Prof. Garbe (Philosophy of Anc. India, sect. on Hindu Monism) argues that all monistic, and indeed all progressive, thinking in ancient India arose not among the Brahmans, who were conscienceless oppressors, but among the warrior caste; citing stories in the Upanishads in which Brahmans are represented as receiving such ideas from warriors. The thesis is much weakened by the Professor’s acceptance of Krishna as primarily a historic character, of the warrior class. But there is ground for his general thesis, which recognizes (p. 78) that the Brahmans at length assimilated the higher thought of laymen. Max Müller puts it that “No nation was ever so completely priestridden as the Hindus were under the sway of the Brahmanic law. Yet, on the other side, the same people were allowed to indulge in the most unrestrained freedom of thought, and in the schools of their philosophy the very names of their Gods were never mentioned. Their existence was neither denied nor asserted....” (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 244). “Sankhya philosophy” [on which Buddhism is supposed to be based], “in its original form, claims the name of an-îsvara, ‘lordless’ or ‘atheistic,’ as its distinctive title” (ibid. p. 283).
Of the nature of a freethinking departure, among the early Brahmanists as in other societies, was the substitution of non-human for human sacrifices—a development of peaceful life-conditions which, though not primitive, must have ante-dated Buddhism. See Tiele, Outlines, pp. 126–27 and refs.; Barth, Religions of India, pp. 57–59; and Müller, Physical Religion, p. 101. Prof. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 346) appears to hold that animal sacrifice was never a substitute for human; but his ingenious argument, on analysis, is found to prove only that in certain cases the idea of such a substitution having taken place may have been unhistorical. If it be granted that human sacrifices ever occurred—and all the evidence goes to show that they were once universal—substitution would be an obvious way of abolishing them. Historical analogy is in favour of the view that the change was forced on the priesthood from the outside, and only after a time accepted by the Brahmans. Thus we find the Khârvâkas, a school of freethinkers, rising in the Alexandrian period, making it part of their business to denounce the Brahmanic doctrine and practice of sacrifice, and to argue against all blood sacrifices; but they had no practical success (Tiele, p. 126) until Buddhism triumphed (Mitchell, Hinduism, 1885, p. 106; Rhys Davids, tr. of Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, p. 165).
In the earliest Upanishads the World-Being seems to have been figured as the totality of matter,[16] an atheistic view associated in particular with the teaching of Kapila,[17] who himself, however, was at length raised to divine status,[18] though his system continues to pass as substantially atheistic.[19] This view being open to all manner of anti-religious criticism, which it incurred even within the Brahmanic pale,[20] there was evolved an ideal formula in which the source of all things is “the invisible, intangible, unrelated, colourless one, who has neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet, eternal, all-pervading, subtile, and undecaying.”[21] At the same time, the Upanishads exhibit a stringent reaction against the whole content of the Vedas. Their ostensible object is “to show the utter uselessness—nay, the mischievousness—of all ritual performances; to condemn every sacrificial act which has for its motive a desire or hope of reward; to deny, if not the existence, at least the exceptional and exalted character of the Devas; and to teach that there is no hope of salvation and deliverance except by the individual self recognizing the true and universal self and finding rest there, where alone rest can be found.”[22]
And the critical development does not end there. “In the old Upanishads, in which the hymns and sacrifices of the Veda are looked upon as useless, and as superseded by the higher knowledge taught by the forest-sages, they are not yet attacked as mere impositions. That opposition, however, sets in very decidedly in the Sutra period. In the Nirukta (i, 15) Yâska quotes the opinion of Kautsa, that the hymns of the Veda have no meaning at all.”[23] In short, every form of critical revolt against incredible doctrine that has arisen in later Europe had taken place in ancient India long before the Alexandrian conquest.[24] And the same attitude continued to be common within the post-Alexandrian period; for Panini, who must apparently be dated then,[25] “was acquainted with infidels and nihilists”;[26] and the teaching of Brihaspati,[27] on which was founded the system of the Khârvâkas—apparently one of several sections of a freethinking school called the Lokâyatas[28] or Lokâyatikas—is extremely destructive of Vedic pretensions. “The Veda is tainted by the three faults of untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology.... The impostors who call themselves Vedic pandits are mutually destructive.... The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons: All the well-known formulas of the pandits, and all the horrid rites for the queen commanded in the Asvamedha—these were invented by buffoons, and so all the various kinds of presents to the priests; while the eating of flesh was similarly commanded by night-prowling demons.”[29]
To what extent such aggressive rationalism ever spread it is now quite impossible to ascertain. It seems probable that the word Lokâyata, defined by Sanskrit scholars as signifying “directed to the world of sense,”[30] originally, or about 500 B.C., signified “Nature-lore,” and that this passed as a branch of Brahman learning.[31] Significantly enough, while the lore was not extensive, it came to be regarded as disposing men to unbelief, though it does not seem to have suggested any thorough training. At length, in the eighth century of our era, it is found applied as a term of abuse, in the sense of “infidel,” by Kumârila in controversy with opponents as orthodox as himself; and about the same period Sankara connects with it a denial of the existence of a separate and immortal soul;[32] though that opinion had been debated, and not called Lokâyata, long before, when the word was current in the broader sense.[33] Latterly, in the fourteenth century, on the strength of some doggerel verses which cannot have belonged to the early Brahmanic Lokâyata, it stands for extreme atheism and a materialism not professed by any known school speaking for itself.[34] The evidence, such as it is, is preserved only in Sarva-darsana-samgraha, a compendium of all philosophical systems, compiled in the fourteenth century by the Vedantic teacher Mâdhavâchâra.[35] One source speaks of an early text-book of materialism, the Sutras of Brihaspati;[36] but this has not been preserved. Thus in Hindu as in later European freethought for a long period we have had to rely for our knowledge of freethinkers’ ideas upon the replies made by their opponents. It is reasonable to conclude that, save insofar as the arguments of Brihaspati were common to the Khârvâkas and the Buddhists,[37] such doctrine as his or that of the later Lokâyatikas cannot conceivably have been more than the revolt of a thoughtful minority against official as well as popular religion; and to speak of a time when “the Aryan settlers in India had arrived at the conviction that all their Devas or Gods were mere names”[38] is to suggest a general evolution of rational thought which can no more have taken place in ancient India than it has done to-day in Europe. The old creeds would always have defenders; and every revolt was sure to incur a reaction. In the Hitopadesa or “Book of Good Counsel” (an undated recension of the earlier Panchatantra, “The Five Books,” which in its first form may be placed about the fifth century of our era) there occur both passages disparaging mere study of the Sacred Books[39] and passages insisting upon it as a virtue in itself[40] and otherwise insisting on ritual observances.[41] They seem to come from different hands.
The phenomenon of the schism represented by the two divisions of the Yazur Veda, the “White” and the “Black,” is plausibly accounted for as the outcome of the tendencies of a new and an old school, who selected from their Brahmanas, or treatises of ritual and theology, the portions which respectively suited them. The implied critical movement would tend to affect official thought in general. This schism is held by Weber to have arisen only in the period of ferment set up by Buddhism; but other disputes seem to have taken place in abundance in the Brahmanical schools before that time. (Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 123; Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 10, 27, 232; Max Müller, Anthropol. Relig., 1892, pp. 36–37; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 34.) Again, the ascetic and penance-bearing hermits, who were encouraged by the veneration paid them to exalt themselves above all save the highest Gods, would by their utterances of necessity affect the course of doctrine. Compare the same tendency as seen in Buddhism and Jainism (Tiele, pp. 135, 140).
But in the later form of the Vedânta, “the end of the Veda,” a monistic and pantheistic teaching holds its ground in our own day, after all the ups and downs of Brahmanism, alongside of the aboriginal cults which Brahmanism adopted in its battle with Buddhism; alongside, too, of the worship of the Veda itself as an eternal and miraculous document. “The leading tenets [of the Vedânta] are known to some extent in every village.”[42] Yet the Vedântists, again, treat the Upanishads in turn as a miraculous and inspired system,[43] and repeat in their case the process of the Vedas: so sure is the law of fixation in religious thought, while the habit of worship subsists.
The highest activity of rationalistic speculation within the Brahmanic fold is seen to have followed intelligibly on the most powerful reaction against the Brahmans’ authority. This took place when their sphere had been extended from the region of the Punjaub, of which alone the Rig-Veda shows knowledge, to the great kingdoms of Southern India, pointed to in the Sutras,[44] or short digests of ritual and law designed for general official use. In the new environment “there was a well-marked lay-feeling, a widespread antagonism to the priests, a real sense of humour, a strong fund of common sense. Above all there was the most complete and unquestioned freedom of thought and expression in religious matters that the world had yet witnessed.”[45]
The most popular basis for rejection of a given system—belief in another—made ultimately possible there the rise of a practically atheistic system capable, wherever embraced, of annulling the burdensome and exclusive system of the Brahmans, which had been obtruded in its worst form,[46] though not dominantly, in the new environment. Buddhism, though it cannot have arisen on one man’s initiative in the manner claimed in the legends, even as stripped of their supernaturalist element,[47] was in its origin essentially a movement of freethought, such as could have arisen only in the atmosphere of a much mixed society[48] where the extreme Brahmanical claims were on various grounds discredited, perhaps even within their own newly-adjusted body. It was stigmatized as “the science of reason,” a term equivalent to “heresy” in the Christian sphere;[49] and its definite rejection of the Vedas made it anti-sacerdotal even while it retained the modes of speech of polytheism. The tradition which makes the Buddha[50] a prince suggests an upper-class origin for the reaction; and there are traces of a chronic resistance to the Brahmans’ rule among their fellow-Aryans before the Buddhist period.