RETROSPECT.
The Arians in India at an early time developed important spheres of human nature into peculiar forms. In that tribal life, by no means feeble of its kind, which they lived in the land of the Panjab, they worshipped the spirits of fire, of light, of water; with deep religious feeling they invoked these helpers, protectors, and judges, with earnestness, zeal, and lively imagination. The movements of the emigration and conquest of the Ganges, the acquisition of extensive regions, led them forward on new paths. The emigrant tribes grew into nations; greater monarchies grew up in the conquered territories. The achievements of the forefathers were sung in heroic minstrelsy before the princes and their companions, the wealthy warriors, the priests, and the minstrels separated themselves from the peasants. The contrast between the new masters of the valley of the Ganges and the ancient population assisted in intensifying the distinction of orders among the Arians. The fear of the spirits of night and drought, the conception of the struggle of good and evil spirits, gave way before the abundance and fertility of these new possessions. In the land of the Ganges the sensuous perception of nature passed into fantastic ideas; the climate inflamed the susceptible senses of the nation, while at the same time it checked bodily activity and invited to contemplativeness. In opposition to the multitude of the ancient divine forms and the gorgeous variety of the new impressions of nature, rose the impulse to find the unity of the divine essence, the need of combination. Abstraction reacted on imagination, the spirit on the senses. The spirit in prayer, the holy spirit, and the world-soul, that mighty breath which the Brahmans seemed to find behind the changing phenomena of nature, were amalgamated by the priesthood, and elevated to be the highest deity: Indra, Varuna, Mitra must give way to Brahman as the nobles gave way to the priests. Together with the new deity, who was at the same time the order of the world, the Brahmans won for themselves the first position in the state.
The theory of the emanation of the world from Brahman established for ever the arrangement of the castes by the different participation of the various orders in Brahman—an arrangement which otherwise, being the result of natural changes, would in turn have been removed in the course of development. The law and the state were arranged on the plan of the divine order of the world which had assigned to every being his duties. With the emanation of beings from Brahman came the demand for their return thither, and the doctrine of regenerations, which were to cleanse the creatures rendered impure by their nature and their sins till they attained the purity of the world-soul. As Brahman was essentially conceived as not-matter, not-nature, a severance of nature and spirit, a contrast of the natural and the intellectual man was set up, which subsequently became the turning-point in the religious and moral development of the Indians. Ethics passed into asceticism, the courage of battle into the heroism of penance. But man could not rest content with the avoidance of sensuality or the mortification of the flesh. It was not enough to torment and crush the body, the Ego, the consciousness, must pass into Brahman. But, inasmuch as Brahman was all things and again nothing definite, it possessed no quality to be apprehended by thought; and along with the annihilation of individual being absorption in this impersonal deity required the surrender of the consciousness and perception of self, of the Ego in order to obtain a passage into this substance. Thus the crushing of the body by a pitiless asceticism, the destruction of the soul by meditation without any object, became the highest command, the ethical ideal of the Indians; the devotion natural to their disposition became a self-annihilating absorption into a soul-less world-soul. The energy of the Indians began to consume itself in this contest; it was applied to the conquest of the appetites, the crushing of the body, the annihilation of the soul. Under the most smiling sky, in the midst of a luxuriant vegetation, was enthroned a melancholy, gloomy, monastic view of the absolute corruption of the flesh, the misery of life on earth.
The theory that every creature must fulfil the vocation imposed upon it at birth, the commands of submissive observance of duties and patient obedience placed absolute and despotic power in the hands of the kings the more firmly because they also undermined activity and independence of feeling; and owing to the extent of the ceremonial, the usages of purification and penance, and the awful consequences of their neglect, the people became accustomed to think more of the next world than of this. As heaven alone was their home, the Indians had scarcely a real world, or practical objects which it was worth while to strive after. Without purpose or activity they were perpetually changing, they obeyed an oppressive and exhausting despotism, which the theory of the Brahmans justified as divine, and provided with the most acute regulations for the maintenance and extension of its power. Thus the most beautiful and luxuriant land on earth seemed really to become a vale of misery.
The scholasticism of the Indians concentrated their efforts on framing ever new conceptions of the categories of spirit and nature, of matter and the Ego, which perpetually changed without ever breaking loose from them. Their philosophy gained no object beyond establishing more firmly their hypothesis, separating ever more widely nature and spirit, body and soul, the fleshly and the supernatural, and rooting more deeply a perverse view of nature. No doubt the appetites compensated themselves for the pain and privation of penances, for the torments of asceticism, in luxurious enjoyment; the imagination sought relief from the necessity of thinking of Brahman and nothing but Brahman in painting a motley world of spirits beside and below Brahman, by confounding heaven and earth, by the restless invention of grotesque charms and miracles, by brilliant pictures on a measureless scale. In the same way the reason compensated itself for its exclusion from philosophy and the compulsion exercised upon it by the most acute distinctions; yet no healthy advance could be made by the alternation of asceticism and enjoyment, by oscillation between hollow abstractions and unbridled imagination, the most irrational view of the world and the most subtle reflections.
Full of compassion for the sorrows of the multitude, distressed at the sight of the oppression under which the people lay, repelled by the cruel asceticism, the pride and exclusive scholasticism of the Brahmans, Buddha undertook to provide the people with alleviation and bring help to their pains. With him the world is Evil, and regeneration is the eternity of evil. In order to escape this, as he was himself confined to the current view of the world and philosophical systems, he could only overthrow Brahman along with the gods; he could merely recommend the restraint of the appetites and desires, patient suffering and renunciation, flight from the world and the Ego, and in the last instance a more complete annihilation of the Ego. It was nevertheless a great gain that the body need no longer be tormented and destroyed, that the difference of the castes was thrown into the background, that the contempt of the higher born for the lower was laid aside. In the place of an exclusive sense of caste came equality and brotherly love; tolerance and gentleness in the place of ceremonial; expiations and penances were superseded by a rational morality, and beneficial sympathy with all creatures. To counteract the new doctrine which threatened the entire position obtained after long struggles by the Brahmans, the latter allowed the idea of Brahman to fall into the background, in order to restore to the people the worship of living personal deities; they were at pains to show that their deities also had the weal and woe of mankind at heart; and if on the one hand they increased the merit of asceticism and its requirements, they reduced on the other the value of good works; they attempted to amalgamate Brahman and the theory of the Buddhists by new speculations, and by means of a simple asceticism and a mystical act of the spirit, to obtain readmission into the highest being, and reunion with the world-soul. But even Buddhism provided its doctrine, and its scepticism which denied everything beside matter and the Ego, with a form of worship, not in the pilgrimages only, and the worship of the relics of the Enlightened, but also in the apotheosis of the teacher, and his elevation above the gods of the Brahmans.
While the doctrines of the Brahmans and Buddhism strove with each other, the extension of the Aryas in the south and the occupation of the coasts of the Deccan went steadily on, and the first shock which an external enemy brought upon India, the attack upon and reduction of the land of the Indus by Alexander the Great, after the most vigorous resistance, exercised the most beneficial influence on the states of India. Chandragupta succeeded not only in breaking down the rule of the foreigner over the Indus, but in uniting the territory of India from the Indus to the Gulf of Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas, into one mighty kingdom. His grandson extended his kingdom over Surashtra, Orissa, Kalinga; in the south his influence extended beyond the Godavari. From this throne, three hundred years after the death of the Enlightened, he announced his conversion to his faith, and proclaimed his rules as laws of the state. This seemed to be the dawn of a happy day for India. The combination of all the tribes could not but secure the independence of the country; the oppression of the hereditary despotism seemed to be softened by the prescripts of a rational morality; a brisk trade with the West appeared to give the last blow to the exclusiveness and rigidity of Brahmanism, and the religion of equality and brotherly love seemed to assure the rise of a new social order and a free movement of the intellectual powers of the people.
A sterner fate overtook the Indians. It is true that even at the time of Açoka the powerful neighbouring kingdom of the Seleucidæ had begun to fall to pieces; Parthia and Bactria had already attempted to assert their independence, and though Antiochus the Great once more succeeded in subjugating Bactria, and in the year 206 B.C. appeared with a powerful army in the region of the Indus, Açoka's son and successor Subhagasena (Polybius calls him Sophagasenus) was able at the price of a number of elephants and some treasure to renew the league which his grandfather Chandragupta had concluded with the first Seleucus, the great-grandfather of Antiochus.[818] The re-established authority of the Seleucidæ over Bactria was of very brief continuance. It was not attacks from without, but the dissensions of the grandsons of Açoka that rent asunder the great Indian empire; the dynasty of the Mauryas fell. A new race, that of the Çungas, ascended the throne of Magadha in the year 178 B.C. with the kings Pushpamitra and Agnimitra, which thirty years after had in turn to give place to the Guptas. Neither the power of the Çungas nor that of the Guptas was sufficient to maintain the national unity, and protect the regions of the West from the foreigner. The Greek princes who ruled in Bactria conquered the lands of the Indus—native Indian tradition presents us with armies of Yavanas on the right bank of the Indus at this time[819]—and established a Græco-Indian empire, which in the course of the second century B. C. carried its arms to the Yamuna, and subjugated Cashmere as well as Surashtra to its rule.[820] From the supremacy of Greek princes and the Greek character India received various impulses of the most lively kind, especially in architecture and plastic art; the influence of the Greek models extends not only over the Panjab but even to Cashmere. This dominion of the Greeks over the west of India was succeeded by other foreign empires, that of the Sacæ from Arachosia (Sejestan), that of the Tibetan nomads, the Yuechis, the Indo-scyths from Bactria. If Buddhism had advanced to Bactria under the Mauryas, elements of the religious views of Iran now forced their way from Sejestan, the worship of the god Mithra, on which they laid especial stress, by means of the Maga-Brahmans, i. e. the Magian Brahmans, into the Panjab and Cashmere.[821] But the land of the Ganges maintained its independence, the civilisation of the Deccan was not interrupted, and the national forces still sufficed to remove at length the power of the foreigner even in the West.
For centuries after this date Buddhists and Brahmans stood side by side in the Indian states of the West and East. Only the Guptas of Magadha had worshipped Vishnu and Çiva;[822] the Sacan and Indo-Scythian princes of the West were devoted to Buddhism. Yet Buddhism was unable finally to triumph over the reformed doctrine of the Brahmans, supported as this was by the worship of Vishnu or Çiva and the speculation and mysticism of the Yoga. It had become divided into sects, of which the bases were almost wholly of a dogmatic character; they rested on the different philosophic foundations of the system. But the adherents of these sects hated each other more than they hated the Brahmans, and the ethics of the Buddhists preached only obedience, patience, submission, and retirement from the world. It was no more adapted than the ethics of the Brahmans to supply new impulses to the volition and activity of the Indians, and in the end the bright world of gods and spirits of Brahmanism, the magic powers and miracles of their ancient saints, exercised a greater power of attraction on the hearts of the Indians than the simpler doctrine of the Buddhists. The Veda, the Epos, and all tradition was on the side of the Brahmans. The genuine Kshatriya could not be satisfied with Buddha's peaceful doctrine; the Brahmans maintained their position as presidents at the funeral feasts of the tribes, and common interests of a very practical nature kept the sects and even the schools of the Brahmans more closely together than was possible among the various divisions of the Buddhists. When it had been shown that Buddhism was not strong enough to overpower the old system, the Brahmans succeeded in entirely overthrowing and expelling that religion. The faith of the Enlightened maintained its ground in Cashmere and Ceylon alone. Before its expulsion from its native home it had taken such firm root in Nepal and Tibet, in further India and China, that it was able from thence to humanise the manners of the nomads of Upper Asia, and in the East to gain the most numerous adherents for the religion of patience.
In the extent of their territory and the numbers of the population the Indians possessed an adequate natural basis for periodical regenerations. The despotic power which the princes had attained not without the assistance of the Brahmans, and which had the more injurious consequences, the more completely the will of the subjects was absorbed in the governing caprice rather than elevated to any moral communion, found on the one hand a certain counterpoise in the close communities and families, and on the other was far from being strong enough, from having sufficient activity and development, to repress and dominate all spheres of life. It had not kept the rich gifts of the Indians at the point which they reached at the time of the conquest of Buddhism; it had not been able to prevent new attempts, a new rise, and the elevation of the depressed powers of will and body. The strongest check was the establishment of the system of castes in full power, the restriction of the circulation of the blood in the body of the nation, the severe repression of free activity and purpose by the supposed divine arrangement of the vocations and orders, the exclusive direction of the heart and will to objects beyond this world. In this way a lasting prohibition was imposed on the free play of the powers, and a false aim was set up; while the physical health of the national body, the moral health of the national spirit, which can only be maintained by the counterpoise and reciprocal action of moral and intellectual impulses, and the exertion of the will for attainable objects, was destroyed and undermined to such a degree that stagnation prevailed and the soil became sterile.