Page 33 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

solves itself into certain observances and social customs of which
he understands neither the spiritual meaning nor the practical util-
ity. To venerate the Scriptures without knowing them and to obey
custom in their place; to reverence all Brahmins whether they are
venerable or despicable; to eat nothing cooked by a social inferior;
to marry one's daughter before puberty and one's son as soon as
possible after it; to keep women ignorant and domestically useful;
to bathe scrupulously and go through certain fixed ablutions; to
eat on the floor and not at a table; to do one's devotions twice a
day without understanding them; to observe a host of meaning-
less minutiae in one's daily conduct; to keep the Hindu holidays,
when an image is set up, worshipped and thrown away,—this in
India is the minimum of religion. This is glorified as Hinduism and
the Sanatana Dharma. If, in addition, a man has emotional or ec-
static piety, he is a Bhakta; if he can talk fluently about the Veda,
Upanishads, Darshanas & Puranas, he is a Jnani. If he puts on a
yellow robe and does nothing, he is a tyagi or sannyasin. The latter
is liberated from the ordinary dharma, but only if he does nothing
but beg and vegetate. All work must be according to custom and
the Brahmin. The one superiority of average Indian religion is that
it does really reverence the genuine Bhakta or Sannyasin provided
he does not come with too strange a garb or too revolutionary an
aspect. The European almost invariably sets him down as a charla-
tan, professional religionist, idle drone or religious maniac.
CWSA 1: 492-93

The Law and Causality
There is no Fate except insistent causality which is only another
name for Law, and Law itself is only an instrument in the hands of
Nature for the satisfaction of the spirit. Law is nothing but a mode
or rule of action; it is called in our philosophy not Law but Dharma,
holding together, it is that by which the action of the universe, the
action of its parts, the action of the individual is held together. This

All India Magazine, August 2025 33