with love and with joy, for
+the light of the soul is Love.  Where Love is, there is
+contentment and peace, and where there is contentment and peace,
+there am I, also, in their midst.__  KRISHNA.
+
+__The aim of the sinless One consists in acting without causing
+sorrow to others, although he could attain to great power by
+ignoring their feelings.__
+
+__The aim of the sinless One lies in not doing evil unto those
+who have done evil unto him.__
+
+__If a man causes suffering even to those who hate him without
+any reason, he will ultimately have grief not to be overcome.__
+
+__The punishment of evil doers consists in making them feel
+ashamed of themselves by doing them a great kindness.__
+
+__Of what use is superior knowledge in the one, if he does not
+endeavour to relieve his neighbour's want as much as his own?__
+
+__If, in the morning, a man wishes to do evil unto another, in
+the evening the evil will return to him.__
+
+THE HINDU KURAL.
+
+
+Thus it went on everywhere.  The recognition that love represents
+the highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this
+truth was so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods
+which distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but
+words.  It was taught that this highest morality was only
+applicable to private life--for home use, as it were--but that in
+public life all forms of violence--such as imprisonment,
+executions, and wars--might be used for the protection of the
+majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were
+diametrically opposed to any vestige of love.  And though common
+sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is to be
+subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of others,
+these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn, arrive at a
+similar conclusion with regard to those who have employed
+violence to them, and though the great religious teachers of
+Brahmanism, Buddhism, and above all of Christianity, foreseeing
+such a perversion of the law of love, have constantly drawn
+attention to the one invariable condition of love (namely, the
+enduring of injuries, insults, and violence of all kinds without
+resisting evil by evil) people continued--regardless of all that
+leads man forward--to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue
+of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of
+evil by violence.  And such a teaching, despite its inner
+contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who
+recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an
+order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to
+torture but even to kill one another.
+
+For a long time people lived in this obvious contradiction
+without noticing it.  But a time arrived when this contradiction
+became more and more evident to thinkers of various nations.  And
+the old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and
+to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another,
+became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to
+believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had
+been made so plausible.
+
+In former times the chief method of justifying the use of
+violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a
+divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs,
+and other heads of states.  But the longer humanity lived the
+weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God--given right of the
+ruler.  That belief withered in the same way and almost
+simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as
+in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so
+faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable
+understanding and the true religious feeling.  People saw more
+and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the
+senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to
+those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden
+to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to
+their moral sense.  And so one might suppose that having lost
+confidence in any religious authority for a belief in the
+divinity of potentates of various kinds, people would try to free
+themselves from subjection to it.  But unfortunately not only
+were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings,
+benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result of
+the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine beings,
+ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and established
+themselves around them, and under an appearance of governing took
+advantage of the people.  And when the old deception of a
+supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these
+men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its
+predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage
+to a limited number of rulers.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+__Children, do you want to know by what your hearts should be
+guided? Throw aside your longings and strivings after that which
+is null and void; get rid of your erroneous thoughts about
+happiness and wisdom, and your empty and insincere desires.
+Dispense with these and you will know Love.__  KRISHNA.
+
+__Be not the destroyers of yourselves.  Arise to your true Being,
+and then you will have nothing to fear.__  KRISHNA.
+
+
+New justifications have now appeared in place of the antiquated,
+obsolete, religious ones.  These new justifications are just as
+inadequate as the old ones, but as they are new their futility
+cannot immediately be recognized by the majority of men.  Besides
+this, those who enjoy power propagate these new sophistries and
+support them so skilfully that they seem irrefutable even to many
+of those who suffer from the oppression these theories seek to
+justify.  These new justifications are termed 'scientific'.  But
+by the term 'scientific' is understood just what was formerly
+understood by the term 'religious': just as formerly everything
+called 'religious' was held to be unquestionable simply because
+it was called religious, so now all that is called 'scientific'
+is held to be unquestionable.  In the present case the obsolete
+religious justification of violence which consisted in the
+recognition of the supernatural personality of the God-ordained
+ruler ('there is no power but of God') has been superseded by the
+'scientific' justification which puts forward, first, the
+assertion that because the coercion of man by man has existed in
+all ages, it follows that such coercion must continue to exist.
+This assertion that people should continue to live as they have
+done throughout past ages rather than as their reason and
+conscience indicate, is what 'science' calls 'the historic law'.
+A further 'scientific' justification lies in the statement that
+as among plants and wild beasts there is a constant struggle for
+existence which always results in the survival of the fittest, a
+similar struggle should be carried on among human beings--beings,
+that is, who are gifted with intelligence and love; faculties
+lacking in the creatures subject to the struggle for existence
+and survival of the fittest.  Such is the second 'scientific'
+justification.
+
+The third, most important, and unfortunately most widespread
+justification is, at bottom, the age-old religious one just a
+little altered: that in public life the suppression of some for
+the protection of the majority cannot be avoided--so that coercion
+is unavoidable however desirable reliance on love alone might be
+in human intercourse.  The only difference in this justification
+by pseudo-science consists in the fact that, to the question why
+such and such people and not others have the right to decide
+against whom violence may and must be used, pseudo-science now
+gives a different reply to that given by religion--which declared
+that the right to decide was valid because it was pronounced by
+persons possessed of divine power.  'Science' says that these
+decisions represent the will of the people, which under a
+constitutional form of government is supposed to find expression
+in all the decisions and actions of those who are at the helm at
+the moment.
+
+Such are the scientific justifications of the principle of
+coercion.  They are not merely weak but absolutely invalid, yet
+they are so much needed by those who occupy privileged positions
+that they believe in them as blindly as they formerly believed in
+the immaculate conception, and propagate them just as
+confidently.  And the unfortunate majority of men bound to toil
+is so dazzled by the pomp with which these 'scientific truths'
+are presented, that under this new influence it accepts these
+scientific stupidities for holy truth, just as it formerly
+accepted the pseudo-religious justifications; and it continues to
+submit to the present holders of power who are just as
+hard-hearted but rather more numerous than before.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+__Who am I? I am that which thou hast searched for since thy baby
+eyes gazed wonderingly upon the world, whose horizon hides this
+real life from thee.  I am that which in thy heart thou hast
+prayed for, demanded as thy birthright, although thou hast not
+known what it was.  I am that which has lain in thy soul for
+hundreds and thousands of years.  Sometimes I lay in thee
+grieving because thou didst not recognize me; sometimes I raised
+my head, opened my eyes, and extended my arms calling thee either
+tenderly and quietly, or strenuously, demanding that thou shouldst
+rebel against the iron chains which bound thee to the earth.__
+
+KRISHNA.
+
+
+So matters went on, and still go on, in the Christian world.  But
+we might have hope that in the immense Brahman, Buddhist, and
+Confucian worlds this new scientific superstition would not
+establish itself, and that the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus,
+once their eyes were opened to the religious fraud justifying
+violence, would advance directly to a recognition of the law of
+love inherent in humanity, and which had been so forcibly
+enunciated by the great Eastern teachers.  But what has happened
+is that the scientific superstition replacing the religious one
+has been accepted and secured a stronger and stronger hold in the
+East.
+
+In your periodical you set out as the basic principle which
+should guide the actions of your people the maxim that:
+'Resistance to aggression is not simply justifiable but
+imperative, nonresistance hurts both Altruism and Egotism.'
+
+Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills, and in it
+you too have the only method of saving your people from
+enslavement.  In very ancient times love was proclaimed with
+special strength and clearness among your people to be the
+religious basis of human life.  Love, and forcible resistance to
+evil-doers, involve such a mutual contradiction as to destroy
+utterly the whole sense and meaning of the conception of love.
+And what follows?  With a light heart and in the twentieth century
+you, an adherent of a religious people, deny their law, feeling
+convinced of your scientific enlightenment and your right to do
+so, and you repeat (do not take this amiss) the amazing stupidity
+indoctrinated in you by the advocates of the use of violence--the
+enemies of truth, the servants first of theology and then of
+science--your European teachers.
+
+You say that the English have enslaved your people and hold them
+in subjection because the latter have not resisted resolutely
+enough and have not met force by force.
+
+But the case is just the opposite.  If the English have enslaved
+the people of India it is just because the latter recognized, and
+still recognize, force as the fundamental principle of the social
+order.  In accord with that principle they submitted to their
+little rajahs, and on their behalf struggled against one another,
+fought the Europeans, the English, and are now trying to fight
+with them again.
+
+A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred
+millions.  Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will
+fail to grasp what these words mean.  What does it mean that
+thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary
+people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever,
+capable, and freedom-loving people?  Do not the figures make it
+clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians,
+but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?
+
+When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it
+is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have
+settled among them have enslaved them.  You tell them that they
+might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so
+accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must
+have alcohol to keep up their energy.  Is it not the same thing
+with the millions of people who submit to thousands' or even to
+hundreds, of others--of their own or other nations?
+
+If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only
+because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do
+not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.
+
+__Pitiful and foolish is the man who seeks what he already has,
+and does not know that he has it.  Yes, Pitiful and foolish is he
+who does not know the bliss of love which surrounds him and which
+I have given him.__  KRISHNA.
+
+
+As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love
+natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes
+all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all
+participation in violence--as soon as this happens, not only will
+hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions
+will be able to enslave a single individual.  Do not resist the
+evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent
+deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of
+taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will
+be able to enslave you.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+__O ye who sit in bondage and continually seek and pant for
+freedom, seek only for love.  Love is peace in itself and peace
+which gives complete satisfaction.  I am the key that opens the
+portal to the rarely discovered land where contentment alone is
+found.__  KRISHNA.
+
+What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is
+like what happens to every individual when he passes from
+childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood.  He loses
+what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction,
+not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he
+invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and
+stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and
+senselessness of his life.  Such a condition may last a long
+time.
+
+When an individual passes from one period of life to another a
+time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and
+excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has
+outgrown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that
+he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he
+must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding
+to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it.  And
+in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and
+development of humanity.  I believe that such a time has now
+arrived--not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but
+that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an
+extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the
+consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the
+other the existing order of life which has for centuries
+occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and troubled mode of
+life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and built on
+the use of violence.  This contradiction must be faced, and the
+solution will evidently not be favourable to the outlived law of
+violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men
+from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in
+accord with the nature of man.
+
+But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when
+they have completely freed themselves from all religious and
+scientific superstitions and from all the consequent
+misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its
+recognition has been hindered for centuries.
+
+To save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the
+ballast, which though it may once have been needed would now
+cause the ship to sink.  And so it is with the scientific
+superstition which hides the truth of their welfare from mankind.
+In order that men should embrace the truth--not in the vague way
+they did in childhood, nor in the one-sided and perverted way
+presented to them by their religious and scientific teachers, but
+embrace it as their highest law--the complete liberation of this
+truth from all and every superstition (both pseudo-religious and
+pseudo-scientific) by which it is still obscured is essential:
+not a partial, timid attempt, reckoning with traditions
+sanctified by age and with the habits of the people--not such as
+was effected in the religious sphere by Guru-Nanak, the founder
+of the sect of the Sikhs, and in the Christian world by Luther,
+and by similar reformers in other religions--but a fundamental
+cleansing of religious consciousness from all ancient religious
+and modern scientific superstitions.
+
+If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds
+of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas
+and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in
+reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference
+of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above
+all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of
+all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and
+the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a
+variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and
+molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote
+worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the
+infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at
+present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law
+of struggle and survival, and so on--if people only freed
+themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of
+our lower capacities of mind and memory called the 'Sciences',
+and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories,
+anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences,
+cosmographies, strategies--their name is legion--and freed
+themselves from all this harmful, stupifying ballast--the simple
+law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all
+questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and
+obligatory.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+__Children, look at the flowers at your feet; do not trample upon
+them.  Look at the love in your midst and do not repudiate it.__
+KRISHNA.
+
+__There is a higher reason which transcends all human minds.  It
+is far and near.  It permeates all the worlds and at the same
+time is infinitely higher than they.__
+
+__A man who sees that all things are contained in the higher
+spirit cannot treat any being with contempt.__
+
+__For him to whom all spiritual beings are equal to the highest
+there can be no room for deception or grief.__
+
+__Those who are ignorant and are devoted to the religious rites
+only, are in a deep gloom, but those who are given up to
+fruitless meditations are in a still greater darkness.__
+
+UPANISHADS, FROM VEDAS.
+
+
+Yes, in our time all these things must be cleared away in order
+that mankind may escape from self-inflicted calamities that have
+reached an extreme intensity.  Whether an Indian seeks liberation
+from subjection to the English, or anyone else struggles with an
+oppressor either of his own nationality or of another--whether it
+be a Negro defending himself against the North Americans; or
+Persians, Russians, or Turks against the Persian, Russian, or
+Turkish governments, or any man seeking the greatest welfare for
+himself and for everybody else--they do not need explanations and
+justifications of old religious superstitions such as have been
+formulated by your Vivekanandas, Baba Bharatis, and others, or in
+the Christian world by a number of similar interpreters and
+exponents of things that nobody needs; nor the innumerable
+scientific theories about matters not only unnecessary but for
+the most part harmful.  (In the spiritual realm nothing is
+indifferent: what is not useful is harmful.)  What are wanted for
+the Indian as for the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, and
+the Russian, are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts
+of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingenious devices for
+submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor powerful
+explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the enjoyment
+of the rich, ruling classes; nor new schools and universities
+with innumerable faculties of science, nor an augmentation of
+papers and books, nor gramophones and cinematographs, nor those
+childish and for the most part corrupt stupidities termed art--but
+one thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear
+truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by
+religious and scientific superstitions--the truth that for our
+life one law is valid--the law of love, which brings the highest
+happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.  Free
+your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which
+hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge
+from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering
+it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one
+and the same in all the great religions of the world.  It will in
+due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the
+nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with
+it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.
+
+__Children, look upwards with your beclouded eyes, and a world
+full of joy and love will disclose itself to you, a rational
+world made by My wisdom, the only real world.  Then you will know
+what love has done with you, what love has bestowed upon you,
+what love demands from you.__  KRISHNA.
+
+
+YASNAYA POLYANA.
+
+December 14th, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter to a Hindu, by Leo Tolstoy
+
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