TRYING TO FATHOM HINDU THOUGHT

Regarding the territory in India generally, the very first difficulty facing the Kingdom publisher is finding some platform upon which minds may meet. To a Hindu graduate, a thing may be both true and not true. If you think that fire burns, then that is true to you, and if he thinks that it does not, then that is truth to him. He will agree that your careful, logical argument is the truth, and the next minute he will agree with the exact opposite. Both are true, he says!

The Hindu may have a surface respect for the Bible, but in reality he has no regard for the Holy Scriptures as a whole. To him there are no such things as truth and error. All is truth and all is error. There are no such things as evil and good. Evil is good and good is evil. There is no God and there is no Satan. We are God and we are Satan. All is God. That chair upon which you sit​—you think it lacks life? That is because you cannot detect its higher thought waves or communicate with its intelligence, which, he says, is higher than yours. That chair also is God, he says!

‘Then we saw our first cow walking on the sidewalk. She seemed to have the right of way and all people seemed to let her have full control of things. Then we saw more cows and sacred bulls. This was something new to us. We were used to seeing cows in a pasture or barnyard or in a barn, but to have them walking about the main streets of a city of four million people, helping themselves to some greens at a shop along the way and being chased away only to go to another shop, or eating something along the sidewalk that someone dropped, this was all so different from other countries visited! These were “sacred” animals. . . .

Illustrating the religious superstition of the Hindus was an incident that occurred while Brothers Knorr and Henschel were going to the assembly on the second day. The report states: “On our way to the assembly hall we encountered a man carrying water. We were informed that he had ‘holy’ water from a near-by well. The well is considered sacred by Hindus and its water is drunk regularly by some. It was reported that some time ago one of the untouchables wanting water let down a bucket into the well and drew out some for himself. This ‘defiled’ the well and a riot ensued. But that did not clean the water. The only thing the religionists could do to make the water ‘holy’ again was to take seven bucketsful of manure from sacred bulls and throw it into the water. Thereafter the Hindus could again drink this ‘holy’ water and use it for sacred purposes. It is also stated that this well is one of the great causes of cholera in Bombay.”