A Letter to a Hindu | Page 6

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