Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)
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Krishna avatar is that the unrighteousness of the Kurus as incarnated in Duryodhana and his brothers became so great a burden to the earth that she had ina oppression and restore t ne etnical balance or nankind^ (Thus the popular and mythical account of the THE DIVINE BIRTH AND DIVINE WORKS to call upon God to descend and lighten her load ; accordingly Vishnu incarnated as Krishna, delivered the oppressed Panda vas and destroyed the unjust Kauravas. A similar account is given of the descent of the previous Vishnu avatars, of Rama to destroy the unrighteous oppression of Ravana, of Parashurama to destroy the unrighteous license of the military and princely caste, the Kshatriyas, of the dwarf Vamana to destroy the rule of the Titan Bali, But obviously the purely practical, ethical or social and political mission of the Avatar which is thus thrown into popular and mythical form, does not give a right account of the phenomenon of Avatar- hood. It does not cover its spi ritual sense , and if this outward utility were ^all, we should have to exclude Buddha and Christ whose mission was not at all to destroy evildoers and deliver the good, but to bring to all men a new spiritual message and a new law of divine growth and spiritual realisation. On the other hand, if we give to the word dharma only its religous sense, in which it means a law of reljgious and spiritual Jife, we shall indeed get to the kernel of the matter, but we shall be in danger of excluding a most important part of the work done by the Avatar. Always we see in the history of the divine incarnations the double work, ahd inevitably, because thej^yatar takes up the workings of God in human life, the way of the divine Will and Wisdom in the world, and that aJy^sJEulfils itself externally ^_well as intermlly, l:g^uMicr.4>ro- gress in the soul and by an outer change^in the life
^he Avatar may descend as a great spiritual teacner and saviour, the Christ, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he has finished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerful change not only in the ethical, but in the social and outward life and ideals of the race. He may on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of the divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna ; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the ^iritual re birtlp It is indeed curious to note that the permanent, vital, universal effect of Buddhism and Christianity has been the force of their ethical, social and practical ideals and their influence even on the men and the ages which have rejected their religious and spiritual beliefs, forms and disciplines ; later Hinduism which rejected Buddha, his sangha and his dharma, bears the ineffaceable imprint of the social and ethical influence of Buddhism and its effect on the ideas and the life of the race, while in modern Europe, Christian only in name, humanitarianism is the translation into the ethical and social sphere and the aspiration to libe|^ty, equality and fraternity the translation into the social and political sphere of the spiritual truths of Christianity, the latter especially being effected by men who aggressively rejected the Christian religion and spiritual discipline and by an age which in its intellectual
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