In the old world Asia has been the mother of religions, but various fates have befallen her offspring. The ancient cults of Babylonia, after an existence longer than the period from Moses to the present day, vanished from the scene. The teachings of Zoroaster were planted in China in A.D. 621, and a temple was erected at the capital, Changan; but the Persian faith could not maintain itself in such a different culture. After the Mohammedan conquest in the eighth century it was finally carried by a little band of exiles into India, and is still cherished by their descendants who bear the name of Parsees. The Jew and the Christian have only a precarious toleration in the land which was once their home. In India and in China alone is the religion of to-day linked in unbroken continuity with the distant past. Islam may set itself in lineal succession to the teachers of old, and claim a place for Mohammed in the sequence of Abraham, Moses, and Christ. But it is the youngest, and in some respects the least original, of the world's great faiths.
India has its own panorama of religions, from the animistic practice of the tribes of the jungle and the hills, up to the refined pantheism of the philosophical school. Diversities of race have been strangely intermingled, and fifty languages make it impossible to secure any uniformity of culture. There are the descendants of the ancient inhabitants who occupied the country before the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus settled themselves upon the fertile lands. They are represented to-day by the wild tribes of Central India such as the Bhils and Gonds. Some ten million probably profess a religion of a well-marked animistic type. But this also lies at the base of wide-spread popular belief and custom, where the propitiation of spirits, the cultus of Mother Earth, and the veneration of village deities, engage much more attention than the higher gods of Hinduism.
The literary foundation of the religions of India lies in the ancient hymns of the Rig Veda, sung by the immigrant Aryans as they entered from the North-west and gradually established themselves in the Ganges valley. These hymns were addressed to gods of earth and air and sky; they celebrated the glories of dawn and day; they told of the conflict between sunshine and storm; they praised Agni, the god of fire, messenger between heaven and earth, himself as agent of the sacrifice a kind of priest among the gods; they commemorated the dead who passed into the upper world and adorned the sky with stars. Already in some of the later hymns the poet's thought endeavoured to find some principle or power that should unite these different agencies as manifestations of one ultimate reality; and philosophic imagination at length fixed on the conception of Brahman, a term whose original meaning seems to hover between that of sacred spell and prayer. Viewed in a personal aspect (Brahma) as a god of popular worship, he could be described as "Lord of all, the Maker, the Creator, Father of all that are and are to be."[[1]] But behind this sovereign ruler metaphysical abstraction placed a neuter Brahma, all-embracing, the ground of all existence, summed up in three terms—Being, Thought, and Bliss. Here was the ultimate Self of the whole universe; and to know the identity of the human self with the Absolute, to be able to repeat the mysterious words tat tvam asi, "that art thou," was the aim of the forest-sages and the highest attainment of holy insight.
[[1]] So in the early Buddhist texts describing the popular religion. Many new forms appear in these documents.
Meantime the social order was acquiring the first forms of caste. The priests and the fighting men, the people who settled on the lands for pasture and tillage, and the tribes of aborigines whom they dispossessed and subdued, formed the basis of divisions which were gradually multiplied with extraordinary complexity. A religious authority was found for the whole system in the teachings of the Veda, and to contest its claims was to defy the power which slowly spread with subtle hold through the whole peninsula. By its side arose the doctrine of the Deed (karma, p. 217), which explained the varied conditions of human life by the principle that "a man is born into the world that he has made." The lot of each individual had a moral meaning: it was the result of previous conduct, good or ill. This is the conception embodied in the word "transmigration." It pictures man as involved in a continuous series of births and deaths, and religion and philosophy undertook in their several ways to secure him a favourable destiny hereafter, or by various means of divine grace, or strenuous self-discipline, or pious contemplation, to extricate him altogether from the weary round of ignorance and pain.
Out of these elements, a crude and ever-varying animism at the bottom, a highly refined metaphysical pantheism at the top, figures of incarnation and deliverance, the cultus of the dead, caste, and transmigration, the complex strands of modern Hinduism have been woven. Many have been the growths upon the way. The early Buddhist texts, representing the society of the "Middle Country," show already in the fifth century B.C. a surprising activity of speculation, busily engaged in questioning every received doctrine of religion and morals. Some forms held their ground for a few centuries and then disappeared. One religious community of that date alone survives, viz. the Jains, who still number about a million and a third. Buddhism, after sending out its missionaries into Ceylon in the south and China in the north, was driven from its ancient seats, and only some 300,000 hold its creed in India itself. In Burma, however, it numbers between ten and eleven million lay adherents, and in the adjacent kingdom of Siam it has 13,000 temples, and more than 93,000 mendicants have taken its vows.
But Hinduism still lives on with a marvellous and self-renewing power. Two great divine figures have been set beside the original creative Brahma, representatives of the forces that preserve and destroy, Vishnu and Çiva (p. [128]). Vishnu succeeded to the place of the Buddha; and Hindu religion gave prominence in him to the conception of a Divine Person who out of love for man assumed human shape to conquer evil and establish truth. The worship of Çiva has been carried everywhere by the Brahmans; if he destroys, he also reproduces; he, too, appears to bless and help, and the Tamil poets of South India in the early Middle Ages sang his praises in hymns that still feed the piety of the people. Again and again reforming teachers have initiated movements on behalf of spiritual religion. Their followers have multiplied and broken up into sects, but still remain within the general area of the ancestral faith, which now embraces considerably more than 200 million souls. The disciples of Nānak (1469-1538), however, known as Sīkhs, formed into a semi-military organisation by the Guru Gobind "the Lion" (1675-1708), retain their religious independence, touching Hinduism on one side and Mohammedanism on the other. They number at the present day more than two millions, and are found almost exclusively in the Punjab.
China, like India, illustrates the principle of religious continuity. Its earliest historic date is fixed by an eclipse in 776 B.C.; and the traditions of its dynasties stretch more than a thousand years beyond. The ancient religion depicted in the books known as the Shu and the Shî Kings, which Confucius (550-478 B.C.) was supposed to have edited out of much older documents, rested upon the solemn order of the living Heaven and Earth, with multitudinous ranks of associated spirits, and the generations of the dead. This has remained the formal basis of the national religion (p. [97]). Meanwhile the ethical sayings of Confucius acquired extraordinary ascendency. They formed the chief element in the national education, and supplied the ideals of popular culture. Carried into Japan in the sixth century of our era, they filled a gap in the old Japanese teaching, which we know by the name of Shin-To or "Spirits' way." Confucius himself became the object of general commemorative homage; and annual ceremonies are still celebrated in his honour with great splendour in the Confucian temples which adorn every city within the empire above a certain rank.[[2]]
[[2]] These are at present in danger, like other public forms of Chinese State Religion, of being rudely abolished.