Each party attempted the conversion of the other; but the methods used were those of persuasion and argument, not those of force. Neither Hinduism nor Buddhism is disgraced by anything corresponding to the Inquisition; neither was ever guilty of such iniquities as the Albigensian crusade or such criminal lunacies as the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Moslems who invaded India brought with them the idea of a God who was not the order of the army of being, but its general. Bhakti towards this despotic person was associated with wholesale slaughter of Buddhists and Hindus. Similarly bhakti towards the personal God of Christianity has been associated, throughout the history of that religion, with the wholesale slaughter of pagans and the retail torture and murder of heretics. It is the business of the rational idealist to harp continually upon this all-important fact. In this way, perhaps, he may be able to mitigate the evil tendencies which history shows to be inherent in the way of devotion and the correlated belief in a personal deity.
It has been necessary to dwell at considerable length on the subject of the emotional method of religious self-education, for the good reason that this method possessed, and still possesses, very great historical importance. To the third method of religious self-education, the method of meditation, I must also devote a good deal of space. It is important not only historically, because of its influence on the affairs of men, but also metaphysically, because of the light it throws on the nature of ultimate reality. With its metaphysical significance I shall deal in the next chapter. In this place I am concerned mainly with the social and psychological results of the methods.[20]
The method of meditation has often been used in conjunction with the emotional and physiological methods. In its purest form, however, it would seem to be quite independent of either. It is possible for meditation to be practised by those who are neither extreme ascetics nor Hatha-Yogis, and also by those who do not believe in a personal God. Indeed, it might even be argued that it is impossible for those who do believe in a personal God ever adequately to practise meditation or to have a genuine mystical experience. Of this I shall have more to say later. Meanwhile, we must concern ourselves with the practical aspects of the subject. From a humanistic point of view, what precisely is the point and purpose of meditation? The following words from Professor Irving Babbitt’s very valuable essay on Buddha and the Occident supply the answer. ‘We come here to what is for Buddha fundamental in religion. To many things that have been regarded as indispensable by other faiths—for example, prayer and belief in a personal deity—he grants a secondary place or even no place at all; but without the act of recollection or spiritual concentration he holds that the religious life cannot subsist at all.’
Speaking of Buddhist love and compassion, Professor Babbitt remarks that they can, like Nirvana, ‘be understood only in connection with the special form of activity that is put forth in meditation. Buddhist love does not well forth spontaneously from the natural man, but is, like Christian charity, the supernatural virtue par excellence. The current confusion on this point is perhaps the most striking outcome of the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century, and of the emotional romanticism of the nineteenth century that prolonged it. This confusion may be defined psychologically as a tendency to substitute for a super-rational concentration of will a subrational expansion of feeling.’
The function, then, of meditation is to help a man to put forth a special quality of will. (‘Meditation,’ says San Pedro de Alcantara, ‘is nothing but a discourse addressed by the intellect to the will.’) This special quality of will, which is peculiar to man, must be regarded as a fact of observation and experience. How shall this fact be explained? The Christian, as Babbitt points out, explains it in terms of divine grace, as something imparted from some supernatural source existing outside the individual. The Buddhist affirms that ‘self is the lord of self’ and sees the super-rational will as something latent in the individual psyche, a potentiality that any man, if he so desires and knows how, can actualize either in his present existence or (more probably, since the road to enlightenment is long and steep) in some future life. We see, then, that from a humanistic point of view, meditation is a particularly effective method of self-education.
Rites and ceremonials are essentially social activities. (The person who wishes to perform rites in private is generally the victim of a compulsion neurosis, which forces him, as Dr. Johnson was forced, to live his life to the accompaniment of elaborate gesticulations and formulas.) They provide, among other things, a mechanism by means of which people having a common emotional concern may have their sense of solidarity revived. Ritual is a kind of emotional cement which can give cohesion to great masses of people.
Physiological religion may be either solitary or social. Thus, considerable numbers of individuals can take part in a religious dance; but where the training is by means of ascetic practices or the acquisition of conscious control over hitherto unconscious physical processes, it must in the nature of things be solitary.
In the same way emotional religion may be either solitary or social. The attempt to establish an emotional relationship with a divine person may be made either alone or in the company of others. In the latter case some form of ritual is frequently made to serve, as it were, as a channel along which the shared emotion of the worshippers may flow towards its object.
Meditation is generally practised in solitude; but there is also such a thing as group meditation. The conditions for successful group meditation are as follows. First, the group must not exceed a certain size, otherwise it is extremely unlikely that its members will attain to that intuition of solidarity with one another and with something greater than themselves, which it is the purpose of group meditation to achieve. Second, the individuals composing the group must be exercised in the art of recollection and have some experience of its good results. A group into which children are admitted, or which contains adults who, however well intentioned, do not know how to practise recollection, nor what is its value when practised, is practically certain to achieve nothing.
Neglecting to study the psychology of their religion, the Quakers have often made the mistake of attempting group meditation in meetings of unwieldy size, disturbed by the presence of fidgeting children and untrained adults. Such meetings are almost always a failure. Not all Quaker meetings, however, are failures. Where conditions are favourable, the purpose of group meditation is still achieved, just as it was in the early days of Quakerism. Group meditation is known among the Hinayana Buddhists of Ceylon and the Mahayana Buddhists of Tibet. In Japan the Zen monks practise recollection all together, each in his appointed place in the meditation hall of the monastery. Group meditation is also practised by certain Moslem dervishes in Asia Minor—or at least was practised by them, until Kemal Ataturk saw fit, a few years ago, to hang them all.
It is worth while, in this context, to expand a statement made in an earlier chapter to the effect that all dictators and, in general, all politically minded reformers, are profoundly distrustful of the mystic. The reason for this is not far to seek. ‘Religion,’ in Professor Whitehead’s words, ‘is world loyalty.’ There is a ‘connection between universality and solitariness,’ inasmuch as ‘universality is a disconnection from immediate surroundings.’ But disconnection from immediate surroundings is precisely what the politician, especially the dictatorial politician who thinks in terms of class and nation, cannot tolerate.
All the dictators, whatever their colour, have attacked religion. Where the dictatorship is revolutionary, this hostility to religion is due in part to the fact that, as a political institution, the Church is generally on the side of the vested interests. But even where, as in Germany, the dictatorship supports and is supported by the vested interests, hostility to religion is hardly less intense than in countries where the dictatorship is revolutionary. In Italy, it is true, Mussolini has made his peace with the Church—but has made it on his own terms. The Church has received a few square miles of independent territory; but Mussolini has taken in exchange the Church’s influence over the Italian mind. Italy, then, is only an apparent exception to the rule.
Any religion—whether theistic, pantheistic or, like Buddhism, atheistic—which trains men to be non-attached to the ‘things of this world’ and which teaches them loyalty to the integrating principle of the universe is anathema to the dictator, who demands of his subjects intense attachment, in the form of a frenzied nationalism, and a loyalty addressed exclusively to himself and the State of which he is the head. The dictator and, in general, the politician cannot admit an individual’s right to universality and solitariness. He demands that
