nkind
have their own rules of life and suitable beliefs and that he who
follows such partial truths does no wrong to the greater and
all-inclusive truths on which his circumstances do not permit him to fix
his attention. And though some Indian religions may sanction bad
customs, sacrifice of animals and immoral rites, yet on the whole they
give the duty of kindness to animals a prominence unknown in Europe and
are more penetrated with the idea that civilization means a gentle and
enlightened temper--an idea sadly forgotten in these days of war. Their
speculative interest can hardly be denied. For instance, the idea of a
religion without a personal God may seem distasteful or absurd but the
student of human thought must take account of it and future generations
may not find it a useless notion. It is certain that in Asia we find
Buddhist Churches which preach morality and employ ritual and yet are
not theistic, and also various systems of pantheism which, though they
may use the word God, obviously use it in a sense which has nothing in
common with Christian and Mohammedan ideas.

India's greatest contribution to religion is not intellectual, as the
mass of commentaries and arguments produced by Hindus might lead us to
imagine, but the persistent and almost unchallenged belief in the
reality and bliss of certain spiritual states which involve intuition.
All Indians agree that they are real, even to the extent of offering an
alternative superior to any ordinary life of pleasure and success, but
their value for us is lessened by the variety of interpretations which
they receive and which make it hard to give a more detailed definition
than that above. For some they are the intuition of a particular god,
for others of divinity in general. For Buddhists they mean a new life of
knowledge, freedom and bliss without reference to a deity. But apart
from such high matters I believe that the mental training preliminary to
these states--what is called meditation and concentration--is well worth
the attention of Europeans. I am not recommending trances or catalepsy:
in these as in other matters the Hindus are probably prone to exaggerate
and the Buddha himself in his early quest for truth discarded trances as
an unsatisfactory method. But the reader can convince himself by
experiment that the elementary discipline which consists in suppressing
"discursive thought" and concentrating the mind on a particular
object--say a red flower--