Besides the daily oblations, there are monthly obsequies to the manes of each man’s ancestors. These are to be performed “in empty glades, naturally clean, or on the banks of rivers, and in solitary spots.” The sacrificer is there to burn certain offerings, and with many ceremonies to set down cakes of rice and clarified butter, invoking the manes to come and partake of them. He is afterwards to feast a small number of Brahmans (not, however, his usual friends or guests). He is to serve them with respect, and they are to eat in silence. “Departed ancestors, no doubt, are attendant on such invited Brahmans, hovering around them like pure spirits, and sitting by them when they are seated.” Innumerable are the articles of food from which a twice-born man must abstain: some for plain reasons, as carnivorous birds, tame hogs, and other animals whose appearance or way of living is disgusting; but others are so arbitrarily fixed that a cock, a mushroom, a leek, or an onion occasions immediate loss of caste; while hedgehogs, porcupines, lizards, and tortoises are expressly declared to be lawful food. A Brahman is forbidden, under severe penalties, to eat the food of a hunter or a dishonest man, a worker in gold or in cane, or a washer of clothes, or a dyer. The cruelty of a hunter’s trade may join him, in the eyes of a Brahman, to a dishonest man; but, among many other arbitrary proscriptions, one is surprised to find a physician, and to observe that this learned and beneficent profession is always classed with those which are most impure. What chiefly surprises us is to find most sorts of flesh permitted to Brahmans, and even that of oxen particularly enjoined on solemn festivals. Brahmans must not, indeed, eat flesh, unless at a sacrifice; but sacrifices, as have been seen, are among the daily sacraments; and rice pudding, bread, and many other things equally innocent are included in the very same prohibition.
It is true that humanity to animals is everywhere most strongly inculcated, and that abstaining from animal food is declared to be very meritorious, from its tendency to diminish their sufferings; but, though the use of it is dissuaded on these grounds, it is never once forbidden or hinted at as impure, and is in many places positively declared lawful. The permission to eat beef is the more remarkable as the cow seems to have been as holy in those days as she is now. Saving the life of a cow was considered to atone for the murder of a Brahman, killing one required to be expiated by three months’ austerities and servile attendance on a herd of cattle.
Besides these restraints on eating, a Brahman is subjected to a multitude of minute regulations relating to the most ordinary occupations of life, the transgressing of any of which is nevertheless to be considered as a sin. Drinking spirits is classed in the first degree of crime. Performing sacrifices to destroy the innocent only falls under the third. Under the same penance with some real offences come giving pain to a Brahman and “smelling things not fit to be smelled.” Some penances would, if compulsory, be punishments of the most atrocious cruelty. They are sufficiently absurd when left, as they are, to the will of the offenders, to be employed in averting exclusion from society in this world or retribution in the next. For incest with the wife of a father, natural or spiritual, or with a sister, connection with a child under the age of puberty, or with a woman of the lowest class, the penance is death by burning on an iron bed, or embracing a red-hot metal image. For drinking spirits the penance is death by drinking the boiling hot urine of a cow.
The other expiations are mostly made by fines and austerities. The fines are almost always in cattle to be given to Brahmans, some as high as a bull and a thousand cows. They, also, are oddly enough proportioned: for killing a snake a Brahman must give a hoe; for killing an eunuch, a load of rice straw. Saying “hush” or “pish” to a superior, or overpowering a Brahman in argument, involve each a slight penance. Killing insects, and even cutting down plants and grass (if not for a useful purpose), require a penance, since plants also are supposed to be endued with feeling. One passage about expiation is characteristic in many ways. “A priest who should retain in his memory the whole Rig-Veda would be absolved from all guilt, even if he had slain the inhabitants of the three worlds, and had eaten food from the foulest hands.”
The effect of the religion of Manu on morals is, indeed, generally good. The essential distinction between right and wrong, it has been seen, is strongly marked at the outset, and is in general well preserved. The well-known passages relating to false evidence, one or two where the property of another may be appropriated for the purposes of sacrifice, and some laxity in the means by which a king may detect and seize offenders, are the only exceptions noted. On the other hand, there are numerous injunctions to justice, truth, and virtue; and many are the evils, both in this world and the next, which are said to follow from vicious conduct. The upright man need not be cast down, though oppressed with penury, while “the unjust man attains no felicity, nor he whose wealth proceeds from false evidence.”
The moral duties are in one place distinctly declared to be superior to the ceremonial ones. The punishments of a future state are as much directed against the offences which disturb society as against sins affecting religion. One maxim, however, on this subject, is of a less laudable tendency; for it declares that the men who receive from the government the punishment due to their crimes go pure to heaven, and become as clean as those who have done well.
It may be observed, in conclusion, that the morality thus enjoined by the law was not, as now, sapped by the example of fabled gods, or by the debauchery permitted in the religious ceremonies of certain sects. From many passages cited in different places it has been shown that the code is not by any means deficient in generous maxims or in elevated sentiments; but the general tendency of the Brahman morality is rather towards innocence than active virtue, and its main objects are to enjoy tranquillity and to prevent pain or evil to any sentient being.[c]
Soul Transmigration
It is well known that the metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul into various orders of being, reviving in one form when it ceases to exist in another, is the tenet of the Hindus. The Brahmans grafted upon it, in their usual way, a number of fantastic refinements, and gave to their ideas on this subject a more systematic form than is usual with those eccentric theologians. They describe the mind as characterised by three qualities—goodness, passion, darkness. According as any soul is distinguished by one or another of those qualities in its present life, is the species of being into which it migrates in the life to come.
Souls endued with goodness attain the condition of deities; those filled with passion receive that of men; those immersed in darkness are condemned to that of beasts. Each of these conditions, again, is divided into three degrees—a lower, a middle, and a higher. Of the souls distinguished by darkness, the lowest are thrust into mineral and vegetable substances, into worms, reptiles, fishes, snakes, tortoises, cattle, jackals; the middle pass into elephants, horses, Sudras, Mlechcha (a word of very opprobrious import, denoting men of all other races not Hindu), lions, tigers, and boars; the highest animate the forms of dancers, singers, birds, deceitful men, giants, and blood-thirsty savages.