It is now asserted that this Aryan immigration had been preceded from the same quarter by an earlier one, in a past so very remote that the Indians had lost completely the memory of it, and that by the time this second wave had reached the north-west Gangetic tracts, the first had pushed its way as far east as the delta, where first vanquishing it finally amalgamated with the aboriginal tribes. It is supposed that from out of this earliest section arose the natural ancestors of Buddha, while in the second and intellectually superior section we must look for the religious teachers from whom his spiritual lineage is to be traced.[[90]] For with them were introduced the Vedas, revealing the earliest forms of civilisation and religion in that great section of the human family to which we ourselves belong. We see pictured in the Rig-Veda a people who, in complexion, manner, and rites, were at first as distinct from the native Indian races as were the Israelites from those of Canaan. Patriarchal in their institutions, pastoral or agricultural in their pursuits, they confront us as a primitive but certainly not a barbarous folk. Nurtured by the invigorating climate and magnificent scenery of an ancestral home “on the very roof of the world,” they had reached a social condition in which, in a language fitly called “polished,” or “carefully made” (Sanskrita), they were as fitly called “Aryan” or “noble.” They practised the arts of Jabal and Jubal, venerated their sages and poets, and called their wives and daughters by names of beauty and grace like that of Naamah. Their religion, though polytheistic, was not inspired by dread of evil spirits or awe of ancestral shades, but by wonder of the world around them and their own awakening instincts. Man in these ancient fragments, as in the first pages of our Bible, is evidently a creature transcending the savage, and made in a diviner image than the type from which it is maintained he must have sprung. Instead of consorting with or worshipping the animals, he exercises dominion over them; he questions himself and the heavens and the earth concerning their origin and author, and with some divine authentic instinct which he has never lost, he seems to be growing into the feeling that not only the trinity of supernatural powers which he worshipped, but his very self, are the children of some primordial and eternal Dyaus, the father of all.
While the earliest light that falls upon our ancestors reveals them as a religious people, whose worship, simple and rudimentary as it was, indicated a sense of inferiority, and also, as one who ought to know informs us, “some sense of flaw in the relationship, some concept of sin and guilt,”[[91]] to the deities worshipped, it is to be noted that gods and men were felt to be too much akin to allow of spiritual aspiration, or of high moral significance in man’s religious acts. The ethical or rather spiritual elements so vital to the Biblical conceptions of religion may not be quite foreign to the earliest Veda, but they are scantily, if at all, represented in it. No prayer can be said to have ever been directed to obtain forgiveness, or growth in goodness, in the Bible sense. The sinner was for the most part only a defaulter in respect of offerings, and his guilt was that of a person who refused to render homage. That the gods might be able to watch over and enrich mankind, they had to be fed and sustained. The worshipper was thus in a certain degree necessary to the worshipped. The sense of submissive gratitude to the Deity which meets us in the earliest fragments of the Bible is not expressed, for religion was conceived of as a kind of exchange in which men purchased a right to divine help by service rendered, and “each man satisfied his higher instinct according to his own conception of the character of the being on whose favour his welfare was thought to depend.”[[92]]
Centuries later, in another strata of sacred literature, composed in prose, dogmatic and liturgic in character, and designated Brahmanas,[[93]] we behold the same branch of the Aryan family in a further stage of their history. Their patriarchal age has vanished, and their heroic seems passing into the aristocratic and hierarchic. Caste has appeared as the invariable attendant upon conquest, when the victor is separated from the vanquished by language, complexion, and religion. It is not so much caste, however, in the ordinary sense of the word, as class, sternly prohibiting marriage not only with the aboriginal tribes, but between persons of unequal rank, and anticipating the organisation of European society in the middle ages. In the nobles, who were subordinate only to the Church, the burghers or merchants socially distinct from and inferior to the nobles, and in the villeins or serfs of the conquered territories, we have an exact parallel to the old Indian system, in which Sudra, Vaisya, Kshatrya, all formed steps in a social pyramid, on the top of which the Brahman was throned.[[94]]
Thus early in the history of the Indian people emerged that sacerdotal institution which was to exercise so powerful and eventually so sinister an influence upon their religious progress. In Vedic times the father of the family and the rajah of the clan were the celebrants of the religious rites, but as life became more complicated ceremonies became more laborious, and men who had preserved the knowledge of the old hymns, and the religious formularies which had died out from the common people, gradually took the rajah’s place. As thought widened, men refused to be satisfied with guardian deities that could be fed with rice and butter. The sense of human law reflected itself in the conception of divine rulers governing men, and penalties inflicted by man for wrong-doing suggested expiation for the infringed laws of deity. This idea of sacrifice, of which there is said to be no trace in the flesh feasts of earlier times, becomes prominent in the offerings of the period. “The shedding of blood, the burning of a limb of the victim in the fire, by some at least was believed to atone for transgression, and it is probable that at one time the religious instinct expressed itself in human sacrifice.[[95]]” In any case, the development of the idea of the great efficacy of sacrifice as a means of compelling the gods to do the will of the worshipper—yea, of elevating the worshipper to their privileges and rank,—must soon have had the effect of making a priesthood, at first only helpful, to be necessary as the sole agents between man and deity. By preserving the memory of what had faded from the vulgar, by transmitting to their families a lore which became the more sacred the more it was forgotten, the professional liturgists or sacrificers, at first satirised by the poets as was the Romish friar by the minstrel in the middle ages, imperceptibly grew into an order whose privileges were more exclusive and whose pretensions were higher than were ever asserted in Israel by the descendants of Aaron. Among the Hebrews the priesthood was never allowed to gain complete ascendency. Its representatives were subordinated to the king, who was the fountain of all law, and they were kept in check by the prophets as the ministers of Divine revelation; but the Brahmans came to be regarded as not only the guardians of religion, but the teachers of all knowledge and the source of all authority. They owned no superior, were subject to no law in the state: each one was a pope in himself, more independent of the crown and the commonwealth than a Christian pope ever pretended to be, and had a faith in his personal infallibility which no Christian pope affected to have. In India there resulted from the ascendency all the evils that were manifested in Judaism and in Latin Christianity; and in India far worse results were produced. For, left to themselves as superior beings apart from the actual world, who never could err, they gave their minds that licence which too often in the history of thought has been confounded with liberty, and, as always happens when self-restraint is disregarded, the result in this instance was the production, not of a system of philosophy, but a crude conglomerate of incongruous phantasies more resembling a chaos than a cosmos.[[96]]
Let us not suppose that the Brahmans were originally, or even eventually, the vain and greedy and self-seeking bigots which the name unfortunately suggests to a European. They gained the ascendency because they cultivated the power to rise; they represent what many are inclined to revere as the ideal aristocracy, that of Intellect. They were not ignorant priests, but learned philosophers, from whom sprung again and again the reformers who headed the revolt from an overdone ritual, and from a faith which expressed itself wholly in metaphysical speculations. By them were excogitated the Upanishads and the laws of Manu, two of the most wonderful literary productions of mankind. From there too came the great epic poems of the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, poems in some respects equal to the Homeric, and in cleverness of purpose, which is said to be that of arresting the progress of Buddhism, equalling anything which the Society of Jesus ever produced to counteract the Reformation. In its complexity and adaptability and many-sidedness Brahmanism is unrivalled by any human system, and the men who first gave it expression and directed its earliest movements must rank among the most original and daring of thinkers.
But they were Indians living in the period beginning about the tenth century B.C., in a land as completely cut off from the rest of the world as they were severed from the practical life of their countrymen. They had the same earnest and inquisitive mind which their westward-moving kinsmen had inherited with them from their trans-Himalayan ancestors, but in them it had to work out its advances in more adverse conditions. The tribes that went westward marched along the uplands, in zones of climate and through scenery and conditions stimulating effort, both mental and physical. Consequently they went on improving their beliefs, till they apprehended the truth which lies at the base of all true systems of faith, the immortality of the soul, and developed a philosophy which represents man’s most successful attempt to grasp that divine unity after which man in his polytheism is ever feeling. It was otherwise with the branch that went southwards. They had to live under physical conditions not conducive to energy, under burning skies which repressed, and on soils which rendered industry unnecessary. As they gained ascendency over the aborigines the vices of the vanquished race told fatally upon them. Their sensual worship, customs like polygamy and sutteeism, ascetic practices and sorcerous rites, took possession of them; and, most marked of all, a belief very widely spread among the lower tribes of mankind so terribly bewitched them that to this day the Indian mind has never been able to break away from its fascination.
This belief in transmigration, with the pessimism which is its inevitable concomitant, was wholly absent from their ancient Vedic faith. At intervals from the times of Pythagoras it has infected the religion and philosophy of the Western Aryans, but never to any extent or with any serious result. Its true habitat and breeding-place, like that of the cholera, is among the degraded and broken-down populations of the East. It was communicated from the native Indian races to the Hindus, who unfortunately were prepared to receive it through the depressing and degenerating influences of tropical life on a northern-born family. Anyway, while their more fortunate brethren were eagerly groping after, in their westward progress, the truth of immortality, and thirsting for more life and fuller, they in their fat Gangetic plains, wearied of life as something not worth having, yet dreading death because it was appointed unto man not once but many times to die, were seeking some way of deliverance from this inherited curse. And the Brahmans professed to point to it. Their earliest popular conception of deliverance was simply that of re-birth in a happier world, perchance secured by sacrificial rites and religious acts, but such a conception could not long satisfy, and eventually it gave way in the higher class of minds to nobler views. In India, as elsewhere, men soon became conscious of the more solid security of merit procured by a life of justice and mercy. Man’s future was in his own and not in the hands of a priest: its happiness or misery would be no accident, but the sure result of good or evil done here and now. Therefore the wise man endeavoured laboriously and continuously to collect merit by good deeds, “as the white ant builds her house, for with these as his guide he could hope to traverse a gloom hard to be crossed.”
But by and by even this belief ceased to satisfy them, for how could man hope to liberate himself from the bondage of endless change as long as, seeking only a happier existence, he was content to be a citizen of the changeable? Let him seek reunion with Brahma, of which he is an emanation. So here again, while the Westerns were finding the path which would lead them from polytheism to theism, and were growing into nobler conceptions of what the individual self should be, the speculative ascetics of the East, in a life of meditation far apart, were trying to subside rather than rise into Brahma the Absolute as a river reunites with the ocean. In their earlier Brahmanas their fathers knew nothing of Brahma as deity, and at no time did Brahma mean to the Indian what deity meant to the Western Aryan. Polytheism in India never became theism in the old Greek sense, nor even Pantheism in our nineteenth-century sense. The mysterious all-pervading Presence was indeed early detected by the Indians as the “Breath” of all things, but the name employed by them to distinguish it signified only the universal self. In no sense was it the conscious author, but only the irrepressible source of things because reflected upon by illusion. Brahma Atman was neither the infinitely intelligent nor the perfectly blessed, in our sense of the word. It was simply thought without cognition, beatitude without consciousness. “The Hindu never thinks of asserting that Brahma knows or even has consciousness, but always that Brahma is knowledge.” “It is simply impersonal being, absolute unity contrasted with disruption, from which existence, as an emanation wholly and only evil, because originating in a mistake, must move through endless cycles of change, until the way of escape be discovered and followed by which the erratic spark may be absorbed in the central fire.”[[97]]
Such a speculation was manifestly an advance upon Vedic materialism, which sought to bring down the gods to the side of man as useful guardians, and upon early Brahmanism which sought by sacrifice to force them to do man’s will, and by and by to elevate man to their level. In endeavouring, however, to abstract its disciples from the superstitions of the priests, it tampered with the foundations of religion. It never attempted to propitiate the gods—for, even if superior to man, they were as much involved in the labyrinth of transmigration as he was himself,—but it professed in a universe of illusion to have discovered the only real. It dared to name the Absolute; so, withdrawing from the world, it practiced austerities for the sake of illumination, gave itself up to meditation to reduce the personal self to an abstraction, and endeavoured thus to escape from the necessity of existence in time and space into “passionless, characterless being.”
All this is expounded in the Upanishads, the special scriptures of philosophical Brahmanism.[[98]] Though translated by Professor Max Müller, and lucidly interpreted by Professor Gough, readers of ordinary philosophical culture find them very hard to understand, and in spite of the high commendation of them by Rammohun Roy and Schopenhauer, they will be inclined to question whether these “beginnings of thought,” “conceptions hardly formed,” though essential to a proper knowledge of Indian philosophy, “should be ranked among the outstanding productions of the human mind.”[[99]] Throughout their long and most tedious verbiage, however, one dominant idea is ever discoverable—that the chief end of the wise man is to know, not the forms of things, but the great self of all things, and seek his deliverance not by practice of religion but by pursuit of Gnosis.[[100]] Religion would indeed secure rewards, but they would only be transient; religion might regulate and modify the course of migration, but only Gnosis could break its adamantine chain. “The vision of Atman is the only deliverance, for by it all ties are loosened”; “the vision of the self is the light of the world, to which only the purest minds attain.” To reach it not only the bonds of desire must be broken, but of ignorance too. “For Atman is highly exalted above all reverence and effort, above holiness and unholiness.” “It, the uncreated, is beyond all good and evil,” and upon rewards and punishments, upon both good and evil, the sage must turn his back, for he alone who knows the Universal is free, from Karman and from Kâma (action and desire) which hold captive the self in the net of the impermanent.[[101]]