In Persia we have a new religious principle making its appearance, quite different from those we have met in our studies of China and India. It is the distinction between good and evil, both being regarded by the Persian as real and self-existent principles. Hence we have a negative power in the divine; for not good alone is supreme, but the good is limited by evil, and both are eternal, or at least real and actual, in the present world. The Hindu did not acknowledge the reality of evil; it was all “maya,” or illusion—a mere dream of our feverish consciousness. The whole world of nature, as well as the world of human beings, was likewise a dream that exists only in human consciousness. It is the duty of the good Brahmin to get rid of this dream of a world, by means of abstraction and penance and mortification of the flesh. When the devotee has tortured and misused his body until he has benumbed and paralyzed it to a degree that it can not feel or perceive, then he is no longer haunted by the things of the world. They do not any longer flow into his mind through his senses, and he becomes divine, or like Brahm, who has no distinctions whatever, and hence no knowledge of anything, nor consciousness of himself. For consciousness is a distinction of the me into subject and object, the knowing and the known—I and me.
The Hindu will not regard evil as divine, or as a part of the highest principle. He goes farther than this,—he will not admit any distinctions at all as divine. He thinks all distinction is division or limitation. Limitation in God is the distinction of his infinitude. It will not do, therefore, to think God as this or that, or as not this or that, for thus we should limit him. He must be pure unity, without distinction—yes, he must be above unity, above all thought.
The Hindu, therefore, can not permit the ideas of righteousness and goodness to be applied to Brahm any more than he can admit the application of wickedness and evil. Special gods, Indra, Varuna, Vishnu, Brahma, may be righteous, but Brahm is above goodness and above righteousness, as well as above evil.
The Persian, however, does not accept such a doctrine. He believes that there is Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd), the lord of all good, and opposed to him is Ahriman, the lord of all evil. The Persian insists on this dualism. Both principles are real; they are in perpetual conflict. This difference in religious principles causes great differences in character between the two peoples.
The Persian was an active people, making war on surrounding nations and fighting to extend the dominion of Ahura-Mazda and to gain a victory over Ahrimanes. The Hindu, on the other hand, in his education, cultivates abstract contemplation and meditation, and does not believe in wars or conflict. The child must be taught how to attain the blessedness of passivity and repose. No active duties for him—no struggles to overcome nature, to slay wild beasts or exterminate the pests of the earth, but he must be mild, and spare animal life, even in tigers, serpents, scorpions, and vermin. The Persian education fits the youth for a career of active warfare against wild beasts and all unclean animals. Clean animals are such as are in the service of light and truth and purity and cleanliness. The unclean do not serve Ahura-Mazda, but darkness and evil and filth and foulness. Unclean beasts are supposed to be tenanted by evil spirits in the service of Ahriman. Not only the horse and cow, but the hedgehog, who roams about at night when evil spirits are abroad, and the beaver, who kills the evil beings in the water, are clean animals. All scavenger animals—all carrion birds also serve Ahura-Mazda.
This principle of good and evil seems to have been at first the principle of light and darkness only. It would seem that Zoroaster converted what was a principle of nature into a spiritual principle. The religion of the Brahmins was also a religion based chiefly on the same distinction of light and darkness, in the early times before their migration from the high table-lands of Bactria, to the southeast, to the Indus valley. But the Brahmin, given to abstract thinking, ascended to the idea of a supreme unity as the origin and final destiny of his Vedic gods of the sky, while the Persian changed light and darkness to moral principles of good and evil, and made their difference more substantial than their unity.
Persian education, in the family and school, trained the youth to ride on horseback, to shoot with the bow and arrow, and, above all things, to speak the truth. This duty to speak the truth is to the Persian before all other duties, because truth is akin to clearness and light, and hence also to the good and pure—to Ahura-Mazda. Falsehood is the setting up of what is not, and hence inconsistent with reality. Hence the veil of falsehood prevents one from seeing reality, and hence it is akin to darkness. Next to truth-speaking is the practice of justice among the Persians. Like the truth, justice is self-consistent, and hence clear and simple. Justice treats each one according to his deed, returning upon him like for like. What one actually does is treated as the reality of his will, and justice is therefore a sort of respect shown toward personal reality. The thief steals property; justice says, “I respect your will; you wish to destroy the right of property, and your right of property shall be destroyed because it is your will. The people who are not thieves all will to respect the right of property, and therefore their property shall be respected. You, thief, shall lose your property, and also the ownership of your limbs: you shall go into prison, and sit still, and no longer possess the freedom of locomotion.” Injustice would make all human action uncertain and obscure, and the darkness of Ahriman would prevail.
Truth-speaking is the worship of reality. If all things and all events are only a dream, it is of no consequence to pay so much respect to them as to be scrupulous of veracity in regard to them. Hence the Hindu makes monstrous fables about things and events, and lets them become the sport of his imagination. Thus we see how deep-reaching the religious principle is, and how widely different the Persian system of education is from the Hindu.
The Chinese revere the past, and make their education consist in memorizing with superstitious exactness the forms of the past—the maxims of Confucius and Mencius. Even the vehicle of literature, the art of writing, requires prodigious efforts of memory to acquire it. “Do not exercise your spontaneity, but conform to the past. Be contented in repeating the thoughts which were uttered twenty-five hundred years ago. Make no new paths; plan out no new undertakings.” The Persian is not content with the past. He must assist Ahura-Mazda in the great contest with evil and darkness, and hence he must do something new. He must hurry to the front. Along the border-land rages the fight. The man who is content to remain within the domain already conquered is a craven, and does nothing for the extension of the realm of light and goodness, but allows the realm of darkness and evil to hold its own attitude of defiance.
Besides truth-speaking and faithfulness to promises, the Persians prized gymnastics. All boys were trained in throwing the spear and javelin, as well as in shooting the bow and arrow and riding on horse-back. An active life is provided for. This training of the body is for real service in the world. The tortures and mortification of the body in India show a very different object.