Notwithstanding the admitted imperfection of materials, it seems to be becoming every day more and more evident, that we have in the north of India one great group of native or at least of Turanian religions, which we know in their latest developments as the Buddhist, Jaina, and Yaishnava religions. The first named we only know as it was taught by Sakya Muni before his death in 543 B.C., but no one I presume supposes that he was the first to invent that form of faith, or that it was not based on some preceding forms. The Buddhists themselves, according to the shortest calculation, admit of four preceding Buddhas—according to the more usual accounts, of twenty-four. A place is assigned to each of these, where he was born, and when he died, the father and mother’s name is recorded, and the name, too, of the Bodhi-tree under whose shade he attained Buddhahood. The dates assigned to each of these are childishly fabulous, but there seems no reason for doubting that they may have been real personages, and their dates extend back to a very remote antiquity.[37]
The Jains, in like manner, claim the existence of twenty-four Tirthankars, including Mahavira the last. Their places of birth and death are equally recorded, all are in northern India, and though little else is known of them, they too may have existed. The series ends with Mahavira, who was the contemporary—some say the preceptor—of Sakya Muni.
The Vaishnava series is shorter, consisting of only nine Avatars, but it too, closes at the same time, Buddha himself being the ninth and last. Its fifth Avatur takes us back to Rama, who, if our chronology is correct, may have lived B.C. 2000; the fourth,—Narasinha, or man lion—points to the time the Aryans entered India. The three first deal with creation and events anterior to man’s appearance on earth. In this respect the Vaishnava list differs from the other two. They only record the existence of men who attained greatness by the practice of virtue, and immortality by teaching the ways of God to man. The Vaishnavas brought God to earth, to mix and interfere in mundane affairs in a manner that neither the Aryan nor the Buddhist ever dreamt of, and so degraded the purer religion of India into the monstrous system of idolatry that now prevails in that country.
No attempt, so far as I know, has been made to explain the origin of the Saiva religion, or even to ascertain whether it was a purely local superstition, or whether it was imported from abroad. The earliest authentic written allusion to it seems to be that of the Indian ambassador to Bardasanes (A.D. 218, 222), who described a cave in the north of India which contained an image of a god, half-man, half-woman.[38] This is beyond doubt the Ardhanari form of Siva, so familiar afterwards at Elephanta and in every part of India. The earliest engraved representations of this god seem to be those on the coins of Kadphises (B.C. 80 to 100[39]), where the figure with the trident and the Bull certainly prefigure the principal personage in this religion. Curiously enough, however, he or she is always accompanied by the Buddhist trisul emblem, as if the king, or his subjects at least, simultaneously professed both religions. Besides all this, it seems now tolerably well ascertained, that the practice of endowing gods with an infinity of limbs took an earlier, certainly a greater development in Thibet and the trans-Himalayan countries than in India, and that the wildest Tantric forms of Durga are more common and more developed in Nepal and Thibet than they are even in India Proper. If this is so, it seems pretty clear, as the evidence now stands, that Saivism is a northern superstition introduced into India by the Yuechi or some of the northern hordes who migrated into India, either immediately before the Christian Era, or in the early centuries succeeding it.
It does not seem at first to have made much progress in the valley of the Ganges, where the ground was preoccupied by the Vaishnava group, but to have been generally adopted in Rajputana, especially among the Jats, who were almost certainly the descendants of the White Huns or Ephthalites, and it seems also to have been early carried south by the Brahmans, when they undertook to instruct the Dravidians in the religion of the Puranas. That of the Vedas never seems to have been known in the south, and it was not till after the Vedas had been superseded by the new system, that the Brahmanical religion was introduced among the southern people. It is also, it is to be feared, only too true that no attempt has yet been made to ascertain what the religion of the Dravidians was before the northern Brahmans induced them to adopt either the Jaina or the Vaishnava or Saiva forms of faith. It is possible that among the Pandu Kolis, and other forms of ‘Rude Stone Monuments’ that are found everywhere in the south, we may find the fossil remains of the old Dravidian faith before they adopted that of the Hindus. These monuments, however, have not been examined with anything like the care requisite for the solution of a problem like this, and till it is done we must rest content with our ignorance.[40]
In the north we have been somewhat more fortunate, and enough is now known to make it clear that, so soon as the inquirers can consent to put aside personal jealousies, and apply themselves earnestly to the task, we may know enough to make the general outline at least tolerably clear. When I first published my work on ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ seven years ago, no one suspected, at least no one had hinted in type, that such a form of religion existed in Bengal. Since that time, however, so much has been written on the subject, and proof on proof has accumulated with such rapidity, that few will now be bold enough to deny that Trees were worshipped in India in the earliest times, and that a Naga people did exist, especially in the north-west, who had a strange veneration for snakes. It may be too bold a generalisation to assert, at present, that no people became Buddhists who had not previously been serpent worshippers, but it certainly is nearer the truth than at first sight appears. It is, at all events, quite certain that underlying Buddhism we everywhere find evidence of a stratum of Tree and Serpent Worship. Sometimes it may be repressed and obscured, but at others it crops up again, and, to a certain extent, the worship of the Tree and the Serpent, at some times and in certain places, almost supersedes that of the founder of the religion himself.
The five, or seven, or one thousand-headed Naga is everywhere present in the temples of the Jains, and pervades the whole religion of the Vaishnavas. In the great act of creation the Naga performs the principal part in the churning of the ocean, and in almost every representation of Vishnu he appears either as supporting and watching over him, or as performing some subsidiary part in the scene. It is, in fact, the Naga that binds together and gives unity to this great group of religions, and it is the presence of the Tree and Serpent worship underlying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vishnuism that seems to prove almost incontestably that there existed a people in the north of India, whether we call them Dasyus, Nishadhas, or by any other name, who were Tree and Serpent worshippers, before they adopted any of the Hindu forms of faith. Nothing can be more antagonistic to the thoughts and feelings of any Aryan race than such forms of worship, and nothing more completely ante-Vedic than its rites. It seems also to have no connection with Saivism.[41] Nor is there any trace of it found among the Dravidians. There appears, in fact, no solution of the riddle possible, but to assume that it was an aboriginal superstition in the north of India, and it was the conversion of the people to whom it belonged that gave rise to that triarchy of religions that have succeeded each other in the north during the last two thousand years.
This solution of the difficulty has the further advantage that it steps in at once clearly to explain what philology is only dimly guessing at, though its whole tendency now seems in the same direction. If this view of the mythology be correct, it seems certain that there existed in the north of India, before the arrival of the Aryans, a people whose affinities were all with the Thibetans, Burmese, Siamese, and other trans-Himalayan populations, and who certainly were not Dravidians, though they may have been intimately connected with one division at least of the inhabitants of Ceylon.
Both the pre-Aryan races of India belonged, of course, to the Turanian group; but my present impression is, as hinted above, that the Dravidians belong to that branch of the great primordial family of mankind that was developed in Mesopotamia and the countries to the westward of the Caspian. The Dasyus, on the contrary, have all their affinities with those to the eastward of that sea, and the two might consequently be called the Western and the Eastern, or the Scythian and Mongolian Turanians. Such a distinction would certainly represent our present knowledge of the subject better than considering the whole as one family, which is too often the case at the present day.
These, however, are speculations which hardly admit of proof in the present state of our knowledge, and would consequently be quite out of place here, were it not that some such theory seems indispensable to explain the phenomena of the architectural history of India. That of the north is so essentially different from that of the south that they cannot possibly belong to the same people. Neither of them certainly are Aryan; and unless we admit that the two divisions of the country were occupied by people essentially different in blood, though still belonging to the building races of mankind, we cannot possibly understand how they always practised, and to the present employ, styles so essentially different. Until these various ethnographical and mythological problems are understood and appreciated, the styles of architecture in India seem a chaos without purpose or meaning. Once, however, they are grasped and applied, their history assumes a dignity and importance far greater than is due to any merely æsthetic merits they may possess. Even that, however, is in many respects remarkable, and, when combined with the scientific value of the styles, seem to render them as worthy of study as those of any other people with whose arts we are acquainted.