Reading section 10

Our ancient _tapovanas_, or forest schools, which were our natural universities, were not shut off from the daily life of the people. Masters and students gathered fruit and fuel, and took their cattle out to graze, supporting themselves by the work of their own hands. Spiritual education was a part of the spiritual life itself, which comprehended all life. Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her economic life also. It must co-operate with the villages round it, cultivate land, breed cattle, spin cloths, press oil from oil-seeds; it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence should depend upon the success of its industrial activities carried out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active bond of necessity. This will give us also a practical industrial training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit.

Before I conclude my paper, a delicate question remains to be considered. What must be the religious ideal that is to rule our centre of Indian culture? The one abiding ideal in the religious life of India has been _Mukti_, the deliverance of man's soul from the grip of self, its communion with the Infinite Soul through its union in _ananda_ with the universe. This religion of spiritual harmony is not a theological doctrine to be taught, as a subject in the class, for half an hour each day. It is the spiritual truth and beauty of our attitude towards our surroundings, our conscious relationship with the Infinite, and the lasting power of the Eternal in the passing moments of our life. Such a religious ideal can only be made possible by making provision for students to live in intimate touch with nature, daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all creatures, tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the immense mystery of the soil and water and air.

Along with this, there should be some common sharing of life with the tillers of the soil and the humble workers in the neighbouring villages; studying their crafts, inviting them to the feasts, joining them in works of co-operation for communal welfare; and in our intercourse we should be guided, not by moral maxims or the condescension of social superiority, but by natural sympathy of life for life, and by the sheer necessity of love's sacrifice for its own sake. In such an atmosphere students would learn to understand that humanity is a divine harp of many strings, waiting for its one grand music. Those who realise this unity are made ready for the pilgrimage through the night of suffering, and along the path of sacrifice, to the great meeting of Man in the future, for which the call comes to us across the darkness.

Life, in such a centre, should be simple and clean. We should never believe that simplicity of life might make us unsuited to the requirements of the society of our time. It is the simplicity of the tuning-fork, which is needed all the more because of the intricacy of strings in the instrument. In the morning of our career our nature needs the pure and the perfect note of a spiritual ideal in order to fit us for the complications of our later years.

In other words, this institution should be a perpetual creation by the co-operative enthusiasm of teachers and students, growing with the growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent, rich with ever-renewing life, radiating life across space and time, attracting and maintaining round it a planetary system of dependent bodies. Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by social bonds, but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection.

THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

=GITANJALI. (Song Offerings.)= Translated by the Author. With an Introduction by W. B. YEATS, and a Portrait by W. ROTHENSTEIN. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM._--"Mr. Tagore's translations are of trance-like beauty.... The expanding sentiment of some of the poems wins, even through the alien medium of our English prose, a rhythm which in its strength and melody might recall familiar passages in the Psalms or Solomon's Song."

=FRUIT-GATHERING. A Sequel to "Gitanjali."= Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM._--"The eighty-six pieces that fill this volume are pure jets of lyric feeling, aphorisms expressed in moving symbols, or fully developed parables and allegories ... several are as perfect in form as they are beautiful and poignant in content."

=GITANJALI AND FRUIT-GATHERING.=

With Illustrations in colour and half-tone by NANDALAL BOSE, SURENDRANATH KAR, ABANINDRANATH TAGORE, and NOBINDRANATH TAGORE. Crown 8vo. 10s. net.

=THE GARDENER. Lyrics of Love and Life.= Translated by the Author. With Portrait. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_DAILY MAIL._--"Flowers as fresh as sunrise.... One cannot tell what they have lost in the translation, but as they stand they are of extreme beauty.... They are simple, exalted, fragrant--episodes and incidents of every day transposed to faery."

=THE CRESCENT MOON. Child-Poems.= Translated by the Author. With 8 Illustrations in Colour. Pott 4to. 5s. net.

_NATION._--"A vision of childhood which is only paralleled in our literature by the work of William Blake."

=STRAY BIRDS.= Poems. With a Frontispiece by WILLY POGANY. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

_SCOTSMAN._--"The richness of this volume in thought and in imagery, in tracing analogies and in discovering apologues, is such as to yield pleasure and profit to the most fertile and cultured minds."

=LOVER'S GIFT AND CROSSING.= Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM._--"The poems often touch extreme heights of passion and sublimity, and the diction has a beauty and a music that few have attained in this particular medium."

=THE FUGITIVE.= Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

_SUNDAY TIMES._--"In 'The Fugitive' the lovers of Tagore will not be disappointed. He has all his powers still undimmed. Indeed, the poet never, in our judgment, has surpassed this work."

=CHITRA. A Play.= Translated by the Author. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

_OBSERVER._--"An allegory of love's meaning, clear as a pool in the sunshine. It was written, we are told, twenty-five years ago.... Even then Mr. Tagore had that calm intensity of vision which we have all come to love in his later work. We find in him that for which Arjuna groped in his love, 'that ultimate _you_, that bare simplicity of truth,' and never more than in this little work of beauty, 'Chitra.'"

=THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER.= =A Play.= Translated by KSHITISH CHANDRA SEN. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_PALL MALL GAZETTE._--"Altogether, the play is a beautiful piece of fanciful writing with a veiled purpose at the back of it."

=THE POST OFFICE. A Play.= Translated by DEVABRATA MUKERJEA. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

_MANCHESTER GUARDIAN._--"'The Post Office' is a delicate, wistful thing, coloured with beautiful imagery; for a moment it lifts a corner of the veil of worldly existence. The translation is throughout extremely happy."

=THE CYCLE OF SPRING. A Play.= Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

_MANCHESTER GUARDIAN._--"The whole little drama is a spring-gift such as England has seldom received."

=SACRIFICE and other Plays.= Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_SCOTSMAN._--"All the pieces have a rare beauty of their own."

=THE HOME AND THE WORLD. A Novel.= Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

_SATURDAY REVIEW._--"In these days of indiscriminating praise, it is hard for a reviewer to find words with which to welcome properly a book so good as this."

=THE WRECK. A Novel.= Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.

_MORNING POST._--"The story cannot fail to interest and delight."

=MASHI and other Stories.= Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_OXFORD MAGAZINE._--"Full of pregnant pictures of Indian life and character, subdued but vivid in tone."

=HUNGRY STONES and other Stories.= Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

_DAILY TELEGRAPH._--"Contains descriptive passages of rare vigour and beauty, and is embellished with imagery of a delicate and distinctive character."

=S[=A]DHAN[=A]: The Realisation of Life. Lectures.= Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

=NATIONALISM.= Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

=PERSONALITY. Lectures delivered in America.= Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

=CREATIVE UNITY. Essays.= Extra Crown 8vo.

=MY REMINISCENCES.= Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

=GLIMPSES OF BENGAL. Selected from the Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, 1885 to 1895.= Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

=ONE HUNDRED POEMS OF KABIR.= Translated by RABINDRANATH TAGORE, assisted by EVELYN UNDERHILL. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

=RABINDRANATH TAGORE.= A Biographical Study. By ERNEST RHYS. Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.

=SIX PORTRAITS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE.= By W. ROTHENSTEIN. Reproduced in Collotype. With Prefatory Note by MAX BEERBOHM. Imperial 4to. 10s. net.

=THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MAHARSHI DEVENDRANATH TAGORE= (Father of RABINDRANATH TAGORE). Translated by SATYENDRANATH TAGORE and INDIRA DEVI. With Introduction by EVELYN UNDERHILL, and Portrait. Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

=THE PHILOSOPHY OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE.= By Prof. S. RADHAKRISHNAN. 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.

=SHANTINIKETAN: The Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.= By W. W. PEARSON. With Introduction by RABINDRANATH TAGORE. Illustrated. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. The page numbers in the Table of Contents have been adjusted to match the actual page numbers.