METHODS OF INTERPRETATION.
At the outset of his undertaking a double problem presents itself to one that would give, even in compact form, a view of Hindu religions. This problem consists in explaining, and, in so far as is possible, reconciling opposed opinions in regard not only to the nature of these religions but also to the method of interpreting the Vedic hymns.
That the Vedic religion was naturalistic and mytho-poetic is doubted by few. The Vedic hymns laud the powers of nature and natural phenomena as personified gods, or even as impersonal phenomena. They praise also as distinct powers the departed fathers. In the Rig Veda I. 168, occur some verses in honor of the storm-gods called Maruts: "Self-yoked are they come lightly from the sky. The immortals urge themselves on with the goad. Dustless, born of power, with shining spears the Maruts overthrow the strongholds. Who is it, O Maruts, ye that have lightning-spears, that impels you within? … The streams roar from the tires, when they send out their cloud-voices," etc. Nothing would seem more justifiable, in view of this hymn and of many like it, than to assume with Müller and other Indologians, that the Marut-gods are personifications of natural phenomena. As clearly do Indra and the Dawn appear to be natural phenomena. But no less an authority than Herbert Spencer has attacked this view: "Facts imply that the conception of the dawn as a person results from the giving of dawn as a birth-name."[9] And again: "If, then, Dawn [in New Zealand and elsewhere] is an actual name for a person, if where there prevails this mode of distinguishing children, it has probably often been given to those born early in the morning; the traditions concerning one of such who became noted, would, in the mind of the uncritical savage … lead to identification with the dawn."[10] In another passage: "The primitive god is the superior man … propitiated during his life and still more after his death."[11] Summing up, Spencer thus concludes: "Instead of seeing in the common character of so-called myths, that they describe combats of beings using weapons, evidence that they arose out of human transactions; mythologists assume that the order of Nature presents itself to the undeveloped mind in terms of victories and defeats."[12] Moreover (a posteriori), "It is not true that the primitive man looks at the powers of Nature with awe. It is not true that he speculates about their characters and causes."[13] If Spencer had not included in his criticism the mythologists that have written on Vedic religion, there would be no occasion to take his opinion into consideration. But since he claims by the light of his comparative studies to have shown that in the Rig Veda the "so-called nature gods,"[14] were not the oldest, and explains Dawn here exactly as he does in New Zealand, it becomes necessary to point out, that apart from the question of the origin of religions in general, Spencer has made a fatal error in assuming that he is dealing in the Rig Veda with primitive religion, uncritical savages, and undeveloped minds. And furthermore, as the poet of the Rig Veda is not primitive, or savage, or undeveloped, so when he worships Dyaus pitar [Greek: Zeùs patáer] as the 'sky-father,' he not only makes it evident to every reader that he really is worshipping the visible sky above; but in his descriptions of gods such as Indra, the Dawn, and some other new gods he invents from time to time, long after he has passed the savage, primitive, and undeveloped state, he makes it no less clear that he worships phenomena as they stand before him (rain, cloud, lightning, etc.), so that by analogy with what is apparent in the case of later divinities, one is led inevitably to predicate the same origin as theirs in the case of the older gods.
But it is unnecessary to spend time on this point. It is impossible for any sober scholar to read the Rig Veda and believe that the Vedic poets are not worshipping natural phenomena; or that the phenomena so worshipped were not the original forms of these gods. Whether at a more remote time there was ever a period when the pre-historic Hindu, or his pre-Indic ancestor, worshipped the Manes exclusively is another question, and one with which at present we have nothing to do. The history of Hindu religions begins with the Rig Veda, and in this period the worship of Manes and that of natural phenomena were distinct, nor are there any indications that the latter was ever developed from the former. It is not denied that the Hindus made gods of departed men. They did this long after the Vedic period. But there is no proof that all the Vedic gods, as claims Spencer, were the worshipped souls of the dead. No argumentum a fero can show in a Vedic dawn-hymn anything other than a hymn to personified Dawn, or make it probable that this dawn was ever a mortal's name.
In respect of that which precedes all tradition we, whose task is not to speculate in regard to primitive religious conceptions, but to give the history of one people's religious progress, may be pardoned for expressing no opinion. But without abandoning history (i.e., tradition) we would revert for a moment to the pre-Indian period and point out that Zarathustra's rejection of the daevas which must be the same devas that are worshipped in India, proves that deva-worship is the immediate predecessor of the Hindu religion. As far back as one can scrutinize the Aryan past he finds, as the earliest known objects of reverence, 'sun' and 'sky,' besides and beside the blessed Manes. A word here regarding the priority of monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on a priori grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration of one universal fact, and posit even Aryan polytheism as an advance on the religion which it is probable that the remoter ancestors of the Aryans once acknowledged.
A word perhaps should be said, also, in order to a better understanding between the ethnologists as represented by Andrew Lang, and the unfortunate philologists whom it delights him to pommel. Lang's clever attacks on the myth-makers, whom he persistently describes as the philologists—and they do indeed form part of that camp—have had the effect of bringing 'philological theories' into sad disrepute with sciolists and 'common-sense' people. But the sun-myths and dawn-myths that the myth-makers discover in Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, ought not to be fathered upon all philologists. On the other hand, who will deny that in India certain mythological figures are eoian or solar in origin? Can any one question that Vivasvant the 'wide gleaming' is sun or bright sky, as he is represented in the Avesta and Rig Veda? Yet is a very anthropomorphic, nay, earthly figure, made out of this god. Or is Mr. Lang ignorant that the god Yima became Jemshid, and that Feridun is only the god Trita? It undoubtedly is correct to illuminate the past with other light than that of sun or dawn, yet that these lights have shone and have been quenched in certain personalities may be granted without doing violence to scientific principles. All purely etymological mythology is precarious, but one may recognize sun-myths without building a system on the basis of a Dawn-Helen, and without referring Ilium to the Vedic bila. Again, myths about gods, heroes, and fairies are to be segregated. Even in India, which teems with it, there is little, if any, folklore that can be traced to solar or dawn-born myths. Mr. Lang represents a healthy reaction against too much sun-myth, but we think that there are sun-myths still, and that despite his protests all religion is not grown from one seed.
There remains the consideration of the second part of the double problem which was formulated above—the method of interpretation. The native method is to believe the scholiasts' explanations, which often are fanciful and, in all important points, totally unreliable; since the Hindu commentators lived so long after the period of the literature they expound that the tradition they follow is useful only in petty details. From a modern point of view the question of interpretation depends mainly on whether one regard the Rig Veda as but an Indic growth, the product of the Hindu mind alone, or as a work that still retains from an older age ideas which, having once been common to Hindu and Iranian, should be compared with those in the Persian Avesta and be illustrated by them. Again, if this latter hypothesis be correct, how is one to interpret an apparent likeness, here and there, between Indic and foreign notions,—is it possible that the hymns were composed, in part, before the advent of the authors into India, and is it for this reason that in the Rig Veda are contained certain names, ideas, and legends, which do not seem to be native to India? On the other hand, if one adopt the theory that the Rig Veda is wholly a native work, in how far is he to suppose that it is separable from Brahmanic formalism? Were the hymns made independently of any ritual, as their own excuse for being, or were they composed expressly for the sacrifice, as part of a formal cult?
Here are views diverse enough, but each has its advocate or advocates. According to the earlier European writers the Vedic poets are fountains of primitive thought, streams unsullied by any tributaries, and in reading them one quaffs a fresh draught, the gush of unsophisticated herdsmen, in whose religion there is to be seen a childlike belief in natural phenomena as divine forces, over which forces stands the Heaven-god as the highest power. So in 1869 Pfleiderer speaks of the "primeval childlike naïve prayer" of Rig Veda vi. 51. 5 ("Father sky, mother earth," etc.);[15] while Pictet, in his work Les Origines Indo-Européennes, maintains that the Aryans had a primitive monotheism, although it was vague and rudimentary; for he regards both Iranian dualism and Hindu polytheism as being developments of one earlier monism (claiming that Iranian dualism is really monotheistic). Pictet's argument is that the human mind must have advanced from the simple to the complex! Even Roth believes in an originally "supreme deity" of the Aryans.[16] Opposed to this, the 'naïve' school of such older scholars as Roth, Müller,[17] and Grassmann, who see in the Rig Veda an ingenuous expression of 'primitive' ideas, stand the theories of Bergaigne, who interprets everything allegorically; and of Pischel and Geldner, realists, whose general opinions may thus be formulated: The poets of the Rig Veda are not childlike and naïve; they represent a comparatively late period of culture, a society not only civilized, but even sophisticated; a mode of thought philosophical and sceptical a religion not only ceremonious but absolutely stereotyped. In regard to the Aryanhood of the hymns, the stand taken by these latter critics, who renounce even Bergaigne's slight hold on mythology, is that the Rig Veda is thoroughly Indic. It is to be explained by the light of the formal Hindu ritualism, and even by epic worldliness, its fresh factors being lewd gods, harlots, and race-horses. Bloomfield, who does not go so far as this, claims that the 'Vedic' age really is a Brahmanic age; that Vedic religion is saturated with Brahmanic ideas and Brahmanic formalism, so that the Rig Veda ought to be looked upon as made for the ritual, not the ritual regarded as ancillary to the Rig Veda[18]. This scholar maintains that there is scarcely any chronological distinction between the hymns of the Rig Veda and the Br[=a]hmana, both forms having probably existed together "from earliest times"; and that not a single Vedic hymn "was ever composed without reference to ritual application"; nay, all the hymns were "liturgical from the very start"[19]. This is a plain advance even on Bergaigne's opinion, who finally regarded all the family-books of the Rig Veda as composed to subserve the soma-cult.[20]
In the Rig Veda occur hymns of an entirely worldly character, the lament of a gambler, a humorous description of frogs croaking like priests, a funny picture of contemporary morals [describing how every one lusts after wealth], and so forth. From these alone it becomes evident that the ritualistic view must be regarded as one somewhat exaggerated. But if the liturgical extremist appears to have stepped a little beyond the boundary of probability, he yet in daring remains far behind Bergaigne's disciple Regnaud, who has a mystical 'system,' which is, indeed, the outcome of Bergaigne's great work, though it is very improbable that the latter would have looked with favor upon his follower's results. In Le Rig Veda [Paris, 1892] Paul Regnaud, emphasizing again the connection between the liturgy and the hymns, refers every word of the Rig Veda to the sacrifice in its simplest form, the oblation. According to this author the Hindus had forgotten the meaning of their commonest words, or consistently employed them in their hymns in a meaning different to that in ordinary use. The very word for god, deva [deus], no longer means the 'shining one' [the god], but the 'burning oblation'; the common word for mountain, giri also means oblation, and so on. This is Bergaigne's allegorical mysticism run mad.
At such perversion of reasonable criticism is the exegesis of the Veda arrived in one direction. But in another it is gone astray no less, as misdirected by its clever German leader. In three volumes[21] Brunnhofer has endeavored to prove that far from being a Brahmanic product, the Rig Veda is not even the work of Hindus; that it was composed near the Caspian Sea long before the Aryans descended into India. Brunnhofer's books are a mine of ingenious conjectures, as suggestive in detail as on the whole they are unconvincing. His fundamental error is the fancy that names and ideas which might be Iranian or Turanian would prove, if such they really could be shown to be, that the work in which they are contained must be Iranian or Turanian. He relies in great measure on passages that always have been thought to be late, either whole late hymns or tags added to old hymns, and on the most daring changes in the text, changes which he makes in order to prove his hypothesis, although there is no necessity for making them. The truth that underlies Brunnhofer's extravagance is that there are foreign names in the Rig Veda, and this is all that he has proved thus far.
In regard to the relation between the Veda and the Avesta the difference of views is too individual to have formed systems of interpretation on that basis alone. Every competent scholar recognizes a close affinity between the Iranian Yima and the Hindu Yama, between the soma-cult and the haoma-cult, but in how far the thoughts and forms that have clustered about one development are to be compared with those of the other there is no general agreement and there can be none. The usual practice, however, is to call the Iranian Yima, haoma, etc., to one's aid if they subserve one's own view of Yama, soma, and other Hindu parallels, and to discard analogous features as an independent growth if they do not. This procedure is based as well on the conditions of the problem as on the conditions of human judgment, and must not be criticized too severely; for in fact the two religions here and there touch each other so nearly that to deny a relation between them is impossible, while in detail they diverge so widely that it is always questionable whether a coincidence of ritual or belief be accidental or imply historical connection.
It is scarcely advisable in a concise review of several religions to enter upon detailed criticism of the methods of interpretation that affect for the most part only the earliest of them. But on one point, the reciprocal relations between the Vedic and Brahmanic periods, it is necessary to say a few words. Why is it that well-informed Vedic scholars differ so widely in regard to the ritualistic share in the making of the Veda? Because the extremists on either side in formulating the principles of their system forget a fact that probably no one of them if questioned would fail to acknowledge. The Rig Veda is not a homogeneous whole. It is a work which successive generations have produced, and in which are represented different views, of local or sectarian origin; while the hymns from a literary point of view are of varying value. The latter is a fact which has been ignored frequently, but it is more important than any other. For one has almost no criteria, with which to discover whether the hymns precede or follow the ritual, other than the linguistic posteriority of the ritualistic literature, and the knowledge that there were priests with a ritual when some of the hymns were composed. The bare fact that hymns are found rubricated in the later literature is surely no reason for believing that such hymns were made for the ritual. Now while it can be shown that a large number of hymns are formal, conventional, and mechanical in expression, and while it may be argued with plausibility that these were composed to serve the purpose of an established cult, this is very far from being the case with many which, on other grounds, may be supposed to belong severally to the older and later part of the Rig Veda. Yet does the new school, in estimating the hymns, never admit this. The poems always are spoken of as 'sacerdotal', ritualistic, without the slightest attempt to see whether this be true of all or of some alone. We claim that it is not historical, it is not judicious from a literary point of view, to fling indiscriminately together the hymns that are evidently ritualistic and those of other value; for, finally, it is a sober literary judgment that is the court of appeals in regard to whether poetry be poetry or not. Now let one take a hymn containing, to make it an unexceptionable example, nothing very profound or very beautiful. It is this well-known
HYMN TO THE SUN (Rig Veda, I. 50).
Aloft this all-wise[22] shining god
His beams of light are bearing now,
That every one the sun may see.
Apart, as were they thieves, yon stars,
Together with the night[23], withdraw
Before the sun, who seeth all.
His beams of light have been beheld
Afar, among [all] creatures; rays
Splendid as were they [blazing] fires,
Impetuous-swift, beheld of all,
Of light the maker, thou, O Sun,
Thou all the gleaming [sky] illum'st.
Before the folk of shining gods
Thou risest up, and men before,
'Fore all—to be as light beheld;
[To be] thine eye, O pure bright Heaven,
Wherewith amid [all] creatures born
Thou gazest down on busy [man].
Thou goest across the sky's broad place,
Meting with rays, O Sun, the days,
And watching generations pass.
The steeds are seven that at thy car
Bear up the god whose hair is flame
O shining god, O Sun far-seen!
Yoked hath he now his seven fair steeds,
The daughters of the sun-god's car,
Yoked but by him[24]; with these he comes.
For some thousands of years these verses have been the daily prayer of the Hindu. They have been incorporated into the ritual in this form. They are rubricated, and the nine stanzas form part of a prescribed service. But, surely, it were a literary hysteron-proteron to conclude for this reason that they were made only to fill a part in an established ceremony.
The praise is neither perfunctory nor lacking in a really religious tone. It has a directness and a simplicity, without affectation, which would incline one to believe that it was not made mechanically, but composed with a devotional spirit that gave voice to genuine feeling.
We will now translate another poem (carefully preserving all the tautological phraseology), a hymn
To DAWN (Rig Veda VI. 64).
Aloft the lights of Dawn, for beauty gleaming,
Have risen resplendent, like to waves of water;
She makes fair paths, (makes) all accessible;
And good is she, munificent and kindly.
Thou lovely lookest, through wide spaces shin'st thou,
Up fly thy fiery shining beams to heaven;
Thy bosom thou reveals't, thyself adorning,
Aurora, goddess gleaming bright in greatness.
The ruddy kine (the clouds) resplendent bear her,
The blessed One, who far and wide extendeth.
As routs his foes a hero armed with arrows,
As driver swift, so she compels the darkness.
Thy ways are fair; thy paths, upon the mountains;
In calm, self-shining one, thou cross'st the waters.
O thou whose paths are wide, to us, thou lofty
Daughter of Heaven, bring wealth for our subsistence.
Bring (wealth), thou Dawn, who, with the kine, untroubled
Dost bring us good commensurate with pleasure,
Daughter of Heaven, who, though thou art a goddess,
Didst aye at morning-call come bright and early.
Aloft the birds fly ever from their dwelling,
And men, who seek for food, at thy clear dawning.
E'en though a mortal stay at home and serve thee,
Much joy to him, Dawn, goddess (bright), thou bringest.
The "morning call" might, indeed, suggest the ritual, but it proves only a morning prayer or offering. Is this poem of a "singularly refined character," or "preëminently sacerdotal" in appearance? One other example (in still a different metre) may be examined, to see if it bear on its face evidence of having been made with "reference to ritual application," or of being "liturgical from the very start."
To INDRA (Rig Veda, I.11).
'Tis Indra all (our) songs extol,
Him huge as ocean in extent;
Of warriors chiefest warrior he,
Lord, truest lord for booty's gain.
In friendship, Indra, strong as thine
Naught will we fear, O lord of strength;
To thee we our laudations sing,
The conqueror unconquered.[25]
The gifts of Indra many are,
And inexhaustible his help
Whene'er to them that praise he gives
The gift of booty rich in kine.
A fortress-render, youthful, wise,
Immeasurably strong was born
Indra, the doer of every deed,
The lightning-holder, far renowned.
'Twas thou, Bolt-holder, rent'st the cave
Of Val, who held the (heavenly) kine;[26]
Thee helped the (shining) gods, when roused
(To courage) by the fearless one.[27]
Indra, who lords it by his strength,
Our praises now have loud proclaimed;
His generous gifts a thousand are,
Aye, even more than this are they.
This is poetry. Not great poetry perhaps, but certainly not ground out to order, as some of the hymns appear to have been. Yet, it may be said, why could not a poetic hymn have been written in a ritualistic environment? But it is on the hymns themselves that one is forced to depend for the belief in the existence of ritualism, and we claim that such hymns as these, which we have translated as literally as possible, show rather that they were composed without reference to ritual application. It must not be forgotten that the ritual, as it is known in the Br[=a]hmanas, without the slightest doubt, from the point of view of language, social conditions, and theology, represents an age that is very different to that illustrated by the mass of the hymns. Such hymns, therefore, and only such as can be proved to have a ritualistic setting can be referred to a ritualistic age. There is no convincing reason why one should not take the fully justified view that some of the hymns represent a freer and more natural (less priest-bound) age, as they represent a spirit freer and less mechanical than that of other hymns. As to the question which hymns, early or late, be due to poetic feeling, and which to ritualistic mechanism or servile imitation, this can indeed be decided by a judgment based only on the literary quality, never on the accident of subsequent rubrication.
We hold, therefore, in this regard, that the new school, valuable and suggestive as its work has been, is gone already farther than is judicious. The Rig Veda in part is synchronous with an advanced ritualism, subjected to it, and in some cases derived from it; but in part the hymns are "made for their own sake and not for the sake of any sacrificial performance," as said Muller of the whole; going in this too far, but not into greater error than are gone they that confuse the natural with the artificial, the poetical with the mechanical, gold with dross. It may be true that the books of the Rig Veda are chiefly family-books for the soma-cult, but even were it true it would in no wise impugn the poetic character of some of the hymns contained in these books. The drag-net has scooped up old and new, good and bad, together. The Rig Veda is not of one period or of one sort. It is a 'Collection,' as says its name. It is essentially impossible that any sweeping statement in regard to its character should be true if that character be regarded as uniform. To say that the Rig Veda represents an age of childlike thought, a period before the priestly ritual began its spiritual blight, is incorrect. But no less incorrect is it to assert that the Rig Veda represents a period when hymns are made only for rubrication by priests that sing only for baksheesh. Scholars are too prone to-day to speak of the Rig Veda in the same way as the Greeks spoke of Homer. It is to be hoped that the time may soon come when critics will no longer talk about the Collection as if it were all made in the same circumstances and at the same time; above all is it desirable that the literary quality of the hymns may receive due attention, and that there may be less of those universal asseverations which treat the productions of generations of poets as if they were the work of a single author.
In respect of the method of reading into the Rig Veda what is found in parallel passages in the Atharva Veda and Br[=a]hmanas, a practice much favored by Ludwig and others, the results of its application have been singularly futile in passages of importance. Often a varied reading will make clearer a doubtful verse, but it by no means follows that the better reading is the truer. There always remains the lurking suspicion that the reason the variant is more intelligible is that its inventor did not understand the original. As to real elucidation of other sort by the later texts, in the minutiae of the outer world, in details of priestcraft, one may trust early tradition tentatively, just as one does late commentators, but in respect of ideas tradition is as apt to mislead as to lead well. The cleft between the theology of the Rig Veda and that of the Br[=a]hmanas, even from the point of view of the mass of hymns that comprise the former, is too great to allow us with any content to explain the conceptions of the one by those of the other. A tradition always is useful when nothing else offers itself, but traditional beliefs are so apt to take the color of new eras that they should be employed only in the last emergency, and then with the understanding that they are of very hypothetical value.
In conclusion a practical question remains to be answered. In the few cases where the physical basis of a Rig Vedic deity is matter of doubt, it is advisable to present such a deity in the form in which he stands in the text or to endeavor historically to elucidate the figure by searching for his physical prototype? We have chosen the former alternative, partly because we think the latter method unsuitable to a handbook, since it involves many critical discussions of theories of doubtful value. But this is not the chief reason. Granted that the object of study is simply to know the Rig Veda, rightly to grasp the views held by the poets, and so to place oneself upon their plane of thought, it becomes obvious that the farther the student gets from their point of view the less he understands them. Nay, more, every bit of information, real as well as fancied, which in regard to the poets' own divinities furnishes one with more than the poets themselves knew or imagined, is prejudicial to a true knowledge of Vedic beliefs. Here if anywhere is applicable that test of desirable knowledge formulated as das Erkennen des Erkannten. To set oneself in the mental sphere of the Vedic seers, as far as possible to think their thoughts, to love, fear, and admire with them—this is the necessary beginning of intimacy, which precedes the appreciation that gives understanding.