[713] "Dhammapadam," v. 106, and at the beginning.
[714] "Dhammapadam," v. 70; supra, p. 170 f.
[715] "Dhammapadam," v. 177, 306, 224.
[716] "Dhammapadam," v. 161, 173, 223.
[717] "Dhammapadam," v. 332. Köppen, loc. cit. s. 472.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE REFORMS OF THE BRAHMANS.
A doctrine coming forward with so much self-confidence and force as Buddhism, touching such essential sides of the Indian national spirit, and meeting such distinct needs of the heart and of society, could not but react on the system which opposed it, which it fought against and strove to remove, i. e. on Brahmanism. We cannot suppose that the Brahmans looked supinely on at the advances of Buddhism. The accounts which we received from the Greeks about the various forms of worship dominant about the year 300 B.C. among the Indians (p. 424) show us that the Brahmanic heaven and the order of the world did not remain untouched; that there had crept in considerable variations from the ideas which the ancient sutras mention as current among the Brahmans at the time of the appearance of the Enlightened. We can confidently conclude that this change in the Brahmanic idea of God—important as we shall find it to be, and accomplished in part unconsciously and in part with a definite purpose—was brought about through Buddhism, by the inward value of the new doctrine, the struggle it entered into with Brahmanism, the necessity of opposing and checking its advances.
We have shown above how the subordination of the gods to Brahman and the great saints, the degradation of the ancient deities, must have aroused especially in the people the need of living divine powers. Thus forms hitherto little noticed in the series of the ancient deities became prominent, in which the people, conforming to the change in their instincts and the new demands of the heart, recognised the ruling and protecting powers of their life, and which they invoked especially as helpers and benefactors. These forms were Vishnu, the god of light, who even in the Veda is extolled for his friendly feeling to man, and Çiva, the mighty god of the storm-wind. In Vishnu the people found the spirit of the beneficent and uniform nature of the district of the Ganges; in Çiva, the lord of the storm-swept summits of the Himalayas, the ruler of mountains. Each was equally in their eyes the life-giving, sovereign power of nature. The system of the world-soul had left the gods a place little to be envied in the series of the emanations of Brahman, and had thrust back nature to a distance; the favour which Vishnu and Çiva found among the people showed the Brahmans that the worship of real and living deities was indispensable, that the life of nature could not be entirely excluded from the forms of the deities. To overcome the tide of popular feeling in the direction of Vishnu and Çiva, and the doctrine of Buddha at one and the same time, was a victory which the Brahmans could the less hope for, as the tendency towards a more personal supreme Being than Brahman was not unknown in their own schools, so far as these were not devoted to strict meditation and philosophy. Thus the Brahmans followed the movement excited within the circle of the ancient religion; they aimed at satisfying both the nation and themselves by the worship of more personal living gods. In one place Vishnu, in another Çiva, was adopted into the system of the Brahmans (p. 326, 330), which in this way underwent a very essential change and assumed an entirely novel point of view.