[Sidenote:  Thought independent of act.]

We ask again for the cause of this progress in thought and stagnation in practice.  In India, creed and practice go their own way; thinking is independent of acting.  Listen to the naive standpoint assumed in the Confession or Covenant of a Theistic Association established in Madras in 1864.  We read in article 3 that the person being initiated makes this declaration:  “In the meantime, I shall observe the ceremonies now in use, but only where indispensable.  I shall go through such ceremonies, where they are not conformable to pure Theism, as mere matters of routine, destitute of all religious significance—­as the lifeless remains of a superstition which has passed away.”  And again in article 4:  “I shall never endeavour to deceive anyone as to my religious opinions.”  In the revision of 1871, both articles were dropped, but in the earlier form there was no attempt to disguise that thought was independent of act.  The familiar figure of Buddha in meditation, seated cross-legged and motionless, with vacant introspective eyes, oblivious of the outer world, is a type of the separation of thought from act that seems natural to India or to the Indian mind, type also of the independence of each thinker.  The thinker secludes himself; “the mind is its own place.”  To become a thinker signifies to become an ascetic recluse; even modern enlightenment often removes an Indian from fellow-feeling with his kind.

[Sidenote:  No Theological Faculties.]

How is it so?  I say nothing of the climate of tropical India as a contributory cause.  The way in which Hindu learning was and is transmitted, is itself almost sufficient explanation of the independence and the fluidity of religious doctrine.  Hinduism has no recognised Theological Faculties as training schools for the priesthood. Buddhist monasteries of the early Christian centuries we do read of, institutions corresponding to our universities, to which crowds of students resorted, and where many subjects were taught; but the Hindu lore is transmitted otherwise.  Beside or in his humble dwelling, the learned Hindu pandit receives and teaches and shares his poverty with his four, five, or it may be twenty disciples, who are to be the depositaries of his lore, and in their turn its transmitters.  Such an institution is a Sanscrit tol, where ten to twenty years of the formative period of a young pandit’s life may be spent.  Without printed books and libraries and intercourse with kindred minds, there may be as many schools of thought as there are teachers.  And all this study, be it remembered, has no necessary connection with the priesthood.  Tols have no necessary connection with temples, or temples with tols.  Hereditary priests are independent of Theological Schools.  Recently, indeed, in Bengal these tols have been taken up by the Education Department, and their studies are being directed to certain fixed subjects.