Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/14

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
x
PREFACE

ments and clasped hands"; and Buddha knew he was doing it to avert evil, and told him thereupon that the true way to guard the regions of Heaven and Earth was by showering good deeds all around him. In this new dispensation he might look upon his father and mother as the East, his wife and children as the West, his masters and teachers as the South, his friends and companions as the North, the saints and religious mystics as the Zenith, and his servants and dependents as the Nadir. Could one have a better reading of a Symbol for the law of human fellowship and a love wide as the world?

What, then, will Buddha's enlightened followers say to our latest Gospel? Kant has been in his grave more than a century, and the latest word of the philosophy that succeeds to his, we are told, points to the declaration: "It is not enough to love your country. You must love it in full armour. Everything that is not it must be hated. Hate is sacred." How different the voice of the patriot in Gitanjali, who speaks of a region "where the mind is without