The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02

by Unknown

CHAPTER IV. BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM

THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF BRAHMANISM

In the vast highlands formed by the conjunction of the great mountain chains of Bolor-Tagh in the northwest of the Himalayas, where, not far from the sources of the Oxus and other great rivers the tableland of Pamir, “the roof of the world,” extends, a well-built nomadic race, possessing the rudiments of civilisation and calling themselves the “excellent” Aryans, in prehistoric times pastured their horses and flocks. Shut off on the north and east by impassable mountains from Central Asia, the country on the west and south was appointed them for the evolution of their natural capacities. When the Aryans, following the inborn wandering instinct of all pastoral races, left their home, one part of them settled in the mountain districts north and west of the Hindu Kush (Paropamisus), which in the Greek writers bore the names of Sogdiana, Bactriana, Hyrcania, and Arachosia; another part went farther, wandered through the southwestern passes of these mountains, and took possession of the rich, fertile country on the banks of the Indus (Sindh). The former, called the Iranians, or according to their sacred language, the Zend people, evolved in time the state of culture which their conquerors—the Medes and Persians—adopted from them. The latter, called among the other nations of the ancient world, Indians or Hindus, after the principal river of their land, became the creators of that perfected system of religion, of those peculiar political and legal forms, and of that Sanskrit literature, which we still admire in its remains and traditions.

The aborigines, dark-skinned races, of rude customs and wild mode of life, were partly exterminated or pushed back into the forests by the Aryan immigrants, partly subjugated and reduced to the condition of servitude and slavery, and in this way an impassable barrier was erected between the two races.

The deep contempt with which the conquerors looked down upon the conquered increased in the Indian consciousness that self-satisfied conceit which led the Brahmans to consider all people who spoke another language, or who were under other laws, as barbarians, called by them Mlechcha (i.e., weak), with whom they must avoid all intermixture and all social intercourse.

There is no trustworthy historical information of antiquity to throw light on the development and gradual evolution of the culture of the Aryans, and so until the chronicles and legends of the Buddhists in the sixth and fifth and the records of the Greeks in the fourth and third centuries, it can only be gathered from a few traces and analogies. The Brahmans had not the slightest interest in records; on the other hand they endeavoured to blot out all recollection of earlier times and other conditions, so that the conditions and views which developed later might appear to the people as the original ones. So the chronological order of the accounts, derived from the national poems and religious writings, is necessarily so very deficient and intermittent that the more ancient periods can only be surmised.

From the years of their immigration into the district of the Indus, which must have occurred in the third millennium before our era, until the fifteenth century, the Aryans lived in the Land of the Five Rivers as far as the sacred Saraswati. Divided into many tribes, they led a settled pastoral and agricultural life under the leadership of elders, chiefs, and kings, worshipping the sun-god Indra and the other powers of nature with songs and sacrifices, and hardening themselves by battle and tribal feuds. In the oldest portions of the Vedas are still preserved some of the songs and invocations sung at the festivals of the gods or at the sacrificial feasts of the dead.

In their gradual expansion towards the south, they may have reached the mouth of the Indus by the fourteenth or thirteenth century, and on the southern seacoast they may have made commercial alliances with the Babylonians and Phœnicians. Diodorus’ account, taken from the Greek historian Ctesias, of the journey of Queen Semiramis to the Indus, and her battle with the “Lord of the Earth” (Stabrobates-Sthavarapatis) seems, in spite of its fabulous exaggeration, to rest upon historical tradition, which, combined with the report that Semiramis founded the city of Kophen on the river Kabul tends to prove, that at this time the country on the right bank of the Upper Indus was subject and paid tribute to the Assyrians.[21]

A second stage of evolution is connected with the conquest of the land of the Ganges, beginning about the fourteenth century before our era, when an heroic period commenced full of warlike deeds, the traces of which are retained in the oldest legends of the national epic, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and in the names of some tribal princes and ruling families. We should have more accurate information about this period of heroic activity had not the heroic poems later undergone complete transformation under the hands of the Brahmans, but even in their present form they still retain a core of historical truth although more concealed and veiled than among other peoples. The farther the Aryans went to the east, the more the forsaken home on the Indus and its tributaries was regarded as the sacred mother country where the Aryan race was unmixed with foreign elements and where the sacred Sanskrit language maintained its original purity. But the patriarchal institutions and the old nature-religion were in the course of time so eliminated from the memory of the race that the remaining tribes, which had not kept pace with the evolution of the people of the Ganges, or had clung to the old forms, were excluded from the religious communion and the legal system of the worshippers of Brahma as impure and of low degree. Some of these tribes on the Upper Indus were under Persian dominion and marched as far as the plains of Eleusis in the army of Xerxes.

The national strength of the Indians seems to have been shattered by these centuries of long-continued struggles, first against the aboriginal population, and then after their subjugation or expulsion, among the Aryan races themselves, the first settlers seeking to defend the territory they had gained against later immigrants. Therefore it was not difficult for the priests, when arms were at last laid down, to repress the warlike portion of the population, which had been supreme in the heroic period, but had lost its best forces and its most capable leaders in the bloody battles, especially as the enervating climate and the fertility of their new abode on the Ganges and Jumna were more conducive to religious contemplation and peaceful courses than to martial excitement and military life.

These circumstances combined with the more passive and vegetative nature of the people, were favourable to the efforts of the Brahmans to subjugate the whole external and internal life of the nation to priestly dominion. They supplanted the old nature-religion by the pantheistic emanation doctrine of Brahma as the soul of the world, and gave the heroic Indra and his crowds of gods a subordinate place as guardians of the world. They restricted the free development of national power by a strict exclusive order of caste, in which they took the foremost place; and they repressed all natural activity by endless ceremonial and ritualistic laws, by sacrifices and purifications. They cast a gloom over life on earth and suppressed all pleasure in life and joyous impulse by the terrifying doctrine of rebirth and hell punishment. They taught a gloomy asceticism full of expiations and penances, the mortification of the flesh and all sensual pleasure by absorption in an imaginary Divine Being as the surest way to free the soul from the bonds of the body and to restore it to its heavenly home from this miserable earthly life.

Moreover the Brahmans not only obtained dominion over the domain of religion, and endowed it with its peculiar spiritualistic character, but they tried to gain power over and regulate with their precepts the state and law, and civil life in all its manifestations. With this end in view, they put into effect a code of law, ostensibly coming from Manu, which was to have authority in all Indian states and which by dint of severe punishments, and a strict royal despotism, based upon the power of officials and police, kept the people in a state of obedient submission.

The Brahmans were more anxious for the Indians to lead a uniform existence according to the precepts of the law, than for the separate kingdoms to unite into a political whole, and form a power with strong external relations. Therefore the Indian nation was never united by a common alliance, but just as the different castes existed side by side, but separated and without any common interest, so the Indian country was broken up into a lot of smaller or greater states without any external connection. They never formed a federal state, nor even a confederation of states. Separated and asunder, and not seldom in hostile relations, the different kingdoms were as distinct as the castes, and the kingdoms themselves consisted in turn of a lot of disunited villages and city communities only loosely connected together for convenience of taxation and supervision.

These political and social divisions and disruptions were not calculated to turn the attention of the Indian race to political life, so it recoiled from the wretched régime in which gloomy tyranny suppressed all joy in life, and watched over every spiritual activity and sought its happiness and salvation in the realm of faith and fantasy, in the world of imagination and dreams. It submerged itself in the divine, it filled heaven and earth with spirits and higher beings of every kind, and in the fascinating world of legends and stories of saints, of fables of miracles, and myths of penitents, it forgot the real world with its oppression of castes, its despotism of princes and officials, and its blood-sucking system of taxation. Thus did the Indians on the Ganges withdraw more than any other race from real practical life, for the “realm of fantasy was their fatherland, and heaven was their home.”

This was the line taken by Indian culture until the sixth century before our era, and it spread over a great part of the peninsula of the Deccan more by the Brahmanical missions and colonisation, than by force of arms. Then Buddhism developed out of Brahmanism and became a mighty ferment for the whole of eastern Asia. Moreover, the new doctrine was not without its influence on the Brahmanic religious system. The perception that the people were so much attached to the doctrine of Buddha because it cherished the belief that a god had appeared in human form on earth, led the Brahmans to the development of the doctrine of incarnations. They divided the creator Brahma, who always remained an incomprehensible idea to the popular mind, into three forms, and taught that the most popular and beneficent form of this triune deity, Vishnu, the vivifying, supporting spirit of nature, appeared from time to time on earth in human form, to restore order to the disturbed arrangement of the world and to lead back erring humanity to the right road. Rama and Krishna, the heroes of the national epics, were represented as such incarnations of Vishnu and the songs of the heroes were reconstructed according to this idea. Therefore, the profound speech of Bhagavad-gita was incorporated in the Mahabharata, in which the attempt to reconcile the faith of the Buddhists with the doctrine of Brahma is evident.

Hellenic culture then found its way to India, and it may have been through Greek influence that many sciences and arts, such as knowledge of the zodiac, scientific astronomy, minting, etc., were first adopted in the land of the Ganges. The Hellenic spirit seems to have been influential in the development of poetry and plastic arts, at least in that of the drama and architecture. Greek culture also led to an early introduction of Christian opinions into India; in the idea of a personal god, which later became prominent and in the evolution of the doctrine of Vishnu-Krishna the influence of Christian ideas is not to be ignored.

In the Macedonian and Alexandrian period, when India came in contact with western Asiatic and Greek culture, Indian spiritual life had come to a standstill, the creative spirit was extinct. The speculative and inquiring spirit had brought forward an abundance of theories and systems, and applied them to life with astonishing consistency; and now it was exhausted, and left to posterity the wonderful images as strict forms and categories for the inner and outer life.

With the peculiar tenacity of the oriental nature, the Indians have retained throughout all centuries, down to the present time, the religious conceptions, the fantastic doctrine of the gods, the oppressing order of caste, the strict asceticism, the faith in the second birth, and in short all the forms and theories, which crippled and broke the moral and productive force of the nation. However many conquerors put their iron heel on the neck of the people, however many storms and wars spread death and desolation over the sacred land, these principles of Indian life survived all changes, and withstood all oppression, persecution, and attempts at conversion.

The despotism and caste power, impregnating the Indian nature, have imbued it with a force of endurance and passive resistance which could not be broken by any outside power. Cunning, artifice, dissimulation, lying, and deceit, the weapons and vices of all the weak and oppressed, helped the Indian to bear his painful position. He bowed under dominion without being broken in character; and as death always appeared to him a gain, and asceticism deadened him to suffering, he always suffered death with composure and stoicism.[b]

Having read an account of the rise of Brahmanism we may well examine its code of morals somewhat more fully before passing on to Buddhism.

The Vedas

The religion taught in the Institutes is derived from the Vedas, to which scriptures they refer in every page. There are four Vedas; but the fourth is rejected by many of the learned Hindus, and the number reduced to three.

The primary doctrine of the Vedas is the Unity of God. “There is in truth,” say repeated texts, “but one Deity, the Supreme Spirit, the Lord of the Universe, whose work is the universe.”

Among the creatures of the Supreme Being are some superior to man, who should be adored, and from whom protection and favours may be obtained through prayer. The most frequently mentioned of these are the gods of the elements, the stars, and the planets; but other personified powers and virtues likewise appear. “The three principal manifestations of the Divinity (Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva), with other personified attributes and energies, and most of the other gods of Hindu mythology, are indeed mentioned, or at least indicated, in the Veda; but the worship of deified heroes is no part of the system.” Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, are rarely named, enjoy no preëminence, nor are they ever objects of special adoration; and Mr. Colebrooke could discover no passage in which their incarnations were suggested. There seem to have been no images and no visible types of the objects of worship. The doctrine of monotheism prevails throughout the Institutes; and it is declared towards the close that, of all duties, “the principal is to obtain from the Upanishads a true knowledge of one supreme God.” But although Manu has preserved the idea of the unity of God, his opinions on the nature and operations of the Divinity have fallen off from the purity of their original. This is chiefly apparent in his account of the creation. There are passages in the Vedas which declare that God is “the material, as well as the efficient, cause of the universe; the potter by whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is fabricated”: yet those best qualified to interpret conceive that these expressions are not to be taken literally, and mean no more than to assert the origin of all things from the same first cause. The general tendency of the Vedas is to show that the substance as well as the form of all created beings was derived from the will of the Self-existing Cause.

The Institutes on the contrary, though not very distinct, appear to regard the universe as formed from the substance of the Creator, and to have a vague notion of the eternal existence of matter as part of the divine substance. According to them, “the Self-existing Power, himself undiscerned, but making this world discernible, with five elements and other principles, appeared with undiminished glory dispelling the gloom.”

“He, having willed to produce various beings from his own divine substance, first with a thought created the waters, and placed in them a productive seed.”

From this seed sprung the mundane egg, in which the Supreme Being was himself born in the form of Brahma. By similar mythological processes, he, under the form of Brahma, produced the heavens and earth, and the human soul; and to all creatures he gave distinct names and distinct occupations. He likewise created the deities “with divine attributes and pure souls,” and “inferior genii exquisitely delicate.” This whole creation only endures for a certain period; when that expires, the divine energy is withdrawn, Brahma is absorbed in the supreme essence, and the whole system fades away. These extinctions of creation, with corresponding revivals, occur periodically, at terms of prodigious length.

The inferior deities are representatives of the elements, as Indra, air; Agni, fire; Varuna, water; Prithivi, earth: or of heavenly bodies, Surya, the sun; Chandra, the moon; Vrispati and other planets: or of abstract ideas, as Dharma, God of Justice; Dhanvantari, God of Medicine. None of the heroes who are omitted in the Vedas, but who now fill so prominent a part in the Hindu Pantheon (Rama, Krishna, etc.), are ever alluded to. Even the deities of which these are incarnations are never noticed. Brahma is more than once named, but Vishnu and Siva never. These three forms of the Divinity occupy no conspicuous place among the deities of the Vedas; and their mystical union or triad is never hinted at in Manu, nor probably in the Vedas. The three forms, into some one of which all other deities are there said to be resolvable, are fire, air, and the sun.

Altogether distinct from the gods are good and evil genii, who are noticed in the creation rather among the animals than the divinities: “benevolent genii, fierce giants, blood-thirsty savages, heavenly choristers, nymphs and demons, huge serpents and birds of mighty wing, and separate companies of Pitris, or progenitors of mankind.”

Man is endowed with two internal spirits, the vital soul, which gives motion to the body, and the rational, which is the seat of passions and good and bad qualities; and both these souls, though independent existences, are connected with the divine essence which pervades all beings. It is the vital soul which expiates the sins of the man. It is subjected to torments for periods proportioned to its offences, and is then sent to transmigrate through men and animals, and even plants; the mansion being the lower the greater has been its guilt, until at length it has been purified by suffering and humiliations, is again united to its more pure associates, and again commences a career which may lead to eternal bliss.

The practical part of religion may be divided into ritual and moral. The ritual branch occupies too great a portion of the Hindu code, but not to the exclusion of the moral. There are religious ceremonies during the pregnancy of the mother, at the birth of the child, and on various subsequent occasions, the principal of which is the shaving of his head, all but one lock, at the first or third year. But by far the most important ceremonial is the investiture with the sacred thread, which must not be delayed beyond sixteen for a Brahman, or twenty-four for a merchant. This great ceremony is called the second birth, and procures for the three classes who are admitted to it the title of “twice-born men,” by which they are always distinguished throughout the code. It is on this occasion that the persons invested are taught the mysterious word om, and the gayatri, which is the most holy verse of the Vedas, which is enjoined in innumerable parts of the code to be repeated either as devotion or expiation; and which, indeed, joined to universal benevolence, may raise a man to beatitude without the aid of any other religious exercise. This mysterious text, though it is now confined to the Brahmans, and is no longer so easy to learn, has been well ascertained by learned Europeans, and is thus translated by Mr. Colebrooke, “Let us meditate the adorable light of the Divine Ruler; may it guide our intellects.”

From fuller forms of the same verse it is evident that the light alluded to is the Supreme Creator, though it might also appear to mean the sun. It is not easy to see on what its superior sanctity is founded, unless it may at one time have communicated, though in ambiguous language, the secret of the real nature of God to the initiated, when the material sun was the popular object of worship.

Every Brahman, and perhaps every twice-born man, must bathe daily; must pray at morning and evening twilight, in some unfrequented place near pure water; and must daily perform five sacraments, viz., studying the Veda; making oblations to the manes and to fire in honour of the deities; giving rice to living creatures; and receiving guests with honour. The gods are worshipped by burnt-offerings of clarified butter, and libations of the juice of the moon plant, at which ceremonies they are invoked by name; but although idols are mentioned, and in one place desired to be respected, yet the adoration of them is never noticed but with disapprobation; nor is the present practice of offering perfumes and flowers to them ever alluded to.

The reading of the Vedas is a serious task. They must be read distinctly and aloud, with a calm mind and in a respectful posture. The reading is liable to be interrupted by many omens, and must be suspended likewise on the occurrence of various contingencies, which, by disturbing the mind, may render it unfit for such an occupation. Wind, rain, thunder, earthquakes, meteors, eclipses, the howling of jackals, and many other incidents are of the first description: the prohibition against reading where lutes sound or where arrows whistle, when a town is beset by robbers, or when terrors have been excited by strange phenomena, clearly refers to the second. The last sacrament, that of hospitality to guests, is treated at length, and contains precepts of politeness and self-denial which would be very pleasing if they were not so much restricted to Brahmans entertaining men of their own class.

Besides the daily oblations, there are monthly obsequies to the manes of each man’s ancestors. These are to be performed “in empty glades, naturally clean, or on the banks of rivers, and in solitary spots.” The sacrificer is there to burn certain offerings, and with many ceremonies to set down cakes of rice and clarified butter, invoking the manes to come and partake of them. He is afterwards to feast a small number of Brahmans (not, however, his usual friends or guests). He is to serve them with respect, and they are to eat in silence. “Departed ancestors, no doubt, are attendant on such invited Brahmans, hovering around them like pure spirits, and sitting by them when they are seated.” Innumerable are the articles of food from which a twice-born man must abstain: some for plain reasons, as carnivorous birds, tame hogs, and other animals whose appearance or way of living is disgusting; but others are so arbitrarily fixed that a cock, a mushroom, a leek, or an onion occasions immediate loss of caste; while hedgehogs, porcupines, lizards, and tortoises are expressly declared to be lawful food. A Brahman is forbidden, under severe penalties, to eat the food of a hunter or a dishonest man, a worker in gold or in cane, or a washer of clothes, or a dyer. The cruelty of a hunter’s trade may join him, in the eyes of a Brahman, to a dishonest man; but, among many other arbitrary proscriptions, one is surprised to find a physician, and to observe that this learned and beneficent profession is always classed with those which are most impure. What chiefly surprises us is to find most sorts of flesh permitted to Brahmans, and even that of oxen particularly enjoined on solemn festivals. Brahmans must not, indeed, eat flesh, unless at a sacrifice; but sacrifices, as have been seen, are among the daily sacraments; and rice pudding, bread, and many other things equally innocent are included in the very same prohibition.

It is true that humanity to animals is everywhere most strongly inculcated, and that abstaining from animal food is declared to be very meritorious, from its tendency to diminish their sufferings; but, though the use of it is dissuaded on these grounds, it is never once forbidden or hinted at as impure, and is in many places positively declared lawful. The permission to eat beef is the more remarkable as the cow seems to have been as holy in those days as she is now. Saving the life of a cow was considered to atone for the murder of a Brahman, killing one required to be expiated by three months’ austerities and servile attendance on a herd of cattle.

Besides these restraints on eating, a Brahman is subjected to a multitude of minute regulations relating to the most ordinary occupations of life, the transgressing of any of which is nevertheless to be considered as a sin. Drinking spirits is classed in the first degree of crime. Performing sacrifices to destroy the innocent only falls under the third. Under the same penance with some real offences come giving pain to a Brahman and “smelling things not fit to be smelled.” Some penances would, if compulsory, be punishments of the most atrocious cruelty. They are sufficiently absurd when left, as they are, to the will of the offenders, to be employed in averting exclusion from society in this world or retribution in the next. For incest with the wife of a father, natural or spiritual, or with a sister, connection with a child under the age of puberty, or with a woman of the lowest class, the penance is death by burning on an iron bed, or embracing a red-hot metal image. For drinking spirits the penance is death by drinking the boiling hot urine of a cow.

The other expiations are mostly made by fines and austerities. The fines are almost always in cattle to be given to Brahmans, some as high as a bull and a thousand cows. They, also, are oddly enough proportioned: for killing a snake a Brahman must give a hoe; for killing an eunuch, a load of rice straw. Saying “hush” or “pish” to a superior, or overpowering a Brahman in argument, involve each a slight penance. Killing insects, and even cutting down plants and grass (if not for a useful purpose), require a penance, since plants also are supposed to be endued with feeling. One passage about expiation is characteristic in many ways. “A priest who should retain in his memory the whole Rig-Veda would be absolved from all guilt, even if he had slain the inhabitants of the three worlds, and had eaten food from the foulest hands.”

The effect of the religion of Manu on morals is, indeed, generally good. The essential distinction between right and wrong, it has been seen, is strongly marked at the outset, and is in general well preserved. The well-known passages relating to false evidence, one or two where the property of another may be appropriated for the purposes of sacrifice, and some laxity in the means by which a king may detect and seize offenders, are the only exceptions noted. On the other hand, there are numerous injunctions to justice, truth, and virtue; and many are the evils, both in this world and the next, which are said to follow from vicious conduct. The upright man need not be cast down, though oppressed with penury, while “the unjust man attains no felicity, nor he whose wealth proceeds from false evidence.”

The moral duties are in one place distinctly declared to be superior to the ceremonial ones. The punishments of a future state are as much directed against the offences which disturb society as against sins affecting religion. One maxim, however, on this subject, is of a less laudable tendency; for it declares that the men who receive from the government the punishment due to their crimes go pure to heaven, and become as clean as those who have done well.

It may be observed, in conclusion, that the morality thus enjoined by the law was not, as now, sapped by the example of fabled gods, or by the debauchery permitted in the religious ceremonies of certain sects. From many passages cited in different places it has been shown that the code is not by any means deficient in generous maxims or in elevated sentiments; but the general tendency of the Brahman morality is rather towards innocence than active virtue, and its main objects are to enjoy tranquillity and to prevent pain or evil to any sentient being.[c]

Soul Transmigration

It is well known that the metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul into various orders of being, reviving in one form when it ceases to exist in another, is the tenet of the Hindus. The Brahmans grafted upon it, in their usual way, a number of fantastic refinements, and gave to their ideas on this subject a more systematic form than is usual with those eccentric theologians. They describe the mind as characterised by three qualities—goodness, passion, darkness. According as any soul is distinguished by one or another of those qualities in its present life, is the species of being into which it migrates in the life to come.

Souls endued with goodness attain the condition of deities; those filled with passion receive that of men; those immersed in darkness are condemned to that of beasts. Each of these conditions, again, is divided into three degrees—a lower, a middle, and a higher. Of the souls distinguished by darkness, the lowest are thrust into mineral and vegetable substances, into worms, reptiles, fishes, snakes, tortoises, cattle, jackals; the middle pass into elephants, horses, Sudras, Mlechcha (a word of very opprobrious import, denoting men of all other races not Hindu), lions, tigers, and boars; the highest animate the forms of dancers, singers, birds, deceitful men, giants, and blood-thirsty savages.

Of the souls who receive their future condition from the quality of passion, the lowest pass into cudgel-players, boxers, wrestlers, actors, those who teach the use of weapons, and those who are addicted to gaming and drinking; the middle enter the bodies of kings, men of the fighting class, domestic priests of kings, and men skilled in the war of controversy; the highest become gandharvas (a species of supposed aerial spirits, whose business is music), genii attending superior gods, together with various companies of apsaras, or nymphs. Of the souls who are characterised by the quality of goodness, the lowest migrate into hermits, religious mendicants, other Brahmans, such orders of demigods as are wafted in airy cars, genii of the signs and lunar mansions, and Daityas, another of their many orders of superior spirits; the middle attain the condition of sacrificers, of holy sages, deities of the lower heaven, genii of the Vedas, regents of stars, divinities of years, Pitris, and Sadhyas, two other species of exalted intelligence; the highest ascend to the condition of Brahma with four faces, of creators of worlds, of the genius of virtue, and the divinities presiding over the two principles of nature.

Besides this general description of the future allotment of different souls, a variety of particular dooms are specified, of which a few may be taken as an example. “Sinners in the first degree,” says the ordinance of Manu, “having passed through terrible regions of torture, for a great number of years, are condemned to the following births at the close of that period. The slayer of a Brahman must enter the body of a dog, a boar, an ass, a camel, a bull, a goat, a sheep, a stag, a bird, a Chandala, or a Pucassa. He who steals the gold of a priest shall pass a thousand times into the bodies of spiders, of snakes, and chameleons, of crocodiles, and other aquatic monsters, or of mischievous blood-sucking demons. He who violates the bed of his natural or spiritual father migrates a hundred times into the forms of grasses, of shrubs with crowded stems, or of creeping and twining plants, carnivorous animals, beasts with sharp teeth, or cruel brutes.” After a variety of other cases, a general rule is declared for those of the four castes who neglect the duties of their order: “Should a Brahman omit his peculiar duty, he shall be changed into a demon, with a mouth like a firebrand, who devours what has been vomited; a Kshattriya, into a demon who feeds on ordure and carrion; a Vaisya, into an evil being who eats purulent carcases; and a Sudra, who neglects his occupations, into a foul embodied spirit, who feeds on lice.” The reward of the most exalted piety, of the most profound meditation, of that exquisite abstemiousness which dries up the mortal frame, is peculiar; such a perfect soul becomes absorbed in the Divine essence, and is forever exempt from transmigration.

We might very easily, from the known laws of human nature, conclude, notwithstanding the language held by the Hindus on the connection between future happiness and the virtue of the present life, that rewards and punishments, very distant and very obscure, would be wholly impotent against temptations to crime, though at the instigation of the priests they might engage the people in a ceaseless train of wretched ceremonies. The fact corresponds most exactly with the anticipation. An admirable witness has said, “The doctrine of a state of future rewards and punishments, as some persons may plead, has always been supposed to have a strong influence on public morals: the Hindus not only have this doctrine in their writings, but are taught to consider every disease and misfortune of life as an undoubted symptom of moral disease, and the terrific appearance of its close-pursuing punishment. Can this fail to produce a dread of vice, and a desire to merit the favour of the Deity? I will still further,” he adds, “assist the objector; and inform him that the Hindu writings declare that till every immoral taint is removed, every sin atoned for, and the mind has obtained perfect abstraction from material objects, it is impossible to be reunited to the great spirit; and that to obtain this perfection, the sinner must linger in many hells, and transmigrate through almost every form of matter.” Our informant then declares: “Great as these terrors are, there is nothing more palpable than that, with most of the Hindus, they do not weigh the weight of a feather compared with the loss of a rupee. The reason is obvious: every Hindu considers all his action as the effect of his destiny; he laments, perhaps, his miserable fate, but he resigns himself to it without a struggle, like the malefactor in a condemned cell.” This experienced observer adds, which is still more comprehensive, that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments has, in no situation and among no people, a power to make men virtuous.[d]

Fate, as understood by the Hindus, is something very different from that of other people. It is necessity, as the consequence of past acts; that is, a man’s station and fortunes in his present life are the necessary consequences of his conduct in his pre-existence. To them he must submit, but not from despair. He has his future condition in his own power, and it depends upon himself in what capacity he shall be born again. He is not therefore the helpless victim of an irresistible and inscrutable destiny, but the sufferer for his own misdeeds, or the possessor of good which his own merits have secured him.[e]

BUDDHISM

When Buddhism was first made known to Europe, not so very many years ago, by means of translations of philosophic writings dated six centuries after Buddha, profound astonishment was felt at taking cognisance of the fact that a religion which had brought three hundred million souls under its law should acknowledge no god; should look upon the world as vain illusion, and should offer nothing but annihilation to the aspirations of man.

The examination of the bas-reliefs, with which the ancient monuments of India are covered, proves that the religion of Buddha, as practised by the Hindus during a period of one thousand years, differs completely from the representation of it given us by written documents. Not in books, in fact, but in a close study of the monuments themselves, can be learned what Buddhism was in former days; and the message these monuments deliver to us is a totally different one from that contained in books. The monuments reveal that this religion, which modern scientists have distorted into an atheistic belief, was, on the contrary, the most polytheistic of all religions.

It is true that in the first Buddhist monuments, eighteen to twenty centuries old, such as the balustrades of Bharhut, Sanchi, Buddha-Gaya, etc., the reformer figures solely as an emblem. Worship is accorded to the imprint of his feet, and to the image of the tree under which he entered the state of supreme wisdom; but we shortly begin to see Buddha represented as a god, having a place in all the sanctuaries. At first he is represented as alone, or nearly so, as in the most ancient temples of Ajunta; then gradually he appears in company with Brahman gods: Indra, Kali, Sarasvati, etc., as is to be seen in the Buddhist temples of the Ellora series of monuments. Completely lost a little later in the crowd of gods that he had at first dominated, he comes, after a few centuries, to be regarded as nothing more than an incarnation of Vishnu. From that day Buddhism has been extinct in India.

The disappearance, or rather the transformation which has just been indicated in a few lines, required a thousand years for its accomplishment. The numerous monuments which retrace its history were erected during the period extending from three centuries B.C. to the seventh of our era. During this long interval of time Buddha was constantly worshipped by his followers as an all-powerful god. Legends show him to us appearing before his disciples and according them favours. One of the men most deeply learned in Buddhist practices, the pilgrim, Hwen Tsang, who visited the peninsula in the seventh century and entered a long novitiate, relates having seen Buddha appear before him in a sacred grotto. Legends and monuments are perfectly clear in their teachings, and had the study of Buddhism been primarily based upon them, an entirely different impression of the religion would have gained ground from that which now prevails. Unfortunately, the European writers on India had never visited that country, gaining all their knowledge of Buddhism from books; and ill chance had directed them upon the works of certain philosophical sects, written five or six centuries after the death of Buddha, and containing little or nothing of the religion as actually practised.

Neither did the metaphysical speculations, which so astonished Europe by their depth, contain anything new. Now that the works of Indian writers are better known, the same theories have been found in the writings of the philosophical sects which developed during the Brahmanic period. Atheism, the contempt for life, morality as existing apart from religion, the world considered as illusion—all these had already appeared in certain philosophical works known under the name of Upanishads, of which there exist about two hundred and fifty, dating from all the epochs. In some are found the same doctrines that are presented in the philosophical writings of the Buddhists. Their authors also profess the doctrine of Karma, the fundamental belief of Buddhism as of all the religions of India—a doctrine according to which the acts accomplished by man in this life determine his condition in a future existence, this forming also the base of the code of Manu. The ultimate purpose of these successive reincarnations is absorption in the universal principle of things, the Brahma of which Manu speaks, parent to the Nirvana of Buddhism. Then, and then only is the soul absolved from reincarnation.

For the attainment of this final state of absorption, Buddhists and Brahmanists lay down the same rules; namely, suppression of all desire, renunciation of the things of this world, and a life passed in solitude and contemplation.

The philosophical theories of the age of Buddhism were thus the same as those held in the Brahmanic age which had preceded it. They are theories which developed parallel with the religion that was taught by the priests and practised by the people, yet they differed from it essentially. To look upon these doctrines as being identical with Buddhism would be to commit an error as great as though we were to confound the theories of certain Upanishads with Brahmanism; nevertheless it is these philosophical utterances of some of the disciples of Buddha which have been received in Europe as Buddhism itself.

It would seem to suggest itself at once as improbable that a religion counting five hundred million believers could be founded solely on cold philosophical reasoning; but perhaps an error of such a nature is excusable in the case of learned men who, having passed their lives in the study of books, have had no time to pursue the deeper study of men. In two or three thousand years, when the centre of civilisation shall have again shifted and our present languages and the books written in them have been forgotten, it is quite probable that some professor who has come upon the English language in his researches shall translate the first works that come to his hand, such as Spencer’s First Principles, or Darwin’s Origin of Species, and give them to the world as the beliefs professed by the Christian peoples in the nineteenth century.

It is only necessary to observe Hindus closely to perceive that they are not the people to adopt the tenets of any religion that is without divinity. The Hindu not believe in gods? Why, the world is full of them for him. He addresses prayers to the tiger that devours his flocks, to the railroad bridge constructed by the European, to the European himself if occasion arises. Make him learn by heart the catechism of the southern Buddhists, recently composed with the assistance of Europeans, which teaches that the universe has no creator, that all is illusion, and you will see that that will not prevent him from feeling the need of still offering up worship to the great Buddha and all the gods of his sanctuary. The most ancient of all books on Buddhism, the Lalita Vistara written some eighteen centuries ago, six centuries later than Buddha himself, contains a number of dissertations on the illusiveness and vanity of the things of this world. But to whom is Buddha teaching these truths? To the gods, principally, to those innumerable gods of whom mention is made on every page and who, Brahma at their head, presided at the birth of the reformer who was to be god in his turn, accompanied him wherever he went and finally came to offer him worship. Naturally contradictions abound in this book; but they are no contradictions to the Hindu. His thought is formed in an entirely different mould from ours, for him our European logic does not exist. Not a single one of his books, from the antique epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the philosophical works previously referred to, is free from glaring contradictions. Doubtless logic is not always lacking, but it is that feminine form which carries its deductions to their extreme limit without concerning itself with contradictions.

It is quite necessary, if one wishes to comprehend Buddhism, to consider alongside of the philosophical speculations superimposed upon it the multitude of gods which no religion of India can do without. Buddha no more tried to shake the foundations of the Brahmanic Pantheon than he tried—an oft-repeated error notwithstanding—to set at naught the laws of caste. Indeed there has never been a reformer powerful enough to dislodge this corner-stone of India’s social constitution.

The preceding goes to make plainly apparent that Buddhism is simply an evolution of Brahmanism, preserving its multiplicity of gods, and altering merely its moral teachings. Nor was it until the expiration of several centuries that it began to be clearly differentiated from the ancient faith; probably at the outset it was not even looked upon as in the nature of a new cult. There is nothing to indicate that Asoka believed himself to be adhering to doctrines hitherto untaught; mention is made but once or twice of Buddha in all the religious edicts which this king spread over India and of which a great number remain to us. He recommends the widest tolerance towards all religious sects, and Buddhism must have presented itself to him simply as one of these, to be esteemed principally on account of the spirit of charity displayed by the king’s son who founded it.

We shall shortly prove that Buddhism disappeared from India by being gradually absorbed into ancient Brahmanism. In the countries other than India in which it became established, Cambodia, Burmah, the Brahmanic Pantheon was a part of it; but the Brahmanic gods never having previously been worshipped in these countries, there were no sects interested in maintaining their supremacy, and Buddha always retained there the dominant position which in India he was to lose.

Discussion was for a long time rife as to whether, by reason of the commingling upon them of the emblems of Buddha and of Siva, the celebrated monuments of Angkor were Buddhist or Brahmanic. No disputes on this point would have arisen if the scientists who examined the monuments of Cambodia had first studied those of India—of Nepal in particular. On these they would have found the same intermingling of the two sets of emblems; they would also have observed the same peculiarity in a neighbouring country, Burmah. Mr. Wheeler, a former English functionary there, calls attention to the fact that the Burmans, Buddhists as is well known, also worshipped the Vedic gods, notably Indra and Brahma; and that the king of Burmah had many Brahmans at his court. He also makes a remark that the Mogul Khans of Asia, those in the neighbourhood of Mount Altai, worship the Vedic gods to this day.

The facts which we have brought forward show conclusively that the wide gulf which was supposed, at a time when the first was known solely through books, to separate Buddhism from Brahmanism has never existed, and it is only the preconceived idea of this separation that has prevented the close bond that in reality unites them from being seen. One of the keenest European observers who has ever made his home in India, Hodgson, in citing certain Sivaic images which are to be seen in the Buddhist temples of India, goes to infinite pains to explain their presence. Not for an instant is it to be admitted, he says, that there could be fusion between cults as widely separated as heaven and earth. Yet Hodgson was a resident in Nepal and had only to cast his eyes about him to see, the point to which Brahmanic and Buddhist gods were intermingled in the temples of the land in which he lived. At this epoch the two religions were held to be so wholly distinct that it was impossible that the idea of their having the least thing in common should arise in any mind.

This instance, showing how a preconceived belief can blind to evidence, is the more curious inasmuch as there exists a work (on the extreme resemblance that prevails between many of the symbols of Buddhism and Sivaism) in which the author shows, by numerous examples, how frequently the Hindu writers and learned men themselves confound the Buddhist and Brahmanic images contained in the ancient temples; a confusion that is instantly made clear if one takes into account what we have said regarding the final merging into one of Buddhism and Brahmanism.

Disappearance of Buddhism in India

No one is ignorant of the fact that after having spread from India all over the rest of Asia, China, Russian Tatary, Burmah, etc., Buddhism, now the religion of three hundred million people, that is to say, of one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants, disappeared almost entirely towards the seventh or eighth century of our era from the country that gave it birth. It still subsists in India only upon the two extreme frontiers of that vast empire; Nepal in the north, and Ceylon in the south. Hindu books being absolutely silent on the subject of this disappearance, recourse has been had until now, in order to explain it, to the hypothesis of violent persecution. Admitting the tolerant character of the Hindus to be compatible with the idea of religious persecution, also granting that the effect of persecution is to destroy a religion instead of facilitating, as history teaches, its propagation, there would still be this difficulty: why, in a country divided as was formerly India into a hundred petty kingdoms, should all the reigning princes have suddenly decided at the same time to renounce the religion practised for centuries by their ancestors, and to force upon their people the adoption of another?

One begins to perceive the cause of the transformation of Buddhism as soon as one applies himself to the study of the monuments of India. After having studied attentively the greater part of the important monuments of India, one arrives at the conclusion that Buddhism disappeared simply because it gradually became reabsorbed into the religion from which it originally sprang.

This transformation was effected very slowly; but in a country which has no history, where are to be encountered periods of five or six centuries concerning which no knowledge has been handed down, there is no possible way of knitting together the loose ends of phases which appear to us alone and unconnected. In relation to these we are in the situation of the ancient geologists who, seeing the transformations that had taken place in the different layers of the earth and their inhabitants, and knowing nothing of the periods that had intervened between these transformations, supposed them all to be the result of violent cataclysms. A more advanced science would have shown them that it was by means of a series of insensible evolutions that these gigantic changes had been wrought.

The monuments of India relate to us plainly, when we examine with care the statues and bas-reliefs with which they are covered, the history of the transformation of Buddhism. They show us how the founder, who disdained all gods, finally became a god himself and figured, after having been absent from all, in every sanctuary. How, after having been the head of the crowd of Brahmanic divinities, he gradually became confounded with them until he finally passed out of sight entirely among their number.

In order to place beyond dispute the theory just advanced in explanation of this transformation and disappearance of Buddhism from India, it will be necessary to place ourselves back in the seventh century of the Christian era, or to discover a country which is undergoing a phase similar to that which India passed through at that epoch. Nepal, one of the cradles of Buddhism, is the region which has opposed the strongest resistance to the transforming forces by which it was menaced as soon as it came in contact with ancient Brahmanism, and has now reached the very moment of transformation at which Buddhism has become mingled with Brahmanism without having been entirely swallowed up. The Hindu and Buddhist gods are so closely intermingled in the temples of Nepal, that it is often impossible to determine to which religion a particular temple belongs. This peculiarity has been remarked, though nothing has been offered in the way of explanation by those English scientists who have made a study of Nepal. The fact, so inexplicable when not made clear by a study of the ancient monuments of India, is perfectly apparent when they have been given careful examination. One notes, as was said a little earlier, that the same confusion of divinities prevails everywhere at a certain period, and it is easy to comprehend how ancient temples could be attributed, even by learned Hindus, first to one religion and then to the other.

The same explanation makes clear to us the fact, so strange at a first glance, of Buddhist-Jain and Brahmanic temples being constructed side by side during the same period. Looking now on the phase when the two intermingled religions were on the point of merging into one, it will be at once comprehended how a sovereign can have distributed his liberalities between them with as much impartiality as a king of the Middle Ages displayed towards churches dedicated to different saints.

There remains to us but the account of a single traveller relative to the epoch of which we speak, that of the Chinese pilgrim Hwen Tsang; and in this we are told how a Hindu sovereign on the occasion of some festival, divides his generosity equally between the two dominant religions of that time; giving presents to Buddhist sectarians the first day, to those of Brahmanism the second. The phase had already been arrived at when the cults were entirely reconcilable, a phase which preceded that of their being united into one. The study of the religion of Nepal at the present time shows exactly how this fusion came about.

The date of the introduction of Buddhism into Nepal is a very ancient one. According to tradition Buddha himself visited the land. In any case it is in the ancient monasteries of Nepal that have been discovered the oldest known writings on Buddhism. To follow the same tradition, Asoka, king of Magadha, who reigned three centuries before Christ, made a pilgrimage to Nepal for the purpose of visiting the temples of Symbhunatha, Pashupatti, etc. He is also said to have founded the city of Patan, of which the Newar name is Lalita Patan, a corruption presumably of Pataliputra, the name given in India to the capital of Asoka. Several tumulus-formed temples have, from time immemorial, been attributed to him.

In Nepal, one of its cradles, the religion of Buddha has reigned for more than two thousand years. The isolation of this region of India may have preserved Buddhism to it for a longer period than is observable in the rest of the peninsula, but it has not prevented its undergoing,—like causes producing always the same effects,—a process of transformation analogous to that preceding its disappearance elsewhere. By reason of certain circumstances the gradual absorption has taken place more slowly in Nepal, and it is thanks to this slowness that we are able to learn what Buddhism was in India during the seventh or eighth century of our era, when its antique monastical institutions had disappeared, when its sacerdotal functions had once more become hereditary, and the ancient divinities had resumed their sway.

Buddhism and Brahmanism form to-day in Nepal, as they did in India in the seventh century, two religions nominally distinct, but having one for the other that tolerance which, according to the facts already cited, must have existed in the rest of India before the disappearance of Buddhism. This tolerance, explained sufficiently by the analogy between the two beliefs, is carried to such a point that their respective followers possess in common a certain number of pagodas, divinities, and feasts.

Instead of holding, with certain philosophical Buddhist sects, that the world is formed of matter alone, imperishable, possessing creative power and constituting the sole divinity of the universe, the Buddhism of Nepal offers for the worship of its followers a supreme trinity. This comprises 1st, Ali-Buddha, who is its principal personage, representing spirit; 2nd, Dharma, representing matter; 3rd, Sangha; representing the visible world, produced by the union of spirit and matter. This trinity, nearly enough related, as one sees, to that of Brahmanism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, has for symbol a triangle with a point at its centre. This point is the emblem of Ali-Buddha, looked upon definitively as the first cause.

Below this superior trinity are placed the gods of the old Brahmanic pantheon—Vishnu, Siva, Ganesa, Lakshmi, etc. Simple emanations of supreme power, they were created by it to govern the world. Fallen somewhat from the elevated rank they occupied in the Brahmanic religion, they are still sufficiently high to have the right to the worship of mortals.

The theories of the Nepal Buddhists concerning the human soul, do not differ sensibly from the old Brahmanic theories. It is looked upon, as is also the soul of all animals, as an emanation of Ali-Buddha, which, after numerous transmigrations, passes back to the bosom of the supreme being who gave it life. Deliverance from this long series of transmigrations by reabsorption into Ali-Buddha, is the supreme end proposed as recompense to all believers. The number and the nature of these transmigrations depend entirely on the conduct during life, the acts of men determining irrevocably their future destiny.

As for the founder of Buddhism himself; he is looked upon as are all the other Buddhas who have preceded him, as a holy personage purified by long anterior existences, and on the point of attaining the supreme absorption.

The most important of the temples of Nepal, notably that of Symbhunatha, are dedicated to Ali-Buddha. In all, the Buddhist trinity (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) is represented in the form of a statue seated, with legs crossed upon a lotus-leaf; Buddha having two arms, Dharma and Sangha generally four. Of this trinity, Dharma alone, the goddess of matter, is given the form of woman.

After the Buddhist trinity the most common objects of worship are the images of the founder of Buddhism and of his predecessors, both mortal and divine. Next came the gods of the Hindu Pantheon, Mahenkal, avatar of Siva; Kali, wife of Siva; Indra, king of Heaven; Garuda, god of birds, having a bird’s head; Ganesa, divinity of wisdom, having an elephant’s head, etc. The last is the most venerated, his image being found at the entrance to every temple, and it is with the worship of this purely Brahmanic divinity that all the Buddhist ceremonies commence.

The Hindu lingam has also been adopted by the Nepal Buddhists, but with the complete alteration of its significance. Instead of looking upon it as the male creative power of Siva, it is held to be the emblem of the lotus in which Ali-Buddha manifested himself in the form of a flame. Its shape is also modified. Four figures of Buddha are sculptured upon its lateral parts, and its summit is surmounted in the manner of the Buddhist chaityas.

It is to be seen from the preceding how intermingled with Brahmanism is Buddhism in Nepal. The religion of that part of the population which calls itself Brahmanic is equally tinged with Buddhism. Buddha is frequently represented in the temples dedicated to Siva, and several temples containing divinities common to the two religions are frequented alike by Brahmans and Buddhists.

This fusion of the two religions to be observed in the temples is also found in the legends with which the literature of Nepal abounds during the religious festivals. In the case of some of these it is really impossible to decide whether they are Buddhist or Brahmanic. Pilgrims also visit with equal confidence the shrines of the two religions.

Such is Buddhism at present in Nepal, and it is easy to predict from what has taken place in the past, that with the expiration of two or three centuries it will have been swallowed up in Brahmanism. The traveller of the future, ignorant of the phase of evolution through which Nepal is now passing will attribute, as do modern writers who treat of Buddhism in India, its disappearance to violent causes. The temple ruins with which Nepal will at that time no doubt be strewn, will also be invoked to attest the mercilessness of the persecutions.

But if the traveller whose existence we have supposed, has not confined himself to the study of a single region in India, but has had the patience to go over all the diverse lands of the immense peninsula, the idea of a religious evolution having taken place will have penetrated too deeply in his mind to allow him to commit such an error. In this respect the study of India itself immeasurably exceeds in value the perusal of history in books; it is the one country in the world where by means of a simple passing from one place to another, can be looked upon anew the successive forms that humanity has taken on from prehistoric times to the present day. This living study reveals rapidly to the observer the anterior transformations experienced by institutions and beliefs, of which books but show us the extremest phases.[f]

New Light on Buddhism

Recent discoveries and researches have greatly modified our notions of early India. In the last few years nearly the whole of the works composed in the earliest period of Buddhism have been edited in the original Pali, chiefly through the Pali Text Society. A few works of the second period have been edited in the original Pali or Sanskrit, and a number of books of later Buddhism have appeared in the various languages of eastern Asia. To appreciate the additions thus made to our knowledge it is necessary to remember that the Buddha, like other Indian teachers of his period, taught by conversation only. A highly-educated man (according to the education current at the time), speaking constantly to men of similar education, he followed the literary habit of his day by embodying his doctrines in set phrases (sutras), on which he enlarged, on different occasions, in different ways. Writing was then widely known. But the lack of suitable writing materials made any lengthy books impossible. Such sutras were therefore the recognised form of preserving and communicating opinion. They were catch-words, as it were, memoria technica, which could be easily remembered, and would recall the fuller expositions that had been based upon them.

In the Buddha’s time the Brahmans had their sutras in Sanskrit, already a dead language. He purposely put his into the ordinary conversational idiom of the day, that is to say, into Pali. When the Buddha died these sayings were collected together by his disciples into what they call the Four Nikayas, or “collections.” These cannot have reached their final form till about fifty or sixty years afterwards. Other sayings and verses, most of them ascribed, not to the Buddha, but to the disciples themselves, were put into a supplementary Nikaya. We know of slight additions made to this Nikaya as late as the time of Asoka, third century B.C. And the developed doctrine, found in certain portions of it, shows that these are later than the four old Nikayas. For a generation or two the books so put together were handed down by memory, though probably written memoranda were also used. And they were doubtless accompanied from the first, as they were being taught, by a running commentary.

About one hundred years after the Buddha’s death there was a schism in the community. Each of the two schools kept an arrangement of the canon—still in Pali, or some allied dialect. Sanskrit was not used for any Buddhist work till long afterwards, and never used at all, so far as is known, for the canonical books. Each of these two schools broke up, in the following centuries, into others. Several of them had their different arrangements of the canonical books, differing also in minor details. These books remained the only authorities for about five centuries, but they all, except only our extant Pali Nikayas, have been lost in India. These then are our authorities for the earliest period of Buddhism. Now what are these books?

We talk necessarily of Pali books. They are not books in the modern sense. They are memorial sentences or verses intended to be learnt by heart.

In depth of philosophic insight, in the method of Socratic questioning often adopted, in the earnest and elevated tone of the whole, in the evidence they afford of the most cultured thought of the day, these dialogues constantly remind the reader of the dialogues of Plato. But not in style. They have indeed a style of their own; always dignified, and occasionally rising into eloquence. But it is entirely different from the style of Western writings, which are always intended to be read.

The striking archæological discoveries of the last few years have both confirmed and added to our knowledge.

The principal points on which this large number of older and better authorities has modified our knowledge are as follows:—1. We have learnt that the division of Buddhism, originating with Burnouf, into northern and southern, is misleading. He found that the Buddhism in his Pali manuscript, which came from Ceylon, differed from that in his Sanskrit manuscript which came from Nepal. Now that the works he used have been made accessible in printed editions, we find that, wherever the existing manuscript came from, the original works themselves were all composed in the same stretch of country, that is, in the valley of the Ganges. The difference of the opinions expressed in the manuscript is due, not to the place where they are now found, but to the difference of time at which they were originally composed. Not one of the books mentioned above is either northern or southern. They all claim, and rightly claim, to belong, so far as their place of origin is concerned, to the Majjhima Desa, the middle country. It is undesirable to base the main division of our subject on an adventitious circumstance, and especially so when the nomenclature thus introduced (it is not found in the books themselves) cuts right across the true line of division. The use of the terms northern and southern as applied, not to the existing manuscript, but to the original books, or to the Buddhism they teach, not only does not help us, it is the source of serious misunderstanding. It inevitably leads careless writers to take for granted that we have, historically, two Buddhisms—one manufactured in Ceylon, the other in Nepal. Now this is admittedly wrong. What we have to consider is Buddhism varying through slight degrees, as the centuries pass by, in almost every book. We may call it one, or we may call it many. What is quite certain is that it is not two. And the most useful distinction to emphasise is, not the ambiguous and misleading geographical one—derived from the places where the modern copies of the manuscripts are found; nor even, though that would be better, the linguistic one—but the chronological one. The use, therefore, of the inaccurate and misleading terms northern and southern ought no longer to be followed in scholarly works on Buddhism.

2. Our ideas as to the social conditions that prevailed, during the Buddha’s life-time, in the eastern valley of the Ganges have been modified. The people were divided into clans, many of them governed as republics, more or less aristocratic. In a few cases several of such republics had formed confederations, and in four cases such confederations had already become hereditary monarchies. The right historical analogy is not the state of Germany in the Middle Ages, but the state of Greece in the time of Socrates. The Sakyas were still a republic. They had republics for their neighbours on the east and south, but on the western boundary was the kingdom of Kosala, the modern Oudh, which they acknowledged as a suzerain power. Gotama, the Buddha’s father, was not a king. There were rajahs in the clan, but the word meant at most something like consul or archon. All the four real kings were called Maha-rajah. And Suddhodana, the teacher’s father, was not even rajah. One of his cousins, named Bhaddiya, is styled a rajah; but Suddhodana is spoken of, like other citizens, as Suddhodana the Sakyan. As the ancient books are very particular on this question of titles, this is decisive.

3. There was no caste—no caste, that is, in the modern sense of the term. We have long known that the connubium was the cause of a long and determined struggle between the patricians and the plebeians in Rome. Evidence has been yearly accumulating on the existence of restrictions as to intermarriage, and as to the right of eating together (commensality) among other Aryan tribes, Greeks, Germans, Russians, and so on. Even without the fact of the existence now of such restrictions among the modern successors of the ancient Aryans in India, it would have been probable that they also were addicted to similar customs. It is certain that the notion of such usages was familiar enough to some at least of the tribes that preceded the Aryans in India. Rules of endogamy and exogamy; privileges, restricted to certain classes, of eating together, are not only Indian or Aryan, but world-wide phenomena. Both the spirit, and to a large degree the actual details, of modern Indian caste-usages are identical with these ancient, and no doubt universal, customs. It is in them that we have the key to the origin of caste.

At any moment in the history of a nation such customs seem, to a superficial observer, to be fixed and immutable. As a matter of fact they are never quite the same in successive centuries, or even generations. The numerous and complicated details which we sum up under the convenient, but often misleading, single name of caste are solely dependent for their sanction on public opinion. That opinion seems stable. But it is always tending to vary as to the degree of importance attached to some particular one of the details, as to the size and complexity of the particular groups in which each detail ought to be observed.

Owing to the fact that the particular group that in India worked its way to the top, based its claims on religious grounds, not on political power, nor on wealth, the system has, no doubt, lasted longer in India than in Europe. But public opinion still insists, in considerable circles, even in Europe, on restrictions of a more or less defined kind, both as to marriage and as to eating together. And in India the problem still remains to trace, in the literature, the gradual growth of the system—the gradual formation of new sections among the people, the gradual extension of the institution to the families of people engaged in certain trades, belonging to the same group, or sect, or tribe, tracing their ancestry, whether rightly or wrongly, to the same source. All these factors, and others besides, are real factors. But they are phases of the extension and growth, not explanations of the origin of the system.

There is no evidence to show that at the time of the rise of Buddhism there was any substantial difference, as regards the barriers in question, between the peoples dwelling in the valley of the Ganges and their contemporaries, Greek or Roman, dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The point of greatest weight in the establishment of the subsequent development, the supremacy in India of the priests, was still being hotly debated. All the new evidence tends to show that the struggle was being decided rather against than for the Brahmans. What we find in the Buddha’s time is caste in the making. The great mass of the people were distinguished quite roughly into four classes, social strata, of which the boundary lines were vague and uncertain. At one end of the scale were certain outlying tribes and certain hereditary crafts of a dirty or despised kind. At the other end the nobles claimed the superiority. But Brahmans by birth (not necessarily sacrificial priests, for they followed all sorts of occupations) were trying to oust the nobles from the highest grade. They only succeeded, long afterwards, when the power of Buddhism had declined.

4. It had been supposed on the authority of late priestly texts, where boasts of persecution are put forth, that the cause of the decline of Buddhism in India had been Brahman persecution. The now accessible older authorities, with one doubtful exception, make no mention of persecution. On the other hand, the comparison we are now able to make between the canonical books of the older Buddhism and the later texts of the following centuries, shows a continual decline from the old standpoint, a continual approximation of the Buddhist views to those of the other philosophies and religions of India. We can see now that the very event which seemed, in the eyes of the world, to be the most striking proof of the success of the new movement, the conversion and strenuous support, in the third century B.C., of Asoka, the most powerful ruler India had had, only hastened the decline. The adhesion of large numbers of nominal converts, more especially from the newly incorporated and less advanced provinces, produced weakness rather than strength in the movement for reform. The day of compromise had come. Every relaxation of the old thoroughgoing position was welcomed and supported by converts only half converted. And so the margin of difference between the Buddhists and their opponents gradually faded almost entirely away. The soul theory, step by step, gained again the upper hand. The popular gods and the popular superstitions are once more favoured by Buddhists themselves. The philosophical basis of the old ethics is overshadowed by new speculations. And even the old ideal of life, the salvation of the Arahat to be won in this world and in this world only, by self-culture and self-mastery, is forgotten, or mentioned only to be condemned. The end was inevitable. The need of a separate organisation became less and less apparent. The whole pantheon of the Vedic gods, with the ceremonies and the sacrifices associated with them, passed indeed away. But the ancient Buddhism, the party of reform, was overwhelmed also in its fall; and modern Hinduism arose on the ruins of both.[g]

THE ACTUAL PIETY OF THE HINDUS AND THE HINDU SEPARATION OF RELIGION FROM FINE MORALS

We have now examined the elaborate doctrines of the Hindus in some detail. It remains to be seen how far they affected the real life of the people.

The works of modern science have not yet been able to dispel the false ideas that prevail concerning the religions of India. It is only after studying the practice of these religions on the soil of the peninsula itself that one can begin to have a conception of its contradictions that seem to us so strange, and to comprehend that the word religion has totally different meanings for the Hindu and the European. In the buoyant, illogical, dreamy soul of the Hindu the most contrary beliefs are associated in a manner quite incomprehensible to us. The same man who will believe firmly in the speculations of the most daring atheism will prostrate himself with equal conviction before thousands of strange, grotesque, or terrible divinities, or respectfully kiss the footprint of Buddha or Vishnu. In India, not only do all religions dwell in perfect harmony, but the most contrary dogmas exist side by side in the same religion.

The innumerable sects of Neo-Brahmanism or Hinduism all share in the two dominant cults of Siva the destroyer and Vishnu the preserver, the two great divinities worshipped by every pious Hindu, who, together with the great creator Brahma, make up the Hindu trinity or trimurti. Although Brahma is conceived as the most powerful of these three gods, he has no special worshippers, and there is hardly a temple in all India dedicated to him. While the symbols of Siva and the incarnations of Vishnu, people the temples with a crowd of forms and images, Brahma is not represented in visible form, and remains the great impalpable soul that animates all creatures and in whose bosom the Hindu dreams of being absorbed.

Siva, the god of destruction, or rather of transformation, the god of birth and of death, whose symbol is the lingam or phallus and to whom victims are sacrificed, the god of the seed that produces beings and of the death that dissolves them—Siva is the true god of India, the true creation of its racial genius.

The female counterpart of Siva is his spouse, Parvati or Kali, goddess of life and death, the great mother of whom the universe was born, and by whom it will finally be swallowed up again. No cult has been the source of more monstrous scenes than that of the terrible Kali. Her worship was a mixture of obscenity and cruelty. On her altars flowed the blood of the last human sacrifices, which have now been abolished forever among the Brahmanic populations. Scenes of debauchery impossible to describe, gloomy or obscene mysteries are still practised in her temples, especially in those frequented by the sect called “Sivaites of the left hand.”

While Siva appeals rather to the intellect and represents the particular form in which Hindu genius has conceived the universe, Vishnu responds to the eternal needs of the heart. He is the god of love and of faith. He is without question a monistic god; but in order to manifest himself to mortals he has assumed so many different forms that it would be quite impossible to define, or even simply to enumerate them. These incarnations, called the avatars of Vishnu, represent so many special divinities, the worship of each belonging to a particular country, age, or social condition. While the principal ones are only ten in number, there is no limit to the multiplication of the others. One can fearlessly preach to the Hindus whatever god one will, as sublime or as coarse as the imagination of man can conceive; they will very likely adopt it, making it at once an avatar of Vishnu. Thus, Christ, whose history has some analogy with that of Krishna, has become one of these avatars; and to all the representations of the missionaries the Hindus reply that they have nothing to learn from them, being already more Christian than the Christians themselves.

As to external forms, they have always changed, and are still changing. The prodigious imagination of the Hindu, which has so multiplied them, is continually altering them. The Hindus love images and material symbols; they are great formalists in the practice of their religion, whatever it may be. Their temples are full of emblems, the principal ones being the lingam and the yoni, symbols of the male and female natures. Vows, penances, mortifications, the reading of sacred books, litanies, prayers, pilgrimages, are regarded as very meritorious and are very scrupulously observed. No other people has ever shown itself so strict in the performance of religious duties.

The pilgrims of Benares, of Jagannath, and of the great pagodas of the south of India, must still be estimated at hundreds of thousands annually. The celebrated places of pilgrimage are most frequently common to the two great sects. Vishnuites and Sivaites mingle on the solemn day; even Mussulmans sometimes come, not through a motive of curiosity, but for a pious end and to perform a meritorious work.

No place in India is more celebrated for its pilgrimages than Jagannath (popularly known as Juggernaut) or Puri on the coast of Orissa; nowhere, moreover, can one prove so well the singular fraternity of the cults of India, and at the same time their enormous diversity. There is not one of them that is not represented here. To whatever religion a Hindu belongs, at whatever distance his residence, and whatever the difficulties of the journey, he strives to go at least once in his life to Jagannath. In the rites of this temple Vishnu [called here Jagannath] shares with the gloomy and fatal Siva the adorations of the multitude whose over-excited piety rises to the point of delirium. His pagoda on wheels is drawn through the city, and such enthusiasm was aroused in the bosoms of the noisy multitudes that fanatics used to throw themselves beneath the wheels with cries of joy.[22]

There are many other places of pilgrimage in India, generally of less importance than Benares and Jagannath. The shores of the Ganges are sacred from source to mouth, and many of the faithful come from afar to visit them. The water of the river is sacred and is carried at great expense from one end of the peninsula to the other. The Hindus attribute a sacred character to all watercourses, but none approaches the holy Ganges in the veneration it inspires. This cult of waters, like that of the clouds and the monsoons, goes back to a very remote antiquity; it is entirely natural in a country of drought, where water brings life and whole populations die of famine when it fails.

Between the religion and the morals of the Hindu there is an abyss which it is difficult for the occidental mind to comprehend. It has been truthfully said that the Hindus are the most religious of all peoples. From the point of view of European ideas it might be said with no less justice that they are perhaps the least moral.

To please the gods and gain their favour is the end that the Hindu has ever before his eyes. But he would be greatly astonished if one should try to persuade him that the gods have the least particle of interest in the honesty of his relations with his fellowmen, the chastity of his life or the integrity of his word and his conduct, or that these all-powerful beings have the slightest disposition to be angry when he steals his neighbour’s goods or practices infanticide.

Their vengeance will smite him severely if he neglects to say his prayers, if he does not read the sacred books, if he is absent from the religious ceremonies, if he kills a cow, or if he does not perform the required purifications. These are the faults that arouse the anger of the gods. They demand sacrifices, pilgrimages, penances, prayers, the performance of a thousand external rites; they are concerned about nothing else. The rest is man’s affair, the material, utilitarian, practical side of life, quite beneath divine care.

If we turn to the laws of Manu, we find that the infraction of apparently puerile rites constitutes for the Hindu a fearful crime that can be atoned only by torture or even death, while robberies and murders may be expiated by the lightest penances. With the exception of adultery, which so deeply disturbs the constitution of families and consequently that of the race, all the sins of the flesh are of little importance to the Hindus. The voluptuous cults which they practice, rather impel them to license, and love becomes criminal only when its object is a being of an inferior caste. Murder derives its culpability from the rank of the person upon whom it is committed. If the victim is a cow or a Brahman, the crime is a grave one; in any other case it becomes a peccadillo. Certain murders, like the infanticide of girls, are not even faults.

The only great moral element that has penetrated the nature of the Hindu is the spirit of Buddhist charity. This spirit has even crept into the rigid code invented for the pleasure of fantastic and cruel gods and not for the true good of mankind. It has softened it and added precepts of love and liberality to its harsh and severe directions. The Buddhist period was the most moral in the history of India, and its beneficent influence still makes itself felt. The good qualities that the Hindu possesses, such as gentleness, faithfulness to his masters, love of family, an admirable spirit of tolerance, belong to his character and are independent of his morals. The most of his virtues are, moreover, altogether passive; he can obey, and he is never so good as when he yields to the yoke of a master. Let him command in his turn and he quickly becomes unjust, arrogant, and tyrannical. One could not say of a single one of his virtues that it is the fruit of a morality grounded upon the powerful base of religious faith and strengthened by ages of development.

The Hindu is, then, an essentially religious being, but he is not a moral being. His yielding and gentle nature is accustomed to submit to the force of a climate that has sapped all his energy and to a long slavery. If he had no curb but his moral conscience, he would perhaps be one of the most fierce and dangerous peoples of the globe. His character alone has made him one of the most inoffensive.[f]

FOOTNOTES

[21] [This picturesque account by Diodorus has already been given in the history of Mesopotamia.]

[22] [On the matter of the famous “Juggernaut” procession which has become a proverb of relentlessness and fanaticism, it is important to note that Sir W. W. Hunter in his history of The Indian Empire makes a sweeping denial of the traditions concerning Jagannath, declaring that his religion is opposed to suicide or slaughter and that the deaths which happen at his festivals are few in number, less indeed than at ordinary political parades, and are due to accident or hysteria and not at all to religious frenzy.]

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