XV. SOME POSSIBLE EPOCHS IN SANSKRIT LITERATURE
Han Chaoti died in 63 B.C.; his successor is described as a "boor of low tastes";—from that time the great Han impetus goes slowing down and quieting. China was recuperating after Han Wuti's flare of splendor; we may leave her to recuperate, and look meanwhile elsewhere.
And first to that most tantalizing of human regions, India; where you would expect something just now from the cyclic backwash. As soon as you touch this country, in the domain of history and chronology, you are certain, as they say, to get 'hoodooed.' Kali-Yuga began there in 3102 B.C., and ever since that unfortunate event, not a single soul in the country seems to have had an idea of keeping track of the calendar. So-and-so, you read, reigned. When?—Oh, in 1000 A.D. Or in 213 A.D. Or in 78 A.D. Or in a few million B.C., or 2100 A.D. Or he did not reign at all. After all, what does it matter?—this is Kali-Yuga, and nothing can go right.—You fix your eyes on a certain spot in time, which, according to your guesses at the cycles, should be important. Nothing doing there, as we say. Oh no, nothing at all: this is Kali-Yuga, and what should be doing? …. Well, if you press the point, no doubt somebody was reigning, somewhere.—But, pardon my insistence, if seems—. Quite so, quite so! as I said, somebody must have been reigning.—You scrutinze; you bring your lenses to bear; and the somebody begins to emerge. And proves to be, say, the great Samundragupta, emperor of all India (nearly); for power and splendor, almost to be mentioned with Asoka. And it was the Golden Age of Music, and perhaps some other things.—Yes, certainly; the Guptas were reigning then, I forgot. But why bother about it? This is Kali-Yuga, and what does anything matter?—And you come away with the impression that your non-informant could reveal enough and plenty, if he had a mind to.
Which is, indeed, probably the case. All this nonchalant indefiniteness means nothing more, one suspects, than that the Brahmans have elected to keep the history of their country unknown to us poor Mlechhas. Then there are Others, too: the Guardians of Esotericism in a greater sense; who have not chosen so far that Indian history should be known. So we can only take dim foreshadowings, and make guesses.
We saw the Maurya dynasty,—that one seemingly firm patch to set your feet on in the whole morass of the Indian past,—occupy the thirteen decades from 320 to 190 B.C., (or we thought we did); now the question is, from that pied-a-terre whither shall we jump? If you could be sure that the ebb of the wave would be equal in length to its inrush,—the night to the day:—that the minor pralaya would be no longer or shorter than the little manvantara that preceded it—why, then you might leap out securely for 60 B.C., with a comfortable feeling that there would be some kind of turning-point in Indian history there or thereabouts. Sometimes things do happen so, beautifully, as if arranged by the clock. But unfortunately, enough mischief may be done in thirteen decades to take a much longer period to disentangle; and again, it is only when you strike an average for the whole year, that you can say the nights are equal to the days. We are trying to see through to the pattern of history; not to dogmatize on such details as we may find, nor claim on the petty strength of them to be certain of the whole. So, our present leap (for we shall make it), while not quite in the dark, must be made in the dusk of an hour or so after sunset. There must be an element of faith in it: very likely we shall splash and sink gruesomely.
Well, here goes then! From 190 B.C. thirteen decades forward to 60 B.C., and,—squish! But, courage! throw out your arm and clutch—at this trailing root, 57 B. C., here within easy reach; and haul yourself out. So; and see, now you are standing on something. What it is, Dios lo sabe! But there is an Indian era that begins in 57 B.C.; for a long time, dates were counted from that year. That era rises in undefined legendary splendor, and peters out ineffectually you don't just know where. There is nothing to go upon but legends, with never a coin nor monument found to back them;—never mind; dates you count eras from are generally those in which important cycles begin. The legends relate to Vikramaditya king of Ujjain,—which kingdom is towards the western side of the peninsula, and about where Hindoostan and the Deccan join. He is the Arthur-Charlemain of India, the Golden Monarch of Romance. In the lakes of his palace gardens the very swans sang his praises daily—
"Glory be to Vikramajeet
Who always gives us pearls to eat";
and when he died, the four pillars that supported his throne rose up, and wandered away through the fields and jungle disconsolate: they would not support the dignity of any lesser man.* Such tales are told about him by every Indian mother to her children at this present day, and have been, presumably, any time these last two thousand years.
——— * India through the Ages, by Mrs. Flora Annie Steel. ———
Of his real existence Historical Research cannot satisfy itself at all;—or it half guesses it may have discovered his probable original wandering in disguise through the centuries of a thousand years or so later. But you must expect that sort of thing in India.
At his court, says tradition, lived the "Nine Gems of Literature," —chief among them the poet-dramatist Kalidasa; whom Historical Research (western) rather infers lived at several widely separated epochs much nearer our own day. Well; for the time being let us leave Historical Research (western) to stew in its own (largely poisonous) juices, and see how it likes it,—and say that there are good cyclic chances of something large here, in the half-cycle between the Ages of Han Wuti and Augustus.
We may note that things Indian must be dealt with differently from things elsewhere. You take, for example, the old story about the Moslem conquerors of Egypt burning the Alexandrian Library. The fact that this is mentioned for the first time by a Christian who lived six hundred years after the supposed event, while we have many histories written during those six hundred years which say nothing about it at all,—is evidence amounting to proof that it never happened; especially when you take into account the known fact that the Alexandrian Library had already been thoroughly burnt several times. But you can derive no such negativing certainty, in India, from the fact that Vikramaditya and Ujjain and Kalidasa may never have been mentioned together, not associated with the era of 57 B.C., in any extant writing known to the west that comes from before several centuries later. Because the Brahman were a close corporation that kept the records of history, and kept them secret; and gave out bits when it suited them. Say that in 1400 (or whenever else it may have been) they first allowed it to be published that Kalidasa flourished at Vikrmaditya's court:—they may have been consciously lying, but at least they were talking about what they knew. They were not guessing, or using their head-gear wrongfully, their lying was intentional, or their truth warranted by knowledge. And no motive for lying is apparent here.—It would be very satisfactory, of course, were a coin discovered with King Vikrmaditya's image and superscription nicely engraved thereon: Vikramaditya De Gratia: Uj. Imp.; Fid. Def.; 57 B.C. But in this wicked world you cannot have everything; you must be thankful for what you can get.
You may remember that Han Wuti, to solve the Hun problem, sent Chang Ch'ien out through the desert to discover the Yueh Chi' and that Chang found them at last in Bactria, which they had conquered from Greeks who had held it since Alexander's time. He found them settled and with some fair degree of civilization; spoke of Bactria under their sway as a "land of a thousand cities";—they had learned much since they were nomads driven out of Kansuh by the Huns. Also they were in the midst of a career of expansion. Within thirty years of his visit to them, or by 100 B.C., they had spread their empire over eastern Persia, at the expense of the Parthians; and thence went down into India conquering. By 60 B.C. they held the Punjab and generally the western parts of Hindoostan; then, since they do not seem to have got down into the Deccan, I take it they were held up. By whom?—Truly this is pure speculation. But the state of Malwa, of which Ujjain was the capital, lay right in their southward path; if held up they were, it would have been, probably, by some king of Ujjain. Was this what happened?—that the peril of these northern invaders roused Malwa to exert its fullest strength; the military effort spurring up national feeling; the national feeling, creative energies spiritual, mental and imaginative;—until a great age in Ujjain had come into being. It is what we often see. The menace of Spain roused England to Elizabethanism; the Persian peril awakend Athens. So King Vikramaditya leads out his armies, and to victory; and the Nine Gems of Literature sing at his court. It is a backwash from Han Wuti's China, that goes west with Chang Ch'ien to the Yueh Chi, and south with them into India. And we can look for no apex of literary creation at this time, either in China or Europe. In the Roman literature of that cycle it is the keen creative note we miss: Virgil, the nearest to it, cannot be said to have possessed quite; and Han literature was probably its first culmination under Han Wuti, and its second under the Eastern Hans. One suspects that great creation is generally going on somewhere, and is not displeased to find hints of its presence in India; is inclined to think this may have been, after all, the Golden Age of the Sanskrit Drama.—At which there can be at any rate no harm in taking a glance at this point; and, retrospectively, at Sanskrit literature as a whole;—a desperately inadequate glance, be it said.
I ask you here to remember the three periods of English Poetry, with their characteristics; and you must not mind my using my Welsh god-names in connexion with them. First, then, there was the Period of Plenydd,—of the beginnings of Vision; when the eyes of Chaucer and his lyricist predecessors were opened to the world out-of-doors; when they began to see that the skies were blue, fields and forests green; that there were flowers in the meadows and woodlands; and that all these things were delectable. Then there was the Period of Gwron, Strength; when Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton evolved the Grand Manner; when they made the great March-Music, unknown in English before, and hardly achieved by anyone since:—the era of the great Warrior-poetry of the Tragedies and of Paradise Lost. Then came, with Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the Age of Alawn, lasting on until today; when the music of intonation brought with it romance and mystery and Natural Magic with its rich glow and wizard insight. And you will remember how English Poetry, on the uptrend of a major cycle, is a reaching from the material towards the spiritual, a growth toward that. Though Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,—by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,—you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise; nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's. There was an evolution upward and inward; from Chaucer's school-boy vision, to Swinburne's (in that one book) clear sight of the Soul.
We appear to find in Sanskrit literature,—I speak in a very general sense,—also such great main epochs or cycles. First a reign of Plenydd, of Vision,—in the Age of the Sacred Books. Then a reign of Gwron,—in the Age of the heroic Epics. Then a reign of Alawn, in the Age of the Drama.
But the direction is all opposite. The cycle is not upward, from the sough of a beastly Iron Age towards the luminance of a coming Golden; but downward from the peaks and splendors of the Age of Gold to where the outlook is on to this latter hell's-gulf of years. Plenydd, when he first touched English eyes, he was Plenydd the Lord of Spiritual vision, the Seer into the Eternities. Wordsworth at his highest only approaches,— Swinburne in Hertha halts at the portals of, the Upanishads.
Now, what may this indicate? To my mind, this: that you are not to take these Sanskrit Sacred Books as the fruitage of a single literary age. They do not correspond with, say, the Elizabethan, or the Nineteenth-Century, poetry of England; but are rather the cream of the output of a whole period as long (at least) as that of all English literature; the blossoming of a Racial Mind during (at least) a manvantara of fifteen hundred years. I do not doubt that the age that gave birth to the Katha-Upanishad, gave birth to all manner of other things also; flippancies and trivialities among the rest;—just as in the same England, and in the same years, Milton was dictating Samson Agonistes, and Butler was writing the stinging scurrilities of Hudibras. But the Sanskrit Hudibrases are lost; as the English one will be, even if it takes millenniums to lose it. Full-flowing time has washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide Paradise Lost; it made the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron; the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference: all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,—Dante and Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the rock-built palaces of the Soul; and these,—not complete, perhaps;—repaired to a degree by hands more foolish;—a little ruinous in places,—but the ruins grander and brighter than all the pomps, all the new-fangled castles of genii, of later times, —come down to us as the Sacred Books of India, the oldest extant literature in the world. How old? We may put their epoch well before the death of Krishna in 3102 B. C.,—well before the opening of the Kali-Yuga; we may say that it lasted a very long time;—and be content that if all scholarship, all western and modern opinion, laughs at us now,—the laugh will probably be with us when we have been dead a long time. Or perhaps sooner.
They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-classical literature, wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation. These three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads. The Vedas consist of hymns to the Gods; and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the Gods a sufficient expression of religion. Where, say, Reincarnation was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it: —you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up in the morning—or not as a rule. You make poems upon a reaction of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,— and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful and Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire, the Winds and Waters. Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of Eternal Beauty. It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as some folk do, a 'primitive' state of society; we have not the keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people among whom those hymns arose. Poetry in every succeeding age has had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her native spheres: were all spiritual truth granted, she would need do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would flood into the minds of her hearers. But now she must labor difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce. So the Vedas tell us little unless we separate ourselves from our preconceptions about 'primitive Aryans'; whose civilization may have been at once highly evolved and very spiritual.
The Brahmanas are priest-books; the Upanishads, it is reasonable to say are Kshattriya-books;—you often find in them Brahmans coming to Kshattriyas to learn the Inner Wisdom. The Brahmanas are books of ritual; the Upanishads came much later that the Brahmanas: that they represent a reaction towards spirituality from the tyranny of a priestly caste. But probably the day of the Kshattriyas was much earlier than that of the priests. The Marlow-Shakespear-Milton time was the Kshattriya period in English poetry; also the period during which the greatest souls incarnated, and produced the greatest work. So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-classical Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure,—a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the wonder and freeddom of their being. Think, perhaps, as the cycle mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving: mighty egos incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the Upanishads: there may have been a descent towards matter, to call forth these more explicit declarations of the Spirit. The exclusive caste-system had not been evolved by any means, nor was to be for many ages: the kings are at the head of things; and they, not the priests, the chief custodians of the Deeper Wisdom.—And then, later, the Priest-cast made its contribution, evolving in the Brahmanas the ritual of their order; with an implication, ever growing after the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, that only by this ritual salvation could be attained. Not that it follows that this was the idea at first. Ritual has its place: hymns and chantings, so they be the right ones, performed rightly, have their decided magical value; we can understand that in its inception and first purity, this Brahmana literature may have been a growth or birth, under the aegis of Alawn of the Harmonies, of the magic of chanted song.
And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that to attribute these three branches of literature to a single manvantara is a woeful foreshortening. I suppose the Rig-Veda is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.
The Upanishads affect us like poetry; even in Max Muller's translation, which is poor prose, they do not lose altogether their uplift and quality of song. They sing the philosophy of the divine in Man; I suppose we may easily say they are the highest thing in extant literature. They do not come to us whole or untainted. We may remember what the Swami Dayanand Sarasvati said to H. P. Blavatsky: that he could show the excellent "Moksh Mooller" that "what crossed the Kalapani from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books." Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching; the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books. Also the Buddha was a Kshattriya; so the ancient eminence of the Kshattriyas had to be obscured a little;—it was the Brahmans, by that time, who were monopolizing the teaching office. And no doubt in the same way from time to time much has been added: the Brahmans could do this, being custodians of the sacred literature. Yet in spite of all we get in them a lark's song,— but a spiritual lark's song, floating and running in the golden glories of the Spiritual Sun; a song whose verve carries us openly up into the realms of pure spirit; a wonderful radiance and sweetness of dawn, of dawn in its fresh purity, its holiness,—haunted with no levity or boisterousness of youth, but with a wisdom gay and ancient,—eternal, laughter-laden, triumphant,—at once hoary and young,—like the sparkle of snows on Himalaya, like the amber glow in the eastern sky. Here almost alone in literature we get long draughts of the Golden Age: not a Golden Age fought for and brought down into our perceptions (which all true poetry gives us), but one actually existing, open and free;—and not merely the color and atmosphere of it, but the wisdom. One need not wonder that Madame Blavatsky drew so freely on India for the nexus of her teachings. That country has performed a marvelous function, taking all its ages together, in the life of humanity; in preserving for us the poetry and wisdom of an age before the Mysteries had declined; in keeping open for us, in a semi-accessible literature, a kind of window into the Golden Age.—Well; each of the races has some function to fulfil. And it is not modern India that has done this; she has not done it of her own good will,—has had no good will to do it. It is the Akbars the Anquetil Duperrons and Sir William Joneses, —and above all, and far above all, H. P. Blavatsky,—whom we have to thank.
So much, then, for the age of the Vedic literature. It passed, and we come to an age when that literature had become sacred. It seems to me that in the natural course of things it would take a very long time for this to happen. You may say that in the one analogy we have whose history is well known,—the Koran,—we have an example of a book sacred as soon as written. But I do not believe the analogy would hold good here. The Koran came as the rallying-standard of a movement which was designed to work quick changes in the outer fabric of the world; it came when the cycles had sunk below any possibility of floating spiritual wisdom on to the world-currents;—and there were the precedents of Judaism and Christianity, ever before the eyes of Mohammed, for making the new religious movement center about a Book. But in ancient India, I take it, you had some such state of affairs as this: classes there would be, according to the natural differences of egos incarnating; but no castes; religion there was,—that is to say, an attention to, an aspiration towards, the spiritual side of life; but no religions,—no snarling sects and jangling foolish creeds. Those things (a God's mercy!) had not been invented then, nor were to be for thousands of years. The foremost souls, the most spiritual, gravitated upward to the headship of tribes and nations; they were the kings, as was proper they should be: King-Initiates, Teachers as well as Rulers of the people. And they ordained public ceremonies in which the people, coming together, could invoke and participate in the Life from Above. So we read in the Upanishads of those great Kshattriya Teachers to whom Brahmans came as disciples. Poets made their verses; and what of these were good, really inspired, suitable—what came from the souls of Poet-Initiates,— would be used at such ceremonies: sung by the assembled multitudes; and presently, by men specially trained to sing them. So a class rose with this special function; and there were other functions in connexion with these ceremonies, not proper to be performed by the kings, and which needed a special training to carry out. Here, then, was an opening in life for men of the right temperament;—so a class arose, of priests: among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the Adept-Kings. They had the business of taking care of the literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,—for convenience we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,—at which they performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal parts. It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given them;—how that literature would have come to be not merely sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of the Soul behind it really is;—but credited with an extra-human sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration? —To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's The World is too much with us, or Henley's I am the Captain of my Soul. And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration, —but as revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance, and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.
Well, the age of the Vedas passed, and pralayas came, and new manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Classical Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics. This too is a Kshattriya age. Whether it represents a new ascendency of the Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one: whether the priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and somewhat fallen from it again,—or whether their rise was still in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings from their lead,—who can say? But this much, perhaps, we may venture without fear: the Kshattriyas of the Epic age were not the same as those of the Upanishads. They were not Adept-Kings and Teachers in the same way. By Epic age, I mean the age in which the epics were written, not that of which they tell. And neither the Mahabharata nor the Ramayana was composed in a day; but in many centuries;—and it is quite likely that on them too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work. Some parts of them were no doubt written in the centuries after Christ; there is room enough to allow for this, when you think that the one contains between ninety and a hundred thousand, the other about twenty-four thousand couplets;—the Mahabharata being about seven times, the Ramayana about twice as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. So the Age of the Epics must be narrowed down again, to mean the age that gave birth to the nuclei of them.
As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue to be found. Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones. Mr. Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the Mahabharata that the great war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the Ramayana, that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C.—Is believed by whom, pray? It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the Mahabharata, died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, was the seventh. Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circumstantial evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very warily;—it is always likely that half the circumstances remain un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change the whole complexion of the case. And this kind of criticism leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down what was built of old. So I think we must be content to wait for real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it; and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point; —say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier; and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,—somewhere between 2500 and 5000 years ago.
Why before Buddha?—Because they are still Kshattriya works; written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;—and because Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman ascendency well established then,—a revolt that by Asoka's time had quite overthrown the Brahman power. Why, then, should we not ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's reign itself, for example?—Well, it has been done; but probably not wisely. Panini in his Grammar cites the Mahabharata as an authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C. Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. En passant, we may quote this from the Encyclopaedia Britannica as to Panini's Grammar: "For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled in the literature of any language."—Panini, then, cites the Mahabharata; Panini lived certainly before Asoka's time; the greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such period;—and from all this I think we may argue without much fear that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long before the reign of Asoka. Besides, if it had been written during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more Buddhism in it than we do. There is some;—there are ideas that would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been structurally and innately, as the Mahabharata is, martial.
There is this difference between the two epics,—I speak of the nucleus-poems in each case;—the Mahabharata seems much more a natural growth, a national epic,—the work not of one man, but of many poets celebrating through many centuries a tradition not faded from the national memory;—but the Ramayana is more a structural unity; it bears the marks of coming from one creative mind: even western criticism accepts Valmiki (whoever he may have been) as its author. To him it is credited in Indian tradition; which ascribes the authorship of the Mahabharata to Vyasa, the reputed compiler of the Vedas;—and this last is manifestly not to be taken literally; for it is certain that a great age elapsed between the Vedas and the Epics. So I think that the Mahabharata grew up in the centuries, many or few, that followed the Great War,—or, say, during the second millennium B.C.; that in that millennium, during some great 'day' of literary creation, it was redacted into a single poem;— and that, the epic habit having thus been started, a single poet, Valmiki, in some succeeding 'day,' was prompted to make another epic, on the other great traditional saga-cycle, the story of Rama. But since that time, and all down through the centuries, both poems have been growing ad lib.
This is an endeavor to take a bird's-eye view of the whole subject; not to look at the evidence through a microscope, in the modern critical way. It is very unorthodox, but I believe it is the best way: the bird's eye sees most; the microscope sees least; the former takes in whole landscapes in proportion; the latter gets confused with details that seem, under that exaggeration, too highly important,—but which might be negatived altogether could you see the whole thing at once. A telescope for that kind of seeing is not forthcoming; but the methods of thought that H. P. Blavatsky taught us supply at least the first indications of what it may be like: they give us the first lenses. As our perceptions grow under their influence, doubtless new revelations will be made; and we shall see more, and further. All we can do now is to retire from the confusion brought about by searching these far stars with a microscope; to look less at the results of such searching, than at the old traditions themselves, making out what we can of them through what Theosophic lenses we have. We need not be misled by the ridiculous idea that civilization is a new thing. It is only the bias of the age; the next age will count it foolishness.—But to return to our epics.—
First to the Mahabharata. It is, as it comes down to us, not one poem, but a large literature. Mr. Dutt compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy, Blackstone's Commentaries, Percy's Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,—all done into blank verse and incorporated with Paradise Lost. You have a martial poem like the Iliad, full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;—and you find the Bhagavad-Gita a chapter in it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it: Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house, or hero. And it is hard to separate these accretions from the original,—from the version, that is, that first appeared as an epic poem. Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and never missed. Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material; which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any consistent Soul-symbol. And yet its chief personages seem all real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;—says Mr. Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer. Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;—as if they had been actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from the life. That might imply that poets began writing about them not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of their deeds was fresh. We are to understand, however,—all India has so understood, always,—that the poem is a Soul-symbol, standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it, or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their writings into an epic for the first time.
For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,— the darkness. There are traces of this submerged diversity of opinion. Just as in the Iliad it is the Trojan Hector who is the most sympathetic character, so in the Mahabharata it is often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies unavoidably flow. We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly depraved and villainous; but not seldom their actions belie the assertion,—with a certain Kshattriya magnamity for which they are given no credit. Krishna fights for the sons of Pandu; in the Bhagavad-Gita and elsewhere we see him as the incarnation of Vishnu,—of the Deity, the Supreme Self. As such, he does neither good nor evil; but ensures victory for his protegees. Philosophically and symbolically, this is sound and true, no doubt, but one wonders whether the poem (or poems) ran so originally; whether there may not be passages written at first by Kuravist poets; or a Brahminical superimposition of motive on a poem once wholly Kshattriya, and interested only in showing forth the noble and human warrior virtues of the Kshattriya caste. I imagine that in that second millennium B. C., in the early centuries of Kali-Yuga, you had a warrior class with their bards, inspired with high Bushido feeling,—with chivalry and all that is fine in patricianism—but no longer under the leadership of Adept Princes;—the esoteric knowledge was now mainly in the hands of the Priest-class. The Kshattriya bards made poems about the Great War, which grew and coalesced into a national epic. Then in the course of the centuries, as learning in its higher branches became more and more a possession of the Brahmans,—and since there was no feeling against adding to this epic whatever material came handy,—Brahmin esotericists manipulated it with great tact and finesse into a symbol of the warfare of the Soul.
There is the story of the death of the Kurava champion Bhishma. The Pandavas had been victorious; and Duryodhana the Kurava king appealed to Bhishma to save the situation. Bhishma loved the Pandava princes like a father; and urged Duryodhana to end the war by granting them their rights,—but in vain. So next day, owing his allegiance to Duryodhana, he took the field; and
"As a lordly tusker tramples on a field of feeble reeds,
As a forest conflagration on the parched woodland feeds,
Bhishma rode upon the warriors in his mighty battle car.
God nor mortal chief could face him in the gory field of war." *
——— * The quotations are from Mr. Romesh Dutt's translation. ———
Thus victorious, he cried out to the vanquished that no appeal for mercy would be unheard; that he fought not against the defeated, the worn-out, the wounded, or "a woman born." Hearing this, Krishna advised Arjuna that the chance to turn the tide had come. The young Sikhandin had been born a woman, and changed afterwards by the Gods into a man. Let Sikhandin fight in the forefront of the battle, and the Pandavas would win, and Bhishma be slain.—Arjuna, who loved Bhishma as dearly as Bhishma loved him and his brothers, protested; but Krishna announced that Bhishma was so doomed to die, and on the following day; a fate decreed, and righteously to be brought about by the stratagem. So it happened:
"Bhishma viewed the Pandav forces with a calm unmoving face;
Saw not Arjun's bow Gandiva, saw not Bhima's mighty mace;
Smiled to see the young Sikhandin rushing to the battle's
fore
Like the white foam on the billow when the mighty storm
winds roar;
Thought upon the word he plighted, and the oath that he had
sworn,
Dropt his arms before the warrior that was, but a woman
born;"
—and so, was slain…. and the chiefs of both armies gathered round and mourned for him.—Now it seems to me that the poets who viewed sympathetically the magnanimity of Bhishma, which meets you on the plane of simple human action and character, would not have viewed sympathetically, or perhaps conceived, the strategem advised by Krishna,—which you have to meet, to find it acceptable, on the planes of metaphysics and symbolism.
There is a quality in it you do not find in the Illiad. Greek and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable self-knowledge: each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of hexameters, the weak points in his opponent's character. They are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir their enthusiasm highly;—but as to faults, neither takes thought for his own; each concentrates on the other's; and a war of words is the appetiser for the coming banquet of deeds. Before fighting Hector, Achilles reviled him; and having killed him, dragged his corpse shamefully round the walls of Troy. But Bhishma, in his victorious career, has nothing worse to cry to his enemies than—Valiant are ye, noble princes! and if you think of it on the unsymbolic plane, there is a certain nobility in the Despondency of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Says the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:
"To characterize the Indian Epics in a single word: though often disfigured by grotesque fancies and wild exaggerations, they are yet noble works, abounding in passages of remarkable descriptive power; and while as works of art they are far inferior to the Greek epics, in some respects they appeal far more strongly to the romantic mind of europe, namely, by the loving appreciation of natural beauty, their exquisite delineation of womanly love and devotion, and their tender sentiment of mercy and forgiveness."
—Precisely because they come from a much higher civilization that the Greek. From a civilization, that is to say, older and more continuous. Before Rome fell, the Romans were evolving humanitarian and compassionate ideas quite unlike their old-time callousness. And no, it was not the influence of Christianity; we see it in the legislation of Hadrian for example, and especially in the anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius. These feeling grow up in ages unscarred by wars and human cataclysms; every war puts back their growth. The fall of Rome and the succeeding pralaya threw Europe back into ruthless barbarity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanism began to grow again; and has been gaining ground especially since H. P. Blavatsky began her teaching. But not much more than a century ago they were publicly hanging, drawing, and quartering people in England; crowds were gathering at Tyburn or before the Old Bailey to enjoy an execution. We have hardly had four generations in Western Europe in which men have not been ruthless and brutal barbarians with a sprinkling of fine spirits incarnate among them; no European literature yet has had time to evolve to the point where it could portray a Yudhishthira, at the end of a national epic, arriving at the gates of heaven with his dog,—and refusing to enter because the dog was not to be admitted. There have been, with us, too great ups and downs of civilization; too little continuity. We might have grown to it by now, had that medieval pralaya been a quiet and natural thing, instead of what it was:— a smash-up total and orgy of brutalities come as punishment for our sins done in the prime of manvantara.
A word or two as to the Ramayana. Probably Valmiki had the other epic before his mental vision when he wrote it; as Virgil had Homer. There are parallel incidents; but his genius does not appear in them;—he cannot compete in their own line with the old Kshattriya bards. You do not find here so done to the life the chargings of lordly tuskers, the gilt and crimson, the scarlet and pomp and blazonry, of war. The braying of the battle conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of domestic life.—This poem, like the Mahabharata, has come swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the addition of new incidents, the Ramayana grew by the re-telling of old ones. Thus you may get book after book telling the same story of Rama's life in the forest-hermitage by the Godavari; each book by a new poet in love with the gentle beauty of the tale and its setting, and anxious to put them into his own language. India never grows tired of these Ramayanic repetitions. Sita, the heroine, Rama's bride, is the ideal of every good woman there; I suppose Shakespeare has created no truer or more beautiful figure. To the Mahabharata, the Ramayana stands perhaps as the higher Wordsworth to Milton; it belongs to the same great age, but to another day in it. Both are and have been wonderfully near the life of the people: children are brought up on them; all ages, castes, and conditions make them the staple of their mental diet. Both are semi-sacred; neither is quite secular; either relates the deeds of an avatar of Vishnu; ages have done their work upon them, to lift them into the region of things sacrosanct.
And now at last we come to the age of King Vikramaditya of
Ujjain,—to the Nine Gems of Literature,—to a secular era of
literary creation,—to the Sanskrit Drama, and to Kalidisa, its
Shakespeare;—and to his masterpiece, The Ring of Sakoontala.
There is a tendency with us to derive all things Indian from Greek sources. Some Greek writer says the Indians were familiar with Homer; whereupon we take up the cry,—The Ramayana is evidently a plagiarism from the Iliad; the abduction of Sita by Ravan, of the abduction of Helen by Paris; the siege of Lanka, of the siege of Troy. And the Mahabharata is too; because,—because it must be; there's a deal of fighting in both. (So Macedon plagiarized its river from Monmouth.) We believe a Greek at all times against an Indian; forgetting that the Greeks themselves, when they got to India, were astounded at the truthfulness of the people they found there. Such strained avoidance of the natural lie,—the harmless, necessary lie that came so trippingly to a Greek tongue,—seemed to them extraordinary.—So too our critics naturally set out from the position that the Indian Drama must have been an offshoot or imitation of the Greek. But fortunately that position had to be quitted toute de suite; for the Indian theory is much nearer the English than the Greek;—much liker Shakespeare's than Aeschylus's. Sakoontal is romantic; it came in a Third or Alawn Period; of all Englishmen, Keats might most easily have written it; if Endymion were a play, Endymion would be the likest thing to it in English. You must remember that downward trend in the Great Cycle; that make each succeeding period in Sanskrit literature a descent from the heights of esotericism towards the personal plane. That is what brings Kalidasa on to a level with Keats.
Behind Sakoontala, as behind Endymion, there is a Soul-symbol; only Kalidasa, like Keats, is preoccupied in his outer mind more with forest beauty and natural magic and his romantic tale of love. It marks a stage in the descent of literature from the old impersonal to the modern personal reaches: from tales told merely to express the Soul-Symbol, to tales told merely for the sake of telling them. The stories in the Upanishads are glyphs pure and simple. In the epics, they have taken on much more human color, though still exalting and ennobling,—and all embodying, or molded to, the glyph. Now, in The Ring of Sakoontala,—and it is typical of its class,—we have to look a little diligently for the glyph; what impresses us is the stillness and morning beauty of the forest, and,—yes, it must be said.—the emotions, quite personal, of King Dushyanta and Sakoontala, the hero and heroine.
She is a fairy's child, full beautiful; and has been brought up by her foster-father, the yogi Kanwa, in his forest hermitage. While Kanwa is absent, Dushyanta, hunting, follows an antelope into that quiet refuge; finds Sakoontala, loves and marries her. Here we are amidst the drowsy hum of bees, the flowering of large Indian forest blossoms, the scent of the jasmine in bloom; it is what Keats would have written, had his nightingale sung in an Indian jungle.—The king departs for his capital, leaving with Sakoontala a magical ring with power to reawaken memory of her in his heart, should he ever forget. But Durvasas, a wandering ascetic, passes by the hermitage; and Sakoontala, absorbed in her dreams, fails to greet him; for which he dooms her to be forgotten by her husband. She waits and waits, and at last seeks the unreturning Dushyanta at his court; who, under the spell of Durvasas, fails to recognise her. If what she claims is true, she can produce the ring?—But no; she has lost it on her journey through the forest. He repudiates her; whereupon she is caught up by the Gods into the Grove of Kasyapa beyond the clouds.
But the ring had fallen into a stream in the forest, and a fish had swallowed it, and a fisherman had caught the fish, and the police had caught the fisherman …. and so it came into the hands of Dushyanta again; who, at sight of it, remembered all, and was plunged in grief over his lost love.
Years pass, and Indra summons him at last to fight a race of giants that threaten the sovereignty of the Gods. In the course of that warfare, mounting to heaven in the car of Indra, Dushyanta comes to the Grove of Kasyapa, and is reunited with Sakoontala and with their son, now grown into an heroic boy.
As in The Tempest a certain preoccupation with the magical beauty of the island dims the character-drawing a little, and perhaps thereby makes the symbol more distinct,—so in Sakoontala. It is a faery piece: begining in the morning calm and forest magic; then permitting passion to rise, and sadness to follow; ending in the crystal and blue clearness of the upper air. In this we see the basic form of the Soul-Symbol, which is worked out in the incidents and characters. Dushyanta, hunting in the unexplored forest, comes to the abode of holiness, finds and loves Sakoontala;—and from their union is born the perfect hero,—Sarva-Damana, the 'All-tamer.'—Searching in the impersonal and unexplored regions within us, we do at some time in our career of lives come to the holy place, get vision of our Immortal Self; from the union of which with this, our human personality is to be born some time that new being we are to become,—the Perfect Man or Adept. But that first vision may be lost; I suppose almost always is;—and there are wanderings and sorrows, forgetfulness and above all heroic services to be performed, before the final reunion can be attained.