A Letter to a Hindu | Page 8

Leo Tolstoy
of another--whether it be a Negro defending himself

against the North Americans; or Persians, Russians, or Turks against
the Persian, Russian, or Turkish governments, or any man seeking the
greatest welfare for himself and for everybody else--they do not need
explanations and justifications of old religious superstitions such as
have been formulated by your Vivekanandas, Baba Bharatis, and others,
or in the Christian world by a number of similar interpreters and
exponents of things that nobody needs; nor the innumerable scientific
theories about matters not only unnecessary but for the most part
harmful. (In the spiritual realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful
is harmful.) What are wanted for the Indian as for the Englishman, the
Frenchman, the German, and the Russian, are not Constitutions and
Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many
ingenious devices for submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor
powerful explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the
enjoyment of the rich, ruling classes; nor new schools and universities
with innumerable faculties of science, nor an augmentation of papers
and books, nor gramophones and cinematographs, nor those childish
and for the most part corrupt stupidities termed art--but one thing only
is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds
place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific
superstitions--the truth that for our life one law is valid--the law of love,
which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all
mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous
imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth
will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been
smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is
one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due
time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense
that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil
from which humanity now suffers.
__Children, look upwards with your beclouded eyes, and a world full
of joy and love will disclose itself to you, a rational world made by My
wisdom, the only real world. Then you will know what love has done
with you, what love has bestowed upon you, what love demands from
you.__ KRISHNA.
YASNAYA POLYANA.
December 14th, 1908.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter to a Hindu, by Leo
Tolstoy
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LETTER TO
A HINDU ***
This file should be named hindu10.txt or hindu10.zip Corrected
EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, hindu11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, hindu10a.txt
This eBook was produced by Chetan Jain at BharatLiterature.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US unless
a copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not keep eBooks in
compliance with any particular paper edition.
We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance of the
official release dates, leaving time for better editing. Please be
encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections, even years after the
official publication date.
Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til midnight of
the last day of the month of any such announcement. The official
release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at Midnight, Central
Time, of the last day of the stated month. A preliminary version may
often be posted for suggestion, comment and editing by those who wish
to do so.
Most people start at our Web sites at: http://gutenberg.net
or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date. This is also a
good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the indexes our
cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an announcement goes
out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03
or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want, as it
appears in our Newsletters.

Information about Project Gutenberg
(one page)
We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The time
it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours to get any
eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright searched and
analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. Our projected audience is
one hundred million readers. If the value per text is nominally
estimated at one
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code

 / 11
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.