“One accent of the Holy Ghost This heedless world hath never lost.”
In Persia we have a new religious principle making its appearance, quite different from those we have met in our studies of China and India. It is the distinction between good and evil, both being regarded by the Persian as real and self-existent principles. Hence we have a negative power in the divine; for not good alone is supreme, but the good is limited by evil, and both are eternal, or at least real and actual, in the present world. The Hindu did not acknowledge the reality of evil; it was all “maya,” or illusion—a mere dream of our feverish consciousness. The whole world of nature, as well as the world of human beings, was likewise a dream that exists only in human consciousness. It is the duty of the good Brahmin to get rid of this dream of a world, by means of abstraction and penance and mortification of the flesh. When the devotee has tortured and misused his body until he has benumbed and paralyzed it to a degree that it can not feel or perceive, then he is no longer haunted by the things of the world. They do not any longer flow into his mind through his senses, and he becomes divine, or like Brahm, who has no distinctions whatever, and hence no knowledge of anything, nor consciousness of himself. For consciousness is a distinction of the me into subject and object, the knowing and the known—I and me.
The Hindu will not regard evil as divine, or as a part of the highest principle. He goes farther than this,—he will not admit any distinctions at all as divine. He thinks all distinction is division or limitation. Limitation in God is the distinction of his infinitude. It will not do, therefore, to think God as this or that, or as not this or that, for thus we should limit him. He must be pure unity, without distinction—yes, he must be above unity, above all thought.
The Hindu, therefore, can not permit the ideas of righteousness and goodness to be applied to Brahm any more than he can admit the application of wickedness and evil. Special gods, Indra, Varuna, Vishnu, Brahma, may be righteous, but Brahm is above goodness and above righteousness, as well as above evil.
The Persian, however, does not accept such a doctrine. He believes that there is Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd), the lord of all good, and opposed to him is Ahriman, the lord of all evil. The Persian insists on this dualism. Both principles are real; they are in perpetual conflict. This difference in religious principles causes great differences in character between the two peoples.