502 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv.
for him who strives after true holiness; the surrender of all possessions, the forsaking of every dwelling-place and of all relatives; deep unbroken solitude, spent in silent contemplation, with voluntary penance and terrible slow self-torture for the absolute mortification of the will, torture which extends to voluntary death by starvation, or by men giving themselves up to crocodiles, or flinging themselves over the sacred precipice in the Himalayas, or being buried alive, or, finally, by flinging themselves under the wheels of the huge car of an idol drawn along amid the singing, shouting, and dancing of bayaderes. And even yet these precepts, whose origin reaches back more than four thousand years, are carried out in practice, in some cases even to the utmost extreme,[1] and this notwithstanding the fact that the Hindu nation has been broken up into so many parts. A religion which demands the greatest sacrifices, and which has yet remained so long in practice in a nation that embraces so many millions of persons, cannot be an arbitrarily invented superstition, but must have its foundation in the nature of man. But besides this, if we read the life of a Christian penitent or saint, and also that of a Hindu saint, we cannot sufficiently wonder at the harmony we find between them, In the case of such radically different dogmas, customs, and circumstances, the inward life and effort of both is the same. And the same harmony prevails in the maxims prescribed for both of them. For example, Tauler speaks of the absolute poverty which one ought to seek, and which consists in giving away and divesting oneself completely of everything from which one might draw comfort or worldly pleasure, clearly because all this constantly affords new nourishment to the will, which it is intended to destroy en-
- ↑ At the procession of Jagganath in June 1840, eleven Hindus threw themselves under the wheels, and were instantly killed. (Letter of an East Indian proprietor in the Times of 30th December 1840.)
