taken, every text in Shruti or
Smriti that goes against that view is twisted out of its natural
meaning, in order to be made to agree with the idea which already
dominates the mind. That is the difficulty with every religion; a man
acquires his view by tradition, by habit, by birth, by public opinion,
by the surroundings of his own time and of his own day. He finds in the
scriptures--which belong to no time, to no day, to no one age, and to
no one people, but are expressions of the eternal Veda--he finds in them
many texts that do not fit into the narrow framework that he has made;
and because he too often cares for the framework more than for the
truth, he manipulates the text until he can make it fit in, in some
dislocated fashion; and the ingenuity of the commentator too often
appears in the skill with which he can make words appear to mean what
they do not mean in their grammatical and obvious sense. Thus, men of
every school, under the mighty names of men who knew the truth--but who
could only give such portion of truth as they deemed man at the time was
able to receive--use their names to buttress up mistaken
interpretations, and thus walls are continually built up to block the
advancing life of man.

Now let me take one example from one of the greatest names, one who knew
the truth he spoke, but also, like every teacher, had to remember that
while he was man, those to whom he spoke were children that could not
grasp truth with virile understanding. That great teacher, founder of
one of the three schools of the Vedanta, Shri Ramanujacharya, in his
commentary on the _Bhagavad-Gita_--a priceless work which men of every
school might read and profit by--dealing with the phrase in which Shri
Krishna declares that He has had [Sanskrit: bahUnijanmAni]
"many births," points out how vast the variety of those births had been.
Then, confining himself to His manifestations as I'shvara--that is
after He had attained to the Supreme--he says quite truly that He was
born by His own will; not by karma that compelled Him, not by any force
outside Him that coerced Him, but by His own will He came forth as
I'shvara and incarnated in one form or another. But there is nothing
said there of the innumerable steps traversed by the mighty One ere yet
He merged Himself in the Supreme. Those are left on one side,
unmentioned, unnoticed, because what the writer had in his view was to
present to the hearts of men a great Object for adoration,