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 BEGINNINGS OF HINDU PANTHEISM 
 
 9ln 9H)t)res0 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING 
 OF THE AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, 
 
 Sr-ATER Memorial Hall of the Free Academy at Norwich, 
 CoNXECTicuT, July 8, 1890, 
 
 BY THE PRESIDENT, 
 
 CHARLES ROCKWELL LANMAN, 
 
 PnOFESSOR OF SANSKRIT IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS, U. S A 
 
 C II A R L E S W . S E V E R. 
 July, 1890. 
 

 Mnibtrsitg Press: 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRI 
 
 ■y ,.^ " 
 
 i^ 
 
THE 
 
 BEGINNINGS OF HINDU PANTHEISM. 
 
 Members of the Association: 
 
 IT is twenty-one years ago this month that the convention 
 assembled at Poughkeepsie which organized the Ameri- 
 can Philological Association. We may congratulate our- 
 selves, accordingly, that we as a society are no longer 
 minors, — that we have now attained our majority. Our 
 youth has been vigorous and fruitful. That we should praise 
 the men who have made it so, is not fitting; for most of 
 them, happily, are still living. Their activity and devotion 
 to the interests of the Association are witnessed by a stately 
 row of published volumes of Transactions, — the twentieth 
 of which, along with an index of contributors and an index 
 of subjects covering the whole series, was issued last March. 
 The prospects for our continued fruitfulness and vigor were 
 never brighter. 
 
 We should be, and I believe that we are, conscious of our 
 manhood and power, of the importance and dignity of our 
 calling. The duty which the scholar as a citizen owes to the 
 state is one of the most frequent themes of the day ; but the 
 duties which we owe to society and the body politic as 
 philologists and public teachers may also well engage for a 
 moment our reflection at this beginning of our new year. 
 
 We stand here as the representatives of one of those " use- 
 less things " which it is the true province of a university to 
 teach. Our labors, be they never so faithful, will not avail 
 one whit to lessen the cost of carrying a barrel of flour from 
 
 ' !^ O 
 
 1^G82 
 
Minneapolis to New York, or to diminish by the hundredth 
 of a cent the price of a yard of cloth at Fall River. Now 
 not for a moment do we underrate the vast intellectual force 
 involved in the great economies of spinning and weaving, or 
 of railway administration ; and yet we boldly maintain the 
 true usefulness of our useless discipline. For is not ours 
 the ministry of teaching men, — by holding up to them 
 the noblest ideals of virtue and of patriotism, the fairest 
 works of poet and of artist, and the truest and loftiest 
 conceptions of God and of our relations to the world about 
 us, — of teaching men, I say, to love better things ? Or 
 else, of what avail is the cheaper bread or clothing, except 
 as giving the man who is hurried and hustled along by the 
 materialism of the age a little more time to cultivate his 
 nobler self by some actual experience in enjoying the ideal 
 and the useless, — in short, a little more time to learn that 
 the " useful " is useful only in so far as it enables us to attain 
 unto the useless. 
 
 To us students of philology belongs the privilege of renew- 
 ing in our experience some of the best thought and feeling of 
 the past. As regards success in turning that to account for 
 our fellows, there is one condition that 1 would fain mention ; 
 it is, that we keep ourselves in touch, in living, active S3^m- 
 pathy, with the life and thought of to-day. No longer may 
 the scholar be a cloistered recluse. He must mingle with 
 men. He must be quick to see the possibilities which the ma- 
 terial progress of mankind offers him for the promotion of his 
 science. He must be up and away, to Olympia or to Delphi, 
 to the Nile Delta or to Mesopotamia, or to the ends of the 
 earth, to explore and to dig, to collect seals and clay tablets, 
 coins and inscriptions, manuscripts and printed books, — in 
 short, whatever material may yield back the treasures of the 
 past. He must study the land and people with his own eyes 
 and mind. He must know of the best recent progress of the 
 graphic arts, in order that he may aid the diffusion of knowl- 
 edge effectively, no less than its advancement. He must 
 
understand the course of current events, in order that a lesson 
 of the past may be applied with telling force to a fault or a 
 problem of to-day. And above all, he must have that discrimi- 
 nating recognition of interest and of character which tells him 
 what to teach and to whom to teach it, and that sympathy 
 which engenders the spirit of docility in the taught. The 
 dictionaries tell us that the word " scholar " goes back to the 
 Greek o-^j^oA,?;, " spare time, leisure, especially for learned pur- 
 suits." No true-hearted American scholar supposes that this 
 leisure is his for mere selfish acquisition of knowledge. Such 
 treasures are barren, and hoarded in vain. It is onl}' as he 
 puts them to the service of his day and generation that his 
 acquisitions of knowledge beget in the scholar himself wis- 
 dom and culture and character, — the end of all learning. 
 
 But if we do well on this occasion to magnify our office as 
 American philologists, let us not forget that even since the 
 founding of this Association the duties and responsibilities 
 oi philologists, of whatever nation, have been greatly widened. 
 Philology aims to unfold to us the whole intellectual hfe of 
 a people as that life is manifested in its language and litera- 
 ture, its art, its antiquities, its religion. As such, philology 
 is a historical discipline ; but it must now be regarded as also 
 a philosophical discipline, for it seeks not only to reproduce 
 the great phases of that life, but also to trace their genetic 
 relations and the causal connections between them. It thus 
 becomes, in fact, one chapter in the great book of the His- 
 tory of Evolution. In this light, its driest and meanest 
 results gain new significance and dignity. No language, no 
 literature, no antiquity can be dead to us so long as we can 
 see the living, acting forces which are ever at work shaping 
 its growth. 
 
 I suppose there are few of us who have not been oppressed 
 by the vastness, the many-sidedness, of philology ; by a feel- 
 ing of hopeless inability to get a commanding grasp of the 
 science as a whole ; by a sense that what we do accomplish is 
 
6 
 
 after all so painful and fragmentary as to be almost in vain, — 
 is, in the words of Goethe's Pylades, — 
 
 ^oU 93^itf)' imb eitet ©tudiuerf. 
 
 May not the contemplation of this noblest aspect of philology 
 — as a study of human evolution — console and help us, take 
 us each out of his self-centred isolation of purpose and 
 action, and co-ordinate the work of each individual with that 
 of the many who precede and follow him, so that his own 
 life-work seems to him no longer a broken fragment lost 
 among countless other lost and broken fragments, but rather 
 a well-jointed part — small, indeed, perhaps — but fitting 
 perfectly into its place in the one grand structure of human 
 elevation, of human ennoblement. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : 
 
 It is to a study of evolution, of the genesis of a form of 
 religion, that your attention is asked this evening. My theme 
 is TJie Beginnings of Hindu Pantheisyn. The materials for 
 its study are the Upanishads, — brief Sanskrit treatises of the 
 Hindu mystics of perhaps the sixth century before Christ. 
 The Upanishads teach the absolute identity of man and God, 
 of the individual soul and the Supreme Spirit, and declare 
 that only by the recognition of its true nature can the soul 
 be released from its attachment to the world-illusion, and 
 from the consequent round of transmigrations. Our sub- 
 ject involves the consideration of the religion of the 
 Upanishads rather than of their philosophy, of their prac- 
 tical rather than of their theoretical aspects. 
 
 He who would discourse upon the religion of Israel has a 
 theme that needs no apology when it asks our attention. 
 The history of that religion is inseparably connected with 
 the beginnings of our own. To the Semites we owe the 
 contribution of the most important single factor in the civili. 
 
zation of the world. Quite different is it with the Hindus. 
 Leaving out of account the Extreme Orient, India has had 
 no grand part in the history of world-civilization. It is true, 
 the primitive Hindus are a branch of the same great Aryan 
 family to which we also by right of birth belong ; but so far 
 as their influence upon our life and thought, or of ours upon 
 them, is concerned, the Hindus might almost as well have lived 
 on the planet Jupiter as on the banks of the Indus and the 
 Ganges. But, once more, supposing that they had lived on the 
 planet Jupiter, and that we here, earth-dwellers in this the 
 nineteenth century, had in some wondrous wise got knowl- 
 edge of the history of their life and thought, and had learned 
 that they in their isolation had, like us, realized and tried to 
 solve the mystery of existence, — would not our interest be 
 heightened to most eager curiosity ? And yet, barring Jupiter, 
 this is the case. Centuries ago their tranquil sages grappled 
 with the problems of existence and of evil, " their young 
 men saw visions, and their old men dreamed dreams." Rude 
 and incoherent were these "words of the wise and their 
 dark sayings," but containing withal a few great thoughts, — 
 thoughts which were taken up by the Hindu thinkers of later 
 times and elaborated into philosophical systems, and of which, 
 even in their crude and unsystematic forms, there are striking 
 counterparts in Occidental philosophy. 
 
 But the human interest of the Upanishads lies not alone 
 in the analogies and the contrasts which they present when 
 compared with Occidental speculation ; they have a great 
 intrinsic interest for the student of one of the most important 
 phases of evolution, inasmuch as they are the reflex of a most 
 wonderful period in the history of India, — the period, namely, 
 in which the sturdy, life-loving Vedic Aryans are being trans- 
 formed into quietistic, pessimistic Hindus. Let me set 
 forth more clearly who and what the people were among 
 whom the Upanishads originated, and explain briefly the place 
 of these works in the literature of India. 
 
The earl}' Aryan tribes immigrant into the northwest of 
 India were, in blood and language, of the same primitive 
 stock from which we ourselves are sprung ; they were the 
 easternmost members of the Indo-European or Aryan family, 
 — that primevalgroupof clans which included the progenitors 
 of the Persian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic 
 tribes. They have left us a record of their character and 
 religion in the hymns of the Veda, — the oldest recorded docu- 
 ments of our branch of the human race. The Vedic Aryans 
 were pastoral clans, vigorous from open-air life in a compara- 
 tively vigorous climate. They evidently enjoyed life ; for 
 they beseech their gods for length of days and numerous 
 children as the greatest blessings. Their wealth lay in their 
 herds and fields. Raids upon neighboring clans fostered a 
 warlike spirit in them ; and their religious instincts were 
 strongly developed by the intensity of action of the forces 
 of Nature which is peculiar to the tropical and subtropical 
 zones. The burst of the monsoon, which ushers in the 
 rainy season in India, is a spectacular drama which defies 
 all human mimicry. Small wonder that the Vedic Aryans 
 conceived the crash and din of the aerial commotion as a 
 battle of god Indra with the dragon, and the forked light- 
 nings as the thunderbolts with which he was smiting the 
 demon of drought and famine. And so it was with the other 
 elemental forces : all were anthropomorphized. The wind, 
 the sun, the fire, the waters, — each was the manifestation of 
 a divine personality whose anger was to be appeased and 
 whose favor was to be sought. The relations of deity and 
 worshipper are often on a simple give-and-take basis. The 
 gods accept the cakes of rice and the oblations of butter, and 
 give in return rain and food, health and wealth, children and 
 cattle. Lofty spiritual aspiration, flights of the poetic my- 
 thologizing fancy, — these are not wholly absent ; but of 
 them there is rather disappointingly little. 
 
 The elements that should inform the Vedic religion with 
 
9 
 
 life are not strong enough to insure its vitality. The simple 
 rites of worship, which were at first conducted by the patri- 
 archal head of a family or clan, fell into the hands of a 
 caste of priests, whose interest it was to develop these rites 
 into a system so complex and minute that only they, the 
 trained sacrificers by profession, could perform them, — to 
 secure, in short, a monopoly of the sacerdotal functions and 
 offices. The nature-religion of the Vedas has been trans- 
 formed into a rigid, soul-deadening ritualism. This is the 
 second phase in the history of Indian life ; and we name it 
 Brahmanism, after the caste of Brahmans, who in priestly 
 robes lorded it over their fellows for centuries. 
 
 It need hardly be said that this transformation could not 
 and did not take place without a great change in the char- 
 acter of the Vedic Aryans ; it was, in fact, the most palpable 
 manifestation of that change. And this change of character 
 in turn was conditioned by a most important change of envi- 
 ronment. The tribes which perhaps a couple of thousand 
 years before Christ had dwelt in the extreme northwest of 
 India, or even beyond its borders, have advanced southeast- 
 ward across the basin of the Indus and into the valleys of 
 the Ganges and Jumna. Burning sunshine, torrid winds, 
 sultry rainy seasons, — these tell, in the course of genera- 
 tions, no less on the moral than on the physical fibre of a 
 race. If we look at the descendants of the Vedic tribes, say 
 in the sixth pre-Christian century, we must write Ichabod. 
 
 Their exuberant love of life has vanished. Nay, more, life 
 is a burden. And worse still, it is a burden from which even 
 death itself provides no escape. The belief in the transmi- 
 gration of souls, the metempsychosis, has become ingrained in 
 the Hindu character. It is not a dogma of the learned only, 
 it is an established conviction among the lowest and meanest. 
 Even the birds and animals in the quaint beast-fables are 
 represented as believing in it, and as attributing their misfor- 
 tunes to their sins in a former existence. There is not a 
 
 2 
 
10 
 
 trace of this belief in the Veda proper ; but the later literal 
 ture is saturated wdth it. The Greeks, as is well known, had 
 the doctrine ; but their national temper was too happy to 
 allow it to influence their life and character appreciably. To 
 the Hindu, on the other hand, the misery of the prospect of 
 life after life and death after death was a reality so terrible 
 as to pervade the whole current of his thought and action. 
 
 The ancient, or pre-classical, literature of India may be 
 comprehended, for the purposes of this discussion, under 
 two heads, — the Vedic hymns, and the Brahmanas, Of the 
 hymns we have spoken. They contain the prayers and 
 praises offered by a simple people to their gods, and, as the 
 oldest records of Indo-European antiquity, furnish most im- 
 portant material for the study of ethnic religions. With the 
 supersession of the nature-religion of the Vedas by Brahman- 
 ism came the writings called Brahmanas. They belong to 
 the oldest Indo-European prose extant. They are theological 
 and mystical disquisitions upon the ritualism into which 
 religion had degenerated. The sacrifice had become the 
 one all-engrossing object of religious and literary activity. 
 Its importance, legends concerning its efficacy, the esoteric 
 significance of each act of its endless, dreary details, — these 
 matters fill the great tomes called Brahmanas. Above all, 
 we find in them the most extravagant symbolism. About 
 the sacrifice the Brahman has spun a flimsy web of mj^stery, 
 and in each of its elements and events he sees a hidden 
 meaning. The blessings which these priestly scriptures hold 
 out as a reward for ritualistic observances are chiefly tem- 
 poral. Thus, to the prescriptions for the morning and even- 
 ing oblations in the sacred fire it is added that one should 
 offer sesamum oil who desires personal beauty ; porridge, if 
 he desire children ; rice-broth, if he desire to get possession 
 of a village ; water, if he desire long life ; and so on. The 
 means and ends of such a system are not lofty ; and therefore 
 it could not in the long run make its appeal to the noble. 
 
11 
 
 For there were noble souls left in degenerate India, — men 
 who had been brought up in the priestly schools, had been 
 taught the wisdom of the ancients, and had seen its vanity. 
 These were the promoters of the great religious awakenings 
 of about 500 b. c, of Buddhism, Jainism, the Brahmanic 
 revival, — the men who felt moved to show to India a " more 
 excellent way." I have said " awakenings : " Buddhism, the 
 greatest of them, was only one of many dissenting move- 
 ments ; and none of them, any more than the Protestant 
 Reformation in Europe, was the work of one man. 
 
 Under the Brahmanic dispensation there were four orders, 
 or stages, in the well-rounded life : a man became in turn, 
 first, a pupil ; then, a householder ; thirdly, a forest-hermit ; 
 and lastly, an ascetic. Now the forest-hermit life and asce- 
 ticism are the outward manifestations of the transition from 
 the ritualism of the Brahmanas to the religion of the Upani- 
 shads. The active Vedic Aryan had looked " outward, and 
 not in." His Hindu descendants were quietists, to whom life 
 seemed not well worth living. What wonder that they 
 should look inward, and not out? Hermit-life fosters the 
 habits of meditation and introspection, and these led naturally 
 to theosophic speculation. And hence we find in the later 
 Brahmanas passages of speculative content appropriate for 
 the use of these vXo^loc, or Forest-hermits, and called Ara- 
 nyakas {i. e. " Forest-treatises") and Upanishads. The more 
 important of these passages have been treated as sepa- 
 rate works and dignified with separate names ; but it must be 
 remembered that the older Upanishads are in fact integral 
 portions of the Brahmanas. Ten or a dozen of these Upan- 
 ishads ^ have become famous classics of the Indian literature, 
 
 1 In the same general style as the genuine Upanishads, have been written 
 others which would swell the number to one or two hundred. Tiie most im- 
 portant old Upanishads are the Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad, or Upanishad of 
 the Great Forest Treatise, the Chandogya Upanishad, and the Katha Upan- 
 ishad. The first two have just been edited and translated by the master hand 
 
12 
 
 and are constantly cited as authoritative texts of holy scrip- 
 ture b}' the writers of the later systematic philosophical 
 treatises. 
 
 Of the date of the older Upanishads we judge chiefij' by 
 the general aspect of their contents as coin|Dared with what 
 precedes and what follows in the development of Indian 
 thought. And by this criterion they must be referred to 
 about the same epoch as the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, 
 — say about five hundred years before Christ. 
 
 There is no abrupt break in the course of development 
 from the old Brahman religion to that of the Upanishads. 
 The men who saw a new light felt that they were " not come 
 to destroy, but to fulfil." Saint Paul says of himself, " Cir- 
 cumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe 
 of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews." So these old 
 Brahman prophets : they wore the sacred cord, — a symbol 
 no less significant than circumcision ; they were born to an 
 intense pride of family and clan ; they were, as " touching 
 the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." But the}^ 
 felt that something must be added to the works of the law ; 
 and this something was not, as in the Christian antithesis, 
 faith, but rather knowledge. 
 
 Ramatirtha's introduction to the Maitri Upanishad is interesting as 
 the attempt of an Indian schoolman " to establish," as he says, " the 
 connection between the earlier (or Brahmana) and the later (or 
 Upanishad) portions of the Veda," that is, to reconcile the ancient 
 ritualism with the new gnosis. '' Although," says Ramatirtha, " in the 
 preceding portion of the Veda, consisting of four books, many cere- 
 monies, morning and evening oblations, and so forth, have been en- 
 joined, and described as producing their higher or lower fruit, still 
 these do not result in the attainment of man's highest object ; for they 
 all aim at fruit which is to be produced, and whatever can be produced 
 
 of Bolitlingk. But a good critical text of all the old Upanishads, conveniently 
 assembled in one volume, with a pliilologically accurate translation and various 
 useful appendices, is still one of the pressing needs of Indology. 
 
13 
 
 is transient, according to the law, ' Whatever is capable of being made 
 is temporal.' For thus saith the scripture " — and the schoolman 
 quotes from the famous controversy between Yajnavalkya and the 
 wise woman Gargi, recounted in the Brhad Aranyaka — " for thus 
 saith the scriptui'e : ' Whosoever in this world, without the knowledge 
 of the imperishable, maketh oblations, giveth alms, and practiseth 
 austerities, even for many thousand years, — for him it all comes to 
 an end.' " 
 
 Now the Upanishad, resumes Ramatirtha, intends to show to the 
 man who desires an object which is in its own nature eternal, the 
 means for the accomplishment of his object. One whose internal 
 organ is filled with the impressions of countless objects which have 
 been experienced in the endless succession of past births, is led by his 
 subjection to these impressions to continued activity ; his mind is still 
 set on external objects, and it is impossible to turn him back suddenly 
 from his external pursuits. The Brahmana, therefore, at first teaches 
 him outward ceremonies only as a means of preparation for the 
 struggle for a loftier aim. These ceremonies, performed without any 
 desire for selfish results, are intended to distract the mind from 
 worldly pursuits ; to develop passionlessness and self-restraint, and 
 extinguish all desire save that for final emancipation ; to effect a clear 
 discrimination between things temporal and things eternal ; to prepare 
 a man for the knowledge of the real nature of the individual soul, and 
 so lead him to the knowledge of the Supreme Soul, in which knowledge 
 abideth perfect peace. — Thus far Ramatirtha. 
 
 Bj historical development, as we have seen, ritualism had 
 no such purpose as this. Indeed, even the Upanishads them- 
 selves, in their earliest portions, cannot claim so lofty a 
 purpose ; for we jfind, as the rewards for a certain mystical 
 knowledge, a full term of life (reckoned at one hundred 
 years), abundance of children and of cattle and of fame. 
 
 It may help us to understand the beginnings of Hindu 
 pantheism if we devote here a few moments to a brief 
 sketch of the life of the Brahmans. Megasthenes, the am- 
 bassador of Seleukos Nikator at the court of Sandrakottos 
 about 300 B. c, observes that even from the time of concep- 
 tion in the womb they are under the care of wise men. 
 
14 
 
 And indeed there are holy rites for every stage of the Brah- 
 man's existence, from before his birth till after death. The 
 most important of all the twelve sacraments are his investi- 
 ture with the sacred cord at the hands of his Veda-teacher, 
 and his marriage. 
 
 The investiture is the symbol of his spiritual regeneration, 
 and hence those who receive it are called the twice-born. 
 The ceremony is described at length in the books. We may 
 picture to ourselves the teacher. He is an aged Brahman. 
 His youth has been passed in hearing the sacred word, and 
 he is in possession of supernatural power before which great 
 and lowly alike tremble ; for the curse of a wrathful 
 Brahman never fails. Solemnly, with the laying on of hands, 
 he addresses the novice with words from the Rigveda. 
 And in response the student performs the first act of his 
 spiritually new life : he places in utter silence a piece of 
 wood upon the sacred fire. Then, taught by the elder, he 
 pronounces line by line the Savitri, which for some strange 
 reason has come to be the most celebrated and oft-repeated 
 of all the ten thousand stanzas of the Rigveda, — 
 
 Of Savitar, the heavenly, 
 
 That longed-for glory may we win ! 
 
 And may himself iusijire oixr prayers. 
 
 Then the teacher lays his hand with the fingers upwards upon 
 the student's heart with the words, — 
 
 In subjection to me thy heart I put. 
 
 Let thy thinking follow my thinking. 
 
 In my word rejoice thou with all thy soul. 
 
 Such is his introduction to the first order, the order of 
 student. Truly, if this is a spiritual re-birth, what is it to 
 be spiritually still-born ? " Let thy thinking follow my think- 
 ing." Herein lies the fatal weakness of the system. 
 
 The girdle is tied around him. He takes his staff, and no 
 
15 
 
 matter how rich or how powerful his family, he starts out 
 to beg his food. Modestly and courteously, with refinement 
 of etiquette, he begs it morning and evening. Morning and 
 evening he tends the sacred fire. Under the vow of poverty, 
 chastity, and obedience he devotes himself to the study of 
 the Veda. The course for learning the four Vedas is forty- 
 eight years, or the half of that, or the quarter, " or " — 
 as the books quaintly say — " until he has learned them ; for 
 life is uncertain." 
 
 A Brahman is born laden with three debts, says an ancient 
 book. He owes Veda-study to the sages; to the gods he 
 owes sacrifices ; and to the spirits of the blessed dead, a son. 
 The first he pays in his long years of pupilage ; to absolve the 
 second and third he must needs be a householder. And 
 accordingly marriage is a duty, and is the most important of 
 aU the sacraments except investiture ; for without a son he 
 has no one to keep up the cultus of his departed ancestors, 
 — a most direful misfortune. 
 
 Having passed through the orders of student and house- 
 holder, the Brahman becomes a forest-hermit. In this order 
 he is clad in a dress made of bark or skin, feeds on wild 
 roots and fruits, is chaste, meek, cleanly, and silent save 
 when he recites the Veda. The hermit differs from the 
 ascetic in that the hermit may take his wife and children and 
 one sacred fire with him to the forest, build a hut, and main- 
 tain his fire and the morning and evening oblation ; and also 
 in that he seeks for heaven. 
 
 The last and highest of the four orders was that of the 
 ascetic, or, as he was otherwise called, the pious mendicant, 
 the beggar, or the wanderer. He sought for something 
 higher than heaven, — for the path that leads to the cessation 
 of re-births. Without a house, without a home, without a fire, 
 clean-shaven, naked, or wearing at most a clout or an old rag 
 or a cast-off garment, chaste, silent save with great ascetics 
 and teachers of the Upanishads, begging, or receiving in his 
 
16 
 
 alms-bowl what is given without his asking, and only just 
 enough to sustain life, harming no sentient being, sleeping 
 by night at the root of a tree, he should wander, wander 
 about, caring neither for this world nor for heaven. 
 
 The life of these ascetics made a striking impression upon 
 Alexander the Great and his Greek invaders. Full of curi- 
 osity, the youthful world-conqueror sent Onesikritos to talk 
 with the sages. And as one of them saw him coming with 
 mantle and hat and boots, he laughed at him, and bade him 
 strip himself and lie naked on the stones to listen, if he 
 would hear his teaching. The ascetic, reproved by a com- 
 panion for discourtesy to the Greek, proceeds to show him 
 that the best doctrine is that which removes not only sorrow 
 but also joy, from the soul. 
 
 Megasthenes, too, tells us of these sombre sages. " They 
 converse very much about death. They believe that this life 
 is as it were only a completion of one's conception in the 
 womb, and that death for the wise man is in reality a 
 birth to the only true and happy life. Therefore they exer- 
 cise themselves with much preparation to be ready to die. 
 They teach that nothing which happens to a man is good 
 or evil in itself; for otherwise, some would not grieve and 
 others rejoice at the same occurrence, as they do, led by 
 dream-like illusions ; nor would the same occurrence which 
 makes a man grieve at one time make the same man rejoice 
 at another. In many things they agree with the Greeks ; for 
 they affirm that the world is created and perishable, and that 
 it has the shape of a sphere, and that the god who created 
 and rules it pervades it completely. And concerning seed, 
 the soul, and much else, they make statements in accord with 
 those of the Greeks, but weaving into them also, like Plato 
 himself, fables about the immortality of the soul and the 
 like." 
 
 Such were the men, the struggles of whose inner life are 
 reflected in the Upanishads. The doctrines of these treatises 
 
17 
 
 cannot be combined into a coherent philosophical system ; 
 they are too disconnected, contradictory, and disorderly. 
 Indeed, as M. Barth says, they are addressed more to man 
 as man than to man as thinker. Vigorous and great and 
 noble thoughts pervade them, but they are thoughts over- 
 run with a parasitic growth of fantastic allegory. They are 
 fairly to be called religious rather than philosophical, because 
 their speculations never lose sight of their one great prac- 
 tical end, — the liberation of the soul. "Were the soul fixed 
 upon the Supreme Spirit so as it is fixed upon the things of 
 sense, who would not be loosed from his bonds?" says the 
 Maitri. And the same Upanishad goes on to describe the 
 soul in bondage : — 
 
 The results of its works in a former existence are no more to be 
 stayed than the waves of a mighty river. The coming of death can 
 no more be kept back than can the tide of the ocean. The unilhi- 
 mined soul is crippled, as it were, by the fetters of good and evil 
 consequences with which it is bound ; bereft of liberty like a pris- 
 oner in his cell ; beset by many a fear, like one who stands before his 
 judge; intoxicated with delusions like one intoxicated with wine; 
 driven hither and yonder by sin like one possessed ; bitten by the 
 things of sense like one bitten by a hufje serpent ; blinded by passion 
 like the darkness of midnight ; full of illusion like magic ; full of false 
 apparitions like a dream ; pithless as the inside of the stem of a 
 banana-tree ; changing its dress every moment like an actor ; falsely 
 fair as a painted wall. 
 
 How shall the soul be loosed from this bondage ? Our 
 deeds — 
 
 " Follow us from afar, 
 And what we have been makes us what we are." 
 
 How shall it be rescued from the eddying vortex of transmi- 
 gration in which it is whirled about by its deeds? The 
 answer of the Upanishads is, " By the recognition of its 
 true nature." By its true nature it is absolutely iden- 
 
18 
 
 tical with the supreme and all-pervading Spirit of the 
 Universe. 
 
 There is, in an ancient Vedic hj^^mn used in the ritual of 
 cremation and burial, a verse addressed to the departed : 
 " Let thine eye go to the sun ; thy breath to the wind." It 
 is perhaps the oldest text involving the idea of the microcosm 
 and macrocosm. Each element in man comes from some 
 element in nature with which it has most affinity, and there- 
 to it returns at dissolution. These affinities are worked out 
 with much detail in the Upanishad : " In case the dead 
 man's voice goes to the fire, his breath to the wind, his eye to 
 the sun, his mind to the moon, his hearing to space, his body 
 to the earth, the hair of his body to the plants, the hair of his 
 head to the trees, and his blood to the waters, what becomes 
 then of the man? " The affinity of the eye and the sun is 
 universally palpable. Thus Plato says : " Most like to the 
 sun, methinks, is the eye, of all the organs of sense." Not 
 less so is that of the breath and the wind. 
 
 Now no less than five of the old Upanishads contain a 
 " Dialogue of the Vital Powers," which has a curious like- 
 ness to the old Roman fable of the " Belly and the Mem- 
 bers," and is not without interest in this connection. It is as 
 follows: — 
 
 The vital powers strove among themselves for the pre-eminence, 
 saying each, I am better than the rest, I am better than the rest. The 
 vital powers went unto Father Prajapati and spake : Exalted one ! 
 which of us is the best ? He answered them : That one at whose de- 
 parture the body seems to feel the worst, that is the best one of you. 
 
 The voice departed. After it had been away for a year, it came 
 back and said: How have ye been able to live without me? — 
 Like mutes that speak not, breathing with the breath, seeing with the 
 eye, hearing with the ear, thinking with the mind. Thus lived we. — 
 So the voice entered in again. 
 
 The eye departed. After it had been away -for a year, it came back 
 and said : How have ye been able to live without me ? — Like the 
 blind that see not, breathing with the breath, speaking with the voice. 
 
19 
 
 hearing with the ear, thinking with the mind. Thus lived we. — So 
 the eye entered in again. 
 
 The ear departed. After it had been away for a year, it came back 
 and said: How have ye been able to live without me? — Like the 
 deaf that hear not, breathing with the breath, speaking with the voice, 
 seeing with the eye, thinking with the mind. Thus lived we. — So the 
 ear entered in again. 
 
 The mind departed. After it had been away for a year, it came back 
 and said : How have ye been able to live without me ? — Like fools 
 without mind, breathing with the breath, speaking with the voice, see- 
 ing with the eye, hearing with the ear. Thus lived we. — So the mind 
 entered in again. 
 
 Now as the breath was on the point of departing, — just as a 
 j)roud steed from the Indus would pull and tear the pegs of his tether, 
 so it pulled and tore tiie other vital powers. Together spake they all 
 to the breath and said : Exalted one ! Thou art the best of us. 
 Without thee we cannot live.^ Depart not. 
 
 This fable appears to contain in its oldest and simplest form 
 the recognition of the supremacy of the vital principle called 
 breath, prana, or atman, upon which even the organ of 
 thought or the manas depends. The atman is the central 
 point in the human personality, — the vague, hidden, underly- 
 ing power which is the necessary condition of all human 
 activity. 
 
 I have said that symbolism and mystery were run mad in 
 the Brahmanas. The sacrifice is a symbol of man, — in short, 
 it is man. The morning oblation is a type of the first 
 twenty-four years of his life, because it is offered with the 
 accompaniment of the Savitri, a stanza of the Rigveda which 
 consists of twenty-four syllables. The midday oblation cor- 
 responds to the next forty-four years of his life, for it is 
 offered with a trishtuhh., or stanza of forty-four syllables. 
 The evening oblation answers to the next forty-eight years 
 
 1 And therefore, it is added, the senses are called neither voices nor eyes nor 
 ears nor minds, but pranas (literally " breaths " : I have rendered it by " vital 
 powers"), for the breath pervades them all. 
 
20 
 
 of his life, because offered with a jayatiy or stanza of forty- 
 eight syllables. And this precious wisdom, the knowledge 
 of this symbolism, has a magic, a god-compelling power. 
 Mahidasa Aitareya, who had this knowledge, lived one hun- 
 dred and sixteen years ; and he who fathoms it shall live one 
 hundred and sixteen years. 
 
 Or again: The light within a man is a symbol of — in 
 short it is — the light which lightens beyond the heaven, on 
 the summit of everything, on the summit of all, in the highest 
 world, above which there are no higher worlds. When one 
 feels warmth in touching the body, then one sees this light. 
 When one, covering his ears, notices as it were a gentle noise 
 or humming like that of a burning fire, then one hears it. 
 One should worship it as the seen and the heard. Him men 
 shall gladly see, and of him men shall hear who hath this 
 knowledge. 
 
 For the Vedic period it was sufficient to seek the elemental 
 counterpart of the breath of life in the wind that bloweth. 
 For the Hindu mystic this was not enough. His dreamy 
 speculations have invested the Atman, the vital breath, with 
 potencies and attributes which pervade the whole being of 
 man. Granted that it must have a counterpart in the macro- 
 cosm, and the first great step of Hindu pantheism is taken. 
 For that counterpart must hold the same relation to the 
 universe that the Atman does to man. It can be nought 
 else than the principle which informs the universe with 
 life, which — as they told Megasthenes — pervades it 
 completely. 
 
 In this atmosphere of mystic symbolism everything is not 
 only that which it is^ but also that which it signifies. So lost 
 is the Brahman in these esoteric vagaries that to him the 
 line of demarcation between is and signifies becomes almost 
 wholly obliterated. If the Atman in man is the type and 
 symbol of the supreme Atman, then it is that su])reme 
 Atman, and pantheism is an accomplished fact. 
 
21 
 
 But we may not suppose that the sages of the Upanishads 
 conceived the doctrine of the absolute identity of the soul 
 with the All-Soul so rigorously as it appears in the system of 
 the Vedanta. On the contrary, many of the earliest texts 
 about the Supreme Atman present a naively anthropomorphic 
 picture of him. He is more like a primeval titanic man than 
 a god. " In the beginning was the Atman. He looked around 
 and saw nought else than himself. He feared. Then he 
 thought : Since there exists nought else than myself, of what 
 am I afraid ? Then vanished his fear." But we need not 
 wonder at the grossness of their attempts to describe the 
 indescribable. Rather must we sympathize with the simple 
 pathos of their search after the unsearchable, of the questions 
 that will out^ whether they be answerable or not. 
 
 " Teach me, exalted one. With these words Narada 
 presented himself reverently before Sanatkumara. He an- 
 swered : Present thyself before me with that which thou 
 knowest already. Then will I teach thee further. Narada 
 said : I study, exalted one, the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the 
 Samaveda, the Atharvaveda as the fourth and the Itihasa 
 and Purana as the fifth Veda ; further, the Veda of the 
 Vedas, the Pitrya Ragi, the Daiva Nidhi, the Vakovakya, 
 the Ekayana, the lore of the gods, of the priests, of the 
 ghosts, of the warriors, of the stars, of the serpents, and of 
 the genii. This, exalted one, I study. 
 
 " Nevertheless, exalted one, I know only the sacred texts, 
 not the Spirit. For I have heard from men like the exalted 
 one that he who knoweth the Spirit crosseth over the stream 
 of sorrow. Yet do I sorrow, exalted one. So let the exalted 
 one bring me across to the farther bank of the stream of 
 sorrow." — One may almost fancy one's self in the study- 
 chamber of Faust. 
 
 And here, on the other hand, is a pendant to the picture, 
 ^vetaketu was of the stock of Aruni. To him spake his 
 father : ^vetaketu, take up thy life as a student. No one 
 
22 
 
 in our family, for lack of sacred study, is ever a Brahman 
 in name only. — So at twelve years of age he betook him 
 to the teacher. At twenty-four he had been over all the 
 Vedas, and returned home conceited, puffed up, and think- 
 ing himself learned. To him spake his father : Since thou, 
 my son, art so conceited and puffed up, and thinkest thyself 
 so learned, thou hast doubtless asked and got the teaching 
 by which the unheard becomes heard, the unthought be- 
 comes thought, the unknown becomes known. — Of what 
 sort is that teaching, reverend sir ? — And his father pro- 
 ceeds to expound the hidden doctrines. 
 
 Such are the questions. And the answers are given in 
 allegories which illustrate one aspect and another of the 
 Atman. The all-pervasiveness of the yet invisible Atman 
 is thus illustrated to (yvetaketu by his father: Put this 
 salt into water, and present thyself before me to-morrow 
 morning. The son did so. Then spake his father : Bring 
 me the lump of salt which thou didst put last evening in 
 the water. He felt for it, but found it not ; it seemed to 
 have vanished. Sip from this side of the vessel. How is 
 it ? — It tastes salt. — Sip from the middle. How is it ? 
 — Salt. — Sip from yonder side. How is it ? — Salt. — 
 Here thou seest not the reality, and yet it is therein. 
 
 Or again : This my spirit or self within my heart is 
 smaller than a grain of rice, or a barley-corn, or a grain of 
 mustard-seed ; smaller than a grain of millet, or even than a 
 husked grain of millet. It is greater than the earth, greater 
 than the sky, greater than heaven, greater than all the 
 worlds. In it all works, all wishes, all odors and savors are 
 comprehended ; it embraces the universe ; it speaks not ; it 
 is indifferent. This is my spirit within my heart ; it is 
 Brahman. Thereunto, when I go hence, shall I attain. 
 Thus said the sage ^a-^idilya. 
 
 " Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself," we read in 
 Isaiah. And time and again we see these ancient sages 
 
answering their young questioners in similar tones. " This 
 is the spirit of whom they say, ' Not^ Not.'' As incompre- 
 hensible, it is not comprehended. As indestructible, it is 
 not destroyed." 
 
 The great practical aim of all this teaching is, as was said 
 before, to lead to the realization of the true unity of the soul 
 and the Supreme Soul, — and this by exterminating in the 
 soul all desires and activity, root and branch. Although 
 the soul may still, for a little while, keep on acting, it is only 
 as when the wheel of the potter keeps on revolving after the 
 workman has ceased to turn it. As water runs over the leaf 
 of a lotus without wetting it, so these acts no longer affect 
 the soul. It is liberated ; and death can only do away what 
 no longer exists for the emancipated soul, the last false 
 semblance of a difference between it and the Supreme. 
 
 The doctrine of the absolute unity finds perhaps its most 
 striking expression in Sanskrit in the Katha Upanishad ; but 
 nowhere, neither in Sanskrit nor in English, has it been pre- 
 sented with more vigor, truthfulness, and beauty of form 
 than by Emerson in his famous lines paraphrasing the Sans- 
 krit passage. They are conceived as if uttered by the All- 
 pervading Spirit : — 
 
 Tf the red slayer think he slays, 
 Or if the slain think he is slain, 
 They know not well the subtle ways 
 I keep, and pass, and turn again. 
 
 Far or forgot to me is near. 
 Shadow and sunlight are the same, 
 The vanished gods to me appear, 
 And one to me are shame and fame. 
 
 They reckon ill who leave me out ; 
 When me they fly, I am the wings ; 
 I am the doubter and the doubt, 
 And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. 
 
24 
 
 The strong gods pine for my abode, 
 And pine in vain the sacred Seven ; 
 But thou, meek lover of the good ! 
 Find me, and turn thy back on heaven. 
 
 What a prospect, dark and void, — this Supreme Spirit, 
 before whom all human endeavor, all noble ambition, all 
 hope, all love, is blighted! What a contrast, a relief, when 
 we turn from this to the teachings of the gentle Nazarene ! 
 
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