Nevertheless, criteria fortunately are not lacking to enable one to assign the general bulk of any one work to a certain period in the literary development; and as these periods are, if not sharply, yet plainly distinguishable, one is not in so desperate a case as he might have expected to be, considering that it is impossible to date with certainty any Hindu book or writer before the Christian era. For, first, there exists a difference in language, demarcating the most important periods; and, secondly, the development of the literature has been upon such lines that it is easy to say, from content and method of treatment, whether a given class of writings is a product of the Vedic, early Brahmanic, or late Brahmanic epochs. Usually, indeed, one is unable to tell whether a later Upanishad was made first in the early or late Brahmanic period, but it is known that the Upanishads, as a whole, i.e., the literary form and philosophical material which characterize Upanishads, were earlier than the latest Brahmanic period and subsequent to the early Brahmanic period; that they arose at the close of the latter and before the rise of the former. So the Br[=a]hmanas, as a whole, are subsequent to the Vedic age, although some of the Vedic hymns appear to have been made up in the same period with that of the early Br[=a]hmanas. Again, the Pur[=a]nas can be placed with safety after the late Brahmanic age; and, consequently, subsequent to the Upanishads, although it is probable that many Upanishads were written after the first Pur[=a]nas. The general compass of this enormous literature is from an indefinite antiquity to about 1500 A.D. A liberal margin of possible error must be allowed in the assumption of any specific dates. The received opinion is that the Rig Veda goes back to about 2000 B.C., yet are some scholars inclined rather to accept 3000 B.C. as the time that represents this era. Weber, in his Lectures on Sanskrit Literature (p. 7), rightly says that to seek for an exact date is fruitless labor; while Whitney compares Hindu dates to ninepins—set up only to be bowled down again. Schroeder, in his Indiens Literatur und Cultur, suggests that the prior limit may be "a few centuries earlier than 1500," agreeing with Weber's preferred reckoning; but Whitney, Grassmann, and Benfey provisionally assume 2000 B.C. as the starting point of Hindu literature. The lowest possible limit for this event Müller now places at about 1500, which is recognized as a very cautious view; most scholars thinking that Müller's estimate gives too little time for the development of the literary periods, which, in their opinion, require, linguistically and otherwise, a greater number of years. Brunnhofer more recently has suggested 2800 B.C. as the terminus; while the last writers on the subject (Tilak and Jacobi) claim to have discovered that the period from 3500 to 2500 represents the Vedic age. Their conclusions, however, are not very convincing, and have been disputed vigorously.[4] Without the hope of persuading such scholars as are wedded to a terminus of three or four thousand years ago that we are right, we add, in all deference to others, our own opinion on this vexed question. Buddhism gives the first semblance of a date in Hindu literature. Buddha lived in the sixth century, and died probably about 480, possibly (Westergaard's extreme opinion) as late as 368.[5] Before this time arise the S[=u]tras, back of which lie the earliest Upanishads, the bulk of the Br[=a]hmanas, and all the Vedic poems. Now it is probable that the Brahmanic literature itself extends to the time of Buddha and perhaps beyond it. For the rest of pre-Buddhistic literature it seems to us incredible that it is necessary to require, either from the point of view of linguistic or of social and religious development, the enormous period of two thousand years. There are no other grounds on which to base a reckoning except those of Jacobi and his Hindu rival, who build on Vedic data results that hardly support the superstructure they have erected. Jacobi's starting-point is from a mock-serious hymn, which appears to be late and does not establish, to whatever date it be assigned, the point of departure from which proceeds his whole argument, as Whitney has shown very well. One is driven back to the needs of a literature in respect of time sufficient for it to mature. What changes take place in language, even with a written literature, in the space of a few centuries, may be seen in Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. No two thousand years are required to bridge the linguistic extremes of the Vedic and classical Sanskrit language.[6] But in content it will be seen that the flower of the later literature is budding already in the Vedic age. We are unable to admit that either in language or social development, or in literary or religious growth, more than a few centuries are necessary to account for the whole development of Hindu literature (meaning thereby compositions, whether written or not) up to the time of Buddha. Moreover, if one compare the period at which arise the earliest forms of literature among other Aryan peoples, it will seem very strange that, whereas in the case of the Romans, Greeks, and Persians, one thousand years B.C. is the extreme limit of such literary activity as has produced durable works, the Hindus two or three thousand years B.C. were creating poetry so finished, so refined, and, from a metaphysical point of view, so advanced as is that of the Rig Veda. If, as is generally assumed, the (prospective) Hindus and Persians were last to leave the common Aryan habitat, and came together to the south-east, the difficulty is increased; especially in the light of modern opinion in regard to the fictitious antiquity of Persian (Iranian) literature. For if Darmesteter be correct in holding the time of the latter to be at most a century before our era, the incongruity between that oldest date of Persian literature and the "two or three thousand years before Christ," which are claimed in the case of the Rig Veda, becomes so great as to make the latter assumption more dubious than ever.
We think in a word, without wishing to be dogmatic, that the date of the Rig Veda is about on a par, historically, with that of 'Homer,' that is to say, the Collection[7] represents a long period, which was completed perhaps two hundred years after 1000 B.C, while again its earliest beginnings precede that date possibly by five centuries; but we would assign the bulk of the Rig Veda to about 1000 B.C. With conscious imitation of older speech a good deal of archaic linguistic effect doubtless was produced by the latest poets, who really belong to the Brahmanic age. The Brahmanic age in turn ends, as we opine, about 500 B.C., overlapping the S[=u]tra period as well as that of the first Upanishads. The former class of writings (after 500 B.C. one may talk of writings) is represented by dates that reach from circa 600-500 B.C. nearly to our era. Buddhism's floruit is from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., and epic Hinduism covers nearly the same centuries. From 500 to 1000 Buddhism is in a state of decadence; and through this time extend the dramatic and older Puranic writings; while other Pur[=a]nas are as late as 1500, at which time arises the great modern reforming sect of the Sikhs. In the matter of the earlier termini a century may be added or subtracted here and there, but these convenient divisions of five hundreds will be found on the whole to be sufficiently accurate.[8]
METHODS OF INTERPRETATION.
At the outset of his undertaking a double problem presents itself to one that would give, even in compact form, a view of Hindu religions. This problem consists in explaining, and, in so far as is possible, reconciling opposed opinions in regard not only to the nature of these religions but also to the method of interpreting the Vedic hymns.
That the Vedic religion was naturalistic and mytho-poetic is doubted by few. The Vedic hymns laud the powers of nature and natural phenomena as personified gods, or even as impersonal phenomena. They praise also as distinct powers the departed fathers. In the Rig Veda I. 168, occur some verses in honor of the storm-gods called Maruts: "Self-yoked are they come lightly from the sky. The immortals urge themselves on with the goad. Dustless, born of power, with shining spears the Maruts overthrow the strongholds. Who is it, O Maruts, ye that have lightning-spears, that impels you within? … The streams roar from the tires, when they send out their cloud-voices," etc. Nothing would seem more justifiable, in view of this hymn and of many like it, than to assume with Müller and other Indologians, that the Marut-gods are personifications of natural phenomena. As clearly do Indra and the Dawn appear to be natural phenomena. But no less an authority than Herbert Spencer has attacked this view: "Facts imply that the conception of the dawn as a person results from the giving of dawn as a birth-name."[9] And again: "If, then, Dawn [in New Zealand and elsewhere] is an actual name for a person, if where there prevails this mode of distinguishing children, it has probably often been given to those born early in the morning; the traditions concerning one of such who became noted, would, in the mind of the uncritical savage … lead to identification with the dawn."[10] In another passage: "The primitive god is the superior man … propitiated during his life and still more after his death."[11] Summing up, Spencer thus concludes: "Instead of seeing in the common character of so-called myths, that they describe combats of beings using weapons, evidence that they arose out of human transactions; mythologists assume that the order of Nature presents itself to the undeveloped mind in terms of victories and defeats."[12] Moreover (a posteriori), "It is not true that the primitive man looks at the powers of Nature with awe. It is not true that he speculates about their characters and causes."[13] If Spencer had not included in his criticism the mythologists that have written on Vedic religion, there would be no occasion to take his opinion into consideration. But since he claims by the light of his comparative studies to have shown that in the Rig Veda the "so-called nature gods,"[14] were not the oldest, and explains Dawn here exactly as he does in New Zealand, it becomes necessary to point out, that apart from the question of the origin of religions in general, Spencer has made a fatal error in assuming that he is dealing in the Rig Veda with primitive religion, uncritical savages, and undeveloped minds. And furthermore, as the poet of the Rig Veda is not primitive, or savage, or undeveloped, so when he worships Dyaus pitar [Greek: Zeùs patáer] as the 'sky-father,' he not only makes it evident to every reader that he really is worshipping the visible sky above; but in his descriptions of gods such as Indra, the Dawn, and some other new gods he invents from time to time, long after he has passed the savage, primitive, and undeveloped state, he makes it no less clear that he worships phenomena as they stand before him (rain, cloud, lightning, etc.), so that by analogy with what is apparent in the case of later divinities, one is led inevitably to predicate the same origin as theirs in the case of the older gods.
But it is unnecessary to spend time on this point. It is impossible for any sober scholar to read the Rig Veda and believe that the Vedic poets are not worshipping natural phenomena; or that the phenomena so worshipped were not the original forms of these gods. Whether at a more remote time there was ever a period when the pre-historic Hindu, or his pre-Indic ancestor, worshipped the Manes exclusively is another question, and one with which at present we have nothing to do. The history of Hindu religions begins with the Rig Veda, and in this period the worship of Manes and that of natural phenomena were distinct, nor are there any indications that the latter was ever developed from the former. It is not denied that the Hindus made gods of departed men. They did this long after the Vedic period. But there is no proof that all the Vedic gods, as claims Spencer, were the worshipped souls of the dead. No argumentum a fero can show in a Vedic dawn-hymn anything other than a hymn to personified Dawn, or make it probable that this dawn was ever a mortal's name.
In respect of that which precedes all tradition we, whose task is not to speculate in regard to primitive religious conceptions, but to give the history of one people's religious progress, may be pardoned for expressing no opinion. But without abandoning history (i.e., tradition) we would revert for a moment to the pre-Indian period and point out that Zarathustra's rejection of the daevas which must be the same devas that are worshipped in India, proves that deva-worship is the immediate predecessor of the Hindu religion. As far back as one can scrutinize the Aryan past he finds, as the earliest known objects of reverence, 'sun' and 'sky,' besides and beside the blessed Manes. A word here regarding the priority of monotheism or of polytheism. The tradition is in favor of the latter, while on a priori grounds whoever thinks that the more primitive the race the more apt it is for monotheism will postulate, with some of the older scholars, an assumed monotheism as the pre-historic religion of the Hindus; while whosoever opines that man has gradually risen from a less intellectual stage will see in the early gods of the Hindus only another illustration of one universal fact, and posit even Aryan polytheism as an advance on the religion which it is probable that the remoter ancestors of the Aryans once acknowledged.
A word perhaps should be said, also, in order to a better understanding between the ethnologists as represented by Andrew Lang, and the unfortunate philologists whom it delights him to pommel. Lang's clever attacks on the myth-makers, whom he persistently describes as the philologists—and they do indeed form part of that camp—have had the effect of bringing 'philological theories' into sad disrepute with sciolists and 'common-sense' people. But the sun-myths and dawn-myths that the myth-makers discover in Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, ought not to be fathered upon all philologists. On the other hand, who will deny that in India certain mythological figures are eoian or solar in origin? Can any one question that Vivasvant the 'wide gleaming' is sun or bright sky, as he is represented in the Avesta and Rig Veda? Yet is a very anthropomorphic, nay, earthly figure, made out of this god. Or is Mr. Lang ignorant that the god Yima became Jemshid, and that Feridun is only the god Trita? It undoubtedly is correct to illuminate the past with other light than that of sun or dawn, yet that these lights have shone and have been quenched in certain personalities may be granted without doing violence to scientific principles. All purely etymological mythology is precarious, but one may recognize sun-myths without building a system on the basis of a Dawn-Helen, and without referring Ilium to the Vedic bila. Again, myths about gods, heroes, and fairies are to be segregated. Even in India, which teems with it, there is little, if any, folklore that can be traced to solar or dawn-born myths. Mr. Lang represents a healthy reaction against too much sun-myth, but we think that there are sun-myths still, and that despite his protests all religion is not grown from one seed.
There remains the consideration of the second part of the double problem which was formulated above—the method of interpretation. The native method is to believe the scholiasts' explanations, which often are fanciful and, in all important points, totally unreliable; since the Hindu commentators lived so long after the period of the literature they expound that the tradition they follow is useful only in petty details. From a modern point of view the question of interpretation depends mainly on whether one regard the Rig Veda as but an Indic growth, the product of the Hindu mind alone, or as a work that still retains from an older age ideas which, having once been common to Hindu and Iranian, should be compared with those in the Persian Avesta and be illustrated by them. Again, if this latter hypothesis be correct, how is one to interpret an apparent likeness, here and there, between Indic and foreign notions,—is it possible that the hymns were composed, in part, before the advent of the authors into India, and is it for this reason that in the Rig Veda are contained certain names, ideas, and legends, which do not seem to be native to India? On the other hand, if one adopt the theory that the Rig Veda is wholly a native work, in how far is he to suppose that it is separable from Brahmanic formalism? Were the hymns made independently of any ritual, as their own excuse for being, or were they composed expressly for the sacrifice, as part of a formal cult?
Here are views diverse enough, but each has its advocate or advocates. According to the earlier European writers the Vedic poets are fountains of primitive thought, streams unsullied by any tributaries, and in reading them one quaffs a fresh draught, the gush of unsophisticated herdsmen, in whose religion there is to be seen a childlike belief in natural phenomena as divine forces, over which forces stands the Heaven-god as the highest power. So in 1869 Pfleiderer speaks of the "primeval childlike naïve prayer" of Rig Veda vi. 51. 5 ("Father sky, mother earth," etc.);[15] while Pictet, in his work Les Origines Indo-Européennes, maintains that the Aryans had a primitive monotheism, although it was vague and rudimentary; for he regards both Iranian dualism and Hindu polytheism as being developments of one earlier monism (claiming that Iranian dualism is really monotheistic). Pictet's argument is that the human mind must have advanced from the simple to the complex! Even Roth believes in an originally "supreme deity" of the Aryans.[16] Opposed to this, the 'naïve' school of such older scholars as Roth, Müller,[17] and Grassmann, who see in the Rig Veda an ingenuous expression of 'primitive' ideas, stand the theories of Bergaigne, who interprets everything allegorically; and of Pischel and Geldner, realists, whose general opinions may thus be formulated: The poets of the Rig Veda are not childlike and naïve; they represent a comparatively late period of culture, a society not only civilized, but even sophisticated; a mode of thought philosophical and sceptical a religion not only ceremonious but absolutely stereotyped. In regard to the Aryanhood of the hymns, the stand taken by these latter critics, who renounce even Bergaigne's slight hold on mythology, is that the Rig Veda is thoroughly Indic. It is to be explained by the light of the formal Hindu ritualism, and even by epic worldliness, its fresh factors being lewd gods, harlots, and race-horses. Bloomfield, who does not go so far as this, claims that the 'Vedic' age really is a Brahmanic age; that Vedic religion is saturated with Brahmanic ideas and Brahmanic formalism, so that the Rig Veda ought to be looked upon as made for the ritual, not the ritual regarded as ancillary to the Rig Veda[18]. This scholar maintains that there is scarcely any chronological distinction between the hymns of the Rig Veda and the Br[=a]hmana, both forms having probably existed together "from earliest times"; and that not a single Vedic hymn "was ever composed without reference to ritual application"; nay, all the hymns were "liturgical from the very start"[19]. This is a plain advance even on Bergaigne's opinion, who finally regarded all the family-books of the Rig Veda as composed to subserve the soma-cult.[20]