[Sidenote:  Asceticism is declining.]

Best proof probably that pessimism is declining is the fact that asceticism is declining.  The times are no longer those in which the life of a brahman is supposed to culminate in the Sannyasi or ascetic “who has laid down everything,” who, in the words of the Bhagabat Gita, “does not hate and does not love anything."[108] The pro-Hindu writer often quoted also acknowledges the new pleasure in life and the religious corollary of it when she says that the recent rise in the standard of comfort in India is opposed to the idea of asceticism.  Desire, indeed, is not gone, and the cords of the heart are not breaking.  Says the old brahman, in the guise of whom Sir Alfred Lyall speaks:  “I own that you [Britons] are doing a great deal to soften and enliven material existence in this melancholy, sunburnt country of ours, and certainly you are so far successful that you are bringing the ascetic idea into discouragement and, with the younger folk, into contempt."[109] Welcome to the new joy of living, all honour to the old ascetics, and may a still nobler self-sacrifice take their place!

[Sidenote:  Pessimism, asceticism, transmigration are allied ideas.]

For Western minds it is difficult to realise the close connection between the doctrine of transmigration and the mood of India, rightly or wrongly termed pessimism. Our instinctive feeling is that life is sweet; while there is life there is hope, we say; “healthy optimism” is the expression of Professor James in his Varieties of Religious Experience; it is “more life and fuller that we want.”  In keeping with this Western and human instinct, the Christian idea of the Hereafter is a fuller life than the life Here, a perfect eternal life.  To the pessimist, on the contrary [and Hindu philosophy is pessimistic, whatever be the new mood of India], the question is, “Why was I born?” The Indian doctrine of transmigration comes with answer—­“Life is a punishment:  it is the bitter consequence of our past that we are working out; we must submit to be born into the world again and again, until we are cleared.”  “Yes, until your minds are cleared,” the Indian pantheist adds, “life itself is a delusion, if you only knew it; life itself, your consciousness of individuality or separateness, is a delusion.”  But the pantheist’s thought is here beside our present point.

[Sidenote:  Transmigration the antithesis of eternal life.]

To the pessimistic Indian accepting the Indian view of transmigration, it is therefore no gospel to preach the continuation of life, either here or hereafter.  “To be born again” sounds like a penance to be endured. Mukti, commonly rendered salvation, is not regeneration Here and eternal life Hereafter; it is deliverance from further lives altogether.  If, however, we accept the statement that the value of human life in India is rising, that life is becoming