An Essay on the Civilisations of India, China and Japan

G Dickinson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136927003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

This volume presents an account of the author's travels during 1912-13 making particular note of the characteristics of Indian, Chinese and Japanese societies and the effect upon them of contact with the West. Although inevitably dated in some of its views, the volume nonetheless provides an excellent starting point for comparisons between East and West and the strengths and weaknesses of the individual cultures, be it in politics, literature or the arts.

AN ESSAY ON THE CIVILISATIONS OF INDIA CHINA AND JAPAN

PART I.—
INDIA

THE first thing I have to note is that the East is not a unity, as implied in the familiar antithesis of East and West. Between India, on the one hand, and China or Japan, on the other, there is as great a difference as between India and any western country. The contrast that has struck me is that between India and the rest of the world. There I do feel a profound gulf. A Chinese, after all, is not so unlike an Englishman, and a Japanese not so unlike a Frenchman. But a Bengalee is strangely unlike anybody outside India. While, however, the East is not a unity, the modern West is. Throughout Europe and America there is the same civilisation, intellectual and economic; so that, to a philo sophic observer, national boundaries there already begin to appear obsolete and irrelevant. On the other hand, this modern West is a very recent creation. And if one goes back in history one can find more analogy between East and West than now appears. Feudal Europe, for example, was in many respects similar to feudal Japan; and a mediæval Christian mystic hardly distinguishable from a contemporary Indian saint. If, therefore, we contrast East and West we shall find our contrast breaking down at every point, unless we confine the term East to India (which is absurd), and mean by the West (as of course, in fact, we do) the West of the last century only. And the contrast between that West and the West of the Middle Ages is perhaps as great as the contrast between the modern West and India. I think it best, therefore, not to attempt to characterise the East as a whole; but to deal separately with India, China, and Japan, and their reactions to the West, as they have shown themselves to me. I shall endeavour to characterise each of these civilisations, first, as they were before contact with the West; and afterwards to consider the effect upon them of that contact.

To summarise, I will say, first, that I conceive the dominant note of India to be religion; of China, humanity; of Japan, chivalry. These terms, of course, to begin with, are mere labels. I shall proceed to develop my meaning in each case.

In discussing the religion of a people one is met with the perhaps insuperable difficulty of estimating what, to the mass of the people, their religious observances really mean. I think it is clear that to the peasants of most countries—of Italy, say, or of China or of Japan—religion is no more than a ritual which they would be uncomfortable if they did not perform; a kind of lightning conductor for the emotions and desires that are concerned with the ordinary business of life, with getting one’s living, with birth, marriage, child-bearing, and death. And, of course, in India ¹ religion is, at least, this. The people pray for children, pray for healing, pray for rain, pray for everything they want. But is not religion to Indians something more than this? Observers who try to know the people believe that it is, and I am inclined to think that they are

¹ In speaking of Indian religion I have in view throughout Hinduism, not Mahometanism.

right; that even the Indian peasant does really believe that the true life is a spiritual life; that he respects the saint more than any other man; and that he regards the material world as ‘unreal,” and all its cares as illusion. He cannot, of course, and does not, put this conviction into practice, or Indian society would come to an end. But he admires and even worships those who do put it into practice. I have seen on the faces of poor Indians, at religious functions, an expression I have seen nowhere else, unless, perhaps, in Russian churches. At Muttra, for instance, I remember the ecstatic look on the faces of the crowd as the priests waved their torches before the image of the god; and similarly, at Kandy, the look of those who came to worship the relics—books even!—at the Temple of the Tooth. This is “idolatry,” of course. But what does idolatry imply? Roman Catholics choose to think that while Christians worship the god symbolised by the image, Chinese or Indians worship the image itself. But this is sheer prejudice. And, unless I am very much mistaken, an idol is far more of a symbol and less of an object of worship to an Indian peasant than it is to most Roman Catholics. Kali is a hideous idol, fed by the blood of goats. But I am inclined to believe what I have been told, that to an Indian she symbolises the divine mother; and that it is her, not the idol, that they are worshipping.

I have said thus much on a very difficult subject, because I am taking the view that religion is the dominant factor in Indian society; and I wished to deal beforehand with the objection likely to be taken that very few Indians are religious in any true or important sense of the term. Very few, I agree, do or could carry through their religion to its logical consequences; but most have it; and most admire those who carry it out. This religion, however, is radically different from the religion of the Western nations. In the first place, India has never put Man in the centre of the universe. In India, and wherever Indian influence has penetrated, it is, on the one hand, the tremendous forces of nature, and what lies behind them, that is the object of worship and of speculation; and, on the other hand, Mind and Spirit; not the mind or spirit of the individual person, but the universal Mind, or Spirit, which is in him, but to which he can only have access by philosophic meditation and ascetic discipline. Indian religion is thus very “inhuman” compared to Christianity; and very much more in harmony with the spirit of western science than with that of western religion. And this fact is exemplified not only by the religious and philosophic literature of India, but by its art. Hindu sculpture and architecture—I have examined it from north to south, and from east to west—is disquieting and terrible to a western mind. It expresses the inexhaustible fertility, the ruthlessness, the irrationality of nature; never her beauty, her harmony, her adaptability to human needs. Man, in the Indian vision, is a plaything and slave of natural forces; only by ceasing to be man does he gain freedom and deliverance.

And this brings me to the second point in which Indian religion contrasts with that of the West. To an Indian saint or philosopher the whole world of matter is unreal, and the whole of human history illusory. There is no meaning in time or the processes of time; still less is there any goodness in it. In some way, unexplained and inexplicable, the terrible illusion we call life dominates mankind. To be delivered from the illusion—from life, that is, and activity in time—is the object of all effort and all religion. In this sense the Indian religion is pessimistic. There is, of course, an important distinction between Buddhism and the Brahminism it supplanted for a time and then succumbed to. Gautama Buddha, it would seem, was a thorough-going sceptic and rationalist; he believed neither in God nor in the soul; and the object of his teaching was to deliver men from life to annihilation by instructing them how to eliminate desire. Brahminism, on the other hand, wishes to deliver them from false life to true life. The true life is life eternal; and we may have access to it by discipline and meditation. But from my immediate point of view this distinction is not important. What is important is that, in either form, precisely that is denied which the West most emphatically affirms: the reality and importance of the material world, and of the historic process in time. The West is often called materialistic as compared with the East. But this antithesis, so far as it is true, does not depend on any metaphysical view held or denied as to the nature of matter. The West does not profess fess to know what matter is, and its hypotheses about it are always changing. The real point of distinction is, that the West believes that all effort ought to centre upon the process of living in time; that that process has reality and significance; and that the business of religion is not to deliver us from effort by convincing us of its futility, but to sanctify and justify it. No modern western man would regard as an admirable type at all—still less as the highest type—a man who withdraws from the world to meditate and come into direct contact with the Universal. But an Indian who is uncontaminated by western culture still regards that as the true ideal of conduct; and views all activities in the world as lower and inferior, though, for undeveloped men, they are necessary and pardonable.

With this view of religion the history and institutions of Hinduism harmonise. The Vedas, it is true, reflect an attitude to life similar to that of the Western Aryans; but this essentially active, positive, optimistic view gradually clouds over. The cause, perhaps, is the influence of climate, of a Nature too strong for man. No impression remains more vivid with me of my visit to India than that of the dominance of nature, and the impotence and insignificance of man. But whatever the cause, there is no doubt about the fact. Indian society became impregnated with the sense of the nothingness of life in time. To escape, not to dominate, became the note of their religion. And life being insignificant, history, of course, was so too. It is not an ac...

Table of contents

• TO THE TRUSTEES OF THE ALBERT KAHN TRAVELLING FELLOWSHIPS
• PART I.— INDIA
• PART II.— CHINA
• PART III.— JAPAN
• CONCLUSION