I have touched in several places on the defects of Hinduism.  They are due partly to its sanction of customs which have no necessary connection with it and partly to its extravagance, which in the service of the gods sees no barriers of morality or humanity.  But suttee, human sacrifices and orgies strike the imagination and assume an importance which they have not and never had for Hinduism as a whole.  If Hinduism were really bad, so many great thoughts, so many good lives could not have grown up in its atmosphere.  More than any other religion it is a quest of truth and not a creed, which must necessarily become antiquated:  it admits the possibility of new scriptures, new incarnations, new institutions.  It has no quarrel with knowledge or speculation:  perhaps it excludes materialists, because they have no common ground with religion, but it tolerates even the Sankhya philosophy which has nothing to say about God or worship.  It is truly dynamic and in the past whenever it has seemed in danger of withering it has never failed to bud with new life and put forth new flowers.

More than other religions, Hinduism appeals to the soul’s immediate knowledge and experience of God.  It has sacred books innumerable but they agree in little but this, that the soul can come into contact and intimacy with its God, whatever name be given him and even if he be superpersonal.  The possibility and truth of this experience is hardly questioned in India and the task of religion is to bring it about, not to promote the welfare of tribes and states but to effect the enlightenment and salvation of souls.

The love of the Hindus for every form of argument and philosophizing is well known but it is happily counterbalanced by another tendency.  Instinct and religion both bring them into close sympathy with nature.  India is in the main an agricultural country[86] and nearly three-quarters of the population are villagers whose life is bound up with the welfare of plants and animals and lies at the mercy of rivers that overflow or skies that withhold the rain.  To such people nature-myths and sacred animals appeal with a force that Europeans rarely understand.  The parrots that perch on the pinnacles of the temple and the oxen that rest in the shade of its courts are not intruders but humble brothers of mankind, who may also be the messengers of the gods.

24. Buddhism in Practice

As I said above, it is easier to estimate the effects of Buddhism than of Hinduism, for its history is the chronicle of a great missionary enterprise and there are abundant materials for studying the results of its diffusion.