As regards India itself, this religious rebellion did not prove a revolution, for the established religion of Brahmanism remained in firm possession of the field, expelling the would-be usurper. But the doctrines of Buddha thus renounced in the land of their origin, spread rapidly to the east, into Tibet and China, and are to-day accepted as the one true faith by some scores of millions of people—an appreciable proportion of the total population of the globe: perhaps as large a number as subscribe to the tenets of any other single form of religious belief.
As to the political history of India, in a narrower sense, comparatively little need be said, so closely is this history bound up with the growth and struggles of religious doctrines. The land was early divided into lesser principalities ruled by petty sovereigns, who themselves were more or less dominated by the priesthood. There were, of course, times when one or another of these principalities was aggrandised through the efforts of an unusual sovereign, and, as we shall see, there were periods and places where memorials of the power of princes and of priests were left in the form of extraordinary temples and grottos of unique design and execution. But beyond the fact of the gradual sweep of the Aryan civilisation from the northwest toward the south and east, until it gradually encompassed the entire Indian peninsula, and the further fact of the growth of Brahmanism, with all that it implied, until it dominated the entire race, there is no single main current in the evolution of the people of ancient India, which the present-day historian can trace in any such clean-cut way, as, for example, he can trace the succession of dominant dynasties in Egypt, or in Assyrio-Babylonia. [a]
THE LAND
On the southern border of that central highland which, like “a high firm rocky islet in the storm-tossed sea,” forms the centre of the Asiatic continent, rise the Himalayas, the highest mountain-range on earth, in parallel chains broken by wild abysses. Boundless fields of snow and ice which even the power of the tropical sun cannot affect and white mountain tops of shimmering brilliance surround the Himavat, “the King of rocks,” as it is termed in the Indian epic, where “nothing blooms, not a spear of grass puts forth its green, and no bird soars through the air, where not a living thing stirs save the wind alone.” The dead silence of ice-bound nature reigns everywhere, no plant, no moss springs from the steep snow-covered slopes. Vegetation commences only at the third ridge of mountains, and, making its first appearance in oaks, birches, and pines and in a scanty cultivation of corn, soon shows its full power in the mighty tree-growth of the lower forest region, which then passes into a highland on the west, and on the east into a richly watered plain, where in the tree-high jungle grass of the impenetrable primeval forest, tigers, elephants, and huge snakes abound, and in the stagnant waters and swamps the plants rot and “the air is filled with foul pestilence.” “This mountainous wall,” says Duncker, “which extends about 1750 miles from west to east, determines the nature and life of the country that stretches out southward from it as the peninsula of Italy does from the European Alps,” and gives it the character of a “continent isolated geographically, climatically, and historically.”
The Himalaya Mountains protect highland and plains from the rough north winds which blow cold and devastating over the highland of central Asia; but they also check the rain clouds, the collected moisture of the ocean which the monsoons drive hither from the southern sea. So these clouds have to pour forth their store of water on the plains at the foot of the Himalayas, “turning the sun’s heat into coolness and the parched vegetation into a luxuriant green.” Hence arises that variety of climate and vegetation which has ever caused India to appear the most blessed part of the earth, the fruit-garden of the world.
The shape of India can be compared to two triangles, which, coinciding at their base, extend their two apexes to opposite points of the compass, northward and southward. The northern triangle, whose sides are intersected by lofty chains of mountains, while broad lowlands and plains stretch over the middle, is Hindustan proper. Across it the mightiest rivers in the country, the Indus in the west, the Brahmaputra in the east, and the Ganges in the middle, after bursting forth from the icefields of the Himalayas, follow their tortuous courses to the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal.
The southern triangle, on the other hand, the sides of which consist of flat coast and the middle of broad plateaus and chains of mountains, is formed by the Deccan, the middle one of the three great peninsulas which extend from the mainland of Asia toward the south.
Hindustan is composed of the two river valleys of the Indus and Ganges, which are quite distinct in nature and history. Both rivers have their source in the northern mountains, in the vicinity of the sacred lakes, where Kailasa, the mountain of the gods, rises to an unmeasured height, in the same district where the three other great streams of India, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Jumna, have their rise.
The Indus at first turns westward, then, not far from the famous vale of Kashmir, it takes a southerly direction, and increased by the Jhelum, Sutlej, and three other tributaries, it flows on through the Punjab (“Land of the Five Rivers”) to the Indian Ocean.
The Ganges, on the contrary, which with its tributary the Jumna takes a southerly course, soon reaches the Indian plains, but, checked in its course by the rugged Vindhya Mountains, it turns to the east, and increased by many tributaries from north and south, it pours its fertilising waters over its low banks, producing that luxuriant vegetation which manifests itself both in the mighty tree-growth with its shady boughs and tops, and in the richness of the splendid products and the tropical flora.