ORIENTAL RELIGIONS.
"Out from the heart of Nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old ;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,
The canticles of love and woe."
R. W Emerson
1
•Oriental Religions
AND THEIR
RELATION TO UNIVERSAL
RELIGION
BY
SAMUEL JOHNSON
INDIA
r
L J H H A W Y
UN I VKilsi r V OF
V .vLIFUliN.
BOSTON
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY
1S73
-^
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872. b7
SAMUEL JOHNSON,
111 the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
THIRD EDITION.
cambridgr:
press of john wilson and son-
CONTENTS.
Page
INTRODUCTORY i
-♦o*-
INDIA.
I.
RELIGION AND LIFE.
I. The Primitive Aryas 39
XL The Hindu Mind 57
III. The Hymns , 87
IV. Tradition '. . 153
V. The Laws 169
VI. Woman 203
VII. Social Forms and Forces 237
-*o^
II.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
I. Vedanta 305
II. Sankhya 375
III. The Bhagavadgita 411
IV. Piety and Morality of Pantheism 441
V. Incarnation 4S3
VI. Transxmigration 513
VII. Religious Universality 555
VI CONTENTS.
III.
BUDDHISM.
Paeje
• T. Speculative Principles 579
II. Nirvana 619
III. Ethics and Humanities . 639
IV. The Hour and the Man 683
V. After-Life in India 711
VI. Buddhist Civilization 735
VI I. Ecclesiasticism , 769
INTRODUCTORY.
M UK A l^"^ i
INTRODUCTORY.
'THHE pages now offered as a contribution to the
Natural History of Religion are the The stand-
outgrowth of studies pursued with constant p°'"^-
interest for more than twenty years. These studies
have served substantially to confirm the views pre-
sented in a series of Lectures, delivered about that
number of years since, on the Universality of Relig-
ious Ideas, as illustrated by the Ancient Faiths of
the East. So imperfect were the sources of positive
knowledge then accessible, that I chose to defer publi-
cation ; and such increase of light has been constantly
flowing in upon this great field of research ever since,
that I have continued to defer my report thereon, in
view of the existing state of scholarship, until the
present moment, when such reasons are comparatively
without force. Engaged for many years in the public
presentation of themes and principles of the nature
here illustrated, I cannot but note that a trustworthy
statement of what the non-Christian world has to
offer to the eye of thoroughly free inquiry, in mat-
ters of belief, is more and more earnestly demanded ;
that in the present stage of religious questions it is
indispensable ; and that the sense of inadequacy felt
by all who have thoughtfully approached the subject,
in a degree which none but themselves can compre-
2 INTRODUCTORY.
hend, should no longer prevent us from performing
our several parts in' this work. I need hardly add
that the response to this demand is already admirable
on the part of liberal thinkers in Europe and America.
To them the present contribution is dedicated, in cor-
dial appreciation of their spirit and their aim. It has
been a labor not of duty only, but of love. I have
been prompted by a desire of combining the testimony
rendered by man's spiritual faculties in different epochs
and races, concerning questions on which these facul-
ties are of necessity his court of final appeal. I have
written, not as an advocate of Christianity or of any
other distinctive religion, but as attracted on the one
hand by the identity of the religious sentiment under
all its great historic forms, and on the other by the
movement indicated in their diversities and contrasts
towards a higher plane of unity, on which their ex-
clusive claims shall disappear.
It is only from this standpoint of the Universal in
Religion that they can be treated with an appreciation
worthy of our freedom, science, and humanity. The
corner-stones of worship, as of work, are no longer to
be laid in what is special, local, exclusive, or anoma-
lous ; but in that which is essentially human, and
therefore unmistakably divine. The revelation of
God, in other words, can be given in nothing else
than the natural constitution and culture of man. To
be thoroughly convinced of this will of itself forbid
our imposing religious partialism on the facts pre-
sented by the history of the soul.
Yet it should perhaps be stated that the following
outline of what I mean by the idea of Universal Relig-
ion, although prefatory, represents no purely a ■p7'iori
assumption, but the results to which my studies have
INTRODUCTORY. 3
led me, as well as the spirit in which they have been
pursued.
Man's instinctive sense of a divine origin, interpreted
as historical derivation, explains his infantile TheWstor-
dreams of a primitive "golden age." In this ^cai process.
crude form he begins to recognize his inherent rela-
tion to the Infinite and Perfect. But while, as his
happy m3'thology, these dreams have an enduring
symbolic value, they no longer stand as data of posi-
tive history or permanent religious belief. And the
same fate befalls the claims of special religions to have
been opened by men in some sense perfect from their
birth, and to possess revelations complete and final at
their announcement. All these ideas of genesis are
transient, because they contradict the natural processes
of growth. • We come to note, as they depart, a pro-
gressive education of man," through his own essential
relations with the Infinite, commencing at the lowest
stage, and at each step pointing onward to fresh ascen-
sion ; an advance not less sure, upon the whole, for
the fact that in special directions an earlier may often
surpass a later attainment, proving competent, so far,
to instruct it.^
And this progress is as natural as it is divine. It
proceeds by laws inherent and immanent in humanity ;
laws whose absoluteness affirms Infinite Mind as impli-
cated in this finite advance ttf to mind, and then hy
means qf?nmd; laws whose continuous onward move-
ment is inspiration.
If this be true, the distinction hitherto made between
^ I insist on the indispensableness of the infinite element to every step of evolution,
because I find this nowise explicable as creation of the higher by the lower. The very
idea of growth involves more than mere historical derivation. Genesis is a constant mys-
tery of origination. And an ascendir.g series is to be accounted for by what is greater
not less, than its highest term.
4 INTRODUCTORY.
" sacred " and " profane " history, interpret it as we
will, vanishes utterly and for ever. " Profane his-
tory " is a misnomer. The line popularl}" drawn
between Heathenism and Christianity as stages respec-
tively of blindness and insight, of guess-work and
authority, of " nature " and " grace," is equally unjust
in both directions, because unjust to man himself. In
all religions there are imperfections; in all, the claim
to infallible or exclusive revelation is alike untenable ;
yet, in all, experience must somehow have reached
down to authority and up to certitude. In all, the
intuitive faculty must have pressed beyond experience
into the realm of impalpable, indemonstrable, inde-
finable realities. In all, millions of souls, beset by
the same problems of life and death, must have seen
man's positive relations with the order of the universe
face to face. In all, the one spiritual nature, that
makes possible the intercourse of ideas and times
and tribes, must have found utterance in some (Eter-
nally valid form of thought and conduct.
The difference between ancient and modern civiliza-
Ancientand tlou is not to bc explained by referring to
r^es'^f Christianity, whether as a new religious ideal
civilization, or Hfc grafted into the process of history, or as
the natural consummation of this process. The Chris-
tian ideal is but a single force among others, all equally
in the line of movement. Civilization is now definitely
traceable to a great variety of influences, among
which that of Race is probably the most prominent ;
its present breadth and fulness being the result of a
fusion of the more energetic and expansive races ; while
the freedom and science, which are its motive power,
have found in the manifold ideals of the Christian
Church on the whole quite as much hindrance as help.
INTRODUCTORY. 5
But, apart from the causes of difference between
ancient and modern conceptions of life, the fact itself
may be described as simply the natural difference be-
tween the child and the man. This transition is not
marked in either case by sudden changes in the nature
of growth, nor by the engrafting of new faculties, nor
by special interferences of the kind called " supernat-
ural," whatever that may mean, but is gradual and
normal. Reflection supplants instinct, and, with the
self-consciousness which brings higher powers and
bolder claims, enters the criminality of which the child
was less capable. In the child there was more than
childishness ; for his whole manhood was there in germ.
The leaf needs no special miracle to become a flower ;
nor does the child, to become a man. The whole
-process of growth is the miracle, — product of a divine
force that transcends while pervading it.
The history of Religion follows the same law. There
is no point where Deity enters ; for there is no ^.^^^j^^jj
point w^here Deity is absent. There is no need of thenam-
of divine interference, where the \e\'y law by
which all proceeds is itself divine. It is as tenderly
faithful to minutest needs at the beginning as at any
later staoj-e of o-rowth. Whatever forms may arise,
they require neither fresh legitimation nor explanation,
since their germs lay in the earlier forms, their finest
fruit encloses the primal seeds, and history, when
read backward, is discerned to have been natural
prophecy.
Thus there are differences of higher and lower in
the forms of revelation ; but there is no such thing as
a revealed religion in distinction from natural religion.
So, too, spiritual and physical difler ; but natural can
be opposed to spiritual only in a very restricted and
6 INTRODUCTORY.
questionable sense. Any distinction thus indicated
must lie within the limits of each and every religion
taken by itself. It cannot mark off one positive relig-
ion from another, still less one from the rest; since,
whatever meanings be given to these terms, every
such religion will be found to have its own spiritual
and natural sides, if any one has them.
Christianity is nevertheless constantly opposed, as
False pre- a " Spiritual" religion, to the earlier faiths, as
tensions set i ,7 ' r ,^
up for Chris- merely natural ones ; as ii there were some
tianity. esscutlal coutradictiou to truth and good in
our human nature, which was abolished by the advent
of Jesus. The history of religion, so far from teach-
ing such a schism between the human and the divine,
— or this bridging over at a certain epoch of a gulf
which, by its very definition, was impassable, — de-
monstrates the exact contrary, — a substantial unity
of God and Man beneath all outward alienations. It
points to perfection in the laws of human nature, under
all the varj'ing phases of human character ; to con-
stitutional health unshaken by the diseases incident to
growth ; to moral and spiritual recuperation, as human
as the vices that required it; to divine iaimanence,
under finite conditions, from the beo;inninof onwards.
Universal Religion, then, cannot be any one, cx~
wher is the ^^^^•^^*'^^6^» 0^ tlic great positive religions of
Universal thc world. Yct it is really what is best in
each and every one of them ; purified from
baser inter-mixture and developed in freedom and
power. Being the purport of nature, it has been ger-
minating in every vital energy of man ; so that its
elements exist, at some stage of evolution^ in every
great religion of mankind.
If any belief fails to abide this test, the worse for its
INTRODUCTORY. 7
claims on our religious nature. " If that were true
which is commonly taken for granted," wrote Cud-
worth/ "that the generality of the Pagan nations
acknowledged no sovereign muncn, but scattered their
devotions amongst a multitude of independent deities,
this would much have stumbled the nattirality of the
divine idea ; " an effect equivalent, in his large and
clear mind, to disproval of the divineness itself.
As distinctive Christianity was in fact but a single
step in a for ever unfolding process, so those Riahtsofthe
earlier beliefs are disparaged when they are ^^^^^ Faiths.
made to point to it as their final cause. They stand, as
it has stood, in their own right ; justified, as it ha's been,
by meeting, each in its own day and on its own soil,
the demands of human nature. They point forward,
but not to a sing^le and final revelation enterinof history
from without their line, and reversins^ at once their
whole process in its new dealing with their attained
results. They point forward ; but it is with the proph-
ecy of an endless progress, which no distinctive name,
symbol, authority, or even ideal, can foreclose. They
are misrepresented, when they are held to be mere
" forerunners " or " types " in the interest of a later
faith, which has in fact entered into the fruit of their
labors, and in due season transmits its own best to
the fresh forces that are opening up a larger unity,
and already demandinof a new name and a broader
■J o
communion. They are misrepresented, when, to con-
trast them* with what is simply a successor, they are
called " preparations for the truth of God." The exi-
gencies of Christian dogma have required that they
should even be described as mere " fallacies of human
reason," tending inevitably to despair; a charge re-
^ Preface to Intellectual System of the Universe.
8 INTRODUCTORY.
futed alike by the laws of science and the facts of
history, since man never did, and never can, despair.
Prejudices of this nature, inherent, it would seem, in
the make-up of a distinctive religion, which forbid its
disciples to render justice to other forms of faith, are
rapidly jnelding to the larger scope and freer method
of inquiry peculiar to our times.
Every historical religion embodies the sacred person-
Misrepre- ality of man ; announcing his infinite relations
sentation of .^. .. ^y. .
them. to hie, duty, destmy. Yet it has been an al-
most invariable instinct of the Christian world to ignore
this presence of the soul in her own phases of belief,
and to hold " heathenism " to be her natural foe. How-
ever non-Christian morality and sentiment may have
harmonized with what is best in the New Testament,
it has seldom been accorded the name of revelation.
Although there is always a comparatively intelligent
orthodoxy, which assents to the idea of a divine im-
manence in all ages, yet the divinity thus recognized
being, after all, "///^ Christ ^'^ — and moreover the Christ
of especial tradition, — and, further still, this Christ in
a merely preliminary^ and provisional form, — there can
be but little freedom in such appreciation of the faith
or virtue extant in non-Christian ages. A mode of pre-
senting these, not unlike that of the early apologists of
the Church* is common even with writers of the so-
called liberal sects ; while, with the more exclusive
ones, to praise the heathen being regarded as despoil-
ing Christianity, it is an easy step to the inference that
Christianity is exalted by referring heathenism to the
category of delusions and snares. And it is not too
much to say, upon the whole, that the most affirmative
treatment of the older religions would hardly suffice to
adjust the balance fairly, and to place them on their
INTRODUCTORY. 9
real merits before the conscience of a civilization which
has, until very recently, expended almost all its hospi-
tality on the claims of Christianity alone. ^
Many of those who write in the interest of denomi-
national efforts have trained themselves to shrink from
no assumptions in the line of their purpose ; while others
are blinded by its logic to the most patent facts of his-
tory. It has been common to deny boldly that moral
and religious truth had any positive existence for the
human mind before the Christian epoch ; to assume
that the Sermon on the Mount actually introduced into
human nature that very love and trust to whose pre-
existing power in the hearts of its hearers it could
itself have been but an appeal. As if ideal principles
could have been imported into man by a special
teacher, or be traced back to some moment of arrival,
like commercial samples or inventions in machinery !
So powerful is a traditional religious belief to efface the
perception that every moral truth man can apprehend
must be the outgrowth of his own nature, and has al-
1 We may mention, as in striking contrast to this general record of Christendom, such
works as Dupuis' Origmes de Tons les Cidies, Constant's De la Religion, Creuzer's
Synibolik, Duncker's Geschichte des Alierthnnis, Cousin's Lectures and Fragments on
the History of Philosophy, Denis' Theories et I dees Morales datis PAfitiquite, Quinet's
Genie des Religions, Michelet's Bible de VHumanite, Menard's Morale avant les
Philosophes, Mrs. Child's Progress of Religious Ideas, and R. W. Mackay's Prog-
ress of the Intellect. To these, in the special field of Oriental Literature, we must
add the Shemitic studies of Renan and Michel Nicolas ; "and those of Abel Remu
sat, Riickert, Lassen, Roth, and Miiller, on the remoter Eastern races. All of these
are distinguished from the mass of writers on this theme by a spirit of universality,
which proves how far the scholarship of this age has advanced beyond the theologicaJ
narrowness of Bossuet, the critical superficiality of Voltaire, and the hard negation of
the so-called rationalistic schools of Lobeck and Voss. But it is to be observed that these
scholars are still reputed heretical, and stand in disfavor with distinctive Christianity in
exact proportion to their historical impartiality. Of unequalled significance are Lessing's
Treatise on the Education of the Hutnan Race, and Herder's Ideas of a Philosophy
of Man; works of marvellous breadth, freedom, and insight, to which, more than to any
other historical and literary influences, we must assign the parentage of modem thought
in this direction. Heine finely says of Herder, that, "instead of inquisitorially judging
nations according to the degree of their faith, he regarded humanity as a harp in the hands
of a great master, and each people a special string, helping to the harmony of the whole." ,
lO INTRODUCTORY.
ways been seeking to reach expression, with greater
or less success.
Until very recently it was the most confident com-
monplace of New England preaching that all positive
belief in immortality came into the world with Jesus.
And it is still repeated, as a fact beyond all question,
that no other religion besides Christianity ever taught
men to bear each other's burdens, or preached a gospel
to the poor.
Nor has there been wanting a somewhat discredit-
able form of special pleading, for the purpose of
reducing the claims of heathenism to the smallest pos-
sible amount; a grudging literalism, a strict construc-
tion, or a base rendering, of ancient beliefs; which
would prove every apparent spiritual perception a
phantom of fancy or blind hope, or else a mirage
reflected from the idealism of the present on the back-
ground of the past. Resolving the fair imaginations
and delicate divinations of the childlike races into
mockery betrays, however, far more scepticism in
the critic than in the race he wronofs. The same
disposition has often arisen from philosophical prej-
udice. Thus the desire of Locke to disprove the
notion of innate ideas led him to a degree of unbelief
in this direction, which has had noticeable effect on
subsequent thought.
But we have yet to mention one of the worst effects
of traditional religion on the treatment of history. It
is still held consistent with Christian scholarship to
deny moral earnestness and practical conviction to the
noblest thinkers of antiquity, in what they have af-
firmed of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood
of man. They were " theorists, not believers ; " " talked
finely about virtues, but failed to apply them ; " "gave
INTRODUCTORY. II
no such meanings to their great words as we give to
them ; " were " aristocrats in thought, whispering one
doctrine to their disciples, and preaching another to
the people ; " and so on. All of which is not only ex-
aggerated or false in details, but in its principle and
method utterly destructive of historical knowledge.
Substantially, too, it amounts to rejecting all founda-
tion for morality in the nature of man, and the constant
laws of life. Critics of this temper have not now the
doctrinal excuse of Calvin, who ascribed the apparent
virtues of the heathen to hypocrisy ; and Dugald Stewart
was hardly more wanting than they must be in the true
spirit of scholarship, when be met the first modern
revelations of Oriental wisdom with the charge that
the Sanskrit lancfuaore was a mere recent invention of
the Brahmans, and Sanskrit literature an imposture.
The larire historical relations of the Roman Catholic
Church have permitted its scholars to gather up the
spiritual wisdom of the heathen, though in the interest
of its own authority.^ But even this appreciation, such
as It was, the Reformation included in its sweeping
malediction upon a "Church of mere human tradi-
tions." And Protestantism, with few exceptions, has
continued to show, in Its treatment of non-Christian
piety and morality, the narrow sympathies incident to
a self-centred and exclusive movement of reaction, and
to an attitude inherentlv sectarian.
When other grounds of depreciation failed, there
remained the presumption that all such outlying truth
must have be.en carried over into Pagan records by
Christian or Hebrew hands. In its origin, doubtless,
this idea was the natural out""rowth of Christian en-
thusiasm, and the sign of a geniality and breadth in the
* See especially Lamennais, Essai sur Vhtdiffcrence en Matiire de Religion.
12 INTRODUCTORY.
religious consciousness which was reaching out every-
where to find its own. But there was also a dogmatic
interest in the development of these claims ; and this
foreclosed the paths of fair inquiry. Just as the i\lexan-
drian Jews referred Greek philosophy to Moses (some of
them even resorted to pious frauds to prove it) , so un-
der the exigency of their creeds of depravity and natural
incapacity, of atonement, incarnation, and mediation,
Christians have been impelled to trace all ancient
piety to their own records ; to imagine late interpola-
tions or communications with Jewish doctors or Chris-
tian apostles, in explanation of what are really but
natural correspondences of the religious sentiment in
different races. And when for such imputed influence
there could not be found even the shadow of a historical
proof, w^ell-reputed writers in all times have not been
wanting, who dared to affirm it without hesitation upon
-purely a priori grounds.^
A common method of dealing with the relative claims
of positive religions is illustrated in a recent writer,-
whose extensive reading is almost nullified for the
purposes of comparative theology and ethics by the
absolutism of his authoritative creed. He beoins with
affirming that "Christianity will tolerate no rival; that
they who wish to raise a tabernacle for some other
master must be warned that Christ, and Christ alone,
^ Thus Hyde (a.d. 1700) supposes that the Persians must have been converted from
idolatry by Abraham, and that their fire-altars have been imitations of that of Jerusalem ;
and a writer in the BibliotJieca Sacra (1S59) attributes the Avesta to the prophet Daniel,
and declares that the Peisians must have borrowed their notion of a Messiah from the
" revealed religion of the Hebrews." Another instance of the ^me kind is the attempt,
not very scrupulously conducted, to derive the moral jihilosophy and spiritual faith of
Seneca from St. Paul, so thoroughly defeated by Hilgenfeld {Zeitschr. d. IViss- Theol.
185S).
* Hardwick, Christ and other Masters, i. pp. 39, 43. Examples of the extreme inca-
pacity of this learned writer to render justice to pre-Christian beliefs may be found on
pages 333 and 336 of the first volume.
INTRODUCTORY. I3
is to be worshipped;" and proceeds to state the hmlts
of his recognition of character in the theory that '" the
most effectual way of defending Christianity is not to
condemn all the virtues of distinguished heathens, but
rather to make them testify in its favor," — not at all,
be it observed, in their own. All of which reminds
us of St. Augustine's sa3ang, that whatever of truth the
Gentiles taught should be " claimed by Christians from
its heathen promulgators, as unlawful possessors of it,
just as the Hebrews spoiled the Egyptians ;" a process
of historical justice still extensively practised by the
Church.
It is not surprising that appreciative Orientalists
should be moved to enter their protest with some
warmth acjainst audacities like those here mentioned.
"The reaction from extravagant theories goes too far,"
exclaims Max Miiller, " if every thought which touches
on the problems of philosophy is to be marked indis-
criminately as a modern forgery ; if every conception
which reminds us of Moses, Plato, or the Apostles, is
to be put down as necessarily borrowed from Jewish,
Greek, or Christian sources, and foisted thence into the
ancient poetry of the Hindus." Friedrich von Schle-
gel at the outset of Oriental studies, as well as Muller
at a later stage, found it necessary to reprove this dis-
position among Christian scholars. Yet he himself
does not hesitate to use Oriental errors to point an
appeal to Christianity as " affording the only clew to
principles too lofty to have been elicited by human
reason." ^
It is time the older religions were studied in the
light of their own intrinsic values. They are at Their inde-
once spontaneities of desire and faith, and ele- ^^^."'^^"^ ''^'.
* India?i Literature.^ B. iii. ch. iv.
14 INTRODUCTORY.
ments in an indivisible unity of growth, which in-
cludes at each stage natural guarantees of all that
has since been or shall yet be attained. We should
go back to them now, in the maturity of science, with
something of the tenderness we feel for our own
earliest intuitions and emotions ; with a reverent use,
too, of those faculties of imagination and contempla-
tion which are our real way of access to essential rela-
tions and eternal truths. For the race as for the
individual, —
" The child 's the father of the man ;
And we could wish our days to be
^ound each to each by natural piety."
The first universal principle of religion is that all
Ideal eie- g^Q^t belicfs havc .their ideal elements; just as
ments. jj^ ^]-^g natural world the bud is not a bud
merely, but the guarantee of a flower. And it is these
with which we are mainly concerned, as pointing to
fulfilments beyond themselves, in a future that will
not be mortgaged to any names, nor to any claims.
They are that promise in the first belief, which the last
cannot fulfil alone ; the dream which only their mutual
recognition can interpret. And it becomes us to find
in our own experience the secret which explains how
they have met the problems of ages and answered the
prayers of generations.
Illustrations of these ideal elements, high-water
marks of ancient faith, readily suggest themselves.
The religious toleration prevailing in China from
very early times is not fairly estimated when it is
shown to have lacked that deep moral earnestness and
spiritual dignity which distinguish the highest forms
of modern religious liberty in Europe or America.
INTRODUCTORY. I5
The question for our religious philosophy is, whether
it is not of essentially the same nature ; a germ out of
which that highest freedom might come by pure force
of the familiar laws of social and scientific growth, by
the intercourse of races and the intimacies of diverse
beliefs; whether it has not, even on its own ground,
reached a point of development, in certain instances or
certain respects, which makes these our greater out-
ward opportunities look less than we thought them ;
and whether it may not hold elements of moral value
whereof our culture needs the infusion. Similarly
with the self-abneof-ation of the Buddhist. It is not that
perfect devotion of the human powers to social good
which would involve the best culture and the larofest
practical efficiency. Neither is this, we may add, the
quality and extent of the same virtue, even as illus-
trated and taught in the Christian records. But to
suppose that there would be need either of miraculous
re-enforcement or essential change, to unfold Buddhis-
tic self-denial into the best morality and piety known to
our time, would be to ignore the fact that it has shown
itself fully equal to these in the spirit of practical
benevolence, and in ardent zeal for an ideal standard
of purity and truth. In the same way, an implicit germ
of Monotheism, even in the "element-worship" of the
early Aryans, fully guarantees progress into the pure
and definite Theism of the best Indo-European minds ;
and shows the assumption of a divine deposit of this
central truth with the Shemitic Hebrew^s alone, for dis-
tribution to the rest of mankind, to be entirely ground-
less and gratuitous. Thus the cardinal virtues and
beliefs belong not to one religion,' but to all religions;
and the diversities of form into which each of these
ideals is broken by differences of race and culture do
1 6 INTRODUCTORY.
not affect its essential identity in them all. We every-
where find ourselves at home in the world's great faiths,
through their common appeal to what is nearest and
most familiar to us in solving the great central facts
and relations with which the soul is for ever called to
deal. Everywhere we greet essential meanings of the
unity of God with man, of fate and freedom, of sacri-
fice, inspiration, progress, immortality, practical du-
ties and humanities, just as we everywhere find the
mysteries of birth and death, the bliss of loving and
sharing, the self-respect of moral loyalty, the stress
of ideal desire.
It will be found, in following the course of these
studies, that all those forms of moral and spiritual per-
ception which are wont to be regarded as peculiar gifts
of Christianity are visible through the crude social
conditions of the old Asiatic communities ; in such
brave struggle, too, for growth as demonstrates not only
their vitality under those conditions, but also the fact
that they fulfil functions inherent and constant in the
nature of man. Such are the recognition of ultimate
good through transient evil ; of spiritual gain through
suffering and hindrance ; of freedom through accept-
ance of divinely natural conditions ; of love, beyond a
thought of constraining law ; of the rightful authority
of the soul over the senses ; of the sacredness of con-
science, and of somewhat immutable in its decrees ;
of the inevitableness of moral penalty, and the beauty
of disinterested motive ; of invincible remedial energies
in the spiritual universe ; of Divine Fatherhood and
Human Brotherhood, and Immortal Life.
Our advantage over older civilizations will thus be
Wherein sccu to cousist not, as is generally imagined,
lies our ad- . ^ . ^ , . , ,
vantage. 1^^ souic ncw lorcc, miused mu-aculously, or
INTRODUCTORY. I7
Otherwise, by the Christian religion ; but in some-
thing of a quite different nature. It is found, in fact,
in tlie immense special development of the under-
standing ; of the faculties of observation and the forces
of analysis ; in the advancement of science, and tlie
fusion and friction of races ; and, finally, in the wealth
of practical material opened to all. So impressive is
this growth of the understanding, and the sciences
thereon dependent, that writers like Buckle go to the
extent of inferring that morality and religion, on the
other hand, as being the comparatively "unchanging
factors" in history, have had "no influence on prog-
ress." But this is to reduce history to a sum in
arithmetic. History is a living process. Its factors
are dynamic, and are not to be pulled apart like dead
bones or a heap of sticks. These ethical forces are
"unchanging," only in the sense of being constant and
unfailing; and the mental growth, which clears their
vision and develops their practical capacities, in fact
enables them to exert an ever-increasing influence, a
completer fulfilment of their own ideal.
And so, in holding the vantage of modern civiliza-
tion io lie specially in the sphere of the understanding,
I do not overlook the force with which the manifold
ideals of Christian belief have wrought, like other and
older ones, at its vast looms of productive power. But
I note also how perfectly these variations in the relig-
ious ideal of Christianity correspond with and depend on
the steps of intellectual progress ; how analogous they
are to those of other religions ; and finally, a point of
no light import, how little what is broadest and best in
our civilization has to do with what is distinctive in
Christian faith, — namely, its exclusive concentration on
Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. It is, moreover, pre-
2
l8 INTRODUCTORY.
cisely in its moral and religious aspects that the Chris-
tendom of eighteen centuries can claim least practical
superiority to the older civilizations.
I have sought to bring into view a law of progress,
Spiritual ^^ which the most important transitions in
Reaction, rcligious history find their true explanation.
I refer to Sfirittial Reaction. It is mainly from
habitual disregard of this familiar law in its broader
aspects that such transitions have been referred to
special divine interference with the natural processes
of history.
It is commonly supposed that natural growth in
things moral and spiritual can proceed only in a direct
line. When a divine life appears in a degenerating
age, this theory requires the inference that, natural
human forces having become effete and exhausted, a
miraculous interference, like the "creation of new
species " in the old theory of biology, had become
necessary. What else should stop the downward ten-
dency of " unaided nature "? Such is the usual method
of accounting for Jesus of Nazareth and his religion ;
such the principle of historical construction which is
assumed throughout the growth of Christian dogma : —
the Christ and his gospel were a new spiritual species.
So far as Jesus is concerned, this theory in fact rests
on a very superficial survey of the condition of man-
kind at his birth ; since his ethical and spiritual faith
had their tap-roots within his native soil, and followed
a line of strong democratic and spiritual tendencies in
that age. Yet it is also true both of the Roman Empire
as a whole, and of the old faiths that were perishing in
its bosom, that social and religious life had, on the
whole, become fearfully degenerate. Grant this to
the fullest extent possible, yet "miraculous inter-
INTRODUCTORY. IQ
ference" need not be assumed in explanation of the
revival.
For there is a law of self-recovery by reaction, in
mind as well as in matter; different indeed from that,
as developing not an equivalent, but a new and greater
force. It has been described as " forbidding that vicious
ideas or institutions shall go so far as their principle
logically demands." ^ It strikes back individuals and
nations from degeneracy. It restrains excess in the
passions with timely warnings. And it shows us each
historic period hastening to an extreme in some special
direction, only that the next may be forced into doing
justice to a different and balancing class of energies,
and so in good time all faculty be liberated into free
play. This natural law of reaction is quite as essen-
tial and constant as the law of steady linear growth ;
though perhaps, when clearly apprehended, it will be
found to be but a more interior and less obvious form
thereof. It is not only essential to the explanation of
primitive Christianity in its relation to the degeneracies
of the epoch, but thoroughly competent to that end.
It is adequate to prove the phenomenon a sign not that
the spiritual forces of human nature had become ex-
hausted, but that they were exhaustless, since even
suppression only nerved them to unprecedented vigor.
Of course this natural solution of religious progress
does not exclude personal or social inspiration,
Inspiration.
in any rational sense of the word. It leaves to
relifrious orenius, as to intellectual, its own unfathomed
mystery, its immediate insight, its spontaneity, its en-
thusiasm, its fateful mastery of life and of men. It
leaves unquestioned the fact that there is an element
in the present instant which the past cannot explain.
* Guizot, History of Civilization.
20 INTRODUCTORY.
Nay : it affirms the constancy of this transcendence
and of this primacy in the instantaneous fact of spirit-
ual perception. It recognizes the special energy of
intuition in the saint and the seer.
But it implies that religious genius also has its con-
ditions, and inspiration its laws ; and it demands that
in this respect they be placed in the same line with
intellectual and poetic genius, even if in advance of
them. They are not less purely human than these,
either in their original source, or in the law of their
appearance.
The energy of all these forces in the early Oriental
world has seemed to me a very noble illustration of
their universality. And I may add that we need not
be surprised to find, amidst the weaknesses of spiritual
childhood, certain superiorities also, incident to that
stage, in the qualities of imagination, intuition, and
faith, over maturer civilizations.
In point of moral earnestness and fidelity also, it
admits of serious question whether what we
Religions •••
judged by Call thc highcst form of civilization is an ad-
eir ruits. ^^j^^g upou the phascs of faith it has been
accustomed to contemn. Admitting the clearer light
in which science has revealed the laws of social prog-
ress, it would be difficult to prove that races in this
»espect far behind us are in any degree our inferiors
'II those qualities of the heart and the conscience which
(oad to the faithful service of what one worships, and
the honest practice of what he believes. I venture
the prediction that we shall yet learn of the Oriental '
nations many lessons in moral simplicity and integrity.
Nothing could be more unfortunate for those who wish
to exalt Christianity by comparison with Heathenism
than to rest their argument on what they call "judging
INTRODUCTORY . 2 1
religions by their fruits." A distinguished orator has
said, "My answer to Buddha is India, past and pres-
ent." It would be as reasonable for a Buddhist to say,
"My answer to Christ is Judaism, past and present;"
for India I'cjcctcd Buddha, as Judaism did Christ.
What India is and has been, the Western world will
probably be better able to state half a century hence
than it is now. But if the power of a specific religion
is shown in its ability to mould a civilization into the
image of its own moral and spiritual ideal, what shall
be said of one whose results after eighteen centuries
of preaching and instituting our orator must charac-
terize by saying that no one would know its Founder if
he came among us to-day ; that there is no Christian
community at all ; and that Christianity goes round
and stamps every institution as a sin? We need not
give too literal a construction to expressions whose
substantial meaning is justified by the facts. What we
would note is that these admissions concerniniif the
practical fruits of Christianity are made by its noblest
disciples ; and that they virtually confess its inadequacy
to meet the actual demands of social progress.
Nevertheless, its religious ideal is still confidently
presented as all productive, and final. Here is evi-
dently some misunderstanding of the origin of these
nobler demands.
It is in fact not the Christ-ideal at all, as is here
imagined, but an advancing moral standard, due to
many new causes, that now criticises the institutions in
question. Such institutions were in fact unmolested
by definite Christian precepts or prohibitions for many
ages. Our reformer's inspiration is indeed as old as
Christianity, — nay, more than that,, as old as heroism
and love ; but its practical present resources lie in
22 INTRODUCTORY.
science and liberty, and even represent the triumph of
secular interests over distinctively religious opposition.
And every fresh task of the reformer is made con-
ceivable only through the accomplishment of the last.
How then can it have been evolved solely out of the
faith and virtue of eighteen centuries ago? It is not
the fruit of Christianity alone, biit generated by living
experience, in the breadth and freedom of modern
civilization.
On this whole subject of judging religions by their
fruits, we are yet to collect the data for a just decision ;
since it involves the study of civilizations whose inner
movements have hitherto been in great measure sealed
from the view of our Western world.
Man=Man is the broad formula of historical science,
„ . as well as of practical brotherhood. But it
Meaning ■*•
of natural must uot bc supcrficially interpreted. It does
equally. ^^^ mcan thc falsehood and egotism of com-
munistic theories, which disintegrate personality and
society alike in the name of an unconditioned "equality"
which natural ethics nowhere allows. It means that in
every age and race, under the varying surface-currents
of organization and intellectual condition, you shall
find a deep-sea calm, — the same essential instincts
and insights, aspirations, tendencies, demands. The
first vital problem of historical research is to find
the constant factor, the guarantee of immutable and
eternal laws, by means of the variables. Its first
duty is never to pause at mere negation, nor in-
dulge in arrogant disparagement, but to draw from
every form of earnest faith or work its witness of im-
mutable law and endless good. Not till this is done,
can we wisely apply analysis, and interpret the diver-
sities of human belief.
INTRODUCTORY. 23
The inspiration of modern physical studies is in the
universality of their idea and aims. This tine ^, .
•^ Universality
idealism in the exploration of nature, by lens in physical
and prism and calculus, which casts theologies
into the background of human interest, is preparing
the way for a religion of religions, whose Bible shall
be the full word of Human Nature. How opulent the
time with encyclopedic survey and comparative sci-
ence ! Humboldt's " Cosmos " was representative of
the drift of the century : a search for that all-inspher-
ing harmony, of which the worlds and ages and races
are chords. Humboldt, pursuing the idea of unity
through immeasurable deeps of law, with a reverence
that is too full of the spirit of worship to need the cur-
rent phraseology of religion; Pritchard, tracing the
physiological, and Miiller the linguistic, affinities of
the human tribes ; Ritter, unfolding the function of
*every continent and sea, every mountain range and
river basin, in the development of humanity as a whole ;
Kirchhoft^ and Bunsen, with their successors, applying
spectrum analysis to the rays of every star, till the
determination of the "sun's place in the universe" is
but a sino;le element in the immeasurable si^rnificance
of light now opening before this marvellous instru-
ment of research ; Tyndall, making the subtlest phases
of force a revelation of poetry and philosophy, and a
delight for the general mind, — these, with others not
less earnestly pursuing the unities of law, whether
wisely or imperfectly interpreting its evolution and
defining its higher facts and relations, represent the
physical science of our time.
How should the spiritual nature fail to be explored
by the same instinct ? It is a deepening sense of the
unity of human experience, and so of its reliability as
24 INTRODUCTORY.
well as dignity, that banishes supernaturalism, affirms
universal laws in place of miracle, and bids us rest in
them with entire trust; "loving," as the Stoic Aurelius
said, " whatever happens to us from nature, because
that only can happen by nature which is suitable, and
it is enough to remember that law rules all." The
growing belief that the stability of law is the guar-
antee of universal good, or, to translate it into the
language of the spirit, that Law means Love, is the
sign that Love, in its practical and universal sense, is
itself becoming the all-solving calculus and all-analyz-
ing prism of our spiritual astronomy, — the pursuer,
diviner, interpreter of Law.
And therefore they who disapprove our inevitable
, . exodus from distinctive relifjions, upon the
In relation ^ ^ *-* *■
to Human- grouud that Organizing good works would be
"^* better than reconstructing theology, have very
slight comprehension of that which they distrust. It is *
the very spirit of humanity that is moving in this relig-
ious emancipation ; clearing its own vision, reaching out
to consistency and self-respect, and finding its sphere
to be, as Herder has said, ''not merely universal as
human nature, but properly no less than human
nature itself."^
"The object of all religions," sings the Persian
Hafiz, " is alike. All men seek their beloved. And
is not all the world love's dwelling? Why talk of a
mosque or a church?" Hindu teachers have said:
"The creed of the lover differs from other creeds.
God is the creed of those who love Him ; and to do
good is best, with the followers of every faith." " He
alone is a true Hindu whose heart is just, and he only
a good Mussulman whose life is pure." "Remembei
* Philosophy of Many B. viii. ch. v.
INTRODUCTORY. 25
Him who has seen numberless Mahomets, Vishnus,
Sivas, come and go, and who is not found by one
who forgets or turns away from the poor." " The
common standpoint of the three rehgions," say the
Chinese, "is that they insist on the banishment of evil
desire."
The Chinese Buddhist priest prays at morning that
the music of the bell which wakens him to his matins
"may sound through the whole world, and that every
living soul may gain release, and find eternal peace in
God." ^ The Buddhist Saviour^ vows "to manifest
himself to every creature in the universe, and never
to arrive at Buddhahood till all are delivered from sin
into the divine rest, receiving answer to their prayers/'
What else, or wherein better, is the claim of the
Christian or the Jew?
It is so far from beini:^ true that the effort to lift
religions to a common level is antagonistic to the
humanities of the age, that these humanities could
not possibly dispense with such an effort. It is their
natural expression. It is the demand not so much
of comparative science even, as of instant social dut\^.
Is it not quite time that the excuses which religious
caste has constantly furnished for treating the heathen
as lawful prey of the Christian in all quarters of the
globe were finally refuted, by bringing to view the
unities of the religious sentiment, and the ethical
brotherhood of mankind? Is it not time that claims
of exclusive revelation ceased, w^hich can only flatter
this spirit of caste ?
Fourier tried to circumnavicfate the cjlobe of human
"passions," that he might show how it could be regu-
lated for the utmost good of all : surely a magnificent
^ Catena of Buddhist Scriptures. ^ Avalokitiswara.
26 INTRODUCTORY.
aim, however be3^ond any man's accomplishment, and
whatever his mistakes of method. A similar idealism
testifies to the same inspiration in all leading move-
ments of modern thought. It is the humanitarian
instinct that guarantees them : it is this instinct that
forbids their falling away from the very principles
that make them colossal in stature and infinite in
reach. Hence the new sciences of mind, theories of
progress, analyses of social function, brave and broad
claims of equal opportunity for the races and the
sexes. Let us be assured that Liberty, Democracy,
Labor Reform, Popular Progress, are to reach beyond
the assertion of exclusive rights or selfish claims into
full recognition of universal duties ; that liberty is not
to stop in license, nor democracy in greed and aggres-
sion, nor progress to be earned through bloody retri-
butions alone.
And this humanitarian instinct, which impels each
private current towards the universal life, is not only
recreating literature and art, but changing the heart
of scholarship also. It demands an ideal culture, that
shall give breadth and freedom to our philosophy of
life. It culls the choicest thouo-ht of all time. It
would nurse every child at the breast of that oldest
wisdom of love which Jesus confessedly but repeated
as the substance of the Hebrew Law and Prophets,
and which in them was but the echo of all noble
human experience from the beginning of time. It
transmutes that one mother's blood which flows
through the veins of all ages to practical nerve and
manly sinew of present service. It will discern the
fine gold in all creeds and rites, which gave them en-
during currency. It will read in sphynx and pyramid,
in prehistoric bone heap and sculptured wall, in Druid
INTRODUCTORY. 2'J
Circles and Greek Mysteries, and Shemitic Prophe-
cies and the antique Bibles and Codes, the varied
hieroglyph of man's assurance of Deity, duty, and
immortality. It will trace through all transforma-
tions of faith the eternal right of man's ideal to re-
interpret life and nature, and to change old gods for
new.
Even so decided an opponent of naturalistic religion
as Guizot bears witness to the constructive spirit of
this aspiration to a larger synthesis of faith. "What
gives the modern movement against Christianity its
most formidable character," he says, " is a sentiment
which has found heroes and martyrs, the love of truth
at all risks, and despite of consequences, for the sake
of truth and for its sake alone." If such a spirit as
this is "formidable" to Christianity, could there be
stronger proof that the time for that free culture
which it demands is fully come?
The scholar must identify himself with the social
reformer, and demonstrate brotherhood out of Duty of the
the old Bibles and the stammering speech of Scholar.
primitive men. It is his duty to show that the human
arteries beat everywhere with the same royal blood.
It is his duty to help break down the strongholds of
theological and social contempt, and refute the pre-
tences by which strong races have ever justified their
oppression of the weak. He may avail himself of
Comparative Philology, or Comparative Physiology,
or of any other branch of ethnological science. The
materials are at last abundant, the laborers in these
harvests equal to his utmost need. But if all these
resources should prove inadequate ; if the language,
physical organization, and social condition of any
race, should all appear to invite the contempt of
28 INTRODUCTORY.
Christian nations, there is still left the testimony of
the religious sentiment. The essential unity of man
does not rest on physiological, but on psychological
grounds.
A true philosophy of History will know how to
reconcile this identity in the substance with phases of
progressive development. But no theory will serve,
which fails to recognize it as real in every one of
these phases. Formulas are as dangerous as they are
fascinating. Thus Hegel, compelled by his formal
logic, regards the Oriental religions as merely repre-
senting man in the undeveloped state of non-distinc-
tion from nature ; in other words, in pure bondage to
the senses. And so, as elsewhere, his philosophical
generalization plays into the hands of theological prej-
udice. It tells but half the truth. It ignores the fact
that man himself was the soul of these earlier faiths.
There were incessantly noble reactions which pro-
tested against such bondage as he describes, and
justified human nature, as genius and intuition and
free self-consciousness, even in the crude experience
of its earlier children ; although men had not yet
learned to analyze the mysteries of subject and object,
Being and Thought. Let us be admonished by the
hint of the old Buddhist poet : —
"The depths of antiquity are full of light. Scarce-
ly have a few rays been transmitted to us. We are
like infants born at midnight. When we see the sun
rise, we think that yesterday never was."
The opening of China to the Western nations, and
Religious of the West to Chinese emigration and labor,
revolution ^^^ eveuts as momentous in tiieir relii^Ious as
approach- o
ing- in their commercial and political bearings.
INTRODUCTORY. 29
Taken in connection with revolutions in Japan indi-
cating the growth of a liberal policy, and with the rapid
disclosure of the field of Hindu literature and life
during the past half century, they announce a new
phase in the education of Christendom. It is as cer-
tain that the complacent faith of the Christian Church
in itself as the sole depositary of religious truth is to
be startled and confounded by the new experience,
as that the fixed ideas of that huge population which
swarms along the great river-arteries of China, and
heaps flowers in the temples of' spirit-ancestors, and
bows at shrines of Confucius and Fo, are to be as-
tounded at the immense resources of the " outside bar-
barians," and their peculiar worship of Mammon and
Christ. The time has arrived, in the providence of
modern social and industrial progress, for a mutual
interchange of experience between the East and the
West, for which neither was prepared, but which is
quite indispensable to the advancement of both forms
of civilization.
In their natural impatience to count these unknown
millions as converts to Christian theolop:y, the ^,
*-'•' Not an ec-
Churches but feebly comprehend the serious- ciesiasticai
ness of the situation. Dreams of denomina- ^pp^'''""''^
tional trophies won in these realms of Pagan night,
where the tidings of salvation by the power or the
blood of Christ are to come as a lonor-desired dawn
of day, will probably prove illusory. Missionary zeal
has been but a poor spell to conjure with. All its
auguries and exorcisms have failed. The real oppor-
tunity and promise is of another kind. The w^orld of
religion is wider than Christendom has apprehended,
and it is undoubtedly destined to widen in the sight of
man as much as the world of population and trade.
30 INTRODUCTORY.
Christianity, as well as Heathendom, is on the eve of
judgment. It is to discover that it has much to learn
as well as to teach. I firmly believe that in making
the worship of Jesus as "the Christ" — which, more
than any essential difference in moral precept or
religious intuition, forms its actual distinction from
other religions — a prescriptive basis of faith, it will
strike against a mass of outside human experience so
overwhelming as to put beyond doubt the futility of
pressing either this or any other exclusive claim as
authoritative for mankind. I have written in no spirit
of negation towards aught that deserves respect in its
faith or its purpose ; in no disparagement of what is
eternally noble and dear to man in the life of Jesus ;
but with the sincere desire to help in bridging the
gulf of an inevitable transition in religious belief, and
in pointing out the better foundations already arising
amidst these tides that will not spare the ancient foot-
holds and contented finalities of faith. And in this
spirit it is, that, after such serious study of the Re-
ligions of the East, their bibles and traditions, as has
been possible, without direct acquaintance with the
Oriental languages, — through the labors of scholars
like Lassen, Schlegel, Weber, Rosen, Kuhn, Wilson,
Burnouf, Bunsen, Spiegel, Riickert, Miiller, Legge,
Bastian, our own Whitney, and of many others, render-
ing such direct acquaintance comparatively needless,
— I have reached the conviction that these oldest relig-
ions have an exceedingly important function to fulfil in
that present transformation of the latest into a purer
Theism, which is still irreverently denounced as infi-
delity. The mission of Christianity to the heathen is
not only for the overthrow of many of their religious
peculiarities, but quite as truly for the essential mod-
INTRODUCTORY. 3I
ification of its own. The change from distinctive
Christianity to Universal ReHgion is a revohition, com-
pared with which the passage from Judaism to Chris-
tianity itself was trivial.
Here is the practical situation. Christendom is
henceforth to face those older civilizations out x^e sima-
of which its own life has in large measure *'°"-
proceeded, and on which its reactions have hitherto
made scarcely any impression. Brought into intimate
relations with races whose beliefs are more obstinate
than its own, and even more firmly rooted in " super-
natural " claims, it will be obliged to drop all exclu-
siveness and absolutism, defer to the common light
of natural religion, and do justice to instincts and con-
victions that have sustained other civilizations through
longer periods than its own. The movement is not
retrograde, but in the direct line of our own American
growth ; a promise of science and a consequence of
liberty. It can be regarded as a return to bygone
systems only by those whose own feet cling too closely
to special traditions to venture on testing what lies
beyond them. As well think it makes no difference
whether one goes to China with Agassiz in a Pacific
steamer, or as a Middle Age monk across the sands
of Gobi. The new wisdom makes and finds all the
old life new. A richer and deeper synthesis beckons
us, of which telegraph and treaty are but symbols.
There are divine recognitions in that grasp of broth-
erly hands which will soon complete the circuit of the
physical globe.
Scholars have not been wanting who bring us hints
of this large communion from the Scriptures of the
East. Here and there a thouo-htful traveller or a
liberal missionary has noted the brighter facts, that
32 INTRODUCTORY.
tell for human nature, and explain the social perma-
nence and enduring faith of these strange civilizations.
Even from the Catholic Church, as v^e have already
said, have come many w^illing tributes, how^ever per-
verted to the support of its own claims, to the idea
that revelation has in no w^ise been confined to one
person, race, or religion. But the strongest evidence
has failed of its due effect thus far, because the prac-
tical interests of society had not compelled attention
to these distant fields. At last their immensity, as
well as actuality, becomes a fact of common experi-
ence ; and the ethics of Confucius and the piety of the
Vedas are to stand as real and positive before the mind
of Christendom as the mercantile and political inter-
ests that give dignity to this opening of the great gates
of the Morning Land.
" Ex Orient e Lux 1 " Light from the East once
The Prom- morc ! As it came to Greece in the " Sacred
ise. Mysteries " with the Dorians and the Pytha-
goreans and the Chaldaic Oracles ; to Alexandria
in Philo and Plotinus ; to Europe in Judaism and
Christianity ; to the Middle Ages by the Crusades, in
floods of legend and fable, the imaginative lore that
was itself an education of the ideal faculty, and pre-
pared the way for modern liberty and aesthetic cul-
ture, — so now again it comes to modern civilization
through literature and commerce and religious sym-
pathy ; and, as ever before, wdth a mission to help
clear the sight and enlarge the field of belief. Chris-
tendom will not become Buddhist, nor bow to Confu-
cius, nor worship Brahma ; but it will render justice
to the one spiritual nature which spoke in ways as
yet unrecognized, in these differing faiths. It will
learn that Religion itself is more than any positive
INTRODUCTORY. ^3
form under which it has appeared, and rests on broader
and deeper authority than can ever be confined in a
prescribed ideal. The reHgious sentiment demands
freedom from its own exclusive venerations, that it
may recognize principles in their own validity, and
instead of revolving in endless beat around some
pivotal personality, some fixed historic name or sym-
bol, front directly the spiritual laws and facts which
man has ever sought to recognize and express, and
find them ample guaranties of growth, and ministers
of good.
These bearings of the present work on questions
now uppermost in the reliixious conscious-
^ ^ _ ^ Limits and
ness are summed up in the outset, not in Purpose of
order to forestall the reader's judgment on the "'^ ^"^"'^y-
field of inquiry before him, but in justice to that inde-
pendent attitude towards distinctive religions, which is
demanded alike by science, philosophy, and human-
ity, enforced by the results of historical study, and
recognized by religion itself as a new birth of in-
tellectual freedom and spiritual power. While our
criticism must point out deficiency of this universal
element, and hostility to it, wherever they appear, yet
the substantial spirit and motive of these studies is not
polemical nor even theological. As far as they go
in regions of research whose immensity the largest
scholarship does but open (and of these I would be
understood as but aspiring to sketch the general out-
line) , they would record the ethical and spiritual im-
port of those older civilizations, whose seats were in
India, China, and Persia previous to the Christian
epoch ; with such light from their later forms and
results as may be required for their appreciation. I
would emphasize in them whatever may encourage
3
34 INTRODUCTORY.
respect for human nature, while hiding none of their
darker features ; which indeed do but illustrate the
common inadequacy of all past forms of faith in view
of our new and still advancing ideals, and so must
the more commend religion to the forward step and
aim. Ill-understood beliefs and institutions, whereof
we ourselves are not without representative forms, I
would trace to their roots in the spontaneities of spirit-
ual being, and make as clear as I may the essential
identity of human aspirations, under conditions of ex-
perience and in stages of progress the most diverse.
Finally, within these limits of inquiry, I would note
directions in which the differing civilizations may help
to supply each other's defects ; and, in sum, endeavor
to bring the old antipodal races now practically at our
doors under that light of free and fair inquiry which
justice to them and to the common good requires.
INDIA.
RELIGION AND LIFE.
-oo^^eio*-
I.
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS.
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS.
^ I ^Hx\T elevated region in Central Asia extending
-^ from the Hindu Kuh to the Armenian The Aryan
mountains, which is now known as the pla- Homestead,
teau of Iran, is entitled to be called in an important
sense the homestead of the human family. It was at
least the ancestral abode of those races which have
hitherto led the movement of civilization. Its position
and structure are wonderfully appropriate to such a
function ; for this main focus of ethnic radiation is
also the geographical centre of the Eastern hemi-
sphere. " There, at the intersection of the continental
axes, stands the real apex of the earth." ^ And its
borders rise on every side into commanding mountain
knots and ranges, that look eastward over the steppes
of Thibet and the plains of India, westward down the
Assyrian lowlands towards the Mediterranean, north-
ward over the wide sands of Central Asia, and south-
ward across Arabia and the Tropic Seas. " Where
else," demands Herder, with natural enthusiasm,
if not with scientific knowledge, " should man, the
summit of creation, come into being?" Whatever
answer be given to this still open question, the sym-
bolism of the majestic plateau points, we may suggest,
1 Reclus, The Earth.
40 RELIGION AND LIFE.
to higher human meaning than that of the mere his-
torical beginning of the race.
The languages and mythologies of nearly all the
great historic races, in their widest dispersion, point
back to these mountain outlooks of Iran. Hindu,
Persian, Hebrew, Mongol, kneel towards these vener-
able heights, as their common fatherland ; a primeval
Eden, peopled by their earliest legends with gods and
genii, and long-lived, happy men. The homes of
ancient civilization rose around their bases, as under
the shadow of a patriarchal tent; and there they
were gathered to the dust. The drift of forty centu-
ries of human history lies amidst their recesses, and
strewn over the spaces which they enclose ; attesting
what storms and tides of life have preceded our own ;
vestiges of aspiration and achievement hid in pre-
historic times ; relics of old religions ; inscriptions in
mysterious tongues ; local names, whose vague ety-
mological affinities suggest startling relations between
widely separated ages and races. The highways of
the oldest commerce strike across this plateau, and
out from it on either side ; and caravan tracks of im-
memorial age hint the lines of those primitive migra-
tions that issued from its colossal gates. We seem to
be contemplating a marvellous symbol of the unity of
the human race and of its movement in history ; born
out of the mystic intimacy of Nature with its inmost
meaning.
Of the primeval life of races on this grander Ararat
we know but little. Why indeed should we call it
primeval? It is but a step or two that history or sci-
ence can penetrate towards any form of human life
that would really deserve that name. Should we gain
much by knowing the crudest human conditions, after
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 4I
all? It is said that there are tribes in Thibet that
glory in believing themselves descended from apes.^
Darwinians would probably be content to glory in
merely getting sight of the process, if that could be
found. But even if we should come upon traces of
it, whether in Thibet or elsewhere, would it show the
origin of man, as mind; that is, as Man f This is
a mystery involved in every step of mental evolution ;
in the fact of thinking, now ; and we cannot account
for this evolution by any previous steps. We shall
hardly find the source of our personality by tracking
it backward and downward into noucfht.
I do not even enter here into the question, whether
the eastern or the western edge of the great plateau
was first peopled : or whether Armenia or Bactria
was the earliest centre of ethnic radiation. The
oldest Bibles "belong to the modern history of the
race." What are patriarchal legends, what is Balkh,
" mother of cities," what is Ararat or Belur-Tagh,
what are Aryas or Shemites, what is Adam or Manu,
— to him who explores the pathless, voiceless ages
of prehistoric man? There is no respect of persons
or places in that silence of unnumbered centuries that
shrouds the infancy of the soul.
It suffices to say that in 'the dawn of history we
find the Hindus descendincj from these heiijhts of
Central Asia to the South ,^ the Iranians to the West,
and the Chinese to the East.
Let us turn to that focus of movement, of which we
know the most, — to the Bactrian Highlands, at the
north-eastern extremity of Iran, nestlinor under the
multitudinous heights of the Belur-Tagh and Hindu
^ Klaproth, Asia Polyglotta.
* See proofs and authorities in Muir's Sanskrit Texts^ ii- 306-322.
42 RELIGION AND LIFE.
Kuh. They who have penetrated farthest into these
mountain ranges report that the silent abysses of the
midnight sky with its intensely burning stars, and
the colossal peaks lifting their white masses beyond
storms, impress the imagination with such a sense of
fathomless mystery and eternal repose as no other
region on earth can suggest. The mean altitude of
these summits of Himalaya, the Home of Snow, is lof-
tier than that of any other mountain system in the w^orld ;
and their mighty faces, unapproachable by man, over-
look vast belts of forest which he has not ventured to
explore. From one point Hooker saw twenty snow
peaks, each over twenty thousand feet in height, whose
white ridge of frosted silver stretched over the whole
horizon for one hundred and sixty degrees. Here
are splendors and glooms, unutterable powers, im-
penetrable reserves, correspondent to that spiritual
nature in whose earlier education they bore an es-
sential part.
Here is the mythological Mount Meru of the Hin-
dus, — "centre of the seven worlds, and seed-vessel
of the Universe." Here are Borj and Arvand, the
celestial mountain and river of the Persians. Here
perhaps is the Eden of the Semites. " Kashmir,"
says the Mahabharata, " is all holy, inhabited by
saints." Here is the plateau of Pamer, regarded
throughout Asia as the "dome of the world." "Men
go to the North," say the Brahmanas, "to learn speech."
Here Manu, the Hindu Noah, led by a fish through
the deluge waters, comes to shore on a mountain-top,
and when they subside descends to people the South-
ern land.^ Here the Greeks saw an ideal climate,
allowing every variety of product, wondrously fecund
* Satapatha Br^hmana.
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 4^
in plants, animals, and men ; and guarded from intru-
sion by mysterious tribes and halt-human creatures,
with marvellous powers over the hidden treasures of
the earth. ^ It was the great unwritten Bible of Asia,
the free field of imas^ination and faith. Here was
Balkh, in Oriental tradition the "Mother of Cides,"
the starting-point of culture, the birthplace of the
Zoroastrian fire. Here are sacred lakes and mystic
fountains, the immemorial resort of pilgrims from
every quarter of the East. The Chinese Buddhists
say that a lake on the summit of the Himalaya is the
origin of all the rivers of the world. And in fact, from
the mountain system of which this region is the centre,
the great rivers of Asia descend on every side, — the
Oxus, the Yaxartes, the Yang-tze-kiang, the Brahma-
pootra, the Indus, and the Ganges. Again we cannot
but recognize an impressive symbol of the wealth and
scope of human nature ; and not less of its love of
broad divergence into special forms, made kindred by
far-reaching supplies of one inspiration, ever flowing
from central springs.
It is in a spot so rich in spiritual suggestion that we
are to seek our earliest data for the Natural TheWit-
History of Religion. What ^tere the resources "^^^•
of human nature at that remote epoch when the ances-
tors of the principal modern races dwelt on these high-
lands of Central Asia ? It is only of the Indo-European
family — comprising the historical Hindus, the Per-
sians, and the various races of Europe, excepting
Jews, Turks, Basques, Finns, and Magyars — that we
can render a positive answer. And even of this pre-
eminent family of nations we cannot speak from data
afforded by the ordinary forms of testimony. For we
* Curtius, Strabo, Ptolemy.
44
RELIGION AND LIFE.
have here to do with a period far antecedent, not only
to the oldest Bibles of mankind, but even to the very
notion of such a thino- as the transmission of knowl-
edge. But in these prehistoric deeps, where even the
half-blind guides of mythology and tradition fail, we
greet a fresh source of scientific certainty. It seems
as if the infancy of man became but a starless night,
in respect of all those dubious guides by whose aid we
penetrate the past, in order that the pure testimony of
language, alone illuminating it, might make his divine
origin unmistakable. For language is, as the oldest
faith and the latest science unite to declare it, an inspira-
tion. It is no arbitrary invention, like the steam engine
or the cotton gin ; no mere imitation of natural sounds ;
but the natural result of a perfect correspondence be-
tween the outward organ and the inward processes,
which must have material expression . Its testimony pro-
ceeds from no interested witnesses, from no treacherous
prejudices, from no play of imagination, but from the
certainties of organic law. Men do not invent names
for things of which they have no idea. A people
puts its character and its history into its language,
without hypocrisy and without reserve. It is a spon-
taneous creation. ■ The ^'^ Word" has always been re-
cognized as the fittest syrnbol of truth, as the purest
manifestation of deity.
This unimpeachable witness it is, that testifies of man
in an antiquity where no other is possible. And the
most primitive fact we know of his nature is thus a
certain unconscious honesty^ that discloses his inner
life without disguise.
It is by the testimony of Language that the nations
called Aryan or, more properly, Indo-European, are
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 45
brouo'ht into a sincrle class and referred to a common
origin.^ And the next step has been, to recover out
of the mass of words or roots common to the lan-
guages of these nations as much as possible of the
primitive language spoken by the parent race in its
prehistoric antiquity previous to dispersion into many
branches.^ The best philological scholarship of the
age has been employed upon this reconstruction. It
may fairly be said that we are able already to look
directly in upon the character and condition of these
hitherto unknown ancestors of the Hindu and the Per-
sian, of the Greek and the Roman, the Celt and the
Teuton. No achievement of modern science is more
brilliant or more marvellous. It is the result of a
comparative Philology as subtile as the calculations of
Astronomy. It has evoked from human data hitherto
unintelligible the substance of a lost language and a
forgotten race, as astronomers have applied the strange
perturbations of the solar system to effect the discovery
of hidden planets. It is not over-conhdent to claim
positive certainty for the general result here stated.
Enough is already achieved in this held to justify its
most skilful explorers in claiming for it the name of
Linguistic Palaeontology.^
^ See especially the researches of Bumouf and Bopp.
- We do not mean that Pictet, Eichhotf, Schleicher, Kiihn, Pick, and other scholars,
have succeeded in reconstructing the language actually spoken by the original Indo-
Europeans, out of the radicals afforded by this comparison of tongues. But their re-
searches, though of very unequal value, have resulted in bringing into view a large number
of the ideas and objects which that language was used to designate.
3 Pictet, Origi7tes Indo-Europcenes^ or Les Aryas Primitifs. See also Spiegel's
Avesta, II., Emleit. cxi.-cxv. ; A. Kuhn in Weber's hidiscke Studien, I. 321-563 ; Las-
sen's Indische Alterthumsktmde, I. 527; Miiller, Science 0/ Laiigiuiges, 234-236;
Duncker, Gesfh. d. Alterthiims, III. q ; Schoebel, Rccherches siir la Religion Prem. de
la Race Indo-Europ. (Paris, 1S6S) ; Whitney, Study of Language (Lect. V.); Mu:r,
Sanskrit Texts, II. ; Fick, Worterbiich d. Indog. Sprache.
46 RELIGION AND LIFE.
The common name by which the Indian and Iranian
The Testi- (oi* Pci'sian) branches of this great family des-
mony. ignated themselves was Aryas (in Zend, Air-
yas) ; a title of honor/ which now, after thousands of
years, returns, in scientific nomenclature, to justify
their self-respect by the magnificent record of Euro-
pean civilization. The first fixed datum for our prime-
val people is therefore their name.
It further appears from these researches that the
Aryas lived in fixed habitations, kept herds, and tilled
the soil. They occupied a diversified region, richly
watered and wooded, and highly metalliferous ; its
climate, flora, and fauna corresponding with the de-
scriptions of Bactriana which have come down to us
from the Greek geographers, and which are confirmed
by modern travellers.^ It was cold enough to stir the
blood and to make them number their years by win-
ters. Their houses were roofed, and had windows and
doors.' Barley, the grain of cool climates, was their
commonest cereal. Their wealth was in their cattle.
Names for race, tribe, family relations, property and
trade, for the inn, the guest, the master, the king,
were all taken from words which desio-nated the herd.
They called dawn the " mustering time of the cows ; "
evening, the "hour of bringing them home." They
had domesticated the cow, the sheep, the goat, the
horse, and the dog. The cow was the " slow walker ; "
the ox, " the vigorous one ; " the dog was " speed ; " the
wolf, "the destroyer." They used yokes and axles
and probably ploughs ; wrought in various metals ;
spun and wove ; had vessels made of wood, leather,
terracotta, and metal ; and musical instruments of
^ Compare Greek ape,rr], valor, and German ehre, honor.
3 Pictet, I. 35-42.
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS.
47
shells and reeds. They counted beyond a hundred.
They navigated rivers in oared boats ; fought with
bows, clubs, bucklers, lances, and swords, in battle
chariots and to the sound of trumpets and conchs.
They besieged each other in towns; employed spies,
and reduced their enemies to some kind of servitude,
of which we know not the extent.
Domestic relations rested on sentiments of affection
and respect. There are no signs of polygamy. Patri-
archal absolutism was tempered by natural instincts.
Father meant " the protector ; " mother, " the former
and disposer ; " brother, " the supporter ; " and sister,
"the careful," or "the consoling, pleasing one." The
primitive names of these forms of relationship have
been transmitted with sli<2["ht chancre throuo-h most
branches of the Indo-European race even to the pres-
ent day. And thus the closest domestic ties not only
became, as common speech, the symbols of an ethnic
brotherhood, which time and space are bound to guard
and expand, but were sealed also to immortal mean-
ings for the moral nature by the oldest testimony of
mankind. And the affirmations of conscience, the
words of the Spirit, were not less clearly pronounced,
in other directions.^
The Aryas had clear conceptions of the rights of
property and definite guarantees for their protection.
These guarantees were based on ownership of the
soil where the family altar stood, concentrating the
sentiment of piety. We see at how early a period
men recognized the natural dependence of those
necessary conditions of social order, the family and
^ Kuhn, in Weber's hid. Studien, I. 321-363; Lassen, I. 813; Muller, Oxford
Essays for 1856 ; Weber, Lecture on /W/a (Berlin, 1854) ; Muller, Science of Language^
236; Pictet, II. 716.
48 RELIGION AND LIFE.
the home, on fixed and permanent ownership of
land. Communistic schemes have never yet suc-
ceeded, among the Indo-Europeans, in overcoming
this instinctive wisdom, which loyally maintains the
Family, the Home, and private Property in Land
as mutually dependent factors of civilization. And
we may infer from the sacredness attached by the
Hindus, Greeks, and Romans to bounds, whether by
stones, or by ploughed trenches, or by vacant spaces,
— each famil}^ thus marking off its real estate from
its neighbors, — that this reverence for property limits
was also a trait of the older race of which they were
the branches.^
The Aryas had formalities for transactions of ex-
change and sale, for payment of wages, and for the
administration of oaths. All the essential elements of
social order were evidently present in this primitive
civilization, the cradle of historic races. Law was
designated by a word which meant right. The notion
of justice was associated with the straight line, sug-
gestive of directness and impartiality. Transgression
meant falling off, and oath constraint.^
Their psychological insight surprises us. They
seem to have distinguished clearly the principle of
spiritual existence. Soul was not merely vital breath,
but thinking being. Thought was recognized as
the essential characteristic of man, the same word
designating both. For four thousand years man has
been called "the thinker." For consciousness, will,
memory, the Aryas had words that are not traceable
to material symbols. They even made a distinction,
it is believed, between concrete existence and abstract
* See De Coulanges, La Cite Antique, B. i. ch. v.
' Pictet, Les Aryas Primiti/s, II. 237, 427, 435, 456.
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS.
49
being ; ^ a germ of that intellectual vigor which has
made the Aryan race the fathers of philosophy. Their
language abounded in signs of imaginative and intui-
tive processes. They believed in spirits, good and
evil;^ and their medical science consisted in exor-
cising the latter kind by means of herbs and magical
formulas.
There are no signs of an established priesthood,
nor of edifices consecrated to deities. But terms
relating to faith, sacrifice, and adoration, are so
abundant as to prove a sincere and fervent religious
sentiment. The similarity of meaning in numerous
words descriptive of divine forces has seemed to " point
to a primitive monotheism, more or less vaguely de-
fined."^ Yet the Aryas had probably developed a
rich mythology before their* separation into different
branches.* They had also firm belief in immortality
and in a happy heaven for those who should deserve
it,^ beholding the soul pass forth at death as a shape
of air, under watchful guardians, to its upper home.
Some of these inferences of linguistic palaeontology
may require further evidence to give them scientific
certainty. But there are other features in the picture
of Aryan religious life which admit of no dispute.
The word Div^ designating at once the clear light
of the sky, and whatsoever spiritual meanings these
simple instincts intimately associated therewith, has
endured as the root-woi'd of worship for the whole
Aryan race : in all its branches the appellatives of
Deity are waves of this primal sound, flowing through
1 Pictet, II. 539-546, 749.
2 Developed afterwards in the Yatus and Rfilishasas of the Veda, and in correspondent
evil spirits of the Avesta. Pictet, I. 633.
3 Ibid., 720, 690. « Ibid., 689. 6 Ibid., 748.
50 RELIGION AND LIFE.
all its manifold and changing religions with the serene
transcendence of an eternal law.
Again, it has been shown ^ that the whole substance
of Greek mythology is but the development, with ex-
quisite poetic feeling, of a primitive Aryan stock of
names and legends, recognizable through comparison
with the Hymns of the Hindu Rig Veda, where they
are found, in simpler and ruder forms. In these early
yet secondary stages of their development, they rep-
resent the daily mystery of solar movement, the swift
passage of dawn and twilight, the conflict of day with
night, of sunshine with cloud, of drought with fertiliz-
ing rain, the stealthy path of the breeze, the rising of
the storm wind, the wonder-working of the elements,
the loss of all visible forms at night only to return
with fresh splendors in the morning. This old Aryan
religion of intimacy with the powers of air and sky
has in fact been aptly called a meteorolatry . And
recent scholarship has applied much ingenuity as well
as insight, in bringing all Vedic names and legends
under the one title of "solar myths," using the word
in the wide descriptive sense just indicated. And
there can be no doubt that they all are more or less
intimately related to natural phenomena, though pro-
ceeding primarily, it is none the less true, from moral
and spiritual experiences in their makers, as all
mythology must do. But what we have now to
observe is that the amount of this mythologic lore,
inherited by both the Asiatic and European branches
of the Aryan race, warrants our ascribing very great
productive capacity, both aesthetic and religious,
* Especially by the recent researches of Muller. See Cox's Manual of I^Iythology for
a popular summary of these. Also the valuable articles of Mr. John Fiske, in the At-
lantic Monthly for 1871.
THE PRIMITIVE ARYAS. 5 1
to their common ancestors, the mountain tribes of
Central Asia.
And, acrain, names and traditions, found alike in the
Indian Veda and the Iranian Avesta, indicate that
these unknown fathers of our art, science, and faith,
must have venerated a mountain-plant, and used its
sap as a symbol of life renewed through sacrifice ; ^
that they believed in a human deliverer, who, after
saving men from destruction, had reorganized their
reviving forces for social growth ; ^ in a human-divine
guardian of the world beyond this life ; ^ and in a true
Aryan hero who slew the serpent of physical and
moral evil.^ And so we learn how early and how
cordial was man's prophetic sense of his proper unity
with the Order of the Universe, the ideal which it is
the main business of all our religion and science to
make good.
I add another fact of equal significance. The
thought that those patient domestic animals, which
gave milk, and bore burdens, and were in other ways
indispensable to man, deserved a better lot than they
were apt to receive, and that the kind treatment of.
them was a religious duty, is common to both the
Aryan races, and redounds not to their own honor
only, but to that of their common progenitors, from
whom it must have descended.^
Finally, we may infer from the testimony of the
^ The Soma (Zend, haonta), or Asclepias acida. The haoma was perhaps a different
plant, yet must have nearly resembled it.
2 F/;«rt (Iran.) and il/(z«?^ (Ind.). They have common functions as mythical beings,
and descend alike from Vivasivat (Zend, Vivaughvat). See Lassen, I. 517-
' Varna (Ind.) and Vohumano (Iran.)- Schoebel points out the curious transference of
functions between the four personages just mentioned, in consequence of the separation
of the Iranian and Indian branches of the family.
* Trita (Ind.) and Thraetona (Iran.).
5 Roth, in Zeitschr. d Deutsch. Morg. Gesellsch-, XXV. 7.
52 RELIGION AND LIFE.
two related bibles that the oldest Aryas found God
in all the forms and functions of Fire ; that they had
great faith in prayer, as intercourse with Deity in
purity and simplicity of trust ; and that they were
endowed with qualities that help to explain a certain
emphasis on sincerity and abhorrence of falsehood,
equally characteristic of the precepts of these old
ethnic scriptures, and of the reputation of the early
Persians and Hindus among the Western races of
antiquity.
The sacred Fire, kept kindled on the domestic altar,
as the centre of religious sentiment and rite, and as
consecrating all social, civil, and political relations, is
found to be a common heritage of all Aryan races.
Its flame ascended from every household hearth,
v^atched by \h.Qfitris, or fathers, alive and dead, of
this primitive civilization. Modern scholars have
traced its profound influence, as type and sacrament
of the Family, in shaping the whole religious and
municipal life of ancient Greece and Italy. ^
Not only are the words we now use to designate
domestic relations and religious beliefs explained by
the radicals of this primitive Aryan tongue, but even
our terms for dwellings, rivers, mountains, and na-
tions,^ are in like manner associated with these patri-
archal tribes. So much are we at home among the
prehistoric men. The largest part of our knowledge
of the ancient Aryas has been reached through Lan-
guage alone. The fleeting words of a people have
become its most endurin^_close of the last century ; and, if their writings had been
known a century earlier, they would certainly have
created a new epoch." ^ Aryabhatta, their greatest
J astronomer and mathematician, in the fourth century
determined very closely the relation of the diameter
of a circle to the circumference, and applied it to the
measurement of the earth. ^ They invented methods
also for solving equations of a high degree.
In the time of Alexander they had geographical
charts ; and their physicians were skilful enough to
' win the admiration of the Greeks. Their investiga-
tions in medicine have been of respectable amount
and value, lending much aid to the Arabians, the fa-
thers of European medical science, especially in the
study of the qualities of minerals and plants.* In
much of their astronomy they anticipated the Arabi-
ans ; their old Siddhantas, or systematic treatises on the
subject, indicating a long period of previous familiar-
ity with scientific problems. And in such honor did
they hold this science that they ascribed its origin to
Brahma. They made Sarasvati, their goddess of num-
bers, the parent of nearly a hundred children, who
were at once musical modes and celestial cycles.^
They gave names to the great constellations, and
noted the motions of heavenly bodies three thousand
* Lassen, II. 1140. * Weber, Voriesungen^ p. 238.
* Lecture on India' " Creuzer, Relig. de VA ntiq., p. 261.
* Lassen, XL 1138-1146.
THE HINDU MIND. 67
years ago. The Greeks appear to have derived much
aid from their observations of eclipses, as well as to
have been in some astronomical matters their teach-
ers. Lassen mentions the names of thirteen astron-
omers distinofuished in their annals. A Siddhanta
declares that the earth is round, and stands unsupported
in space. The myth of successive foundations, such
as the elephant under the tortoise, is rejected for good
and sufficient reasons in one of these works, as in-
volving the absurdity of an endless series. " If the
last term of the series is supposed to remain firm by
its inherent power, why may not the same power be
supposed to reside in the first, that is in the earth
itself ? " 1
Aryabhatta appears to have reached by independ-
ent observations the knowledge of the earth's move-
ment on its axis ; ^ and to have availed himself of the
science of his time in calculating the precession of
the equinoxes and the length of the orbital times of
planets.^
Especially attractive to Hindu genius were Grammar
and Philosophy. They alone among nations
. ^ . Grammar.
have paid honors to grammarians, holding
them for divine souls, and crowning them with mythical
glories. Panini in the fourth century B.C. actually com-
posed four thousand sutras, or sections, in eight books,
of grammatical science, in which an adequate termi-
nology may be found for all the phenomena of speech.*
* Siddhanta Siromani, quoted by Muir, IV. 97.
* Colebrooke (Essay II.) quotes his words: "The starry firmament is fixed: it is the
earth which, continually revolving, produces the rising and setting of the constellations."
3 See Lassen, II. 1143-1146. Also, Craufurd, Ancient and Modern India, ch. viii.
The views of Lassen and Weber as to the origin and age of Hindu astronomy are criticised
by Whitney, whose opinions are entitled to very high respect. These criticisms, however,
do not affect the substance of what is here stated.
* Lassen, II. 479.
68 RELIGION AND LIFE.
His works have been the centre of an immense Htera-
ture of commentation, surpassed in this respect by
the Vedas alone. No people of antiquity investigated
so fully the laws of euphony, of the composition and
derivation of words. "It is only in our own century,
and incited by them," says Weber, "that our Bopp,
Humboldt, and Grimm have advanced far beyond
them." 1 The Hindu Grammar is the oldest in the
world. The Nirukta of Yaska belongs probabl}- to
the seventh century B.C., and quotes older writings
on the same subject.^ In whatsoever concerns the
study of words and forms of thought, the Hindus have
always been at home ; anticipating the Greeks, and
accomplishing more at the outset of their career than
the Semitic race did in two thousand years.
Yet not more than the Semites are they inclined to
pure history. There are, it should seem, no
reliable Hindu annalists. The only sources of
important historical information are the records of roj'al
endowments and public works preserved in the temples,
and the inscriptions on monuments and on coins, fortu-
nately discovered in large numbers, and covering many
periods otherwise wholly unknown. The scattered
Brahmanical Chronicles of several kingdoms are but
dvnastic lists and mea^^re allusions. The Buddhists,
on the other hand, have made a really serious study
of history, though even they have not had enough of
the critical faculty to distinguish fact from legend. It
is only by careful study, and comparison with Greek,
Chinese, and other testimony, that their voluminous
records can be made to yield the very great wealth of
historical truth they really contain. There are in fact
* Lecture on India (Berlin, 1854), p. 28.
* Reuan, La7igues Shnitiquesy 365.
THE HINDU MIND. 69
only two general histories of India from native sources ;
one quite recent, and the other dating from the four-
teenth century. A most valuable Indian chronicle is,
however, the Buddhist Mahavansa, which gives a
more complete and trustworthy account of Ceylon,
reaching; from the earliest times down to the last
century, than we possess of any other Oriental State
except China. 1 For determining chronology, there
are as yet few landmarks ; both Brahmans and Budd-
hists making free use of sacred and mystic numbers,
with whose multiples they strive to express a haunting
sense of interminable space and time. But though
the mythology of the latter deals in extravagances
beyond all parallel, they far surpass the Brahmans in
serious historical purpose, in observation of human
affairs, and in the taste for recording actual events.^
Their earliest Sutras are of great value in the inves-
tigation of an epoch of which we have scarcely
any other record. This superiority as chroniclers
is due in part to their freedom from caste ; a system
whose theoretic immobility and practical lack of motive,
either for the backward or the forward look, forbid the
growth of a historic sense. They differ from the Brah-
mans also in a deeper interest in the hiunan foj- its ozvn
sake. A philosophy which wholly absorbs man in Deity
cannot allow that independent value to the details of
life, the recognition of which is an indispensable condi-
tion of historical study. How to escape the flow of
transient events, and know only the Eternal One, was
the Brahmanical problem ; and it would seem quite
incompatible with even observing the details of posi-
1 Lassen, II. 13, 16.
' Of the services of Buddhist literature to the geographical and historical study of
India, see a just recognition iu St. Martin's Gcographie du Veda (Introd.), Paris, iS6o.
70 RELIGION AND LIFE.
tive fact, not to speak of tracing the chain of finite
causes and effects. It is only remarkable that the
Brahmans should have shown any capacity whatever
in this direction. Especial notice is therefore due to
the opinion of a thoroughly competent scholar that
they have not indulged in conscious invention, and
the falsification of facts, to such extent as would
justify European writers in casting stones at them on
this account.^
The historic sense is indeed by no means wanting,
at least in certain directions. We are told that, in
every village of the Panjab, the bard, who fills in
India the place which in Europe is taken by the
"Herald's Ofiice," can give the name of every pro-
prietor who has held land therein since its foundation,
many hundreds of years ago, and that the correctness
of these records is capable of demonstration. ^ It
would, in fact, be far from becoming, in the present
state of Sanskrit studies, to deny that the Hindus have'
ever written genuine history. The destructive effect
of the climate of India on written documents is of
itself a discouragement to literary pursuits, and to the
preservation of records.
Yet we cannot overlook their natural propensity to
ofthe ^^^^^^ ^^ limitation by positive facts, and to the
contempia- objectivc authority of details. This was not
tiveeement. Q^yjj^g^ ^g jj^ ^ great dcgrec with the Semites,
to intensity of passion and the worship of auto-
cratic caprice, but to a stronger attraction tozvards
■pure thought. Whatever they may have accomplished
in astronomy and medicine, an ideal generalization
was always easier to them than observation. The
* Lassen, II. 7. ' Gvi&vi's Rajahs 0/ the Panjab, p. 494.
THE HINDU MIND. 7 1
Hindu has, after all, effected little in the purely prac-
tical sciences ; almost as little as the Hebrew did in
ancient times, and in his distinctively Semitic capac-
ity. But while the Hebrew failed here by reason of
his defective appreciation of natural laws, and his
appetite for miracle and sign, the Hindu, belonging
to a family in which the scientific faculty is supreme,
failed for a different reason ; namely, his excessive
love of abstraction and contemplation. This enfee-
bled the sense of real limits. His imagination spurned
the paths of relation and use. It dissolved life into
intellectual nebula, and then tried to create the worlds
anew, weaving ideal shapes and movements in phan-
tasmal flow, out of this star-dust of thought.
Its boundless desire to bring the universe under one
conception, and make it flow forever from Mind as the
perfect unity and sole reality, by contemplative disci-
plines alone ^ — though one-sided and ill-balanced, was
yet a magnificent aspiration in days when practical
and social wisdom was in its infancy. Limit, the true
balance of ideal and actual, fate and freedom, divine
and human, — limit, which is not limitation, but har-
mony and order and justice of the parts to the whole,
— this, the inspiration of Greek genius, the Hindu
did not know. Compare his art with the Egyptian and
the Greek. Egyptian sculpture is a phiin prose record
of actual life ; or else it binds the idea within fixed
types, which are conventional, and, though often
grandly serene, everywhere mechanically repeated
and allegorically defined. Greek sculpture demon-
strates the capacity of the Human Form for every
aesthetic purpose, embodying divine ideas therein
with pure content and noble freedom. Here CEdipus
has solved the riddle, and pronounced the answer, —
72 RELIGION AND LIFE.
Man. But in Hindu Art you see mythological fancy
overpowering real life ; and, instead of the actual
human form, a boundless exaggeration and reduplica-
tion of its parts, a deluge of symbolic figures, gathered
from every quarter and heaped in endless and stupen-
dous combinations, the negation of limit and of law.^
Every thing here is colossal. This aspiration to
enfold the Whole cannot find images vast enough to
satisfy its purpose. It excavates mountains, piling
chambers upon chambers through their depths, tor
mile after mile of space. ^ It carves them into mon-
strous monolithic statues of animals and gods. It
brings the elephant to uphold its columns, and stretches
their shafts along the heavy vaults of Ellora and Karli,
like the interminable spread of the banyan trunks in
its tropical forests. Its temples represent the universe
itself; gathering all elements and forms around cen-
tral deity, yet seldom pausing to bring out of these
forms the artistic beauty of which they are individ-
ually capable. Intellectual abstraction — as of mind
fascinated by the vague sense of cosmic wholeness,
and not yet definitely constructive — excluded Art,
except in the one grand, all-enfolding form of iVrchi-
tecture. And here sculpture is involved ; yet not as
with the Greek, in separate freedom, but adherent to
the whole edifice, and absorbed in it, save in the
instances of a few special forms of statuary.
The contemplative element did not fail at last to
itssignifi- engulf outward forms, and even human per-
sonality, to an extent elsewhere unparalleled.
cance
^ See Kiigler's Kunst^eschichte^ p. 121 ; Renan in Nott's Indigenous Races, p. X03 ;
Ramee, Hisi- de V Architecture, vol. i.
2 There are forty series of caves in Western India ; and at Ellora the architecture
extends more than two miles.
THE HINDU JVIIND. ^3
But we should say that these facts had not yet reached
their real values for the mind, rather than that the
values themselves were denied. At the least we are
allured by the sense of an immeasurable scope in
these mystical aspirations to unity with God, which
bears witness of genuine intuition. Here abides an
illimitable Whole, instead of the manifold symbols of
special faith, that have come to stand out, for our
sharper Western understanding, in mutually exclusive
and even hostile attitudes, plainly enough needing to
recognize some higher unity, even though it were by
suorcrestion of the Hindu dream.
To appreciate the results of these contemplative
tendencies, we must recall the old Aryan worship of
the clear Light of Day. It seems to have given
place, in the development of Hindu thought, to its
exact opposite, of which the gloom of the Forest and
the Cave would be a truer sj^mbol. But it is in fact
not lost. It is transformed into an inward representa-
tive and analogue, becoming a worship of the serener
Light of Meditation. It is this divinity, which with
full confidence in its power to pass through and dis-
solve all possible barriers, is here invoked to illumine
mystic depths, whether of matter or mind, which the
outward sunlight cannot pierce. This aspect of Hin-
duism must not be forgotten, ^vhen, in order to see
its true embodiment, we endeavor to picture to our-
selves those sunless caves of Ellora and Elephanta ;
where columns and symbolic statues loom dim and
colossal through a silent abyss, and only the mystical
imagination finds play, losing itself in its own hover-
ing phantoms ; those deeps where all shape is spell-
bound, and all action dream ; where puny, awe-struck
men light up some little patch of lifeless wall with
74 RELIGION AND LIFE.
feeble torches, or wake some little space around them
with half-whispered words, — a wizard gleam, a
stealthy sound, — and all is dark again and still. To
make these profound sepulchral recesses of nature
and art endurable, light must have shone through
V them from an Invisible Sun.
The Hindu thinker found Deity most near to him,
TheLan- ^^^t as Pcrsou uor as visible Shape, but as
guage. Word, the S3^mbol of pure thought, in his own
^ marvellous Sanskrit. It was in language, the most
purely intellectual, most nearly spiritual, of all human
products, — and we might almost say it was in language
\ only, — that he showed absolute mastery in constructive
work. With pious zeal he perfected and transmitted
this, the express image of his ideal life. He wrought
it out in love and faith and patience, in the depths of
mind, far back in antiquity, without aid from abroad ;
and then slowly developed or decomposed this divine
"Word" into many popular dialects, — still holding
'^ its purest form sacred and inviolable.^ "Speech,
melodious Vach," says the Rig Veda, "was queen of
the Gods ; generated by them, and divided into many
portions."^ So grew up this typical language, if not
the norm of Indo-European speech, yet the centre
and hearth of this brotherhood of tongues ; reveal-
ing their several resources through the wealth of its
radical forms and structural aptitudes. Its rich
grammatical elements are combined, with unequalled
simplicity of law. It is pre-eminent among languages
* The Sanskrit was the vernacular tongue of Northern India in early times. It began
to die out in the ninth centiir)' B.C. In the sixth it was no longer spoken. In the tliird
it became a sacred language ; and by the fifth of the Christian era was established as such
throughout India. (See Benfey, in Muir's Sanskrit Texts, II. 143) Muir has carefully
traced it back to Vedic times, and shown that the oldest hymns were composed in the
every-day speech of their authors.
« R. v., VIII. 89, 10; X. 125.
THE HINDU MIND. 75
in creative faculty, in flexion al and verbal develop-
ment ; full of terms descriptive of intellectual and
spiritual processes ; deficient only in those which re-
late to practical details. The profound thirst of the
Hindu mind for unity is indicated in its wonderful
synthetic power of fusing radical words into com- .
posites ; so great, that a Sanskrit verse of thirty
syllables may be made to contain but a single word.
Its makers gave it a name which means -perfected^ _
and not perfected only, but adorned; for to them
Beauty was in tlie Word of the Mind, not the Work
of the Hand. This was their Kosmos. They created
it by pure force of native genius, and as in sport;
when, and in how long a time, we know not. We
know only that it was too near and too dear to their
hearts to need letters for its transmission. It is a ma-
ture product when w^e first find it in the oldest Vedas,
which w^ere preserved without an alphabet for ages,
in the memory alone. At last came writing. Then
as sound had been " God's music," so letters became
the chords thereof.^ The Sanskrit letters are not
transformed picture-signs, but something more ab- -
stract and intellectual. They are phonetic, symbols
of articulate sounds. Infinite was the toil the Hindu
grammarians for thousands of years expended in de- —
veloping the laws of euphonic structure ; drawing
from this fine and facile tongue of theirs as from a
perfect instrument, with what has been called a "pro-
found musical feeling," harmonious assonances more ^
regular and delicate than the Greek. They referred
its primal sounds to the organs by which they were
severally shaped. And, with a presentiment of sci-
entific truth, they sought to divine an essenUal relation,
1 Karma Mimansa.
76 RELIGION AND LIFE.
existing in the nature of things, between the sounds
of words and the objects they represented.^ They
went so far as to trace back the whole langj^uaore to
about fifteen hundred root-words, to all of which they
ascribed distinct meanings. EichhofF enumerates
nearly five hundred of these in his Indo-European
Grammar, fully illustrating the clear light they throw
upon the comparative etymology of this whole family
of languages.^
But it was not till the Buddhist reaction that the
uses of writing were recognized. The Brahmanical
laws indicate contempt of this instrument for the
diffusion of truth. Was their opposition based partly
on the fact of its democratic tendencies, as was that
of the Christian Church afterwards to the invention
of printing?
Recent writers have described the Hindus as icrno-
„ . , rant and wasteful, careless to better their con-
Practical
andphysi- ditiou, lackiug in comprehension of the uses
cal interests. r rr'
quite equal to those of .Western Europe.^ Nor must
we do injustice to the genius that ma,y show itself in
the very use of crude conditions. The Hindu woman,
working up raw cotton into thread for the incompar-
able muslins they call " running waters " or " webs of
woven air," with no other instrument than a fish-bone,
a hand roller, and a little spindle turning in a bit of
shell, is at- all events an artist, endowed with the
rare gift of making the most of simplest and nearest .
materials. The above unfavorable report is certainly
exaggerated.' But enough of truth remains in it to
indicate that there are drawbacks in the qualities of
this race to steady progress in practical directions, ^
without impulse from abroad.
The Hindu mastered many physical uses. Yet he
was, on the whole, disinclined to the labor of devel-
oping them. His passive temperament was unsuited
for material progress, having little curiosity and little
zeal for conflict with reluctant nature. The caste-
system was an exponent of his dislike of movement.
His favorite games are dice and chess ; the latter his
own invention, his typical gift to all civilized races ;
and both answering to the combination of a passive
body with a speculative mind. The pivot of most
Hindu philosophy has been the pure unreality of
phenomena. It was as if this busy brain, debarred
from social construction, teeminij with thouorhts it
"^ Speeches before the British India Society {\Z-yf-\o).
78 RELIGION AND LIFE.
could not liberate into the world of action, had de-
clined to accept all external tests of validity whatever.
And the history of its metaphysical speculation proves
in many ways that man cannot live by Thought alone.
It is not implied that these tendencies shape the
whole current of Hindu thought. We do not forget
how the people of India have gloried in their great
epochs of wide literary culture. We do not forget
that twice at least, in their history, all the rays of
Oriental learning, science, and song were gathered
into a focus of free energy, — at the brilliant courts of
Vikramaditya, the companion of poets, and Akbar,
the " Guardian of Mankind." We do not forget the
opportunity constantly open, on this great mustering
ground of nations, for the friction of races and the
sympathy of religions. Nor can we overlook that
passionate love of the Hindus for dramatic personation,
— the sign of a wide scope of the imaginative and
sympathetic faculties, — which ha^ shown such pro-
ductivity in their literature, and makes the social
delight of every village in the lanci.
The results of excessive abstraction and contempla-
tion, even in India, are equally far from encouraging
the widely held belief that these mental habits are de-
void of noble uses. The reactions to realism that
were involved in their natural processes of development
will claim our admiration. And we are especially to
study the splendid capacity, philosophical and relig-
ious, — or both, since the two in Oriental life are
substantially one, — which was brought out in the
endeavor to live by Thought alone.
It should seem that personal energy belongs of right
Force of |-q ^|-^g Hiudu, as a member of that Indo-Euro-
Physical
Nature. pcan family of nations, in whom a vigorous
THE HINDU MIND.
79
practical genius, whether as Persian, Greek, Ro-
man, or Teutonic, appears to be inherent and irre-
pressible. How is it that, in his case, the old Ar3^an
manliness and vigor have yielded to enervation, and
the instincts of liberty and progress comparatively
failed? Though the extent of this failure has been
greatly overstated, there is truth enough in the pre-
vailing estimate to mark an exceptional fact, which
requires explanation. It is doubtless an extreme illus-
tration of the power of cliniaiic conditions. In every
other instance Aryan migration has been westward or
north-westward : in this alone it has been southward. ■
The dreamy and passive element obtained mastery
only after the tribes had penetrated the whole breadth
of Northern India from the Indus eastwards, and
settled in the sultry valle}^ of the Ganges ; where
to this day it is scarcely possible to rear children
of English blood, without annual migrations to the
cooler hills. 1 Montesquieu has suggested,^ as one
cause of the general absence of practical energy and
free progress in the Asiatic races, the fact that Asia
has not, like Europe, — and we may add America, —
a temperate zone open in all directions, w^here races
of equal force can enter into free mutual relations,
whether of collision or of combination. Her tribes
are brought together only by sharp transitions of
climate ; and easy conquests by superior physical
vigor are followed by rapid enervation of the con-
querors, whose movement, from obvious causes, has
usually been from the mountains to the plains. The
descent of the Aryans into a tropic wilderness, where
the invigorating alternations of summer and winter
* See Jeffrey's British Army in htdia, Appendix.
» Esprit cUs Lois, XVII. 3.
1/
8o RELIGION AND LIFE.
were wanting, and every day renewed the same be-
wildering luxuriance of leafage, blossom, and fruit
throughout the year, was subject to these transforming
conditions. We should naturally expect that these
hardy mountaineers, sweeping down from their cool
eyries in the Hindu Kuh and Kashmir, into a land
wherein
" the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that had a heavy dream,
A land where all things always seemed the same," —
would lose intellectual muscle and nerve. The colos-
sal unity and simplicity of movement in the natural
world would be reflected in their mental processes ;
and an atmosphere heavy with perfumes would lull
them to rest in mystical reverie.
We may easily exaggerate these forces, as well
as the enervation we adduce them to explain. Por-
tions of India have a cool and bracing atmosphere ;
and the tribes that occupy the higher levels are vigor-
ous, active, and enterprising. But the climate of the
lowlands, where Hindu culture has had its centre,
although modified by the wind and rain of the wet
season, is in all essential respects determined by the
tropical heats. A colossal vegetation covers this rich
alluvion, through which enormous rivers flow from
the Himalaya to the sea, enclosed between vast moun-
tain ranges on the north and lofty plateaus on the
south. An almost vertical Sun, whose beams have
ever held the Hindu's love and awe, — all the more
strongly because relied on to smite the sensitive head of
the invading Englishman, while they have been slowly
transforming the texture of his own dark skin till it
ceased to suffer from their shafts, — has proved master
THE HINDU MIND. 8l
of the very movement of his thought, and disposed it
to the languor of contemplation and the melting pas-
sivity of dreams.
Yet that Aryan vitality, which in the North turned to
Teutonic sinew and in the West to Persian and intellectual
Hellenic nerve, even here wrought its special ^^^^"^^'"".^
wonders. Its brain, self-centred, enclosed in suits,
tropical forests and under all-mastering heats, and
without the fine stimulation from climate and the inter-
mingling of vigorous races which the Greek enjoyed,
nevertheless became an immensely productive force.
And the fact tends to show that, while climatic or other
ph3^sical conditions modify original spiritual forces,
they are not adequate to explain civilizations, nor to
supply the inspiration which sustains and directs them.
The elements which characterize the later develop-
ment of Hindu mind were, as we shall see, present in
its infancy. The solitude and heat of the Indian wil-
derness gave it no new forces, but subserved a certain
original ethnic personality, its special essence ; some
of whose qualities indeed they forced into excessive
action, thereby provoking the others to bring out their
latent strength in energetic reactions. Such historical
results as these have an important bearing on the phi-
losophy of development, by • which modern science
seeks to interpret the growth of man. They illustrate
the truth which all evolutionists affirm, that no histor-
ical changes require to be explained by creative inter-
ference with the natural order. But they also tell
against the tendency which prevails, in many scien-
tists of this class, to mistake the physical conditions of
phenomena for their productive cause, and to ignore
forces, inexplicable by such conditions, which work
in every step of the process, involving the -precedence
6
82 RELIGION AND LIFE.
aiid creativity of mind, and constituting spiritual stcb-
stance; more or less enduring forms of which appear
in race, in personality, and in the constancy and wis-
dom of natural law.
As it is not incapacity, so it is by no means pure
enervation that we note in the passive quality of Hindu
temperament. It is rather, as one has well defined it,
an " inclination towards repose ; " a constant reference
to coming rest, alike in things material and spiritual,
as the consummation of endeavor and the end of strife ;
explicable in part by the recurrence of a sultry, relaxing
season, as the predestined end of the climatic 3^ear, and
the most salient fact of its monotonous round. This is
of course compatible with a degree of active energy.
The religion of Brahman and Buddhist alike was
aspiration to repose ; yet its disciplines were pursued
with incomparable energy and zeal.
"If the Hindus are not enterprising," says Lassen,
"they are industrious, w^ierever they have real labors
to perform. They show much power of endurance,
and bear heavy burdens with patience. And they
avoid toils and dangers more from a dislike to have
their quiet disturbed, than from want of courage ; a
quality in which they are well known to be in no
way deficient." ^
The freedom and force of self-conscious manhood
could hardly be expected of a people who were mi-
grating further and further into tropical lowlands and
wildernesses. The keen goads of the mountain air
were forgotten. Lassitude crept over the will and re-
laxed the practical understanding, till they seemed to
lie buried in the helplessness of dreams, confounded
with this overwhelming life of physical nature ; and
1 Lassen, I. pp. 411, 412.
THE HINDU MIND. 83
their place came to be defined by the philosopher as
that stage in human development where man as yet
knows not that he is other than the world in w^hich he
dwells. But, if we look more closely, we shall find
that the facts are not wholly as they have seemed,
and that the severity of the Hegelian formula is far
from fairly representing them ; since man is not here as
an embrvo in the womb of nature, but as livinor force
that reacts upon it, though with little help from the
practical understanding. And, if we listen atten-
tively, we become assured that even the somnambulism
of the soul may be inspired ; hearing from these
dreamers, also, who at least have faith in their dream,
not a few of those accents
" of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost."
III.
THE RIG VEDA.
'• I have proclaimed, O Agni, these thy ancient hymns ; and new hymns for thee who
art of old. These great libations have been made to Him who showers benefits upon
us. The Sacred Fire has been kept from generation to generation." — Hytnn of VisvA-
niitra.
THE HYMNS.
TT is not yet determined at what period the Aryas
•^ descended into the plains of India ; whether Antiquity of
moved by one impulse or in successive waves *'^^ Hymns.
of immigration ; whether impelled by disaster or
desire.^ While their religious traditions indicate a
march of conquest, those of agriculture, on the other
hand, as embodied in the extensive organization of
the village communes, have been supposed to point
with greater probability to a peaceful colonization. ^
Their earliest footprints at the base of the Himalayas
are effaced. It is even, doubtful whether their name
means " men of noble race " or tillers of the earth. ^
The etymology which derives it from roots {ar, or ri)
that signify niovement^'^ is at least finely sugges-
tive of the destiny of their race. It is pleasant too
to trace, however dimly, a primitive association of
labor with dignity and success, and to note that the
name assumed by this vigorous people for themselves
served also for their gods.^ In later times it was
applicable to the Vaisyas, or third caste, who consti-
^ Lassen, hidische A Iterthutnskunde, I. 515 ; Mliller, in Bunsen's Philos. of History ^
I. 129 ; Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol. ii. ; Ludlow's Brit. India, L 37.
* Maine, Village Cotnmunities in the East and IVest^ p. 176.
' Miiller's Science of La7iguage, L 23S; Lassen, I. 5; Pictet, I. 28; Weber, Indisch*
Studien, I. 352. Sclioebel considers it the title of the family chiefs, or patriarchs.
* Pictet, I. 29. See the Lexicons of Roth and Burnouf.
» Rig Veda, V. 2, 6 ; IL 11, 19.
88 RELIGION AND LIFE.
tuted the mass of the community.^ Dates are uncer-
tain in this remote antiquity. There are signs that,
as early as twelve centuries before our era, the Aryas
were not only a powerful people spread along the
banks of the Indus, making obstinate resistance with
trained elephants to the Assyrian invaders, but had
even reached the mouths of the Ganges on the extreme
east of India. ^ The whole intermediate country lies
before us in the half-light of a heroic age, the scene
of epic and doubtless historic wars, of tribe with tribe
and dynasty with dynasty.
But we have a record more precious than many
precise facts and dates. We have the sacred song
(Veda, or wisdom^) of these otherwise silent genera-
tions. The Rig Veda, oldest of the four Hindu Bibles,
— the other three are mainly its liturgical develop-
ment,* — is a collection of about a thousand Hymns
("Mantras," dorn of mind) composed by different
Rishis, or seers — not one of which can have orig-
inated later than twenty-six hundred, and few of
them later than three thousand years ago. These
initial syllables of Hindu faith are probably the devo-
tions of still earlier times. ^ They appear to have been
composed in that part of north-western India now
called the Panjab, whose wide slopes descend sea-
ward between the upper Indus and the Jumna ; a
land always famous for the spirit and grace of its free
^ St. Martin, Geographie dti Veda^ p. 84 : Miiller, ut supra.
2 Ktesias: Duncker, Gesch. d. Alterth., II. 18.
* From the root vid^ to know; Greek, ol6a ; Lat., video ; Germ., wissen; Eng., wit^
wisdom.
* "The Rig Veda,'''' says Manu, " is sacred to the gods: the Yajur relates to man;
the Santa., to the manes of ancestors." The Atkarva consists, mainly, of formulas for use
in expiations, incantations, and other rites.
^ Miiller's Sansk. Literal. ., 481, 572 ; Whitney, in Chr. Exam., 1861, p. 256 ; Wilson's
Introd. to Rig Veda; Duncker, II. 18 ; Koeppen, Relig. d. Buddha, I. 12; Colebrooke's
Essays, I. 129 ; Lassen, I. 749.
THE HYMNS. 89
tribes, having its outlook on soaring mountains and
limitless snow-reaches ; a land of picturesque hill
ranges and of redundant streams, whose rushing
waters these children of Nature loved to celebrate
in their sacred songs.
We possess this Rig Veda in precisely the state,
down to the number of verses and syllables, in which
it existed centuries before the Christian era.^ It prob-
ably represents the earliest distinctly expressed phase
of religious sentiment known to history.^ There is
not the slightest sign of a knowledge of writing in the
whole collection.^ In all ancient literature, there is
no parallel to this inviolable transmission of " sacred
text," and the veneration with which men are wont to
regard such protection from the vicissitudes of time
may be more justly claimed for this the oldest of
Bibles, than for any other in the world.
And the respect deepens when we reflect that these
Hymns are outcomes of a yet remoter Past ; Pre-vedic
that they point us beyond themselves to mar- Religion.
vellous creative faculty in the imagination and faith
of what is otherwise wholly inaccessible, the childhood
of Man. They present a language already perfected
without the aid of a written alphabet ; ^ a literature
already preserved for ages in the religious memory
alone ! They sing of older hymns which the fathers
sang,— of "ancient sages and elder gods." They
1 Miiller and Whitney, ut supra; Colebrooke, in Asiatic Researches, VIII. 481;
Craufurd's Ancient and Modern India, ch. viii. ^
^ Miiller, 557.
* Miiller (497, 528) finds no sign of writing in ancient Hindu history. Whitney (Chr.
Exam., 1861) thinks it may have been employed, though not for higher literary purposes.
* The language of the Rig Veda differs in many respects from the later Sanskrit, the
learned language of its commentators. " Its freedom is untrammelled by other rules than
those of common usage." Muir's Sanskrit Texts, II. 223 ; Whitney, in Journal of
Amer. Orietital Society^ III. 296.
•pO RELIGION AND LIFE.
were themselves old at the earliest epoch to which we
can trace them. Their religion, like their language,
was already mature when they were born. Do not
seek in them the beginning of the religious sentiment,
the dawning of the Idea of the Divine. Their deities
are all familiar and ancestral. It is already an inti-
mate household faith, which centuries have endeared.
" This is our prayer, the old, the prayer of our fa-
thers."^ "Our fathers resorted to Indra of old : they
discovered the hidden light and caused the dawn to
rise ; they who showed us the road, the earliest
guides." "Now, as of old, make forward paths for
the new hymn, springing from our heart." " Hear a
hymn from me, a modern bard."^ As far back as
we can trace the life of man, we find the river of
prayer and praise flowing as naturally as it is flowing
now. We cannot find its beginning because we can-
not find the beginning of the soul.
The earliest religion is one with the maturest in this
TheVedic Tcspcct : that it records itself in the details of
People. lifg^ And these primitive Hymns have been
called the "historical" Veda, so real is the picture
they give of the Aryas after their descent into India.
They are described as a pastoral and to some extent
agricultural race, divided into clans, and often en-
gaged in wars of ambition or self-defence.^ Their ene-
mies, designated as Dasyus, or foes,* and Rakshasas,
or giants,* are unquestionably the aborigines of North-
ern India, and are described as of beastly appearance,
1 /?. v., III. 3g, 2; I. 48, 14.
2 Muir's Sanskrit Texts^ III. 220-230.
8 It has been suggested that the hymns contain traces of an opposition between a peace-
ful, and a warlike element within the old Aryan community, ancestors perhaps of the
priestly and soldier castes, respectively. Wheeler, Hist, of India^ II. 439.
* Muir. See also Bunsen's Philos. 0/ History, I. 343.
THE HYMNS. pi
every way abominable, and even mad. They are
sometimes represented as magicians, who withhold
the rain in the mountain fastnesses ; and identified
mythologically with darkness and drought. They
are declared to be living without prayers or rites, or
any religious faith ; charges which go further to prove
the devotion of the invaders to their own belief, than
the atheism of the tribes they despised. The extreme
religious sensitiveness of the Aryas is attested by the
frequency with which these charges of godlessness are
repeated, in the strongest terms of indignation as well as
contempt ; feelings which point perhaps to barbarous
practices abhorrent to their own purer faith. Their
social ideas indicate primitive relations and pursuits.
Their political institutions very closely resembled those
of the Homeric Greeks. Their names for king meant
father of the house and herdsman of the tribe. Their
public assemblies they called "cowpens," and war was
"desire of cattle." They prayed for larger herds, for
fleet horses, broader pastures, and abundant rain; for
nourishing food ; for valor and strength ; for long life
and many children ; for protection against enemies
and the beasts of the wild.
This infantile human nature nevertheless adored
the Light. The dawn and the decline of The wor-
Day, and the starlit Night that hinted in its Lig^,°
splendors an unseen sun returning on a path behind
the veil, were dear to its imagination and its faith;
and Fire, in all its mysterious forms, from the spark
that lighted the simple oblation, and the flame that
rose from the domestic hearth, to that central orb, in
which the prescience of their active instinct saw, so
long ago, an all-productive cosmic energy, ^ was every-
* See Hjanns quoted by Burnouf, Essai sur le Veda, ch. xv.
92 RELIGION AND LIFE.
where one and the same, alike mysterious, alike divine.
And this vital fire of the universe was ever within
call, stooping to human conditions, respondent to theii
need and will ; at once a father and a child ; born when
the seeker would, out of dark wombs in herb and tree ;
waiting there to kindle at the touch of his hand, when
he rubbed the two bits of wood, or turned the wheel of
his fire-churn, — as if his busy fingers reached through
the bright deeps on high, and brought life at their
tips, kindred life, fresh from the central flame. ^ In
the imagery of the hymn, they are " the ten brothers,
whose work, one with the prayer, brings forth the
god." The worshipper, plying them with power,
"plants the eye of Surya in the sky, and disperses
the delusions of darkness." ^
Thus early in the history of religion the act of
Its creative worship is blcudcd with a sense of creative
^hetk° faculty. Man is here dimly aware of the
meaning, truth that he makes and remakes his own con-
ception of the divine ; that the revealing of deity
must come in the natural activity of his human
powers.
This prophetic instinct thrilled within him, at each
spark he drew from the splinter's cleft to kindle his
altar-fire, so long before science had secularized his
mastery of nature in lightning-conductor and electric jar.
There was more in this delight than the mere satis-
faction of physical necessities. With every upward
dart of flame from the dark wood, the god was new
born ; a mystery of answered prayer and expanded
oblation. So the omnipotence of the child's dream
^ So the North-American tribes. Brinton {.Myths of the New World, p. 144) quotes
a Shawnee prophet as saying: "Know that the life in your body and the fire on your
hearth are one, and both from the same source."
« ie. F., v. 40; X. 62.
THE HYMNS. 93
was the first regenerator of the heavens and the earth.
The out-goings of the morning shone with the cour-
age and strength of his inward day.^
Such was the religious rite of the old Vedic fami-
lies. Each had its altar and its sacred Fire. The
family hearth was the first "holy of holies;" and the
flame kept burning in every household was the sign
of perpetuity for all powers that bound men in social
relations. And not for the Vedic families alone. The
Romans and the Greeks also made the hearth the
centre of religious faith and rite ; and so the word
Hestia, or Vesta (the altar), originally signifying the
fixed -place for the family hearth-flame, came to rep-
resent the divine mother, to whom all deities bent the
knee with the old filial reverence for that flame, at the
hearth of the world. Vesta, or womanly purity, was
worshipped in the "ever-living fire," which meant the
inviolability of the family, and the sacred meaning
that invests its transmission of human life.^
In the later age of the Hindu epics, the rites of a
whole people in honor of their king are still performed
with the primitive instruments of these joyful oblations :
not only mortar and pestle for crushing the Soma
plant, but the two pieces of wood for kindling the
altar fire.^
This original delight in producing the element
1 Pillon i^Les Religions de PIfide, in L^Annee Philosophique for iS6S) traces the
tyranny of the priesthood in later times to this Vedic faith in tlie power of prayer and
sacrifice to bring forth and sustain the god. "It is not man, but the priest, that thus
creates the divine, in those early sacrifices; and this naturally developed itself into the
divinity of the Brahman." But the writer seems to forget that the priesthood, as a distinct
class, was not then conceived of as masters of this simple rite. And the feeling of creative
power involved in it belonged to the self-confidence of the religious sentiment, was its
natural faith, its wonder at the work of its own hands- That its prestige came to be con-
centrated in the worship of the priest as such was due to other causes, tending to narrow
and ritualize the religious life of the Hindus; to such, among others, as ecclesiastical
organization, climate, and, later, passivity of temperament.
* Cicero, Pro Domo, § 41. 8 Ramayana, II. ch Ixwiii.
94 RELIGION AND LIFE.
which animates the world, and in preserving its pure
and helpful forces, is retained in all religions of the
Indo-European race. It is consecrated in myth and
rite, and fable and spell. Its vestiges are in the legend
of Prometheus, civilizer of men through this secret of
power ; in the Roman Vestal Fire ; in the lighting
of the sacred lamps in Christian churches ; and in the
. "need-fires " to remove evil and cure disease, familiar
to the Germanic tribes.^ The races of the New
World also guarded the sacred element with the same
loyalty, and renewed it by the same primitive method
of friction which the Aryas of the Veda em ploy ed.^
Man could not forget that pregnant dawn of revela-
tion, the discovery of his own power to rekindle the
life of the universe.
From first to last, what sic^nificance he has read in
Primitive Light ; as element of nature, as vision of the
Symbolism. gQ^| j Tlic symbol is for ever dear. And
it was as symbol, not as mere material element,
that it had religious homage in the early ages. It is
true that developed symbolism requires the separation
of the thing from what it represents, and the choice of
it as representative ; and this can hardly belong to
Vedic experience. But we must remember that there
must be an early stage of tinconsciotis S3aTibolism, — a
sense of help, beauty, power in the elements," already
obscurely suggesting the intimate unity of nature with
man ; the condition and the germ of all later develop-
ment in this direction. And this is what we find in
the Veda. ,. .
From the first stages of its growth onwards, the
<■
* Kelly's Indo-European Folk-Lore, ch. ii.
' Compare Brinton, p. 143 ; Prescott's Pern^ I. 107 ; and Domenech's Deserts of
America, II. 418.
THE HYMNS.
95
spirit thus weaves its own environment : nature is
for ever the reflex of its life. And what but an un-
quenchable aspiration to truth could have made it
choose Light as its first and dearest symbol, reach-
ing out a child's hand to touch and clasp it, with the
joyous cry, "This is mine, mine to create, mine to
adore ! "
That instinctive cry predicts not only the whole
light-loving mythology of the Indo-European races,
and its free play through the heavens and the earth,
but the concentration of the ripest intelHgence on
Light in all forms and in all senses, physical, moral
and spiritual. That primitive pursuit of a cosmic
fire centred in the sun was indeed natural divination :
it struck the path which science was ever afterward to
trace through the subtle forms and processes of force,
paying an ever nobler homage to solar light and heat.
It is interpreted across thirty centuries by Tyndall's
song of science to this centre and source of living
powers.^ That wonder and joy over the first kindling
of the flame is an earnest of the rapture which has
ever celebrated Light as type of spiritual resurrection.
That infantile thrill at generating the "eye of Surya "
is a crerm of man's mature consciousness that knowl-
edge is power. And that fearless clasp on the ele-
mental fires predicts the full trust in Nature, which
at last affirms her, against all implications of. dogmatic
theology, to be not the spirit's darkness, but its day.
Such prophecy was in that primal attraction to the
Light. Well might its priest and poet sing at morn-
ing, his face to the rising sun : " Arise ! the breath of
our life has come ! The darkness has fled. Light
^ Heat as Mode of Motion^ pp. 455-4'>9'
96 RELIGION AND LIFE.
advances, pathway of the Sun ! It is Dawn that brings
consciousness to men : she arouses the Hving, each to
his own work : she quickens the dead. Bright leader
of pure voices, she opens all doors ; makes manifest
the treasures ; receives the praises of men. Night
and Day follow each other and efface each other, as
they traverse the heavens : kindred to one another
for ever. The path of the sisters is unending, com-
manded by the gods. Of one purpose, they strive
not, they rest not; of one will, though unlike. They
who first beheld the Dawn have passed away. Now
it is we who behold her ; and they who shall behold
her in after-times are coming also. Mother of the
gods, Eye of the Earth, Light of the Sacrifice, for
us also shine ! "^
The old Vedic deities all centre in this purest of the
Iranian and clcmcnts. In this, as in many other respects,
Indian. their affinity with the Avesta-deities of the Ira-
nians is so striking as to prove beyond reasonable
doubt that the two races were originally one. Of this
primitive unity we have already spoken. ^ A sharp
discordance seems to have struck into it ; and the two
sections of the Aryan family, moving in different direc-
tions, are found using the same mythological names in
opposite and hostile meanings. The gods of the one
are the evil spirits of the other. But the antagonism
touches the names only. The worship of the Light
stands unchanged for both.
Unchanf^ed in essence. Yet there was a diff'erence
in the application of this common symbol to express
the inward' experience. While the Iranians converted
* Rig Veda, I. 113; Muir.
2 Lassen, I. 527, 529; Bunsen, Philos. Hist., I. 130; Schoebel, Richerches sur la
Religion Premiere de la Race hido-Europeeiie, Paris, 18C8.
THE HYMNS.
97
the phenomena of nature into signs of moral conflict,
the Indians, on the other hand, made them the divine
reflex of simple social instincts and practical pursuits.
We see here a happy confidence in these nearest ele-
ments of experience, rising to the form of religious
trust. It is coextensive with the tasks and the de-
sires ; and there was, moreover, suflicient self-respect
in this primitive sense of natural order to claim freely
for human interests the sanction of an intimate relation
to all vast, unfathomable forces in the Universe. So
early was man, the purport of nature, at home in its
mysteries. Titanic Powers have tenderly waited on
the processes of his growth, and taken the signifi-
cance his childish purpose craved. This lord of the
manor rules it from his birth.
The Horse and the Cow, the nomad's earliest help-
ers and sustainers, are the earliest symbols of xhepasto-
his poetic faith. The clouds are the " herds ''^^ Symbols.
of the sky;" "the many-horned, moving cattle, in the
lofty place, where the wide-stepping Preserver shines."
"When the dawns bring rosy beams, then these ruddy
cow^s advance in the sky."
Vritra (the enveloper), or Ahi (the serpent), en-
camped on the mountains, withholds their bounty.
Indra, as the lightning, pierces this foe with his
gleaming spear, and milks the nourishers of man.
Down go the drops to the sea "like kine." Ahi lies
felled by the bolt, under his mother, " like a dead cow
and her calf, and the floods go joyfully over him."
The streams are the "herds of the earth." The sum-
mer drought is Ahi's work, who has driven them to
the mountain caves, or castles, and holds them bound.
Indra follows, and sets them free. His thunder is
"like a cow lowing for her calf." Swift as thought,
98 RELIGION AND LIFE.
the winds (Maruts), "born among kine, strengthened
with milk," attend him. "With their roaring they
make the rocks tremble, they rend the kings of the
woods ; and men hear their talk to each other, as
they rush on, with awe." The clouds are their "spot-
ted deer, the lightnings their bright lances : " they are
"heroes, ever young, that bring help to man." Indra
smites down Vritra as " an axe fells the woods ; breaks
down the castles (of cloud) ; hollows out the rivers ;
splits the mountain in pieces like a shard." And
therefore the singers "bring their praises to heroic
Indra, as cows come home to the milker."
Ushas,^ the morning light, is now a "maiden, like
the dun heifer;" now twin youths, Asvins,^ on fleet
steeds; now a "stately spouse, who steps forth, awak-
ening all creatures, stirring the birds to flight, and
man to his toil." Sarama, the dawn, creeps up the
sky, seeking right and left for the bright herds, whom
the night has stolen, and hidden in its caves. "As
mares bring up their new-born foals, so the gods bring
up the rising sun." Savitri^ is the risen sun. "Bright-
haired, white-footed steeds draw him along his ancient
upward and downward paths, the paths without dust,
and built secure ; the wise, the golded-handed, bounte-
ous Sun." He is himself "a steed, whom the other
gods follow with vigorous steps."
Agni,^ Fire, is the "herdsman's friend, bright in the
sacrifice, and slays his foes." He is the child
^'' of the two pieces of wood rubbed together,
hidden in the cleft between them ; brought to birth by
1 From wf, to bum ; Gr., lywf; Lat, «r
"
o ' Vedic wor-
ever sin we may have committed, O Indra, let ship.
us obtain the safe light of day : let not the long dark-
ness come upon us." "Preserve us, O Agni, by
knowledge, from sin ; and lift us up, for our work and
for our life." "Thou leadest the man who has followed
wrong paths to acts of wisdom." "Deliver us from
evil " is the constantly recurring prayer.^
"The gods are not to be trifled with." "They are
with the righteous : they know man in their hearts."
1 Ji. v., X. 82. 2 Ibid., I. 164, 4. 8 Ibid., X. Si, 4. * Ibid., X. 72, 2.
5 Ibid., I. 115, 6; II. 27, 14; I. 36, 14; I. 35.
I20 RELIGION AND LIFE.
"They behold all things, and hear no prayers of the
wicked." "May I, free from sin, propitiate Rudra,
so as to attain his felicity, as one distressed by heat
finds relief in the shade ! " "I have committed many
faults, which do ye, O gods, correct, as a father his
ill-behaving son. Far from me be bonds, far be sins."
"May our sins be removed," or "repented of" is the
burden of a whole hymn.-^ What rude tribes, unused
to self-examination, may have meant by the terms here
translated " sinning " and " repenting," may not be
easy fully to determine. We may readily overesti-
mate their moral aspirations. But we shall err even
more seriously if we recognize in their hymns nothing
better than the desire to buy material advantages from
their deities, or the fear of losing these advantages, or
of suffering outward penaltits at their hands. ^ It is
very clearly a sense of wrong-doing from which the
worshipper is seeking relief. It is conscience that
pricks him, the rebuke of his moral ideal. Because
the evil he thinks or does offends himself, therefo7'e
he holds it an offence to the All-discerning. Its penal-
ties, w^hether inward distress or outward failure and
loss, — and both kinds, as will hereafter be noticed,
are confessed, — he construes as signs of its opposi-
tion to a rectitude to which he aspires. It is purity
of heart, it is peace with the conscience, that these
prayers pursue. Their simple confessions of weak-
ness and ignorance are laden with earnest feeling.
" I do not recognize if I am like this : I go on per-
plexed in mind."^ "O Agni, thou art like a trough in
the desert, to one who loners for thee."^
1 R. F., VII. 32, 9; VIII. 13, is; II- 33,6; 11.24,5; 1-97.
2 For this kind of criticism, see Hardwick, Christ and other Masters., I. 182, and even
Wilson's Lectures at Oxford (1840), p. 9, 10.
8 R. v., I. 164, 37. 4 Ibid., X. 4, I.
THE HYMNS. 121
The moral law is eminently embodied in Varuna.
His name, kindred with the Greek Oiiraiios Yzmn^-.^h^
and the Zend Varena — from var^ to veil or "'°''^^ ^'""'•
surround — remands us to the outermost confines of
the universe. ■• He is essentially the Limit, which en-
folds the thought of these simple natures, and protects
it from being bewildered and oppressed by the myste-
ries of immensity. He is the measurer of depths,
whose wise ordinances round them in. His world is
farthest space. His calm unswerving legislation is
the safety of all beings and forms. '^ His worship ex-
presses man's instinctive sense of natural law, of the
bands that cannot be loosed. He is adored as framer
and sustainer of the everlasting order of the world ;
who appointed the broad paths of the sun, prepared
from of old, free from dust, well-placed in the firma-
ment; who holds the stars from wandering, and keeps
the streams from overfilling the sea. " The constella-
tions, visible by night, which go elsewhere by day,
are his inviolable works." " Wise and mighty are his
deeds who has Stemmed asunder the wide firmaments.
He lifted on high the bright heavens : He stretched
apart the starr}^ sky and the earth, and made great
channels for the days."^ He is calm and immovable,
the Aryan Fate: inevitable things are "his bonds."*
Night, with its mysterious deeps and steadfast orderly
watches, is his special realm ; and he it is who brings
back the sun to his place, to reappear after passing
invisibly through the heavens. Thus the world was
instinctively felt to be stanch with orderly cycles, long
before the conception of law could be fully formed.
* Lassen, I. 758.
2 R. v., VIII. 42. 8 Ibid , V. 85 ; VII. 86, 87 : I. 24, 10.
* Roth, Die Jidchsten G'dtter d. A rischen Vdlker {Zeitsckri/t d. Deutsch. Morgenl.
Cesellsch., VI. 72).
122 RELIGION AND LIFE.
But in this physical order was reflected also the
divine law which shone in the conscience, and pro-
claimed eternal decree against moral disobedience.
" By day, by night, there is said one thing. The
same is spoken to me by my own conscious heart." ^
This unseen Eye of the Night " beholds all that has
been and all that will be done."^ To Varuna the
darkness shineth as the light. It is he who is of-
fended at the evil-doer, who is satisfied only when the
sin is put away. " Desirous of beholding thee, I
ask what is my offence." ^ A later hymn from the
Atharva Veda says of him, " If one stand or walk,
or hide, the great Lord sees as if near; he knows
what two whisper together ; he is there the third.
He who should flee beyond the sky would not escape
Varuna. He hath counted the twinklings of the eyes
of men."*
He is " merciful to the evil-doer, and takes away
Deliverer siu, cxtricatiug man from its bonds. "^ This
from evil, morality is plainly not the bondage of an in-
exorable physical necessity, nor the 'blind fear of a
wrathful judge. It has sight of a divine compassion,
that spares and restores.
1. " Let me not yet, O Varuna, enter into the house of clay.
Have mercy, Ahnighty, have mercy !
2. " If I go along, trembling, like a cloud driven by wind, have
mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
3. " Through want of strength, thou Strong One, have I gone to
the wrong shore. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
4. " Thirst came on the worshipper, in the midst of the waters.
Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy !
5. '^ Wherever we men, O Varuna, commit an offence before the
1 I^. y., I. 24, 12. 2 Ibid., I 25, II. 3 Ibid., VII. 86.
* Muir, v. p. 53 ; Muller, C/i//'S, I. p. 41. 6 7^. ^.^ yil. 87; I. 25, 21.
THE HYMNS. 1 23
heavenly host ; wherever we break thy law through thoughtlessness,
have mercy, Almighty, have mercy ! " '
Similar trust in forgiving love inspires the prayers
to all the Vedic gods. They are all called by the
names Saviour and Father.
It has been said that " we look in vain in the Vedas
for penitential psalms, or hymns commemorat- .
^ ^ ^ Aryan sense
ing the descent of spiritual benefits."^ This of moral
is true only if we take these expressions in ^^ '
their Semitic meaning. In most Hebrew piety, the
sentiment of moral obligation, yielding much fruit of
sublimity and tenderness, is yet more or less an over
bearing despotism.' Its austere and jealous God tends
to paralyze the worshipper's freedom with dread of
having done, or of being about to do, something that
trenches upon exclusive and sovereign claims. Hence
an intensity of contrition, and a disposition to dwell
on what is called the " malignity " of sin, amount-
ing, in the ultimate phases to which Christian the-
ology has developed it, to a demand for self-contempt
and even self-abhorrence as the first condition of
piety ! Now it is certain that nothing like this will be
found in the Vedic or any other religion of Aryan
orig^in. But it is not to be inferred that such religions
do not rest on moral and spiritual foundations. If they
know nothinof of these moral aci^onies, so liable to
narrow and enslave the mind, they are not for this
reason incapable of recognizing the inevitable penalty,
and the need of divine renewal, involved in evil think-
inij and ie^noble livino-.
On the other hand, the gods are not jealous of the
liberties of their w^orshipper. They cordially beckon
him on every side, and make the world a genial
1 R. v., VII. 85. « Hardwick, I. iSi.
124 RELIGION AND LIFE.
climate for all his energies. If there is danger lest
this entire spontaneity should relax the authority of
conscience, there is at least implied in it a guarantee
of freedom and progress indispensable to conscience
itself. It does not dwell mournfully and hopelessly
on the past, nor on the enormity of offence ; but passes
readily on to greet fresh opportunity, accepting the
future as still its friend. This moral elasticity and
ready recovery of self-estimation, this good under-
standing between the conscience and a happy devel-
opment of all human powers, is the needful corrective
of a despotic moralism in religion and culture, which
Semitic earnestness has mingled with its better gifts
to the inward life of man.
The Hymns to Varuna, which have suggested these
TheAdi- remarks concerning a common criticism upon
tyas. reliofions of non-Semitic oricjln, are not the
only illustrations of the Vedic conscience. Varuna
is one of Seven Adityas, or Everlasting Ones.^ These
are the " Children of Aditi," who is "The Unlimited,
Immortal Light Beyond." Sleepless, beholding all
things, far and near, evil and good, the innermost
thoughts of men, — irreproachable protectors of the
universe, haters of 'falsehood, punishers of sin, yet
forgivers too, and abandoning none, they "bridge the
paths to immortality, and uphold the heavens for the
sake of the upright."^ And to them the herdsman
prayed that he might escape the vices that were " like
pitfalls in his path;" calling on them to spread their
protection over him, " as birds spread their wings over
their young." ^ Of these the nearest to Varuna is
Mitra, " the Friend''
J Roth, ut supra, Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., VI. 69 ; Muller's Ri^ Veda, I. Notei, p. i^j.
2 R. v., II. 27. 8 Ibid., VIII. 47- 2- See Muir, V. 57.
THE HYMNS. 1 25
" Neither is the right nor the left hand known to us,
neither what is before nor what is behind. O givers of
our homes, may I, weak and afraid, be guided by you
to the light that is free from fear. Far or nigh, there
can come no harm to him who is in your leading." ^
Though called '^ children of the light," these Im-
mortals are not to be confounded with the
Their spirit-
heavenly bodies : they are not mere phases of uaimean-
the Sun, as the later Puranas have been sup- '"^'
posed to represent them. They were conceived as
the unseen support and background of his radiance.
Their light was of the spirit. Their very names have
moral and religious. import, born of the conscience and
the heart. They mean Friend, Protector, Beholder,
Sympathizer, Benefactor, Giver without Prayer.^ They
preserve from the evil spirits, or druhs, that follow
the sins of men." The oldest Aryan faith centres in
these Shining Ones. The x\dityas are, in fact, radiant
witnesses that the visible heavens have always been
recognized as the symbol of a Higher Light, through
which the soul lies for ever open to infinite wisdom,
justice, and care.
In all ancient religion there is no name more in-
teresting than that of Aditi, the " mother " ^he mother
of the Aryan gods. To maternity all deities °^ ^^^ sods.
pay reverence ; and to the bosom of its infinite ten-
derness man must refer his w^hole conception of the
divine. "Aditi," says Max Miiller, "is the earliest
name invented to express the Infinite, — the visible in-
finite. A-diti is the unbound, unbounded, one might
almost sav, the Absolute. It is a name for the dis-
tant East, the Dawn, — but more. Beyond the Dawn;
and in one place the Dawn is called the ' Face of
1 R. v., II. 27, II, 13. > Roth, ut supra.
126 RELIGION AND LIFE.
Aditi.' In her cosmic order she is The Beyond, the
unbounded realm beyond earth and sky." Beyond
Aditi, however, was Daksha, literally " the powerful."
*'She, O Daksha, who is thy daughter; after her,
the gods."^ Yet Daksha is also said to be born of
Aditi. 2 And here it must be noted that this phrase-
ology of descent does not indicate chronological suc-
cession, but ideal relation ; just as we may say, with
equal truth, that light is the child of power, and
that power is the offspring of light. ' Yet there
can be no doubt that this reaching forth to an all-
embracing Life beyond and behind special forms of
deity, — an ultimate in which the two conceptions of
love and power, under the symbols of male and female,
are combined in the interchangeableness of Daksha
and Aditi at the fountain of being, — is but a typical
expression of the whole religious experience of the
Vedic poets.- For we find the same unlimited capac-
ity invoked, in each and every deity, to reach out
beyond itself, with a care and a power that should
absorb all the rest.
The study of the Rig Veda has revealed the
The earliest ^^^^t that tlic carlicst apothcosis of which we
apotheosis, havc rccord was a form of homage to virtue.
Some of the hymns are addressed to deified men,
who had attained their divinity through beneficent
work. 3 They are the "dexterous, humble-minded
artisans of the gods."^ The miracles ascribed to
them indicate what was then thought godlike in con-
duct. They had restored their parents to youth ; an
act typical, to the Oriental mind, of all social virtues.
1 Mulder's Rig Veda, I. p. 230, 237; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, IV. 10-13.
2 R. v., X. .72, 4, 5-
• N^ve, My the des Ribhavas ; Roth, Brahma und die Brahmanen, in Zeitsch. d. Morg.
Ges., I. 76.
* /?. F, v. 42, i2(WiIson).
THE HYMNS. 1 27
They had made a chariot for the dawn, that daily
blessings might be brought to all men. They had
multiplied sacred vessels for the service of the gods.
They had created, or brought back to life, cattle for
the poor.-^ Their name, Ribhavas, formed from that
most fruitful of Aryan roots, which indicates upward
movement, points to aspiration and growth. It is
closely related to the Greek Orpheus, both names sym-
bolizing the arts of orderly and rhythmic construction ;
and to the German Elfen, denoting the busy, service-
able elves.2 To these divine helpers, who seem to
have been in some respects identical with the_^//r/5,
or ancestral fathers of families, especially in their
beneficence, prayers were addressed for the same
blessinofs which the older deities bestowed. Thus
the gfood man ascends to heaven, and stands amoni^
the gods. The stars of the generous shine in the
firmament : they partake of immortality.*'^ They are
like the AsVins, those divine physicians, who enabled
the lame to walk, the blind to see; who restored the
aged to youth, were guardians of "the slow and
weak," relieved burns with snow, cured cattle, sowed
fields, and delivered sailors from storms.*
This instinctive recognition of the divine in the hu-
man gave shape to the Vedic idea of a Future xhe Future
Life. The first man who had passed through ^'^^•
1 R. F., IV. 33, 35, 36; v. 31, 3-
* See Kelly's Indo-European Folk-Lore, p. 19.
' R- v., X. 88, 15. (See Maury, Croyances, &c., 147.) Even if, as Neve suppose?, the
multiplication of the goblets for worship, as well as the other services to the gods ascribed
to the Ribhavas, signify that they " extended the pomp and importance of the religious
ritual," and represented the tendency to priestly organization in those early times, it will be
none the less true that they were exalted to divinity for acts held in grateful remembrance
as serviceable to men. That they were merely priests, or beloved for merely vicarious and
official acts, the whole account of them in the Rig Veda disproves.
* See Muir, V. 242, and R. V., I. 116-120. For remarks on the relations of the Ribhus
and Pitris to the bright spirits or elves of the Teutonic mythology, see Kelly's Indo-Europ.
Folk-Lore, p. 19.
128 RELIGION AND LIFE.
death waited, enthroned in immortal light, to welcome
the good into his kingdom of joy.^ This " Assembler
and King of Men " in another life had himself been hu-
man, and knew all human needs. Death was thus
Yama's kindly messenger, "to bring them to the homes
he had gone before to prepare for them, and which
could not be taken from them." ^ It was far in Varu-
na's world of perfect and undying light, in the " third
heaven," in the very "sanctuary of the sky, and of
the great waters," and in the bosom of the Highest
Gods. Thither the fathers had gone, and " the earth,
the air, and the sky were underneath them ; " and
thither the children were following, each on his own
appointed path.^ That which men desire is the
attainment of good in the world where they may
behold their parents and abide, free from infirmities,
" where the One Being dwells beyond the stars." ^ The
morning and evening twilight, the gloaming in which
darkness mingles with light, were the " outstretched
arms of death," the two watchful dogs of Yama,
guiding men to their rest.^ The poet sang the in-
evitable longing, and the assurance that has for ever
come with it. " There make me immortal, where
action is free, and all desires are fulfilled."^ And
age after age the simple tribes repeated the Hymn.
And while the mourners for the dead, in their rude
symbolism of mingled faith and fear, set a stone
between themselves and the grave, and placed the
clog upon the feet that were to move no more, and
1 Roth, in Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., IV. 426 ; R. V., X. i, 14.
2 R. v., IX. 113, 7-
3 Hymns in R. K, X.
* R. v., X. 82, 2.
^ Muller's Science of Language^ II. 496.
8 Rig Veda Burial Hymns ^ translated by Muir, Sansk. Texts., II. 468, and by Whit-
ney, Bib. Sac.., 1859; Roth, D. M. G., II. 225; IV. 428.
THE HYMNS. ' 1 29
look the bow from the nerveless hands, placing in
them — in token of Nature's bounty and protecting
care — portions of the body of the goat or cow, their
trustful ritual made appeal to the Earth to " receive
him kindly, and cover him with her garment as a
mother her child ; " to the Fire-gods, to " warm by
their heat his immortal part;" and to the Guide of
Souls, " to bear him by his sure paths to the world
of the just." To the body it said, " Go to thy Mother,
the wide-spread, bounteous, tender Earth. I lay the
covering on thee : may it press lightly ; thou feelest
it not. Pass, at thy will, to the earth or sky." And
to the spirit, " Go thou home to the fathers, on their
ancient paths : lay aside what is evil in thee : guarded
by Yama from his sharp-eyed sentinels, by right
ways ascend to the farthest heaven, if thou hast de-
served it, and dwell, in a shining body, with the
gods. May the fathers watch thy grave, and Yama
give thee a home." ^ "Let him depart," it is some-
times added,- "to the mighty in battle ; to the heroes
who have laid down their lives for others, to those
who have bestowed their goods on the poor."^
"Wash the feet of him who is stained with sin,"
says the Atharva ; " let him go upward with pure
feet."
And so, amidst prayers, libations of water, and
purifying fires, the loved were sped on their unseen
way ; and death was conquered, in these rude children
of Nature, by an unquestioning trust in the eternal
validity of virtue, in the fidelity of the departed, in
1 Miiller's Transl. of Burial Hymns, in Zeitschr. d- D. M. G., IX. [Appendix], and
Whitney, ut supra. The tender invocation, " may it press Hghtly," was a part of the burial
rite of the Greeks and Romans also. Eurip., Alcesi., 463; Juvenal, VII. 207.
2 R. v., X. 154.
9
130 RELIGION AND LIFE.
the care of a Providence as wide as their thought of
being, or their need.
The honor paid by such childHke instincts of grati-
tude and trust to the souls of parents at their graves
was the natural bond of these simple tribes with an
unseen world and future life. The Sraddha, or offer-
ing of rice-cakes to his father's spirit, is the first duty
of the Hindu son ; and it has descended from remotest
antiquity. This oldest religion of filial piety appears
in all branches of the Aryan race.
" So great," says Cicero, " is the sanctity of the tomb.
Our ancestors have desired that those who departed
this life should be held as deities." ^ Plato says : " Let
men fear in the first place the gods above ; next, the
souls of the dead, to whom in the course of nature it
belongs to have a care of their offspring."^ The
Latin " Dii Manes " and the Greek " Theoi Chthonioi "
correspond perfectly to the Vedic Pitris, blessed div-
inities who watch over their descendants, and expect
their tribute of holy rites. The Pitris were in fact
fathers of families, and represent the religion of
those patriarchal times when the family, isolated and
self-sustained, was the centre of social life and the
foundation of all law and rite.
Whether the body was buried or burned, the garment
The spirit- of th^ spirit was to be fire, " the bright armor
uai body. Qf Agni." ^ Of course it cannot here receive the
symbolic meaning which it holds in the mature relig-
ious imagination, in the poetry of the later mystics. But
it would be equally wrong to take it in a merely gross
and material sense. In fact, we detect in it the natural
* De Leg., II. 22. So Eurip., Alcest. *' Stant manibus arae: " Virgil (III. 64).
* Laws, XI. 8.
* R. v., X. 14, 8 ; 16, 4. So, in the later epic belief, the perfect men, the great sages,
cast off their old bodies and ascend in new ones of a splendor like the sun, and in chariots
of fire.
THE HYMNS. * I3I
germ of all ideas, Christian or other, of a sj^iritual
body; a blending of sense and soul; a clinging of
the imafjination and the affections to the familiar
organs through which life has been manifested, as
if still existing or destined to resume existence, even
after they have turned to dust. Vedic Hymns not
only exhort the fire " not to burn nor tear the body,"
but even invoke the fathers to " rejoice in heaven with
all their limbs." Even the gods themselves have
material enjoyments. Here it is the deep natural in-
stinct of respect for life, that attributes permanence
and power over death even to its corporeal exponents.
But the maturer doctrines of a glorified spiritual body
and a corporeal resurrection spring originally from
the same instinct. They betray the same confused
perception of the relations of the physical with the
moral. And if this is not gross materialism in the
.Christian dogma, neither is it so in the Vedic hymn.
Of the same nature, and equally common among
early races of the Aryan stock, is the apparent inconsis-
tency of treating the departed spirit as if shut up under
ground, and dependent on food provided at the grave
by living relatives, while it is at the same time invoked
as moving in a freer sphere, and addressed as con-
scious of their veneration and love.^
The moral aspect of Vedic immortality points to the
same respect for life and its uses. The spirit immortal
in his armor of fire was not to live for self: he ^^^^•
was to protect the good, to attend the gods, and to be
like them.^ Such is the immortal function of the
^it?'is, as intimated in the hymns, which represent
1 Juvenal, VII. 207 ; Eurip., Alcest., 463,993-1003 ; Helene, 962 ; Virgil, y£"«., III. 67;
Cic. Tusc.Ques., I. 16; Ow'id's Meiam. \_Orph. and Euryd.\ X. 1 S5
2 Roth in D. M. C, I. 76; IV. 428; R. V., X. 15.
132 RELIGION AND LIFE.
them as altogether happy therein. "They have
adorned the sky with stars, placed darkness in the
night and light in the day." Even when drinking up
the libations of their worshippers, as if to satisfy phys-
ical thirst, they are busy in offices of guardianship.
Their immortal life is none other than the actual life
of the best men.
" On the path of the fathers, there are eight and eighty thousand
patriarchal men, who turn back to the earthly life to sow righteous-
ness and to succor it." *
" He who gives alms goes to the highest heaven, goes to the
gods." ^
" To be kind to the poor is to be greater than the great there." '
We find the same belief among the Greeks. "The
souls of the dead," says Plato, reproducing the oldest
faith of his race, "incline, like the gods, to the care
of the orphans and the destitute : they are kind to
those who act justly, but angry with those who act
otherwise."'^
Vedic futurity has its heaven, but no very distinct
No Inferno, traccs of a hell.^ Not that sins are without their
penalties. This would be impossible in Varuna's
world. "The Drubs, 'powers of evil,' follow the sins
of men, binding as with cords." ^ But these simple
hymns are natural outpouring of the trust, rather than
of the fears or hates, of the poet. Their divinity is mer-
ciful, and loves to efface the marks of transgression.
And the yearnings of the heart to brighten and warm
the shadows of futurity leave no room for that sternness
1 R. v., X. 15 : Yajnavalkya, III- 186..
2 R. v., I. 125, 5. 6.
" See Miiller, Chips^ I. 46.
* Laivs^ XI. 8.
8 The same is true of the oldest Chinese Scriiitures, or " Kings." The Veda has two
or three inUmations of an abyss of darkness. Muir V. 312.
a i?. K., VII. 61, 5; 59, 8.
THE HYMNS. I33
of judgment which would blacken them with its own
spirit of avenging wrath. ^ The theological hell of
civilized races has been w^orked up with a refined vin-
dictiveness, and a morbid exaggeration of moral evil
under the name of organic " sin," that does not shrink
from staining the eternity of God with blind inexora-
ble hate. But this systematized ferocity in judicial
logic comes from the perversion of developed mind and
conscience. The childish familiarities of rude races
with their gods are not so audacious and irreverent as
this ; and if they lack the constraints of its infernal
terrors, they escape also their fearfully demoralizing
power.
Here is a period of pure spontaneity in man's ex-
perience, before he had begun to brood over sponta-
the hideous fantasy of everlasting woe ; and ^^^^y-
we are glad to note how far the good impulses of.
Nature have sped him without the goads of that dismal
lore.
We hail the simplicity of these moral and spiritual
instincts, so frank and direct, like the opening eyes of
a child, or the movement of his limbs at play. This
entire confidence in immortality was based on an intui-
tive trust in the continuity of life, and in destiny pro-
portioned to the bes.t desires. It associated itself with
filial and parental love, a firm belief in the continued
interest of ancestors, who had entered Varuna's world
beyond death.
" Give me, O Agni, to the great Aditi, that I may again behold
my father and my mother." 2
^ In the early teaching of Buddhism, there seems to have been a similar effect, arising
from the intensity of sympathy and pity. Among certain savage races, as the Kamska-
dales and the North American Indians, there is no definite idea of a hell.
2 R. v., I. 24, 2.
134 RELIGION AND LIFE. |
i
Such reliance on the demands of the affections is
prophetic of immortaHty in its highest meaning. It
comports, too, with the genial sense of present reahties
which predominates in these Hymns. Yet this very
quahty has perhaps led to an impression that they indi-
cate but faint belief in 2i future existence. -The constant !
tributes to the pitris, for example, have been repre- |
sented as ^^ merely an expression of grateful remem-
brance."^ Such estimates fail of justice to that instinct
of continued existence which would naturally be de-
veloped by a healthful confidence in life itself. It is
earnest and deep in the Vedic poets, for the very rea- \
son that it is so closely associated with the affections.
Every god and every good act, it would seem, was the
promise of "immortality."
The sense of living, the feeling of real import in |
actual, present experience, must have been very in- i
tense in such a race as the Vedic Aryans. And this ;
is ever the germ and the guarantee of all genuine i
sight in the direction of a future life. In the Rig Veda ;
it is perfectly pure and simple : it has not a trace of the
later schemes of transmigration, wi'th their elaborate j
ingenuity of fear ; nor of ascetic disciplines bartering 1
comfort in this life for bliss in another. This relicr-
ion is just the inborn impulse to believe, to aspire ; 1
the natural search that finds the hand it feels after, be- i
cause it is this very hand that moves it to feel. " The |
belief in the immortality of the soul," says Burnouf, !
"not naked and inactive, but living and clothed with a I
glorious body, was never interrupted for a moment : it |
is now in India what it was in those ancient times, and
even rests on a similar metaphysical basis." ^
j
* Wheeler's /Twi'iyry (?/■ /w^/rt, II. 436. ]
2 Le Veda, p. i86. \
THE HYMNS. I35
Here is as yet no idolatry nor organized priesthood,
no ecclesiastical nor mediatorial authority. The
Simplicity
Ar3'ans had risen beyond the fetichism which ofUfeand
is found in the lowest races to be without these ^^'^^^'p-
elements/ to a stage which dispensed with them
through higher insight. The parent, as transmitting
the mysterious life principle, was the centre of religion.
Each householder was as Arya, capable of immedi-
ate relation with the family deities ; was priest and
psalmist in one : and rites were still domestic.^ There
is no trace of the burning of widows, no prohibi-
tion of their marrying again. The filial instincts
were the basis of a social order as yet innocent of
castes.^ The marriage relation had its sacramental
rites; and polygamy, though not absent, was excep-
tional.^ We are still farther from the barbarous custom
of polyandry, which appears more distinctly in the
epics, and of w^hich a trace is discovered in but one
Vedic hymn.^
A delicate sense of the significance of family ties is
indicated in the words chosen to represent them, -phe sexes
— words which remain in all Aryan tongues to ^'i"^^-
testify of this line instinct in the childhood of the race.^
The sexes are on the same level, and the Vedic idea
of their mutual relations strongly reminds us of that
which prevailed in the old Germanic tribes.^ The
marriage rite by joining hands and walking round the
1 See instances in Lubbock's Origin of Civil izatio7i.
2 Wilson's Introd. to Rig Veda; Burnouf, p. 226.
•^ Haug, Brahma uiid die Brahmaneu, affirms, contrary to the opinion of most schol-
ars, that the castes existed in an organized form in the oldest Vedic times. At most, how-
ever, his illustrations seem to prove only that germs of these distinct orders of society
were visible in the early rituals. His principal authority, R. V., X. 90, is generally regarded
as of late origin. See Muir's effective reply to this theory of Haug and Kern, in Sanskrit
Texts, II. 457- Wilson, R. V., II. xi.
* Muir, v. 457. • s Wheeler's Hist, of India^ II. 502.
6 Burnouf, Le Veda^ ch. vii.
T Weber's hid. Stud., V. 177 ; Pictet, Orig. Indo-Europ., II. 338.
136 RELIGION AND LIFE.
hearth does not seem to imply either a " natural " or
"ordained" supremacy of the male over the female.^
Husband and wife were equal in the household, and
at the altar of sacrifice.^ Woman cares for the sa-
cred vessels, prepares the oblation, often composes the
hymn. There are references, perhaps symbolical, to
the mother of the altar fire, who gathers the Soma,
and holds it in her bosom as a babe ; ^ to the sacred
mothers, who adorn this child of the sky.* There
are hymns descriptive of domestic affection, and
breathing the sentiment of love. The union of hus-
band and wife is likened to the " embrace of Indra by
the hymn." The sun follows the dawn as a man a
woman ; and the dawn is like " a radiant bride."
"As a loving wife shows herself to her husband, so does she,
smiling, reveal her form ; moving forth to arouse all creatures to
their labors." "All life, all breath, is in thee, O Dawn, as thou
ascendest. Rise, daughter of heaven, with blessings ! " ^
The religion of labor is honored in harvest hymns.
The husbandman prays that " the ploughshare may
cut the earth with good fortune." The phj^sician
blesses his healing herbs, and hints, with a touch of
humor, that it is not a bad thing to cure the sick, and
make monev, at one stroke.^ A democratic instinct
has play in this Vedic community of functions, in which
" the purohita could till the earth or pasture flocks, as
well as crush the Soma or kindle the sacred fire." <"
Some hymns have serious moral purport, and record
Ethics. ^he effects of vicious habits on personal and
domestic happiness, in descriptions which have
1 Pictet, Orig. Indo-Europ., II. 338.
2 Weber, Vorlesungeti, pp. 37, 38 ; Miiller, Satisk. Lit., p. 28. R. V,, IX. 96.
8 H. v., v. 2, I, 2. 4 Ibid., II. 33, 5.
fi Rig Veda, II. 39, 2 ; I. 1, 23 ; X. 43, 1 ; I. 48, 92.
c R. y., X. 97. Roth , in D. M. G., XXV. ^ Burnouf, Essaisurle Veda, p. 227.
THE HYMNS. 1 37
lost none of their truth for human nature by the lapse
of three thousand years. The gambler " finds no
comfort in his need : his dice give transient gifts, and
ruin the winner : he is vexed to see his own wife, and
the wives and happy homes of other men." Rudra is
entreated not to "take advantage, like a trader^ of his
worshippers." " Men anoint Savitri with milk, when
he makes man and wife of one mind."
Here too are philanthropic sayings : —
" I regard as king of men him who first presented a gift."
" The wise man makes the giving of largess his breastplate."
" The bountiful suffer neither want nor pain."
" The car of bounty rolls on easy wheels."
" He who, provided with food, hardens his heart against the
poor, meets with none to cheer him. Let every one depart from
such an one : his house is no home."
" Let the powerful be generous to the suppliant : let him look
to the long path."
"For riches revolve like wheels: they come now to one, and.
now to another."
" He who keeps his food to himself has his sin to himself also." '
And here finally is a quaint benediction from the
later Atharva Veda, which sounds like an echo of
this simpler domestic age : —
" I perform an incantation in your house. I impart to you con-
cord, with delight in each other, as of a cow at the birth of her calf.
Let not brother hate brother, nor sister sister." ^
Of the Vedic sacrifices, we cannot speak so posi-
tively. Yet, so far as we can see, there was Meaning of
the same frankness and simplicity in these sacrifice.
as in other matters. Sacrifice is always from the
highest to the lowest, from the earliest to the latest
form, in some sense the consecration of one's best
and dearest possession to his ideal. Even in the
1 R v., X. 107, 117 (Muir). 2 jith. Ved., III. 30.
138 RELIGION AND LIFE.
lowest tribes this cannot be the mere reluctant service
of fear, or atonement of sin : gratitude, trust, and love,
must mingle in these primal relations with the invisible.
And the very sincerity of the instinct involves search-
ing for the mysterious and even the noble qualities
of things, beyond their mere barter price; an effort
to discover their representative values ; in other
words, an ideal aim.
And so the Aryan offered these three gifts : the
vedicsacri- f^ci^it^ whosc juices promised new life to all
^^^^- inactive powers ; clarified butter^ as choicest
gift of his herds and his simple art, just as the He-
brew offered his corn and wine ; and, above all, fire,
as the purest of elements, the light and life of nature
and of man. These his best he brought with awe,^
not only as his own choice, but as themselves par-
taking of the divinity, to whom he yielded them as to
their natural source and home. He had chosen them
because he saw divineness in them ; for nothino- less
than a god could meet his desire. In the sacrificial
act he stood their ministrant ; to further, not to destroy,
their life. It was meant not onl}^ to effectuate their
saving power towards himself, but also to second their
own inmost purpose, and inspire the divinity with the
joy of finding his own ; speeding the inherent good-
will that nestled within them to its fulfilment in the
bright track of the altar flame. The offering, this
bright Agni, was thus a radiant messenger, swift to
bring the earthly blessing and the divine society, and
wincred with freedom and delii^ht. Do we not note
here in its early form that intuition, which makes the
saint or martyr see his own powers transfigured, by
the ideal to which they have been dedicated, as his
1 Rig Veda, I. 91 ; VI. 47 ; VI. 16, 42.
THE HYMNS. 139
best gift? Such meaning was hinted in Soma, symbol
of life given for the good of men, to quicken them to
"immortality." It is the vital fire of the universe
poured out through the mystery of death in the plant,
to resurrection in the flame. "It generates the great
light of day, common to all mankind."^
This covering up of destruction by consecration,
this absorption of the death involved in sacri- Human
fice by the life it is to effect, this belief in the sacrifices.
exaltation of the victims above all loss, through satis-
faction of the divine affinities within them, — is for-
ever the significant fact in the sacrificial impulse, under
whatever name it appears. Even its darkest forms
are interwoven with this redeeming instinct. This is
our key to the painful fact that at some time or in
some form human sacrifice has been the custom of
almost every race of men.^ It has everywhere been
regarded, to a greater or less extent, as an exaltation
of the victim, a fulfilment of his best desire ; as his
sublime opportunity of representing the affections of
the worshippers, the atonement of their sins, or the
assurance of their hopes. Thus the Nicaraguans
believed that only such as offered themselves on the
funeral piles of the chiefs would become immortal. ^
The Aztec victim was held to be the favorite of the
god ; and every gift and honor was lavished on him in
preparation for his exalted destiny. We are told of a
Mexican king who devoted himself with many of his
lords to sacrificial death, to efl^ace the dishonor of an
insult ! * The Khonds regard their chosen human
victims as divine, rear them with utmost tenderness,
1 Ri^ Veda, IX. 6i.
2 The sad record is summed up in Baring Gould's work on the Origin of Religiout
Belief ch. xviii. See also Mackay's Progress of the Inteliect, vol. ii.
* Brinton's Myths, &c., p. 145. * Prescott's Mexico, I. 84.
140 RELIGION AND LIFE.
and teach them that a noble destiny awaits themJ
The choice of such victims as were free from blemish,
as well as most precious and honored, whether of
beast or man, in the rites of Baal, Moloch, or Zeus, is
sufficient evidence that the fate was believed to be
essentially a blessing. In the Ramayana, the hermit
Sarabhanga, believing himself desired by Brahma for
his heaven, only defers self-immolation till Rama's
coming. Having seen this incarnation, he is content,
and " hastens to cast off his body as a serpent his
slough." He prepares a funeral pile, enters the fire,
and being burned, arises as a youth from the ashes,
bright as flame. ^
The burning of widows with their husbands, prac-
tised under Brahmanical rules, and not yet quite
extinct, was not only commended by the hope of re-
joining the lost, but even desired as a crown of glory
in the eyes of the assembled people. It was also a
deliverance from the doom to sohtary asceticism, or to
new repulsive relations for securing male descend-
ants to the deceased. Mutual attachment alone would
have made sati quite natural under these circum-
stances.^ It has been estimated that five-sixths of the
women who undergo it are moved by devotion to their
affections.^ The actual spirit of this rite lifts it high
among those forms of martyrdom which have grown
out of ignorant notions of duty, whether Pagan or
Christian. Women have been seen seated in the
flames, lifting their joined hands as calmly as if at
ordinary prayer.^ Ibn Batuta reports, in the four-
teenth century, that the woman was usually surrounded
1 Mrs. Spier's India, p. 21.' 2 Ramayana, B. III.
* See Wheeler's Hist, of India., II. 116, and Arnold's Life of Dalkousie, II. 316.
* Arnold, II. 314. ^ Life of Elphinstone, I. 360.
THE HYMNSj^ ^' ^ \' ^4* /
by friends who gave her commtssiona t'o spirits cli^-
parted, while she laughed, played, xyv danced, down
to the moment of being burnt. And the Dabistan
tells us it is " not considered right to force a woman
into the fire."
In the Mahabharata, two widows of a raja dispute
for the privilege, one pleading that she was the favor-
ite wife, the other that she was the first and chief.
Herodotus mentions the custom of the Thracians to
select the best beloved wife for this honor, to the grief
of the rest.i And the Norse Sagas refer to widows
who, like Nanna, the wife of Baldur, insisted on
following their dead husbands and sharing their
destiny.^
If, then, human sacrifice existed among the Vedic
Aryans, it must have been regarded as an
. . ^ . . . . In the Veda.
exaltation oi the victim ; and to a greater ex-
tent than we can now realize accepted by him as such.
Even in the later Puranas, this barbarous rite, which
had become a part of the established worship of Siva,
is found still penetrated by such beliefs ; and without
them would surely have been a far more cruel super-
stition than it was. Siva declares the victim to be
" even as himself." Brahma and all the deities
" assemble in him, and be he ever so great a sinner
he is made pure, and gains the love of the universe." ^
That such sacrifices were ever offered by the Vedic
Aryans is by no means clear ; and the supposed notices
of this,' as well as of the "Horse Sacrifice," in the
Hymns and the Brahmanas, are very uncertain histor-
ical data ; * while sacrifices destructive of life in any
1 Herod., V. 5.
2 Keyser, Private Life of the N'orthmen, p. 42.
' Kalika Purana, As. Res.., vol. v.
* See, on one hand, Colebrooke (I. 61, 62); Wilson, in As. four., XVII.; Roth, in
142 RELIGION AND LIFE.
form seldom appear in the Rig Veda."^ There is
nowhere any mention of human sacrifices, in dis-
tinct ter^ns, in the whole Rig Veda ; and the only
evidence for even an allusion to them rests on an
inference from the later form of one old Vedic legend.
Sunahsepa, afterwards the centre of this sacrificial
tale, is in the Vedic Hymn itself simply a prisoner,
bound and in deadly peril, who is delivered through
his prayer to Varuna, as Master of life and death.
And so the poet sings, "May He, the far-ruling One,
hear us without wrath, taking not away our life. This
they say to me day and night ; this my own heart
teaches me. He whom the fettered Sunahsepa sought
in prayer, Varuna our' King, shall us also free."^
There is no necessary allusion here to a sacrificial
rite ; and the only ground for supposing such refer-
ence is in the mythic story found in the later Aitareya
Brahmana ; ^ in which Sunahsepa is the son of a
starving Brahman, and bought for a price, to be
offered to Varuna, as substitute for a certain prince,
who, having been devoted from his birth, is taking
this method to ransom himself from the doom. Here
also Varuna acts the part not of a destroying, but of a
preserving God, which is his natural function in old
Hindu faith. For again and again he defers exacting
his claim to the prince's life, and when Sunahsepa is
Weber's Ind. Stud., II. 112. On the other, Miiller's strongly expressed suspicions,
Satisk. Lit., 41Q, and Weber's additional illustrations to confirm them, in Zeitschr. d.
D. M. G., XVII I. 262. Of the two Vedic Hymns concerning the Horse Sacrifice, "one at
least," says Burnouf, " is certainly symbolical ; " and Weber himself has shown {ut supra,
p. 276) that the long list oi persons of every class, enumerated as victims in the Vayasaneyi
Sanhila, must certainly be, in part if not altogether, of a similar character.
1 Wilson's Introd., xxiv.
2 R. v., I. 7, I, 12; V. 1,2,7.
' See Miiller's Sansk. Lit., p. 40S; Weber's /«^. Stud., II. 112. The mjih of a sacri-
fice of Purusha, the Spirit, by the gods (/?. V., X. 90), believed by Haug to prove the
existence of human sacrifice in the oldest time, is regarded by Muir as of late origin.
Records of
^<^.-/ A ^^wi V* w. iiumansacri*
THE HYMNS. I43
bound in his stead, at the altar, answers his prayer, as
in the older legend, with deliverance, bidding him
"praise the gods and so be free."
' Here, however, it is plainly implied that men were
sometimes offered up in these ^^5^-Vedic ages
of the Brahmanas. The same ages record ah
substitution of the horse for man as a sacrificial '^^'
victim ; then of the ox for the horse ; then succes-
sively of the sheep, the goat, and lastly of the earth
and its products.^ These mythic intimations of what
was perhaps historic fact derive strength from anal-
ogous legends recorded of other races ; as that of the
ram substituted for Isaac in the Hebrew story, and of
the hind received for Iphigenia, by Diana, in the
Greek. Manetho relates that Amasis, King of Egypt,
abolished the sacrifices of Typhonic men at the tomb
of Osiris, and substituted wax figures; and Ovid, that
images made of bulrushes were thrown into the Tiber
in place of the old sacrifices of living beings. Many
Greek heroes are credited with abolishing this barbar-
ity, as Cecrops, Hercules, Theseus. And to Krishna
in the Mahabharata myth, who punishes it as a crime
to have offered victims to Siva, corresponds the histor-
ical Mexican monarch, who delivered Anahuac from
similar rites.
These analogies, however, do not prove that the
custom in India went back, as Haugf has in-
. . . Results.
sisted, to Vedic times. Such testimonies, if
mythologic, may but prove a consciousness of the in-
herent cruelty of such forms of worship, and the desire
to find far back in antiquity an authority for discon-
tinuing them. They would thus testify to a germ of
progress, even in stages of social decay. That human
1 A itareya Brdhtnana, as quoted by Miiller.
144
RELIGION AND LIFE.
sacrifices were offered in later periods of Hindu his-
tory is certain ; but there may well have been an
earlier age w^hen they had not yet an existence, as
there was for that noble Toltec civilization on the West-
ern continent, whose pure and simple religion was all
engulfed in the sanguinary institutions of the Aztecs.
And there is much in the character of Vedic civiliza-
tion to make us hesitate, in the present state of the evi-
dence, to believe that it could have mingled immolation
of men with its simple offerings of the product of the
dairy and the plant of the field.
The Vedic gods were indeed believed to approve the
Different dcstructlou of the evil-doer who oflended their
forms of hu-^^ig aud rcsistcd their claims; and to slay
man sacn- ^ ^ •'
fice. "godless Dasyus" was an acceptable service.
But this desire to find a religious sanction for inflict-
ing extreme penalties on real or imagined crime is
manifestly to be distinguished from the desire to please
the deity by bestowing on him a human victim purely
as an oblation. The national gods of the Hebrew,
the Greek, and the Norseman, were appealed to in
the same way, as fully disposed to destroy their ene-
mies, and to accept for service such revenges as the
worshipper chose to inflict in their name, on his own.
Substantially the same spirit is ascribed to the Chris-
tian God in the doctrine of eternal punishment, which
is simply a refinement of the belief that deity would
fain deal inexorably with its foes, though carried over
into the other life and from physical to eternal woe.
It appears frequently in the New Testament,^ and ap-
parently comes from the lips of Jesus, ^ as well as from
the intolerant disciple he rebukes. But incomparably
* Matt. XXV. 41, 46; Romans ix. 17-23; i Tim. i. 20; Apocalypse, /««?';«.
* Matt. X. 33; xii. 32; xxiii. 33; xviii. 17, 18, 35; xxv. 41.
THE HYMNS. 1^5
the worst form of the inference that God is pleased by
the severest punishment of crime is to be found in
those bloody inquisitions upon the persons of heretics
and witches, in which Christian ages have certainly
surpassed all others in human history. Many in-
stances in Hebrew annals, mistaken for human sacri-
fices,^ were of this characters The}' were in fact
barbarous -penalties inflicted on actual or supposed
criminals: such as "hewing" hostile kings in pieces,
and " hanging up " law-breakers or tyrannical fami-
lies "before the Lord," and "consecrating" one's self
to Him, by putting to the sword those who had
relapsed into idolatry. They were simply the earlier
analogues of modern Christian rejoicings over barbar-
ous massacres of the heathen in India and Algeria, and
of Christian arguments for the death penalty as based
on a commandment of God. In all these cruel atone-
ments, the victim is held to \i^ -paying the -penalty for
his sins; and they differ very decidedly from human
sacrifices in the proper sense, such as Jephthah's offer-
ing of his virgin daughter, or the abominations of Baal
worship,^ or the dreadful Chereni, devoting to death men
"not to be redeemed;"^ or, we may add, the Chris-
tian " atonement," which is of essentially similar nature,
— a death of the best to satisfy divine justice for the
sin of the worst.
In the former or simply primitive class of sacrifices,
the Vedic age of course abounded ; though there is no
evidence of special cruelty in their warfare, or special
barbarism either in dealing with offenders, or in grati-
fying personal revenge. Of distinctive human sacri-
fice there seems on the whole to be no positive proof.
1 Numbers, xxv. 4, 13; xxi. 2 ; i Sam. xv. 33 ; 2 Sam. xxi. 9; Exod. xxxii. 27, 29.
See Mackay, Progress of the Intellect^ II. 456.
2 Psalm cvi. 38; Ezek. xx. 31. 3 Levit. xxvii. 28.
10
146 RELIGION AND LIFE.
It is said in a Hymn in praise of Vishnu that " men
Free bear- worship him, offering him their libation face
ing towards to face."^ And Asrni is ever a " companion "
the gods. . ^ . . .
and "confidant." We note with especial inter-
est this cordial freedom in the bearing of the early
Aryans towards their gods. Deity was the " gracious,
well-beloved guest " of the householder's altar and
hearth, invited to find home there, to give and receive ;
praised among the people as their " food and dwell-
ing," reverenced as a " kinsman " and " friend." ^ So
the Greeks addressed the gods standing, and some-
times prayed sitting. The Homeric heroes converse
freely with the Olympians, whose human interests are
as profound and absorbing as their divine ; are in fact
one and the same thing with these. And this was not
due to irreverence, or to a low ideal of the divine. It
was partly a form of childlike confidence, and partly a
manly self-respect, to which slavishness was unknown
and impossible. While the religious sentiment is yet
untaught by science, this freedom is a strong defence ;
and wherever in such epochs it does not exist, there
must be grovelling fear before the phantoms of the
religious fancy ; and thence that blind intolerance and
savage cruelty which befit the spiritual slave.
It is one of the grand compensations for all er-
Ourdebtto I'ors iuvolvcd iu pol3'theism, that it consulted
Polytheism, individual liberty far more than the stern
exclusiveness and absolute will of monotheism. Its
principle has been finely stated to be the " independ-
ence of forces." '"^ The soul protects its own right to
grow in every direction, by creating a divine balance
of powers ; the basis of which is. in its instinct of
» R. v., X. I, 3. 2 Ibid., IV. I, 20; VI. 16, 42; VI. 2. 7, 8; I. 31, 10.
• Menard, La Morale avant les Philosophes, p. 94. a
THE HYMNS. 1 47
-•
equal justice to all. And thus while the religion of
the monotheistic Semites, wherever it has followed its
native instincts, has proved ungenial to many forms of
growth, that of the polytheistic Aryans has been a
hearty tolerance, inviting the full expansion of human
nature. But for Greek liberty and culture, Hebrew
concentration on the Unity of God, descending through
its Christian modifications, would, with all the purity
of its spiritual ideals, have been to the modern world a
legacy of moral bondage and intellectual death. The
early error had its truth, which saved us from that
one-sided and narrow view of another truth, which
would make it error. Faith in many gods was in
fact a recognition of that manifoldness of expression
by which the divine really becomes human ; and there-
fore, in the beautiful and orderly path of human evolu-
tion, it has not been wanting ; so that we know how
to worship The One in fulness of free opportunity
and integrity of culture. The keys of progress were
not committed to any single race or religion. Greek
and Jew alike were inspired ; alike heard eternal
truths, and bore divine messages to the generations
whose day was to be more liberal for the mingled
light of this twofold dawn. The Semite has sought
to preserve the principle of authority in the divine ;
the Aryan, that of development in the human. Only
the maturer reason of man could learn the true mean-
ing of both these principles and their unity in Uni-
versal Religion.
The Hebrew, or Christian, and the Aryan Bibles
are very unlike each other. The resemblance of the
praises of Indra or Varuna to the praises of Jehovah
goes, after all, but a little way. Even the Gospel of
John, with all its Alexandrian inspiration, is touched
148 RELIGION AND LIFE.
only at certain points with the creative religious im-
agination of the Aryan mind. Semitic ardor has
warmed and illumined many of the dark passages
of nature and life. But the Rishis also, lovers and
searchers of the Light, " saw " what they sang. The
debt we owe to the prophets and psalmists of Jehovah,
and to the Christian ideal, we are not likelv to over-
look or to undervalue. But we do need to be reminded
of other historical obligations and affinities. The
monotheist, whether of Athens, Rome, or Palestine,
was not the sole parent of our modern faith. The
plastic susceptibility which secures it from permanent
intolerance, opening broad paths of experience in
every direction, comes, so far as it depends on the past,
of o\xx polytheistic affinities and descent. Our liberty
and our science, the sense of free communion with God
and Nature through principles, ideas, laws, — are in
the line of the Veda rather than of the Thora or the
Gospels. These Aryan children feel no separation
from God through their thirst to know. To them
deity is not apart from man, but in him, revealed in
the free play of his own energies. They look straight
at the facts with their own eyes, not as aliens, and under
ban ; no sense of a " fall " comes in between to dis-
able the natural sight, nor is miracle made to dispar-
age the familiar facts of life ; no exclusive incarnation
limits the divine meaning of Nature as a whole ; no
external authority judges or supplants free thought,
aspiration, pursuit of truth. The modern spirit recog-
nizes its own features here in their infancy. This is
plainly the inextinguishable spark that has flamed at
last into our free arts and sciences and beliefs, and
shines with steady radiance in the civilization that
issues in such diverse types of universality as Goethe
THE HYMNS. \ i^p
and Humboldt and Emerson. And for the germs of.
this our larger opportunity, which guarantees wisdom
and gladness to man's present and future thought ; of
his genial outlook upon life as a home, and his fearless
hospitality to its forces and laws ; of the home-born
courage tp use all faculties and open all paths ; of
the assurance that we are not slaves of prescription,
whether to person, creed, or distinctive religion, but
natural heirs to universal truth ; of the self-respect
whose religion is rational, and the liberty whose ideal
is endless progress, — we must go back to the frank
Aryan herdsman, inviting his gods to sit as guests
beside him on his heap of Kusa-grass.
IV.
TRADITION.
!
TRADITION.
" \ ND Brahma said to Manu, * Divide the Veda, O
•^^^ Sage ! The age is changed ; the strength, the
fire is gone *down ; every thing is on the path of
decay.' " This passage from the Vayu Pm-ana shows
us that the later Hindus were not without perception
of the causes w^hich brought three ritiiahstic Script-
ures out of the simple Rig Veda Hymns.
The spontaneity of a germinant faith greets us only
to disappear. We are to pass from primitive Limits of
Aryan piety along a track, such as every re- degeneracy.
ligion has seemed fated to tread ; wherein we should
find bitter discouragement, as being led ever further
from the promise of the morning, were not every
lapse the guarantee of a coming self-recovery of
human nature, the nobler for the depth of the apparent
fall. We shall see this social equality exchanged for
the complex hierarchy of caste ; this liberty of private
worship for the despotism of an official priesthood ;
this inspiration for the pedantic echoes of past reve-
lations, themselves regarded as but mediators of a
yet older gospel, — those same manly Hymns which
we have just now admired as made to rebuke, not
to compel, a servile fear. We shall see this genial
practical vigor yield to expiatory sacrifices and the
154 RELIGION AND LIFE.
terrors of transmigration ; this freedom of the moun-
taineer to the enervation of dreamers among tropical
banyans and palms. In a word, we shall note a two-
fold degeneracy, caused by the forces of Ecclesiastical
Organization and Physical Nature.
But this is by no means a full account of the process ;
and that we may deal fair measure in our interpreta-
tion of it, we must be able to enter into the spirit of
these remote civilizations, as we would enter into the
inner life of a new personality, to do it justice for its
own sake.
At the outset then, let us appreciate that Worship
^. , of Tradition, which lies at the" root of Ori-
Onental -^ ^ ' ^
worship of ental faith. It is not to be judged by the
t epast. patent vices of modern traditionabls;;?, whose
preference of outworn, lifeless finaUties to an ever-open
spirit of inquiry is not a foundation of faith, but a form
of unbelief. This is a trailing shadow, flowing away
from the living substance of worship. But, whatever
else was wanting to it. Oriental veneration for the Past
was at least a fervent and supreme faith. That pro-
found absorption in religious sentiment which we saw
in the Veda is typical of the whole mind of these
Eastern races. Their tradition-worship was a rude
form of reverence for the Eternal : it was awe before
everlastingness. They built their temples and hewed
out their caves and their rock statues on a scale that
should symbolize this awe. It was because the religious
books, rites, legends, hymns, seemed as old as the
stars and streams and patriarchal trees, and memory
w^ent not back to their becrinning's, that thev were held
sacred. Their permanence belittled the fleeting lives,
the vanishing dreams and deeds of men : it did not
minister to their vanity, but to their humility. Man
TRADITION. , 155
could have had things so ancient and so stable, only
of God. If the hoary head was believed the patri-
archal chrism, the visible sign of divine appointment
to the oldest priesthood, much more should God be
present in words white with the love and awe of un-
told generations ; words which could no more come to
death than they could be traced back to any mortal
birth. The earliest sense of immortality came, as we
have seen, in the feeling of a continuous existence
traceable through the. ^itris or progenitors, and in the
aspiration to become one with them in their inviolable
home ; for the serene silence of the past in which
they dwelt was a fit shrine to hold the moral and
spiritual idealism of their descendants. "The pitris,"
according to this faith, "are free from wrath, intent
on purity, without sensual passion ; primeval divini-
ties, who have laid strife aside. "^ It was a worship
founded in gratitude, the apotheosis of the tenderest
sentiments. "A parent's care in producing and rear-
ing children," says the law, "cannot be compensated
in a hundred years." ^ This authority of ideal love
and duty penetrated all worlds. Even the gods could
not turn recreant to the past, and forsake their duties
to progenitors, without penalty : they were even in-
voked by the priests, in sacrifice, by the names of their
special ancestry.^
Under such conditions, Bibliolatry deserves a cer-
tain respect. As these old Vedic Hymns, „
■t J ^ Reverence
in process of time, came to be collected, ar- for the
ranged, and enlarged into Samaveda and Yajur-
veda for purposes of ritual service, we note indeed
the failure ci inspiration, and the growth of ecclesias-
1 M>MV, CXI. 192. 2 Ibid., II. 227
• MuL.e , SaTtskrit Literature, p. 386.
156 RELIGION AND LIFE.
ticism ; yet there is something tender as. well as noble in
the faithfulness with which the Hindu cherished them
as " reminiscences of a former state ; " ^ as " words
heard from above," ^ committed to him by a long line
of ancestors, who still sought him with yearning care,
and who were cherished with the whole strength of
his affections ; their primitive Sanskrit the very lan-
guage of God ; their syllables so full of virtue that they
needed not to be uttered or even understood, only silently
whispered in the heart ; yet every one of them laden
with ineffable meanings, which endless commentaries
souorht in vain to exhaust ; laden with Brahmanas,
Upanishads, Sutras, Puranas ; literally a thousand
schools of biblical science founded on their mooted
texts; wells of theology, literature, science, legisla-
tion, for ever brimming, let never so much be drawn
ofT from ap;e to agre.^ It is but a childish thouo^ht of
everlastingness : but this child is Humanity ! Then
how colossal that outgrowth of the intuition, how utter
that faith, how prodigal that toil in its service ! And
if age be indeed venerable, surely there was better
ground for such Bibliolatry than for any other that
has ever existed. What records, what institutions, can
be called time-hallowed by the side of these? When
Solon boasted of the antiquity of Greek wisdom, the
old priest of Sais led him through the sepulchral
chambers, showed him the tombs of a hundred dynas-
1 The Veddfiia. ^ Manu.
3 Manu (XII. 94-102) declares the Vedas "an eye giving constant light, not made by
man, nor to be measured ty his powers. All that has been, is, or shall be, is revealed
by them ; all creatures are sustained, all authority is imparted, all prosperity given, by the
knowledge of these, which burns out the taint of sin, and makes one approach the divine
nature though he sojourns in this low world." — "Brahma has milked out of them three
holy letters, — A. U. M. ; three mystic words, — Earth, Sky, Heaven ; three sacred meas-
ures of verse, — the Gayatri : and tliese immutable things, the essence of this wisdom that
was from the beginning, shall be sanctity and salvation to him who ceaselessly utters them
with faith." II. 74-84.
TRADITION. 157
ties, recounted to him the annals of nine thousand
3'ears, and admonished him that he was but a child,
that there lived no aged Greek. " You have no re-
mote tradition, O Solon, nor any discipline that is
hoary with age." What must the pandits of Benares
think of the Christian missionary, who would supplant
their veneration for the Sanskrit Vedas by claiming that
divine guardianship has transmitted his Greek or even
his Hebrew Scriptures? Wherein is his advantage?
Is not evc7'y Bible a cup that holds what the drinker
wills? "Every one who pleases," says the Dabistan,
" may derive from the Vedas arguments in favor of
his particular creed, to such a degree that they can
support by clear proofs the philosophical, mystical,
unitarian, and atheistical systems ; Hinduism, Judaism,
Christianity, Fire-worship, the tenets of the Sonites or
Shiites ; in short, these volumes consist of such ingen-
ious parables and sublime meanings, that all who
seek may find their wishes fulfilled."^
A mature, self-conscious generation cannot compete
with races of instinctive faith, upon their own ground,
without making itself more childish than they. Its
own liberty to inquire and grow is what represents, in
a nobler way, that very authority of age which tradi-
tion-worsliip but dimly divined. Nature is older than
ritual or Bible, and the personality of Man more ven-
erable, even with years, than all his " special revela-
tions." We cannot forsake the insight nor the tasks
of the man for the unquestioning credence of the child.
But in the child we none the less admire a tender
respect for age. We recognize the "trailing cloud of
glory ; " a filial instinct towards eternity ; an inborn
sense of our affinity with imperishable life.
^ Dabistan-, ch. II. 2.
158 RELIGION AND LIFE.
To the unfolding consciousness of the race as of the
^ individual, the first great mystery is memory.
its divine All dear and honored things pass into one
fuuction. giient but living fold, and there await the call
that evokes them from their sleep. There death is
incessantly overcome, and swallowed up in resur-
rection. In this light of endless preservation and
renovation the fact of immortality is first revealed.
Megasthenes tells us that no monuments were erected
in India to the dead, because the people believed that
their virtues would make them immortal in the memory
of posterity. We are far away now from those days
when man bent in natural wonder before this experi-
ence of renewal. The memory is, for us, one of many
faculties, into which our science has analyzed the
mind, and with which we have grown but too familiar
as human instruments to venerate them as mysteries of
power. But to the awakening soul it was the wonder
of wonders, the power of powers. It might well be,
as it was, the earliest purely spiritual deity of the hu-
man race. It was the only preserver of man's " winged
words," the only conductor between his past and his
future ; and its stupendous achievements were at once
result and warrant of the reverent culture it received.
For many centuries the treasures of human experi-
ence, of hymn, meditation, and ritual, accumulating
from remotest time, were in its keeping alone ; and
the immense deposit was transmitted more faithfully
than by the later devices of writing and printing.
The prophet was "the rememberer," the "bearer on"
of an ancient message. Never to forget was the most
sacred and tender duty. The Greeks preserved Homer
in their memory alone for four hundred years. Down
to the time of Buddha there is no positive evidence of
TRADITION. 159
a written Sanskrit. Veda does not mean Scriptures,
does not mean Bible, or Book at all, but, more spiritu-
ally. Wisdom. The Hindus know no dearer name
for it than " Words remembered from the beginning."
Through indefinite ages this whole literature "was
transmitted in this invisible way, by means of inces-
sant mnemonic practice,^ and guarded from the dese-
crating hand of the penman, even after the introduction
of writing, by stern prohibitions as well as by traditional
contempt. And it has been finely suggested that the
ample satisfaction afforded to every need of intellectual
and religious communication, by their splendid culture
of the memory, may have prevented the early Hindus
from inventing a written alphabet ; an achievement
which other races, such as the Chinese, Egyptians,
and Hebrews, owed to their inability to mature this
more intellectual instrument. ^ In Plato's Egyptian
myth in the Phasdrus, the god who invents letters as a
medicine for memory is told that he is doing detri-
ment to the mind, by teaching men to remember out-
wardly by means of foreign marks, instead of inwardly,
by their own faculties. We can at least admire the
fine economy of Nature, in opening the resources of
this faculty in men, while as yet science had not se-
cured other means of preserving and transmitting
thought. How should we ever, in this age of discon-
tinuous reading and ephemeral journalism, — chopped
feed for ruining these powers, — come to realize, as
Miiller has well suggested, how vast they are?
Thus even Oriental worship of tradition has its own
proper root in human nature, and its noble germs also
* See Miiller's account of such exercises in Hindu schools, Sansk. Lit., p. 504.
* Pictet, II. 558.
l6o RELIGION AND LIFE.
of future dignities ; nor had those children of memory
turned their faces, like our religious traditionalists,
coldly and unbelievingly to a dead Past.
And so, when we see the Hindu slowly elaborating
his minute ritualism ^ in that still life alono^ the
Oriental rit- °
uaiisman Gaugcs, tweuty-five hundred years ago, until
ideal. j^g j^^^ transferred, out of his brooding thought
of the Everlasting, its inviolable permanence into all
works and ways, we cannot permit any superstition
or puerility involved in it to hide the fact that it brings
also its incentives to respect for human nature. That
hypocrisy and sanctimony were quite as possible in
this as in any other religious form, is palpable ; but
the essence of Oriental ritualism was certainly reality.
The absorbed ascetic, girt with sacrificial cord, gesticu-
lating before animals and plants, bowing to his platter,
walking round it, wetting his eyes, shutting his nos-
trils and mouth by turns, muttering spells as in a
dream, performing his three suppressions of the breath,
whispering the three sacred letters, pronouncing at
intervals the three holy words and measures,^ is to
nature, reason, and common sense, in many ways, an
unedifying . spectacle ; yet, as compared with much
modern formalism of a less detailed and visible sort,
he will compel a serious moral esteem. '"These
Hindu gesticulations," says Professor Wilson,^ " are
not subjects of ridicule, because reverentially prac-
tised by men of sense and learning." That quaint
writer, James Howell, the contemporary of Sir Thomas
Browne, whom he in many ways resembled, tells us
frankly : " I knock thrice every day at heaven's gate,
* See the microscopic regulation of times, rites, food, and auguries detailed in the first
book of Yajnavalkya's Law Code, and the fifth of Manu.
2 Manu, II. 74. 8 Essays on Hindu Religion^ II. 57.
TRADITION. l6l
besides prayers at meals, and other occasional ejacu-
lations, as upon the putting on of a clean shirt, wash-
ing my hands, and lighting the candles. And as I
pray thrice a day, so I fast thrice a week," &c. These
quaint devotions, somewhat in the Oriental spirit,
may help us to distinguish the idea which its round
of observances sought to embody, from the formal-
ism of mercantile piety that pays off a business-like
God at a fixed rate, in days, words, and rites ; set-
ting apart for this exalted Personage, a Church, a
Bible, an abstract morality, that it may keep its houses,
trades, politics, and practical prudence for quite other
dedications. Oriental ceremonial was at least essen-
tially an effort to cover the zvhole of life with divine
relation. It was recognized that the primacy of relig-
ion did not cease at some given point, where men
may have chosen to draw the line. That is not relig-
ion whose outward law and set plan fastens on us
like a thumb-screw, is endured as penance, and gladly
thrown off to escape the pain and awkwardness of its
constraints. Relations which are afhrmed in theory
to be unnatural, and shown in practice to be so by
systematic evasion, have certainly little to do with
either faith or freedom.
Behind the dreary ceremonialism of the old relig-
ions, there is the aspiration of an ideal. The despot-
ism of priestcraft does not explain such phenomena
as the requirements of Burmese law, that a priest
when eating shall inwardly say, " I eat not to please
my palate, but to support life ; " when dressing, " I put
on these robes, not to be vain of them, but to conceal
my nakedness ; " and in taking medicine, " I desire
recovery, only that I may be the more diligent in
II
1 62 • RELIGION AND LIFE.
devotion."^ That minute regulation of the form,
whether inward or outward, in which we should find
the death not of spontaneity only, but of sincerity,
must be taken in connection with the permanent habit
of the Oriental mind, which in each individual was
itself, more or less, a constant reproduction of the
original meaning of the precept. The instinctive
demand for enduring things required that the whole
of life should reflect divine unchangeableness, from
the largest relations to the least. There must be
nothing hurried, erratic, impulsive : all must be fixed
and serene, an image of brooding deity. Human
action had surer determination than the impulses of
the moment. Fate was the dearest of divinities to these
contemplative minds, because it expressed this idea of
ah unalterable path, and satisfied this instinctive yearn-
ing for absolute devotion to the religious ideal. Where
reason has not yet come to its sure revolt against im-
plicit faith, men move in the chains of habit, which they
themselves have forged, with slight sense of bondage,
and without the moral degradation which always
enters with enforced conformity. There is freedom
in spontaneity, even of Religious Form.
It is generally allowed that the Oriental races wear
their robes of ceremony, whether in worship
Its freedom- . • i i i
or in manners, with real ease, and even a
strange grace, in spite of endless petty elaboration.
"There is more civility and grace among all classes
in India," we are told, " than in corresponding classes
in Europe and America."^ This is because their
'etiquette is spontaneous, without doubleness and self-
rebuke in the person, a wholeness, a genuine faith.
^ Malcom, Travels in Btir^nah. * Allen's hidia^ p. 483.
TRADITION. • 163
Manners are here a part of religion, and common
actions grow punctilious from an instinctive sense
of accord with the ideal form. There is, I doubt
not, a kind of freshness and even freedom in the
Hebrew boy, as he binds the thongs of his tephillin
seven times round his wrist, and thrice round his
finger, and repeats the formularies over every bit of
food, and at sight of every change that passes
over the face of Nature, and on the "enjoyment of
any new thing. "^ For the Hebrew still retains in some
measure the infantile faith in forms as the natural
body of piety, and in piety which clothes the whole
of life in a time-hallowed ritual. It is not Form as
such that is ungracious, constrained, or undevout, but
forms that do not express the life in its unity and
integrity. In the instinctive ease and freedom of
Oriental routine there is even an image, not so faint
as to be insignificant, of that perfect liberty of the
wise and just person, whose every act is unconditional,
inevitable, precise as the planet's sweep.
" Slight those who say, amidst their sickly healths,
Thou livest by rule. What doth not so, but man ?
Houses are built by rule, and commonwealths.
Entice the hasty sun, if but you can,
. From his ecliptic hne : beckon the sky !
Who lives by rule then, keeps good company."
There is a self-idolatry of passions and cupidi-
ties, a failure of respect for great social and moral
traditions of civihzation, on which order and culture,
as .well as purity and decency stand, that would remand
us to infinitely worse barbarism than all the tradition-
worship of the older races combined.
1 See InstructioTts in the Mosaic Religiotu, from the German of Johlson (Philadelphia,
1830), p. 112.
164 ' RELIGION AND LIFE.
The ritualism of Eastern devotees is of course not
the intelligent freedom of living according to universal
laws of culture and use. But at least the ease, preci-
sion, and minute perfection of both, flow alike from
free surrender of the whole life to the ideal faith ;
though this faith be ever so different in the two cases,
and though in the one case the principle itself be but
germinant, in the other mature.
When we recognize therefore that in all the history
The protest 0^ rcligious forms there is nothing like Hindu
of thougiit. j-j^^^ligj-Q {q-^- complexity, thoroughness, and
rigor, we really concede to this people a certain pre-
eminent integrity in fls religious conviction. We
have here in fact a great, all-surrounding abstract
idea, admitting no exception, no evasion, no com-
promise, no practical limit. It is the first product of
that pure brain-work which makes the inward life
of the Aryans of the Ganges. In their clime of beat-
ing suns and towering forests, one element of the old
Iranian energy made vigorous protest against the
forces of physical nature, — the intellectual element.
It would create after its own vast aspiration, even
though it were in idea only. Of the manifold beauty
and wealth of which this dream-life was capable, the
whole history of Hindu poetry, from the Vedas to the
Puranas, is the impressive record. In philosophy and
religion, the contemplative faculty produced yet more
marvellous results. Its grasp on pure ideas was ex-
traordinary, and its faith in living by them absolute.
It was bound to take the whole of life into its mighty
impulse to create and rule. It was bound to construct
all forms of action in the image of its own eternity ; a
world whose very freedom should be in the absolute-
ness of its sure and perfect ways. So that in the
TRADITION. 165
absence of that struggle with practical conditions and
for visible uses which educates us to independence
and progress, ritualism, all-pervading and all-ordain-
ing, became the natural language of its ideal ; the
more so in proportion as it sought to organize itself in
a Brahmanical or other ecclesiastical communion.
For how insignificant and impotent would the indi-
vidual come to appear, seen through this absorbing
vision of everlastingness. Heart-deadening asceticism
was but a natural result. But let us remember that
all real self-abnegation, though it may fail of due bal-
ance from the practical and social energies, none the
less truly involves the substance of practical virtue.
And its upward aim surely deserves our thoughtful
study, as an element of universal religion, however
the mist of dreams rolled in between it and the goal
it sought.
V.
THE LAWS.
THE LAWS OF MANU.
"XT 7HEN Vedic inspiration ceased, there came ages
^^ of organized traditional religion. To Growth of
the Mantras, or Hymns ofseers, succeeded the ^""f^^'^^^"
^ -J cal institu-
Brahmanas, or theological homilies about the tions.
hymns ; explanations of the sacrifices and rituals,
definitions of faith, directions for efficacious use
of formulas in prayer. They are the work of a
priestly class, gradually formed by the development
of the old patriarchal or family religion into close
clans or fraternities, with distinct functions in the ritual ;
and dealing for the most part, naturally enough, in
quite spiritless pedantry and verbiage, ringing changes
on " revealed texts " with superstitious and pompous
verbal commentary, after the manner of biblical func-
tionaries everywhere. Miiller has traced this tradi-
tionalism even in the latter part of the Vedic period,
busily at work arranging and combining the hymns
for ceremonial purposes.^ Gradually priestly author-
it}^ became elaborated in the caste-system, and ex-
pressed itself in ideals of legislation. These were
based in part on natural wants of the social organiza-
tion, and in part on the logic of the religious idea, as
1 Sansk. Lit.^ p. 456. There were more than twenty of these old clans, out of which
sacerdotal families were developed.
170 ■ RELIGION AND LIFE.
traditionally received, and developed by its represen-
tative class. Doubtless there were many such codes,
emanating from different priestly schools and fellow-
ships;^ but their ecclesiastical compilers could hardly
have possessed the means of imposing them upon the
population of India. It is probable therefore that they
were carried into practice only in so far as they really
embodied popular customs and beliefs. Their devel-
opment, too, must have been very slow ; and many
ages must have elapsed before so vast an edifice of
rules and relations could have been constructed, even
in theory, as we find presented, with a serene and
simple absolutism, as if by universal consent of gods
and men, in the Dharmasastra of the Manavas, com-
monly called the Laws of Manu.
This serene self-assurance, in fact, rested upon pub-
lic recognition. Law itself, we must remember, was
originally but the mandate of religious sentiment, and
the oldest legislation was everywhere honestly as-
cribed to the gods ; for these ruder ages heard secret
whispers of an eternal truth, on the acceptance and
right following of which depends the life of the latest
and freest states.
It is still undetermined at what period the theolog-
ical, moral, political, and social ideal of the
Code of Brahmanical schools became embodied in this
code. It has been usual, ever since its trans-
lation by Sir William Jones, in 1794,^ to place it next
in antiquity to the three oldest Vedas, as one of the
few great landmarks of Hindu literature ; and most
Orientalists have dated it somewhere between the
eighth and thirteenth centuries before the Christian
^ Parishads and Charanas. See Miiller, Sansk. Lit.
* The version here used.
THE LAWS OF MANU. I7I
era.^ Yet other recent scholars find the evidences of
this great antiquity inadequate, and hold its date to be
altogether unknown, the most eminent of these being
Max Miiller.
It is certain that Greek authors, from the time of
Alexander, agree that Hindu courts appealed to no
written codes ; though Lassen may be correct in his
suggestion that their references are to special occa-
sions only, and do not prove that such written laws
were not in existence. It must be allowed, too, that
legislative codes depend on the current use of writing ;
and this cannot be traced back in India beyond the
age ascribed to Buddha. True, a wonderful develop-
ment of the memory supplied the place of books ; and
as the Vedic hymns were preserved by oral tradition
alone for centuries, so, doubtless, were definite social
customs and rules. But a code so elaborate as this,
embodying the whole Brahmanical system in its de-
veloped form and full application to all branches of
human conduct, would imply a common understand-
ing of relations and duties for which zvritte^i docu-
• 1 This is the view of such eminent authorities as Lassen and Burnouf, as well as of
Koeppen in his very thorough investigations into the history of Buddhism ; and Weber's
exhaustive researches into the literature of India result in the judgment that it is the oldest
of the numerous Hindu Codes. The groui^ds of this general agreement are given by
Duncker, Geschichte d. AUertkmns, II. pp. 96, 97. The followmg is a summary: The
oldest Buddhist Sutras describe a more developed stage of Brahmanism in many respects
than this code, and must therefore have a later origin : yet they are traceable far back
beyond the Christian era. It is probably cited in the Buddhist legends and in the Mahab-
harata. It is cognizant of only three Vedas, while the Buddhist Sutras are acquainted
with the latest Veda also. It contains no allusion to Buddhism by name, and makes only
general reference to rationalists who denied the Veda, as was in fact done by many schools
previous to Buddha. It knows nothing of the worship of Siva, familiar to Buddhist
Sutras ; nothing of that of Vishnu-Krishna, — its only allusion to Vishnu being in a pas-
sage of doubtful antiquity, and this after a purely Vedic manner, — nothing finally of the
epic -heroes, while it freely mentions kings famous in the Vedic age. Finallj', its geo-
graphical knowledge extends no farther than the Vindhya Mountains, though the Aryans
had conquered much of Southern India long before our era. See Lassen, I. 800; Bur-
nouf, Introd. a VHist. dii Boiiddhistne, p. 133 ; Koeppen,, I. 38; Weber, Vorleszmgen,
p. 242-244. Wilson, Introd. to Rig Veda, places it as early as the fifth century B.C.
172 RELIGION AND LIFE.
ments appear absolutely necessary. And the use of
such documentary form for systems or ideals of jurispru-
dence was not likely to have been undertaken in India,
until a comparatively late period ; both because of the
general dislike for written teachings and because all
authoritative priesthoods are disinclined to limit them-
selves to defined and recorded rules. Such self-limi-
tation came, doubtless, only when it could no longer
be resisted, and may have been compelled by the ad-
vance of Buddhism. Yet even these considerations
would not greatly diminish the supposable antiquity
of the Code, at least in its main elements. That in its
present form it represents a gradual growth of the
Brahmanical ideas, and contains additions belonging
to very different periods, is more than probable, es-
pecially from the confused and contradictory elements
in its legislation. At all events, it alludes to earlier
codes, whose elements are doubtless incorporated into
this, the fullest and most perfect in form of all that are
yet known to us.^ Of these Indian codes, early and
late, there would seem to be no end. Stenzler enu-
merates forty-seven law-books by different authors,
besides twenty-two special revisions ; the codes of
Manu and Yajnavalkya only being now practically
accessible to us.^ Most of these books, however, are
metrical versions, based on older texts.
Both these codes define the extent of their territorial
validity by calHng themselves the "law of the land
(Aryavarta) where dwells the black gazelle." It was
thus admitted that a portion of the peninsula lay out-
side their jurisdiction. Whatever antiquity may be
ascribed to Manu, or however late the orio;in of its
to
1 Sten:£ler, in Weber's Indische Studien, I. 336, 237.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 73
present form, it is difficult to find the age when it can
have had practical recognition by any large portion of
the people of India. It is in fact but the Law Code
of the Manavas, one of the old Brahmanical fellow-
ships founded on common guardianship of sacred texts,
and is valuable mainly as embodying what was un-
doubtedly Orthodox Brahinanism in its most vigorous
age, as well as a vast number of the recognized usages
and institutions of ancient Hindu life. And there is
reason for believing, in accordance with what is stated
by Mr. Maine to be the opinion of the best scholars,
that " it does not as a whole represent a set of rules
ever actually administered in Hindustan, but is an
ideal picture of what, in the view of the Brahmans,
ought to be the Law." ^
As further evidence of a later origin than the Brah-
manas, we may observe that the Manava-Dharma-
sastra belongs to the class of writings defined by the
orthodox Hindus as Smriti, or tradition, in distinction
from Sruti, or revelation. It is difficult to explain this
fact, except upon the supposition that a 7Jiore recent date
was ascribed to it than to the Brahmanas, which, as we
know, by reason of their antiquity were held to be
verbally inspired. For it represents Manu as receiv-
ing the eternal rules of justice from Brahma himself,
and as delivering them to the ten great rishis, who
reverently address him as master of all divine
truth. '-^
Notwithstanding this inferior position, the Brahman-
^ Ancient Law, p. i6. See Sykes, Polit. Condition of A7tc. India, Journal R. As.
Soc, 1851, VI. ; Afinah of Rural Bengal, p. 104. The Code of Manu is nominally
the law of the Burmese empire. But we are told that every monarch alters it to suit
himself, and that it is null for all practical purposes, being never produced or pleaded
from in courts. Malcom, Travels in Burinah, Notes, IV.
2 Introduction to Manu.
\^
I'J^ RELIGION AND LIFE.
ical commentators have not failed to recognize its
immense value as authority in whatever relates to their
traditional faith. And they labor earnestly to prove,
not quite true to their bibliolatry here, that Manu's
knowledge of the Vedas gave him equal claims
with their authors ; yet they bring the testimony
of Vedic text itself, that " whatever Manu said is
me-dicine."^
Of all Institutes of Government, this, to the Brah-
manical tribes, was the consummate and sacred
ame. ^^^^^^j.^ Mauu signifies Thought. The word
is kindred with the Latin juens^ as also with nian^ and
indicates the honor paid by the Aryan race to the in-
tellectual nature.- The name thus expressive of
divine intelligence revealed in the human, was ap-
plied by the Hindus to the mythical first man and
first king, as to many other imaginary rishis in prime-
val legend.^ The Institutes called by his name are
in twelve books of metrical sentences, covering all
branches of speculation and ethics, of public and pri-
vate life. The first reveals a Cosmogony ; the second
and third re^xulate Education and Marriacj^e as duties of
the first and second stages of Hindu culture ; the fourth
treats of Economics and Morals ; the fifth, of Diet and
Purification, also of Women ; the sixth, of Devotion, or
the duties of the third and fourth stages ; the seventh,
of Government and the Military Class; the eighth, of
Private and Criminal Law ; the ninth, of the Com-
mercial and Servile Classes ; the tenth, of Mixed
Classes and Regulations for Times of Distress ; the
1 See quotations in Miiller, p. 89. 103.
* Minos of Greeks, Menes of Eg>'ptian, Mannus of Germans, Menw of Welsh. See
Pictet, II. 621-627.
8 See Ztschr. d. D. M. G., IV. 430; Muller, p. 532.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 75
eleventh, of Penance and Expiation ; the twelfth, of
Transmio-ration and Final Beatitude.^
As the basis of Brahmanical speculation is that self
is nothing, and that of their ethics that self- g^sis in self-
ishness is hell, so the substance of their juris- abnegation.
prudence is a discipline of entire self-renunciation.
The theoretic aim of the Manavasastra is the utter
suppression of selfish desire. It is absolute despotism ;
but a despotism hy the conscience rather than over it;
enslavement not of subjects by rulers, but of souls by
their religious idea. Manu begins, and Yajnavalkya
ends, with reverent ascription of the Law to the Self-
existent. Highest and lowest castes alike confess its
terrible sanctions, present and future. Its minuteness of
legislation is unequalled. If we should judge Oriental
prescription by the principles we must apply among
ourselves, w^e should say that its regulations, purifica-
tions, penances — an endless reach of absurdity — had
not left the slightest loop-hole for the self-Ussertion of
private reason or will. They are doubtless framed with
special regard to the prerogative of the priesthood, as
divinely appointed, and as conscious of being the in-
telligent and controlling class ; but the legislation was
\-dc\N fo7' the priesthood, as well as by it, and demanded
of this class as complete self-abnegation as it exacted
from the Pariah. The Brahman was fully invested
with the duty of concealing its inner meaning from all
but such as are worthy to receive it from his sacred
lips ; and an appalling secrecy repelled curiosity and
^ The Law Code of Yajnavalkya, probably next in the order of time to Manu, and
referred by Stenzler to the period between the second and fifth centuries of our era, covers
substantially the same ground with its predecessor, but with much less of detail, and in a
style and diction in many respects peculiar to itself. Its speculative contents are different
from those of Manu, comprising a curious treatise on the physical birth and structure of
man, and a philosophy that strangely combines astrological fancies with mystical. Buddhis-
tic, and positive tendencies. It consists of three books only, which have been translated
by Stenzler (Berlin, 1849), from whose German version our extracts are taken.
176 RELIGION AND LIFE.
repressed ambition in the lay classes. This is their
sacrifice. He has also his : to surrender himself,
body, mind, and soul, to its ascetic observances ; and
faithfully to fulfil its minutest precepts, on penalty of
dreadful transmigrations for ages. Thus a master
instinct of sacrifice sweeps the whole compass of life
and thought. It is because this instinct, however
blind, has yet essentially noble elements, that w^e find
even a spiritual and social thraldom like caste, though
bristling with insensate ceremonies and penalties, alive
with the endeavor to subdue selfish desires. We see
this alike in the implacable severity with which sensual
and brutal appetites are punished, and in the benevo-
lence which runs in fine veins and broad arteries
through the gloomy organism, forbidding wrath and
revenge, binding the heart to the least of sentient
creatures,^ and in its way anticipating the tenderness
of the modern poet : —
" He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all." ^
We see the same endeavor in the stern disciplines
laid upon servants, priests, and kings, a deeper
democracy of renunciation beneath the tyrannies of
caste ; and in the final aim of the whole to make
saints whose motive shall lie in virtue, not in its re-
wards ; whose ultimate freedom shall be to lose them-
1 Manu, IV. 238, 246 ; VI. 40, 68.
2 A striking instance of this mixture of superstition with tenderness to the brute world,
as a discipline of self-denial, is in the penance prescribed in Manu for having chanced to
kill a cow; a creature inviolably sacred for the Hindu, from his sense of her benefits to his
fathers in the early nomad days. The offender "must wait for months all day on the herd,
and quaff the dust raised by their hoofs ; must stand when they stand, move when they
move, and lie down by them when they lie down. Should a cow fall into any trouble or
fear, he must relieve her ; and, in whatever heat, rain, or cold, must not seek his own
shelter, without having cared for the cows." Manu, XI. 109-116.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 77
selves in Deity, whose method to " shun all worldly
honor as poison, and seek disrespect as nectar,"^
" reposing in perfect content on God alone." ^ And we
see it in the creed which inspires all this asceticism,
and proves it to have been a living faith, not an en-
forced bondage: — "The resignation of all pleasures
is better than the enjoyment of them."^
The product of Brahmanical self-renunciation was
the Yogi, a creature of penances, purifications,
and ascetic feats ; the conventional type of ^ °^"
heathen degradation ; whom the law book itself paints
as crouching at the foot of a gloomy banyan, his
hairs growing over him, and his nails growing in,
gazing listlessly on the tip of his nose, or moping
along with his eyes fixed on the ground, lest he should
unawares destroy some ant or worm ; " waiting release
from his body as a servant his wages," yet wishing
neither life nor death, and receiving his food from
others without asking it, as the due of his austerities
for the public good.^ Unpromising enough ; yet the
desert monks of Christendom in the fourth century
were, as a class, less gentle and thoughtful, and cer-
tainly far less cleanly, than these Eastern devotees;
while they drew from Christian dogma the same
unnatural theory of self-abnegation which the others
drew from Hindu caste. And, repulsive as he may
be, the Yogi is a specimen, such as these crude social
conditions could furnish, of devotion to a purely
contemplative ideal. Under all the circumstances
even squalid asceticism appears as a positive moral
protest. For sensuality must have all the more
fiercely beset the temperament of the Hindu, under
* Manu, H. 162. 2 Ibid., VI. 43, 34.
8 Ibid., II. 95. * Ibid., VI. 42, 45, 58, 68; Yajnavalkya, III. 45, 62.
12
178 RELIGION AND LIFE.
hot suns, amidst a voluptuous physical nature, the
more he was devoted to seclusion and meditation ;
and these relentless disciplines were in fact a vigor-
ous reaction aorainst titanic attractions in the senses.
Their very name, tafas^ signifying heat, hints of a
torrid climate, in which the moral sense was finding
itself severely tried. This virtue is of the passive
Hindu quality, lacking self-consciousness and free-
dom, a divine instinct struggling against hard con-
ditions ; but how complete its command ! Man shall
know nothing, and be nothing, apart from the God of
his ideal thought ; and in finding Him all things else
shall be found. Such is its law and its promise. To
escape the finite dream, and the petty limit of self,
and to enter into the real and eternal, as a blessed life
worthy of all price, is the mystic desire into which all
great religions have flowered, each in its own hour
and way.
The Brahmanical poets certainly knew how to
picture their wilderness-life in very attractive colors,
even for the civilized mind.-^ The hermitages are
described in the Ramayana, as well as by Kalidasa,
as surrounded by spacious lawns, well planned and
scrupulously neat; frequented by antelopes, deer, and
birds, creatures "taught to trust in man; " shaded by
fruit-bearing trees; laved by canals, strewed with
wild-flowers,* and set with clear pools, where white
lilies, symbols of holy living, spread their floating-
petals, never wet by their contact with the element
beneath, to the clear sky.^ And here the peaceable
saints, husbands and wives, purified bodily by con-
tinual ablutions, and spiritually by happy meditation
on sacred themes, lived amidst supernatural delights
^ Ragh7wafisa^ B. I. ; Sakimiald^ Act I.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 79
in the society of celestial guests, and received the
visits of their admirers with hospitality in their leafy
huts ; performing stupendous feats of asceticism with-
out physical injury ; multiplying their simple roots and
herbs into splendid bouquets, large enough for .armies,
with resources beside which those of Hebrew and
Christian miracle rnust, to this Oriental imagination,
be hopelessly tame. Through the mythological dress,
we detect an ideal which could not have failed in
some degree to reconcile ascetic life with natural occu-
pation and social good.
And we, in fact, find that the active virtues are
not forgotten. "All honor to the house- The active
holder," says the law, " and let him faithfully ^^^^"^^•
fulfil his duties." " He who gives to strangers, with a
view to fame, while he suffers his family to live in
distress, having power to support them, touches his
lips with honey, but swallows poison. Such virtue is
counterfeit."^ And the purely contemplative life was
not allowable till three stages of practical activity had
been passed through : the student life ; domestic mar-
ried life, or social service of some sort; and anchoret
life, a kind of missionary function, to feed the forest
creatures, and preach to disciples, — doubtless, like
St. Francis, to the fishes and the fowls also. "Low
shall he fall who applies his mind to final beatitude,
before having paid the three debts, to the gods, the
fathers, and the sages ; read the Vedas according to
law; begotten a son; and sacrificed, to the best of
his power. "2 Then only "shall the twice-born man,
■perceiving his muscles relaxing and his hair turning
gray^ leave his wife to his sons, or else, accompanied
» Manu, XI. g. « Ibid., VI. 35-
l8o RELIGION AND LIFE.
by her, seek refuge in a forest, with firm faith and
subdued organs of sense." There he is to Hve, patient
of extremities, a perpetual giver, benevolent towards
all beings, content with roots and fruit, studj'ing what
the Vedas teach of the being and attributes of God ;
proving his mastery over outward things ; in the hot
season by adding four fires to the sun's heat ; un-
covered in the cold ; putting on wet garments in rain ;
and, if incurably diseased, living on air and water till
his frame decays and his soul is united with the Su-
preme.^ Thus he advances to the final disciplines of
a Sannyasi, whose sole employment is "to meditate
on the transmigrations caused by sin and the im-
perishable rewards of virtue, on the subtle essence
of the Supreme Spirit and its complete existence in
all beings." So " his offences are burned away ; "
" all that is repugnant to the divine nature is extin-
guished ; " " higher worlds are illuminated with his
glory," and he is "absorbed in the divine essence."^
Here the balance of the active and passive elements
is indeed lost, since the ideal of life is contemplation
alone ; but both elements are at all events recognized,
and the system in this respect compares very credita-
bly with Christian asceticism, by insisting, as that has
seldom or never done, on the fulfilment of practical
duties as passport to contemplative repose.
Far back in the ages, without doubt long before
Spirituality, the Christian era, Hindu formalism was met
b}'' these trenchant rebukes : —
" By falsehood sacrifices become vain ; by pride, devotions. By
proclaiming a gift, its fruit perishes." ^
" For whatever purpose a man shall bestow any gift, according to
that purpose shall be his reward." *
1 Matm, VI. 1-31. * Ibid., VI. 62, 72, 81.
8 Ibid., IV. 237. * Ibid., 234.
THE LAWS OF MANU. l8l
"One who voluntarily confesses his sin shall, so far, cast it off:
when his heart shall loathe it, the taint then only shall pass away." ^
" Let no man, having committea sins, perform penance, under pre-
text of devotion, disguising his crime under fictitious religion :
such impostors, though Brahmans, are despised."^
"A man who performs rites only, not discharging his moral
duties, falls low : let him discharge these duties, even though he be
not constant in those rites." ^
" He who governs his passions, though he know only the Gdyalri,
or holiest text, is more to be honored than one who governs them
not, though he may know the three Vedas." ^
. Though with Eastern extravagance it is said else-
where that "sixteen suppressions of the breath, with
the constant repetition of the holy syllables for a
month, will absolve even the slayer of a Brahman for
his hidden faults,"^ passages like the foregoing cer-
tainly imply also that only a repentant spirit could give
such efficacy to the form. So this frank confession of
bibliolatry — " as a clod sinks into a great lake, so is
every sinful act submerged in the triple Veda" — should
be taken in connection with such precepts as the fol-
lowinof : —
" The wise are purified by forgiveness of injuries ; the neghgent
of duty, by liberality ; they who have secret faults, by devout medi-
tation." ^
" Of all pure things, purity in acquiring wealth is pronounced
most excellent ; since he who gains this \vith clean hands is truly
pure, not he who is purified with earth and water."'''
" Penance brings purification for the Veda student ; patience for
the wise ; water for the body ; silent prayer for the secret sin ; truth
for the mind : for the soul the highest is the knowledge of God." ®
" Let the wise consider as having the quality of darkness every act
which one is ashamed of his having done, or doing, or being about to
do ; to that of passion, every act by which he seeks celebrity in the
world ; to that of goodness, every act, by which he hopes to acquire
' Mann, XI. 229-232. 2 Ibid., IV. 198. ' s ibid., IV. 204.
* Ibid., II. 118. 6 Ibid., XI. 249. « ibid., V. 107.
' Ibid., V. 106. 8 Yajji., III. 33, 34.
1 82 RELIGION AND LIFE.
divine knowledge, which he is never ashamed of doing, or which
brings placid joy to his conscience. The prime object of the foul
quality is pleasure ; of the passionate, worldly prosperity ; of the
good, virtue." '
"To be a hermit is not to bring forth virtue," adds
Yajnavalkya : " this comes only when it is practised.
Therefore, what one would not have done to him, let
him not do to others."^
"God is Spirit," says the Christian Gospel, "and
they who worship Him must worship Him in
spirit and in truth." Hear the Hindu Law : —
" O friend to virtue, that Supreme Spirit, which thou believest
one with thyself, resides in thy bosom perpetually, and is an all-
knowing inspector of thy virtue or thy crime."
" If thou art not at variance with that great divinity within thee, go
not on pilgrimage to Gunga, nor to the plain of Curu." ^
" The soul is its own witness, its own refuge. Offend not thy
conscious soul, the supreme internal witness of men."
" The wicked have said in their hearts, ' None sees us.' Yes,
the gods see them, and the spirit within their own breasts." *
"The wages of sin," says the Christian Bible, "is
^ .^ . death." Quite as distinctly savs the Hindu
Retnbution. ^^- ^ -^
Law : —
" The fruit of sin is not immediate, but comes like the harvest,
in due season. Little by little, it eradicates the man. Its fruit, if
not in himself, is in his sons or in his sons' sons."^
" Even here below, the unjust is not happy, nor he whose wealth
comes from false witness, nor he who delights in mischief."^
" One grows rich for a while through unrighteousness, and van-
quishes his foes ; but he perishes at length from his root up."'
"Justice, being destroyed, will destroy ; preserved, will preserve.
It must therefore never be violated." *
" In whatever extremity, never turn to sin." ^
» Manu, XII. 35-38. • Yajn., III. 65. » Manu, VIII qi, 92-
* Ibid., VIII. 84, 85. 6 Ibid., IV. 172, 173. Ibid., IV. 170.
T Ibid., IV. 174. « Ibid., Vlil. 15. ^ Ibid., IV. 171.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 83
" Let one walk in the path of good men, the path in which his
fathers walked." '
" Vice is more dreadful by reason of its penalties than death." *
"Whosoever," says the New Testament, "shall
break one of these commandments, is guilty of all."
The Dharmasastra of Manu affirms the same natm-al
law of integrity. " If one sins with one member, the
sin destroys his virtue, as a single hole will let out all
the water in a flask." ^
"Let one collect virtue by degrees, as the ant builds its nest,
that he may acquire a companion to the next world. The Future
For, in his passage thither, his virtue only will adhere Life.
to him.
" Single is each man born ; alone he dies, alone receives the reward
of his doings. When he leaves his body on the ground, his kindred
retire with averted faces, but his virtue accompanies his soul.
" Let him gather this, therefore, to secure an inseparable com-
panion through the gloom, how hard to be traversed ! " "*
" The only firm friend who follows man after death is justice." °
In order to discover what is the stibstance of this
Brahmanic ideal, let us note first some of the Humanities,
humanities of the Code.
" The care and pain of parents in behalf of their children can-
not be repaid in a hundred years." ®
" Reverence for age is to the young, life, knowledge, and fame." "^
" The old, the blind, the maimed, the sick, the poor, the heavy
laden, are to be treated with marked respect, even by the king." ®
" Knowledge, virtue, age, even in a Sudra, should have re-
spect." ^
The diseased and deformed were avoided in sacri-
ficial acts,^^ which concerned only what was physi-
1 Matm, IV. 17S. 2 Ibid., VII. 53. » Ibid., II. 99.
4 Ibid., IV. 239-242. 6 Ibid., VIII. 17. ^ Ibid., II. 227.
7 Ibid., II. 121. 8 Ibid., II. 138 ; VIII. 395 ; Yajn., I. 117.
» Yajn., I. 116. 10 Manu, III. 161.
184 RELIGION AND LIFE.
cally as well as spiritually unblemished. Yet they
were "in no wise to be insulted."^ As Homer
pictures the gods going about disguised as beggars
and outcasts, to try men's hearts, so, according
to Manu, children, poor dependants, and the sick
are to be regarded as "rulers of the ether." ^ The
blind, crippled, old, and helpless are not to be taxed ; ^
the deaf and dumb, the idiotic and insane, the maimed,
and those who have lost the use of a limb, are indeed
excluded from inheriting, but must be supported by
the heir, without stint, to the best of his power."* On
the father's death, the oldest son must support the
family, and the brothers must endow their sisters.^
The authority of the householder over his family is
almost absolute ; yet he must " regard his wife and
son as his own body, his dependants as his shadow,
his daughter with the utmost tenderness."^ His pre-
scribed prayer is, " that generous givers may abound
in his house, that faith and study may never depart
from it, and that he may have much to bestow on the
needy." ^
" A guest must not be sent away at evening : he is sent by the
retiring sun ; and, whether he have come in season or out of sea-
son, he must not sojourn in the house without entertainment." ^
The sense of solidarity in social ethics is well worth
noticing, as shown in passages like the following : —
" The soldier who flees and is slain shall take on himself all the
sins of his commander ; and the commander receive all the fruit of
good conduct stored up by the other for the future life."
" A sixth of the reward for virtuous actions, due the whole peo-
ple, belongs to the king who protects them : if he protects them
not, a sixth of their iniquity falls on him." ^
» Manu, IV. 141. 2 Ibid., IV. 184. 3 ibid., VIII. 394.
* Ibid., IX. 202. c Ibid., IX. 104-118. 6 Ibid., IV. 185.
^ Ibid., III. 259. 8 Ibid., III. 105. Ibid., VII. 94; VIII. 304.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 185
r
The Brahman's decalogue not only commands con-
■ tent, veracity, purification, coercion of the
senses, resistance to appetites, knowledge of
scripture and of the Supreme Spirit, but abstinence
from illicit gain, avoidance of wrath, and the return
of good for evil.^ Forced contracts are declared
void.^ Transfer of property must be made in writ-
ing.^ Royal gifts are to be recorded on permanent
tablets.^ There are laws against slander, peculation,
intemperance, and dealing in ardent spirits ; laws pun-
ishing iniquitous judgments, false witness, and unjust
imprisonment ; laws providing for the annulment and
revision of unrighteous decrees ; enforcing the sacred-
ness of pledges and the fulfilment of trusts ; justly
dividing the responsibilities of partners ; dealing se-
verely with conspiracies to raise prices to the injury
of laborers ; laws which either forbid gambling alto-
gether, or discourage it by regulative drawbacks ; laws
declaring persons reduced to slavery by violence free,
as well as the slave who has saved his master's life, or
who purchases his own freedom.^ Penalty becomes
merciless in dealing with crimes which involve the
greatest mischief, such as arson, counterfeiting coin,
and selling poisonous meat.^
The king shall " never transgress justice." " It is
the essence of majesty, protector of all created things,
and eradicates his whole race," if he swerves from
duty.'' " He shall forgive those who abuse him in their
pain : if through pride he will not excuse them, he
shall go to his torment."^
1 Manu, VI. 91. 2 jbid., VIII. 168; Yajn., II. 89.
8 Yajfi., II. 84. 4 Ibid., I. 317, 31S.
8 Ibid., III. 285; II. 270; Matm, IX. 221; Yajn.^ II. 4, 82,243; 31, 305; 58, 164,
849, 259; Mann, VIII. 211, 230-233; Yajn., II. 199, 182.
« Yajn., II. 282, 297. 7 Manu, VII. 13, 14. 28. » Ibid., VIII. 313.
l86 RELIGION AND LIFE.
" A king," says Yajnavalkya, " should be very patient, experi-
enced, generous, mindful of services rendered, respectful to the old,
modest, firm, truthful, acquainted with the laws, not censorious, nor
of loose habits, nor low inclination, able to hide his weak points,
wise in reasoning and in criminal law, in the art of procuring a
livelihood, and in the three Vedas."
" Higher than all gifts is the protection of his subjects."
"The fire that ascends from the people's sufferings is not extin-
guished till it has consumed their king, his fortune, family, life." '
" What he has not, let a king seek to attain honestly ; what he
has, to guard with care ; what he guards, to increase ; and what is
increase let him give to those who deserve it." ^
He shall be "a father of his people."^ He should
make war only for the protection of his dominions ;
must respect the religion, laws, and even the fears, of
the conquered.^ Punishment by military force must
be his last resort.*
The warrior, " remembering what is due to honor,"
shall not shoot with poisoned arrows, nor strike the
weary, the suppliant, the non-combatant, the sleeping,
the severely wounded, the fugitive, the disarmed, nor
one already engaged with an opponent, nor one who
yields himself captive.^ Civilization has added noth-
ing to these humanities of military chivalry. To sum
all, "let not injustice be done in deed or in thought,
nor a word be uttered that shall cause a fellow-creature
pain : it will bar one's progress to final bliss." ^ " He
who has caused no fear to the smallest creature shall
have no cause for fear when he dies."^
It may not be easy to comprehend the idea of justice
Moral which mingled with such precepts as these
sanctions. ^\^q cruclties of castc le<]:"islatIon. Yet do not
such incompatibilities proceed side by side in the
1 }'4/n., T. 30S-310, 334, 340, 316 2 Mami, VII. 80; Vdj'n., I. 333.
3 Man?i, VII. 168, 170, 20I, 203. * Ibid., VII. 108; Vdj'n., I. 345.
^ Manu, VII 90-93; Vajn., I. 325. " Manu^ II. 161 ' Manu, VI. 40.
THE LAWS OF MANU. ' 1 87
laws, theologies, and bibles of all races? For the
State as such, the reconciliation of law with love,
of government with noble instinct, as yet lies in the
future. — We notice that self-interest is suggested as
motive for benevolence. This sanction is constantly
appealed to in the New Testament also, and even in
the Beatitudes of Jesus. But it would be irrational
to make this a ground for ascribing such delicac}^
of affection as appears in both Hindu and Hebrew
ethics to any other primary cause than noble and hu-
mane feeling. Laws may suggest interested motives,
and they nmst appeal to sanctions. But Lazv itself
springs from the natural instincts of love and care,
as well as from social dangers. And so the eternal
piety of the heart had its large share in the oldest
legislation.
With what decision a natural self-respect breaks
forth throufjh the slavery of abnegation, the,,,
^ . Self-respect-
despotism of custom and law, in such pre-
cepts of an older stoicism as these : —
" One must not despise himself for previous failures : let him
pursue fortune till death, nor ever think it hard to be attained." '
" Success depends on destiny and on conduct : the wise expect
it from the union of these ; as a car goes not on a single wheel, so
without one's own action the fated is not brought to pass." ^
" All that depends on one's self gives pleasure : all that depends
on another, pain." ^
" The habit of taking gifts causes the divine hght to fade." ^
"A behever may receive pure knowledge even fromasudra; and
a lesson in the highest virtue even from a chandala ; and a woman
bright as a gem even from the basest family. Even from poison
may nectar be taken ; from a child, gentleness of speech ; even from
a foe, prudent counsel ; even from an impure substance, gold." '
1 Manu, IV. 137. 2 Yajn,, I. 348-350.
8 Manu. IV. 160. * Ibid, IV. i86. « Ibid., II. 238, 239.
l88 RELIGION AND LIFE.
It may be asked how much of all this preaching was
T. , , f reduced to practice? It is doubtless true, as
r^atuie of -r '
Oriental we havc said, that Oriental Codes express
codes : their . , . . . . . r i
right inter- rather the aspirations and convictions oi the
pretation. classcs from which they spring, than actual
rules of civil and political conduct. They are vast
repositories of national life, of individual ideals,
philosophical systems, customs and traditions more
or less sacred, laws more or less recognized and
carried out. They have also an imaginative form,
deal in the superlative and boundless, and must not be
too literally interpreted. These considerations apply
alike to their good and evil ; and we must guard alike
against over-censure and over-praise. But this much
may be said. The Greeks who travelled in India
centuries before the Christian era were enthusiastic
in their admiration of Hindu morals. Thev told of
kings, spending the whole day in the administration
of justice, of the honesty of traders, and the general
dislike of litigation ; of the infrequency of theft,
though houses were left open without bolts or bars ;
and of the custom of loaning money without seals or
witnesses. They praised the truthfulness of the men
and the chastity of the women. ^ Whatever deduc-
tion must be made from these testimonies for exaf>"G:er-
ation and mistakes, they are not without their value.
But for us the main import of such precepts is that
the human soul recoc^nized the nobility of truth.
The sub- ^ ^ ^ ^ -^ '
stance of the justicc, aud lovc througli its own resources,
testimony. ^^^ borc witucss to the universality of its own
inspiration. There they stand written in their old
Sanskrit, or " beautiful speech " as the Hindu called
it, pointing back to how much older times than such
^ Arrian, Strabo. See also Duncker, II. 283-287.
\
'■' ^ J I- -I /i -
THE LAWS OF MAKtT. ^ A /pp ' y"
writing we cannot tell. And to affirm/ift^he exQiusive
interest of the Christian, or any other " dispensation'jf V'r
that they were not deeply felt and bravely lived by ^
men and women even then, were indeed
" To sound God's sea with earthly plummet,
To find a bottom still of worthless clay."
The barbarities of this legislation — and they are
many and dark — do not disprove our conclu- ^he darker
sions. In all times and civilizations, verities ^^'^^•
stand side by side with falsities ; and barbarous laws
and customs contradict the best theoretic claims of
states. The better moments of a people's life record
their natural capacities for good ; and of these their
unjust or cruel traditions of law must not be taken as
the measure. Would it be fair in some future historian
to assert that the American conscience had no better
ideal of freedom down to the year 1865 than a slavery
basis of representation and a Fugitive Slave Law? It
would certainly be more just to say that American
history had been throughout, the struggle of the two
opposing ideas. Liberty and Slavery, each existing
potentially in the consciousness of the age and people,
and more or less apprehended by individuals ; and that
the laws, so far from showing the stage at which this
personal light or darkness had arrived, as a definite
point, gave merely the general resultants of the strife
with long established and instituted wrong. If then
the barbarities of the Hindu Codes were even crimes
like those of mature civilization, instead of being, as
they to a great extent are, results of childish fears and
superstitions, they would still prove nothing against
other evidences that a high sense of ethical truth stood
side by side with them in the Hindu mind.
O
/>^
190 RELIGION AND LIFE.
In fairness we must note that the beginnings, even
„ . of customs which the advance of practical
♦ How inter- -t
pretedand intelHgcnce stamps as enormities, are to be
explained. /- i«iir • •.•,1
lound m hali-conscious mstmcts, by no means
discreditable to human nature. And the legislation
we condemn was perhaps the effort actually to modify
and control their mis-growth. Whoever the earlier
legislators may have been, they were obliged to make
the best of existing institutions. What to us are de-
fects in their codes may have been timely reforms and
remedial restraints. Solon's laws gave political func-
tions according to wealth ; thus continuing, to a degree,
the old exclusion of the people .as a whole from office.
But he was thereby enabled to lift them from a yet
more abject position, and to procure them, in compen-
sation for such defects, their archons and general
assembly, — powerful checks on the aristocratic party.
^ Another arbitrary decree of this great Athenian can-
celled just debts, and debased the currency. Yet
it delivered the poor from burdens which they could
no longer bear, freed them from personal seizure for
debt, and produced an abiding respect for the force of
contracts.^ ."I made the land and the people free,"
/' he said ; and Aristotle reaffirms this claim on his
behalf. Portions of the Mosaic legislation concerning
the Canaanite races, that seem to the last degree cruel
and barbarian, were really a limitation to the treat-
ment of certain most dangerous enemies alone, of
usages previously applied to enemies as such.^ Traces
of similar effi3rts at mitigation are observable in many
severities of the Hindu Code.
The better impulses in which many persistent forms
of law, now seen to be inhuman, originated in rude
^ Grote, III. 105. * Deut. xx. 10-18.
TV.
\
THE LAWS OF MANU.
191
ages, have seldom been recognized by historical
inquirers, and scarcely enter into the estimate of
heathenism by the Christian world in general.
The elder races, for example, were fully and in-
tensely convinced of the nature of moral evil ^, ^
•^ ^ _ _ The Ordeal.
and the certainty of moral retributions. They
were, on the other hand, ignorant of the invariableness
of natural laws. These two conditions led inevitably
to the use of the Ordeal^ as a means of testing guilt by
an appeal to divine interposition. It was simply an
effort to find decisions of justice in the ill-understood
operations of physical nature ; to prove that the ele-
ments were under moral sovereignty. The Sanskrit
words for ordeal signify "faith" and "divine test."
"The fire singed not a hair of the sage Vatsa, by
reason of his perfect veracity." ^ Nature is pledged,
in other words, to deal justly, when appealed to.
Can Christians tell us why a miracle should not be
wrought to save a truthful Vatsa, as well as to punish
a lying Ananias ; or why fire and water should not
discriminate between the saint and the sinner in the
old Hindu courts as well as in the cases of modern
reprobates recorded in the " manuals " as drowned or
struck by lightning for violating the Christian Sab-
bath? But there is in fact a great difference. For
while it may have indicated not a little faith and cour-
age, in races ignorant of physical laws, to believe that
Nature was subordinate to justice, and to trust its cause
to her defence, it seems to imply something very unlike
either of these qualities to renounce the light of a
scientific age in the name of religion, and persistently
to cling to the superstitions of an ignorant one.
Manu knows only ordeals by fire and water, or by
1 Manu, VIII. 116.
192 RELIGION AND LIFE.
touching the heads of one's wife and children with
invocations thereon. Other codes add tests by poison
and by various processes, — for example, by being
weighed twice in scales, drinking consecrated water,
toijching hot iron with the tongue. In the trial by
carrying a red-hot bar for seven paces, however, leaves
were to be wrapped round the hand ; in that by re-
maining a certain time under water, the legs of another
could be clasped. The seasons of the year for em-
ploying the different forms of ordeal were determined
with a certain regard to the interests of those who
were to undergo them. Women, children, the old,
the sick, and the weak were not to be subjected to
ordeals by fire, water, or poison, but by the scales
only.-^ Yajnavalkya implies that they were not to
be used except in cases of great moment.^
The ordeal cannot be called the special barbarism
of any one race or religion, though it appears never
to have existed in China. The Arab, the Japanese,
the wild African, alike defer to its authority.^ The
Hebrew husband had his " bitter water of jealousy."
And the historian of the Christian Church tells us
that she "took the ordeal under her especial sanction,"
sprinkled its red-hot iron with her holy water, and
enacted its cruelties with solemn rituals within her
temples.* Down to the twelfth century, it " afforded
the means of awing the laity, by rendering the
priest a special instrument of Divine justice, into
whose hands every man felt that he was liable at any
moment to fall."^ And its final abolition was due
* For a summary of these laws, see Stenzler, in Zeitsch. d. D. M. G., IX. 661-6S2 ;
Manu, VIII. 115; Asiat. Res., I. 389.
* Yajn., II. 95. See Stenzler's Itttrodicction, p. vii.
8 See Pictet, II. 457, 458. * Milman, Lat. Christianity, III. v.
^ Lea's Superstition and Force., p. 271.
THE LAWS OF MANU.
193
quite as much to the revival of the old Roman law
and the rise of the free communes as to the repent-
ance of the Church.
Personal deformities and diseases are reofarded in
Manu as the consequences of sin in the present _
_ ^ Treatment
or in a previous life. And the law classifies of physical
them according to the sins from which they ^^^^*^^^-
proceed. In one passage it declares that the victims
are to be despised ; ^ excluding some of them too from
the Sraddha, or feast in honor of the dead.^ And this
superstition is as wide-spread as the ordeal ; it has,
like that, infected the Jew and the Christian, and had
a similar origin in the effort to comprehend the mystery
of physical evil under a moral law. — The instinctive
presumption that it becomes the material world to
show allegiance to the moral, is of course, while
growing up among ignorant races, the source of a
superstitious expectation of miracles. But we must not
forget that it is this very instinct to whose develop-
ment by science we owe the abolition of every ground
for believing or demanding miracles ; its ultimate form
being the conviction that natural laws are themselves
the desired expressions of universal good.
The contempt which Hindu law prescribes towards
the physically deformed and diseased is limited
within strictly defined lines of conduct ; and towards de-
this legislation is evidently an endeavor to ^°^^^y ^"'^
^ '' disease.
modify and restrain, as well as to respect, the
crude instinct that physical evil is a punishment for
sin. The unfortunate were not to be despised as
such. They were to be treated kindly and even with
respect.^ They were exempted from public burdens ;
and although avoided in the act of sacrifice as being
1 Manu, XL 48, 53. « Ibid., III. 150. » Vdjn., II. 204.
13
J94 RELIGION AND LIFE.
blemished, and in the choice of partners for life, prob-
ably for physiological reasons, yet they were not to
be expelled from society; and, after prescribed rites,
could freely associate with other people.
There are also sanguinary punishments on the prin-
ciple of "eye for eye and tooth for tooth." And
Eye for eye. , . , . , , .
these are made most repulsive by their connec-
tion with the enormous inequalities of caste. This
principle, cruel as it seems, forms the basis of all first
essays at abstract and ideal justice in the requital of
crime. Some of the severest penalties are left to the
criminal's own execution, as if falling back on a sup-
posed spontaneous recognition of their rightfulness in
his own mind.^ And their barbarity cannot be ex-
plained on any theory that leaves out of view the fact
that their makers had at least an intense abhorrence
of the crimes they punished. Adulterers must burn
on a bed of red-hot iron. Thieves were to lose the
limbs with which they effected the theft. ^ " Where-
withal a man hath sinned, with the same let him be
punished," recommended itself to these unflinching
judges as the maxim of natural right. It was but
following out the stern hint of nature in its retribu-
tions of sensual excesses.
But the law knew how to provide compensations for
Sympathies ^^ enduraucc of its barbarities. As if dissat-
of the law. isfied with them, and' looking upwards for a
way out of these bonds of judgment, it says : " Men
who have committed offences, and received from
kings the punishment due them, go pure to heaven,
and become as clear as those who have done well."^
A similar reaction against the severity of statutes was
* Manu, XI. loo, 104. Suicide is one of the commonest forms of penalty in the East.
« Ibid., VIII. 372, 334- » Ibid., VIIL 318.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 95
naturally to be expected in the case of false witness,
in view of the tremendous penalties which were at-
tached to this crime, both for the present and the
future life. And this presumption may help explain*
the exceptional fact that falsehood is expressly al-
lowed, wherever the death of a person of any caste,
who has sinned inadvertently, would be caused by
giving true evidence in the courts.^ It would seem as
if the affections sought to assert their precedence, in
such extreme cases of the conflict of duties, to the
demands of literal fact. In the same way we may
account for the singular scale of fines and forfeits in
commutation of penalties, based, by a crude sense of
natural justice, on the principle of eye for eye and
life for life. They are not a mere money measure
of crime, but the modification of a harsh lex talionis
under the influence of the humane sentiments.
This relenting indicates the natural character of the
Hindus better than the barbarism of the legislation in
detail. It is not to be believed that the punishments
by branding and mutilation, the expiations by self-
torture and suicide, even for minor crimes, were car-
ried out with any thing like the precision of our western
conformity to written law.^ There is so much contra-
diction between different texts, both in spirit and in
letter, so much manifest exaggeration, such frequent
confusion of law with ethics, and such difficulty of dis-
tinguishing between dogmatic statement and positive
command, that this natural inference from the general
1 Manti, VIII. 104; Yajn., II. 83,
2 The very ^eat disregard of legal prohibition concerning the use of animal food and
the destruction of animal life, by the Brahmans, is described in Heber's JourTial, vol. ii.
P- 379-
196 RELIGION AND LIFE.
character of the race is not set aside by the text of
the Law Book itself.^
Even the history of infanticide and of sati bears
infanticide witncss to this natural gentleness of Hindu
and Suttee, character. No traces of these customs are
found in the Rig Veda, in Manu, or in Yajnavalkya.
They are a later growth, partly of tropical enerva-
tion, partly of social misery. But nobler elements^
also were involved in the widow's desire to follow
her lost husband ; and female infanticide was due to
the marriage custom of giving a costly dowry with
the bride. ^ Both these barbarities were abandoned
at the earliest opportunity afforded by European in-
fluence.^ Their rapid extinction in British India was
mainly the work of the native chiefs themselves, under
the persuasion of men like Ludlow, Macpherson, and
Campbell.* Even before British interference, many
of these chiefs had endeavored to control them by
their own unaided efforts. The natives now gener-
ally regard the river sacrifices of children as disgrace-
ful ; and sati, since its abolition, is seldom spoken of
but with condemnation.^
Later pandits have not hesitated to rule out such
Free treat- rcgulatious from the old law;s as did not seem
kwrii^iater suitablc to their times, upon the ground that
times. they were established for a less advanced age
of the world. In the progress of the Hindus came
1 It has been acutely observed (La CiU Antique, chap, xi.) that "the principle of the
divine origin of laws in the older codes made it impossible for their subjects definitely to
abrogate them." And so the old statutes remained side by side with later ones of a dif-
ferent and often humaner tenor. In this way we may partially explain the contradictions
with which these codes abound ; though, as we shall see, the rule was not without its
exceptions, even in the remote East.
2 See chapter on Rig Veda, p. 140. 8 Elliott's N. W. India, I. 250.
* Ludlow's British India, II. 138, 149, 151.
^ Ludlow, II. 149; Buyers's Recoil- of N. India., 132, 235; Allen.p. 418.
THE LAWS OF MANU. 1 97
denunciation of many ancient customs. "Among
these," says Mr. Wheeler, " may be mentioned the
sacrifice of a bull, a horse, or a man; the appoint-
ment of a man to become the father of a son by the
widow of a deceased brother or kinsman ; the slaugh-
ter of cattle at the entertainment of a guest; and
the use of flesh meat at the celebrated feasts of the
dead, still performed under the name of sraddhas."
It is not so much a spirit of cruelty that darkens the
pages of this Code as an insatiate self-abnega- supersti-
tion, which in many respects is a kind of ^'°''^^^^.^"
•^ ■"• . . ^ abnegation.
suicide. And, for full answer to all justifica- its lesson.
tion of human nature under these aspects, it may seem
sufficient to point to their consequences. " Here," it
may be said, "is the end of Hindu virtue; here, in
Jagannath and his car of human slaughter, in Kali
with her sword of human sacrifice, in Mahadeva with
his collar of sculls." These deities have been greatly
belied. 1 The Hindus certainly became sensualized,
— from causes easy to trace. If, however, we should
accept the facts as condemnatory of human nature, we
must admit that Christianity does not reinstate it, since
this religion fell into similar degeneracy, and since its
theology still retains this dreadful destructiveness in
an ideal form. The records of Christian superstition
are more dismal than those of Brahmanical. The
fanaticism of the Donatist and the human sacrifice of the
Hindu are of kindred nature. It has been well said,
that " England and France have pages in their religious
history that ought to cause them to be silent, or else to
1 " Instances of victims throwing themselves under the wheels of Jagannath have always
been rare, and are now unknown. Nothing could be more opposed to the spirit of Vishnu-
worship than self-immolation." (Hunter's Orissa, p. 134-) The great mortality among
the pilgnms to this shrine is in fact due to neglect of sanitary conditions. The symbols
of destruction in figures of the other deities referred to have more relation to spuits of
evil, or to death as such, than to human sacrifice, which has always been infrequent.
198 RELIGION AND LIFE.
bring their charges of cruelty against Hindu rites with
some humiHty." It has been computed that several
millions of persons have been burnt as heretics, sorcer-
ers, and witches, in Europe, during the period of Chris-
tianity. In Cadiz and Seville alone the Inquisitors
burned two thousand Jews in a single year (1481).!
It is not desirable to dwell much on this aspect of the
subject. But why should all these dark pictures
combined make us sceptical concerning the spiritual
faculties of man? The self-tortures and the dismal
fanaticisms that reach through the long history of his
beliefs are not there to prove his moral incapacity : they
even teach the very opposite. They are birth-throes,
blind and bitter indeed, but none the less genuine, of
his divinity. Let us face the worst. There is the Yogi, .
crawling in agonizing postures from one end of India
to the other, or sitting whole days between scorching
fires and gazing at the sun with seared eyeballs and
bursting brain. There is the Shaman cutting himself
with knives, the Moloch worshipper passing his chil-
dren through flames, the Aztec piercing himself with
aloe thorns and tearing out the hearts of his kinsmen
on the reeking teocalli. There are Stylites on their
columns, Flagellants beating themselves through the
streets of Christian Europe, and all the mad penances
and savage suicides of the Desert Monks. And there
is Jesuit Loyola with girdle of briers and merciless
iron whip ; his followers giving themselves " as a
corpse " into the hands of " Grand Masters," to be
used at their absolute will ; — dismal and dreadful in-
centives to a contempt of human nature, that almost
start the doubt whether its origin be not from some
demoniacal Power, doomed to self-annihilation. But
^ Jost, Gesch. d. Judenthums., III. no.
THE LAWS OF MANU.
199
other scenes are at command, and to these you hasten
that you may recover your respect for hfe. You turn
to Christian saints dying serenely on the rack and at
the stake ; to the great martyrs of the world's later
day, witnesses for truth, liberty, and love ; and stand
at last reverently on Calvary before the consummate
sacrifice to which you ascribe all this majesty of the
soul. You seem to have passed from death to life.
"There," you say, " man was on the brute's level:
here he becomes a God. A new nature has surely
descended on him." But that is impossible, and as
needless as it is impossible. You have done injustice
to the soul. Can we not read between these dark
lines, and discern that the endurance for errors, how-
ever dismal and demoniacal, and the endurance for
truths, however benignant and divine, have one point
in common, and that of utmost significance? Do they
not at least assure us that inan will suffer all things
for what he believes true and sacred? It is not mere
superstitious terror that makes martyrs even to super-
stitions. Fear does not explain these extremities of
self-sacrifice, these mournful self-crucifixions, — but
something that masters fear. They hint of aspiration,
they cry for light, they assure progress. They are
impossible without a sentiment of awe before duty,
and a vision of triumph beyond pain. They are
signs, even they, that man has in his very substance,
assurance of those spiritual dignities which he has
been believed to owe to some supernatural change, or
some all-creative element, introduced by Christian
and Jewish revelation alone.
VI.
WOMAN.
WOMAN.
'T^HE Dharmasastras are unquestionably no wiser
on the nature of woman than the Law
, . r \ Spirit of
of Moses, or the mythologists of Adam's Fall. Hinduiegis-
Manu is as positive as the Christian Apostle ^^^'°^'
was, and as the Christian world in general has been
hitherto, that man is her appointed head, and that her
prerogative is to obey. This theory of the sexes, in
spite of age and Scripture, is rapidly vanishing, with
all analogous pretensions that "might makes right."
And it is of less import now to discuss its evils in this
or that form of society than it is to note the remedial
forces in human nature which mitigated those evils,
even in times when the relative "might" of man was
in most respects much greater than it is now.
The general status of woman in the East is given
in the declarations of the Law books, that she is
"unfit by nature for independence," and " must never
seek it ; " that " she is never to do any thing for her
own pleasure alone ; " that " a wife assumes the very
qualities of her husband, as a river is lost in the sea."^
This is our precious modern principle of "feme
covert " in its purest essence I — The widow must give
herself up to austerities and remain unmarried,
1 ManUi V. 147, 148 ; IX. 3, 22 ; Yaj'n., I. 85. The old Roman Law was similar. See
Thierry, Tableau de VEtttpire Rotnainy p. 279.
204 RELIGION AND LIFE.
preparing for reunion in the next life ; ^ while the
husband could, and should, marry again. ^ As the
Hebrew law allowed husbands to put away their
wives on the plea of mere "uncleanness," so the Hindu
made mere " unkindness," as well as barrenness or
disease, sufficient ground for supersedure ; w^hile it
exhorted the woman on her part, on pain of bestial
transmigrations, to revere even the basest husband as
a god.^ The Brahman in later times, like the Hebrew
patriarch, might by law have several wives, though
of different castes, having claims to preference ac-
cording to the order of their classes ; and neither his
wife, child, nor slave, could hold any thing as abso-
lute property. He could take every thing from either
of them or from all.* This was an incident, affecting
them all alike, of the old system of patriarchal au-
thority. The custom of polyandry, or possession of
one wife by several husbands, was also prevalent
during the Middle Ages of Hindu history ; originating
partly in the necessity of male offspring, as ground of
religious hopes as well as source of physical support.^
This was the theory, — easily matched, we may
remark, in Western ideas and institutions, even of
recent time. But let us observe the counteractions
provided by human nature to its worst effects.
1 Maim, v. 157-162. 2 Ibid., V. 167-169; Viijn.t I. 89.
3 Dcut. xxiv. i; Mamc, IX. 81; V. 154; Va/M., I. 77.
* Matin, IX. 85 ; VIII. 416. "A woman's properly taken by her husband in distress,
or for performance of a duty, he need not restore her." (J '/'«., II. 147.) Yet this does
not involve the right to violate otlier laws, which are very stringent in protection of the
property rights of woman. {Maim, III. 52. Macnaghten, p. 43.) The language in the
text is perhaps too strong. Wilson tells us {Essays on Sanskrit Literature, III. 17, 28)
that a widow in India was, by the older laws, free to do as she would with her property ; but
in later times efforts were made to deprive her of this right. "At present, in Hcugal," he
adds, "a woman is acknowledged by all to be mistress of her own wealth."
'' The same necessity explains the custom universal among savage tribes, and even
practised by more advanced ones, like the Hebrew tribe of Benjamin, of capturing wives,
and dividing them among the captors ; a custom which tended of course to ensure other
qualities of- bondage, in the permanent status of woman under ancient laws.
WOMAN. 205
Woman was secured against total enslavement in
rude times by the operation of two causes. ,,
•^ -^ ^ Natural de-
She was involuntarily recognized by man as fences of
■!•• !• ••iiii* 1 woman.
brmgmg his spn-ituai deliverance, and as ap-
pealing to his physical power for protection.
Of these recognitions, the former was due to her
procreative function. In early times a man Religious
depended for safety, for help, and for honor, f^irtherance.
on the number of his children. The patriarch's sons
were his strength. " The estimation of an Egyptian,"
says Herodotus, ''was, next to valor in the field, in
proportion to the number of his offspring." ^ To this
day, the prayer of the laborer in the Nile Valley is
for many children, to aid him in his toil. They
were men's hold on the life beyond death. " Chil-
dren," says the Greek poet,
" Are for the dead the saviors of fame ;
Even as corks buoy up the net on the sea,
Upholding its twisted cord from the abyss beneath." *
The mysterious principle of life, as transmitted by
the seed of man, is the earliest object of veneration
by tribes that have risen above the condition of Fet-
ichism. As essence of the family bond, it is the centre
of patriarchal religion, and embodied in that demand
for male offspring, which determined the early institu-
tions of the principal races of Europe and Asia. Greek
and Roman law watched for ages over the preserva-
tion of the family lines through male offspring, as the
ground-work of religious rite and tradition. It is
easy to explain the fact that interests of this nature
were so excessively developed among the Hindus. In
the first male child centred the religious relations with
* Herod., I. 136. * ^schyl., Cho'epliori^ 497.
206 RELIGION AND LIFE.
past and future. A male child has always been the
primal necessity for the Oriental man. Through a
son he pays his progenitors the debt for the gift of his
own life, which is held the most sacred of all dues,
and assures himself of the like payment from pos-
terity.^ The happiness of his ancestors was believed
by the Hindu to depend on the performance of me-
morial rites in their honor by an uninterrupted line of
male descendants. For was it not throucrh a son that
his own existence became a part of that continuous
line of generations, which was probably the first "and
simplest sign to man of his own immortality ? The
laws declare that " by a son one obtains victory, by a
son's son immortality, by a great-grandson reaches the
solar heaven." ^ " By a son he overcomes the great
darkness (of death) : this the ship to bear him across.
There is no life to him who has no son." ^ Kalidasa
pictures the joy of a king in the birth of a male child,
as resembling that which is felt by the Supreme, at
the thought that Vishnu, as manifesting His own sub-
tance, is a guarantee of the stability of His Universe.'^
The Upanishads record the tender forms by which a
father at the point of death transfers his whole being
to his son.^ The very word for son {J)tct?'a) means
deliverer from the hell called put. In the Mahab-
harata, a saint has a vision, in which he sees his an-
cestors descending into this, limbo, heads downwards,
in consequence of the extinction of their male line
of descendants in him. The laws of the Greeks and
Romans prescribed adoption to the father who had no
son, as his sacred duty to his own line.^
1 Manuy IX. io6, 107. ^ Manu^ IX. 137.
8 Aitereya Brahtnatta. Roth, in Weber's Ind. Stud., I. 458.
* Raghtivatisa, III. '' Kaushitaki Upan. (Weber, I. 409).
* See references in La Citi Antique, I. ch. iv.
WOMAN. 207
Here then was man exalting his stronger sex to
heaven, finding therein, as Christianity did after-
wards, in the " well-beloved Son," the ground of his
salvation. But even to this end the wife and mother
was by nature, after all, the sole and sacred path.
The gods said to man concerning woman : " In her
you shall be born again." "The husband," as Manu
expresses it, " becomes himself an embryo, and is
born a second time."^ And so marriage became of
necessity a sacrament, invested with the sanctions of
conscience and piety. Nature enforced, in behalf
of woman, the respect that seemed likely to be re-
fused. " Since immortality and heaven come through
descendants," says Yajnavalkya, "therefore preserve
and honor woman." ^
So Manu : —
" A man is perfect when he consists of three, his wife, himself,
and his son." ^
" A wife secures bliss to the manes of his ancestors and to
himself."
" She is as the goddess of abundance, and irradiates his
dwelling." '*
Hence the great simplicity and purity of marriage
in the Vedic times, — a more equal and just relation by
far than in those of Manu ; though nothing in the
recorded marriage rites of later times indicates other
than mutual respect and unity of interests.^ Through
this religious motive, it must have been that polyandry
was got rid of; ^ and even the polygamy of still .more
J Manu, IX. 8 ; Yajn., I. 56. 2 Yajtt., I. 78.
3 Matm, IX. 45. 4 Ibid., IX. 28, 26.
^ See full accounts of the marriage rites of the Hindus according to the later Vedas, in
Weber's hidische Studieji, vol. v.
6 This custom still exists in some parts o< India, as among the Nairs, and is ascribed
by Mr, Justice Campbell to the modification of that widely spread custom among the
Hindus, of a wife passing on the death of her husband to his brother : " This successive
208 RELIGION AND LIFE.
recent ages was much modified by it, being made
rather a last resort where the religious end of mar-
riage could not otherwise be attained, than a means
of gratifying loose and lawless desires. Polygamy
came in fact to be prohibited except for such causes
as are expressly declared just grounds for dissolving
the marriage contract, among which long continued
barrenness naturally was the chief.^ Again, as with
the Hebrews, the necessity of securing male offspring
led to the transference of the wife by her husband to
a near relative, or safmda^ for the purpose; but the
religious motive of the act led also to the most solemn
precautions lest this infringement should be abused
for sensual purposes.^
These are a few of the legal defences that inured
to woman as the recognized way of immortality to
him whose mere brute strength, uncontrolled by such
motives, would have made her his slave. But they
give only a faint idea of that fine compensation which
nature must have lent her weakness, through her
hold upon man's dearest hopes.
And as her procreative function enlisted on her be-
Physicai de- h^l^ his rcHgious aspiratious, so her physical
pendence. inferiority appealed in rude times to his gen-
erosity and tenderness. The laws of Manu had
the grace to put that lifelong dependence to which
they consigned her on the ground of protection.^
holding being here transformed into a joint contemporaneous holding," where the great
object, that of obtaining children, could not otherwise be secured. — Ethnology o/ India,
p. 135. As to the influence of this belief on marriage relations, see Ditandy, Poesie
Indie7tne, p. 137.
^ Macnaghten, 60. ^ Manu, IX. 59, 60; Vaj'n., I. 67, 68.
' Manu, I., IX. 3. In rude and ill-governed states of society, even polygamy was plainly
in many respects a safeguard, assigning female captives, for example, to a recognized status,
under the care of a husband, and in the partial management of a household. Manu's
sedulous instructions to the husband, in the art of protecting his wife by employing her "in
the collection and expenditure of wealth, in purifications and female duty, in the prepara-
WOMAN. 209
And a regard to her helplessness runs through the
special provisions on those matters in which she was
liable to be oppressed. .On certain grounds, even
"for bearing only female children,"^ a wife might be
superseded; but "not a beloved and virtuous wife,"
who must never be set aside without her consent. ^
A superseded wife is entitled to a sufficient mainte-
nance in all cases whatever. " It is a crime to leave
her without support." ^ Unmarried daughters inherit
their mother's estate equally with sons.* So in
general, though the yN\i€?> feciilmm^ or special prop-
erty, made up of six different kinds of gifts, and pro-
nounced positively hers, could nevertheless be used
by the husband in case of distress ; ^ yet a special
provision consigns to torment male relations who take
unjust possession of a woman's property.^ A wife
could not be held liable for the debts of a husband
or a son."^ A good wife is to be faithfully supported
by her husband, thotigh married against his inclina-
tion^ from religious duty.^ A father is forbidden to
tacitly sell his daughter by taking a gratuity for giving
her in marriage ; ^ and the son is charged to protect
his mother after the death of her husband. -^^ Insanity
in a husband, impotence, and extreme vice, are held
tion of daily food and the superintendence of household utensils " (ix. 1 1), are evidently
dictated by the fear of trusting her to her own dispositions, which are regarded as her most
dangerous enemies. This diligent protection and preservation of the wife from \ace, which
is made so essential a part of his own salvation, savors of a complacency which might have
been rebuked, had woman had the making of the laws. Yet, as things were, it must have
proceeded from his judgment as to her special needs, and doubtless expressed a real sense
of her physical weakness and exposure to rude assaults. For instance, the law commands
him, " if he have business abroad, to assure a fit maintenance to his wife while away; for
even if a wife be virtuous, she may be tempted to act amiss, if distressed for want of sub-
sistence" (ix. 74).
1 Yajn., I. 73. 2 Mami, IX. 81, 82. ^ Yajn., I. 74.
* Macnaghten, 61; Yajn.^ II. 117; Ma7m^ IX. 192. ^ Macnaghten, 44.
« Ma7iu, III. 52. 7 Yajn., II. 46. » Manu, IX. 95.
9 Ibid., IX. loo. 10 Ibid., IX. 4.
14
2IO RELIGION* AND LIFE.
sufficient excuse for aversion on the part of the wife ;
which must not be punished by desertion nor depriva-
tion of her property.^
And this regard for the weakness of woman could
not fail to lead to a certain appreciation of her true
strength. Thus, as we have just noted, it is upon her
need of protection that Manu bases not only a per-
petual wardship, but a most vigilant system of restric-
tions and occupations, to preserve her from the perils
to which her " natural frailty " was presumed to ex-
pose her. But the injunctions to these end in what
for this presumption is decidedly a fatal admission ;
namely, that those women only are truly secure
"who are protected by their own good inclinations." ^
So Rama says, "No enclosing walls can screen a
woman. Only her virtue protects her." ^
In fact, a far greater amount of domestic tyranny
has been presumed, by those who refjard only
Domestic ^ -^ .
oppression thc letter of the law, than the facts will war-
overstate . j.jjj^^^ q^j-^g seclusion of females which prevails
in India, for example, has been regarded as forming
part of a despotic system. But it is probably due to
other causes, in the main, than marital jealousy and
distrust. The Brahmans maintain that it is of Mo-
hammedan origin, and was adopted by the Hindus
merely in self-defence against foreign brutality.*
With both Moslem and Hindu, it may have had its
origin in modest reserve ; in that instinctive reverence
which penetrates the whole life of Eastern races, and
passing in the course of ages, like every thing Orien-
tal, into a rigid etiquette.^ The use of the veil by
1 Manu, IX. 79. * Ibid., IX. 12. 8 RUmciyatta.
* Wilson, Theatre 0/ the Hindus, Introd., xliii. ; Buyers, Recollect. 0/ India, p. 401.
• Do Vera, Pictur. Sketches of Greece and Turkey, p. 270.
WOMAN. 211
Persian females seems to have been derived from
times when it was regarded as a sign of dignity and
social elevation.^ A Buddhist legend illustrates the re-
lation of this religion to democratic reform on the
subject. The wife of Buddha, it is said, rejected the
veil, against the wishes of the court, immediately after
her marriage, saying : " Good women need veiling no
more than the sun and moon. The gods know my
thoughts, my manners, my qualities, my modesty.
Why then should I veil my face ? " - It would appear,
too, that, in spite of their seclusion, the women of the
upper classes exercise as much influence in family
affairs as among Europeans.^ In the Hindu epics,
women are described as entirely independent in their
intercourse and movement, travelling where they will,
and showing themselves freely in public, and un-
veiled.^ Married women, especially, were perfectly
free in India in their social intercourse with the other
sex ; ^ and Sakuntala, in the drama, pleads her own
cause at the court of King Dushyanta, and even boldly
rebukes him. .
But these hints of the compensative forces of nature
in behalf of woman lead us still farther. Here Recognition
were circumstances scarcely suited to demon- of woman.
strate her finer spiritual gifts. Yet Hindu law and
literature abound in proofs that woman did then, as
she now does, compel recognition of these gifts ; al-
though it may have been shown then, as it has since
been, more by the service of the lips than by the con«
duct of life.
The ages we are now studying are not those of the
1 Gobineau, Relig. et Phil. d. VAsia Centrale, p. 348.
« St. Hilaire. » Prichard, Admin, of India., II. 89.
* See Williams, Indian Epic Poetry, p. 57.
* Wilson, ut supra.
212 RELIGION AND LIFE.
simple Aryan household, where husband and wife,
equals in age, in rights, in serviceable industries,
hand in hand ministered to the holy fires on their
altars and hearths.^ They are ages of southern
polygamy and caste; when woman, betrothed in
childhood, was in law for ever a child, superseded at
her husband's pleasure, forbidden to read the Vedas
or to take part in religious rites. In these times, too,
the epics reveal the semi-barbarous custom of poly-
andry, although this possession of one wife by several
husbands must certainly, even in the stormy social
conditions which the Mahabharata describes, have been
exceptional.^
The Ramayana, indeed, somewhat later, shows pro-
found respect for the marriage relation. But even
this poem, abounding in manly sentiments towards
women, frequently falls into the tone of contempt
which their perpetual minority suggested ; as where
Rama admonishes Bharata of the duty of a ruler
always to treat them with courtesy, while he should
disregard their counsel, and withhold from them all
important secrets.
Yet, under such circumstances as these, observe
what the law itself confessed. Not only did it declare
" mutual fidelity till death the supreme duty between
husband and wife,^ and "virtue, riches, love, the
three objects of human desire," to be "the reward of
their mutual friendship,"^ and pronounce the woman
the highest beatitude of the man."^ It admonished
^ See Manu, IX. 96.
• In Manu indeed it is not mentioned, and Brahmanism had little toleration for it. The
Himalaya mountaineers explain the custom as necessary for the protection of women
during the long absence of their husbands on distant expeditions for trading purposes.
Lloyd's Himalayas, I. 255.
8 Manuy IX. loi. * Y&jiu, I. 74. « Manu^ IX. 28.
WOMAN. 213
him that " where females are honored the deities are
pleased, and where they are dishonored, or made
miserable, all religious rites are vain;" while "their
im.precation brings utter destruction on the house." ^
The inference that women must therefore be con-
stantly supplied with ornaments and gay attire shows
that Eastern and Western logic on these matters stands
in common need of reconstruction at the hands of
woman herself. But the law went deeper than man-
ners. In an outburst of Oriental reverence it proclaims
a mother to be greater than a thousand fathers.^ In a
calmer, didactic mood, it defines the sum of all duty to
consist in assiduous service of one's father, mother,
and spiritual teacher, as long as they live, holding
them "equal to the three worlds and the three Vedas ; "
and even commands that the wife of the teacher, if of
the same class, shall be treated with the respect shown
to himself.^ In the Sraddha, or memorial rite in honor
of the pitris, or ancestors, those on the female side
must not be forgotten.^ The Swayamvara form of
marriage, after free choice of a husband by the
maiden, is celebrated by the later poets as well as
in the Vedas. ^ And Burnouf has gone so far as to
affirm that marriage in India was never a state of
servitude for woman. ^ It is certain that, of the four
forms of marriage recognized as valid by Manu,
neither necessarily involved such subjection ; while, in
the Prajapatya form, bride and bridegroom are dis-
tinctly enjoined "to perform together their civil and
relifjious duties." ^
We have here, it is true, no such testimonies as
1 Ma7itty III. 55-62. 2 Ibid., II. 145. 3 Ibid., II. 210.
* Yajn., I. 242; III, 4. 6 R^ v^^ I. 116; Raghuvaniot VI.
^ Essay on the Veda^ p. 213. ^ Manu, III. 27-30.
214 RELIGION AND LIFE.
those of Herodotus and Diodorus concerning Egypt,
who inform us that in that country it was customary
for the husband to obey the wife, and for women to
manage business affairs while the men pHed the loom
at home.^ Yet Yajnavalkya specifies certain classes
of women whose debts their husbands were bound to
pay, because dependent on their labor for support.^
And Wilson tells us that all the contempt shown by
the Hindus for women was learned by them of their
Mohammedan masters.^ The Ramayana shows us
King Dasaratha prostrate at the feet of his wicked
wife, entreating her to release him from his promise
to grant her any boon she might ask. In fact, Hindu
literature abounds in amusing illustrations of submis-
siveness in husbands to wives as well as in wives to
husbands.*
The gentleness of Hindu character was favorable
to the sway of these subtler forces. This has
Influence on '' . t • i
public af- been shown on a great scale m political,
fairs. mercantile, and domestic life. Women have
ruled empires in India, as in Egypt and Assyria, and
had their full share in bringing about the frequent
wars and revolutions of the petty Hindu States. The
Indian epic, like the Greek and the Teutonic, cele-
brates feminine control over the military destinies of
states, and Kalidasa describes the admirable govern-
ment of Ayodhya by a mythic queen. ^
Among the native rulers who have heroically re-
sisted foreign invaders, none have shown stronger
qualities than Lakshmi Baee, the Rani, or queen, of
N^ Jhansi ; whose wonderful generalship held the British
1 Diod., I. 27; Herod., II. 35. « YAJn., II. 48.
* Essays on Sanskrit Literature, III. 17. * See Wheeler's India, II. 569-572.
" Raghuvama, XIX.
WOMAN. 215
army in check ; and who headed her troops in person,
dressed as a cavalry officer, and was killed on the
field. Sir Hugh Rose declared that the best man on
the enemy's side was the Rani of Jhansi.^ Another
Rani, Aus Kour, being elevated by the British to the
disputed throne of Pattiala in the Panjab, an utterly
disorganized and revolted state, "as the only person
competent to govern it," is recorded by the historian
to have changed its whole condition in less than a
year, reducing rebellious villages, bringing up the
revenues, and establishing order and security every-
where.^
Malika Kischwar, queen dowager of Oude, educated
her son, who was dispossessed in 1866, to a knowledge
of ancient and modern literature, resulting in his be-
coming an author of high repute, and surrounding her
and himself with persons of literary distinction.
Aliah Bae, the Mahratta queen of Malwa, for
twenty years preserved peace in her dominions, devot-
ing herself to the rights, happiness, and culture of her
people. It was said of her that it would have been
regarded as the height of wickedness to become her
enemy, or, if need were, not to die in her defence.
Hindus and Mohammedans united in prayers that her
life might be lengthened. And of so rare a modesty
was this great queen, that she ordered a book, which
sounded her praises, to be destroyed, and took no notice
of the author.
Notwithstanding certain precepts, the law has practi-
cally allowed women a larger share in the manage-
ment of property than the statutes of most Christian
nations ; and thev have shown abundant shrewdness
1 Arnold's Dalhotisie, II. 153. ^ Griffin's Rajahs of tJie Panjab., p. 138.
2l6 RELIGION AND LIFE.
and tact in trade. "In family affairs, secular or relig-
ious, their influence is very great, and almost supreme.
Seldom can a man complete any important business
transaction, without having settled the matter with his
privy council, in the female apartments."^ "As the
law in Ceylon," says Tennent, "recognizes the abso-
lute control of the lady over the property conve3'ed to
her use, the custom of large marriage portions to
woman has thrown an extraordinary extent of the
landed property of the country into the hands of the
females, and invested them with corresponding propor-
tion of authority in its management." ^ A recent very
careful work on India tells us that " in the family circle,
and daily rounds of domestic duties, interests, and
enjoyments, the Hindu woman has a field for her
sympathies which puts her quite on a level with her
sisters of the West."^
Nor have the intellectual capacities of women failed
Intellectual of rcspcct. Thcrc are hymns in the Rig Veda
recognition, j-jy female rishis.* Malabar boasts seven ancient
sages, and four of them were women. The moral
sentences of Avyar are taught in the schools, as golden
rules of life ; and they certainly deserve the name.
Here are a few specimens : —
" Honor thy father and mother. Forget not the favors thou
hast received. Learn while thou art young. Seek the society of
the good. Live in harmony with others. Remain in thy own
place. Speak ill of none. Ridicule not bodily infirmities. Pursue
not a vanquished foe. Deceive not even thy enemy. Forgiveness
is sweeter than revenge. The sweetest bread is that earned by
labor. Knowledge is riches. What one learns in his youth is as
lasting as if engraven on stone. The wise is he who knows him-
self. Speak kindly to the poor. Discord and gambhng lead to
^ Buyers, p. 399. « Christia7tity in Ceylon, p. 157.
* Prichard, Admitiistr. of hidia, II. 89. * Weber, Vorlesitngen, 37, 38.
WOMAN.
217
misery. He misconceives his interest who violates his promise.
There is no tranquil sleep without a good conscience, nor any virtue
without religion. To honor thy mother is the most acceptable
worship. Of woman the fairest ornament is modesty. " ^
A little Hindu work on " Deccan Poets," by a pandit,
Rameswamie (Calcutta, 1829), tells us that Avyar,
supposed by some to have been a foundling, was ven-
erated as the daughter of Brahma and Sarasvati.
She was the child of a Brahman by a low-caste
woman, like Vyasa and other great Hindu person-
ages, and, though brought up by a singer of the servile
class, excelled all her brothers and sisters in learning,
and wrote, besides poetry, on astronomy, medicine,
chemistry, and geography. The same work mentions
many other female poets, among them the daughter
of a potter.
Though the law prohibited women from teaching
the Vedas, we know that priestesses were teachers of
princes. We know that there were Brahmanical
schools, not unlike the famous Saracen Colleges of
the Middle Ages, at which kings, priests, and women
united in the enthusiastic study of metaphysical and
moral science ; and of the women it is reported that
some astonished the masters by the depth and sub-
limity of their thought, and that others delivered
responses from a state of trance.^
In the Dramas, women always speak in the Prakrit
or common dialects, while men use the Sanskrit or
"holy" speech. These softer popular dialects derived
by decomposition from the Sanskrit are believed by
Renan to be special consequences of the female organ-
ization, and to prove its independent activity in the
^ From Schoberl's Hindustan in Miniature.
2 Megasthenes, Nearchus in Strabo, XV. ; Weber, 21.
2l8 RELIGION AND LIFE.
structure of the language.^ More significant is the
fact that the Prakrit, thus proper to woman, and by
her means introduced into literature, has gradually
supplanted the Sanskrit, and forms the basis of the
present spoken languages of India. So that the stamp
of female influence is in fact conspicuous in the his-
torical development of Hindu speech, as an informing
and determining force.
It would require a separate volume to render justice
to the fine appreciation of womanly qualities
Literary zp- -^ -^ j x
preciationof in what wc already know of Hindu literature,
woman. j^ j^^^ bccu notlccd that, in recognizing these,
the poets abandon exaggeration and draw from na-
ture.^ Nothing could be more tender and noble than
these ideal pictures, covering, too, so wide a range of
destiny and desire : the chaste love of Rama and Sita,
— her courage, fortitude, and womanly dignity under
his unjust suspicions, her mastery of all forms of evil
by moral purity and spiritual insight ; the fidelity of
Damayanti to her unhappy Nala, tempted by an evil
spirit first to play away his crown, and then to flee
from her for shame at his beggary, but followed and
redeemed at last by that loyalty of love, which thought
only of the misery he must endure in ofl'ending against
his nobler nature ; the piety of Savitri, controlling fate,
charming the god of death himself, by her wisdom
and love, into giving back life to her dead husband,
and sight to his blind father, with his lost crown, and
the glory of his fallen race.^ Equally intuitive is the
sense of woman's power to inspire a noble manhood
with absolute devotion. The Mahabharata describes
^ De VOrigiiie du La7t^age, Pref. p. 28.
2 Monier Williams, Indian Epic Poetry, p. 54.
' Savitri and Satyavan, Episode of the Mahabharata.
WOMAN. 219
the passionate love of Rurus, imploring the gods to
restore his Pramadvara, and offering to yield up his
own lifetime to be added to hers.
" I give thee half my future days, beloved,
Light to renew thy life be drawn from mine." *
And Kalidasa gives us the tale, wrought out in East-
ern traits, of the wasting grief of good prince Adja
for his young wife, whom the fall of celestial flowers
on her bosom has called away from earth ; pursuing
his Indumati through all sweet perfumes and sounds
and forms, refusing to turn away his mind or to be
comforted, the mighty grief slowly dividing his soul,
as a bough will rend the wall into which it grows,
until after "wearing through eight years ©f pain,
patiently and faithfully for his young son's sake, living
on pictures and images of his beloved, and on fleeting
transports of reunion, in his dreams," >he freely lays
aside the ruined body for an immortal life, with the
lost one, and among the gods.^ In Hindu poetic jus-
tice the fickleness, unfaithfulness, or harsh suspicion
towards true womanly love, which so often recurs in
Eastern story, is always visited by remorse, distraction,
or despair ; and even where changes of heart are as-
cribed to the malevolence of evil powers or the male-
dictions of offended saints, they are in no wise freed
from these penalties, which teach humility and ttuth,
w^hile they honor outraged virtue by proving it be-
friended by the eternal laws.^ What European poet
knows better than Kalidasa how gracious a soul is
born in nature at the touch of woman? Sakuntala,
cherishing her plants like a sister,
1 Mahabh., I. ^ '2 Ragkuvansa, VIII.
3 See especially Sakuntala and the Ramayana.
220 RELIGION AND LIFE.
" Never moistening in the stream
Her own parched Hps, till she had fondly poured
Its purest water on their thirsty roots,
And oft, when she would fain have decked her hair
With their thick clustering blossoms, in her love
Robbing them not e'en of a single flower," ^
infuses into them her own affections : the woods, the
flowers, the forest creatures, feel her coming and going
like the breath of life and the blast of death.
, " In sorrow for her loss the herd of deer
Forget to browse ; the peacock on the lawn
Ceases its dance ; the very trees around
Shed their pale leaves like tears, — while they dismiss
Their dear Sakuntala with loving wishes." ^
'J3
" He who would wish her to endure the hardships of
penance would attempt to sever the hard wood with
the blue leaf of the lotus." She is "the mellowed
fruit of virtuous actions in some former birth." — Wild
beasts respect the holiness of Damayanti, wandering
in the deserts ; the noisy caravan halts, and the rough
men beseech for her benediction.'^ TKe poet of the
Mahabharata sings the praise of woman like an earlier
Schiller. The wife is " man's other half, his inmost
friend, source of his bliss, root of his salvation ; friend
of the solitary one, consoling hiai with sweet words,
in his duties like a father, in his sorrows like a
mother." She reproves his neglect of manly duties,
and admonishes him of the forgotten God within him,
the witness and judge of human deeds. Deserted by
her husband, w^ho refuses 'to recognize her, the Sa-
kuntala of the epic says with dignity: "Thou, who
knowest what is true and what is false, O King !
^ Williams's translation. ^ ibid.
8 Nala and Damayanti, Episode of the Mahabhctrata,
WOMAN. 221
scorning this child of our love, bringest shame on
thyself. Thinking, ^I am alone,' thou hast forgotten
that beholder from of old, who is in the heart. Doing
wickedly, thou imaginest, 'No one knows it is I.'
But the gods know, and the witness within thee : sun
and moon, day and night, their own hearts, and the
justice of God, behold the deeds of men. The spirit
that dwells within us judges us hereafter."
Sita, the ideal wife in the Ramayana, is Rama's
"primeval love," not less tenderly human for being
divine. She compels him, by her devotion, to take her
with him into his exile in the wilderness, overpowering
his reason and will alike by the higher wisdom of
love. She rebukes him for his anger against even
the Rakshasas, demon foes of gods and men, as un-
becoming one who had assumed the consecration of
a religious life ; and warns him to subdue the first
risings of evil desire, since even a great mind may
contract guilt through neglecting almost imperceptible
moral distinctions : with which frankness Rama is
delighted, and replies, "O Sita, one who is not ad-
monished is not beloved. You have spoken becom-
ingly, and you are my companion in virtue, and
dearer to me than life."^ Fully to appreciate this
recognition of womanhood, we must remember that
Rama is nothing less than incarnated deity.
Even the wife of the demon Ravana, the Satan of
the epic, warns him against gratifying his sensual
passions on the person of his beautiful captive ; " for
he who forces the inclination of a woman shall die an
early death, or become the prey of endless disease."
The Ramayana likens " the wind that drives away the
white lotus from the too thirsty bees " to " the modesty
^ R&mciyana, B. ii.
222 RELIGION AND LIFE.
that drives the cov bride from her husband." Sita, on
her part, can forgive her cruelest enemies. Saved
from their hands, she says, "Why sholild I revenge
myself on the servants of Ravana, whom harsh com-
mands drove to injure me? What I have suffered
pays the penalty for a former life. I would not punish
others who are also enforced to evil." What exquisite
sense of the fine divination of womanly love is in the
picture of Damayanti, surrounded by the gods, who,
to deceive her, have all taken the form of her chosen
Nala, and mingle in the crowd of suitors, in her
father's hall !
" And Damayanti trembled with fear, and folded her hands in
reverence before the gods, praying them to resume their immortal
shapes, and reveal Nala, that she might choose him for her lord in
presence of all. Then the gods wondered at her truth and love,
and revealed straightway the tokens of their godhead. And
Damayanti saw the four bright gods, and knew they were not
mortal heroes ; for there was no sweat on their brows, nor dust on
their garments, and their garlands were fresh as if the flowers were
just gathered, and their feet touched not the earth. And she saw
also the true Nala ; for he stood before her with shadow falling to
the ground, and twinkling eyes and drooping garland, and moisture
was on his brow, and dust on his raiment. And she went and took
the hem of his garment, and threw a wreath of radiant flowers
Siround his neck, and thus chose him for her lord. And a sound of
wild sorrow burst from all the Rajahs ; but the gods and sages
cried aloud, ' Well done ! ' And Nala said, ' Since, O maiden ! j^ou
lave chosen me for your husband, in presence of the gods, know
that I will be your faithful consort, ever dehghting in your words,
and so long as my soul shall inhabit this body I solemnly vow to
be thine, and thine alone.' " '
The lamentation of Tara, the wife of Bali, over the
dead body of her husband, is as touching and noble
as any thing in poetry.
1 Wheeler's History of India, I. 484.
WOMAN.
223
"Why lookest thou so dull on thy child, thou, to whom thy
children were so dear ?
" Thy face seems to smile on me in the bosom of death, as if
thou wert alive.
" I see thy glory still like sunset on a mountain's head." *
As the moral interest of the Iliad centres in the
nemesis that follows crime ai^ainst the sancti-
^ Woman the
ties of wedded life, so that of the Ram ay ana inspiration
centres in the public and private calamities ° ^ ^ ^°^'
naturally incident to polygamy. It is the attempt of
one of the king's wdves to set aside the rights of the
son of another, in the interest of her own offspring,
that brings about the exile of Rama, the misery of the
people, the death of the unwise, uxorious king him-
self, the capture of Sita, and the war for her recovery ;
and this last portion of the epic is but a Hindu counter-
part of the Trojan war in punishment of the rape of
Helen. But while the Greek heroine shares the crim-
inality of her captor, the Hindu Sita is the ideal of
the faithful wife.
The crime which leads on the woes depicted in that
other great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, is a gam-
bling match, in which a monarch, made desperate by
continual losses, finally plays away his own wife, — an
atrocity which is rebuked on the spot by a Brahman,
who represents the eternal ethical law ; protesting that
Judhishthira "lost himself ho-ior^ he staked his wife,
and having first become a slave could no longer have
the power to stake Draupadi."
Without entering- into definite criticism of all these
ideals, I cannot forbear quoting the excellent remarks
of Monier Williams in his sketch of Indian Epic Poetry.
* Ram&yana, B. iv.
224 RELIGION AND LIFE.
''SIta, Draupadi, and Damayanti," he says, "engage
our affections and interest far more than Helen or even
Penelope. It cannot be doubted that in these delight-
ful portraits we have true representations of the purity
and simplicity of Hindu domestic manners in early
times. Children are dutiful to their parents and sub-
missive to their superiors ; younger brothers are re-
spectful - to their elder brothers ; parents are fondly
attached to their children, and ready to sacrifice them-
selves for their v^elfare ; wives are loyal, devoted,
obedient to husbands, yet show much independence
of character, and do not hesitate to express their own
opinions ; husbands are tenderly affectionate towards
their wives, and treat them with respect and courtesy ;
daughters and women generally are virtuous and
modest, yet spirited, and when occasion requires
courageous : love and harmony reign throughout the
family circle. It is in depicting scenes of domestic
affection, and expressing these feelings that belong to
human nature in all times and places, that Sanskrit
epic poetry is unrivalled."
Reverence for ^notherhood is here carried beyond
all other forms of respect for natural ties. The divine
sons of Dasaratha, all gods, all bow at the feet of
their human mothers. Rama, obliged to go into exile
that his father may not break his vow, is indeed un-
moved by his mother's unmeasured distress, and can-
not concede the claims she founds on the Sastras
themselves, to greater respect and obedience than is
due even to a father ; yet from his exile he sends
messages of profound affection to her, and even to
that other wife of his father whose criminal ambition
was the cause of his own disinheritance, and bids his
WOMAN.
225
brother Bharata pay every form of pious attention to
both.
The inspiration of these two great epics is indeed
nothing: else th.d.nthQ Wo7^l/i of Wo niaji. They, , ^
<3 -^ ^ _ -^ And of my-
celebrate her not onl}^ as imparting a divine thoiogy in
dignity to every sacrifice for her sake, but as ^^"^^^
conquering all moral evil through her constancy and
faith. In this whole cycle cf mythology, it is always
woman who destroys the dreaded powers, and revives
the energy of good. In the natural symbolism of the
Rig Veda, "the divine Night arrives, an immortal
goddess, shining with innumerable eyes, scattering
darkness with their splendors ; and men come to her
as birds to their nests. She drives away the wolf and
the thief, and bears them safely through the gloom." ^
And the Dawn arrives, "a daughter of the sky, shin-
ing on them like a young wife, arousing every living
being to his work, bringing light and striking down
darkness ; leader of the days ; lengthener of life ; for-
tunate, the love of all, who brings the eye of the
god."^ Woman prepares the holy fire. "The great
sacred mothers of the sacrifice have uttered praise,
and decorate the child of the sky." ^
It is remarkable, in view of the reverence of Hindu
life for male offspring, that the later tlieogonies com-
bine male and female elements, and treat both sexes
as equally necessary to the conccj)tw7i of deity . Crea-
tion, in Manu as well ^s in the Upanishads, proceeds
from the divine Love or Desire, becoming twain, male
and female.^ This co-essentiality of the two, for all
manifestation of the absolute, is common to the Hindu,
1 R. v., X. 127. 2 ^. F., VII. 77.
' R. v., IX. 33, 5. Perhaps symbolical expressions, yet not the less significant.
* Manu, I. 32 ; BriJiad Up. I. 43 ; Wilson's Essays en Hindu Religion, I. 241, 245.
15
226 RELIGION AND LIFE.
Egyptian, and Phoenician religions. The deities are
androgynous, whether Brahma-Maya, Osiris-Isis, or
Baal-Baut ; or they flow in series of twofold ema-
nations through all pantheistic cosmogonies, Oriental,
Gnostic, Neo-Platonic, under names not so familiar
as even these, — names which it is needless to enumer-
ate. In most cases the divine equality of sex is still
further represented by the fact that these wives of the
deities are also their sisters, and thus co-eternal. It
is a striking illustration of that greater breadth of sym-
pathy we have already noted in polytheistic and pan-
theistic forms of religion, as compared with intensely
monarchical, that this cosmooj^onic recoornition of the
equality in the sexes was confined to the former class.
Thus it is quite unknown to the old monotheistic
severity of the Hebrew faith, as well as to the distinc-
tively Christian, in its original form, which prefers the
masculine alike in its name of God and its choice of
Saviour. Only with latest heresy does God, as God,
come to stand as " Our Mother." ^ Honor to deity as
mother was indeed, both in Hindu and Egyptian wor-
ship, ''carried to a point beyond what was rendered to
any male function or authority. To Isis, greatest of
Egyptian divinities, whose myriad names were woven
into this one, the most tender of all, answers the Vedic
Aditi, " Mother of all the gods." 2
And not less significant is the fact that in all the
The Word oldcrEastcm religions ^Uhc Word''' is feminine.
feminine. Thought, lu Its purcst symbol, is thus awarded
^ So it is only in the latet Kabbalistic theology of the Hebrews, subsequent to Greek
and Oriental influences on their faith, that we find the first emanation of Deity conceived
as "the great Mother." (Sohar. See Bcrthold's Christologia, § 23.) And the Book of
the "Wisdom of Solomon," under similar influences, praises its female "cro^itt," as the
mirror of the power of God.
2 Herodotus, II. 40; Apuleius, Metatnorphoses.
WOMAN. 227
to the physically weaker sex. In India, as Sarasvati,
woman is the genius of art, literature, eloquence, — is,
in short, " the Word ; " ever the holiest symbol to the
Hindu mind. She is thus properl}^ the wife of Brahma.
At her festivals, as goddess of learning, all books,
pens, and other implements of study, are gathered in
the school-houses in India, and strewn with white
flowers and barley-blades ; and in the prayer her
name is coupled with the Vedas and. all the sacred
writings, and her love invoked, as one w^ith that of
Brahma, "the great Father of all."^ "Sarasvati,"
says the Rig Veda, "enlightens all intellects." "The
gods made Ila the instructress of men." Vach, or
Speech, is "the melodious Qj^ieen of the gods," who
says : —
" I myself declare this, which is desired by gods and men."
" Every man whom I love, I make him terrible. I make him a
priest, a seer."
" I make him wise." ^
Here is Indra's praise of Lakshmi : —
" Thou art mystic and spiritual knowledge. Thou art the phi-
losophy of reasoning, — the three Vedas.
" Thou art the arts and sciences, thou moral and political
wisdom.
" The worlds have been preserved and reanimated by thee." ^
" Every book of knowledge," says the Hitopadesa,
"which is known to Usanas or Vrihaspati, is by na-
ture implanted in the understanding of women." As
Durga, it is woman who sla^^s the Satan of the later
popular belief, and delivers mankind from the fear of
evil ; for which service this goddess is adored by all
1 Wilson's Essays, II. 190.
2 Rig- Veda, I. 3i 12 ; I. 31, 11 ; VIII. 89, 10; X. 125, 5.
* Visknu Puratia, I. ch. ix.
228 • RELIGION AND LIFE.
deities and saints.^ In the myth of the Kena Upanis-
had, it is a woman, Uma, who represents divine knowl-
edfje. She is a«shinin£j mediator between Brahma
and the gods : none but she is able to reveal to Indra
"who it was that had appeared to them, enforcing their
adoration, and vanished when they sought to approach
too near." The epics also describe Uma as one of the
three divine daughters of the great mountain king,
Himavat, all of them renowned in the three w^orlds
for force of contemplation, for chastity, and for power
in expounding divine wisdom.^ And as in the Rig
Veda, at the beginning of Hindu religious develop-
ment, we have Aditi, "mother of the gods," so in the
mystical Puranas, at the end, we have Durga, or
Mahamaya, defined as " the eternal substance of the
wt)rld, soul of all forms, whom none has power to
praise ; by whom the universe is created, upheld, pre-
served, into whom it is absorbed at last."^
After eighteen centuries of Christianity, the task of
christianit emancipating woman from legal incapacities
and Hea- yet rcmaius to be accomplished. Such prog-
emsm. ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ actually been made in this direction
cannot be laid to the sole account of any distinctive re-
ligion. Physical and social science, intellectual culture,
and practical necessity have had more to do with it than
either Christian belief or that spirit of brotherhood
which Christianity has held to be its own peculiar
grace. The history of its churches as a whole affords
no ground for according them superiority, in this form
of justice, to the heathen world. The Hindu law for-
bade woman to read the Vedas, or to officiate at holy
rites. Christian councils and Popes, echoing the
1 Puranas, quoted in Muir, Sanskrit Texts, IV. 371.
* See texts in Muir, IV. 367. ' Ibid., 371 ; Wilson's Essays, I. 247.
WOMAN.
229
great Apostle to the Gentiles, have interdicted her
not only from assumption of the priesthood, but from
speaking in religious assemblies, or administering the
rite of baptism.^ Christian legislation has been in
many points even more unjust to her than Manu. A
law of Justinian concerning deaconesses makes death
the penalty for their marrying. What is there in the
Hindu code harsher towards females than their exclu-
sion by English common law from " benefit of clergy,"
so that they were put to death for crimes which a
clergyman could commit with impunity, and for which
a man was simply branded P^ Have Hindu laws
prescribed the self-burning of widows ? Eighteen
centuries of Christianity elapsed before it ceased burn-
ing women at the stake for heresy. Is the absolute
authority of husband and father the oldest despot-
ism? It survives still in the law of England, which
"vests parental rights in the father alone, to the
entire exclusion of the mother ; " giving him power
not only to remove the children from her during his
life, but to appoint a guardian with similar power over
them after his death .^ What could be worse than the
European principle of " feme covert," the absorption of
her legal existence during marriage into that of her
husband, still described in the very language of the
Hindu Law ? Or what shall we say of the facts that
the Ecclesiastical or Canon Law has been the source
of woman's severest disabilities ; and that it is only in
so far as the secular principle has prevailed over the
ecclesiastical that any progress has been made in re-
1 Laodicea; Carthage; Autun (670 a.c); Aix-la-Chapelle (816); Paris (824). The
Synod of Orange (441) forbids the ordination of deaconesses. See Ludlow, IVomajis
Work in the Church, p. 65.
2 Wendell's Blackstone, I. 445, n.
* Westminster Review for Jan. 1872, p. 30.
230 RELIGION AND LIFE.
moving tliem ? ^ The persecution of witches in modern
Europe has no parallel in Hindu or any other barbar-
ism. Many of the legal disqualifications of woman,
which have descended from feudalism, make her per-
petual wardship among the heathen appear almost
respectable in comparison.
And on the other hand, as we have seen, an instinc-
Treatment tivc rcspect for the scx was not wanting to the
?dTff^ent pi'e-Christian world. It was the command-
reiigions. mcut of uaturc. Its roots were in religion,
in moral appreciation, in generosity and in love.
Judaism and Christianity helped it onward, by their
stern protest against polygamy and sensuality, and by
sublime ideals of purity and beneficence. But the
Church, it must be remembered, was anticipated by
a noble movement of Roman law, which steadily
transformed the status of woman from almost total
bondage into freedom and equality in respect of con-
jugal, marital, and proprietary rights. It has been
said with truth that Roman jurisprudence gave her
" a place far more elevated than that since assigned to
her by Christian governments."^ The culmination
of liberal tendencies under Christian emperors, as
especially shown in the laws of Constantine in her
favor, was the issue of a secular movement, which
had been penetrating for centuries through the whole
mass of Roman legislation. Under Christianity itself,
the progress was slow : later emperors undid the work
of earlier ones ; and it is admitted even by Troplong
that this religion " did not take full possession of civil
society till after the older races had been rejuvenated
^ See BlackstoTte, I. 445 ; also Maine's Ancient Law, p. 153.
2 Westm- Rev. for Oct. 1856.
WOMAN.
231
by fresh life infused from new sources.^ Without dis-
paraging the services of the Church, we must render
justice to that far greater help towards the emancipa-
tion of woman which came from a different quarter.
I mean those Teutonic tribes, to whom a queen was
as good as a king, and who gave Rome an empress.^
I mean those free " barbarians," who brought with
them a perfect equality of sex in all the domestic and
social relations ; with whom the wife was accustomed
not to yield up a dowry, but to receive one from the
husband, while each formally endowed the other with
spear, and steed, and sword, in token of common
public duties and claims ; whose women were " fenced
with chastity," and "guardians of their own children ; "
who held that " somewhat of sanctity and prescience
was inherent in the female sex;"^ who entered neither
on peace nor on war without consulting the priestess
as an oracle ; whose mythology conceived destiny in
female forms, whether as Valkyriur or Nornir, at the
tree of life or on the field of death ; and whose oldest
poem, the Voluspa, was ascribed to a woman, repre-
sented as a divinity who unveils the past and future to
gods and men.
But behind Roman, Christian, and Teutonic helpers,
rise the grand Greek ideals of Wisdom and Greece and
Maternity, Athena and Demeter, with their ^si'pt.
consecration not of thought only, but of earth and air.
The inviolability of the family was enthroned in Hera.
The awe of all deities beheld Hestia, the earth, as
their common mother, and the witness of their most
sacred vows. And even behind these stands Egyp-
1 Troplong, Infltience du Christianisme^ p. 218.
2 Victoria, " Mother of Camps." See Thierry, Tableau de F Empire Rottiam, p. 189.
8 See Tacitus, De Mor. Gerjn., c. 18, 19, 8 ; Hist.^ IV. 61.
232 RELIGION AND LIFE.
tian Isis, Goddess Mother, crowned with her thrones,
shielding Osiris with her outspread wings, co-equal
ruler of the land during his calamity, and its saviour
through her own distress ; tender seeker of the lost
divinity of love and truth ; his deliverer from bonds,
and his avenger on the powers of evil ; commending
even the brute creatures to human (gratitude for their
sympathy and help in her beneficent work. How
beautiful the myth ! ^ Diodorus gives us an inscrip-
tion in which she says what she well might say,
"What I have decreed, none can annul." And
Apuleius calls her "Nature, beginning of ages,
parent of all." ^
Tfiese natural instincts spoke clearly in the Far
East also. There was faith in maternity as the
India. _ ''
root of redemption, long before men bowed
at the shrine of a Catholic " Mother of God." When
Dante and Dominic beheld the mysteries of hell and
heaven through faith in the sanctity of Womanhood,
they but made fresh confession of a spiritual need,
which in other forms is as surely represented in the
old Hindu Epic, Drama, and Sacred Hymn. And
when free opportunity and becoming culture shall
have been at last achieved for women, and the old
contempt for their intellectual capacities shall have
everywhere gone to its place, it will be better under-
stood that the recognition has been but clearer vision
of what could not anywhere have been wholly hid.
Recent movements in India for the better education of
women, and the recent mission (1870) of the leader
of Hindu Theism to England, in the interest of their
deliverance from the marital, social, and ecclesiastical
^ See Plutarch's Isis and Osiris.
2 Diod., I. 27; Apuleius, Metatnorph.
WOMAN. 233
oppressions of ages, are but the springing of these
ancient waters afresh with renewed power. Native
Hindu women are being educated for the medical
profession, without distinction of caste. Some have
already entered on regular practice.^ " In north-
western India," we are told, " the pandits are always
ready to do their very best to promote the cause of
female education." ^ Miss Carpenter, in her recent
noble mission for this purpose, found the intelligent
Hindus so earnest and so wise in their interest in it,
that she was fain, as she tells us, to follow their lead-
ing, convinced that the best way for them was to
emancipate tliemselves.^
And our hopes are strengthened, when we remem-
ber that this contemplative race would naturally be
disposed to regard intelligence, by whomsoever mani-
fested, as worthy of respect; and that even the des-
potism of caste could not wholly exclude the special
gifts of woman from hospitality and honor, with a
people whom it is but just to call the Brain of the
East.4
1 At the school of Dr. Corb^ni in Bareilly, where twenty-eight native girls are now
studying. See Victoria Magazitte., April, 1871.
2 Prichard, Administr. of htdia^ II. 73.
* Six Montlis in India, I. 78, 80.
* The position of Woman in Buddhism will be noticed in the sections relating to that
religion.
VII.
SOCIAL FORMS AND FORCES,
SOCIAL FORMS AND FORGES.
TT has been usual to ascribe the social system of the
Hindus to the deliberate artifices of a origin of
priesthood. But the germs of caste are in the ^^^^^•
instinctive, not in the self-conscious age of man. Nor
can we now accept Niebuhr's sweeping statement that
"castes are in all cases the consequence of foreign
conquests." Neither theory meets the all-important
question : Of what social needs and aspirations is a
system_ so general in the early history of nations the
natural expression?
The religious instincts are as old as the social. The
savage makes a fetich of the wooden sticks out Thepnestiy
of which he churns his fire ; and the medicine- *^^^^'
man listens with awe to the din of his own rattle or
drum. The sorcerer makes an image of a diseased
person out of earth or grass, and, confounding his own
processes with the life of the individual represented,
ascribes to this work of his own hands a magical
power over the disease. This is the rude beginning
of religious mysticism ; and it is but a more refined
form of the same " superstition," when the crucifix is
believed to possess a divine efficacy in removing the
crosses of life and the anguish of death from the
human being in whose likeness it is made. But in
238 RELIGION AND LIFE.
neither case does the word '* superstition " express the
whole truth. To the primitive tribes nature is not
merely hunting-ground and pasture, but m3^sterious
living Presence of invisible powers. Endless motion
and endless rest, brooding stillness, inexplicable sounds,
stir strange yearning and awe in these children of the
open eye and ear. Who shall solve these mysteries,
and draw the secret runes of life and death out of the
night and the day ? He whose organization is most sen-
sitive to the contact of these subtle forces shall be holy
and dear to men. The natural seer is the first recog-
nized ruler. The grateful people will live to honor, die
to appease him. They will stand afar off, while he
talks with gods and spirits for their sake. Moses shall
go in among the clouds and lightnings for us. Vasish-
tha shall pray for us to Indra, the storm-ruler, to an-
nihilate our foes. This interpreter of Nature fulfils all
ideal functions, except that of military chief or king.
He is magician, astrologer, physician, philosopher,
poet, moral leader. And he is eminently sincere.
It is his faith and feeling that make him what he is,
and give him his power over the people. He is meet-
ing their deepest needs as well as his own ; being
more plainly impressible than others by those powers
which all confess. As yet there is no priestcraft here.
And as nature is felt but as a chaos of undistino-uished
powers, so society has reached nothing like a hier-
archy of classes. A division of labor is in fact just
beginning in this instinctive respect for the inspired,
or possessed person.
Such is the A.ry?in pzirohiia ; such the Hebrew ncibi
or roch.^ Both are properly natural seers. The name
purohita, meaning one who has charge^ shows how
* I Sam. ix. 9 ; Judges xvii. 2 Lassen, I. 795.
THE CASTES.
239
closely the sentiment we have described allied itself
with the performance of religious rites. As social
relations are developed, this class become not only
psalmists and singers, btit teachers and counsellors of
the king.^ They direct his policy, simply because
they are his wisest men. " That king withstands his
enemies," says the Rig Veda, " who honors a purohita ;
and the people bow before him of their own accord." ^
The seer teaches his wisdom to his children, who
follow in his honored paths. They come to have
esoteric mysteries ; but it is simply because their re-
ligious disciplines as well as natural susceptibilities
have put them in possession of physical or psycholog-
ical knowledge which the multitude can receive only
in parables.
By and by the seers become an organization. These
hereditary disciplines draw them into closer TheErah-
combination for such purposes as grow naturally ™^'^^-
out of their public functions ; and we have Levltes,
Magi, Brahmans. The Hindu purohltas, thus trans-
formed, are bound into chai'anas and -parishads^ schools
and associations for definite objects, such as the guar-
dianship of formulas and rites, or the study of Vedic
hymns. They are divided Into forty-nine gotras^ or
families, who trace their descent from the " seven holy
rishis," and the mythical or other saints who figure in
their traditions ; and these gotras are governed by strict
religious and social regulations. Gradually the text
becomes more precious than the soul which created it ;
and at last Its guardian is holler even than Itself.
The freedom and ardor of the Veda hymn are sup-
planted by formulas of doctrine, the oracles of Nature
^ 2 Sam. xxiv. 11.
2 R. v., IV. 5, 7, 10. See Roth, in Zeitschr. d. D. M. G., I. 80.
240 RELIGION AND LIFE.
by ritual law. A corporate authority grows up, by
force of intellectual supremacy and in the name of
religion, which favorable circumstances develop into
the Brahman caste.
The heroic life of the Greek cantons in the older
Aryan spirit forbade this distinct separation of a relig-
ious class from the rest of the community.^ But the
contemplative Hindus, passive, fatalistic, yearning
in the lassitude of tropical life for self-surrender to
ideal powers, gave full sweep to the caste tendency,
and became its typical representatives.
Such, substantially, is the history of priesthood in
The priest- ^^^ timcs. It bcgius in the natural gravitation
hood. Qf power to the wisest and friendliest men.
In the Middle Ages, a Martin, an Ambrose, or a
Gregory, standing for the weak and oppressed in the
name of God, made iron knees and fierce unshorn
heads bow down, and do penance for every act of
injustice. But where the prophet stood in the morn-
ing of a religion, by and by stands the priest, its
functionary, inheriting his honors, but not his spirit.
It is the destiny of every organized religion. In the
Eastern races the degeneration was not arrested by
science or political liberty. But, on the other hand,
it escaped that sort of ecclesiastical Jesuitism which
follows the deliberate refusal to recognize what these
teachers bring. For the impulses of nature wrought
through the religion, not against it: a real faith, both
in priests and people, made devotees and martyrs after
its own kind.
The other castes likewise begin in certain rude
^ The priest and king were there one and the same person ; and, both in Hellenic and
Roman civilization, the political element gradually absorbed the religious into its own cur-
rent, shaping it to practical and general uses.
THE CASTES. 24I
forms of social need. A portion of the tribe be-
comes agricultural. It must be defended from ^he other
sudden incursions, in its quiet settlement along ^^^^^^
the Ganofes or Nile. The Soldier, as more inde-
pendent, and as holding rAore firmly to the traditions
of the free roving life, will stand higher in the social
scale than the Husbandman. His function is an in-
dispensable one : he assumes, with this social pre-emi-
nence, the special burden of public defence. He rules
not by the might of the strongest, so much as by
the need of the strongest. Contempt of labor in the
ancient communities was coiuj^arative, not absolute.
In all of them there are recognitions of its worth,
such as Hesiod's " Works and Days," or the lives of
early Romans, like Cincinnatus and Cato. But the
labors of the priest and soldier are more prized than
those of artisans or tillers of the earth. The pursuits
of settled life begin to exist, on mere sufferance by the
armed nomad; and they endure only so far as pro-
tected by the military class. Again, the handicrafts,
as they arise, are subservient to the wants of the
agriculturist ; and so we have the natural order of the
castes. Veneration for parental disciplines and ex-
ample, and the need of an exact transmission of
methods, render all employments hereditary. Force
of fellowship, tradition, custom, accomplish the rest.
Thus society becomes organized by the law's of pre-
cedence in public service. In its origin the baleful
caste system, which is not confined to Egypt and India,
but in some form has appeared in most races at a
certain stage of development, was simply an instinc-
tive effort for the Organization of Labor. ^
1 Quinet {Genie des Religiotts) has traced a striking parallel between Hindu castes
and the European classes in the Middle Ages, another epoch of social reconstruction.
16
242 RELIGION AND LIFE.
Plato himself, in his ideal Republic, supposes classes
to have originated in a natural division of labor, and
justice to be that adherence of each to its own function
vv^hich the general good requires. I cannot doubt that
Plato's " justice " is the philosophical statement of a
natural ideal, which had much to do with constructing
the earlier forms of society.
An old Hindu myth gives the following solution of
our question. Brahma created a son, and,
Hindu ideas -'•
oftheori- calling him Brahman, bade him study and
ginofcastes. ^^^^^ ^^^ y^^^^ g^^^ fearing the attacks of
wild beasts, he prayed for help ; and a second son
was created, named Kshatriya, or warrior, to protect
him. But, employed as he was in defence, he could
not provide the necessaries of life ; and so a third
son, Vaisya, was sent to till the soil ; and as, once
more, he could not make the tools, and do the other
needful service, a youth called Sudra succeeded, and
all dwelt together, serving Brahma.^ The Brihad
Upanishad says that "Brahma is in all the castes, in
the form of each." The law books and the older
mythologists deprecate the idea of a violent origin of
the system, and affirm that all the castes descend from
One God ; the priest proceeding from Brahma's head,
the soldier from his arm, the husbandman from his
leg, the s'udra from his foot. Buddhist accounts,
which describe castes as the consequence of social
degeneracy, none the less represent them as having
been spontaneous and elective. A discourse attributed
to Buddha himself contains a legend of the following
purport : —
* Creuzer, Relig. de PAntigjtiiS, I. 227.
2 Mann, I. 31 ; Yajnavalkya, III. 126. A passage to similar effect in the Rig Veda
(X. 90, 6, 7) is believed to be of later origin than the rest. Miiller's ChiJ>s^ II. 30S.
THE CASTES. 243
When outrages on society began, a ruler was elected to pre-
serve order, who received for such service a portion of the produce.
He was called Khattiyo, or Kshatrya^ as owner of lands, and after-
wards Raja, as rendering mankind happy. But his race was origi-
nally of the same stock with the people, and of perfect equality with
them. Then, by reason of the increase of crimes, the people ap-
pointed from among themselves Bahmanas, or suppressors of vice
and awarders of punishment, — a class which afterwards became fond
of living in huts in the wilderness ; and these were the ancestors
of the Bra/wians, who also were therefore originally of the com- ■
mon stock. Other persons, who distinguished themselves as ar-
tificers, were called wessa, or Vaisya, while others, addicted to
hunting (ludda), became siidras j but all these classes were at first
equal with the rest of mankind. Finally, from out of all these
classes came persons who despised their own castes, left their habi-
tations, and led wandering lives, saying, " I will become samana,
ascetic, or priest." Thus the sacerdotal class, being formed from
all the rest, does not properly constitute a caste.^
Finally, the Bhagavadglta, giving the philosophy of
Brahmanism on the subject, refers these subordinations
to differences of natural disposition {guna) among
men ; in other words, to moral gravitation.^ This
resembles the defences of slavery offered by the later
Greeks and modern Americans ; and serves, like
these, to demonstrate that the worst institutions are
compelled to do homage to a natural sense of right,
and must defend themselves by the pretence of justice.
But the common idea which all these Hindu authori-
ties suggest — the intimation of mythologist, lawgiver,
and theorist alike — is that castes were, in their origin,
spontaneities of social growth, pursuing, both by di-
vine order and human consent, the common good of
society. Nor did the common sense and humanity
of the people fail to recognize that the separation of
^ This legend, as translated by Turnour, is given in full in Colonel Sykes's Notes
on Ancieiit India {Journal of Roy. As. Soc, vol. vi.).
2 So the Vishnu and Vayu Puranas.
244 RELIGION AND LIFE.
the classes by absolute difference of origin was it-
, self a delusion, and refuse it place in their ideal of
history.-^
As far as regards the three upper castes in India,
The lowest ^^^ explanation now given seems adequate,
castes. g^|- j|- jg ^Q ]^Q noted that the lowest caste was
black ; that its name Sudra is not Sanskrit, but desig-
nated an indigenous tribe ; and that its caste degrada-
tion would thus appear to be the result of conquest by
the invading Ar3^ans.^
There are many outcast classes, even lower than the
Sudra. These are the product of "mixed marriages,"
from which, as confusion of the castes, according to
the law, all possible evils proceed.^ Doubtless Miche-
let's opinion, that the whole relation of the caste system
to the aborigines was but an indispensable policy of
self-protection on the part of the Aryan tribes against
absorption into degraded races, is entitled to some
regard in explaining this intense hatred of mixed
marriages, which we find throughout the Brahmanical
legislation,* Yet there are also ignoble sources of low-
caste miseries, and it is plain that priestcraft has had
its share in elaborating a system which began in sim-
ple instincts of mutual help.
1 Muir has fully established the truth of his statement (Sansk. Texts, I. 160) that "the
separate origination of the four castes is far from being an article of belief universally
received by Indian antiquity." Abundant passages in the Ramayana describe the earliest
or Krita age of man, in which " righteousness was supreme, ' when " the soul of all beings
was white ; " when "men were alike in trust, knowledge, and observance;" when " tha
castes were devoted to one deity, used one formula, rule, and rite, and practised one duty."
And the Bhagavata Purana says {IX. 14, 18) there was formerly but one Veda, essence of
speech, one God, and one caste, the triple Veda entering in the Treta, or later and degen-
erate age.
2 Unless the Aryan occupation was, as Maine believes, a colonization rather than a
conquest. The Rig Veda calls the black skin the "hated of Indra" (IX. 73, 5). Varna^
or caste, may mean color; and the Mahabharata carries out the idea, representing
Brahma as having created the Brahman white, the Kshatriya red, the Vais'ya yellow, and
the Sudra black. Weber, Vorlesungen, p. 18; Duncker, II. 12, 55 ; Lassen, I. 799.
8 Ma?tu, VIII. 353 ; X. 45. * Bible de V Humanite, p. 40.
THE CASTES. 245
The Brahmans must have owed their supremacy
to other sources than physical force. In mod- origin of
ern Kashmir and the Mahratta country they ^•'f^"^^"
•z ./ cai author-
still rule by the brain and the pen.^ The ity.
Hindu has always believed that his chief power
lay in blessing and cursing. According to Manu,
" Speech is the weapon by which they destroy their
foes."^ The Ramayana makes the priest Vasishtha
overcome the Kshatriya VisVamitra by the miraculous
power of his staff. In the Rig Veda, both these
saints, who became for later times representatives of
rival castes, are alike -purohitas ; and the whole third
book is ascribed to Visvamitra. No contest of classes
had then arisen, and the poet's inspiration was honored
without regard to the question whether he was soldier
or priest.^ Even were it probable that any such inter-
necine conflict between the two orders as that described
by the poets in the myth of Parasurama, which ends
in the "extermination" of the Kshatriyas, ever really
occurred, it is plain that nothing of the kind was possi-
ble until the caste system had become fully organized.
In no case could it have been the primary source of
priestly supremacy.
Parasurama himself, in the legend, is a Kshatriya,
and destroys his own caste, not merely in the inter-
est of Brahmanical revenge for the murdered priestly
tribe of Brighu, but also from motives of a personal
character, the Kshatriyas having slain his father. It
would seem from this that the reference is to a civil
war inside the soldier caste.^
Lassen and Roth, upon the whole, regard the con-
* Campbell on Ijidian Eth7iology, Jotirnal Bengal Society, 1S66.
2 Mann, XI. 33. s Burnouf, Essai siir le Veda.
* Wuttke, Gesch. d. Heidcnth., II. 321 ; Muir, Sansk. Texts, I. ch. iii. ; Mahdbh., Ill,
246 RELIGION AND LIFE.
flict of Vasishtha and Visvamitra as a symbolic ex-
pression for the victory of Brahmanical organization
over the simpler life of Vedic times. Visvamitra, as
his name indicates, has always represented the demo-
cratic or popular element in Indian faith. -And the
outcast races have generally been associated with his
family. 1
When this organization of castes was effected, or
how far its development ever proceeded, is not easy to
determine. A rationalistic and democratic element,
of which distinctive Buddhism was but a single ex-
pression, seems to have existed in every epoch of
Hindu thought ; and this must have constantly hin-
dered the growth of Brahmanical authority. The
progress of the system must therefore have been slow.
A civil war of so barbarous and destructive a charac-
ter as the tale of Paras'^urama implies becomes ex-
tremely improbable.
If, as has been conjectured, the conflict occurred in
later Buddhist times ,^ it must still have been of a very
different character from that described in the legend ;
for the history of Buddhism gives no record of such a
conflict in any form. Nor, as matter of fact, were the
Kshatriyas "exterminated;" either "three times," as
the poet puts it, or even once. Their descendants
\ abound in Rajputana and the Panjab, amidst the old-
est seats of Hindu civilization. In the epics there are
still signs of superiority in the soldier class : the chief-
tains often treat Brahmans with contempt, as merce-
nary sacrificers. At the marriage of Draupadi,^ the
^ The word z/;'/ means probably to occupy or liold (Greek, OLKng ; Latin, vlais ; Enj;-
lish, wick), and indicates the settled householding class ; hence Vaisyas, the agricultural
caste, and probably Vishnu, the preserving One.
2 Wheeler's History of India., II. 64 ; Campbell, id supra.
« Mahabh., I.
•THE CASTES. 247
Rajahs are indignant at being humbled by a Brahman,
whom the maiden chooses for her husband in prefer-
ence to all her Kshatriya suitors.
Manu, indeed, believed to have been himself a
Kshatriya, records the names of kings, who perished
by reason of not submitting to Brahmanical divi7ie
right. But this means only that the spiritual arm
claimed and secured mastery over the temporal, in
the maturity of both; as it afterwards did in Chris-
tendom.
Like every thing Hindu, this worship of a priesthood
was hewn out of an abstract conception. With Hindu
whatever base elements minpcled, to whatever p"^^^^^°°^
o ' ship an
ends exploited, the theory was that justice ideal.
could be administered only by just men, and that pun-
ishment belonged only to the pure.^ As the Egyptian
priesthood represented the national idea of absolute
duty, and exhorted the king on solemn occasions to
the use of his power for the public good,^ so the Brah-
man was held to be an " incarnation of Dharma, or
Sovereign RigJit ; born to promote justice and guard
the treasure of duties."^ The king must appoint a
Brahman as chief of his ministers.^ The Brihad
declares justice created to rule force (Kshatriya).
" Through it the weak shall overcome the strong."
Therefore the Brahman was inviolable, world-maker,
world-preserver, venerable even to the gods. Hor-
rible transmigrations are the penalty for assaulting
him, even with a blade of grass, and barbarous pun-
ishments for slaying or mutilating him. The grains
of dust wet by his blood are counted as years in the
atonement of the murderer.^ Down at his feet, and
1 Manu, VII. 30; Yajn., I. 354. ^ J)iod. Sicul.
8 Mami., I. gS, 99. * Ibid., VII. 58, 59.
6 Ibid., IX. 314, 316; XI. 84; IV. 166, 168; Yajn., II. 215.
248 RELIGION AND LIFE.
ask forgiveness, if you have confuted him in logic.
Let him suffer, and the nation perishes. The sea
fails, the fire goes out, the moon dwindles, if his
prayers and offerings for the people cease. He is the
producer, the healer, the deliverer : the world is but
the outcome of the virtue of which he is the visible
sign. He may violate every rule of caste without sin,
to relieve himself from extremity of distress : though
the king die of hunger, the Brahman shall not be
taxed, his contribution being already infinite. He is
venerable from his birth ; though a Brahman be but
ten years old, and a Kshatriya a hundred, the former
is the father, and all things are his.^
To invest individuals or classes with an exclusive
Its mean- diviuity belougs to all forms of organized
ing. religion hitherto prevalent in the world. And
it is easy to show, in this worship of the Brahman
which is i^.s typical form, of what folly, superstition,
and despotism it is capable. But such criticism, how-
ever just, does not explain the facts of history. We
would recognize that sentiment, in itself eternally
valid, which found crude and blind expression in this
old absolutism, so as to give it currency with human
nature. What it aspired to, in its imperfect way, is
in fact achieved only through the mutual stimulation
of free, vigorous, practical races. The question w^hich
Brahman worship properly suggests is whether he,
whom the progress of civilization has shown to be
the real goal of that imperfect groping and striving,
whether the tj'ite preserver of states and sustainer of
worlds, he whose conscience outrajied, whose service
stayed or suppressed, is indeed the people's shame
^ Manu, XI. 206; IX. 316; X. 103; II. 135; I. 100.
THE CASTES. 249
and loss, — whether the just citizen, the laborer for
universal ideas and uses, has at last adequate recogni-
tion and respect. Meantime it is well to note how
strong an impulse to this natural veneration underlies
the most unpromising features of Hindu life.
Brahmanical absolutism could not have been the
mere device of a body of priests, imposed from with-
out on the religious sentiment. Priest and people
were alike swayed by a sense of the indispensableness
of spiritual help. They comprehend that to bring
this is to sustain the world; that social order, custom,
inspiration, are derived from this ; that the first of
duties is to recognize him who has this to give ; and
that to stay this product is to deal destruction to the
people. Here, in the crude ore, is the fine gold of an
eternal idea, which these latest ages are still engaged
in workinof out. Here is at least a sincere effort to
divinize spiritual help ; and the Brahman himself was
substantially a believing servaiit of the impulse, even
while he more or less selfishly directed it to efiect his
own supremacy.
He wrought out the laws, under a sense of inspira-
tion. He bowed his own neck under the yoke „
•^ Responsibu-
which he laid on the lower castes. This isityofthe
certainly true, w^hatever the alloy of priest-
craft in his legislation. The theory being that primi-
tive power belonged only to the just, its organ must
first master himself.^ As far as the wretched Chandala
lay beneath this incarnate god, so far the god himself
was beneath the law. Let him violate its precepts or
disciplines, he shall be turned into a demon whose
food is filth, and whose mouth a firebrand.^ To
1 Manu, VII. 30; Vdjn., I. 354. ^ Manu, XII. 71.
250 RELIGION AND LIFE.
neglect them is to make way for his own destruction.
Dante's Christian Inferno is prefigured in these penal-
ties of Brahmanical sin. "If, as judge, the Brahman
shall overturn justice, it shall overturn him : if he
extracts not the dart of iniquity from its wounds, he
shall himself be wounded thereby."^ If he begs gifts
for a sacrifice, and uses them otherwise than for sacri-
fice, he shall become a kite or a crow ; ^ if he begs
from a low-caste man, he shall become an outcast in
the next existence ; and if he marries a low-caste
woman, he degrades his family to her caste, and loses
his own.^ For his marrying a Sudra woman, the law
declares there is no expiation.* Crimes are specified
which will change his nature into that of a Sudra in
three days.^ The law forbids the king to slay him,
even though convicted of all possible crimes.^ Yet it
also prescribes his banishment for capital offences,
and even declares it permissible to kill him, if he
attempts to kill.' If he steals, his fine is eight times
that of a Sudra ; and, if he accepts stolen property, he
is punished as the thief.^ Care is taken indeed that
he shall be able to compound for the severest penalties,
by milder penance ; but the recognition of a higher
law than his own will is none the less real, nor are his
expiations an easy burden. The Brahmanical bed
was not made of roses. The demands of asceticism
rose in proportion to one's elevation in caste life, and
the Sudra is a freeman by comparison, in the matter
of ceremonial bonds. ^ Whatever riorhts the Brahman
possessed over the lives and property of others, the
1 Manu, Vlir. 15, 12. 2 Ibid., XL 24, 25. s ibid., III. 16, 17.
* Ibid., III. 19. B Ibid., X. 92. 8 Ibid., VIII. 380.
7 Ibid., VIII. 350. 8 Ibid., VIII. 337, 340.
° For some curious effects of tliis flict on the relations of the castes, see Ludlow's
British India, I. 57.
THE CASTES. 25 1
law insisted with energy that he should subdue his
passions, be just and merciful, and return good for
evil, on penalty of losing all the prerogatives of his
birth. He must not gamble, nor sell spirituous liquors,
nor indulge any sensual desires. Nor must v^e esti-
mate lightly the practical power of these saving pro-
visions, and of the religious beliefs from which they
sprung. Alexander and his followers found the Indian
Gymnosophists " blameless, patient, wise, and just." ^
And the Egyptian priesthood, under analogous disci-
plines to the Hindu, seem to have won a like reputa-
tion in the ancient world. A very interesting little
tract was sent to Hodgson, and communicated by him
to the Royal Asiatic Society, in w^iich the Buddhist
author confutes the doctrine of the castes out of the
mouth of B}'ahmans themselves ; proving, by a great
number of examples drawn from their sacred writings,
that Brahmanism cannot be a matter of birth nor race,
nor wisdom, nor observance of rites. He shows that
many leading Brahmanical authorities w^ere from
low-caste mothers, that many Sudras have become
Brahmans by their austerities ; quotes Manu to the
effect that "bad actions wdll change a Brahman into
a Sudra, that virtue is better than lineage, and that
royalty without goodness is contemptible and worth-
less ;" also the Mahabharata, as saying that the signs
of a true Brahman are the possession of truth, mercy,
self-command, universal benevolence ; and that origi-
1 Megasthenes, for example [De Situ Orbis^ ch. xv.), describes the Brahmans as frugal
in living ; avoiding animal food or sensual pleasure : intent oil serious conversation with
such as are willing to hear. And Scholasticus, in the fifth century, says of ihem : " They
worship God ; never question Providence ; always in prayer turning towards the light,
wherever it may be ; live on what the earth spontaneously brings forth ; delight in the sky
and woods, and sweet song of the birds ; sing hymns to God, and desire a future life."
These philosophers were in fact the highest ideals of the Greeks in morality and religion.
See Marco Polo, and the Arabian writers on India ; also Wuttke, 463, 464.
252 RELIGION AND LIFE.
nally there was but one caste, the four arising from
diversity of rites and vocations. " All men born of
woman have the same organs, and are subject to the
same wants." ^
These considerations may show the injustice we
condhioQ of should do the Hindu caste-system in placing
the sudra. [^ q^ ^ mofal Icvel with modern slavery.
The Sudras were indeed at the mercy of a fearful
system of oppression. Legal penalties for enslaved
races were neither more nor less barbarous in the
Code of Manu tha,n in the written and unwritten
codes of the old Slave States of America. Slittins:
of tongues, pouring hot oil into mouths and ears,
cutting off lips and branding foreheads, are neces-
sary adjuncts of any system which undertakes to make
any form of slavery its corner-stone, in old time or
new. The thraldom of the Sudra was very distinctly
stated. "Though emancipated, he does not become
free, since none can divest him of a state which is
natural to him."^ He can possess no property as
against a Brahman ; ^ and must not accumulate wealth,
lest he give trouble to the superior race ! ^ And a kind
of colorphobia, too, certainly underlay the old bondage
as it did the later. Whether the Sanskrit word for caste
(varna) really points to the color of the skin or not, at
present a doubtful question,^ it is certain that the lowest
caste was black, or nearly so. The indigenous races
of India, according to good authority, are negrito.^
As the Dasyas in the Veda are called " black skins,"
so the Aryas are the "white friends of Indra." It is
1 Transac. of Roy. As. Soc, III. p. 160.
2 Manu, VIII. 414. » Ibid., VIII. 417. * Ibid., X. 129.
5 Muir, II. 374-413 ; Lassen, I. 407-409 ; Duncker, II. 55. In the Rig Veda, varna
has the sense of race, tribe, says Sclioebel {Researches, p. 11).
• Campbell on Induui Etliiiology, in Jour. Beiig. Soc, 1S66.
MITIGATION OF CASTE. 253
an old sin, this preying of the fair skin on the dark ;
and, in the overbearing oligarchy of British rule in
India, its penalties are falling on the native posterity
of those Aryan oppressors.
But there is this difference. The Brahman recog-
nized a higher law than his own gain. The difference
modern slaveholder made his power his law. of Eastern
^^ . . ... , caste and
Caste, m its general outlmes, was an outgrowth western
of the social and religious faith of the East : slavery.
slaveholding denied and affronted the conscience of
the West. Caste rested on a belief in reciprocal
duties that held every member of the system under
rigid responsibilities and restraints : slaveholding rested
on mere force and fraud, and the belief in a reciprocity
of duties was exceptional and incidental. Man escapes
from both systems not by miraculous intervention of
Christianity, but by the deeper forces of his own moral
and spiritual nature. As these have driven American
slavery to self-destruction, so they have in past times
counteracted, and continue to counteract, the worst
tendencies of Hindu caste.
- The military and mercantile classes intervened be-
tween the Brahman and the Sudra ; and a qx\^^ys to
series of mutual checks pervaded the system, oppression
, . , , , . . - . *'. 1 i" the caste
which graduated its tyrannies, and mitigated system.
their force. "The king is formed," says Manu, ^oy^^ty.
"out of the essence of the eight guardian deities,
and exercises their functions. He is ordained protector
of all classes in the discharge of their several duties."^
In the Ramayana, the king of that model Brahmanical
city, Ayodhya, "takes tribute of his subjects, not for
his own use, but to return it to them with greater
1 Manu^ V. 96 ; VII. 80, 35.
254 RELIGION AND LIFE.
beneficence ; as the Sun drinks up the ocean, to return
it to the earth in vivifying rain." ^ " O Bharata," says
Rama to his brother, " the tears which fall from those
who are unjustly condemned will destroy the children
K and the herds of him who governs with partiality."^
By the law of Manu, the king is under a responsi-
bility equivalent to his power. The burden of inno-
cent blood shed by the courts falls in large measure
on him.^ He is commanded to proceed mildly in
dealing with offences : first by gentle admonition,
then by severe reproof, then by fines, then by inflic-
tion of corporeal pain ; and to use severest methods
only as a last resort.*
All persons are obliged^ to adjust their controversies
according to the particular laws of their own order,
and by reference to those who are familiar with the
interests under question : kindred, fellow-artisans, co-
- habitants of villages, may decide lawsuits, and meet-
ings for the purpose are entitled judicatories. There
are judges appointed by the king also in these courts ;
and an appeal lies from these to higher ones, and
finally to the king himself.
He is exhorted to mild and conciliatory discourse
towards litigants. The law codes abound in injunc-
tions upon him to adhere to justice by conscientious
investigation of the cases brought before his tribunal.
He is to appoint a counsellor from the priesthood, who
. shall check him if he act "unjustly, partially, or per-
\ versely." And the judicial assemblies are subject to
the same rules. We are reminded of the official oath
of the Egyptian judges not to obey the king if he
* Ramayana, B. i. 2 Ibid., B. ii.
8 Manu, VIII. i8. « Ibid., VII. 104; VIII. 129.
^ These rules for the administration of justice are taken from Colebrooke's elaborate
Digest of Hindu Law. See Trans, of Roy. As. Soc.y vol. ii. pp. 174-194.
MITIGATION OF CASTE.
255
should command them to act unjustly. By Hindu
law, the judge who sits silent and does not deliver his
real opinion is deemed guilty of deliberate falsehood.
The unjust judge is to be fined twice the penalty in-
volved in the suit, and shall make good the loss to the
injured party. The king shall appoint for the trial
of causes only persons who are " gentle and tender
rather than austere, and who are wise, cheerful, and
disinterested."
The -poetic ideal of Hindu royalty is found in Kali-
dasa's King Atithi, who, " even when young on the
throne, was invincible through the love of his people ;
who spoke no vain words, nor recalled what he had
given, inconsistent only in this, that, having overturned
enemies, he lifted them again from the earth ; seeking
only what was practicable, as fire attacks not water,
though the wind is its servant to consume the forest ;
amassing riches, only because gold gives power to
help the unhappy ; loving honest ways even in war ;
making travellers as safe as in their own homes ;
sending the poorest from his presence enabled to be
generous to others, as the clouds come back from their
voyages over the sea ; making enemies feel the infec-
tion of his virtue."^
The severest caste-laws must have been inoperative,
as the numberless contradictions and absurdi- Looseness
ties of the code amply manifest. It is certain of the laws.
that the cruelties made legal in Manu could never
have been inflicted by any physical power which the
priesthood could have possessed ; and, as we have seen,
it is matter of serious doubt whether this legislation ever
had very extended recognition in India. To learn the
actual condition of things, we must resort to other wit-
^ Raghuvansa, XVII.
256 RELIGION AND LIFE.
nesses. I have already alluded to the testimony of
Greeks who visited India before the Christian era, tc
the excellence of royal and judicial administration.
They report further that the courts judged without
reference to any written code whatever ; and such is
to a great extent the case at the present time, local
usages taking the place of positive written statutes.^
Practically, the lines of caste were always ill-
defined, shiftinij like waves of sand blown by
Interchange- o j
abieness of the wluds of tlic dcscrt ; a constant satire on its
pretensions to immobility. Inter-marriage has
always been permitted, and some of the mixed classes
have been treated with respect. Colebrooke; in a
valuable paper on the subject, has described the
disintegration of fixed orders in Hindu society, and
the breaking down of its " impassable walls " of caste
by this subdivision into mixed classes. They were
" multiplied to endless variety " at a very early epoch ;
so that it seems hardly possible that the division into
four distinct classes could have really prevailed in
India for any great length of time.
The higher castes could, in case of necessity,
assume the occupations of the lower ; and the Sudra
could not only engage in trades belonging to the class
above him, but even "gain exaltation in this world
and the next, by performing certain lawful acts of the
twice born men." ^ " In fact almost every occupation,
though regularly the profession of a particular class,
is open to most other classes. The only limitation is
in the exclusive right of the Brahmans to teach the
Vedas, and perform religious ceremonies."^
^ Maine, Village Comwiinities^ p. 52.
* Mavui X. 81, 96-99, 128 ; Ydjn., III. 3?.
* Colebrooke, in Asiatic Researches, vol. v.
<9
MITIGATION OF CASTE. 257
One may often, we are told,^ see carpenters of five
or six different low castes employed on the same build-
ing ; and the same diversity may be observed among
the craftsmen in dockyards, and on all other great
works. Manu's caste laws are perpetually violated,
even those to which the severest penalties are attached.
It is well known that the Bengal army has been com-
posed of high-caste Hindus, mostly Brahmans, as the
Madras army is composed of low-caste men, and a
Brahman may even be a private under a low-caste
officer ; an assertion of natural democracy as little
likely to be relished in India as the authority of a
negro general by scions of first families in America,
yet equally inevitable in both cases. Men of low
castes have been princes and had Brahmans in their
service. 2 "The President of the Dharmasabha at
Calcutta is a Sudra, while the secretary is a Brahman.
Three-quarters the Brahmans in Bengal are servants." •*
High-caste cooks are said to be in great demand in
the army, and in native families. The rules of
Brahmanical purity make it far easier for the high-
caste man to become servant to the low, than the
reverse.* And this intermixture of caste functions
has gone on from very early times, leading to an
elaborate chapter of regulations in Manu.
Every thing in climate and ethnic constitution tended
to favor this system in India ; yet even there the force
of justice in human nature has been too strong for it,
and shown a transforming energy that is marvellous.
Such testimonies suggest that the resort to super-
naturalism, either to explain man's past or guarantee
his future progress out of the barbarism of caste in
* Rickards, India, I. 32. * Allen's India, p. 472.
8 Miiller's Chips, II. 350. < Ludlow, I. 57.
17
*
w^
258 RELIGION AND LIFE.
any form, is wholly gratuitous. They have thus a
bearing on the adequacy of Natural Religion to the
explanation of history, which makes them of great
interest in the present state of inquiry on that subject.
Strong centrifugal and disintegrative tendencies
Democratic havc rcvcaled themselves in the very structure
reactions, ^f ^]^q systcm, affording ample proof that the
free impulses of nature in which its first foundations
were laid refused to yield either to priestcraft or social
pride. " Manu's classification never passed in its in-
tegrity," sa3''s Mr. Hunter, "beyond the middle land
of India. On the east where Lower Bengal begins,
caste, as a fourfold classification, ceases. It never
crossed the Indus on the west. Beyond this the
tribes held all men equal." ^ In Northern India, at
the present day, all castes mix socially together, even
where separated by religious distinctions, or diversity
of functions.^ In the South, Sudras rank next to
Brahmans ; and their name has never had the deirrad-
ing sense which is given it in Manu's Laws.^ In
truth the old doctrine of four distinct castes has no
longer a semblance of validity anywhere. The
ancient Sudras and Vaisyas are absorbed into the infi-
nite diversity of mixed castes, now no longer treated
with contempt.* So are the old Dasyus of the Veda.
Brahman cultivators are numerous in Western India,
and in Oude outnumber all others ; and the chief
traders, civil officers, and writers in the Panjab* are
descendants of the Kshatriya, or soldier class. "The
Vai^ya caste," says Ludlow, "has almost wholly dis-
appeared. The Kshatriya (as soldier) exists perhaps
* Annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 102, 104. 2 Campbell, p. 136.
' * See Monier Williams's LecUire ott the Study of Sanskrit-
* Campbell on Indiun Ethnology.
DEMOCRATIC REACTIONS. 259
only among the Rajputs of the north-western frontier ;
the Sudra, scarcely anywhere but among the Yats and
Mahrattas. Only the Brahman holds his ground ; and
beneath him a chain of castes, varying almost infinitely
in number according to locality, seldom less than
seventy, and averaging a hundred. In Malabar are
enumerated three hundred."^ And of the Brahmans
Wilson tells us that " they have universally deviated
from their original duties and habits ; " that " as a hier-
archy they are null ; as a literary body, few, and meet
with slender countenance from their countrymen ; "
that " they have ceased to be the advisers of the peo-
ple ; " and that " various sects have arisen which
denounce them as impostors." ^ The gosains and
fakeers have succeeded to the old Brahmanical sway,
and generally contemn these subordinations of the
ancient system, which one reformer after another has
assailed, from Gotama Buddha to the present day.
The most national religious festival in India, that of
Jagannath in Orissa, has always rejected caste. "No
on^ in India," says Max Muller, "is ashamed of his
caste ; and the lowest Pariah is as proud and anxious
to preserve his own as the highest Brahman. Sudras
throw away their cooking vessels as defiled, if a Brah-
man enters the house." ^ Sir H. Elliott, in his valuable
work upon the races of North-Western India, sup-
plies conclusive evidence on the failure of caste to
maintain its principle of immobility in that region.
" The attempt of early lawgivers to divide society into
classes, which should hold no communion with each
other, was one which broke down at an early period.
Even in India 'love will be lord of all.' The plan of
1 British India, I. 48 ; Elliott, Races of N. W. India, I. p. 166.
2 Religiotis Sects of the Hindus, 1862. ^ Chips, II. 347-
u--
26o RELIGION AND LIFE.
degrading the issue of mixed castes has been highly
beneficiaL It is like the disintegration of granite till
it forms fertile soil. In practice, a man who had a
Brahman or Rajput for father was not likely to be
ashamed of it, or to be looked down on by his fellow-
men ; and the barriers of caste once overstepped,
that mixture and fusion of the people began which
has gone on to our day, and promises to continue till
there shall be no remnant of caste left. A laconic
modern proverb in North Behar says, ^ Caste is rice ; '
i.e., matter of eating or not eating with others, only.
It is a hopeful sign, presaging, like the Brahmo Somaj,
a new and better order of things in India." ^ One or
two more witnesses will suffice.
Says the author of " Rural Annals of Bengal : "
" That the time foretold in the Sanskrit Book of the
Future, when the Indian people shall be of one caste
and form one nation, is not far off, no one who is ac-
quainted with the Bengalis of the present day can
doubt. They have about them the capabilities of a
noble nation." Finally, Maine does not hesitate to
say that caste is now '' merelj^ a name for trade or
occupation;"^ and Monier Williams asserts that
" however theoretically strict, it practically resolves
itself into a question of rupees."^ Caste, in Ceylon
as well as in India, is now in fact a purely social dis-
tinction, and disconnected from any sanction derived
from religious belief.^
V The D^-aina has given expression to the democratic
^ Elliott, I. p. 167. 2 Village Coynmunities, p. 57. ^
8 Lecture oft the Study of SaTtskrit (1S61). He mentions the fact that, a few years
before, it was decided at a meeting of Old and New School Hindus in Calcutta that certain
young Brahmans, who had lost caste, should be readmitted on paying a large line and
performing purification.
* Tennent, Christianity in India, p. 91.
DEMOCRATIC REACTIONS. 261
spirit in India, — as it did to the opening of modern
liberties in Europe, — by protest against the sho^vniIl
pride of caste, which is in fact but the feudal- literature.
ism of the East. The Mrichchikati,^ for instance,
describes the social contempt that befalls poverty, in
indignant language, as suitable to the Western as to
the Eastern world : —
" This is the curse of slavery, to be disbelieved when you speak
the truth.
" The poor man's truth is scorned : the wealthy guests look at
him with disdain ; he sneaks into a corner.
" Believe me, he who incurs the crime of poverty adds a sixth
sin to those we term most hideous.
" Disgrace is in misconduct : a worthless rich man is con-
temptible."
The same play brings out a Brahman thief who
uses his sacred thready " that useful appendage to a
Brahman," to measure the walls he would scale, and
to open the doors he would force. It ridicules a
Brahman pandit, "stuffed with curds and rice, chant- ^
ing a Veda-Hymn ; a pampered parrot." A king is,
in another passage, represented as commanding the
impalement of a priest. Again, the brother of a slain
king, dragged about by a mob, is set free by the for-
giveness of the subject he would have put to death
unjustly. A slave is shown as a model of integrity,
and made to say, " Kill me, if you will : I cannot do
what ought not to be done." A chandala, the lowest
of all outcasts, when ordered to execute a supposed
criminal, replies : —
" My father, when about to depart to heaven, said to me :
' Son, whenever you have a culprit to execute, proceed slowly ; for
perhaps some good man may buy the criminal's liberation ; perhaps
1 Translated by Wilson.
262 RELIGION AND LIFE.
a son maybe born to the king, and a general pardon be proclaimed ;
perhaps an elephant may break loose, and the prisoner escape in
the confusion ; or perhaps a change of rulers may take place, and
every one in bondage may be set free.' " ^
The lower castes have established claims to respect
in other ways. In Ceylon they have been the only
astronomers, and amidst their astrological fancies
attained a certain amount of scientific knowledge,
calculating eclipses and noting the periods of the
stars. ^
It is probable that the intercourse of the Aryans with
native tribes has helped to weaken and disin-
Influence of
the native tcgratc the caste system. The very ancient
*" ^^' popular rites in honor of serpents, doubtless of
- agricultural origin, and celebrated throughout India,
in which all classes unite, amidst holiday pleasures,
prove that a democratic influence has proceeded from
- the aboriginal races. Most of these tribes have
always been free from caste ; many have bravely
resisted the invader among their rocky fastnesses,
maintaining a heroic independence. And, with all
their barbarism, many of them have shown primitive
virtues which ignore conventional distinctions among
men. The Bheels are described as " more honest
than the Aryan Hindus," and their women as having
a higher position than those of the latter race, and
taking part actively in all reforms in behalf of order
and industry.^ . The Khonds believe that to break an
oath, or repudiate a debt, or refuse hospitality, is to
' invite the wrath of the gods.* Another writer speaks
of " the kindly spirit of the Kols towards each other."
" The Kol girl is never abusive : her vocabulary is as
1 Wilson's Hiftdji Theatre, vol. i.
* See Upham's Sacred Boohs of Ceylon^ Introd. xiv.
V 8 Mrs. Spier's India. * Lassen, I. 377, 378.
DEMOCRATIC REACTIONS. 263
free from bad language of this kind as a Bengali's
is full of it."^ "The whole Santhal village," says
Hunter, " has joys and sorrows in common. It works
together, hunts together, worships together, eats to-
gether. No man is allowed to make money out of
a stranger." ^ In the interesting work here quoted,
the democratic " village-system," which extends over
a large portion of India, is traced back to the aborigi-
nal tribes. They must, at all events, have shared it
from the earliest period with the Aryan immigrants.
Ludlow ^ depicts them in general terms as " savages,
with scarcely a rag to cover them, yet honest and
truthful, as all free races are." " A tithe of the care
and benevolence expended on the Hindus," says a
still more recent writer,^ " would make the hill races a
noble and enlightened people." However strong some
of these expressions may seem, the unanimity of the
best observers points at least to a strong democratic
force as working from this direction on the Hindu
social system.
Such the force of democratic reaction within this
oldest system of social wrongs, — a system which has
generally been taken as type of their unchangeable-
ness under heathen influences. Such the protest
that began with its beginning, and steadily smote
against its iron joints till it broke them in pieces ;
not indeed introducing liberty, but preparing the way
for it by dividing the bondage to an indefinite extent,
atomizinof the elements as it were for better affinities.
And this old Brahmanical code, wrecked and stranded
by the sacred instinct of freedom, bears witness that
1 Bengal your7taC, iS56. 2 Annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 202, 208, 216.
•■ 8 British India, I. 19.
* Lewins, Races of S. E. Ifidia, 349; also foxtrnal Bengal Society (1866), II. 151.
^-•-
264 RELIGION AND LIFE.
man was always greater than his own theocracies,
oligarchies, or despotisms, of whatever kind, and will
never abide in them as in his home.
But further, so far as was possible amidst a series
„ .. of chancres like these, each caste has always
Positive ^ "^
rights of really stood by itself in political matters,
"managing its affairs by its own suffrage ; and
even the lowest have always had, notwithstanding the
theory of the law, certain well-understood and well-
defined civil rights, such as that of acquiring and
bestowing property, learning to read, and performing
certain sacrifices.^ Caste usages have even been
found to resemble in some respects the ancient popular
institutions of the European Teutonic tribes. Slavery
itself, in many parts of India, has helped to equalize
caste, since men of all castes could become slaves,
and a Brahman might serve a Sudra ; while, in Mala-
bar, slaves, in their turn, have had higher social con-
sideration than some of the free castes.^
Slavery in India must be distinguished from caste.
It sta'nds on a wholly different basis and origi-
Slavery. . - ^- • 1
nates m causes oi a more superncial nature.
Accordincr to the Mohammedan law, there is but one
justifiable ground of enslavement ; namely, punishment
of infidels ficrhtinor ag^ainst the true faith. According-
to the Hindus, fifteen causes are enumerated, among
which voluntary or involuntary self-sale is the sub-
stance of several, and punishment that of others.^
The strong language of the law concerning a slave's
natural destitution of rights received in fact many im-
portant qualifications. He could be manumitted ; if
he saved his master's life, he could demand his free-
1 Buyers's Northern India, 314, 457 ; Allen, Indii, 471.
2 Adam, Slavery ifi India,, 131-133.
' Adam ; Macnaghten's Hindu and MoJtatntnedan Law.
SLAVERY. 265
dom and the portion of a son ; if the only son of his
master, both his slave mother and himself became free
by virtue of that condition alone ; when enslaved for
special causes, voluntarily or otherwise, his bondage
ceased with the cessation of its grounds.^ Contracts
made by slaves in the name of an absent master, for
the behoof of the famil}^, could not be rescinded by
him ; nor was there any bar to the institution of judi-
cial proceedings by a slave against his master ; nor, in
practice, to the reception of his testimony thereon.^
We must observe, too, that slavery in India has not
been as in the West an incident of race, but attached
alike to all 7'aces^ and even to all classes in society.
It was therefore impossible that the relation as such
should be held, as in Christian countries, to be some-
thing organic and essential in its victim.
Notwithstanding Hindu laws speak of slaves as
mere cattle, though they could be transferred Distinction
with the soil, or sold from hand to hand, and fJo^'^^veTt-
though their condition, especially in Southern em slavery.
India, has been past description miserable and de-
graded,'^ yet it may fairly be said that slavery, in the
sense in which we have been used to understand the
word, has not existed in India. ^ It does not claim in
that country to rest on religious foundations.'^ Chief
Justice Harrington distinctly declared that " the law^
and usage of slavery had no immediate connection
with religion," and that its abolition would not shock
the religious prejudices of the people. Manumission
* Colebrooke, in Macnaghten, p. 130.
2 Mafiti, VIII. 167; Adam, p. 17.
3 See the accounts given by Adam ; and in a valuable pamphlet on Slavery in htdia
(printed in London by Thomas Ward & Co., 1841), full of statistics drawn from official
documents, originally prepared for the Mornittg Chro7ticle.
* Buyers, 314, 315. ^ Macnaghten, p. 128.
266 RELIGION AND LIFE. /
Itself, on the other hand, is regarded as an act of piety
expiative of offences ; and by the Mohammedan law
it is expressly commended as a religious merit. The
form in which slavery appieared in ancient India was
so mild that the Greeks refused it the name ; Megas-
thenes declaring definitely that "there are no slaves in
India," and Arrian that " all Hindus are free." And
even in later times and in re^fions of which these
writers had no knowledge, it is not easy to find
among the Hindus the abstract idea of chattelhood, as
Western ingenuity has wrought it out. Everywhere,
for example, are traces of the right of the slave to in-
heritance ; while the "Law of Nature," as the Romans
called those ancient ethnic customs which had a uni-
versal scope, was always favorable to his claims.^ I
venture to affirm that nothing of the exact nature of
Western slavery as an idea existed in the older East,
either among the Hebrews, the Persians, the Chinese,
or the Hindus. The systematic reduction of men to
things could hardly have been conceived by these
instinctive races. It belongs to socially self-conscious
generations, who know enough of ideal freedom to
comprehend what the negation of it implies. It is a
Satanic fall made possible only by a mature sense of
personal rights. The earliest approach to it, so far as
I know, was by polished ethical philosophers of
Greece.^ ,
But there is a family likeness in the forms of slavery
, ^ in all races and times. And that theoretic
Appeal of J
caste to basis whicli could not quite reach the absolut-
outoogy. .^^ of Western bondage was, within the limits
of caste, developed with extreme precision. The idea
1 Maine's Ancient Law, 15S-160. 2 Aristotle's Politics, B. i. ch. 4-6.
SLAVERY. 267
of caste everywhere rests upon an abstract postulate
of organic differences among men.^ Thus, in Manu,
it is the "nature" of a Brahman to read Vedas, to
pray, to be adored. It is the " nature " of a Kscha-
triya to fight, of a Vaisya to labor, of a Sudra to
serve. This belief grew up insensibly, as the system
became fixed, and its distinctions hereditary. Then
the Brahmanical priesthood went further, by a neces-
sary law of development. With those subtle brains
of theirs, they spun out an ontology of caste. The
laboring class represented the physical world of ac-
Hon, in their philosophy an unreality, a kingdom of
obscurity and delusion. The soldier caste represented
the -will^ which struggles up out of this lower region,
and maintains itself in contradistinction therefrom.
The Brahmans themselves represented the purely
spiritual realm, the only real life, absorbed in deity.
As for the lowest caste, it lay outside the world of
ideas, an opposite pole of negation ; though even here
it would seem that no absolute evil was affirmed, since
from the lowest caste one might rise into the hijjhest
through transmigration. Thus it was attempted to
justify a colossal servitude by the structure of the soul
and the constitution of the universe. To us the chief
value of this attempt is in its illustration of the neces-
sity which compels every form of injustice to render
account to the natural sense of justice in mankind.
jMere power never sufficed to vindicate any despotic
system in the sight of man. And in this fact lay
guaranteed from the first an ultimate real perception
and appreciation of social ethics. The ceaseless en-
1 See Grote, on Plato's "guardians," or "golden and silver men," and on the way in
which they would necessarily regard the "brass and iron" natures, ordained to lower
functions and destinies. Crete's Plato, III. 214.
268 RELIGION AND LIFE.
forcement of all institutrons to plead their cause at the
ideal bar" of conscience leads at last, without need of
miracle, to a true commonwealth.
It was inevitable that caste should be driven in India,
as slavery has been in America, to justify its falsity
upon abstract grounds of nature and right. To this
theoretic test it has to come, whether a thousand years
before Christ or two thousand years after him. And
the appeal to ontological defences was its refutation,
just as we have since seen it to be the suicide of
American slavery.
For a deeper dialectic came to rebut them. And
Brahmanism was driven, on its own logical ground,
to the utter denial of its own social principle. This
result came to pass in the Buddhist reaction. For
Buddhism was the abolition nfon recognized meta-
physical as well as moral principles, of all distinc-
tions founded on caste, and the consequent affirmation
of universal brotherhood. And from this Brahmani-
cal caste has never fully recovered. So close lay
truth to honest error, so inevitable was the appeal to
pure reason three thousand years ago. The history
of this reaction will claim our attention at a subsequent
stage of these studies.
But we may go behind the spirit of caste, to far
Democratic uoblcr tendencies in the Hindu mind. The
tendencies. ^|^ Vcdlc Hvmns do uot rccoc^nizc it at all.
in the Hni- -j o
dumind. Tlic uamcs afterwards given the three upper
castes are found in these hymns, but not as indicative
of social distinctions. Brahmana is appellative of
prayer ; Kshatriya, of force ; and Vis, whence Vaisya,
of the people in a general sense. Indeed the old
pastoral Aryans, as we have seen, were a very demo-
cratic community. They seem to have known no dis-
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 269
tinctions resembling those defined in Manu. The
householder had his chosen seer, like the Hebrew,
or might himself offer sacrifices as the head of his
family.^ The epics speak not only of Brahmans who
descended from soldiers, and of Vaisyas taking part
in government, but of times when the whole popula-
tion assembled to ratify the nomination of a King.^
In the Mahabharata,^ King Judhishthira is inaugu-
rated by the united action of all the castes. So the
Ramayana tells us that Das'aratha called a great coun-
cil of all his ministers and chieftains to discuss the
appointment of a son to share the government ; and
that all the people were gathered together in like
manner to express their preference, and give their
advice. The divine Rama is the ideal of a democratic
prince. His sanctity in the epic is itself a transfer-
ence of the ideal of religion from the Brahman to the
Kshatriya ; an affirmation of liberty on this soil of
caste. The chiefs praise him for continually "inquir-
ing after the welfare of the citizens, as if they were
his own children, afflicted at their distresses and re-
joicing in their joy, upholding the law by protecting
the innocent and punishing the guilty ; so that all
the people, whether they be servants or bearers of
burdens, citizens or ryots, young or old, petition the
monarch to install Rama as coadjutor in the admin-
istration of the Raj."* Rama's brother Bharata,
seeking to move him from his determination to yield
the crow^n, in obedience to his father's vow, as a last
resort appeals to the people. "Why, O people! do
you not lay your injunction on Rama ? " And the
^ Weber, Vorlesiingen, p. 37; Lassen, I. 795. 2 Lassen, I. 811.
8 Mahabharata, B. 11. < Ramayana, B. 11.
270 RELIGION AND LIFE.
people reply that they find reason on both sides, and
cannot judge the matter in haste.
The people were from the first divided into little
clans under independent chiefs. Down to this day
the tribes of the Panjab, that oldest homestead of the
Hindu Aryans, remain free from consolidated mon-
j archy and caste. ^
A quarter of the population of India, about fifty
millions, are governed by about two hundred native
chiefs. Such is the force of the centrifugal principle
of local independence. 2 Small, self-governed com-
munities, adhering to local customs and traditions,
and organized in guilds and corporations, exist all
) over India, even under the shadow of royalty and
caste, persistent protests in many ways against the
authority of these institutions.^ The type of this free
spirit is the Sikh, whose Bible says : —
" They tell us there are four races ; but all are of the seed of
Brahm.
"The four races shall be one, and all shall call on the Teacher.
" Think not of caste, but abase thyself, and attend to thy own
soul."
Originally the full title of the laborer to the soil was
Title to the religiously conccdcd. " The old sages declare
land. ^1^0^^ cultivated land is the property of him who
^ first cut away the wood or cleared and tilled it, just
as an antelope belongs to the first hunter by whom it
is mortally wounded.^ Even the feudalism of the
Rajput princes still acknowledges the ryot's ownership
in the land.^ This natural hold upon the soil and the
right of self-government consequent thereon have been
* See Weber, p. 3. 2 Wesitn. Rev., July, 1859.
' Duncker, II. 105; Miiller, Saiisk. Lit., p. 52. * ManUy IX. 44.
^ Asiatic Journal, New Series, V. 41.
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES^ 7'' /2^1
embodied bv the Hindus from remote times ia what
are called the "Village Communities."^ - ''/
By this system the land is held by the village com-
mune as an organized whole, having complete village com-
arrangements for distributing the produce "^^'^ties.
among the laborers, after the payment of a certain
small fraction, differing at different times, to the king
and the local chiefs. The village has its arable land
cultivated by all, and its waste land used by all as
pasture. It has its judge or head-man, appointed by
the raja in the old time, but now a hereditary officer.
He is the agent of the village in all transactions with
the government, the assessor of taxes according to
property, and the manager of the common lands.
Yet all matters of moment are determined by " free
consultation with the villagers, and disputes decided
with the assistance of arbitrators."^
The organization of the little commonwealth is com-
plete ; having its judge, its collector, its superintend- ^
ent of boundaries, its notary public, its weigher and
ganger ; its guide for travellers, its priest, schoolmaster,
astrologer ; its watch and police ; its barber, carpen-
ter, smith, potter, tailor, spice-seller; its letter-carrier, ^
irrigator, and burner of the dead ; all functions being
hereditary in most villages, and all work paid for out ~
of the common fund."^ Within the limits of Oriental
instincts this little community is an independent unit ;
a " petty republic ; " containing within itself all the
elements of stability and mutual satisfaction ; organ-
1 " The right of the sovereign extended only to the tax. Theoretically, he was owner
of every thing acquired by his subjects ; but practically they had their rights, as fully —
secured as his own." Ritchie, British World in the East^ I. 179.
2 See Wheeler, History 0/ British India, II. 597. Hunter's 6>rwJrt, (1872') vol. ii.
* MiW, British India., I. 217; Heeren, Asiatic Nations, II. 259; IVestm. Revietuiot
July, 1859; Ludlow, Brit. India, I. 61.
272 RELIGION AND LIFE.
ized for the security and profit of each family in the
position hereditarily or otherwise assigned it, and
accordins" to the recoijnized measure of its contribu-
tion to the public service. And these villages, it may
be added, have from very ancient times been, not in-
frequently, bound together into larger organizations,
containing generally eighty- four members.^ They
are an adm.irable illustration of the principle of Mutual
Help, and of its controlling influence over mankind in
the early organization of social life. The members of
such primeval republics, of which India itself has
been styled " one vast congeries," have no other tradi-
tions of political duty than what this form of govern-
ment has transmitted from immemorial antiquity.
"They trouble themselves very little about the dis-
memberment of empires ; and, provided the township
remain intact, it is matter of perfect indiff'erence to
them who becomes sovereign of the country, the in-
ternal administration continuing the same."^ The
system in fact rests on principles that may not only be
called congenital with actual Hindu tribes, but go back
to more primitive social relations. The tie which
unites the members of these village communities in-
volves, as Maine has shown in his remarkable work
on Ancient Law, the assumption of a common family
) descent, suggesting unmistakably their origin in
Patriarchalism, the earliest constructive principle of
social life. The same profound student, in a more
recent volume of equal interest, has added to his
previous parallel between the Indian comrhunities and
the Russian and Slavonian village-brotherhoods, a
1 Elliott, N. W. India, II. p. 4.
' Wilkes's Historical Sketches of the South of India, See Heeren, Asiatic Nations,
II. 260.
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 273
description of the very close resemblance of the first-
named organizations to the old Teutonic townships, —
a resemblance "much too strong to be accidental,"
— and especially in their presenting " the same double
aspect of a group of families united by common kin-
ship, and a company of persons exercising joint
ownership of land." ^ These Indo-European affinities
will of course suoffjest to the reader a common orif^rin
in the primeval life of the race previous to its disper-
sion into different nationalities.
Mr. Maine infers from the character of villao^e com-
munities, as w^ell as from other data, that the Their liber-
oldest discoverable forms of property in land ^^^^•
are collective rather than individual ownerships ; ^
though he finds a periodical redistribution of the land
among families to have been universal among Aryan
races. ^ The Hindu villager's idea of freedom is cer-
tainly associated with the rights of the corporate
body of which he is a member, rather than with
personal independence, and the notion of his own in-
dividuality as a limitation of these traditional corporate
rights is substantially new to him. The idea is doubt-
less profoundly alterative of this whole system, now
subjected to the influence of European ideas and in-
stitutions. Yet the defect of personal freedom is by
no means so great as might be inferred ; since these
corporate rights constitute the natural body of political
consciousness, assuming the form of organic guaran-
ties and sacred trusts. The Family, moreover, has its
sphere, within which the commune does not penetrate,
protected in part by patriarchal traditions of very
great sanctity. Personal property is by no means
* Village Commtmities inihe East atid the West, pp. 12, 107, 127.
2 Ibid., p. 76. 8 Ibid., p. 82.
18
274 RELIGION AND LIFE.
excluded from the system ; and even the arable land,
though owned by all, is marked off to different culti-
vators, by more or less permanent arrangements.
It is to be observed, too, that the absorption of pro-
prietary rights in land by the commune is by no
means universal in the Hindu villages. Whole races,
like the Jats, spread over Northern and Central India,
are described ^ as thoroughly democratic ; as having
an " excessive craving for fixed ownership in the land,"
of which every one has his separate share, while the
government is not patriarchal, but to a very great
degree representative. On the Western coast, and in
the broken hilly regions especially, the land is largely
held by private ownership. ^ And the isolated home-
stead so natural to the Teutonic races is in fact very
common in India, notwithstanding the strong ten-
dency of an agricultural population like the Hindu,
to seek the advantages of a communal system of
cultivation.^ Seventy years ago, Sir Thomas Munro
found the lands in Kanara owned by individuals sub-
ject to government assessments, who inherited their
estates; and "who understood property rights as well
as Englishmen."^
Ramaswami Naidu, a native official, of reputation
in the British service, prepared a careful memoir of
the tenures of those ancient States which came to be
included in the Madras Presidency.^ It contains full
evidence that, under the native sovereigns of India, a
portion of the cultivators possessed full proprietary
rights in the soil, while another portion merely paid a
tribute to the kings in return for protection, according
1 See Campbell's elaborate account oi Indian Ethnology ■, in the JourtuU of tJie Bengal
Society for i866.
2 Campbell, p. 83, 134. ' Maine, Village Communities, p. 114.
* See IVestm. Rev., Jan. 1868. '' Jourtial R. A. 5"., vol. i. 292-306.
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 275
to a fixed proportion of their products. It gives us
also a full description of the constitution of a village
community, and of the eighteen salaried officers hered-
itarily attached to it ; of their appointment by the
king in newly conquered territories, and of the distri-
bution of free proprietorships among the clearers of
the land. "This ownership," says the author, " the
cultivators enjoy to this day, because hereditary right
tp the soil is vested in them."^
Absolute equality is no part of the ideal of a Hindu
commune. There are " parallel social strata ; " and in
many parts of India outcast classes are attached to the
villages, probably belonging to indigenous conquered
races. Yet even these outsiders are held authori-
tative on the subject of boundaries ; and the letter-
carrier and burner of the dead, who usually belongs
to the lowest class, is, like the other functionaries, a
free, proprietor, with official fees.^ The people freely
discuss laws and customs ; nor can the constant inter-
mixture of races of more or less democratic tendency,
which has been going on for ages all over India, have
failed to supply elements of individuality to Hindu
life. It has already been observed that the village
system is by no means an exclusively Aryan institu-
tion in India, but indigenous also ;^ and, even where it
is predominantly Aryan, the native tribes have been
quite freely incorporated into its membership, and
shared its elements of political equality. This hospi-
tality is so characteristic, that the natural working of
the system is probably preferable in such respects to
the changes introduced by foreign interference, which,
* Wilson {Hist. India, I. 418) declares distinctly that "the proprietary right of the
sovereign derives no warrant from the ancient laws or institutions of the Hindus."
* Ramasw. Naida. ^ Hunter's Orissa, vol. i.
276 RELIGION AND LIFE.
in Maine's view, has induced a more jealous corporate
exclusiveness, clinging to vested rights, than had pre-
viously existed.^ Looking at the history of the insti-
tution as a whole, we may discern hints and openings,
which promise to throw much light on the subject of
indiz'idiial freedom, as an element of Hindu civili-
zation. The breaking up of the old caste-system
on the one hand, and the persistence of these local
liberties and unities of the ai^^ricultural communes on
the other, are facts of great historical signiiicance, in
estimating the degree in which the idea of personal
rights and duties is probably already developed among
the races of India. The extent to which the com-
munes have absorbed Brahmans and Kshatriyas into
the class of cultivators opens the further question,
how much this permanent devotion to agricultural
industry may have done towards counteracting the
exclusiveness of caste.
The village community is now affirmed to have been
^ the primitive political unit in all Aryan tribes. These
little Indian republics have been truly characterized as
^ " the indestructible atoms out of which empires were
formed." Many of the largest cities of India were
ori-ginally collectioijs of these villages. Every succes-
sive master of the soil has been compelled to respect
them, as the real " proprietary units " with which his
authority must deal. Wherever the English have
abolished them, the people have returned to them at
• the earliest opportunity. Their extension, not only
over all India, Ar3'an and native, but even beyond
Java,^ makes them the ground fact of Oriental history,
and especially interpretative of Hindu character. And,
^ Village Communities^ p. 167.
' Raffles, quoted by Heeren, II. 260.
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 277
after trvino^ all their own buncjlinof and barbarous
forms of political surgery, the latest experimenters in
SioverninfT India find the main features of this ancient
polity best suited to the genius of the race, and most
consistent with social order. It has been an admirable
preparation for that system of full personal proprietor-
ship, which should long ere now have been accorded
to the Hindu people.^
The school-master is an essential member of this
system ; and bv virtue of his function eniovs ^
" ^ _* .., Education.
a lot of tax-free land by gift of the commune.
" In every Hindu village which has retained its old
form. I am assured," says Ludlow, "that the children
generally are able to read, write, and cipher; but
where we have swept away the village svstem, as
in Bengal, there the village school also has disap- -
Trial by jury (^fanchdyet)^ alike for the determina-
tion of law and fact, is jrenerallv a part of this
: Junes.
system ot selt-government ; as is also a special
service for the discovery of criminals, and the escort-
ing of travellers. Mr. Reynolds, who was emploved
for many years in suppressing Thuggerv, testified in
the highest praise to the vigilance of the village police, -
and to the aid afforded him in trackino- ofi^enders
sometimes for hundreds of miles. He went so far
as to call the village system of India "the best in the -.
world." 3
1 For a full account of the \-illage land-tenures, see Mackay's Rc/aris on U'esiefyt
India-
, 2 British Ittdla., I. 62. In Bengal alone there were once no less than eighty thousand
native schools ; though, doubtless, for the most part, of a poor qualit}'. According to a
government Report in 1S35, there was a village school for every four hundred persons-
Missionary iTttelligettcer^ IX. 133, 193.
5 Ludlow, 1.66; II. 3+4. "^
278 RELIGION AND LIFE.
The fanchdyet juries vary in their composition,
and in the number of their members. Originally
each party named two, and the judge one. It is a
common saying in India, " In the -panchdyct is God."
And, though not always incorrupt, its administration
is, according to good authority, on the whole " singu-
-^ larly just." The influence of the elders of the village
often induces contending parties to yield points of
difference, or even to forgive the injury.^
In Nepal, both civil and criminal cases are referred
to the panchayets, at the discretion of the court, or
the wish of the parties ; the members being always
appointed by the judge, each party having the right
of challenge in case of every man nominated. The
parties, in other cases, name each five members, and
the court adds five to their ten. The verdict must be
unanimous, to effect a decision of the case. These
jurors are never paid any compensation for travel-
ling expenses or loss of time. The prisoner can
always confront his accuser, and cross-examine the
witnesses against him. The witness is commonly
sworn on the Harivansa^ which is placed on his head
with a solemn reminder of the sanctity of truth. If
a Buddhist, he is sworn on the Pancharaksha ; if a
Moslem, on the Koran. If parties are dissatisfied
with the judgment of the courts at law, they can
appeal to the ministers assembled in the palace at
Kathmandu ; applying first to the premier, and, if
failing to obtain satisfaction from him, proceeding to
the palace gate and calling out, "Justice ! Justice ! "
Upon which fourteen ofiicers are assembled to hear
the case, and give final judgment.^
^ Elliott, N. W. India, I. 282. * Hodgson, in Journal R. As. Soc, vol. i.
DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES. 279
The Hindu mind, then, retained the natural bias
towards republicanism which was so distinctly Republican
shown in the Aryans of Vedic times, and tendencies,
which reached such energetic growth in the Teu-
tonic races of the same stem. Neither the hot sky
of Central India, nor the caste system, which it stimu-
lated to such rankness, could eradicate this germ.
Its fires constantly broke forth in organized efforts to
expel the Mussulman invader from the soil. The
formidable Mahratta confederacy, which came near
overthrowing first the Mogul, and then the British
empires in India, was a military republic of independ-
ent chiefs, loosel}^ related to a central authority.
The Sikhs, or disciples, at first peaceful religious
puritans, became, when roused by Moslem persecu-
tion, ardent apostles of political liberty. Even after
the long and bloody struggle which ended in the
subjugation of the peninsula by England, there still
remained the energy to combine in one immense
revolt against a foreign despotism that had been peel-
ing the land and demoralizing the race for more than
a century ; and to compel the government to deprive
the colossal East India Company of autocratic power.
A brief notice of some of the most important features
of British rule in India, which, it must be remembered,
have been succeeded by much better methods, will be
here introduced, not in a censorious spirit towards the
people of England, for whom I cherish a most cordial
respect, but because such a review will enable the
reader to do something like justice to the natural
qualities of the Hindus, and to judge whether their
degeneracy, so much harped on, is, as we are con-
stantly told, owing to viciousness specially inherent
in the heathen heart.
28o • RELIGION AND LIFE.
The English systems of land tenure and taxation
y have been more preiudicial to the riorhts of
'^ Foreign mis- ^ i J o
government; the village communes than the Mahommedan
land system, ^^j^j^j^ ^j^gy supersedcd. Under the latter, the
zemindars, or farmers of revenue, took from a fourth
to a half the produce of the ryot, in the government's
name, paying themselves out of the revenue thus ex-
acted. The Eno-lish transformed the zemindars into
. positive owners, who paid quit-rent to the Company,
and were armed with powers of summary distraint
on the tenants ; a system involving the utter extinction
of native rights, which had still lingered, favored by
the general irregularity of the Mussulman administra-
tion. ^ The presidencies of Bengal and Madras becom-
ing impoverished by this policy, the Ryotwaree system
was tried, in which the zemindars were supplanted by
the government tax-gatherers, lev3'ing directly on the
villagers ; and this proved as fruitful of corruption,
extortion, and outracre as the other. ^ The bribe which
would often deliver the ryot from the clutch of the
.Mussulman collector would not assuage the rapacity
of his Christian successor. The one was generally
content with payment in kind, but the other insisted
. on having money ;. thus not only throwing the peasant
into the grasp of usurers, so that he was at last
oblifTfed to alienate his land, but also drainins^ the
country of precious metals, to enrich a foreign com-
pany. ^ The older taxation took a portion of the
actual crop ; but the English " fixed an assumed capa-
city of each field for produce, and an assumed price
for this, and then from 35 to 40 per cent of this fixed
" ^ See JVesttn. Rev., Jan. 1858.
2 LudJow, Lect. IX.
* Ibid ; McCulloch's East Indus.
MISGOVERNMENT. 281
sum as its share for ever." ^ The effect was to absorb
the larger part of the ryot's actual income, and in
general to sweep away the whole. From the time
of Clive,^ the material exhaustion and social misery
went on steadily increasing, until, as in the Puttee-
daree plan, which was adopted in the Panjab, isolated
efforts were made towards a partial return to the
native village polity.
In 1838, by the exertions of many leading reform-
ers, conspicuous among whom were George
Thompson and Daniel O'Connell, the "Brit- India so-
ish India Society" was organized, — a natural ^'^*^'
offshoot from the great movement against Western
slavery, — for the purpose of emancipating the^masses
in Hindustan, and at the same time, through the devel-
opment of the culture of cotton in that country by free
labor, to abolish slavery in America by destroying
the English market for the slave-grown article. The
apostles of this movement made the land ring with
eloquent denunciation and appeal. They brought a
flood of light to bear on the wretched condition of the
Hindu laborer. Their speeches assailed the pretence
that the Government was owner of the soil of India,
" with the right to take what suited it from every man's
field." They proved that its extortion of rent made
private property in land impossible, and that cultiva-
tion had decreased in consequence in the ratio of two-
thirds, while the tax assessed continued nearly the
same. They denounced it for laying high taxes on
the cultivation of waste lands, for the express purpose
of preventing the impoverished ryots from resorting to
these. They pointed to a long series of appalling
1 Gen. 'Qnggs's Speech at Glasgpwi AvLg. i, 1839.
*^ 2 Macaulay's Essay on Clive.
282 RELIGION AND LIFE.
famines ; in one of which five hundred thousand per-
sons perished in a single 3'ear, while grain enough was
being exported from Bengal to feed the whole number
with a pound of rice a day ; and another of which
swept off three millions in Bengal alone. They de-
scribed the ruin of Hindu manufacturing industry,
and the fall of British imports down to sixpence a head
on the population. They warned the rulers of the
detestation in which they were held throughout India,
of the elements of desperate revolt that were gather-
ing. The horrors of Hindu slavery were spread out
before the tyes of the British people, who w^ere just
then strikinof off the chains from their West India
bondsmen.^ Yet twenty years of corporative des-
potism were yet to elapse, finding their natural result
in the terrible scenes of 1857-58, before the worst
features of the old land system in India began to yield
to the civilization of the age.^
The police of the East India Company was as mis-
chievous as its revenue system. It was de-
Police. *'
scribed as " not only powerless to repress crime,
but a great engine of oppression and corruption."
The venality and arbitrariness of the courts became
intolerable, and were among the leading causes of the
rebellion."^
The monopoly of opium and its compulsory culture
Opium were sources of enormous evil. At one time
trade. ^ f^f(-}-^ q{ i\iq revcnucs of the Company were
* Of pre-eminent value were the labors of George Thompson, both in advocating the
abolition of slavery and in defending oppressed and defrauded native' rulers, with a thor-
oughness and eloquence which entitle iiim to be called the apostle of East Indian emanci-
pation, as he was one of the bravest helpers of the American slave.
2 See the speeches of Thompson, O'Connell, and Bjjggs, before the British India
Societies during 1839 and 1840, for abundant and startling statistics on tliese points.
3 Ludlow, cli. xix. ; Macaulay's Essay on Warre?i. Hasthii^s.
MISGOVERNMENT. 283
derived from this pernicious interest. The loss of
productive industry effected v^as as nothing compared
with the moral ruin it entailed.^ It was the decisive
testimony of Hastings that the Hindus were a remark-
ably temperate people before evil communication with
the Europeans had corrupted them.^ The use of in-
toxicating drugs is prohibited to the Brahmans by the
native law, and is still disreputable among the higher
classes. In the rural districts intemperance is still
rare ; but wherever English rule is established, and
foreign influence active, it has greatly increased. It
is admitted on all hands that in these localities the
character of the people has changed, and that both
Mohammedans and Hindus are rapidly degenerating,
under the effects of alcohol and opium. -^
The Mohammedan government is nowise respon-
sible for the terrible results of the opium trade. It
repressed the cultivation of the poppy as long as it
was able. Ninety years ago no regular trade in
opium existed. The East India Company's officers
began it by smuggling a thousand chests into China.
Thenceforward the " fostering care " of the Company
developed it till it "enticed all India, native and for-
eign, Christian and Buddhist." In 1840 the Chinese
government destroyed twenty thousand chests of
opium, being not more than half the importation for a
single year. In 1858 the production in India, of
which England held the monopoly, for exportation
into China, amounted to seventy thousand chests.
* Westm. Rev., July, 1859. "Half the crime in the opium districts," said Mr. Sym
(Ludlow, II. 300), "is due to opium. One cultivator will demoralize a whole village."
Dr. Allen [India, p. 304) declares that he knew nothing in mo.^em commerce, except the
slave-trade, more reprehensible than the manner in which this business was carried on.
■^ 2 Ludlow, II. 302.
3 Allen, pp. 478, 479, 497. See testimonies collected in Thompson's Address at
Friends^ Yearly Meeting in London, 1839.
284 RELIGION AND LIFE.
Government, down to the rebellion of 1857, not only
never made the slightest effort to repress, but steadily
encouraged it, urging the legalization of it upon the
Chinese rulers, who as strenuously strove to resist a
scourge that was desolating their dominions. Eng-
land, in fact, " found India and China comparatively
free from intemperance through the positive restraints
of Buddhism and Mohammedanism. She has estab-
lished in these countries the most extensive and deeply
rooted debauchery the world has known." ^
" The intemperance of the British soldiery in India,"
wrote Dr. Jeffreys in 1858, " appears to be bounded
only by the opportunities they can command. It is
to a lamentable extent associated with Christianitv in
the minds of the natives. Once, on my making in-
quiries into the creeds of certain black descendants of
Europeans in the Upper Provinces, a well-informed
Mussulman informed me they were Christians, that he
knew it (speaking not disrespectfully, but in all sim-
plicity) from their being nearly all of them drunkards.
The example of Christians, and the efforts of govern-
ment to multiply spirit-shops for the sake of revenue,
are chanoincr the habits of the natives. Drunkenness
is becoming prevalent, whereas formerly there were
few who touched alcohol in any form."^
The salt monopoly afforded another fifth of the rev-
Saitmo- enue of the Company. The peasants were Ibr-
nopoiy. bidden the ver}^ salt-mud of the river mouths,
their main reliance for agricultural purposes. "Not a
grain of the sun-evaporated salt left by nature at his
own door could be placed by a native on his tongue, or
^ These last facts and affinnations are taken from a work by Dr. Jeffreys on The British
Army in hidia (London, 1858). See, also, Ludlow, IL 302.
* Jeffreys, p. 19.
MIS GOVERNMENT. 285
removed into his hut ; " and the trade in salted fish was
destroyed. At one time the price of this necessary
article was raised to thirteen hundred per cent above ^
the cost of production.^
The supersedure of native manufactures by English
machinery created an amount of suiTering^ ^ . ,
•^ _ ^ o Rum of
among numerous classes in India scarcely to manofact-
be paralleled in the history of labor.- The ^'^^*
slave-grown cotton of America, manufactured in Eng-
land, was forced on a people who once had woven
for their own use the finest fabrics in the world. The
native looms that not long before produced annually
eight millions of pieces of cotton goods were stopped
altogether. Once flourishing cities and villages, the
seats of a busy and thriving population, were ruined.
Dacca, for instance, once a city of three hundred
thousand inhabitants, has been reduced to sixty thou-
sand ; and its transparent muslin, a " woven wind," a
w^hole dress of which will pass through a finger-ring,
is " almost a thing of the past." ^
The older governments were careful to build roads
and secure communication across the country.
•^ Internal
In 1857, the "Friend of India" confessed thatcommuni-
" for one good road we have made we have ^^'^^' ' ^'
suffered twenty to disappear." * Four or five thousand
miles of railroad have since been projected and in
great part constructed, as well as several thousand
miles of canal ; but the native industry can hardly
have begun to recover from the terrible discourage-
ment created by the long-continued neglect of internal
communication, on the part of the invaders, and the
^ Ludlow, Thompson, &c. * Allen, 449.
8 Ludlow, I. 10. * See, also, Allen, p. 327.
286 RELIGION AND LIFE.
incessant shocks of conquest and civil strife which
they helped to introduce.
The Skanda Purana describes the descent of
. . , Ganor-a, the sacred stream, through the tresses
Agnciilture. o ' ' o
of Vishnu, which broke her fall and scattered
her waves, bearing fertility to the*land. She followed
the steps of Bhagiratha, to whom she was granted,
— a drop of the waters of heaven, as reward of his
all-conquering devotion. Such the consecration in
mythic lore of the popular enthusiasm and love for
fertilizing streams. Nothing in the Ramayana is
more eloquent with genuine national feeling than the
episode in which the descent of the waters is identified
with the beneficence of all the gods. It represents
them as sent to revive the ashes of the seventy thou-
sand sons of Sagara, reduced to dust by Vishnu,
" spouse of the all-nourishing earth, in his avatara of
Fire," because they reproached him with carrying
away the sacred horse of their father's sacrifice, which
they had sought in vain through the worlds. These
are the symbols of an agricultural people ; and the
whole is manifestly like the Greek myth of Ceres and
Proserpine, significant of the death and re-birth of
vegetation.
Serpents, in the popular mythology of India, seem
to represent this oldest interest of the community.
The festivals in honor of these first owners and occu-
pants of the ground are celebrated by young and
old, rich and poor, throughout Western India. The
children have holiday, and the serpent figures are
crowned witk flowers. In the Sutras, Puranas, and
Epics, these animals are always mentioned with respect,
and incarnations in serpent form abound. The popu-
lar faith ascribes this veneration to gratitude for the
MISGOVERNMENT. 287
forgiveness shown by the queen of serpents to the
husbandman who killed her little ones by the stroke
of his plough.
The prodigious monuments of this agricultural
ardor, so mtimately related to the old Hindu religious
faith, have been treated by later invaders very much
as similar achievements by the ancient Peruvians were
treated by the Spanish conquerors of South America.
Of the innumerable canals, reservoirs and tanks for
irrigation, built by native and Mussulman govern-
ments, great numbers were suffered to decay, and the
contributions paid in by the people for their repair, in
accordance with ancient custom, were appropriated to
other purposes.^ Wherever the opportunity has been
aflbrded, as especially in the Panjab of late years,
the natives have entered with vigor on the improve-
ment of these long-neglected works, and their exten-
sion upon a. suitable scale.
To such demoralizing forces the Hindus have been
subject for centuries. When we read therefore , ,
•' Inferences.
of the filthy condition of villages, the destitute
and despondent state of the agricultural population,
we shall not need to resort for explanation either to
caste or to religion. We shall appreciate McCul-
loch's abundant proofs that this poverty and misery
are largely owing to that misgovernment of which we
have here given but the merest outline.^ We shall
appreciate the force of such testimony as that of the
"Bombay Times," in 1849, ^^^^ ^^^ boundaries of the
dominions of the East India Company could be dis-
covered by the superior condition of the country
people who had not become subject to their sway ;
i
1 Ludlow, II. 317; Arnold's Z>«//20«J2V, II. 282. i^ ■*,
2 Commerc. Diet., article on East Indies. |
288 RELIGION AND LIFE.
or as Campbell's, who affirms, in his work on India,
that "the longer we possess a province, the more
common and grave does perjury become ; " or as Sir
Thomas Munro's, half a century since, that the in-
habitants of the British Provinces were " the most
abject race in all India." We shall appreciate the
energy with which Burke declared in the House
of Commons that, "if the English had been driven
from India, they would have left no better traces of
their dominion than hyenas and tigers."
Systematic contempt and outrage by British officials
Ill-treat- ^as SO mucli a matter of course, that for
^^""^ an Englishman to treat natives with common
civility was looked upon as a prodigy ; and the gov-
ernment servants had a general impression that it
would bring one into bad odor with the Compan3^l
Impressment, plundering of houses, and burning of
villages, the kick, the buffist, the curse, mal-treatment
in every form, such as made men like Metcalfe,
Napier, and Shore " wonder that we hold India for a
year," brought the ryots to the conviction at last, as
the missionaries confessed in their conference of 1855,
that "the Christian religion consisted in having no
caste, eating beef, drinking freely, and trampling on
the rights of niggers."^ The gross immoralities of
Europeans in the early period of British rule in India
in fact led to the use of the term Christian as a bv-
word, having nearly the sense of "bastard ;" and, "had
the name been altogether laid aside, it would have
been a great blessing for those parts of India most
frequented by Europeans." ^ It can therefore hardly
1 Hon F. J. Shore. See, also, Speeches at Friends' Meeting in London., 1839
2 Ludlow, II. 365.
3 Buyers's Northern India, p. 107 ; Sanger, History 0/ Prostitution, p. 423 ; Westm.
Rev. for July, 1868.
MISGOVERNMENT. 289
be held suggestive of special hardness in the natural
heathen heart, when we find, after more than a century
of British sway, that there are less than a hundred
thousand Christian converts in India out of a popula-
tion- of nearly two hundred millions ; and less than
twenty thousand out of the forty-five millions of
Bengal.
It remains to add one more item to this sad detail
of Christian influence in India. Not only did ^,
•^ Slavery.
the Company gratuitously sanction existent
Hindu and Mohammedan slavery by interpreting law
in its interest, needlessly placing it under the shield of
" respect for the religious institutions of the natives ; "
not only did it everywhere permit and justify the sale
of this kind of property among them ; not only en-
courage an external slave-trade, for a long period
carried on for the supply of India by Arab traders'
with the coast of Africa and the Red Sea ; not only
sell slaves itself, to secure arrears of revenue. It
steadily resisted numerous endeavors to obtain the
abolition of Hindu slavery on the part of such men
as Harrington and Baber, from 1798 to 1833. ^ Not
till 181 1, was legislation directed against the slave-
trade ; and the law then made prohibited the sale of
such persons only as should be brought from abroad
for this exp7'ess fzcrpose, — a limitation which rendered
it of no effect. Every extension of British territory
increased the traffic, opening the whole domain to
importation of fresh victims.^ In 1833, a bill intro-
duced by Earl Grey, for abolishing slavery in five
years, was so emasculated in its passage through
Parliament by the opposition of the Duke of Welling-
* See the case fully stated in Adam's Slavery in India.
2 Judge Leycester, in Parliatnentary Documents for i8^q, No. 138, p. 315.
19
290 RELIGION AND LIFE.
ton and others, as to come out finally but a timid recom-'
mendation to the Company to mitigate the evil as far
as should be found convenient ; serving only to en-
couracre and confirm it. The earnest af^itation of the
subject by the British India Society in 1838 aroused
fresh interest ; but the East Indies and Ceylon were
excepted from the great Colonial Emancipation of that
year. Nor can I learn that any complete Act of Aboli-
tion has been passed, down to the present hour. What
we are here especially to observe is the fact that this
continuance of so barbarous a system has not had the
excuse of a necessary regard for the prejudices and
interests of the people. Judge Vibart, after an inves-
tigation maae by desire of government in 1825, re-
ported that the respectable classes of the Hindus were
strongly in favor of abolition, and that the Moham-
medans had no very great objection. Macaulay, as
Secretary of the Board, was assured by the ablest of
the Company's civil servants that there would be
no danger in the attempt. In 1833, four thousand
Hindus, Parsees, and Mohammedans memorialized
Parliament, thanking it for its exertions to abolish the
slave-trade.^ It was the opinion of able lawyers that
the Mohammedan law itself, if rightly executed,
would free almost all the slaves in India ; nor has
that of the Hindus any immediate connection with
their religion or their system of caste.
But we hasten from this criticism to an estimate
^ . ^ which could not be fairly presented without
Traits of jr.
Hindu such reference to an oft-told history, otherwise
needing no fresh recital. Charges of gross
depravity are constantly brought against the Hindus
^ Pamphlet on Slavery in India^ compiled largely from ofiBcial documents ; printed by
Ward & Co., Loudon, 1841.
HINDU CHARACTER.
291
as a people. Such writers as Mill and Ward seem to
be incapable of finding any good in them. Of these
sweeping accusations, falsehood, vindictiveness, and
sensuality have been the most frequent. The best
authorities agree in refuting them.^ Dr. Jeffreys
allows himself the extravagant statements that "every
child is educated carefully to avoid speaking the truth,
except as a matter of interest or necessity," and "that
they will compass each other's ruin or death for the
smallest object." Colonel Sleeman, on the contrary, tells
us he has had hundreds of cases before him in which
a man's property, liberty, or life depended on his telling
a lie ; and he has refused to tell it, to save either. Mr.
Elphinstone, whose opportunities were those of thirty
years in the highest positions in Indian service, de-
scribes the Rajputs as remarkable " for courage and
self-devotion, combined with gentleness of manners
and softness of heart, a boyish playfulness and an
almost infantine simplicity." " No set of people among
the Hindus," he continues," "are so depraved as the
dregs of our own great towns. The villagers are
everywhere amiable, affectionate to their families, kind
to their neighbors, and towards all but the government
honest and sincere. The townspeople are different,
but quiet and orderly. Including the Thugs and
Deceits, the mass of crime is less in India than in
England. The Thugs are almost a separate nation,
and the Deceits are desperate ruffians in gangs. The
Hindus are a mild and gentle people, more merciful
to prisoners than any other Asiatics. Their freedom
from gross debauchery is the point in which they
appear to most advantage ; and their superiority in
^ See especially Montgomery Martin's admirable Report on the Conditio7i of India
{1838).
292 RELIGION AND LIFE.
purit}^ of manners is not flattering to our self-esteem."^
"Domestic slaves are treated exactly like servants,
except that they are regarded as belonging to the
family. I doubt if they are ever sold."^ It is highly
creditable to the Hindus that Siva-worship through
the symbol of reproduction, the lingam, once widely
spread in India, is now found to have "no hold on
the popular feeling, and to suggest no offensive ideas."
"It is but justice to state," says Wilson, "that it is
unattended in Northern India by any indecent or
indelicate ceremonies ; and it requires a lively imagi-
nation to trace any resemblance in its symbols to the
objects they are supposed to represent. The general
absence of indecency from public worship and re-
ligious establishments in the Gangetic provinces was
fully established by the late General Stuart, and in
every thing relating to actual practice better authority
cannot be desired."^ The licentious customs attri-
buted to the sakti-worshippers the same authorities
state to be seldom practised, and then in secrecy ; and
to be held illicit even by their supporters, if instituted
merely for sensual gratification.^ Statistics show that
the profligacy of the large cities of British India
hardly exceeds that of European communities of
similar extent. And to the amount actually existing
the habits of Europeans have largely contributed ;
while the efforts of the government to diminish this
form of immorality have done much to counterbalance
these bad influences, as well as to suppress the older
religious ceremonies which involved it.^
^ History of British India, pp. 375-381. See Ritchie, British World in tlie East,
I. 186.
2 Elphinstone, I. 350.
' Wilson, Essays on Religion of Hindus, II. 64 ; I. 219. * Ibid., I. 261.
^ Sanger, History of Prostitution, p. 423.
HINDU CHARACTER. 293
The great diversity of opinion as to the practical
morals of the Hindus is doubtless due in part ,. ,.
^ Morality.
to the great varieties of moral t3'pe that must
exist in so immense and complex a population as
that of India, subjected to sucli variety of foreign
influence for thousands of years. It does not appear,
however, that the Hindus have been more inclined
to sensuality than other races. This is true of them
even as sharing the almost universal cultus of the pro-
ductive principle in nature, whose symbols seem to
have represented the sacred duty of man to propagate
his kind. They have always had sufficient sense of
propriety to carve the statues of their gods in a way
not to give offence to modesty.^ Yet their vices must
on the w^hole have been such as belong to the impres-
sible temperament of tropical races, the passive yield-
ing fibre that obeys the luxury of illusion and reverie.
The truth must be somewhere between the unbounded
praises lavished by Greek writers on the ancient Hin-
dus and the excessive censure of their descendants
by Christian criticism.
It is in no unmindfulness of these probabilities in
the case that I add a few more good words for this non-
Christian people from competent witnesses. Malcom
"could not think of the Bengal sepoys in his day without
admiration." Hastings said of the Hindus in general
that they were " gentle and benevolent, more suscep-
tible of gratitude for kindness shown them and less
prompted to vengeance for WTongs inflicted than any
people on the face of the earth; faithful, affectionate,
submissive to legal authority." Heber, whose detes-
tation of the religions of India was intense, yet records
similar impressions. "The Hindus are brave, cour-
^ Stevenson,. in Jour. Roy- As. Soc, 1842, p. 5
294 RELIGION AND LIFE.
teous, intelligent, most eager for knowledge and
improvement; sober, industrious, dutiful to parents,
affectionate to their children, uniformly gentle and
patient, and more easily affected by kindness and
attention to their wants and feelings than any people
I ever met with."^ Doubtless these statements, like
those on the other side, are highly colored ; but they
have great value in view of the character and op-
portunities of their authors. " The Hindus," says
Harrison, 2 "are a mild, peaceable people, fulfil the
relations of life with tolerable exactness, naturally
kind to each other, and always ready to be hospita-
ble, even where poverty might exempt them : they are
never deficient in filial affection. It is a common thincr
to find people in humble walks of life bestowing a third
or even half their scanty income on aged and destitute
parents." I will only add the somewhat ardent tribute
of the Mohammedan Abul Faz'l, vizier of the great
Sultan Akbar in the seventeenth century, a thoroughly
competent witness. " The Hindus," he says, in his
Ay in Akbar i^ " are religious, afTable, cheerful, lovers
of justice, given to retirement, able in business, ad-
mirers of truth, grateful, and of unbounded fidelity.
And their soldiers know not what it is to fly from the
field of battle."
What inhumanity must have been needed to rouse
such a race to the barbarities of Delhi and Cawn-
pore !
It must be remembered that these barbarities were
Cruelties of ^o^ the work of the people as a whole, and
the war. ^\y^^ they wcrc quite paralleled by cruelties on
the part of the Christian invaders both before and
afterwards. The horrors of Cawnpore were the work
^ Heber's Journal, II. 369, 409. 2 English Colonies, p. 64, 66. •
HINDU CHARACTER.
295
of Nana Sahib and his body guard of savage adher-
ents, his. own soldiers "refusing to massacre the women
and children, whiqh was accomplished by the vilest
of the city," while his own officers sought in vain to
dissuade him from his monstrous purpose. ^ Dr. Mc-
Leod invokes his countrymen to public confession,
with shame and sorrow, " of indiscriminate slaughter
perpetrated in cool blood by Christian gentlemen, in a
spirit which sunk them below the level of their ene-
mies."^ The atrocities of this war, on the part of the
Hindus, were in fact the natural excesses of an excit-
able people, driven to madness, not merely by such
crimes as the causeless massacre of the loyal thirty-
seventh Sepoy regiment, at Benares, such treacheries
as the broken promise of higher pay to the army of
Oude, such outrages on the religious convictions of the
native soldiers as the compulsory use of cartridges
greased with pork, but by a long-continued series of
enormities that had become habitual. As illustrative
of these, the fact will suffice that, a year or two before
the revolt of 1857, investigations by the govern-
ment brought to light a regular system of torture of
the most revolting description even upon women,
which for years had been applied in many parts of
India by native officers of the Company, in the collec-
tion of its revenues and for extorting evidence. This
insurrection was but the last of a series growing out of
similar causes, and upon the greatest scale of all. It
was the common cause of dispossessed kings and beg-
gared chieftains starting up and springing to arms all
over India ; the issue of a policy of annexation and
"subsidiary alliances," pushed for half a century by
bribery, fraud, and force ; of the industries of mi-llions
^ McLeod, Da^s in Northern Itidia, p. 68.
296 RELIGION AND LIFE.
drained, and the hoarded wealth of ages swept off, to
fill the coffers of rapacious foreign masters ; of syste-
matic outrage and contempt as of ^he lower animals,
practised upon a race whose literature is magnificent,
and whose civilization runs beyond historic record ;
of a system of exclusion, which shut out the native of
India from office and opportunity, whether civil or
military : the issue, in short, of monstrous misgovern-
ment, which the noblest men had labored ineffectu-
ally to reform, and which had made the coming of
just such an earthquake as this, for every thoughtful
mind in India, merely a question of a few years more
or less of time. It could not be said that the East
India Company had attempted to suppress the religion
of the Hindus : it would give little countenance to
missionary efforts, and it even derived revenues from
the superstitious rites of the most ignorant classes ;
yet it had not succeeded in the slightest degree in
calming the nervous fears of the Sepoy army, which
knew its character by closest contact, that the native
beliefs and traditions would be recklessly trampled out
by its mere military and secular interests.
It is by no means my purpose to throw the respon-
justiceto sibility of the terrible scenes of 1S57-58 upon
both sides. ^}^g East India Company alone. I have no
desire to hide either the difficulties of the position with
which they had to deal, or the previous semi-barbar-
ized condition of the Hindu States, upon which in
many respects certainly their rule was an improve-
ment. The brutality, corruption, and weakness of the
later Mogul princes of India, had disorganized these
communities ; and robber tribes and robber chieftains
were spreading desolation through portions of the
peninsula when the French and English began their
HINDU CHARACTER. 297
struggle for its possession. Still more important is it
to recognize the improvement in Indian affairs after
their administration — withdrawn from the East India
Company in consequence of the revolt — was assumed
by the British people. New civil and criminal codes
have been introduced, more wisely regardful of the
interests of the native tribes ; municipal and other
offices have been transferred in some degree to native
talent ; and the extortion of rents has been measur-
ably guarded against. The results of these changes,
it is claimed, are already apparent in improved culti-
vation, purer administration, and happier social life ;
though such terrible facts as the Orissa famine in
1865, with its record of governmental neglect, become
all the more discreditable, in view of such claims.
While we render all due credit to those who have
labored to bring about these measures, and are labor-
ing for still more important ones equally consistent
with the spirit of the age ; and while the noble record
of individual officers and scholars, like BenUnck,
Elphinstone, Briggs, Crawford, Jones, Lawrence,
through the long history of British India, should re-
ceive the lasting gratitude of science and humanity ,i
— w^e w^ould not fail to note also the bearing of the
happy results so speedily claimed for a juster policy, on
the question of Hindu capacity and character. That
Mogul oppression should have brought about the de-
generate social condition of the natives at the com-
mencement of British rule, is nowise to their dis-
credit. That such amelioration as is now described
should follow at once in the track of the earliest
1 The reader will find this record, which I would gladly pause here to review, in the
pages of Kaye's Lives of Indian Statesmen, Arnold's Dalhmcsie, and other like works,
familiar to the public in England and America.
298 RELIGION AND LIFE.
fair opportunity afforded them, after more than a cen-
tur}^ of this rule', is surely a strong argument in their
favor.
And, after all, the conclusion we draw from this
painful history must differ widely from that of
Nemesis. jt ^ j
writers whose view springs from their natural
sympathy with the victory of a higher civilization over
a lower, and from that only. This crowning insur-
rection, in the view of history, reflects more credit on
the conquered than on the conquerors. If Macaulay's
logic be admitted as fair, when, in his brilliant essay
on the life of Clive, he affirmed that " the event of our
history in India is a proof that sincerity and upright-
ness are wisdom, that all we. could have gained by
imitating the duplicity around us is as nothing when
compared with what we have gained by being the
only power in India on whose word reliance can be
placed," — what inference could be drawn when his
premise was reversed by unanswerable facts, and th'e
event proved an utter absence of confidence in the
government of India from end to end of the land?
What a piece of irony does the complacent self-eulogy,
echoed by so many less respectable voices, become !
The event of European government in India yields
a very different lesson. When the rajas of Oude
marched in procession to give in their adhesion to the
British Government, after the conquest of that kingdom,
"all," says McLeod, "were thankful for their restored
lands, and the hope of British protection. But there
was not one who loved us for our own sakes ; not one
who would not have preferred a native rule to ours,
even with tolerable protection of life and property ;
not one who did not regret the unrighteous destruction
HINDU CHARACTER.
299
of the Kingdom of Oude."^ So, in the war of 1857,
almost the whole Bengal army was in" sympathy with ,
the rebellion. 2 It was universally recognized at that
time that the lono^-continued rule of En inland in
India had in no degree reconciled the masses of that
vast empire to the authority of their masters. " If the
Russians should march an army into Scinde," said the
"Westminster Review," so late as in 1868, "a spirit of
disaffection and desire of change would agitate the
whole country." This persistent refusal to accept or
to trust selfish and despotic rulers, with whatever un-
civilized impulses it may be connected, gives hints of
higher loyalties. And humanity finds its real interest
in the impressive fact that, after centuries of wars and
tyrannies, Persian, Afghan, Mongol, Mohammedan
and Christian, there should yet have survived enough
of the old Aryan fire to turn on the latest invader in //
determined and desperate revolt. Such wrath indeed
smoulders in the most orentle and laborious races,
and in them is most terrible when its frenzy comes at
last. In the East and in the West alike, a Nemesis
has awaited proud and selfish nations for exploit-
ing races weaker than themselves. Tlie passion of -
the Hindu and the patience of the American Negro
are dissimilar qualities ; but the wrongs of both are
avenged.
The Hindus do not deserve contempt on any ground.
They are made for noble achievement in phi- ^ .
-' ^ Promise.
losophy, in aesthetics, in science, and even,
with Western help, in social and practical activities.
Their full day has not yet come. Their vitality is far
from spent: they are not in their senescence, but in
1 Days in Northern India, p. 88. ^ ibid., p 166.
\
300 RELIGION AND LIFE.
their prime. Their chiefs, often ferocious and crafty,
are as often heroic and magnanimous. Sivaji, Hyder
AH, Tippoo Saib, Holkar, and others, w*ere briUiant
soldiers, and fought valiantly for their cause to the
death. India has no lack of subtle thinkers, learned
scholars, able administrators, shrewd merchants, nor
yet of generous helpers in the improvement of the
people. An estimate made by British officials in 1829
represents the works of public utility constructed by
individuals, without view to personal profit, in a single
district of half a million people, as amounting in value
to nearly a million pounds sterling, besides plantations
of trees enclosing two-thirds of the villages.-^ Hindu-
stan has native scholars of eminence both in Sanskrit
and European letters, whose editorship of Sanskrit
works as well as contributions to the philosophical
and ethnological journals are at this time especially
of great value. Deva Sastri mastered the Eastern
and Western systems of Astronomy. Rajendralal
Mitra was entrusted with the task of expounding the
ancient coins discovered in 1863, and has brought out
important Brahmanical and Buddhist works. The
lamented Radhakanta Deva Bahadur, the author of
an immense Sanskrit encyclopgedia, was an honorary
member of numerous learned European Societies.
Fresh editions of the national epos, and other great
works of antiquity, with valuable commentaries,
paraphrases, and learned revisions, have within
a few years appeared under the auspices of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal, which owe very much of
their excellence as well as their elegance to the per-
sonal industr}^ ability and munilicence, of native
^ See Westm. Rev., July, 1868. -*
HINDU CHARACTER. 3OT
scholars.^ There is ample ground for predicting that,
as further friction with Western thought shall elicit
the special genius of the Hindus, it will be found
capable of supplying many desiderata in our Western
civilization, contributing in ways as yet unimagtned
by us to the breadth and fulness both of our religious
and social ideals.
The effect of a sensuous, enervating climate on the
Aryan has, however, been in many wa3's Power and
prodigious. -His very idealism became a '^^^^'^*'
persuasion of the nothingness of the individual.
The lack of practical stimulus inclined his intellect
to contemplation, and turned his first endeavor at the
organization of Labor into what looks to us more like
an organization of Idleness : the drone priest at the
head, the drudging menial at the foot, the lazy soldier,
a blight on industry, between the two. Hindu life, in
its twofold aspect, grew more and more like the great
rivers it dwelt by, in their alternate flood and failure, -
overflow and return. In Thought, a great, broad,
still, dreamy sea, its bare, motionless face upturned
to the sky ; in Action, a cooped and stinted stream,
however stirred here and there, girt with broad strips
of thirsty desert and even treacherous slime. Surely
it is refreshing to find, under these dead-weights of
physical nature, the earnest endeavor for co-opera- ^
tive work, the love of agriculture, the unconquerable -"^
germs of liberty. The degeneracy itself has its
hopeful side. It does not prove that the physical
must inevitably overmaster the spiritual everywhere,
1 Many of these are mentioned in a synopsis of the recent publications of the Asiatic
Society of Be?igal, in Zeitschr. d. D. M. C, XXV. {1S71), p. 656. Their contributions
to the Bibliotheca Indica have been of especial value. GUdemeister (^/(5/. Sajiskr-y 1S47)
mentions more than 60 Hindu scholars of our time, besides 100 earlier ones.
302 RELIGION AND LIFE.
except under specifically Christian disciplines. It
illustrates the universal law, that the life that spends
itself in thinking or dreaming, and fails to put its
brain into its hand, under whatever disciplines or
" dispensations," unmans itself, and becomes impotent
even to think and dream.
TT
J.X.
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPflY.
■oo^rdnder life it sees and loves.
The voice of the Eternai, alone heard, takes up the
human into itself, and the poet's tongue can but echo
its- words : —
" I am what is and is not. I am, — if thou dost know it
Say it, O Jellaleddin, — I an* the Soul in all."
Is not man of one nature with what he worships?
Knowing Where his faith reposes, t/icre and t/ial is he.
and being, ^q thcsc Eastcm mystlcs do not hesitate to
say : " Whoso worships God under the thought, ' He
is the foundation,' becomes founded ; under the
VEDANTA. 333
thought, * He is great,' becomes great ; or under the
thought, ^ He is mind,' becomes wise."^ "Whoever
thus knows the supreme Brahma becomes even
Brahma."^ It is only the prevalent habit of associat-
ing self-assertion with whatsoever is said or done, that
makes language like this, in any religion, shock and
repel. It is perfectly natural to the poetic sense,
to the spiritual imagination, to the spontaneity of
faith and the self-surrender of love. It is not " self-
deification," but that very spirit by which alone, in
any age or people, the vice of self-worship is to be
escaped.
Not yet have we heard any better statement of the
relation of individual to universal life than this : —
" Round and round, within a wheel, roams the vagrant soul, so
long as it fancies itself different and apart from the Supreme. It
becomes truly immortal, when upheld by him." ^
" As oil in sesame seed is found by pressure, as water by digging
the earth, as fire in the two pieces of wood by rubbing them together,
so is that absolute Soul found by one within his own soul, through
truth and discipline alone." ^
" The soul must churn the truth patiently out of every thing." ^
The poet does not forget that this is the end, not
the beginning, of human endeavor ; and must come
by paying the price.
The earnestness of this aspiration appears in the
stress everywhere laid upon the sufficiency To know
of really knowing and seeing truth. The Jg^come^"
modern or Western mind, concentrated on truth.
action, taught by its theology to distrust intellectual
intuition in religious belief, finds it hard to do justice
to the ancient principle, "Whoso knows or sees
* Taittariyci, III. x. 3. * Mutzdaka, III. ii. 9
' Svetasvatara, I. 6. * Ibid., I. 15. " Amritanada Upan.^ Weber, II. 63.
334 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
truth becomes truth." But if this principle was not
moral power, how came it to be, as it certainly was,
the resort of thoughtful men who sought to compre-
hend and master the ills of life? What must they have
meant by "knowing," who said, "Whatever nature
one meditates on, to that nature he goes : he who
meditates on God attains God"?^ The Semitic myth
of the Fall of Man separates, even to antagonism, the
tree of knowledge from the tree of immortal life.
Here is a deeper synthesis, that makes the two to be
one and the same.
There is a worship of knowledge which is not
pride of understanding, but sincerity of mind, — the
longing to escape falsities, the sway of the will by
a supreme necessity of living by truth. " Truth alone,
and not falsehood, conquers : by truth is opened the
path on which the blest proceed."^ "No purifier in the
world like knowledge."^ In the simplest and purest
form of conviction, to know is not divorced from to
be ; in other words, the life goes into the thought, and
is one with it. And this sacred unity of Thought and
Being attends the highest philosophy as well. Plato
distinguishes "true science" from "opinion," affirming
that in this way to know truth is to become truth. Of
like purport is his great ethical postulate, that vice
is but ignorance ; none who see the beauty of virtue
being capable of violating her laws. "Wisdom," in
the Hebrew Apocrypha, shines with the same ade-
quacy, reflected in large measure from the Hellenic
mind. " She is the brightness of the Everlasting
Light ; and, being but one, she can do all things ; and
in all ages, entering into holy souls, she maketh them
* Bhag. Gitdt ch. viii. * Mundaka, III. 6.
8 Bltag. Gii&^ ch iv.
VEDANTA. 335
friends of God and prophets." "Bondage," says
Kapila, "is from delusion."^ "Whoso knows is eman-
cipated, and thirsts no more."^ Spinoza answers
across the ages that the knowledge of God is one with
loving Him. And the Christian mystic, of whose
genius the fourth Gospel is the product, puts into the
lips of his ideal " Word " this truth of universal relig-
ion : " Ye shall know the truth, and truth shall make
you free."
" The truth of being and the truth of knowing,"
says Bacon, "is all one. A man is but what he
knoweth. For truth prints goodness ; and they be
the clouds of error that descend in storms of passions
and perturbations."^
To be what one knows to he real is for ever the
goal of noble effort, simply because it is implied in
the unity and integrity of thought. Nothing is really
known so long as it stands aloof, as mere distinction
from the thinker, an external object only. Mind can
know only by finding itself in the thing known.
Nothing is really thottght by us, whose being is not
made mystically one with our thought, through the
common element which makes knowledge possible.
Nothing is really s-poken or named ^ unless the word or
name is in some sense merged in the reality it would
express. Hence, for Vedantic piety, the name needed
not to be spoken, but breathed only. " The best wor-
ship is the silent."^ Hence, too, the significance of
names and even syllables for Oriental contemplation,
as carrying with them something far deeper and
more real than an arbitrary symbolism for social con-
venience. Thinking, naming, knowing, are the ideals
* Kapila, Sctnkhya Aphorisms^ III. 24. 2 ibid., II. Introduction.
' Essay in Praise of Knowledge. * BJiag. Gitd, ch. x.
33^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
of contemplative life. To identify them with being
was to prove them earnest and devout.
Is not all intense faith, will, love, identified with its
ideal purpose? Does it not make thought one with
thing, knowledge with what it knows, and the name
with what it means?
We know truth by participation, not by observation.
To be absorbed into our idea or principle, so that it
is the life of our life, to find it the substance of our
path and opportunity, — this, not the mere perception
of it as an object, is to know it. Of God what else
can we know, save what we have found as life, ideal
or actual, in ourselves ?
Indispensable to universal religion is the unfailing
faith of all mystics, that to know and to be are one.
Veda, Upanishad, Sutra, — poetry, philosophy,
Search for pi'^ycr, — arc possessed by the infinite de-
truth. gii-g {q,^ spiritual knowledge. With incessant
questioning they beset the mystery of being. The
Svetasvatara opens thus: "The seekers converse to-
gether. What form of cause is Brahma? Whence
are we ? By whom do we live and where at last
abide? By whom are we governed? Do we walk after
a law, in joy and pain, O ye knowers of God? " And
the Kena thus : " By whom decreed and appointed,
does the mind speed to its work ? " The Mitri asks :
" How can the soul forget its origin ? How, leaving
its selfhood, be again united thereto ? " In Yajna-
valkya's Code, the munis inquire of their chief: " How
has this world come into being, with gods, spirits, and
men ; and how the soul itself ? Our minds are dark :
enlighten us on these things." ^
» YAjn., III. ii8.
VEDANTA. 337
In the Vedanta poems, wise men and women pro-
pound questions, and are answered by wiser ones, or
ask in vain. Experience is revealed, foolishness
confounded. " Answer truly, or thy head shall fall
down," say these saints to each other, let us hope
symbolically. The problems that all generations
must meet are stated, solved, or left reverently in the
care of the Unknown. " How shall death be escaped,
and what are the fetters of life ? What is the light
of this soul, when the sun and moon have set ?
On what are the worlds woven and rewoven ?
What is this witness, ever present, the soul within
each ? If, O venerable one ! this whole world were
mine, -could I become immortal thereby ?"^
The wise answer wisely, and the questioner is
dumb.
" The king of the Videhas sat on his throne. Then came Yajna-
valkya. ' Why hast thou come, O Yajnavalkya ? Is it seeking
cattle, or with subtle questions ? ' — ' Even both, O king of kings ! '
— '•Let us hear what any has taught thee.'' " ^
The boon the king asks of his seers is that he may
question them at his pleasure. " O sages, whoever is
best knower of Brahma, shall have a thousand cattle,
their horns overlaid with gold." "As a warrior rises
with arrows, and binds the string to his bow, so will
I rise before thee with two questions," says Gargi, the
daughter of Vachacknu ; " do thou make answer."
"Ask on, O Gargi!" And questions and answers
lead on through the circle of being, resting at last
in the "imperishable One, who unseen sees, unheard
hears, unknown knows, beside whom there is none
that sees, or hears, or knows." ^
^ Brihad, III. IV. VI. * Ibid., IV. i. a ibid., III. viii. .
22
338 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
" The wise does not speak of any thing else but the Supreme,
his delight is in the soul ; his love and action also." '
. The earliest writers about the Hindus inform us
that this people spent their time conversing on life
and death. These lively Greeks were profoundly
impressed by the absorption of the Brahmans in the
thought of immortality. Megasthenes noted their
frequent discourse of death as the birth of the soul
into blessed life. And Porphyry marvelled at their
passion for yielding life, even when no evils pressed
on them, and their efforts to seoarate the soul from
the senses, esteeming those who died to be happiest,
as receiving immortal life.
Nachiketas, having earned the promise of a boon
Nachiketas from Yama, or Death, demands to know if the
death. soul is immortal. And Death replies : ^ —
" It is a hard question : the gods asked it of old. Choose another
boon, O Nachikdtas ! do not compel me to this : release me from
this."
N. " The gods indeed asked it of old, O Death ! And as for what
thou sayest, that 'it is not easy to understand it,' there is no other
speaker to be found like thee, O Death ! there is no other boon like
this."
Y. " Choose, O Nachikdtas ! sons and daughters who may live a
hundred years ; choose herds of cattle, elephants, gold, horses,
celestial maidens ; choose the wide-expanded earth, and live as
many years as thou wilt. Be a king, O Nachiketas ! on the wide
earth ; I will make thee enjoyer of all desires ; but do not ask what
the soul shall be after death.
N. " All those enjoyments are of yesterday : perishes, O thou
end of man ! the glory of all the senses ; and more, the life of all
is short. With thee remain thy horses and the like, with thee
dance and song.
" Man rests not satisfied with wealth. If we should obtain wealth
and behold thee, we should live only so long as thou shalt sway.
The boon I choose is what I said.
1 Mundaka, III. i. 4. * KatJia Uj>an.y I.-IIL
VEDANTA. 339
"What man living in this lower world, who knows that he decays
and dies, — while going to the undecaying immortals he shall obtain
exceeding bliss, — who knows the real nature of such a's rejoice in
beauty and love, can be content with a long life ?
" Answer, O Death ! the great question, which men ask, of the
coming world. Nachiketas asks no other boon but that, whereof
the knowledge is hid."
K " One thing is good : another thing is pleasure. Both with
different objects enchain man. Blessed is he who between these
chooses the good alone. Thou, O Nachiketas ! considering the
objects of desire, hast not chosen the way of riches, on which so
many perish.
" Ignorance and knowledge are far asunder, and lead to different
goals. I think thou lovest knowledge, because the objects of desire
did not attract thee.
" They who are ignorant, but fancy themselves wise, go round
and round with erring step, as bhnd led by the blind. He who
believes this world exists, and not the other, is again and again
subject to my sway.
"Of the soul, — not gained by many, because they do not hear
of it, and which many do not know, though hearing, — of the soul,
wonderful is the teacher, wonderful the receiver, wonderful the
knower. The knowledge, O dearest ! for which thou hast asked, is
not to ,be gained by argument ; but it is easy to understand it when
declared by a teacher who beholds no difference in soul. Thou art
persevering as to the truth. May there be for us another inquirer
like thee, O Nachiketas ! Thee I believe a house with open
door.
" The wise, by meditation on the unfathomable One, who is in the
heart, leaves both grief and joy : having distinguished the soul from
the body, the mortal rejoices, obtaining it in its subtle essence."
Nor is the questioner yet content. "Make known
to me this being which thou beholdest, as different
from this whole of times, of causes, and effects."
Then follows the praise of essential being ; of spirit,
as of one nature with deity : —
" It is not born, nor does it die : it was not produced from any
one, nor was any produced from it. Eternal and without decay, it
is not slain, though the body is slain.
340 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
" If the slayer think, ' I slay,' or if the slain thinks, ' I am slain,'
then both of them do not know well. It does not slay, nor is it
slain. Subtler than what is subtle, greater than what is great, it
abides in the heart of the living.
" He who is free from desire and grief beholds, through tran-
quillity of his senses, that majesty of the soul.
" Sitting, it goes afar ; sleeping, it goes everywhere.
" Thinking the soul as bodiless among bodies, as firm among
fleeting things, as great and all-pervaTding, the wise casts off all
grief.
" The soul cannot be gained by knowledge of rites and texts, not
by understanding of these, not by manifold science. It can be
obtained by the soul by which it is desired, //zs soul reveals its
own truth}
" Whoever has not ceased from evil ways, has not subdued his
senses, and concentrated his mind, does not obtain it, not even by
knowledge."
*rt^
" Know the soul as the rider, the body as the car ; know intellect
as the charioteer, and mind, again, as the reins. The senses are
the horses, their objects the roads. ^
"Whoso is unwise has the senses unsubdued, like wicked horses
of the charioteer. But whoso is wise has the senses subdued like
good horses of the charioteer.
" Whoso is unwise, unmindful, always impure, does not g^in the
goal, but descends to the world again. But whosoever is wise,
mindful, always pure, gains the goal from whence he is not born
again, the highest place of the all-pervading One.
" Higher than the senses are their objects, higher than their
objects is the mind ; intellect higher than mind ; higher than intel-
lect the great soul.^
" Higher than this great one the Unmanifested ; higher than the
unmanifested the Spirit ; * higher than this is nought ; it is the last
hmit and highest goal.
" Let the wise subdue his speech by mind, his mind by knowl-
edge, his knowledge in the great soul ; subdue this also in the
placid Soul [peace of the soul].
r
' This is Sankara's understanding of the text ; but Rber thinks, in common with Rfiiller
and Muir, that a more literal version would be : " It is attainable by him whom it chooses.
The Soul chooses this man's body as its own." In view of tlie context, however, the
meaning is substantially the same, — that the wise seeker finds God wiihin, and not through
outward revelations.
2 Compare Plato in Pkeedrus, § 74. ' The "rider." * Purusha.
VEDANTA. 341
"Awake, arise, get to the great teachers, and attend. The
wise say that the road to Him is as difficult to tread as a razor's
edge."
" The wise who tells and hears the eternal tale, which Death
related and Nachiketas received, is adored in the world of
Brahma."
"It is evident," says Dr. Roer, the translator of this
wonderful Upanishad, "that the Katha derives the
knowledge of Brahma from philosophy, and denies
the possibility of a revelation." ^ We should say rather •
it grandly identifies knowledge with revelation. Its
God is revealed to the wise by their own nature.
" One's soul reveals its own truth ; not to be gained
by mere knowledge of Vedas, by understanding nor
by science;" "not by word, mind, nor eye, but by
the soul by which it is desired ; " nor by intellect alone,
but by "union of intellect with soul."^
There is nothing of which we read so much in this
Hindu thought and worship as Immortality .
J. lie oCXloC
It is the word for final beatitude, for the end of immor-
of all human aspiration. "Whoso is one with '^'
the Supreme obtains immortality," is the burden ot
precept, philosophy, and prayer. " Immortal become
those who know." ^ What meaning did they attach
to the term ?
Certainly the idea of self-conscious individuality
beyond death did not stand so definitely before these
dreaming souls as it does before the sharper intelli-
gence and the intenser individualism of the modern
mind.* But this was simply because self-conscious-
ness was not so definitely conceived as a -present fact;
1 KatJui, Introd. 2 ibid., H. 23 ; VI. 12 : II. 12.
8 Ibid., VI. 9.
* It is denied in the Brihad {YV . v. 13) that after death there is any self-consciousness;
but it is explained as referring to such as are become pure soul, — one with Brahma.
342 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
because it is never definite to the contemplative imagi-
nation, which tends to escape it, rather than seeks to
hold it fast.
On the other hand that anxious dependence on it
which comes with the growth of the understanding,
and the complexity and refinement of personal relation
to men and things, did not trouble them with the
doubts and fears which beset it in view of the mystery
of physical death.
It is here that the feeling of -personal liberty^ so
Difference "^^^^ strougcr in the Western than in the
of Eastern Eastcm raccs, shows at once its value and its
conscious- defect. Their belief in definite creation as an
°^^2' act of divine Will, for, instance, so cherished
by them, has this advantage over the Oriental belief
in Emanation, that it expresses and develops the
human sense oi free intelligent -purpose; and thus
strengthens the hold of the individual soul on its own
conscious existence, and its faith in its own continu-
ance as a productive force. At the same time, this
strong individuality, nurtured not only by the beli€f
just mentioned, but in so many other ways, brings
a certain sense of isolation. Self-consciousness be-
comes a treasure that demands profoundest care. It
is besieged by anxieties and fears, arising from mys-
teries which the understanding, thus roused to full
faith in itself, and in itself alone, is yet incompe-
tent to fathom. But a larger liberty succeeds, which
drops the burden. It comes of fresh self- absorption
in ideas and principles, in the life of the whole, as
the unity of God and Man.
The absence of this jealous watch over personal
consciousness would naturally cause the Hindus to feel
comparatively little interest in continued existence
VEDANTA. 343
after death. Yet so strong is the desire of these
dreamers for real being, so entire their faith that they
are made for it, that they perpetually recur to the idea
of immortality ; haunted by the sense of a life beyond
death or change. And it is not merely another name
for the joy of losing conscious being in the life of
Brahma.
For they followed the spirit through future lives ;
traced it back to past ones ; believed in reminis- ,
•*■ Individual
cence of actions done in former states of being ; imniortai-
shrank from future bonds of penalty for present ^*^'
deeds, as if they fully recognized that personality was
somehow continuous through these manifold births. It
was in fact associated with transmigration, if only as a
doom to be escaped. But it would seem impossible that
the goal which they yearned to attain beyond that,
and which seemed to them worth the sacrifice of all
positive special desires, could be other than a form of
conscious being. It is certainly the longing of all
mystical love and faith, to rest in no other object of
thought, to be conscious of no lower form of being,
than the One and Eternal. Yet they do not discon-
nect this rest, even in conception, from personal ex-
perience and the sense of communion with God.
One of the Upanishads, for instance, describes poeti-
cally the soul of the just man as ascending to Brahma's
world : there it is questioned by Him about its faith
and knowledge, and, being wisely answered, is
welcomed thus : " This my world is thine." ^
As the old Hymns of the Rig Veda pray for distinct,
conscious immortality in the " world of imperishable
light, whither the fathers had gone before, and where
all desires shall be fulfilled," — so even the abstrac-
^ Kaushitaki Upan., Weber, I. 395-403.
344 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
tions of later philosophy glow with assurance, how-
ever ill-defined and mystical, of essential life as the
crown of sacrifice and devotion. " On whatever
nature thou meditatest at thy last hour, with desire, to
that shalt thou go." ^ " The heavens are Light ; " ^
" the highest thought is a drop of Light ; " ^ and the
departing spirit has a sunbeam for its guide.* " As a
serpent, casts its slough, so this body is left by the
soul. Its immortal life is Brahma, even Light." ^
Of the desire to keep track of the individual soul
on a definite path beyond death, we shall speak else-
where. But, after all, surely the vaguer sentiment
of a natural confidence in life itself is nobler ; leaving
this invisible future, in its form and detail, to the
benignity and wisdom of immortal laws ; confident
that these must involve what is best for the nature
whose relations they unchangeably represent.
The Vedanta philosophy, in its highest form.
Immortality affirms that the proper definition of Immortal
f^*^^^^ Life is to know God, by discernment of the
knowledge *^
of God. soul as real being. ^
Mere continued existence, from world to world, did
not, for such aspiration, constitute the substance or root
of Immortality at all. It hardly entered as a noticeable
element into the conception of this fulness of knowl-
edge and bliss. No pains were taken to prove the
fact. And the very thought of lapsing times and
renewed births was to be escaped, for the pure sense
of inalienable and eternal being. To know Okie's self
as one with necessary life was the fact of Immortal-
ity, and the evidence of the fact, at once.
^ Bhagavadgita. ^ BriJiad. s Tejovinda Upan., Weber, II. 63.
* Thomson's Bhag. Gii&, note to p. 60 ; Brahma-Siiiras, in Colebrooke, I. 366.
» Brihad. IV. 18, 7. « BrUiad, IV. iv. 14.
VEDANTA. 345
Manifestly the contents of the idea here indicated
are not to be supposed the same, whenever p^^ce of this
and wherever the same terms are employed evidence.
to express it. But, as Idea, it is for ever the
essence of all spiritual evidence on this subject.
How can we possibly know ourselves immortal,
otherwise than by experience of what is imperisha-
ble, and by knowing that we are in and of it, and
inseparable from it ? " To know thyself immortal,"
said Goethe also, " live in the whole."
" Evidences of immortality " which do not meet
these conditions of assurance are crude and imper-
fect : their defect of spiritual vitality and relation is
fatal to them. Such are those which infer a future
life for all men from traditions of a single miraculous
resurrection ; and those which rest on testimonies to
the reappearance of many persons after their bodily
death, as through some natural law ; and those which
proceed on the ground that we can be spiritually fed
by the reflection of our curiosity or desire, or even by
the echoes of* our gossip, from beyond the veil. Of
such physical evidences of mere continued existence,
the Vedanta philosophy knows nothing. It does not
seek its data on this external plane.
But of those higher forms of evidence, whose
method, still the best we know, has the most,,,
Illustrations.
intimate relation to essential truth and life,
that older piety, like the best of every later faith, has
full measure ; though their practical contents in Hindu
experience cannot of course compare with those of a
larger civilization. The Sankhya philosophy proves
immortality from the effort we make to liberate our-
selves from the senses ; the Vedanta, from the realitv
of all spirit; Brahmanas and Upanishads alike, from
34^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the knowledge of God in the soul; and- one Vedic
hymn, as Miiller translates it, from death itself.
" There was in the beginning no death ; ihei'cfore
no immortality." ^
•J
Soul itself was immo7'tality ^ "indestructible, an-
cient," " not to be dissipated, not to be seized nor
touched ; " soul itself, in its essence one with the Su-
preme.^ It is one's own soul that teaches this, " if
he be desirous of immortal nature." "Wise, mindful,
alwaj^s pure, subduing the senses, fixed on God, one
finds the place where fear is not; the goal, the refuge,
the serene Soul : he escapes the mouth of death." ^
The sum was this. To know the infinite and eter-
nal in all, makes immortal life. The Bhagavadgita
says, " He is bright as the sun beyond darkness at the
hour of death." ^ And the Mundaka, " He is the bridge
to immortality."^ "When He is known," says the
Kena, " as the nature of eyery thought, then immor-
tality is known." ^ It is "the death of duality in the
soul : when the notion of being different (in essence)
from the Supreme ceases, the soul if^held by him
becomes immortal."'''
" Cast off thy desires as the serpent his slough : break but this
bondage of the heart, thou art immortal here."*
" That Supreme Soul, whose work is the universe, always dwell-
ing in the hearts of all beings, is revealed by the heart. Those
who know Him become immortal. None can comprehend Him in
space above or space below or space between. For Him whose
name is the glory of the universe, there is no likeness."
" Not in the sight abides his form, none beholds Him with
the eye. Those who know Him as dwelling within become
immortal." ^
^ Sansk. Lit., 560. 2 Upanishads, passitn; Bhagav. Gita. ^ Kailta^ III. IV.
*Bh.G.,VUl. ''' Muttdaka, n. \\. s- ^ Kena, U. a-
'' Brih.^ II. iv. ; Svetds'vatara.
8 Katha, VI. 15. ^ Svetdsv., IV. 17-20.
VEDANTA. 347
In that interior sense in which the eternal only is
real, the transient is phantasmal. ' Conceived MSya, the
as manifold, transitional, not as one in essence, phenomenal.
but as ever-flowing form, the world to the Vedantist
was but a shadow. Its phenomena referred him to
somewhat beyond, which they could but hint, which
their changefulness suggested by contrast only.
Every passing fact or form in its vanishing said :
" Not in me thy goal, thy rest. I am but masking
and disguise." We recall the cry of Job out of the
depths of this sense of the perishable : —
" Where is wisdom, and where the place of understanding ? It
cannot be found in the land of the living.
" The deep saith, ' It is not in me ; ' and the sea saith, ' Not in
me.' Destruction and death say, ' We have heard of its fame with
our ears.' God only knoweth the way to it. He only its dwelling-
place.
" Behold the fear of the Lord, that is thy wisdom; and to depart
from evil, thy understanding."
The " wisdom " which the Aryan mystic, on his
part also, could not find in the land of the living, nor
in the sky nor sea, nor in destruction and death, was
to him also a reality ; and it turned the perishable to
a shadow, only as knowing the unchangeable to be a
reality. His " fear " was the fear of being swept
from that foothold by the tide of fleeting forms. His
"forsaking of evil " was in casting off delusion, and
knowing truth as the one and imperishable refuge.
The shifting play of forms in time and space, in that
they were not truth in this sense, was illusion. Did
they not change with the eye itself that beheld them?
Of what could their flowing and flitting give assur-
ance? This evanescence mocked the infinite thirst
of man, and piqued it to negation. This was their
348 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
7ndyd. It was coextensive with the universe of
change. It was uiij-eality ; yet not in the sense in
which one who had learned to associate great human
interests with the visible world would use the word in
contradistinction to thei7' reality. It will be better
understood in the sense in which it would be applied
to the world in contrasting such reality with its evanes-
cence^ which in this point of view would become its
unx^dXiX-y.
Maya was not a declaration of nonentity, not a
pure negation. It was part of the mystic's
Itsperma- . ° . ^ . . -^
nent mean- solutiou of his problem of asplratiou versus
'"^' imperfection, of ideal and actual, of the
moral choice between a higher and a lower aim.
Maya was his explanation of that flicker of the senses
which disturbed his contemplation, and mocked his
effort to fix thou^cht and heart on Beinor alone. His
mastery of wandering desires, and sorrow, and evil,
and of all that bitterness in the actual, which smote
on his ideal hope, was in that word Illusion. It solved
the mystery. It overcame the world. For it meant ; —
These things are not really as they seem. It is only
that I see them so for the moment. Their sense is in
what my soul shall make them mean through its one-
ness with the real ; which I shall know even as it is
when I am master of self and sense, and in knowing
become.
Give us, what we are now attaining so fast, full
understandinof of material and social uses ; turn the
current of faith and work from the transcendental
dream of the East into the positive and clear actualism
of the West ; yet this substance of the necessity
which the believer in nidyd felt, none the less truly
stands fast for us also. And its uses remain ; though
VEDANTA. 349
what Goethe calls the "tenacious persistence of what-
ever has once arrived at actual being," the exactly
opposite pole to that Oriental sense of instability and
transience, has now become the all-controlling spring
of thought and conduct.
Maya, in its root, ina^ meant at first manifestation
or creation^ marking these as real; then this Meaning of
reality considered in its mystery^ the riddle the word.
which finite existence is to the sense of the infinite in
man ; and so, generally, the mystery of all subtle
untraceable powers, — and from this meaning of the
word come magic and mage; and last, in this com-
pleted mystic devotion, it meant the illusion that
besets all finite things. Such the power of the spirit
to take up the visible universe into its dream, to turn
its concrete substance into shadow, its positive real
into unreal, and dissolve the solid earth in the fervent
heat of faith.
Some have referred the complete conception ot
mdyd to an advanced staple of Hindu philos-
■^ . ° , ^ Function of
ophy. In the earlier Upanishads there is a Maya in the
certain realism in the idea of the world and of'^'^'^""''"'^-
life ; and they present these as consuhstantial with
God, rather than illusory in any absolute sense. ^ It
has even been supposed — I cannot see with what
reason — that mdyd originated in the negations of
Buddhism. But its substance seems to be inherent in
the structure of the Aryan mind, after all ; whose
habit, even in its most practical phases, is to treat
its present conception of a truth or a thing as partial
1 See Banerjea, Dialogues on Hindu Philosophy, p. 386. Colebrooke {Essays, I.
377) says that mdyd does not belong to the original Vedanta Sutras. It is very fully devftl-
oped, however, in some of the later Upanishads, such as the Svetasvatara.
350 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
and imperfect; in other words, as (so far) illusion in
view of a better future one. On this habit of holding
the facts of experience as provisional depends the
power of progress which distinguishes it. This is no
fanciful analogy. To the courage and energy of the
Aryan race, as well as to its contemplative faculty, in
the West as in the East, the actual is always plastic
and convertible. It flits like dreams in the waking
moment, before the higher possibility that beckons
beyond. All is mdyd, as contrasted with the perma-
nence of productive. Mind. Neither in speculation
nor practice is any special form of being held to be
independent of this all-revising, reconstituting force.
The more it discerns of the world, the more intensely
does it transfer reality from the conceptions that are
behind to those that are before, and sweep these in
turn into the same transforming flood. Mind makes,
unmakes, and makes again.
Yet the true limitation of mdyd comes through this
very faith in mind as the only substantial reality and
power ; a fact which appears pre-eminently in the con-
sciousness of the Indo-European. I refer to the claim
of the individual soul to persistence, by virtue of hold-
ing in itself full recognition of this validity of mind.
Consciousness of being, in other words, involves par-
ticipation in being. No Eastern dream of universal
metamorphosis, or of the unreality of definite forms or
the evanescence of experience, is likely to shake the
sense which culture is enforcing, of somewhat per-
manent in the subjective source of one's changing
thought and growth, memory and desire. With us, as
well as with these mystic dreamers, such words as "con-
sciousness," "self," "identity," hover in a dim atmos-
phere of past changes and future possibilities. But the
VEDANTA. 351
indefiniteness of these Ideas is passing more and more
surely into a sense of permanent relation to the whole ;
and this sense comes to be the real self-conscious-
ness, giving sublimer meaning and validity to life as
life. To have once arrived at personality, to generate
the perception of being, and to have consciousness of
it as real, is to partake of that reality. And whatever
is achieved by this personality participates in like man-
ner in its validity. So that even the fleeting detail of
life and conduct assumes eternal meaninn^. The use
of illusion is to deepen, not to destroy, this meaning ;
being genially interpreted as friendly to the soul, and
the natural index of its perpetual growth. We may
well believe that it had its helpful and hopeful aspects
to the more contemplative Oriental mind also, seeking
in its way to lose individual self-cansciousness in the
life of the whole.
Maya was the fine sense of transition, of the flow
of form into form, that makes each intangible Analogues
and elusiv.e ; the sign of evanescence. In of Maya.
the delicate mythology of the Greek, it appears as
mother of Hermes, who is messenger of the gods, and
their deceiver also ; the cheat of expectation, the thief
of trusts ; whose brisk and versatile genius can never-
theless draw music from the laggard tortoise of time.
It is mdyd^ too, that we trace in the keen dialectics
of the Eleatic School, chasing time and space and all
forms of perception through the vanishing points of
transition, to end in the same sense of the phantasmal
everywhere save in " the One."
And modern science comes back to mdyd in its
protean dance of forces ; its metamorphoses and cor-
relations, that prove the manifold to be illusory, and
all phases of force to be in essence one.
352 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
The common sense of civilization is not at war with
Its indispen. this ancicnt wisdom of Illusion. It needs no
sabieness. mystic to 866 that indyd is not to be escaped, is
indeed the most practical of realities. Does not our so
palpable and solid world change with the eye that looks
on it ? Does it not mock our fixed ideas and our
stable definitions ? Not even does gold mean gold.
The boy's coppers are gold to him ; but what are
eagles to the miser ? Are dollars wealth, tied round
a drowning man's waist for preservation, and so
dragging him down to loss of all ? Are the shrewd
shrewd ? How the financial storm sweeps down the
business colossus beneath petty men who trembled in
his shadow ! Room yet for thee, great Maya, with
the wisest of the children of this world !
Is not all our knowledge relative ? Who of us sees
the facts as they ' are ? An owl's eyes peering into
darkness detects what we cannot. Molecular immo-
bility is an illusion. Every atom vibrates with cosmic
and local movements, imperceptible to eye or ear.
" The human organism reaches but a little way along
the scale of sensibility." And the universe is aflame
and vocal with subtler light and sound that it perceives
not. What comes with the touch of the insect's anten-
nas, or the cilia of the rotifer ? Our chemist knows
what nature is made of, for his crucibles ; but let him
tell us what she is to the monad in the water-drop,
and show the relations of that image to the world, as it
stands in the thought that combines galaxies and £eons
as we do stars and hours. What is nature to deity,
to the Soul that sees all as an Eternal Now ? And
beneficent Maya still helps us to solve the problems of
evil. For if sorrow and loss mean exactly what they
•seem, then what sense is there in our hope to find
VEDANTA. 353
that in them which we see not ? If inscrutable wrongs
and vices are not to be newly read from a higher
point of vision, then what are providence and growth,
and how shall we justify existence itself ? There is
no solution of these mysteries till we take to heart the
laws of illusion. Plutarch finely says, " Alter the
nature of your misfortunes by putting a different con-
struction on them." Always it is man's wisdom as
well as relief to expect metamorphoses, and to deny
stability of the hard solid facts that resist us. To read
between these lines ; to see loss as gain in the making,
fate as freedom, failure as success, death as life, —
thus still and ever to recognize illusion, — is the path
to reality.
Very solid is granite, very rigid is fact ; and you
shall take men and things as they are. Undeniable
indeed ; but how ai'e they ? " Where the spider sucks-
poison, the bee finds honey," says the proverb. What
we are, that we see ; and, sooner or later, we find that
the first step to knowledge is to doubt if things are what
they seem. Under the thought of the Hindu mystic,
that all below God is illusion, hides a secret that
masters pain and loss, and turns hindrance to help.
He' saw that the permanent only was to be trusted;
and his mdyd meant that he knew whatsoever did
not yield him this to be delusion and dream. Natural
illusions have their protective uses, their fine adapta-
tions and delights ; recognized more and more, the
larger the sense of practical capabilities in life. They
gird it with delicate talismans and charms ; soften rough
contacts ; hide sterner fates. All the more need, then,
that, when we learn how they play with our credulity,
we do not react to universal doubt, but pluck divine
certainties even from the heart of our dreams. And
23 '
354 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
in the rush and whirl of social machinery, the phantas-
magoria of things^ we want all the more of the tran-
scendental conviction that there is pure reality in the
best and highest only. It is better to believe the
world and the senses to be illusory than to believe
the eternal, the immutable, the ground of law and
duty and faith, to be a dream.
Hindu philosophy did not fail on this side. Crca-
The world tion iudccd was illusion ; yet it had its
from'^'^^ ^ substance in a divine intent ; and at least was
Brahma, not Separated therefrom. It was Brahma's
own maya, his "breathing," his "sport," his "magic,"
and so within him still ; ^ not the outside ball, made
of nothing, and flung out of his hand to spin of itself.
In the Hindu myth that God created the world " by a
thought ^''^ there is even a deeper hold on the imma-
nence of Spirit than in the Hebrew, that it was called
into being by a " wor<^," — something sent out and
away from the mouth, as it were. "God said^ and
it was," is the one : " God thought^ and it was, " is
the other.
Hebrew religion, fervent and spiritual as it was,
emphasized sc-paratton between God and the
Semitic and ^ ■'■
Aryan world, cspccially the world of man. It was
ideals. ^j^g shrinking of the soul before its own ideal,
in a deep. sense of short-coming; and these seeds of .
fear and alienation in the relimous sentiment ofi'ew
into debasing theologies which no imperfect bridge-
work of mediation or atonement can permanently
redeem. Hindu belief emphasized 07ieness of God
1 "He who is only One, possessed of mSyS, united with mSyS, creates the whole."
Svetasvatara,\\\. i; IV. 9. "The Maya of the Vedantists," says the DabistSn, "is
the 'magic of God ; ' because the universe is 'his playful deceit.' He gives it apparent
existence, himself the unity of reality ; like an actor, passing every moment from form into
form." Dai..^ oh. ii. 4.
VEDANTA. 355
with the world ; even in the play of illusions seeking
fearlessly for the reality they disguised. It lacked
the awe the Semite felt in presence of his own
conception of the Infinite. It was not a goad of
self-condemnation like his stern moral law. And it
could degenerate, though in different ways, into
mythology and rite as superstitious as the Semitic.
But its ground was faith, not fear; and now that re-
ligion, mature enough to dispense with schemes for
"reconciling God and man," affirms, as its starting-
point, the immanence of deity, it is simply resuming
on a higher plane, and with practical insight, the truth
which early Aryan philosophy instinctively divined.
I do not forget that idolatry of the Veda,, which
might seem to disprove these claims of devo- vedawor-
tion to the Spirit alone. In the wide freedom ^^'p-
of discussion open to the Hindu schools, through
endless subtleties of speculation on the primal ques-
tions of being and thought, the authority of this
common bible, twisted and accommodated, like the
Christian, in every way that teachers or times might
demand, is for the most part accepted without ques-
tion. The Vedanta commentators, especially, labor
to prove that it is infallible and without human author,
identical with "the eternity of sound;" and that the
rishis, who are called makers of the hymns, really
saw them only. How far this last theory implied that
the human faculties of these inspired men were sup-
planted by supernatural vision, may not be easy to
say. These are questions which bibllolatry raises in
all religions. But the mystical worship of soul rose
easily out of such conventionalism into the assertion
of its own higher inspiration. Scarcely one of the
Upanishads fails to urge the superiority of the science
35 6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
of soul to the study of scripture, or else to imply this
by the whole tenor of its thought. " Of what use,"
they say, " are the hymns of the Rig to one who does
not know Him in whom all the gods abide? "^ To one
who said, " I know only the hj^mns, w^hile I am
ignorant of soul," a sage replies, "What thou hast
studied is name. But there is something which is
more than name."^ "There are two sciences: the
lesser comprehends the rituals, astronomy, the study
of words, and the Vedas ; the higher is the science
by which the Eternal One is known." ^
It may be of use to hear the testimony of the author
of the Dabistan, who wrote tw^o or three centuries ago,
as to the spirit of the later Vedantists. He records a
visit made to one of their schools with an eminent
Hindu poet, who was filled with admiration at what
he heard there, and said, " My whole life is passed in
the company of devotees ; but my eyes never beheld
such independence, and my ears never heard any
thing comparable to the speeches of these emanci-
pated men."
A few passages brought together from the literature
of this Spiritual Pantheism will show the meaning it
gave to Soul, Duty, Deity, Life : —
"Whatever exists in this world is to be enveloped in the thought
The su- of the supreme Soul. Whoever beholds all beings in
preme soul, this soul alone, and the soul in all beings, cannot look
down on any creature. When one knows that all is soul, when he
beholds its unity, then is there no delusion, no grief."
"He is all-pervading, bodiless, pure, untainted by sin, all-wise,
ruler of mind, above all beings, knd self-existent. He distributed
things according to their nature for everlasting years." "^
" Adore Him, ye gods, after whom the year with its rolling days
' Svetasvaiara. ^ ChJiandogya. ^ Mutidaka^ I. i. 5. * Vayasaneya Upatu
VEDANTA. 357
is completed, the Light of lights, the Immortal Life. He is the
Ruler and Preserver of all, the Bridge, the Upholder of worlds lest
they fall." '
" The great, the Lord in truth, the Perfect One, the Mover of all
that is, the Ruler of purest bliss, He is Light and He is everlasting.
He, the Infinite Spirit, is like the sun after darkness. He is to be
adored by the deity of the sun : from Him alone has arisen the
ancient knowledge."
" By the Perfect Soul is all this universe pervaded. None can
comprehend Him in the space above, the space below, or the space
between. For Him whose name is infinite glory there is no like-
ness. Not in the sight abides his form. None beholds Him*by
the eye : they who know Him dwelling in the heart and mind be-
come immortal."
" Without hands or feet He speeds, He takes. Without eye He
sees, without ear hears. He is all-knowing, yet known by none ;
undecaying, omnipresent, unborn ; revealed by meditation ; whoso
knows Him, the all-blessed, dwelling in the heart of all beings, has
everlasting peace." ^
" He is not apprehended by the eye, not by devotions nor by
rites ; but he whose mind is purified by the hght of knowledge
beholds the undivided One, who knows the soul. Inconceivable
by thought, more distant than all distant things, and also near,
dwelling here in the heart for him who can behold." ^
"The wise who behold this Soul as the eternal among transient
things ; as the intelligent among those that know ; as that which,
though one, grants the prayers of many, — the wise, who behold the
one ruler and inner soul of all, as dwelling within themselves,
obtain eternal bliss ; they, not others." "^
" This is dearer than a son, than wealth, than all things ; for this
is deeper within. Whoever worships the soul as dear, to him what
is dear is not perishable.^ It is for the soul's sake that all are dear.^
" The soul is to be perceived only by its own true idea ; and only
by him who declares that it is real." ^
" Truth alone, not falsehood, conquers. By truth is opened the
road which the rishis trod, whose desires are satisfied, the supreme
abode. "' ^
1 Brihad, IV. iv. 22. » Svetasvatara, III. IV. VI.
3 Mimdaka, III. i. 7, 8. * Katha, V. 12, 13.
5 Brihad^ I. iv. 8. ' Brihad, II. iv. 5.
' Kaika, VI. 12, 13. 8 Mtmdaka, III. 6.
358
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
" Let one worship the Soul as his place, and his work shall not
perish. Whatsoever he desires from the Soul, the same shall he
obtain." ^
" He gains that world and those desires which he imagines in his
mind. Therefore let one who desires prosperity worship Him who
knows the souh" ^
" The wise who has studied the scriptures casts them by, as he
Soul is free- who seeks grain the chaff." ^
dom. " Yajnavalkya, when asked how a Brahman can do with-
out the sacrificial girdle, answered, ' The soul itself is his girdle.' " *
" They who fancy that oblations and rites are the highest end of
m^n know not any thing good. The foohsh ones go round and
round, coming back to decay and death, oppressed by misery, as
blind led by the blind." 5
" There is a higher and a lower science : the lower is that of the
Vedas, the higher that of the Eternal One." ^
" Worshipping deities as if these were apart from themselves, the
ignorant maintain their gods, as beasts support a man. It is not
pleasant to such gods that men should know Brahma," — and be
free.^
'' To behold the soul in itself alone is to subdue sin, not to be
Soul Is moral subdued by it." ^
discipline. " By holy acts shall one become holy, by evil ones evil.
As his desire, so his resolve ; as his resolve, so his work ; as his
work, so his reward." ^
" Whoso has not ceased from evil ways shall not obtain true
soul." >"
If prayer is aspiration to become one with ideal life,
Soul is then this Vedantic pantheism is itself essential-
prayer. ]y ^ prayer. And its religious earnestness lifts
up the old eternal cry for guidance, help, and rest.
There is an old hymn perhaps relating to the last
hours of life, which is often quoted in the Upanishads.
1 Brihad, I. iv. 15.
^ Amritanada Up., V. 18.
" Mzmdaka Up., I. ii. 7, 8, 10.
' Brihad, I. iv. 10.
» Ibid., IV. iv. s.
2 Mundaka, III. 10.
* yabala, Weber, Indische Studien, II 75.
« Mundaka Up., I- i. 5.
8 Brihad, IV. iv. 23.
" Katha Up., 11. 24.
* VEDANTA. 359
It appeals to deity as dwelling in the Sun, whose
outward light is invoked to give way to its spiritual
meaning: —
" To me, whose duty is truth, open, O Sun ! upholder of the
world, the entrance to truth, hidden by thy vase of dazzling light.
Withhold thy splendors that I may behold thy true being. For I
am immortal. The same soul that is in thee am I. Let my spirit
obtain immortality, then let my body be consumed. Remember
thy actions, remember, O my mind ! Guide, O Agni ! to bliss. O
God, all-knowing ! dehver from the crooked path of sin." '
"As the birds repair, O beloved ! to a tree to dwell there, so all
this universe to the Supreme." ^
" From the unreal, lead me to the real ; from darkness to light,
from death to immortality. This uttered overcomes the world." ^
" There is no end to misery, save in knowledge of God." ^
" ' Thrice,' let the saint say, ^ I have renounced all.' " ^
What was this absolute renunciation? It did Renunda-
not mean surrender of self-indulgence for the ^^°^-
sake of practical uses. It meant rejection of the
senses and the world altogether. His problem w^as
to deliver hi« soul from all that was conditional, de-
pendent, transient. And since he tracked these forms
of experience through every phase of his being, it
would seem at first sight as if he deliberately sought
self-annihilation. But this could not be true in any
recognized sense of the word. For he called the
highest goal for which he strove beatitude, and its
path emancipation. Its bliss was "knowing God," its
end "immortal life."
"A hundred fold the bliss of those who are gods by birth, is one
joy of him who reaches the world of Prajapati. But the world of
Brahma is the highest bliss of all." ^
'O
1 BriJiad, V. xiv; V&yasaneya Sank. Up.., 13-18. * Prasno, Up-, IV.
' Brihad, I. iii. 28. Yajtir Veda Mantras. * Svetasvatara., VI. 20.
B Arunika Up. (Weber, II. 178). « Brihad, IV. iii. 33.
360 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
I find no evidence that earnest men have ever made
Not self- ^ religion out of the desire of nonentity. Mys-
annihUation. ^j^g j^^ve always yeamcd to lose the sense of
separate and limited selfhood in the depths of eter-
nal and absolute being ; and they have, as invari-
abl}^ been charged with desiring to abolish personal-
ity. And the charge has usually come from those to
whom the Absolute and Eternal was, as nearly as
could well be, non-existent.
To me it is quite incredible that a religious philoso-
phy, so absorbed in the idea of Infinite Life as this is,
should aim at destroying, in any absolute sense, that
very consciousness which revealed it. And can we
suppose any one to be longing for nothing with his
whole heart and soul ? Great efforts have been made
to prove the Buddhist Nirvana such an irrationality
as this.^ But they are far from satisfiictory, and do
not prove any thing but the extreme difficulty of
making the mystical consciousness of the Oriental
mind stand in the clear definite moulds* of Western
thouo-ht.
It should be fully recognized that this ardent devo-
^.^ . ^ J tion souorht not death, but life; not unreality,
Life m God. & . ' •> r- j t
but reality ; to escape error, perturbation,
change ; conceit of the understanding, idolatry of
self, absorption in sense, and slavery to things. " Our
fire is piety, and in it I burn the wood of duality ;
instead of a sheep, I sacrifice egotism. This is my
The Alexandrian school of Greek thought was
pervaded by this Oriental thirst for the One and Eter-
1 Burnouf, Koeppen, St. Hilaire. But Duncker, Mohl, and Miiller have fully shown
the weakness of their interpretation.
• A Vedantist sage ; quoted in Dabistaft, ch. ii. 4. Horn is the sacrificial butter.
'M-,:^**
VEDANTA. \ ^ , A'j.2>^T- '^ \^^
nal. It pursued this "ecstasy," or identltyAof the /'
soul with its ideal object as the only reality, witVCferi-
earnestness of faith of which the Enneads of Plotinus^ ;J
remain a marvellous monument for all time. And
the same spirit gave religious fervor to the noblest
minds of Christian ages ; to the freest of those whom
the Church has refused to recognize, from age to
age ; a mystic passion for the Infinite that, however
unacknowledged, has been the fountain of the ideal
life in man.
The same in substance, how^ever remote the practi
cal Western mind from the life of the East, is Augus-
tine's ejaculation : "Thou hast made us, O Lord ! for
thyself; and our souls are restless till they return to
Thee." Mysteriously involved in the sense of immor-
tality is a secret reminiscence of the " immortal sea
which brought us hither." It haunts all religious
imagination from the Vedic hymns down to Tauler
and the Theologia Germanica ; to Wordsworth and
Emerson, and the devout sonnets of Henry Vaughan
and Jones Very. Say the Upanishads : —
" He who has found God has ceased from all wisdom of his own ;
as one puts out a torch and lays it down, when the place he sought
in the darkness is found." ^
" As the flowing rivers come to their end in the sea, losing name
and form, so, liberated from name and form, proceeds the wise to
the Divine Soul." ^
" By him who thinks Brahma is beyond comprehension is Brah-
ma known. He who thinks Him comprehended does not know
Him. Known as the one nature in every thought, He is truly
known. By this knowledge comes immortal life." ^
So sings the Sufi poet : —
" O Thou of whom all is the manifestation,
Thou, independent of ' thou and we,' Thyself ' thou and we,' —
* Amritanada. * Mundaka. 8 Kena.
362 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Thy nature is the spring of thy being : whatever is, is Thou ;
We all are billows in the ocean of thy being ;
We are a small compass of thy manifested nature."*
And so the Christian mystic : —
" God is a mighty sea, unfathomed and unbound :
Oh, in this blessed deep may all my soul be drowned ! " *
Here to abide, in the Spirit " that is without strife,
without decay, without death, and without fear,"^ was
the goal of that old ceaseless yearning to escape what
was called the "return to births," as involved in the
"bonds of actions." In a similar lihoris}ns, I. 139, 142, 143.
» Karika, XXXVII. « Apk., I. 129, 130.
» A ph., II. 29 ; K&riJi&, XIX.
SAJ^KHYA. 387
soul " ? Have we not here a germ of positive science ?
Is it any thing else than an instinctive presentiment of
natural law, and of the development of the world there-
by ? And is not the remanding of soul to the position of
a " witness and seer," not interfering with those innate
properties of spontaneous development, an imperfect
recognition of the invariability of natural law, and its
independence of all external volition or arbitrary in-
tervention ? I cannot find a better explanation than
this of his meaning, when, as if fascinated by the
self-adequacy of nature, he refers the orderly processes
of experience to modifications of an active but uncon-
scious principle. Yet the unconsciousness of Prakriti
is, as we have just seen, only relative to itself a;3 pro-
cess, as mode, or as law. It stands in the closest rela-
tion to conscious intelligence^ or soul, which, if not its
cause, is allowed to be the motive from which it acts
and the force w^hich " superintends " it.^ These are
hints that soul, in the Sankhya, really means spirit
guiding the course of nature, though Kapila does not
seem to have followed them out. So the strictest
modern positivist must recognize in natural law that
unity, beauty, order, mystery, which are in fact repre-
sentative of whatever intelligence holds most worthy
of itself.
What does Kapila mean here by "soul" and its
"desire"? How does Prakriti point to that for whose
service it exists ? In other words, how does the actual
enforce faith in the ideal ? Here is the compact
answer to the last questions : —
" Since sensible objects are for use of another [than them-
selves] ; since the opposite of that which has the three qualities
must exist ; since there must be superintendence ; since there must
* Karika, XVII. ; Aphorisms, I. 142.
•qSS RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
O
be one to enjoy ; and since there is a drawing to abstractionj — that
is, since every one desires release, — therefore [know we that]
Soul isP ^
What then is Soul? It is affirmed to be free from all
What is qualities which produce the imperfections of
soul? experience, — free, therefore, from their activ-
ity or pursuit of special objects, which in experience
produces dependence, bondage, loss, and grief. As
steadfast, imperturbable, perfectl}^ self-subsistent, it
must be related to the world of imperfect conditions
as a witness and a bystander only, not a participant
in these defects.
In other words, — as we should say, and as the
Hindu, in his fashion, says here, I think, quite clearly,
— an ideal capability stands fast in us, as the real sub-
stance of ourselves, untouched by the errors and stains
of life, unabated by its discouragements, with serenity
beholding them, as it were, in their real outwardness
to its own essence. y
Yet this ideal essence, like the Hellenic-Hebrew
Soul not "Wisdom," though " remaining in itself, makes
really bound. ^^^^ thlugs ucw." It is Constantly united with
Prakriti in the individual consciousness, and so af-
■pears to share in its infirmities, to be bound in
all the fetters of experience. But the appearance
is illusory. The soul is not really bound. In all
this confused activity, this unsatisfactory doing, it is
" the qualities " that are active, while the " stranger "
[soul] but appears the agent. ^ It is like our con-
founding fire and iron in a heated bar, or sun and
water in reflections from a stream ; like the color of
glass when a rose is near it. It is ilkision : " verbal ;
resides in the mind, not in the soul itself." ^ The soul
1 Kkrikd, XVII. 2 Ibid., XX. 3 Aph., I. 58.
SANKHYA. 389
cannot be bound. "Verily not any soul is bound,
or released, or transmigrates ; but nature (Prakriti)
alone is so, in relation to the variety of beings." ^
In other words, the bondage men feel is not essential
bondage ; ^ and thoroughly to know this by faith in
the soul as absolute, imperishable, and free,^ is libera-
tion. Plotinus, also, asserts the soul to be an essence
which miseries and changes cannot touch; that these
reach only to the shadow of it, not the substance ; that
its bliss is in pure seeing, free of the blindness of ma-
terial desires and pursuits. How the soul comes to be
united with " nature," or the defects of experience,
Kapila does not ask. He accepts the fact. Whence
comes our ideal vision, is not the first, nor the main
question, nor soluble for the scientific understanding at
any time. For what end it is always with us, is the
point of moment. And Kapila's answer is that, prac-
tically, " union is for the sake of liberation." Till
true discrimination is attained, till the validity and
independence of this higher personality is appreciated,
there remains the illusion which is bondage and pain.
The lame and the blind are journeying, and agree to
help each other : the blind carries the lame on his
shoulders, and the journey is accomplished, since the
one can walk and the other show the way. So " soul "
conjoined with " nature," if it cannot move, can see ;
and " nature," if it cannot see, can advance under
guidance. Thus liberation is effected, and the jour-
ney ends.'^ The Sankhya loves to describe the essen-
tial good-will that resides in the process, arduous as it
is; the real harmony of ideal and actual, the friend-
ly purpose that animates this necessary illusion and
1 Karika., LXII.; ApJu, I. 160, 162. 2 Aph-, I. 7.
5 Aph.y I. 12, IS, 19. * Karika, XXI.
390 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
defect; the effort, as it were, of Prakriti herself to
deliver man from his pain. That man shall know
and discern her truth, — not that she hold him
bound in ignorance, — is her purport. Unconscious
nature lives and loves, in his desire. "As people
engage in acts to relieve desires, so nature to liberate
soul; generous, seeking no benefit, nature accom-
plishes the wish of ungrateful Soul." ^ Her evolution
goes on " for deliverance of each soul : " it is " done
for another's sake as for self." ^ Here is unity of
spirit plucked even from the abysses of speculative
analysis, of essential distinction ! " Nothing," says
Gaudapada, "is, in my opinion, more gentle than
Prakriti : once aware of having been seen, she does
not expose herself again to the gaze of soul." ^ How
delicate and genial is this sense of illusion, which
makes error vanish from the eyes of truth, as one
who knows she should not be seen !
Similar ideas are found in the Gnostic systems.
And the fundamental principle of both philosophies
is the same. "Bondage is from misconception."'*
It consists in errors about the nature of soul. If this
seems to ignore the moral element, we have seen that
the intellectual and the moral are closely associated in
the old philosophies of the Aryan race : that " knowl-
edge " involves entering into the nature of what is
known, becoming one with the ideal, through aban-
donment of all selfish and sensual interests.
All Oriental wisdom assumes to a sfreater or less
Moral reia- ^^g^^^ ^^^ \rvi\\\ of thc Platouic maxim, that to
tionsofthis know virtue is to love it, and that whoso really
* ^ sees vices must shun them. That moral evil
1 K&rik&, LVIII. LX. 2 Ibid., LVI.
« Ibid., LXI. 4 A/>h., III. 24.
SANKHYA. 391
is from misconception, and is to be cured by the pure
vision of truth, is at least a principle tending to
purify the conscience, and urge it to the pursuit of
the real, to surrender of the shadow and the surface
to win the substance of virtue. In the absence of
that light which science lends to the conscience, the
moral effect of this absolute faith in right knowing must
have been relatively greater than that of distinctively
intellectual motives at the present day.
The Sankhya is philosophy rather than ethics ; and
its aphorisms do not enter definitely into the . ,
.... . Ethical
special disciplines by which pure " soul " was value of the
to be reached. Yet the very substance of its ^^"^^'^^'^
"discrimination" is the preference of higher to lower
principles ; of the eternal to the transient ; of ideal
personality to self-centred individuality ; of spirit to
sense ; of duty to desire. And the sum of those
"defects of the understanding" which cause ^' delay of
liberation" is distinctly defined to be " acquiescence ;"^
the self-complacency that causes It to stop short of that
perfect sacrifice bv which truth is fullv known.
Of the forms of such "acquiescence," four are in-
ternal. The first relates to nature^ and consists In
merely recognizing principles as of nature, without
going further ; the second, to means, a mere depend-
ance on observance ; the third, to time, a mere wait-
ing, as if liberation would come in good season ; the
fourth, to lack, expecting it to turn up by chance.
The other, or external, kinds of acquiescence, are
forms of abstinence from objects, merely because of
the trouble and anxiety they bring. ^
The practical philosophy of the Sankhya, as far as
^ Karika, I 2 Qaudapada on Kar., L.
392 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
it can be seen in the Aphorisms, in fact, reminds us of
the manly precepts of the later Stoic and the breadth
of the Eclectic schools.
" Not in a perturbed mind does wisdom spring."
" The lotus is according to the soil it grows in."
" Success is slow ; and not even, though instruction be heard, is
the end gained without reflection."
" Not by enjoyment is desire appeased."
" Go not, of thine own will, near to one driven by strong desire."
" He who is without hopes is happy."
" Though one devote himself to many teachers, he must take the
essence, as the bee from flowers."^
How far the sacrifice must be carried may be learned
Limits of from the following decisive aphorism of the
sdf-abnega. Karika I —
tion.
" Liberation obtained through knowledge of the twenty-five princi-
ples teaches the one only knowledge, — that neither I am, nor is
aught mine, nor do I exist." ^
Such is Wilson's translation, which doubtless a little
periphrasis would make more intelligible to the Teu-
tonic mind.
How are we to understand such a statement as this?
If it were the language of sentiment, instead of being,
as it is, a positive aphorism of philosophy, it might
find its equivalents in the mystical piety of every age.
That it should here mean either nihilism, or the " desire
of annihilation,'" is plainly impossible. We have seen
that even the Vedanta, in resolving all existence into
illusion, except the life of the soul in the absolute and
eternal, taught no such purpose of self-destruction.
Can we then imagine this to be, in any sense, compati-
ble with the intense realism of Kapila, who firmly
insists not only that nature is a positive principle and
1 A^/t., IV. 2 K&rikci, LXIV.
SANKHYA. 393
entity,^ but that soul is not one, but many; and that
each of these souls is a unit, or monad, real and
imperishable?^ The whole aim of the Sankhya is
liberation ^^for the sake of this,''^ which is the -pi'o^er
■personality ^ and nowise to be lost, nor merged, nor
marred. Kapila indeed takes special pains to declare
that "the soul's aim is not annihilation."^ And the
commentators on the verse above quoted explain it to
mean that the one true wisdom is " difference from
egotism," and "exemption from being the seat of
pain;" i.e.^ from the errors and bonds of the under-
standing in its consciousness of agency.* "By these
expressions, — 'neither I am, nor is aught mine, nor
do I exist,' — we are not to understand negation
of soul. This would be direct contradiction to the
Sankhya categories. It is intended merely as nega-
tion of the soul's having any active participation, in-
dividual interest, or property, in human pains and
human feelings. The verse does not amount, there-
fore, as Cousin has supposed, to "le nihilisme absolu,
dernier fruit du skepticisme."^
It should seem that the term ^Wiunian^^^ in Wilson's
explanation, as indicating what is to be dismissed from
the life in liberation, covers too large a ground ; since
the soul, as Kapila conceives it, is properly the very
essence of our humanity, and all human experience is
for its sake.^
Yet, inasmuch as in Hindu thought knowledge of
soul can be attained only by becoming soul, it Disparage-
would follow that the interests of the body, Outward.
1 Aph., I. 79 ; VI. 53.
* Aph., I. 144, 149-151. "As the elements are real so is the soul real." Yajnav.,
III. 149-
s Aph.^ I. 47. * Chandrika, quoted by Wilson, p. 180.
e Wilson, p. 181. « Aph.^ II. 46.
394 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
and properly the body itself, must pass away before
liberation, in the pure and perfect sense, can be
achieved. Disparagement of man's physical and
practical relations is of course the weak point in this
as in all Oriental philosophy. Kapila's insistence
on the "isolation" of soul, and its distinction from
''nature," involves a constant endeavor to separate the
two in the interest of the former, which, even his
realistic view of " nature," and his perception of her
essential sympathy with the "aim of soul," cannot
counteract. Thus while he affirms that liberation is
possible in this life, and without the dissolution of
the body, he is careful to explain that, wdien this is
attained, soul remains invested with body only as the
potter's wheel continues to whirl, after the potter has
left it, by the impetus previously given. ^ The aspira-
tion after purely spiritual existence in the present life
has produced similar disparagement of outward rela-
tions in Christianitv also, froni the New Testament
down to the renaissance-epoch in modern Europe, and
even till the recent growth of physical science. Its
asceticism could only be counterbalanced by social
interests and practical aims ; and these have but fol-
lowed up the "necessary discriminations" insisted
on by the Kapilas and other rationalists of old, with a
higher synthesis of soul and sense.
But, liberation not being accomplished in this life,
body was, accordino^ to the Sankhva, not
Linga, or -^ ^ "
spiritual escaped at death. It accompanied the soul
^"'^^* still, in its subtile form, the linga Sa^'ira?
or " spiritual body," which consisted of all those prin-
ciples and rudimental elements which flow from Prak-
' Karika, LXVII.
2 Li?iga signifies a characteristic, or mark. Sarira is the body.
SANKHYA. 395
riti, with the exception of the enveloping gross organs
and bodily frame ; these, and only these, perishing at
death. The linga, with all its component parts, — un-
derstanding, egoism, and the subtile organs that serve
them, — is subject to transmigration, requires the sup-
port of a special vehicle or body, and ceases only wdth
the process of liberation, and the full realization of
soul.^
Here Kapila stops. He does not tell us what he
holds this life of realized soul to be, save in its Kapiia's
difference from all present experiences through ^^°"*-
the understanding, from all our self-conscious feeling
and action. Not his to describe the end, but to state
the distinctions that condition it, and to hint the way
to it. But the implication seems to be, that with the
fulfilment of man's highest ideal comes the ineffable
reality, which we can neither understand nor con-
ceive ; but to which all that we see, and know, and
feel, and dream ourselves the doers and possessors of,
is but the imperfect and transient means ; the deaf,
dumb, and blind servant of a secret which its finiteness
helps, by very contrast, to reveal.
The substance is this. There is a reality^ abid-
ing eternally, to know which is life, and be-Hisaffirma-
fore which all other intelligence, as Paul says ^^°^'
of " tongues and prophecies and knowledge," shall
" vanish away." And as the apostle's reason for the
evanescence of these is that " we know in part, and
prophesy in part, and when that wlvch is perfect is
come that which is in part must be done away," Kap-
ila would probably ask why the specially Christian
faith, hofe, and love, which Paul thought sure to
^ The Bhagav. Giia says that, *' when spirit abandons a body, it migrates, taking with it
its senses, as the wind wafts along with itself the perfume of the flowers."
396 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
abide when knowledge shall have been proved a vain
thing, must not also, as being in like wise imperfect
and partial, pass away when that which is perfect is
come. And shall we not hear Kapila and Socrates as
well as Jesus and Paul? Are ideals of pure knowledge
essentially less adequate than ideals of faith and love,
if these disparage knowledge? Will not the future
insist on the necessity of independent seeing, in order
to right believing and true helping, — on the unity
of science and love?
For fuller understandinor of this interestmof svstem,
TheAphor-l^t US rcvicw its leading characteristics, with
isms. special illustration from the aphorisms ascribed
to Kapila himself.
The Sankhya proves the capacity of Hindu genius
Differences for SL vcry different form of thought fi-om that
°^7c^T^ which we have been tracing- throuo|;h the mvs-
and bank- o » ^
hya. tical unities of the Vedanta. There is no pas-
sive receptivity of mind, no dissolving of distinctions
in the infinite as the only real. Precisely the opposite.
The word Sankhya refers us to mimbe7's as definite
entities : it means to distinguish, to weigh, to judge.
"Learn to discriminate, and be free," was the precept
of this philosophy ; and that it was needed in Indian
thought has already become sufficiently plain.
Both Vedanta and Sankhya aim at spiritual emanci-
pation. But the one assumes absolute unity, and
seeks freedom by solving all distinctions therein ; the
other assumes essential distinction, as between " soul "
and blind "natural" forces, and seeks freedom by dis-
solving^ the bonda<^e which consists in confoundinof
them.
The Vedanta affirms all spirit to be absolutely one :
SANKHYA. 397
the Sankhya recognize^ the diversity of persons as
real. So that while the Vedantist escapes bondage
when he sees himself to be one with Brahma, the
Sankhyan is free when he knows himself as really
separate from all blind and confused conceptions, all
crude, intractable material in the natural order of ex-
perience. "To know that one was not bound when
one seemed to be so, — this," says Kapila, " is libera-
tion." So the Vedantist could say, but hardly in the
interest of individual being. For him the real soul
was free, in that its substance was not in the indi-
vidual self, but in God. For the other it was free, in
that it was itself substance, as individual, which bon-
dage could not really touch. The Nyaya, also,
affirms individual souls to be real, eternal, and even
infinite.^
For the Vedantist, bondage was unreal, because the
ego that was bound and the phenomenal world which
bound it were alike void of essential life.
For the Sankhyan, bondage was unreal, because
while the world that seemed to bind it was granted
real, the true ego^ also real, for ever stood beyond its
power. Definite forms of existence were maya (illu-
sion) for the one : bondage itself, bondage alone, was
mava for the other.
The Sankhya is analytic, as the Vedanta is synthe-
tic. It reacts against the very idea of unity ; and, so
far as is possible, avoids it ; being, in fact, not a sys-
tem of theology at all, but a system of analytic phi-
losophy in the interest of individual (speculative and
moral) freedom. Without denying an ulterior synthe-
sis, it affirms its two primary principles, Purusha (the
soul) and Prakrid ("nature"), which again are divis-
1 Colebrooke's Analysis, Essays, I. 268.
398 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
ible ; since of souls there is multiplicity, and of Prak-
riti there is a primal and also a developed, " phe-
nomenal," form.
Prakriti, "rootless (or primary) root," is not, let us
Meaning of o^ice more note, material nature in any abso-
Prakriti. j^j-g geuse ; since, as developed through contact
with "soul," it appears in a series of evolutions, of
which the first member is apprehension^ and the sec-
ond self-consciotcsness, or self-will, the egoistic ele-
ment ; out of which, as Hindu thought is wont to make
mind precedent and body derivative, arc generated the
subtile organs and gross body of sensation and action. ^
To explain the real meaning of the conception, we
have the further fact that Prakriti is also the original
equipoise or latent potentiality of three psychological
qualities, evolved in man through its union with mind,^
— the ascending quality {sattva^ or goodness), allied
to essence and light; the impulsive, ungoverned ro-
tating quality (j-ajas^ or passion) ; and last, the down-
ward-tending quality of weight and darkness {tamas^
or irrationality). Of this triplicity of qualities, which
runs through the whole of Hindu thought, and which
has formed substantially the basis of psychological
conceptions in other races also, Prakriti was the mere
potential ground, or indifference, generating them in
definite forms, only through union with soul, itself
unconscious ; " energizing spontaneously, not b}'
thought," yet really existing as Prakriti, in these
qualities, the phenomena of mind.
From all which, we can perhaps divine the meaning
of the word in this subtle system of analytics. Prak-
riti cannot be dead matter ; nor is it independent mind.
It indicates simply, in my judgment, an effort to ex-
1 Aph.,l. 71, 73; II. 16, 18. » A/>h., III. 48-50.
SANKHYA. 399
press that mysterious interweaving of unconscious and
active powers, which obscures the rekuion of mind
with body, not to Hindu vision only, but lo all human
insight hitherto attained.
Over against this, Kapila posits essential man,
seeking to lift the conception as far as possible Meaning of
above these sources of error, confusion, and ^i^rusha.
consequent bondage, with which man is phenomenally
connected, and to affirm his inalienable ideal sover-
eignty. "Soul (purusha) is;"^ and it is substantial
and valid in every individual soul ; not competent
merely to liberate itself from this blind Prakriti and
its bondage of illusions, but in and of itself vitally
and for ever free, the ultimate force " for whose service
this exists and energizes." Hence it is seen only
when felt as throned serene behind the warfare of life,
inviolate ; a witness and seer in itself, " neither agent
nor patient," though taking the tinge of qualities by
reflection merely, so as to appear both the one and
the other, just as glass reflects the color of the object
near it ; and moving the organs " by proximity only,"
through some subtle authority lying behind contact,
and of a higher quality than that ; as the loadstone
moves the iron, or a king his army through orders
and not by engaging in the fight. ^ A grand concep-
tion, or divination by pure intellect, of the authority
of mind over circuvistance, and of the impossibility
of final moral and spiritual failure. This is to lay
a noble basis for psychology and theology in the
dignities of personal being ; and for that inward union
with imperishable principles which lifts it above
transiency and loss. It is the affirmation of ideal
'personality^ in a very high form.
1 Aph.y VI. I. 2 Aph., I. io6; II. 29; I. 96.
400 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Here then the two principles ; not absolute duality,
Not pure since Prakriti is said to generate y^r the sake
dualism. qJt i/^^ sotd, and thus soul alone is declared
really and absolutely to be. Yet the Sankhya makes
no S3'stematic effort to reduce the two to one, nor even
to urge the unity of either with itself It is too much
absorbed in the endeavor to distinguish the proper
personality from temporary illusions, overmastering
passions.; and special solicitudes, and too thoroughly
possessed by its glad vision of the soul as divine
repose, as free beholding, as pure transcendence. So
the substance of its insight is freedom ; its watch-
word, "the separateness (or detachment) of soul.''^
So profoundly was the Hindu mind prepossessed
. ,. by the synthetic tendency, that an analytic
Rationalism ^ ^ J J
of the Sank- process was but natural reaction, sundering
^^ the elements, and drawing forth their respec-
tive validities. Thus the Sankhya takes special pains
to prove, against Vedantic absorption of the many in-
to the One, that there is a real imdti'pUcity of souls. ^
And it explains the Vedic texts which affirm the one-
ness of soul, as referring simply to the comprehen-
siveness of " genus." ^
The Sankhya is rationalistic, as the Vedanta is
pietistic. It is sceptical, as the other is believing.
It is active criticism, as the other is unquestioning
faith. It appeals to common sense and realistic per-
ception against the unbalanced mysticism that merely
absorbed all things into one. It is an effort to escape
from this into the true sense of spiritual being, by
concentration on perception, inference, testimony, and
the exclusion of all causes of false notions.*
1 Apk; v. 6s ; VI. I, 70. 2 Ibid., I. i4c^isi.
8 Ibid., I. 154. * Ibid., I. 87, 89 100.
SANKHYA. ' 401
The Vedanta in its best form recognizes that the
highest truth cannot be reached by the study .
of the Vedas, and that the wise may " throw
them by, as one who seeks grains the chaff." Its
piety left paths open out of the bibliolatry that beset
its schools.
But the Sankhya made a more radical protest ;
for it starts from postulates of reason, not of xreatment
faith. The worship of the letter, the author- °f''^^'^^'^^-
ity of a book, must cease. Kapila declares plainly,
The Veda is not eternal ; it is not supernatural nor
superhuman ; its meaning does not transcend the com-
mon intuition. He who understands the secular mean-
ings of words can understand their sense in the Veda.
There is no special bible sense ; there is no authorit}^
of scriptures apart from their self-evidence and the
fruit of their teaching. They do not proceed from a
supreme Person (Iswara) ; for since one liberated
could not desire to make them, and one unliberated
could not have power, no such supreme Man or Lord
can have been their author. They are there; a breath
of self-existence ; a fact m other words, traceable to
no special mind. That is all that can be said.^ Kap-
ila, it is true, on the other hand, did not dispute the
Vedas. But he called them " self-evident conveyers
of right knowledge, through the patentness of their
power to instruct rightly." ^ In other words, he rested
his respect for them on their appeal to his own reason,
and judged them by their tendencies. What he found
contrary to his intuition and his judgment, he ascribed
to such and such a motive, and quietly set it aside. ^
Their central idea of unity, for instance, he disposes
« Aph., V. 40-51. » Aph., v. 51.
• Roer, Introd. to Svet&svatara Upan.^ p. 36.
26
402 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
of thus: "Such texts as, 'all is soul alone,' are there
' for the sake of the undiscriminating,' ' to help the
weak to meditation.' " ^ In view of all this, it can
hardly be supposed that Kapila allowed absolute
authority to the Vedas. Decidedl}^ criticism of the
" holy text " has here begun. Its later development
forms a strikino; feature of the Buddhist and Puranic
systems, which, in the main, follow the Sankh^^a.^
" Scriptural rites and forms are but works : they are not the
Ofritualism. cl^ief end of man." ^
" Pain to victims must bring pain to the sacrificer of
them." *
How indeed, with his intense conviction of the free-
dom of the soul, could Kapila believe that any outward
conformities would satisfy its desire ? To know itself
is its wisdom and its rest. Here is what he says
of it : —
" Soul is other than body ; not material, because overseeing
Of spiritual physical nature, and because, while this is the thing ex-
liberties, perienced, the soul it is that experiences." ^
" Atoms are not the cause of it, for atoms have neither pleasure
nor pain."**
" Light does not pertain to the unintelligent, and the soul is
essential lisfht." '
«5'
"Mind, as product of undiscerning activity (Prak-
riti) and as made of parts, is perishable, but not soul." ^
It is an error to mistake even mind, as such, for soul.^
" Only soul can be liberated ; because only that can
be isolated, in which blind, changeful qualities are but
reflected, and do not constitute its essence." ^^ Simply,
■ 1 Ap/t., v. 63, 64. > Wilson's Essays.
8 Ap/i., I. 82. * Ibid., I. 84.
" Ibid., I. 139-142. 6 Ibid., I. 113.
1 Ibid., I. 145. « Ibid , I. 136; V. 70-73.
• Ibid., I. 129. io Ibid., I. 144.
SANKHYA. 403
as we have seen, a form of expressing that pure in-
dependence which this system claims for spiritual
substance, or rather for spiritual integrity.
" The soul is solitary, uncompanioned : it is constant freedom, a
witness, a seer." '
" Liberation is not through works, which are tran-
sient ; nor through the worship of the All, whatiiber-
which must be mingled with fancies about the ^^^°^ '^•
world; "^ " nor through the desire of heaven, for that
desire is to be shunned."^ "It is not the excision
of any special qualities ; not possessions, nor magic
powers ; not going away to any world, since soul is im-
movable, and does not go away ; not conjunction with
the rank of gods, which is perishable ; not absorption
of the part into the whole ; not destruction of all ; not
the void, — nor yet joy:"* but more and better than
all these, to know the difference which separates the
undiscerning movement of qualities, or tendencies to
goodness, passion, and darkness in -the senses and
the mind, from free spiritual being, and so " to thirst
no more ; " ^ "a work not of a moment, but of that
complete concentration and devotion, which has many
obstacles." ^
How finely affirmative through all this negation is
Kapila's appeal to pure reason to prove that Appeal to
bondage is not essential to the soul ; '' that for reason,
ever, within man, whether he knows it or not, and lifted
above the possibility of subjection to evil, witness and
seer, watching and waiting its hour, indefeasible and
inviolate, is the principle of purity and freedom ! ^
" To know the difference, and that one was not bound
1 ^/;^., v. 65; 1. 162: II. 29. 2 ^^/;., in. 26, 27.
3 Ibid., III. 52. 4 Ibid., v. 74-83.
5 Ibid., II., VijnSna Bhikshu's Introd. ; so SvetaJvatara, III. 10; IV. 7-17.
« Ibid., II. 3- ■^ APK 1-7, &c. 8 Aph., I. 162.
404 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
when one seemed to be so,"^ — is Kapila's idea of
"liberation;" and he knew it was not to be reached
without paying the price in all that surrender of lower
desires on which he insists.
To take all this on the authority of pure Reason ;
to believe it because it seemed most rational and be-
coming, and so to stake the issues of life upon it, — is
surely an achievement for all ages and religions to
respect.
For this great work of liberation, Prakriti is but an
„. ^ instrument. She, the really bound, "binds
All IS for ''
man's ideal hcrself scvcn ways, but becomes liberated in
^' one form only," which is " knowledge " of the
truth of thinors.^ All is thus for the ideal life of man.
"The soul is the seer, the organs are its instruments."^
"Creation is for the soul's sake, from Brahma down
to a post ; till there be liberation thereof."* "Nature
serves soul like a born slave ; " " creates for its sake, as
the cart carries saffron for its master^"^ And " sense "
itself becomes " supersensuous " through this necessity
for mind as the explanation of its phenomena. " It is
a mistake to suppose that sense is identical with that
in which it is seated."^
That all this inherent sovereignty is ascribed to
every individual soul, and the " multiplicity of
Is the Sank- -^ _ .
hyaathe- souls " iusisted ou, lias been thought to involve
^^^^'^' unbelief in unity of essence above this multi-
plicity of individuals ; and hence the division into
"Theistic" and "Atheistic" Sankhya ; Kapila being
regarded as representative of the latter, and Patanjali
of the former.
It is true that Kapila's jealousy for the freedom
1 A ph., I. 155. 2 jipfi,^ I XI. 73. 8 Afih., II. 29.
* Ibid., III. 47. Mbid., III. 51 ; VI. 40. « Ibid., II. 23.
SANKHYA. 405
and self-subsistence of spirit carried him to the fur-
thest possible isolation of its essence, in each and
every individual beings from finite conditions. But
the Sankhya cannot, even in his logic, be called athe-
istic. On the contrary, as Bunsen has noticed, " God,
regarded as the undivided Unity, therefore the eternal
essence of minds when perfected, is an assumption, or
■postulate^ running through the whole system, like
that of the existence of light in a treatise on colors ; "
and fairly inferrible, as a " Divine Order of the Uni-
verse," from the "recognition of reason, knowledge,
righteousness, as common attributes of these individ-
ual minds." ^ And the latest translator of the Bhaga-
vadgita, in an elaborate review of Hindu philosophy,
asserts, from a point of view quite different from Bun-
sen's, that the Sankhya " not only does not deny the
existence of a Supreme Being, but even hints at it in
referring the emanation of individual souls to a spirit-
ual essence gifted with volition."^ The idea of a
multiplicity of souls, real, endless, and eternally dis-
tinct from body, is not inconsistent with theism ; since
the Nyaya, which follows the Sankhya in this belief,
also declares the Supreme Soul (Paramatma) to be
"one, eternally wise, and the source of all things."^
It is curious to note how similar, in many respects,
is Patanjali's description, in his theistic Yoga^ sys-
tem, of an ^^ Iswara^'' or Lord, to that which Kapila
gives of ^^ Soul,'' — "untouched by troubles, works,
fruits, or deserts." Were not both seeking, each in
his own way, the spiritual ideal in its independence of
limit or change? Kapila could not have admitted
^ God in History, I. 336.
2 Thomson's Bhag. Gita, Introd., p. Iviii. Such definite reference to emanation I have
not been able to find in Kapila.
* Colebrooke's Essays, I. 268. * "Yoga" means conjunction (with deity).
406 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
an Iswara, like that of the Yoga, who is in one sense
distinct from all actual souls ; yet his conception of soul
itself afforded ample basis for the idea of infinite Mind.
Theistic scholiasts on Kapila's aphorisms affirm that
his denial of an Iswara is but hypothetical, not abso-
lute. It would have been more correct to say that it
did not deny central and tm^nanent deity.
In truth it was Kapila's function to apply a disinte-
grating analysis to the monarchical sii^ernaturalistic,
as well as to the blindly ^pantheistic, conceptions of his
time.
He simply shows that there is no evidence of an
Iswara, or Lord, — that is, of a " governor of nature,"
in such a sense as the separation of soul from nature
and its isolation as witness forbade ; one, namely,
whose action would involve imperfection ; the sway of
some " passion " or desire ; a certain needy " working
for his own benefit ■ or glory, like a worldly lord ; " ^
one whose interference should be necessary to the
retributions of conduct, — an inadmissible condition,
in his view ; since works produced their consequences
by having their law for ever in themselves. Christian
theology also has its Is'wara. The interfering, self-
interested Providence, the " deus ex machina" of the
supernaturalist, is found in all religions, whether in
early or late stages, w^herever there is an unreasoning
faith. It was this idea of a mechanical Deity that
Kapila seems to have rejected so positively in the
name of an inherent virtue in the constant course of
things ; the adequacy of those laws of being which he
sought to unfold. And the like protest of rationalism
returns to-day, at the culmination of a Semitic faith
also, with similar sanctions and justifications. The
1 A/>h., v. 3, 4, 6.
SANKHYA. 407
selfishness of a God who could create man " for his
own glory," and interfere capriciously with the laws
he has made, renders denial of such Iswara a duty
still.
All this is not positive piety, not heartfelt theism.
But neither is it atheism. It does not deny deity to
spirit. It denies creation and interference ab extra,
by spirit ; and this, in order to exalt it above all that is
conditional, and to isolate it so that it may affirm its
own highest ideal of freedom and self-subsistence.
And, with all its emphasis on the multiplicity of souls,
it constantly describes soul as such, — not souls, but
soul, — as if it were indeed but one in essence, after
all : one of those unconscious confessions, by which
all reasoning assumes the necessity of primal unity ; in
other words, of God. Love indeed does not move in
these depths of logic. But the intellect also has its
work to do, and we have here a legitimate form of this
work.
If Kapila is not distinctly ethical and theistic, it is,
we repeat, because he is not teaching a religion, but a
system of analytic philosophy ; because the Sankhya
is a criticism, not a confession of faith. If it is in-
complete ; if it does not fuse its own elements and
reconcile its own poles of thought, it is yet a protest
against the one-sided mysticism and supernaturalism,
which do not sufficiently guard the dignity and seren-
ity of spirit, in the form under which they conceive its
relation to the world.
It was in fact found easy to develop out of the
Sankhya those very elements of universal pruits of the
religion which it failed of positively affirming. Sankhya.
Its intellectual criticism was the condition and germ
at once of the purest theism and the most practical
408 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
humanity in Oriental history ; of lessons in love and
worship which Christendom cannot afford to despise
nor to ignore.
Its clear separation of soul from sense was unfolded
into the theistic Sankhya and the Karma Yoga of
the Bhagavadgita, in which the old Vedantic panthe-
ism is inspired with the thought of deity as both inde-
pendent and providential ; as at once purely spiritual,
and the All in all.
Its free dealing with bibliolatry and tradition, its
appeal to practical reason, and its trust in the ade-
quacy of the dialectic faculty, issued not only in the
independence of the best Puranas ; but, far better than
this, in the pure democracy and boundless brother-
hood of Buddhism, — a gospel of " mercy for all."
Had those contemplative philosophies been so par-
alyzing to the heart and will as they would at first
seem, they could not have afforded groundwork for
even a reaction to this great impulse. Oriental in its
scale and ardor, to emancipate the world through
love.
Our review of Hinduism already justifies us in af-
instinctof firming that the profound intuition of Unity
Unity. traversed the whole field of desire and belief,
and that in this one branch of the Aryan race it found
scope for revealing those great typical moulds in
which its aspirations are elsewhere found to grow.
III.
A
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA
^
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA.
'T^HE date of the Bhagavadgita, or " Divine Lay,"
"*- the most important episode of the Ma- The Divine
habharata, although uncertain, cannot be far ^^y-
distant on either side from the beginning of the Chris
tian era..^ It embodies, in the form of dialogue, a
revelation by Krishna, as incarnation of the Supreme,
to the hero Arjuna, on the field of Kuru ; and the
armies of two opposing dynasties, about to join battle,
are drawn up in silence to await the close of this
transcendental communion between the man and the
god. Its initial motive is to remove the scruples of
the prince against destroying human life, which have
paralyzed his power to fulfil the duties of a soldier
and a ruler. To this end it celebrates the sovereignty
of the soul over the body, its eternal essence, which
death cannot harm, and the fulfilment of personal
duty as the way of life and the path of glory. The
use of such arguments to reconcile men to the sternest
obligations involved in a state of war is itself an im-
pressive illustration of the power of ideal interests.
It contrasts favorably with the use of arguments from
immortality to justify the destruction of the heretic's
body in order to save his soul from eternal woe, or to
1 Thomson's transl., Inirod., p. cxiv. ; Lassen's Frefacg, p. xxxvi.
412 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
make the threat of future punishment more appalling.^
The meditations of Arjuna before a Hindu epic battle
contrast in many ways with the prayers of Cromwell's
soldiers before a real English one. They are, how-
ever, alike in the recognition of ideal relations in the
sternest actual work.
But this is incidental to the great purpose of the
poem, which covers the whole ground of theology,
philosophy, and ethics. It is the final flower of
Hindu intellect and piety ; the summary reconciliation
and poetic fusion of the best elements that preceded
it in the mystical, rationalistic, and practical schools.
It is better known to modern scholars than any
other production of Oriental genius ; having been
again and again edited with rare critical industry, re-
sulting in the statement of Schlegel, based on diligent
comparison of a great number of manuscripts, that
the differences between these are almost impercep-
tible ; while Lassen, after a still more extended use
of materials, adds, but fifteen slight emendations.^
The disagreement among translators and critics on
here and there a passage^ interferes in no degree
with our sense of possessing an accurate transcript
of this, the most important of all records of Eastern
faith, into the languages of the West.^ And the en-
thusiasm of its European students almost rivals that
veneration which in India has assigned it a place
not inferior in dignity and authority to the Vedas
themselves.^
Wilhelm von Humboldt celebrates it as "the most
* See Matt. xii. 32 ; xxv. 41. * Lassen, p. xxxiv.
8 See especially Wilson's criticisms on Lassen and Schlegel (Essays on Satiks. Litera-
ture, vol. iii,).
* The translations consulted in the present chapter are Schlegel's Latin version, edited
by Lassen (1846), and the English versions of Wilkins (17S5) and Thomson (1855).
" Lassen, p. xxvii.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 413
beautiful, perhaps properly the only true, philosophical
song, that exists in any known tongue." Lassen
shrinks from attempting to recommend it, lest he
should imply that it has need of any praise of his.
Warren Hastings notes a " sublimity of conception,
reasoning, and diction, almost unequalled ; " and Schle-
gel closes his Latin version with a pious invocation of
the unknown prophet bard, "whose oracular soul is as
it were snatched aloft into divine and eternal truth
with a certain ineffable delight."
It is indeed, though not without its imperfections
like the rest, one of the grand immortal forms in relig-
ious literature ; an eternal word of the Spirit in man.
It combines in broad and inspired synthesis the
various points of view from which the Hindu j^g compre-
schools had contemplated the union of philoso- i^ensiveness.
phy and faith. Opening with the practical doctrine
of duty, as conceived by the Yoga, it unfolds the Idea
of God from the best side of the Vedanta, and the
speculative analysis of man's spiritual relations after
the formulas and in the freedom of the Sankhya, and
ends with the substance of mystical piety, — deliver-
ance, through self-renunciation and devotion, into
union w^ith deity.
It adheres indeed to the system of caste ; yet seeks
to soften its injustice^ by declaring perfection itsuniver-
open to all who do faithfully their own work, ^^^'^y-
-and making this very dogma of natural subordination
emphasize the call to every class to seek refuge in
God. Even while, with the old contempt which
Buddhism had repudiated so nobly, it once mentions
women with the lowest castes, it yet declares that
^ A method not unlike that of the early Christian teachers touching slavery.
414 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
all who resort to God will reach the highest goal.^
Krishna says : —
" I have neither friend nor foe : I am the same to all. And all
who worship me dwell in me, and I in them." ^
" To them who love me, I give that devotion by which they
come at last to me." ^
" The soul in every creature's body is invulnerable ; "^ and none
who has faith, however imperfect his attainment, or however his
heart have wandered from right discipline, shall perish, either in
this world or in another. He shall have new births, till, purified
and made perfect, he reaches the supreme abode." ^
" Mankind turn towards my path in every manner, and accord-
ing as they approach me so do I reward them." ^
Deity here is not abstraction, but speaks to man as
, . . Creator, Preserver, Friend. Krishna is the
Its god inti-
mate with companion and intimate counsellor of Arjuna,
'°^"' revealing to him out of pure love "^ the law
of duty and the path of immortal life ; yet preserving
the majesty and mystery of the Infinite. This is the
" Supreme Universal Spirit," above and behind* the
universe, as well as its inmost substance ; the Maker
as well as the All. " I am the origin of all ; from me
all proceeds."*^ "Thou," says Arjuna, "thou only,
knowest thyself by thyself, O Creator and Lord of
all that exists, God of gods, most ancient of Beings !"^
And Krishna says, "I am the soul that exists in the
heart of all beings. I am the beginning, the middle,
the end, of all things." ^^^
He is death as well as life ; absorbing all forms, to
^^ . . the terror of the finite worshipper ; yet the
The vision ^ ^ •'
of Time as tcrror is not meant to be final. Arjuna would
estroyer. j^gj^Qj^^ ^j-^g wholc infinite of deity with mortal
eyes. His prayer is answered ; and he sees what
» Bk. G., ch. ix. 2 Ibid. » Ibid., ch. x. * Ibid., ch. ii.
« Ibid , ch. vi. 6 Ibid., ch. iv. ^ Ibid., ch. x. » Ibid., ch. x.
^ The term is Purtisha, or person^ ch. x. w ibid., ch. x.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 415
mortal eyes can see, the onward sweep of atoms and
worlds and souls from life to death. This is the terri-
ble, all-devouring form under which the god appears.
The mystery of time, whelming all objects of sense, is
concentrated into One Visible Shape, clothed by the
tropical imagination, which most dreads the power of
fire, in terrors and splendors that no eye can endure.
The transient, for ever vanishing into the bosom of
the eternal, stands manifest in one immeasurable sym-
bol. Flaming mouths and ventral abysses open to
engulf it ; down these, through rows of dreadful
teeth, the human heroes rush, by their own will, as
full streams roll on to meet the ocean, as troops of
insects seek their death in the taper's flame. ^ Very
apt symbolism it is, in view of the other and immediate
purpose, to reconcile the hero to the dread necessity
of carnage that fronted the assembled hosts.
As in the old Hebrew legends men fall upon their
faces before the vision of Jehovah, so is it ns friendly
with Arjuna here. But this " awe is mingled i^eaning.
with delight." And its cry of trust is, —
"Thou shouldst bear with me, O.God ! as a father with his son,
as a friend with his friend, a lover witli his beloved. Be gracious,
O habitation of the universe ! show me thy other [more human]
form." ^
And the vision of destruction vanishes, when the
divine relations of destruction are thus made plain,
into the familiar shape of the companion and friend.
Through the terrors of Death and Time, that eternal
good-will has been abiding unchangeable ; and the
sublimest lesson of life is learned.
" Be not alarmed, nor troubled, at having seen this my terrible
1 Bh. Gt ch. xi. « Ibid.
4l6 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
form. But look free from fear, with happy heart, upon this other
form of mine.
" That which thou hast seen is very difficult to behold ; not to
be seen by studying the Vedas, nor by mortifications, nor alms-
givings, nor sacrifices. Even the gods are always anxious to be-
hold that form. But only by worship, which is rendered to me
alone, am I to be seen, and known in truth, and obtained. He
Cometh to me whose works are done for me, who holdeth me
supreme ; who is my servant only ; who hath abandoned all conse-
quences, and liveth amongst all men without enmity." ^
This Hindu form of the faith that deity is present in
„. , , human shape, to teach, console, instruct, and
Hindu and *^
Christian in- save meu, and to make clear and sweet to
carnations, ^j^^j^ ^^iQ mystcHes of death and change,
differs from the Christian idea of incarnation,, as set
forth in the gospel of John, in this respect among
others, that it does not seek to confine the freedom of
the universal and infinite to a single historic form.
Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, the all-pervading
Preserver, is not claimed to be the only possible Word
of God in the flesh for all time. Not once for all is
this immanent life invested in a man.
" Although I am not in my nature subject to birth or decay, and
am lord of all created beings, yet in my command over nature as
mine own, I am made evident by my own (maya) power ; and as
often as there is a decline of virtue and insurrection of vice and
injustice in the world, I make myself evident ; and thus I appear^
from age to age, for the preservation of the just, the destruction of
evil-doers, and the establishment of virtue." ^
This is the Krishna of philosophy ; but it expressed
a truth that lay deep in the religious instinct of the
people.
Accordingly, for the worship of the "all-pervading
Preserver," incarnation, or avatar a (descent), runs
> Bh. G., ch. xi. > Ibid., ch. iv.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 417
through every form of life, beginning in earliest ages
with the creatures in which it was supposed that the
primitive piety of mankind must have beheld deity,
and passing on through a series of saints, heroes,
redeemers, to a final judge, so reaching to the bounds
of time. In the latest Puranas no less than twenty-
two of these avataras are ascribed to this unfailing
providence ; ^ not all indeed of a noble or worthy
quality, but such as the varying degrees of spiritual
and moral intelligence in the worshippers compelled.
It has never been shown that any appreciable influ-
ence was exerted by Christianity upon the for- Avatara sys-
mation of this Avatara system of the Hindus. J^"V"°^ ^''^
•/ to Christian
Neither the Apostle Thomas, nor Nestorian influence.
Christians from Syria, nor a stray legend about some
distant realm of mystical monotheists, that turns up
among the leaves of the old epic, nor traces of very
secluded and unimportant Christian settlements in later
times upon the coasts of India, can be made available
for refuting the claim of Hindu religious genius to unin-
terrupted assurance that preserving deity is manifested
in constantly renewed forms upon the earth. Lassen,
after a careful inquiry into the traditions of a Christian
origin of this belief, reaches the conclusion that we
cannot ascribe to missionaries of the church any in-
fluence whatever in shaping these religious concep-
tions of the Hindus. 2
The Krishna Avatara, in special, has been sup-
posed, not only from the resemblance between the
1 See Lassen's account of them in Indische Alterthmnskunde, IV. 578-586. Also
note on Thomson's Bhag. G., p. 147.
2 Weber {Ind. Stud., I. 400) and Hardwick {Christ and other Masters, I. 254) main-
tain the theory of Christian influence ; but all its points seem to be fully met by Lassen,
and no real evidence has been adduced in its defence. There is no proof whatever that the
Apostle Thomas ever saw India, and none that Nestorian missions had any influence there
before the fifth century.
27
41 8 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
names Krishna and Christ, but from certain corres-
^ . . , ^ pondences in the later Puranic lessen ds with
Ongin of the ■*• "
Krishna thosc of the infancj of Jesus, to have origi-
^^ ^"^^ nated in these relations with Christianity. But
the resemblances are of slight import ; and the belief
itself goes back, at the latest, to the time of Megas-
thenes, three centuries before the Christian era. This
writer describes Krishna as the Indian Hercules, who
had "traversed the whole earth and sea, to purify
them from evil ; " and even identifies his worship with
Mathura, the native place of Krishna in the legend.^
The similarity of the names, Krishna and Christ, is
Its possible purely accidental. The word Krishna means
relations. ^^^ black. And it forms the pivot of a very
curious tendency among the Aryan Hindus to vener-
ate that very color which they despised in the aborigi-
nal tribes of India, and which marked the lowest and
most degraded of the castes. For, in spite of these
antagonisms, strange symbols of a deeper brother-
hood seem to crop out in several interesting myths,
both philosophical and poetic. Here, for instance, in
the Bhagavadgita, Krishna, or the blacky is the intimate
friend and divine counsellor of Arjuna, or the white, —
a feature which cannot be accidental. And in the
Vishnu Purana, Vishnu sends two of his hairs, the
one white, the other black, to remove by their joint
virtue the miseries of the whole earth. I can hardly
help believing that this respect for the dark skin points
to very early recognitions of a common humanity ;
and it is not improbable that Krishna worship itself is
the mark of some profound influence exerted on the
faith of the aristocratic Aryans by the conquered tribes
of India. The generally democratic character of this
' Lassen^ I. 647; II. 1107.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 4I9
wide-spread and deeply rooted form of worship would
thus be explained. And the exaltation of a repre-
sentative of the enslaved race as divine guide of their
white master, in the noblest intellectual achievement
his literature can boast, is a piece of fine poetic justice,
which gives dignity to the whole history of the Hindus.
And it associates the oldest with the latest phases of
our Aryan pride of race, in a common lesson for com-
ing time.
From the early period above mentioned, down to
the latest Purana, the Bhae^avata, in the thir- , ^.
\ & ' ^ Its history.
teenth century, Kris-hna comes constantly into
view, in the utmost variety of forms, — as protecting
hero; as saint and sage, mastering evil spirits instead
of physical and outward enemies ; as inspired shep-
herd boy, idyllic lover of the country maidens, and
wonder-worker in the spheres of popular interests
and pursuits; assuming in the epic mythology, where
all the numberless rills of popular belief have flowed
together, all imaginable powers and forms of charac-
ter. ^ He says in the Bhagavadgita, " I am represen-
tative of the supreme and incorruptible, of eternal law
and endless bliss." ^
In the Bhagavata Purana he is exalted as the ideal
centre of all virtues, human and divine ; and saviour
of men through the blessings he bestows on all who
enter his spiritual being through meditation and holy
discipline.^ His worship is thus a purely native prod-
uct of Hindu sentiment. And the sublime assertion,
in the Bhagavadgita, of his incarnation whenever
right needs to be re-established and wrong to be over-
turned, requires no other explanation than an intuitive
1 Muir's Sanshrit Texts, vol. iv. 2 Jbid., ch. xiv.
• See Th. Pavie's Krishna et sa Doctrine (Paris, 1852).
420 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
faith in the intimate union of deity with life and the
world.
We may further observe, as characteristic of Hindu
Relation to rcHgious development, an effort in the history
pantheism. Qf Krishua-worship to purify pantheism of its
cruder elements. The pantheistic sense of divine im-
manence and universality naturally involves profound
moral and spiritual meaning. With the advance-
ment of thought, such better significance is brought
to the interpretation of popular beliefs of whatever
nature. Krishna is the common term which Hindu-
ism has maintained as the thread of its religious
tradition ; and, in the heterogeneous web of the Ma-
habharata, all its meaning for the popular mind has
been wrouo-ht over in the interest of the hifjher form
of pantheism just mentioned. So that the Krishna of
the epic presents the very noblest traits which the
Hindu mind was able to conceive, as will be seen
hereafter.
The play of illusion, under which his assumption of
all forms of human sympathy and desire is believed
by the more spiritually-minded to be masked, is
frequently lifted away, revealing what is held to be
his inmost reality, by which the often questionable
phenomena are to be mystically interpreted ; a pro-
cess of compromise to which all distinctive religions
have in their different ways, from time to time, sub-
jected their sacred books. The substance of this
higher pantheism is expressed in language like the
following : —
" Know that Dharma (righteousness) is my first-born beloved
Son, whose nature is to have compassion on all creatures. In his
character, I exist among men, both present and past, in different
disguises and forms. While all men live in unrighteousness, I, the
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 42I
unfailing, build up the bulwark of right, as the ages pass. Assuming
various divine births to promote the good of all creatures, I act
according to my nature." ^
Upon this grand postulate of the constant presence
and watchful intimacy of deity with man, as sympathies
guide and deliverer, the Bhagavadgita sought °J^^^'°g^jJ^^g_
to unfold the sympathies of past and present avadgita.
forms of faith.
It declared that knowledge and action are one in
worship. 2
" Children only, not the wise, speak of the Sankhya (rational)
and the Yoga (devotional) religious systems as different. He who
sees their unity sees indeed. The place which is gained by the
followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other." ^
" He who can behold inaction in action, and action in inaction, is
wise amongst mankind." ■*
" There are divers ways of sacrificing ; and all purify men. But
the worlds are not for him who worships not.^'' ^
For one to reach this higher point of spiritual recog-
nition, the Veda, with the subtle questions Bible and
thereon that have distracted the conscience, mediators.
must have become secondary, and be held as transient
means to a spiritual end.
" When thy mind shall have worked through the snares of illu-
sion, thou wilt become indifferent to traditional behef. When thy
mind, liberated from the Vedas,^ shall abide fixed in contemplation,
thou shalt then attain to real worship," '
" Thou shalt find it in due time, spontaneously, within thyself" *
This freer treatment of the " sacred scriptures " de-
1 Mahabh; XIV. 2 BJiag. G., ch. iii. 3 Ibid., ch, v.
* Ibid., ch. iv. ^ Ibid., ch. iv,
6 So Thomson translates nirveda, which according to Wilson also {Essays on Sanskr.
Lit.., III. 128)' means "certainty of the futility of the Vedas." Schlegel translates the
passage thus: "sententiis theologicis antea distracta." Only Wilkins differs: his reading
is, " by study brought to maturity," which can hardly be correct.
^ Bhag. G; ch. ii. * Ibid., ch. iv.
422 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
serves notice, as showing how strong is the demand,
Reactions evcn in 3. race whose faith naturally turns to
lioiatry. thc past, for escape from a bible-worship,
which still dominates far more enlightened communi-
ties. In every great form of Hindu philosophy we find
this opening upward into freedom from sacred text and
rite. The Vedanta declares "the science of the Vedas
inferior to the science of soul." The Sankhya denies
the eternity of the hymns, and asserts fullest liberty
of interpretation. The Bhagavadgita holds real wor-
ship to be that in which the Vedas have no further
place, having done their work, and given way to the
vision and enjoyment of deity. The Ramayana and
Mahabharata speak of themselves as equal to the
Vedas. The Puranas, in general, go much further.
The Bhagavadgita says : —
" As great as is the use of a well when it is surrounded by over-
flowing waters, so great and no greater is the use of the Vedas to a
Brahman endowed with knowledge."
But the Bhagavata Purana : —
"Men do not worship the Supreme when they worship Him as
circumscribed by the attributes specified in the hymns. Thou who
strewest the earth with thy sacrificial grass, and art proud of thy
numerous immolations,' knowest not what is highest work of all."
The Brahmanas speak of the limitations of the
Vedas in the same tone. Even Manu perceives that
the spirit must interpret the text, to make it of service.
The progress of experience brought fresh inspirations
that criticised the older ones ; and there were bitter
controversies between the supporters of the different
Vedas, fatal to the pretence of inviolable authority in
either.^
1 See iexls in Muir, III. ch. i.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 423
The " spiritual knowledge " which is to be substituted
for all written or traditional objects of faith, ^.. ,.
•' bpintuality,
as the supreme end of life, is called jndna.^
The Bhagavadgita describes what it reveals as deity,
in terms most clearly expressive of spiritual being : —
" It is that which hath no beginning, and is supreme ; not the
existent alone, nor the non-existent alone ; with hands and feet on all
sides, at the centre of the world comprehending all ; exempt from all
organs, yet shining with the faculties of all ; unattached, yet sustain-
ing everything; within and without ; afar, yet near; the hght of
lights, the wisdom that is to be found by wisdom, implanted in
every breast." ^
" The recompense of devotion is greater than any that can be
promised to the study of the Vedas, or the practice of independ-
austerities, or the giving of alms." ^ e^ce.
" Better than material sacrifice is the sacrifice of spiritual
'wisdom." ■*
" Men are seduced from the right path by that flowery sentence
proclaimed by the unwise, who delight in texts from the Vedas, and
say, ' there is nothing else than that,' covetous of heaven as the
highest good, offering regeneration as the reward of mere perform-
ances, and enjoining rites for the sake of pleasures and powers." ^
" The worship of personages as divine bestowers of all good
seeks to propitiate such personages ; and* receives, as from theni^ its
reward, which yet comes after all only from God. .But the reward
of these disciples of little mind is finite. They who worship gods
go to their gods. They who worship me come to me. Only the
unwise believe that I, who neither am born nor die, am confined
to a visible form." ^
While the power of attaining union with essential
truth and good, independently of permanent Ethical cui-
or exclusive mediators, is thus affirmed as in- ^^^^ 5 ^"io°-
dispensable to the highest life, the ethical conditions
of such attainment are not slighted. The authority
of the moral nature has all due reverence.
^ Compare Greek yvcJOig^ Latin nosco, Saxon know. ' Bhag. G-, ch. xiii.
* Ibid., ch. viii. * Ibid., ch. iv, 5 Ibid., ch. ii. * Ibid., ch. vii.
424 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
What is the secret of duty ? O Arjuna ! the old
eternal answer, — the soul knows no other : — Master
the senses, and subdue desires. Of all actions the con-
sequences are bonds determined and inevitable. What
is the self-centred act, what the pleasure of mere
physical contact, that comes but to pass again, leaving
unsatisfied desire behind it, but " a womb of pain " ?
Is then all activity to be renounced ? By no means.
" No one ever resteth a moment inactive. Every one is in-
voluntarily urged to act, by principles which are inherent in his
nature. Inertness is not piety. Perform, then, thy functions.
Action is better than inaction."
" But as this world entails the bonds of action on every work
but that which has worship for its object, therefore abandon,
son of Kunti ! all selfish motive, and perform thy duty for God
alone."
"Even if thou considerest only the good of mankind, still thou*
shouldst act. For what good men practise, others will practise
likewise."
" I have no need of any good, that I should be obliged to do any
thing throughout the three worlds ; yet do I for ever work. For if
1 did not, — men follow in my steps in all things, and the people
would perish." ^
" But every work is comprehended in wisdom : seek thou this,
by worship, inquiry, service." ^
" Whoso abandons all interest in the reward of his actions shall
be contented and free : though engaged in work, he, as it were,
doeth nothing. The same in success and failure, even though he
acts he is not bound by the bonds of action. His mind led by
spiritual knowledge, and his work done for the sake of worship,
his own action is, as it were, dissolved away."
" God is the gift, the sacrifice, the altar-fire ; God the maker
of the offering ; and God, the object of his meditation, is by him
attained." ^
" Let thy motive lie in the deed, and not in the reward : perform
Motive. *^y *^"*y) *^"^ make the event equal, whether it ter-
minate in good or ill. This is devotion." ^
* Bhag. Cr., ch. iii. ' Ibid., ch. iv. ' Ibid., ch. ii.
THE BHAGAV AD-GIT A. 425
" He who puts aside self-interest is not tainted by sin, but re-
mains unaffected, as the lotus-leaf is not wet, by the waters." ^
" What is given for the sake of a gift in return, or for the sake
of the fruit of the action, or reluctantly, is a gift of inferior quality." ^
" Whatever thou doest, do as offering to the Supreme." ^
" He who casts off desires, he into whose heart desires enter but
as rivers run into the never-swelling, passive ocean, he is Mastery of
tranquil ; and there springs in him separation from all desires,
trouble. He only whose thoughts are gathered in meditation can
find rest." ■*
" The wise are troubled to determine what is action and what is
not. I will tell thee the path of deliverance. He is the doer of
duty who beholds inaction in action, and action in inaction, free
from the sense of desire : his action is consumed by the fire of
knowledge." ^
" As a candle placed in shelter from the wind does not flicker,
so is he who, with thoughts held in devotion, delighteth in his soul,
knowing the boundless joy that the mind attains beyond sense,
whereon being fixed it moveth not from truth ; and who, having
attained it, regardeth no other attainment as so great as it is, nor
is moved by severest pain." ^
" Seek refuge in thy mind." '
" Let one raise his soul by his own means : let him not lower
his soul ; for he is his soul's friend or enemy. He v/ho gg^-.^es ect
has subdued himself by his soul finds that self which,
by reason of the enmity of what is not spiritual, might be a foe,
the friend of his soul." ^
" Draw in the senses from objects of sense, as the tortoise
its limbs ; for when the heart follows their roaming it Spirituality
snatches away spiritual wisdom as a wind a ship on the of purpose,
waves." ^
Yet even in the practice of ascetic disciplines, com-
mended to the devotee who would concentrate „ ^ .
Moderation,
his mind on God alone, excess is discounten-
1 Bkag. G., ch. V. * Ibid., ch. xvii. 3 ibid., ch. ix.
* Ibid., ch. ii. s ibid., ch. iv. 8 ibid., ch vi.
' Ibid., ch ii. 8 ibid., ch. vi. ^ Ibid., ch. ii.
426 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
anced ; and fanatical abstinence from food, sleep,
recreation, action, are discouraged, — he only being a
true devotee who is moderate in all things, and, above
all, in his desires.^ How these opposite tendencies
are reconciled does not indeed appear. It has been
supposed '^ that indifference to results was substituted
for abandonment of action, from a sense of the neces-
sity of modifying the strictness of ascetic practices,
which is very probable.
Such are the cultures of piety, — contemplative
Practical mainly, and in their final aim. But practical
virtues. virtues are held as equally imperative. Such
are fearlessness, temperance, rectitude, veracity, a
harmless spirit, freedom from anger, liberality, mod-
esty, gentleness, benevolence towards all, stability,
energy, fortitude, patience, purity, resolution, and the
absence of vindictiveness and conceit. ^ These are
enforced as positive duties. They are described, also,
as the path of those who are " born to the lot of divine
beings," while those who have them not gravitate the
other way.
All actual conditions were, to the Hindu, profoundly
Natural rctrospectivc. They must somehow find their
destiny. ground iu the determinations of a divine Order.
There w^as more in moral good and evil than mere
fruit of culture. And to be " born to the lot " of divine
or depraved beings must of course have meant some-
thing beyond caste-distinctions. A sense of destiny
came mightily down on the dreamer's vision, as he
thought of the prodigious force of natural endow-
ment in determining the paths of conduct. Virtues
were upward tracks, for which, it was plain, some had
1 BJiag. G; ch. vi. 2 Wilson, III. no. 3 Bhag. G-, ch. xvi.
THE BH AG A V AD-GIT A. 427
a kind of natural fore-ordinatlon ; while the birth-doom
of others drove them in the opposite direction into
correspondent vices. And here the poet's moral judg-
ment seems too much absorbed in the sense of inevi-
table consequence to recognize that apparent injustice
in such predestinations, which demanded solution.
And he turns the evil-doers away ^ upon their down-
ward path of bestial transmigrations, with as little
apparent sympathy as is conveyed in that kindred
sentence from another gospel: "These shall go
away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous
into life eternal." Doubtless in the one case, as in
the other, the special aspect under which moral evil
was, for the moment, intensely conceived, excluded
other and kindlier elements of faith, which elsewhere
enter into both these gospels, though in different ways.
With the Hindu, the deliverance from these bonds of
destiny might surely be found in the all-embracing
mystic unity of spiritual life, as with the Hebrew in
the depths of the Fatherhood of God. And yet it is
evident of the one as of the other gospel, that its cen-
tral idea had not reached its own full significance, as
a guaranty for the preservation and perfection of
all spiritual forces, even in the mind of its greatest
teacher.
But we must not overlook the fact, that this whole
poem is intent on pointing out the ways in which the
dark, bewildering, bestializing ^;^;2<25, or organic qual-
ities, might be "burned away in the fires of worship."
It implies a certain inherent and absolute power in
these disciplines and endeavors, to accomplish their
purpose. They involve a higher freedom, which
contravenes the apparent fatalities of evil.
^ Bhag. G., ch. xvi.
428 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
And for all aspirations alike there was the One I/ife
The path ^^^^ animated all lives, an unfailing promise,
open to all. justification, and resource.
" Rest assured, O son of Kunti ! that they who worship me,
shall never die. I am the pledge of their bliss." '
" Forsake all other reliance, and fly to me alone. I will deliver
thee from all thy transgressions." ^
" Even if one whose ways have been ever so bad worship me
alone, with devotion, he shall be honored as a just man; for he has
judged aright. He soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and entereth
eternal rest." ^
" He my servant is dear to me, who is free from enmity, the
friend of all nature, merciful, exempt from pride and selfishness, the
same in pain and pleasure, patient of wrongs, contented, of subdued
passions and firm resolves, and whose mind is fixed on me alone.
"He also is worthy of my love who neither rejoices nor finds
fault ; neither laments nor covets ; and, being my servant, has
forsaken both good and evil fortune.
" He is my beloved who is the same in friendship and hatred, in
honor and dishonor, unsolicitous about the event of things ; to
whom praise and blame are as one ; who is of little speech, and
pleased with whatever cometh to pass ; who owneth no particular
home, and who is of steadfast mind.
" They who seek this amrita [immortal food] of religion, even as
I have said, and serve me faithfully, are dearest of all."'*
Here the independent witness-soul of the Sankhya
Concen- is combiucd with a Vedantic reverence for the
trationof q^^ Universal Life, and a Buddhistic recocrni-
virtues in c5
worship, tion of actiou and social duties. The meaninof
of this blending of stoical indifference, pious ardor,
and human love, can only lie in the effort to consecrate
the whole of life, to fuse every element of the human
ideal in the one purpose of worship, as substantial
unity with the Highest, as all-sufficing joy.
^ Bhag. G., ch. ix. 2 Jbid., ch. xviii.
8 Ibid., ch. -au * Ibid., ch. xii. (Wilkins).
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 429
"They who worship me dwell in me, and I in them." '
" By him who constantly seeks me, without wandering of mind,
I am easily found." ^
" Thinking on me, absorbed in me, teaching each other, and
constantly telling of me, the wise are blessed. To such as seek
me with constant love, I give the power to come to me. Through
my compassion, while remaining in my own essence, I yet turn their
darkness into light." ^
" Most dear am I to the spiritually wise, and he is dear to me.
The distressed, the seeker for hght, the desirer of good, the wise,
are all exalted ; but the wise, whose devout spirit rests on me, I
hold even as myself."^
" Though thou wert the greatest of offenders, thou shalt cross
the gulf of sin in this bark of spiritual wisdom. He who hath
faith shall find this ; and, having found it, shall speedily attain rest
for his soul. No bonds of action hold the mind which hath cut
asunder the bonds of doubt. Son of Bharata, sever thy doubt in
worship, and arise ! " ^
And, on the other side, the inevitableness of moral
penalty is as positively asserted. It rests not Moral pen-
on any arbitrary decree, but on the essential ^^^'^^•
qualities of conduct. It is associated indeed in certain
aspects with the notion that the castes originated in
these moral qualities, and their due subordinations;^
for the Bhagavadgita does not attain the grand dem-
ocracy of Buddhism. But the inherence of moral
consequence according to purely moral quality is
nevertheless strictly defined : —
" The pleasure that springs from serenity of mind is first like
poison, and afterwards like the amrita of immortals ; but the pleas-
ures of the senses begin like amrita, and end as poisons ; and the
pleasure that, is from sleepy sloth is the utter bewilderment of the
soul." 6
According to the quality that has ripened into pre-
dominance is the form the individual spirit assumes ;
^ Bhag. G., ch. ix. ^ ibid., ch. viii. 8 Ibid., ch. x.
* Ibid., ch. vii. ^ Ibid., ch. iv. ^ Ibid., ch xviii.
430 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
gravitating at death to the "imperishable place," or
downwards, through lower forms of life, even to the
"wombs of the senseless," or inorganic matter, if the
deathly blight of indifference shall come to that at
last.^ "Threefold the gate of this hell, — avarice,
anger, and lust."^ Thus the bad are consigned, not
to endless misery by one dread sentence, but to pro-
bations manifold; and, if hopelessly sunk, reaching
at last a quasi annihilation, by laws of affinity alone ;
not to be preyed on by the worm that dieth not and
the fire that is not quenched ; but, more mercifully (if
that word be applicable at all), to become the clod or
the stone, which testify that the capability to sin and
to suffer are alike no more. So that hope ceases only
with consciousness itself; for transmigration is a re-
volving wheel, and with every fresh birth comes fresh
gift of opportunity for such intelligence as may still
survive.
" All worlds up to that of Brahma are subject to
^, ,, ^ [the law ofl return." But there is a state
The blessed ■- ^ -■
life beyond from which they who enter it do ilot need, as
they cannot desire, to return.
" There is an invisible, eternal existence, beyond this visible,
which does not perish when all things else perish, even when the
great days of Brahma's creative life pass round into night, and all
that exists in form returns unto God whence it came. They who
obtain this never return." ^
" They proceed unbewildered to that imperishable place, which
is neither illumined by the sun nor moon ; to that primeval Spirit
whence the stream of life for ever flows." ^
" Whoso beholds me in all things and all in me, I do not vanish
from him, nor does he vanish from me ; for in me he lives." ^
" Bright as the sun beyond darkness is He to the soul that
remembers Him in meditation, at the hour of death, with thought
^ Bhag. G., ch. xiv. ' Ibid., ch. xvi. * Ibid., ch. viii.
* Ibid., ch. XV. " Ibid., cb. vL
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 43 1
fixed between the brows, — Him the most ancient of the wise, the
primal ruler, the minutest atom, the sustainer of all, — in the hour
when each finds that same nature on which he meditates, and to
which he is conformed." ^
" They who put their trust in me, and seek deliverance from decay
and death, know Brahma, and the highest spirit (Adhyatma), and
every action (karma). They who know me in my being, my person,
and my manifested life, in the hour of death know me indeed." -
Who is this that is so known?
" The Soul in all beings, the best in each, and the inmost nature of
all ; their beginning, middle, end ; the all-watching preserver, father
and mother of the universe, supporter, witness, fiabitation, refuge,
friend ; the knowledge of the wise, the silence of mystery, the
splendor of light ; and death and birth, and all faculties and
powers ; the holiest hymn, the spring among seasons, the seed
and the sum of all that is." ^
And whoso by inward worship of God overcomes
the bhnd qualities and dispositions, by devotion shall
enter at once into His being.*
These conceptions of a future life seem to hover
between absorption into deity and revolving cy- personal
cles of ever-renewed births. Yet, through alP"'°^°'^^^y-
this indistinctness, a certain sense of permanence must
have been felt by those whose minds dwelt so con-
stantly on the thought of somewhat eternal in the very
consciousness of spiritual being. We have already
seen that the mystical Hindu mind did not demand so
distinct an assurance of continued personal conscious-
ness after death as does the intense individualism
of modern thought. Such positiveness of prediction
would have been associated with limitations rather than
with freedom : always the longing of mystical faith
has been to lose limit in pure self-surrender, and find
freedom in absolute present trust.
1 Bhag-. G., ch. viii, 2 ibid., ch. vii.
3 Ibid., ch. ix. x. xi. * Ibid., ch. xiv. xviii.
432 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Yet the Bhagavadgita recognizes the desire of con-
tinued being, as indeed it does not fail of recognizing
almost every genuine aspiration. And when Krishna
would allay the compassionate scruples of Arjuna
against destroying human life, he points to the im-
perishable personality that resides in every soul. Its
description fully corresponds with what we mean by
that term. One with infinite soul, expanded to share
the universal life, yet in a real sense distinct in itself,
as being that in each soul which makes it real and
eternal, it comes home to our experience as our own
deepest sense of immortality, which transcends the
thought of beginning as of end.
" As the soul in this body undergoes the changes of infancy,
youth, and age, so it obtains a new body hereafter.
" Know that these finite bodies have belonged to an eternal,
inexhaustible, indestructible spirit. He who believes that this spirit
can kill, and he who believes it can be killed, both are wrong.
Unborn, changeless, eternal, it is not slain when the body is slain.
" As a man abandons worn-out clothes and takes other new ones,
so does the soul quit worn-out bodies and enter others. Weapons
cannot cleave, nor fire burn it. It is constant, immovable ; yet it
can pass through all things.
" If thou hadst thought it born with the body, to die with the
body, even then thou shouldst not grieve for the inevitable ; since
what is born must die, and what is dead must live again. All
things are first unseen, then seen, then at last unseen again. Why
then be troubled about these things ?
" Some hold the soul as a wonder, while some speak and others
hear of it with astonishment ; but no one knoweth it, though he
may have heard it described. The soul, in its mortal frame, is invul-
nerable. •
" Grieve not then for any creatures, and abandon not thy duty.
For a noble man that infamy were worse than death." ^
" It is good to die doing thy own work : doing another's brings
danger."^
» Bhag. G., ch. il » Ibid., ch. iii.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 433
The sense of immortality is here associated with
the idea of duty, conceived indeed after a Hindu
fashion. Wherever such connection is recognized as
essential, there, under whatever special form duty may
be presented, w^e may be sure that personality is in-
volved in the idea of eternal life.
This " invulnerable soul " is in every one of the
living beings before Arjuna on the battle-field ^n destinies
of Kuru. "An imaginary thing can have no ^^"^^•
existence, nor can that which is real be other than a
stranger to nonentity." ^ Is not this an implication
of full faith in personal destinies? What limitation
is possible to the sweep of this invulnerability of life
through all special lives? What is it but the living
path and the living goal, at once, for them all? It is
a protest against the fate elsewhere in the Bhagavad-
gita assigned to those who are fallen lowest in delusion
and vice. The " w^ombs of the senseless " disappear
before it. How can the soul die down into a clod, if
soul is invulnerable? By this rescue of the substance,
all that waste is made impossible. The higher "con-
servation of force," which resides in intelligence itself,
forbids it. The "wombs of the senseless," like the
"everlasting woes" of Christian theology, are, in
fact, but mythological and dramatic fictions, in which
the fears and hates arising from certain stages of
moral development invest the idea of spiritual destiny.
Intuitions of the eternal validity of that which is in-
most substance and proper selfhood in every one, flash
out by the side of these mythologic fancies, and reach
beyond them, discerning the real purport of existence.
This inmost personal life, rooted in essential life, con-
tains all guaranties of good : whatever else dies out or
^ Bhag. G; ch. ii.
28
434 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
revolves through phases of matter, coming up again
in vapor or tree, that which is called "soul" in each,
the intellectual and moral quality, the sphere of aspi-
ration and relation to the infinite, however it may
change and develop, must escape such fate, — must
abide, according to this philosophy, in the imperish-
able place of soul itself. Honor to pantheism for
affirming the oneness of spiritual substance, for the
sweep of its great circle that leaves no life homeless
and wandering outside God.
The recognition of an inmost personality, lifted in
, pure independence of all the chanfje and loss
Correspond- •*■ ^ ^
encewith juvolvcd iu actious and their fruits, is as posi-
^^' tive in the Bhagavadgita as in Kapila's dis-
tinction between Prakriti and Purusha. In fact, this
distinction, with the whole Sankhya system,^ is here
fully set forth ; though as but a single side of an
eclectic philosophy, and combined — Kapila would
hardly say, reconciled — with that oneness of spiritual
being to which he objected as opposed to individual
claims.
"He who beholdeth all his actions performed by Prakriti, at the
same time perceives that his atma [self] is inactive in them. The su-
preme soul, even when it is in the body, neither acts nor is it affected,
because its nature is eternal, and free of qualities. As the all-pene-
trating ether, from the minuteness of its parts, passeth everywhere
unaffected, so this spirit in the body. As one sun illumines the
whole world, so does the one spirit illumine the whole of matter,
O Bharata ! They who thus perceive the body and the soul as dis-
tinct, and that there is release, go to the Supreme." ^
This effort to combine the Sankhya with the Ve-
Unjversaiity dauta is but One element of the vast synthesis
of the Gita. Qf f^i^i-^ attempted in the " Divine Lay " which
* The reader will recall the explanation of this distinction, as suggested in the chapter
on the Sankhya in the present volume, p. 388.
2 Bhag. G; ch. xiii.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 435
we are now studying. It has been described^ as
evading all great questions which divide the schools
of belief, as hovering between faith and works,
reason and devotion, the worship of the invisible
and the worship of the visible God.^ It is certain
that the reconciliation of opposite tendencies is by no
means clear or satisfactory. It is syncretism rather
than fusion. It is intellectual recognition, rather than
final system. But the breadth of this recognition is
what deserves our admiration, the large justice done
to every existing element of Hindu thought. Like its
own Brahma, the Bhagavadgita is the best of every
form, revealing its highest aspect, its spiritual pur-
port. Faith is good, and works are good ; but the
goodness of each is in the subordination of one to the
other. Absorption and transmigration are both real ;
but their meaning for the desire of immortality is in
their respective meanings as the true end of life and
the consequence of conduct. Not less real the worth
of the Veda for the greater worth of ntrvcda, the
divine certainty that lies beyond it. Sacrifices are
good, yet only as the step to a higher service of God.
The Sankhya witness-soul is exalted ; not less so the
soul performing these duties that belong to its path in
life. The gmias, or qualities of blind nature, have
their tremendous moral issues : not less true are the
all-dissolving Unity of Brahma, and the illusion of this
universe that comes and goes, these worlds of life
that are " subject to return." The eternal Substance
abides, beyond all forms of existence, inconceivable,
unknown. Yet every term by which the inmost per-
sonality of man is expressed is carried up into this
divine substance, making it a fulness of life. It is
1 Wilson, Essay on Bhagav. Git& {Sanskr. Lit,, III. 144).
43^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Purtisha, personal soul. It is Puriishottdma, Ultimate
Personality. It is Adhydtma^ Over-Soul, or Divine
Self. It is even Mahesvara^ the Great Lord. It is
the Avatara, the perpetual providence, ever manifest
in visible form to save the w^orld.
This boundless hospitality to existing beliefs indi-
cates at least the force with which the religious senti-
ment was embodied in them all at the time when the
Bhagavadgita was written. One element betrays the
Brahmanical source from which it flowed, the main-
tenance, however modified, of caste. Brahmanism is
here seen, surrounded by rationalizing independent
tendencies, seeking to accommodate itself to their
demands, while maintaining the unity of religious
development as a whole. Like the somewhat analo-
gous production of the Christian Church, the Johannic
Gospel, it is the work of the highest spiritual genius,
the most deliberate and careful constructive skill,
the most earnest desire of religious unity, which the
tendencies it represented had at their command ; and
a spirit is moving through its speculative deeps, that
could not be bound within the limits of any creed, —
the spirit of Universal Religion.
We cannot wonder that in a time of contending sects,
The maker ^^^^ amidst the distiuctious of caste, the disclo-
of the Lay. g^-g gf ^^^ " sublime mvstcry " to the reviler,
the indifferent, the unspiritual, should be forbidden. ^
How indeed, leaving caste out of the question, could it
be made known to such ? No deep religious faith fails
wholly of that wisdom which knows where not to cast
its pearls. , As the Hebrew reformer clothed his doc-
trine in parables, for those who hearing did not hear,
and as the Greek philosopher veiled his in symbols, so
1 Bhag. G-t ch. xviii.
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA. 437
the Hindu mystic admonished his disciples th»at prepa-
ration was needed for receiving what only the eye of
thoughtful attention could even behold. And was not
this light of pure thought indeed shining in compara-
tive darkness ? Was it not on the heights of con-
templation, in a region which the disciplined intellect
alone could make a home ? Yet we detect also behind
these ethical and spiritual considerations the strict re-
quirements of caste. Not here the broad humanity of
Buddha, whose word was a gospel rather than a phi-
losophy, and probably uttered with less of esoteric
myster}^ or exclusiveness than that of any other teacher
of the ancient world. The claims of the philanthropist
differ from the claims of the seer.
Shall we not say with the latest English translator
of this wonderful song, sung in the far East two
thousand years ago, that " it is sufficient praise for the
mystical old Brahman to have inferred, amidst dark-
ness and ignorance, the vast powers of mind and will,
and to have claimed for the soul the noble capacity
of making the body and even external matter its
slave ? "
IV.
PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM.
PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM.
TF the Bhagavadgita is pantheistic, it is none the less
^ theistic also. While these two terms inThedemand
their extreme meaning represent widely differ- °^ ^^® ^se.
ent conceptions, here is a higher unity which seeks to
include what is best in both. Whatever may have
been the result of this effort, its comprehensiveness
deserves special notice, in view of the demand of our
civilization for a breadth and freedom which can ap-
preciate every real element of human belief. In this
spirit of the age, Goethe wrote to Jacobi that he could
not be content with one way of thinking ; that as artist
and poet he was a polytheist, while as student of
nature he was a pantheist.
All phases of religion appear alike imperfect, if
defined as mutually exclusive systems. But their
real affinities are coming to be comprehended in the
unity of personal experience. We are learning to
recognize theism, polytheism, and pantheism as legiti-
mate parts of ourselves, to resume them under as-
pects which explain their power over races and times
other than our own, and so to relieve the steps of
human endeavor from disparagement by exclusive
creeds.
442 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
There are phases of skepticism and phases ot
, . science which seem to turn from reliction as
Justice to *-*
pantheism Well as intuition with sweeping denial. There
are phases of superstition apparently blind to
all rights of skepticism and science. But both science
and religion in our day are to receive a republican
breadth of meaning. They will not only guard the
right of every faculty and every aspiration to plead
its own cause, but respect the witness it may be able
to bring in its own behalf from the confidence of
mankind.
To how purely negative a criticism has pantheism
been subjected ! Yet there must be truth in a form
of belief which has satisfied enduring civilizations,
and which has reappeared in philosophy and ethics
wherever these have reached a high development,
without regard to the lines which separate recognized
religions or even races. It has usually been through
some form of spiritual pantheism that these distinctive
religions have escaped their limitations, and risen into
a universality unknown either to their founders or
to the ordinary current of their history. We may
instance the Sufism of the Mohammedans, the Neo-
Platonism of the Greeks, and the Mysticism that
preceded the Reformation in Germany and Italy, and
showed a far larger and profounder spirit than that
movement. Modern philosophy has received its
strongest impulse from a similar tendency in German
thought. And the unities of political, intellectual, and
religious life, at the present time, make the relation
of pantheism to the coming age a question of real
moment.
Whatever inferior forms of experience may have
received or assumed the name, it is of great impor-
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 443
tance to emphasize that special purport of pantheism
which accounts for its frequent recurrence and its
noble fruits. Our study of the Hindu schools of re-
ligious philosophy should help us to this result.
It is commonly insisted that all pantheistic systems
are ways of confounding the Creator with the what is
creation, and sinking the soul in the senses. Pantheism?
This form of statement comes mainly from Semitic
habits of thought inherited by Christianity. Panthe-
ism could expect no other reception from their intense
jealousy for the rights of an external deity, by whom
the world is made out of nothing, and the human soul
autocratically ruled.
But, if pantheism were what this fixed impression
of the Christian Church as a whole represents it, it
would certainly be far from resembling the aspirations
of those Hindu seers whom we have been studying
in the preceding chapters of this volume. They, of
all men, sought emancipation from the "wheel of the
senses," and fervently believed in the possibility of
union with the Absolute and Eternal.
In reality, pantheism, whether as sentiment or
philosophy, is not the worship of a finite and visible
world. In its nobler forms it is essentially of the
spirit, and rests, as its name imports, on these princi-
ples : that Being is, in its substance, one ; that this
substantial unity is, and must be, implicated in all
energy, though indefinably and inconceivably, — as
Life, all-pervading, all-containing, the constant ground
and ultimate force of all that is ; and that the recog-
nition of this inseparableness of the known universe
from God is consistent with the worship of God as
infinitely transcending it.
A theism of pure sentiment, following the Hebrew
444 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
prophetic consciousness of intimacy with God, yet, like
that earher Semitism, too monarchical in its
Limits of
Christian thcory to recognize how completely all manifes-
t eism. tatlon must be one with its spiritual substance,
was the religious inspiration of Jesus and his compan-
ions. Not less was this the limit for every form under
which Christianity could appear. Even the Gospel of
John — though a later product, drawing largely from
Greek and Oriental fountains, and imbued with mystical
elements apparently unknown to the original faith as
it was in Jesus — stopped short, on this track, w^ith
limiting the -pure immanence of God in the universe
to the ideally constructed person of Jesus, as the "Word
made flesh." All pantheistic forms or tendencies of
distinctive Christianity have had the same limitation ,
and this obscures the universal element, which never-
theless underlay and in fact prompted them.
The ideal demand of modern life is for fuller recosf-
„ , nltlon than was ever before possible, that spirit-
Modem ^ '^
ideal of ual being is of one substance. All religions
^^^* measurably express this truth, and their aspira-
tions after universality imply it. But their distinctive
tendencies have interfered more or less harmfully with
its free development and just emphasis. With the
knowledge of universal laws there enters a more
genial and inclusive spirit.
■ Philosophy now aims at complete expression of the
essential unity of subject with object, in what Aristotle
called "thought thinking itself;" thus reaching the
ultimate conception of One Spiritual Substance em-
bracing all being within the scope of its self-affirma-
tion. ^ The Imagination of our time divines, beyond
* This is involved even in the " relativity of all knowledge," which might seem to
make it void ; since the conception of this relativity implies recognition of its opposite, the
non-relative or absolute, as the test of its own reality even as a conception.
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 445.
this metaphysical conception, that the living universe
is the play of deity, through all forms and forces, all
dream and faith and action, all names, all symbols,
all religions. Its Piety and its Humanity must be
more than a mere recognition of what is eternally
good and true, as an object of thought : they aim at
the expression of this, as far as possible, in forms of
which it shall be at once the productive cause and the
inseparable life. Its Sciences must recognize that
what lies beyond their tests and explanations is really
the one master force involved in every step of evolu-
tion from lowest to highest forms, the substance of
these force-factors out of which all constructions flow.
Its God must be no mere Creator of a distinct uni-
verse, in the sense of maker, constructor, provider ;
but far more, even the inmost Essence and Principle
of all. The age, in fine, is resuming, in the fulness
of its experience, the ideal meaning of all spiritual
motives profound enough to have acquired distinctive
names, and to have entered into the classification of
religious systems.
I am not then forgetting the larger light of science
and practical relation in the civilization of the West,
when I bring the " Hindu dreamers " to help towards
a better understanding of the needs of our time. It is
these very forms of intellectual maturity that impel us
to seek fresh meaning in all ancient divinations of the
Unity of Being.
The mystery which we are to ourselves, and find in
all things around us, not only transcends our jj^e mystery
theological terms, but effaces all scientific land- °'^ ^^'"s-
marks and distinctions. It is by tho2tght we know all
that we call God, the world, ourselves ; and in all
44^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
directions alike is thought incomprehensible to the
thinker. Facts, phenomena, the operation of forces,
we claim to understand simply because we employ them
for our purposes, select them to meet definite demands,
combine them in positive constructions. But of force
we only know that it acts in certain ways, not how it
can act thus, nor how act at all. And of the fleeting
play of phenomena, what can we say but that the con-
nection between mind and the physical organs through
which they are perceived — nay, between mind and
its own activity — is a mystery penetrable by no faculty
that we possess. With a change in our mode of exist-
ence, the familiar universe would roll up as a scroll ;
though it were only to reappear in such new% unim-
agined form as may accord with new desires or needs,
— so sligrht the hold of either our volition or our com-
prehension on the relations of our being. Yet we
inevitably trust the reports of consciousness concern-
ing its own objects. And how should this unison be
possible, and this confidence and calm abide in the
depths of the reason, but for an inmost identity of es-
sence^ including" within itself alike the truster and
what he trusts f
This presence of the unfathomable, in which all ex-
perience is involved, cannot be set aside on the ground
that it is always unknown, and that a purely unknown
factor may be eliminated from the problem. It abides
everywhere : it is that which we do know most surely,
even if we know nothing else, unless knowing means
comprehending, in which case we should do well to
drop the word altogether.
Nor can a universal element be eliminated and left
out of the problem, — like a constant factor in arith-
metic, — on the ground that it is constant and every-
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 447
where of equal force. ^ It is dynamic, not arithmetical.
It enters into the substance of each experience, with
special influences in each. Its presence affects the
spirit and attitude of inquiry, shapes the definitions,
and saves from absorption in the finite side of experi-
ence. " They who prize experience exclusively," said
Goethe, "forget that experience is but the half of ex-
perience."
Our victorious science fails to sound one fathom's
depth on any side, since it does not ex-_,
i^ 'J ^ _ The pantne-
plain the parentage oi mind. For mind was istic side of
in truth before all science, and remains for^^"''^^'*
ever the seer, judge, interpreter, even father, of all its
systems, facts, and laws. Our faculties are none the
less truly above our heads because we no longer won-
der, like children, at processes we do not understand.
Spite of category and formula, of Kant and Hegel,
we are abashed before our own untraceable thought.
The stars of heaven, the grass of the field, the very
dust that shall be man, foil our curiosity as much as
ever, and none the less for yielding to the lens, the
prism, and the polariscope of science ever new tri-
umphs for our pride and delight. Not less mystical
is mind because it will no longer be suppressed and
stultified by mysteries of faith. True as ever is what
Krishna savs in the old Eastern reverie : —
" Some regard the soul as a miracle, while some speak of it, and
others hear of it, with like astonishment ; but no one comprehends
it, even when he has heard it described." ^
What know we of matter f Philosophy can define
it as a form in which spirit manifests itself to spirit,
a reflex of thought, an expression or mode of mind ;
1 This is Mr. Buckle's mode of historical computation: "The moral factor is con- "j
stant: ergo^ it has no influence." j
' Bhagavadgit^ ch. ii. |
448 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
and so escape the dualism that would seem involved in
its being an independent reality. The spiritual is its
substance, is what it means, is what we are conscious
of, after all. What, then, is spiritual essence? We
cannot define it, we know not how, only that it acts ;
still less do we know what it is. To remember, to
hope, to love : these we explain only by themselves
again. That they are is itself the mystery, all-
pervading, infinite, — To Be.
Into such transcendence the whole of life enters,
and with it all science, matter, force, and form. By
this one fact of mystery alone, though we should look
no further, the infinite of mind is found inseparable
from all experience. And this " Unknowable " is
known to be not merely continuous with the human,
nor interpenetrating it merely, as space is per-
vaded by light, — but more. As a man's mind is in
his thought and his love, so is essential mind the
unfathomable life in which all intelligent spiritual
forces move.^
And this truth has still closer relations with our
In etWcs fiioral and spiritual nature. The sense of
and faith, limit that for ever besets the understandinor,
withholding from us the meaning of the world and
the purpose of existence in a certain repulsion as
towards aliens and strangers, necessitates a path
upwards to the freedom of an all-embracing idea, an
all-dissolving unity, in which our individual imperfec-
tions shall, ideally at least, cease to separate us from
the whole. This dualism, as between one who seeks
^ ^"^^viz^x {Psychology, p. 110) regards such ideas as anthropomorphic, and so without
authority. But if the substance of the universe is not mind, as we are mind wlio tliink it,
then the very conception of existence, on whicli that of substance depends, is also base-
less as resulting from our mentality alone. \
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 449
and one who shuns, can yield only to a sense of in-
most identity. The soul must gather the world and
itself under one conception. It must see the whole,
in other words, in God. Only the inseparableness of
finite from infinite can assure our life of an origin and
purport adequate to its nature. " Because God is,"
saith the soul, " therefore I am and shall.be, — in
God."
But to this assurance there is no other path
than that of moral consecration. The reconciliation,
the freedom, the unity, come only with absorption
of the conscious self into the truth of principles,
convictions, ideal aims; with finding, in the best
moments, somewhat of thought or feeling, which
" having been must ever be ; " with participation in
somewhat of divine nature and endless promise,
throuo-h an absolute love and service : so that it
shall no longer be the private self, but soul as soul,
which affirms within us, and once for all, — " I am."
" O grace abundant, by which I presumed
To fix my sight upon the light eternal,
So that the seeing /consumed therein !
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up in love together in one volume
What through the universe in leaves is scattered ;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple lightP *
Such experience is limited to no age nor race.
Through such paths as these, in such form as v\ as
possible within his special horizon, as I believe, the
Hindu saint arrived at his pantheistic faith. This is
the substance of the process, with whatever errors
* Paradise, XXIII. (Longfellow's transl.).
29
-1
450 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
mingled, by whatever superstitions marred. Through
such experiences not the saints and seers only, but
simply earnest people, through much imperfection,
have in every religion reached the certainty of infinite
good, under whatever name, as inseparable from
their own inward being.
These are truths not of the reason only, however
Its ethical they may accord with its higher processes ;
value. -^ut primarily of religious sentiment, and espe-
cially in its dealing with the facts of moral and phys-
ical evil. For the root of all effective force against
these facts as actual is in holding the good to be the
one reality ; in finding fast anchorage in this tdtimate^
essential fact which they are bound to subserve ; in
being sure that the whole process of life is somehow
contained within the infinite rectitude of God. The
Hindu dreamer, seeking to abolish evils by thinking
them away ; and the practical worker, in practical
races and times, more effectually battling them down
by action^ — alike assume that the real and essential
are to be found only in the good. Both seek to reach
true being by denying the claim of evil to be positive
and permanent ; to read the world with clearer insight
of its meaning ; to affirm for the actual its ultimate
significance in the ideal, in God.
We master the despair with which the prevalence
of evils would otherwise overwhelm us, by assuring
ourselves that evil is properly "good in the making,"
a condition of finite growth. This is but recognizing
tht: fact that our philosophy cannot possibly be sound
and healthful so long as it does not explain the finite
by the infinite, and interpret the life of man in its
wholeness as manifestation of God.
The best and bravest souls have always treated evils
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 45 1
not as if their depressing side were the substance of
their meaning, but as involving issues of all-reconcil-
ing good. This mystic faith, that things seen but in
part are seen in illusion, and that they are seen but in
part till they are brought out into relations that accord
with ideal good, is as practical as it is speculative.
Science itself can offer no other interpretation than
this of the physical evil, which "final causes" and
" special interferences " only aggravate by their im-
plication of a divine intention. Its help is for the
sternest and bitterest lot. It is an instinct of cheerful
hope, where it has not yet become a clear perception
of the reason. It inspires the will, where it finds no
hold in the understanding. Its secret assurance is
perhaps strongest in the simplest natures that are least
perplexed with casuistry or doubt. It is apt to find
clear and hopeful solutions of duty, whether men are
dealing with their own sense of wrong-doing or with
outward and social wrong.
We must act upon the testimony of the practical
consciousness \ hold common sense sacred ; ignore no
facts that life teaches ; neglect no function of the
understanding. But there is need of a philosophy in
which the ideal only is seen as real ; of hours when
the eye is opened with vision of the divine alone.
Alas for common sense itself, if our ideals have taught
us no more than our understandings ; if banks and
ships and railroads do not sometimes dissolve as illu-
m
sions in the white light of noble dreams ; if even the
woes and sins of the world, which permit no rest to
the eyelids of faithful men, could never vanish before
their sight into the infinite depths of Divine Order;
never melt, even for an hour of happier inspiration,
into the mystery of all-embracing good !
452 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
But is not this pure Fatalism, and destructive to the
Relation moral being? To this question we must reply
to fate. that, while destiny or fate in the sense of abso-
lute external compulsion would certainly be destructive
not only of moral responsibility, but of the personality
itself, yet religion or science without fate, in another
sense, is radically unsound. The word properly means
"fixed, settled, irrevocably spoken ;" that is, it notes the
final truth and substance of things. To make it mean
only hostile sovereignty — what is desperately bad, and
rendered so by a dead, mechanical, motiveless, yet
external power — is to misapply it. Rather should
it signify what is impregnably certain ; and if good is
so, — things being regarded in their inherent and ulti-
mate meaning, — then good, not evil, is fate. Is not
truth itself, then, fate: — truth, which is but another
name for the sanity and integrity of nature and law ;
truth, which is the health and sweetness of universal
order ; truth, which is therefore interchangeable, as to
its meaning, with good? Why should not the very
perfection of the moral and spiritual laws, whose be-
nignity it is no part of our liberty of thought or will
to alter or suppress, to make or to mar, stand to the
soul as its fate? Subject as we surely are to organi-
zation, heredity, conditions innumerable, shall we not
hold that the ideal g-ood also, which we dream of beyond
these limitations, is our ultimate destiny? We cannot
separate perfection and fate. Deity, whose sway is
not destiny, would not be venerable, nor even reliable.
It would be a purpose that did not round the universe,
a love that could not preserve it. Theism without
fate is a kind of atheism. And a self-denominated
''atheism," yet holding justice to be the true necessity,
or fate, is properly theism, though it refuse the name.
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 453
Sovereign right and good at the centre of soul and
nature, what is that but God?
So that destiny should not be defined as hostile
sovereignty or suppressive decree. But we Freedom
must go further. It cannot be pure outward reconciled
^ , , . ^ , . I with fate.
lorce, compelling man, even to his good.
Even worshipped as the dearest ideal, even cherished
as the power of God to set aside human defect and
guarantee the best, it would still abolish liberty, the
substance of the soul, — if it were this. The impell-
ing forces therefore represent not foreign mastery, but
natural growth. God is the inmost life of the human,
not the- external will that shapes it as the potter moulds
his clay. The fate that man must accept is but the
real law of his own nature, whereby it is in accord
with the universal life. It is thus not only consistent
wdth freedom, but coincident with it. While he resists
his own essential humanity, while he fails to express
or to seek in his individual purpose that harmony with
the universal order, his will can in no proper sense be
called free : it is enslaved to illusion and bound to
failure, and can reach nothing he really needs or can
intelligently love. Liberty itself can be found only in
knowing essential good to be the moving force of his
own spiritual being. This unity is the true self; in
this is personality ; therefore it is spontaneity, joy,
health, success. The fate that abolishes individual
caprice is the seal of freedom. Hence the inspiration
that comes in self-abandonment to an idea or a dutv.
It identifies our fate with our freedom. All great
aspiration brings the sense of destiny, because it frees
from inward conflict, from the resistance of finite
caprice to infinite good ; and in this deep natural alli-
ance and harmony of forces the doubts and fears are
dissolved.
454 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Even in the less enlightened forms of personal
energy, we note that the sense of destiny comes in,
wherever there is unity of the motive powers, al-
lowing entire concentration of purpose. This is
the condition of valor, assurance, authority. The
vivacious Norse Sagas, are full of fatalism, and
every storming Viking believed that his destiny was
written in his brain at birth. " Odin," says the Heim-
skringla, "knew beforehand the predestined fate of
men, or their not yet completed lot." "No soul can
die unless by permission of God," says Mohammed
in the Koran, for the encouragement of his followers.
"Everyman's fate have we bound about his neck."
Better still, fate is the refuge and strength of Greek
Prometheus in that sublime martyrdom which he en-
dures as the penalty of his love for man. It is free-
dom and justice approaching in the future, to dethrone
the tyrannical gods of the past. And this divine
myth of the identity of fate with noble will is a normal
type of all ethical and spiritual inspiration.
The heroes and the saints are fatalists, and read
doom and triumph alike by one token : " for this
cause came I unto this hour." The Stoic schools,
both Greek and Roman, have proved that spiritual
pantheism, as the essential unity of the human and
divine, is reconcilable with the strongest conviction of
moral freedom ; ^ affirming in theory, and carrying
out into actual life, a degree of personal independence
and self-respect as remarkable as their confidence that
fate and providence are one.^ The pantheistic fol-
lowers of the Bab, a modern Persian heretic, have
* See Zeller's Sioics, pp. 170, 205, 227.
' Siobceus Eclog-, I. 179 ; Seneca de Bene/.^ IV. 7.
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 455
^
met incessant persecutions of the most barbarous kind
with astonishing courage and enthusiasm.^
And why should the fact be otherwise? Immanent
deity, become intensely real for the consciousness,
should not only consecrate the whole life to duty, but
should give the powers that freedom of aspiration
which a universe so consecrated cannot but guarantee
to all its own natural and proper forces. "It is an
error to suppose," says Heine, "that pantheism leads
to indifference. On the contrary, the sense of his
own divineness wall stir man to reveal the same, and
from that moment really grand actions and genuine
heroism will enter and glorify this world."-
The life and death of the pantheistic Fichte were
full of noble service, both patriotic and humane.,
Spinoza was the harbinger of free thought and scholar-
ship, the Columbus of ethics and theology as well as
of philosophy. The mystical " Friends of God " in the
Middle Ages were the fathers of modern philanthropy :
their "Theologia Germanica," Luther tells us, first
brought him inward light and peace. From the spirit-
ual closet of a pantheistic dream issued the Reforma-
tion. And every time the world is about to move a
fresh step forward, there is somewhere in seclusion
a m3'Stical brooding sense of all-mastering and all-
absorbing deity, that holds in its bosom the germinant
religious and social revolution, and sends forth the
earliest witnesses and purest martyrs in its cause.
It must not, then, be supposed that Hindu Panthe-
ism and Fatalism were wholly irreconcilable Hindu Pan-
with moral earnestness, or even eners^y. j J^eismand
' o ./ the moral
cannot admit, for instance, that Mr. Banerjea, sense.
1 See their history in De Gobineau's Relig. de PAsie Centrale.
' DeVAllemagjiei I. p. 103.
45^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
a Hindu convert to Christianity, has furnished con-
vincing proofs that the Vedanta, making the universe
and the soul identical with God, destroyed the idea of
duty. The same was said of Spinozism, by Jew and
Christian.' Yet Spinoza himself, cast out of the syna-
gogue with curses as the sum of all wickedness, was,
in morality, piety, and spiritual earnestness, far in
advance of all his accusers, then or since. Moral
purpose in the Hindu was apt to take inward, rather
than outward, directions : this was incident to his
ethnic and climatic conditions. But how large a
degree of such purpose was involved in the effort to
overcome self and the senses by his method! It was
contemplative indeed, not social. He watched the
flow of change as it swept through all forms, as one
watches in reverie the waves of a running stream,
or the drift of clouds across the sky ; and the thought
that he was himself but part of the current made him
feel himself profoundly a child of fate. And he was
fond of such sayings as these : —
" Life, death, wealth, wisdom, works, are measured for one while
on his mother's bosom."
" Their fated allotments the very gods must bear. As pieces of
drift-wood meet in ocean, and remain together a little time only ;
as a traveller sleeps under a tree, and the next day departs, — so
friends and possessions pass : there is no return." ^
"When his time is come, the bird who can see his food a long
way off cannot see the snare."
" Birds are killed in the air ; fishes caught in the sea : what help
in choice of place ? "
" When I see the sun and moon in eclipse, and the wise man in
want, then I say, Fate is master." ^
" Where are the princes of the earth with their chariots and
armies ? The earth that saw them perish still abides."
' Ram&y&na. ' Hito^adesa, I. 44-46.
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 457
" Who sees not that this body passes away every moment ?
Like a pot of clay in the water, it falls in pieces."
" So many dear ties as man may form, so many thorns of sorrow
are planted in his heart."
" Foolish is he who would lay up riches in a world that is like
a bubble."
" As waters flow away and come not back, so the days and nights
of mortal men."
" The society of the good, which brings us a little joy, is bound
to the yoke of pain ; for it ends in separation.
" And there is no healing for the heart that is wounded with this
sword." ^
But the inferepce shows that the wisdom to draw
help from these necessities was not wanting.
" Therefore be thou resolved, and think no more of sorrowing :
here is the healing for thy wounds." ^
" Every thing on earth has its pleasure and its pain. Death
comes to all that is born, and new birth to all that dies. Grieve
not for what must be."^
And what was this intense feeling of the transient
but equally intense suggestion of the eternal ? Did
not the lower fate point to a higher ? If change
sweeps over all, . what makes the changes but a
changeless law ?* What makes a changeless law
but an eternal life ? Vicissitudes pass, God is. And
we are, — in God. So, with all his moral energies,
the devotee of contemplation strove to reach perma-
nent peace, at the heart of a restless world.
The old lawgivers found no lack of moral sanction
here.
1 Hit op., IV. 67-77 2 Ibid., 82.
* Rattiayana; Bhag, Git&, &c.
* '• Anaxagoras, Epicurus, and Euripides agree that
'nothing dies;
But different changes give their various forms.' "
Plutarch, Sentim. of Nature.
458 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
>
" If one considers the whole universe as existing in the Supreme
Spirit, how can he give his soul to sin ? " '
" He who understands divine omnipresence can no more be led
captive by crime." ^
A Upanishad says : —
" Such a one, who beholds the soul in the infinite soul alone,
him sin does not consume : he consumes sin ; becomes free from
doubt, and is pure." ^
The pantheistic bias of Hindu thought does not
exclude a trustful and hopeful spirit. Through
most Indian poetry there flows a delicate sense
of divine benignity in the natural processes of life.
The Hitopadesa, the people's ancient Book of Precepts
and Fables, whose choice sentences are gathered out
of all the Hindu classics, says : —
" Hear the secret of the wise. Be not anxious for subsistence :
it is provided by the Maker. When the child is born, the mother's
breasts flow with milk. He who hath clothed the birds with their
bright plumage will also feed thee."
" How should riches bring thee joy, which yield pain in the
getting, and pain in the passing away, and turn the head of the
winner with folly .'' What trouble so great, in this life of many
cares, as the for ever unsatisfied desire ? That only which one no
longer seeks with anxious heart has he really attained." *
The Vedanta says : —
" As birds repair to a tree to dwell therein, so all this universe
to the Supreme One."^
" He, the All-wise Preserver, dispenses the objects of our desire.
To know Him is to be free : there is no end of misery but through
this knowledge of God, To him whose trust is in God reveal
themselves the mysteries." ^
Says the Divine One in the Gita : —
^ Manut XII. ii8. * Ibid., VI. 74; so Spinoza.
8 Brihad^ IV. iv. 23. * From Miiller's version, I. 170-179.
" Pras'na, IV. 7. " Svet&savatara, VI. 13-23-
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 459
" I am the Preserver who watches in all directions. Be not
alarmed at having seen me in the terrible shape of all-destroying
Time. Hasten to look, free from fear, on my human and friendly
form." ^ ^
Another text, of frequent recurrence in the philo-
sophical and ethical books, makes mortality itself
the ground of spiritual faith : —
" From what root springs man, when felled by death ? Say not,
' like a tree, he springs from seed.' If the tree be destroyed with its
root, it grows not again. If then man be cut down by death, from
what root shall he spring to life again ? It is God, the highest aim
of one who abideth in and knoweth Him." ^
In the Ramayana, Bharata is adjured by the sages
not to mourn too bitterly for his dead father : —
" O wise Bharata ! grieve not for the departed. He is no longer
an object for grief, and too many tears may bring him down from
the heaven to which he has gone." ^
And Arjuna, permitted to ascend, though living, to
the heaven of the just,
" Follows the path unknown to mortals, where no golden sun
nor silver moon divides the time, but the mighty hosts of men
shine with the splendor of their own virtue, in a light which we
afar off think to be the tremulous fires of stars.
" There sees he the good kings, the brave and faithful men who
were blessed with glorious deaths, and holy prophets, and pure
women in chariots that wing the heavenly spaces." "*
In the absence of historical and biographical facts,
we are obliged to infer the ethical ideal and Ethical
attainment which Hindu civilization permitted, illustrations.
from the prevailing maxims and proverbs ; the wisdom
that has been circulating for ages, in sentence and in
song, among the masses of this immense empire.
1 Bhag. G., ch. xi. 2 Brihad, III. ix. 28.
8 Ramay., B. 11. * Mahabh., III.
460 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Here, for example, is manly diet, from the Hltopa-
The Hito- des'a, for the believer in fate : — •
padesa.
" Twofold is the life we live in : fate and will together run :
Two wheels bear the chariot onward : will it move on only one ? "
" Nay, but faint not, idly sighing, ' destiny is mightiest.'
Sesamum holds oil in plenty ; but it yieldeth none unprest." '
"Fortune comes of herself to the honlike man who acts. It is
the abject who say, ' All must come from fate.' Forget fate, and be
brave. If thou failest, having put forth all thy force, the blame is
not thine.
" The deeds done in a former life are what is called fate. There-
fore let one exert himself with unwearied energy in the present.
" As the potter shapes the clay at his will, so a man shapes his
own action.
" Though he see his desired good close at hand, fate will not
bestow it on him : it waits the manly deed.
" A work prospers through endeavors, not through vows : the
fawn runs not into the mouth of a sleeping lion." ^
" Take good and ill as they come ; for fortune turneth like a
wheel.
" Frogs to the marsh, birds to the lake, so all good to the man
who strives for it : as one who seeks him, so hastes it to the hero
who dallies not, is virtuous, grateful, and a faithful friend." ^
"By his own doings one rises or falls, as one man digs a well
and another throws up a wall."''
" Seek not the wild ; sad heart ! Thy passions haunt it.
Play hermit in thy house, with will undaunted.
A governed heart, thinking no thought but good,
Makes crowded houses holy solitude."
* Hitopad- Introd., 29, 31. The verses are from Arnold's pleasant abridgment of this
old Book of Good Counsels (Lond. 1861), and are literal translations. The prose pas-
sages are selected from Ariillp.r''s German version (1S44). I have also carefully compared
with this the French version of Lancercau (1855) and the English by Sir IVilliatu Jones.
This last is hardly trustworthy, and Miiller thinks it cannot have received the author's
entire elaboration. Such liberties are taken by the native copyists of the Hitopadesa,
that, in Miilier's opinion, no trtte edition is possible, and each tratislator must select the
special text he will follow. This fact helps to explain the very marked difference in
these versions.
2 Ibid- hiirod.y 30-35. * Ibid., I. 164-166 < Ibid., II. 45.
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 461
" Thine own self, Bharata, is the holy stream, whose shrine is
virtue, whose water is truth, whose bank is character, whose waves
are sympathy. There bathe, O Son of Pandu ! Thy inward life
is not by water made pure." '
II 1
" Better be silent than speak ill ; better give up life than love
harsh words ; better beggar's fare than luxury at another's board." ^
" Only that life is worth living which is free. If they live who
depend on others, who are dead.''"^
" He has all good things whose soul is content: the whole earth
is spread with leather, for him whose own feet are well shod."
" He has read and heard and acquired all things, who turns his
back on hope, and expects nothing.""*
" Do not rage, like a cloud, with empty thunder : the noble man
does not let the good or ill that foes have done him be seen."^
" What is a brave man's fatherland, and what a foreign country ?
Wherever he goes, his strength makes-that land his own."^
" A bad man is like an earthen pot, easy to break and hard to
mend. A good man is like a golden vase, hard to break and easy
to mend."'
" Disposition is hard to overcome. If you make a d6g a king,
will he not still gnaw leather ? " ^
"A gem may be trodden under foot, and glass be put on the
head : yet the glass is only glass, and the gem is still a gem." '
"How shall teaching help him who is without understanding?
Can a mirror help the blind to see ? " ^^
" It is to no purpose that the bad man says, I have read the
Vedas and the Laws. His character rules him, as it is the property
to milk to be sweet." ^^
" Wise men seek not things unattainable : grieve not over the
lost, and stand firm in time of trouble." ^^
" In the poisoned tree of life grow two sweet fruits, — the enjoy-
ment of the nectar of poetry and the society of noble men." '^
" Integrity, self-sacrifice, valor, steadfastness through all changes,
sympathy, loyalty, and truth are the virtues of a friend." ^*
1 Hitopadeia, IV. 83, 86 From the Mahabh. 2 ibid., I. 129. 3 Ibid., II. ai.
« Ibid., I. I3S, 137. 5 Ibid., IV. 91. 6 Ibid., I. 96.
7 Ibid., I. 86. 8 Ibid., III. 58. 9 Ibid., II. 67.
w Ibid., III. 117. 11 Ibid., I. 15. " Ibid., I. 161.
" Ibid., I. 145. »* Ibid., I. 89.
462 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
"By whom is this jewel created, this word of two syllables
(Mitram, friend), wherein we pour the joy of love, which guards us
from sorrow and foes and fear? A friend who gladdens the heart,
sharing one's pleasure and pain, is hard to find. Friends in pros-
perity, self-seekers, abound ; but misfortune is their touchstone."
" Be hospitable to thine enemy when he comes to thy door : the
tree withdraws not its shade even from the wood-cutter.
" Good men are compassionate to the lowest beings. The moon
refuses not its light to the hut of the Chandala.
"A guest who departs from a house disappointed, leaves his
own sins behind him, and carries away the virtue of its owner.
" Even a low-born man who comes to a Brahman's house must
be honored: the stranger is on the same footing with the gods."^
" He alone is to be praised, he is blest, from whom the weak and
suppHant go not away with hopes destroyed."^
" The friendship of noble persons endures to the end of life ;
their anger is quickly appeased ; their liberality is without self-
interest." ^
" Only the foolish ask, * Is this one of us or ah outside person ? '
To the noble the whole world is a family." ^
" One should spare his neighbor, thinking of the pain one feels
when he sees that he must die."
" O sacred earth ! why dost thou endure the false man, who re-
turns noble and trusting kindness with evil treatment ? " "
" This life, which is like a wave trembling in the wind, is in a
right cause to be sacrificed for the good of others."''
" Let the wise man give up his goods for the sake of his neigh-
bor ; for the sake of the good let him even give his life." "*
" As life is dear to thee, so is it to other creatures : the good
have mercy on all, as on themselves.
" He who regards ahother's wife as his mother, his wealth as vain,
and all creatures as himself, is wise.
" Give to the poor, O son of Kunti ! not to the rich. Medicine is
for the sick, not for those that are well.
" The gift, bestowed with right purpose, at right time and place,
on one who cannot repay it, is to be called a real gift."*
' Hitopade'sa^ I. 203, 204. * Jbid., I. 52-57. ' Ibid., I. 183.
* Ibid., I. 180. 6 Ibid., I. 64. « Ibid., I. 61, 73.
' Ibid , III. 140. » Ibid., I. 38. » Ibid., I. 10-14.
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 463
" Between virtues and the body there is infinite difference : the
body perishes in a moment, virtues endure while the world lasts." ^
" The wise will follow duty, as if death were already grasping his
hair." «
The following are from the Panchatantra, a still
older collection of tales and sentences, whose pancha-
relation to the Hitopadesa is not yet very ^^''*^^-
clearly understood : —
" In all actions, to be like one's self is the praise of the wise :
this makes smooth the right path, so full of hindrance." ^
"When the just falls, it is like a ball of feathers, but the wicked
falls like a clod." *
" A noble person never fails in protecting others, even in his
extreme need ; as the pearl loses not its whiteness, though it have
passed through the flames." ^
" The storm blows down the strongest tree, if it stands alone ;
but not the well-rooted trees that stand together."^
" He who is kind to those that are kind to him does nothino;
great. To be good to the offender is what the wise call good." '''
" A good prince is eye to the blind, friend to the friendless,
father and mother of all who do well." ^
" Where he is honored who is unworthy of honor, and he de-
pised who deserves respect, there come three things, r- famine,
pestilence, and war." ^
The fact that these popular "Books of Wisdom " are
mainly of Buddhist origin '^^ does not weaken their
testimony to the union of practical morality with pan-
theistic sentiment. The Hindu masses who have
rejected Buddhism as a system of negations cherish
these manly maxims as the true philosophy of life.
They are heard on the lips of the poorest people, and
circulate freely through city and village. As in the
* Hitopadesa^ I. 43. 2 Ibid., Introd-, 3.
' /'««cAiZ^. (Benfey's German transl.) B. III. * Ibid., II.
B Ibid. IV. 6 Ibid., III. » Ibid., IV. ix.
« Ibid., I. xii. 9 Ibid., III. x.
><> See Benfey, Einleitung^ z. Panchatantra,
464 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
gnomic literature of other races, so here, the higher
ethics are combined with maxims of prudential and
even of selfish quality, though these last are very
rare.^ Plaints of poverty, and policies that secure
success are quaintly mixed with admonitions on the
brevity of life and the vanity of riches. And, as with
Buddhist teaching generally, the inculcation of good
will sometimes runs out into extravagant forms of self-
sacrifice. These fables are in fact an honest picture
of human life, and proverbs are not wanting which
answer to every human quality represented therein.
That those of sense and shrewdness should abound
is but another proof that pantheism does not exclude
practical capacities and aims.
Bhartrihari, a very ancient gnomic poet, whose
"sentences " on human life and conduct are very popu-
lar in India, begins with the praise of Jove and beauty,
and ends with the praise of devotion : —
" Wisdom is a treasure thieves cannot steal. It grows by spend-
ing, and it cannot pass away. The wise are the rich ; and ye, O
princes ! will never become their equals."
" Without the wisdom that burns away our sins, the Vedas are
nothing but men's trading wares."
" Virtue has no need of penances, nor a pure heart of washing
in the Ganges, nor a true man of human protection, nor magna-
nimity of any ornament, nor the wise of any treasure but wisdom."
" Though thy efforts fail, be steadfast, and thou shalt be exalted.
The torch thrown on the ground goes not out."
" He who has given himself to virtue, and felt the joy of obedi-
ence to duty, will give up life, but not his purpose."
" If the thistle has no leaves, is the spring to be blamed ; or the
sun, if bats fly not by day ; or the cloud, if no drop of rain fall into
^ The worst of these in the Hitopadesa are suggested by the good mouse (B. i.) —
purely for the purpose of testing tlie lieroic professions of the king of the doves, who begs
him to gnaw his subjects out of the net before himself, thus preferring their safety to his
own. The selhsh maxims are promptly rejected, and answered by others of the opposite
quality: whereat the mouse praises this. wisdom of self-sacrifice as worthy of a king.
MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. 465
the-cuckoo's beak ? So blame not fate : not so wilt thou change its
path."
" Go not aside from wisdom : then shall fire become as water, and
the sea as a well ; Meru shall be as a hillock, and the lion as a
gazelle ; poison shall be sweet as nectar, and serpents a crown of
flowers."
" As shadows in the morning is friendship with the wicked : .
hour by hour it wanes. But friendship with the good grows like
the shadows of eve, till lifers sun shall have set."
" The drop of rain tails on glowing iron, and is no more. It falls
on a flower, and shines like a pearl. It sinks into a shell at the
happy hour, and becomes the pearl itself. Such the difference be^
tween kinds of friendship among men."
" To do good in secret, to conceal one's good act, to help the
poor when he comes, to be moderate in prosperity, always to speak
kindly, is the path of wisdom." ^
I add a few selections of similar ethical purport
from other popular Hindu writings : —
" In thy passage over this earth, where the paths are now low,
now high, and the true way seldom distinguished, thy steps must
needs be unequal ; but fidelity to thyself will bear thee right on-
ward." ^
" Let thy motive lie in the act, not in the reward. Having sub-
dued thy passions, do thy own work, unconcerned for the result.
Then shalt thou stand untainted in the world, as the lotus-leaf lies
on the waters unwet."^
^'
The Mahabharata says of Arjuna that —
" Neither lust nor fear nor love could tempt him to transgress
his duty, or to do evil : " —
and Rama in the Ramayana that —
"As birds are made to fly and rivers to run, so the soul to-ii*"
follow duty."
" As the fragrance of a blossoming tree spreads far, so the fra-
grance of a pure action." *
1 Bhartr- (Von Bohlen's Latin vers.) I. 13; III. 72; I. 45, 75; II- 100; I. 89,
78, 5°. 57- •
• Sakuntal^. « Bhagavad-Gitd.. * Mahanarayana U/>an., II.
30
466 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
"As the stars disappear, so fades the memory of a kindness out
of a,n evil heart." ^
"Our senses are like lattices, at which the deities keep watch.
And if the soul unconsciously leaves them open to the poisonous
air of temptation, sincere prayer to these heavenly guardians will
save the precious hght."
" How can he who loves all men be torn by affliction ? Or he
who hates be free from terror ? or the voluptuary from misery ?
How can he fail who acts wisely? How can he be happy who mur-
murs at Providence ? Who can be glorious without virtue ? who
truly dishonored without blame ? And how without justice shall
the kingdom stand ?"^
" He who lives pure in thought, free from malice, contented,
leading a holy life, feeling tenderness for all creatures, speaking
wisely and kindly, humble and sincere, has Vasudeva (Vishnu) ever
in his heart. The Eternal makes not his abode within the heart of
that man who covets another's wealth ; who injures living creatures ;
who speaks harshness or untruth ; who is proud of his iniquity ;
whose mind is evil."^
" Men are ever seeking, never attaining, bliss. They die thirst-
ing. The whole world is suffering under triple affliction. Why
should I hate beings who are objects for compassion ? why cherish
malignity towards those who are more prosperous than myself.'' I
should rather sympathize with their happiness. For to suppress
unkind feelings is itself a reward."*
" It is the duty of the good man, even in the moment of his de-
struction, not only to forgive, but to seek to bless his destroyer, even
^ as the sandal-tree sheds perfume on the axe that fells it." *
" Heaven's gate opens to the good without a gift : the gate shut
fast to the wicked, though he bring hundred-fold offerings.
" Put a thousand horses in the scale, yet shall virtue be the
heavier weight. '
" The sweet scent of flowers is lost on the breeze, but the fra-
grance of virtue endures for ever.
" Whatever men do of good or evil, they shall reap the fruit in
due season.
" The foolish, like a child, knows not if things grow better or
worse ; and while, drawn by the roses, he lets the orchard go, he
will mourn over the fading flower, and lose the golden fruit." ®
* Hindu Play (Wiison). ' Ramciy&7ta. 3 Vishnu Purdna^ III. viL
* Vishnu PurdnOf I. xvii. ^ Halhed's Gento'o Code- « Rantdydna.
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. ' 467
And so we may judge whether Manu is not justified
in claiming what he does for the religion of his race.
"Of all duties the first is to know the Supreme. It is
the most exalted science, and assures immortal life.
For in the knowledge and adoration of God, which
the Veda teaches, all rules of good conduct are com-
prised." "Wisdom," says the Hitopadesa, "is the
highest good of man ; for it cannot be sold nor taken
from him, nor can it ever die. He who hath it not,
the destroyer of doubt, the mirror of the unseen, the
eye of all, is blind." ^
The belief that the substance of life is one and
divine has its forms in all af^^es, — recocrnitions, . .
^ ' o ' The intui-
more or less enlightened, of a constant spir- tionofiife
itual fact ; to which thought is again and again ^^ °°^*
remanded, under broader and clearer aspects, as man
advances to new forms of culture. And this better
knowledge comes mainly from doing justice to the
balancing fact of difference, or individuality.
In the Hindu mystic, a child of religious instinct
and dream, the unity of life was an exclusive con-
sciousness, an all-absorbing wonder and delight.
For the religious sentiment of itself is not analytic,
but integrative ; absorbed in what it loves, it sees not
parts, but wholes ; it dissolves antagonisms and dis-
tinctions, just as it does doubts or fears, in its own
fervent heat. While the understanding is unde-
veloped, this mystic sense of oneness is of course
blind to the capabilities of life, and the meaning of
its relations. As in Brahmanism, it even helps to
eternize social wrongs ; either ignoring them as illu-
sion, or else accepting them as elements of a divine
order, and reconciling them in its all-dissolving dream.
* Hiio^., Introd., 4, 9.
46S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Yet this dream is divination also of a central truth,
whose practical and social meaning grows with prog-
ress, and appears in the latest science and faith.
For these are really the goal involved in that mystic
point of departure, that intuitive ideal of the unity of
life. The course of history justifies and reaffirms it
on a broader plane, having at last developed its human
values. We can here but sketch this process.
In the Oriental philosophies, unity is for the most
Its historical P^^^t 3. rcligious abstraction, an ideal of con-
evolution, templatiou. But with Greek and Roman the
understanding comes to its rights. The individual
asserts his validity. The human and finite are
marked oflf, as against the infinite, and studied, in and
for themselves. And in this polarity or antagonism
come liberty and progress. Man recognizes his own
regulated powers to be the path to truth, beauty, good.
It is no longer the unlimited, but limits that is divine.
What Kapila and his Sankhya reaction on Vedantism
showed in germ thus reaches maturer expression
under more favoring skies, in more energetic races.
Here all is relation, contrast, difference.
With the Greek comes the triumph of dialectics,
the clear analysis of ideas and principles, the keenest
sense of individual purpose. With the Greek appears
duality of matter and mind ; also of matter and num-
ber. Pythagoras determines the harmonious relations
of finite things. Xenophanes, who pronounced unity
to be the ultimate fact, as distinctly as the Vedantists,
and who recognized the illusion of the phenomenal
world as fully, yet not the less insisted that all visible
things should be studied, and had his own natural
history of their origin and development. So the
Ionian cities first thoroughl}^ distinguished politics
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 469
from theocracy ; and Greek life emancipated govern-
ment, making it a separate independent science. And
the first great step was taken towards freeing men
from religious bondage when Xenophanes pointed out
the fact tliat they made their own gods.
*' The gods have not given every thing to man. It is man who
has ameHorated his own destiny."
The Prometheus of ^^schylus, resisting Jove for the
sake of mankind, and predicting his downfall at the
hands of the son of a mortal woman, illustrates the
same protest of the human, against an overwhelming
sense of infinity. Taine has admirably pointed out
this quality of the Greek mind. " The Greeks have
no sentiment of this infinite universe, in which a
generation of people is but an atom in time and place.
Eternity does not set up before them its pyramid of
myriads of ages. The universal escapes them, or at
least half occupies them, or remains in the background
in their religion."^ In Rome, on the other hand, the
universal was everywhere pursued, yet always in con-
crete and human forms, — as political organization,
as jurisprudence, as world-wide sway.
Even in Greece and Rome, however, we still find
the religious sentiment to be, on the whole, inclusive
of all human spheres and functions. It gives man
and nature their meaning for art, science, philosophy,
domestic, social, municipal life ; so that there is still
a sense in which life might make the impression of a
divine unity. But the process advances.
Aristotle has defined ; analyzing man and nature as
he could. Bacon goes further ; plots the sciences on
a map, and marks the regions yet to be filled. Men
botanize, dissect, unroll the earth's pages, loose the
^ Ari in Greece, p. 38.
470 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
bands of Orion, and resolve the galaxy into m3Tiads
of worlds. It is telescope and calculus, instruments of
analysis, that are divine. We learn the mechanics
of religion, politics, commerce, art. ■ Men search out
the cunning workmanship of the universe. They are
all eye to detect how it was contrived by a Being who
plans, devises, manipulates, constructs like themselves.
In this inspection of definite processes the immanence
of the infinite gradually recedes from thought, and
religion enters the phase of a more or less external
deism, oscillating between the Paleys and Voltaires ;
knowing God only as a manipulator of materials
provided for him from without, just as one knows an
architect by the style of his house, or a watch-
maker by his watch. It is not strange that analytic
science, elated by its discoveries in this realm of de-
finable relations and palpable mechanism, and in-
attentive to the infinite substance that must condition
all phenomena, should concentrate its homage at last
on the processes by which it achieves its triumph.
Analysis, in fact, by its own function of taking the
world to pieces, instead of receiving the impression
of its unity and integrity, is reduced to holding this
critical process as the essential thing, the vital fact of
the universe. Mind and nature become in its theory
simply objective material for testing and reducing,
mere hylic mass for manipulation by its forces ;
whether to afford them discipline, or to give scope to
their energies, or to reflect their praise.
This merely analytic process is quite incompetent to
reveal truth in the form oi life. To dissect its objects,
it must destroy them. It slays that beautiful unit}^ of
functions and relations, in which life is mysteriously
shrined. In the heap of dead fibres and organs, on
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 47 1
which it has operated, and which it displays in their
mere outward mechanism, what resemblance is there
to the living, breathing, inspired body? What resem-
blance to the former life can you get by putting them
together again? Phosphorus in the growing grain is
food for human brains : extract this phosphorus by
chemical process, and it is poison. Being must be
seen in its natural and vital relations, in its integrity,
or it is not seen at all. Under the power of mere
analysis, science would become pure autopsy, and
nature have no informing soul.
The genius of scientific and practical races has
therefore not been without its tendencies to transform
the living universe — which for the contemplative spirit
is thrilling with a mystic divine pulsation, and which
Plato even called a living creature — into a well-devised
machine. Their vast capacities, under the lead of
analysis, have developed its definable uses, rather
than felt the mystery of its life. As one after
another they have unfolded its flowing activities, its
unfathomed forces, they have seemed to claiai these
by right of creation quite as much as by tRat of dis-
covery ; to throw off the Infinite as a separable ele-
ment, and then refuse it all place in the triumph of the
very powers which it conditions and supplies ; writing
on each freshly won field, " God is not here, but, if
anyzvhe7'e, behind and beyond ; " insisting all tlie
time, observe, that the idea of God as a distinct exter-
nal power is the only idea of God, being that which
analysis must report. Their physical science goes
further still, and in its search for physical origins of
life has often quite overlooked the substance for the
processes of nature, and mistaken the mechanism of
life for its explanation and cause.
472 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
But science cannot penetrate far on her divine path
Through without discerninor that it zs divine. Science
mature sci- , ,
ence. has uo commissiou to take the mystery out of
nature, to exorcise from its law^s the life that preserves
them from being fathomed by progressive thought,
or marred by imperfect will. So much is clearly dis-
cerned by the broadest scientific minds of the day.
Science solves no problem but by recognizing
another and more interior, disclosed by the solution
itself, as a flower within its opening sheath. The
freest explorers of nature not only see most clearly the
unity of the universe, tracing its laws through their
relations to each other and to the whole, but also the
infinitude of these relations, inexhaustible for every
atomic fact. Not less is the unity of life revealed in
the w^onderful gradations of its forms ; in the compre-
hension of all lower stages within all higher ones ;
and in endless subtle affinities, transitions, transforma-
tions, that forbid absolute lines of separation between
these stages of ascent. And the whole drift of mod-
ern science is towards the recognition of what has
been described by one of its ablest exponents as " one
harmonious action, underlying the whole of nature,
organic and inorganic, cosmical, physical, chemical,
terrestrial, vital, and social." ^
Yet this unity is, it must also be observed, of a
purely transcendental kind. It is not explicable, or
even expressible, by the processes of science, which
can but trace the order of phenomena, and must
therefore confess herein the immanence of the infinite
throughout its fields of research. Science, then, must
inevitably bring fresh tributes to mystic contempla-
tion, and reconcile liberty and knowledge with that
* Mivart, Genesis of SfecUs, p. 239.
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 473
old eternal longing of the soul for the unfathomable
One.
Of this whole process, miracle is of course the in-
tolerable neofation. If it were possible for the^,
=' ^ Through re-
notion that the course of natural law can bejectionof
violated or suspended to hold its ground, it "^'^'^ ^^" -*
would utterly abolish the power of science to reveal
immanent deity, and even the idea of deity as infinite
intelligence. Logically, there could be no science,
and no religion ; only observations of phenomena that
point to no universal or reliable basis of belief. How
could these observations really reveal One who mav
contradict them to-morrow? But such contempt of
nature and distrust of its orderly laws is not properly
Aryan. With races of this stock science hastens to
fulfil its religious function. The Semitic mind also
has learned to greet this form of revelation as freely
as the Aryan.
Oriental faith in miracles knew no bounds. But
miracle was as universal in the East as law with us, and
so that stupendous mythology had meaning for the re-
ligious sentiment. There was no vain distinction made
between miraculous and 7iatural revelation ; but the
whole actual or possible of nature and life was, as it
were, insphered in deity. In a child's wonder at all
he sees, special wonder-working counts for no more
than plain nature. .
The scientific conception of invariable law comes,
then, not to destroy this divine dream that the The
universe is in God, so dear to contemplative °^
minds in every age, but to interpret and fulfil it.
Man has been learning to reconcile freedom, even
in deity, with orderly and unchanging ways, and to
clear his own ideal of perfection from every element
mission
science.
474 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
of excluslveness or divided power. He has been
learning that the closest study of mind and nature
does not free him from the conviction that infinite in-
telligence is the inmost ground of finite, but confirms
it by all the certainties of law. The mystic faith
which, while yet an infantile instinct, sang of Brahma
as the All, and of the world of forms as his divine
play, has thus permanent meaning for man ; and all
its phases in history have been pointing beyond them-
selves to a maturity which only science could bring.
Clothed in new knowledge as in new names ; inter-
preted by things natural and practical, and giving
these a sublime reach of relation and promise ; set to
largest social uses, and inspiring them with universal-
ity, identifying religion with the free growth of every
human faculty, with labor and with life, and so eman-
cipating it from dependence on mediator or miracle, —
this mystic faith in the oneness of God and man
reappears at last as a freedom and intelligence, which
neither distinctive Brahmanism, Judaism, nor Chris-
tianity could express.
I perceive no power cither in the friends or foes of
^ . . , . science to resolve it into spiritual nefjation. It
Spiritual re- i o
lationsof can neither become the slave of superstition
nor the bar to sentiment and ideal vision. It
refuses to be ruled by the hostile supernaturalist, who
imagines that a development theory must involve
atheism. It must no less distinctly decline the pro-
posal of the student of nature to banish, in the name
of law itself, " what we call spirit and spontaneity,"
from human thought. ^
For a law, physical or ps3xhological, is no mere
automatic machinery. It is a mode of action^ so
^ YixxA^-^ Qw Physical Basis of Lije.
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 475
orderly, so harmoniously related to other laws, so
expressive of what we most reverence in thought,
that to divorce it from mind would be to refuse belief
in the ideal forms of those attributes which most
dignify mind ; those highest functions to which in-
telligence, as we find it in ourselves, clearly points
upward. Instead of being apart from mind, the con-
stancy of natural law implies an inseparable mental
force, none the less real because without the limita-
tions which human intelligence involves. Its univer-
sality does not make it the less, but the more divine.
A man may make wheels, springs, and levers his
agents, and withdraw ; for inertia and weight do not
depend on his fingers, and the machine will get on for
a while without his aid. But deity cannot leave the
laws of the universe* to work alone, since they are sim-
ply forms of divine energy ; the activity of the law
being nothing else than the instant energy of imma-
nent mind. That this energy transcends all we ex-
perience as personal consciousness does not alter the
fact that it is a form of mind.
What serves it to remand this wisdom and power
to a distinct sphere, and lay it quietly aside as "The
Unknowable " ? How indeed can that be unknowable
of which we know that it exists, and of w^hich, if we
are to allow ourselves competent to science in any
form, the very meaning for us is constant self-mani-
festation in phenomena?
The mind and heart of man still fail not to enter-
tain the never solved, yet never wholly unanswered
questions which a secret intuitive assurance will not
suffer him to dismiss.
What is this instant intelligence whereby the uni-
verse becomes unity and order and growth ? What
4^6 * RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
harmonizes nature and man ? What brings the atoms
together each moment to form the coherent globe, and
yet holds them at the same moment apart, so that two
shall never touch ? What lifts each separate billow
of the sea, yet binds it to obey the tidal swell ?
Discussion as to which is the one great force in
material atoms, attraction or self-repulsion ; or w^hether
all things come to pass through action and reaction
of the two, — makes no difference to our questions,
which go deeper.
What is that in conscience which is so at one with
gravitation^ and affinity and light ? What mysterious
sway makes recollection and hope, past and future,
alike our servants ? What directs the remedial retri-
butions, silent and sure, to bring us back to nature
and right ?
What is that most minute attention which guards
the pulsations of the heart; keeps thought, affection,
will, coherent and untroubled ; buoying up individual
existence on the unfathomed sea? And what makes
the deep that brought us hither, and into which we
return, to be in all its mystery a home into whose care
we entrust what is dearest to us with such wondrous
calmness?
Questions these as old as mind and heart, earlier
than the study of natural laws, and not set aside there-
by. And what of the answer ? Was it only because
he had so little knowledge of the definite processes,
the delicate distinctions which science reveals, that the
Hindu, pondering over these mysteries, solved all
questions by pronouncing the one word AdhydtJiia^ —
Over-soul ? Was it his ignorance that spirit and
spontaneity must be dismissed, upon the discovery of
law, that prompted the answer, "Mind is all" ? Yet
PIETY OF PANTHEISM. 477
it would appear that our science of invariable har-
monious law itself can give no other answer ; and
we must still demand what invisible life is plying at
this seamless warp and woof of "evolution," "natural
selection," "metamorphosis." Is it we individually, we
collectively, who do it, — we who can neither make nor
mar one of these laws, and who advance only by
accepting and rightly using them according to laws
of reason and love ? Is it, as some dream, spirits
wiser than we, a hierarchy of diviner insights and
powers ? We gain not a step by such ascent, to-
wards reaching the constitutive force of law. Spirits
themselves are not less truly expressions of this force
in thfeir mental energies, for being also free, produc-
tive, personal. Their spontaneity itself rests on this
mystery of orderly law, like the movements of atoms
and of suns. Morality is personal liberty ; but it is no
less the movement of immutable law, transcending
the individual, while it lifts him into the freedom and
strength which belong to universal truth.
We call the intelligence, of which universal law is
the movement, God. But in reality we have no name
for it, because no name can cover the whole. Law,
Life, Love, Unity, Fatherhood, Brotherhood, this re-
ligion, that religion, all are waves of the One Divine
Sea.
None of these syllables have quite expressed the
truth that is found only in the whole. They yield but
fragments of a sense that was never sounded, of a
growth that cannot end.
The Vedantic worship of One Life in all was
darkened by idolatry of tradition and of caste. Escape from
Yet it should be noted that caste and tradition limitations.
were held to be steps only, to higher unity of being
478 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
which should dissolve them away. After all, the rela-
tions of the devotee with his ideal of the Supreme
were felt to be personal and direct : his own sacrifice,
his own disciplines, not another's, were relied on to
make his illusions vanish and reality appear.
All special religions have, in like manner, presented
obstacles of their own to that free recognition of the
infinite which they sought. Especially is this true
of their pretensions to supernatural revelation, which
science is so thoroughly setting aside in the name of
law. In the lower stages of culture, supernaturalism
is indeed a reaching forth to find God : it means that
there is at least a divineness in things exceptional or
wonderful, for those who have not yet learned what
sacredness there is in things familiar and near. It is,
primarily then, a form of spiritual progress, and satis-
fies real needs. But, when prolonged into scientific ages
and enlightened races, claims of this kind practically
teach that God is not in man, in nature, in history;
but Old of man, against n2,\.\\x^^ behind history; en-
tering the world once on a time, with what men
are expected to receive as truer than truth, more
legislative than law, more loving than love. They
teach that spirit is to be held the more divine
for secluding itself in the prescriptive claim of one
or of a few. They teach that the infinite is the
better recognized for confining its manifestation to a
class, an epoch, an individual life. All this limita-
tion of universal forces, this prescription of divine
paths, this foreclosure of inspiration, the liberty of
our day holds to be no better than sarcophagus or
shroud. It will choose rather that pantheism of
the Spirit that finds God instant and informing in all
history, experience, law, and work. What Eastern
PIETY OF PANTHEISM.
479
contemplation could foreshadow, Western vigor and
grasp of things will have to deliver out of its limita-
tions, old and new, by bringing the unities of races
and sciences and faiths, to serve, now that their day
too has come, this eternal desire of the soul.
Never can man, with whatsoever motive, even in
theory separate himself from God. Theology has
vainly attempted it, under promptings of fear and
self-contempt. Even the noble sentiment of humility
has been pressed by a sense of imperfection and in-
ward evil, to the point of imagining a gulf positively
separating the divine from the human. It has thus
attempted what would divide deity itself, and abolish
at once both human and divine. This also was in
vain.
It is the virtue of modern culture, intellectual and
moral, that it educates man in self-respect; so that
he shall no longer think himself bound to deny the
validity of his own nature, in order to affirm the reality
of the divine. It does not hesitate to assure him that
it is only where he finds his own real being that' he is
finding God.
I
I
V.
INCARNATION.
-?!
INCARNATION.
'THHE literal meaning of Incarnation is that deity
-*" assumes a material body, in order to be universality
clearly recognized as present in the actual °^ ^^^ ^'^^^•
world. Substantially, the belief implies a profounder
truth, which its various forms imperfectly express: —
that Life is in its inmost sense one with God. It is
essential to the religious sentiment, and has as many
forms as there are religions in the world. God must
be not abstraction, but life. Somehow the world must
manifest the Highest Spirit. Philosophy affirms that it
must be so, by the very nature of being, notwithstand-
ing the conditions of relativity and imperfect vision
under which we must behold this manifestation. The
heart pleads that it is surely so, because God loves
us, and nothing will satisfy this love but to take our
nature, that he may be among us as a friend. The
disciples of every positive religion insist that it has
been so, in this or that exalted personage who has
appeared, to found a faith. The devout thinker says :
It is so, now and always ; for what is God but the
life of the universe, as of the soul?
No race of men, in other words, is satisfied to think
of the world as separate from ideal good. And every
religion devises some special way of bringing the one
into the other, even though it may overlook or deny
484 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
some completer way ; because all instinctively divine
that the two are essentially one. Of course the form
chosen is noble or otherwise, according to the charac-
ter of the civilization ; but the endeavor is not any-
where wanting. Even where little inspiration or faith
is left, religions throw themselves back upon past
ideals, which are believed to have exhausted the
sources of truth. And this idolatry becomes the more
anxious and jealous, the feebler the faith in revelation
through living consciousness and present opportunity.
The manifold superstition that hastens to call itself
" inspirational " proves at least the need of being some-
how assured of a divine presence. Lacking the
heavenly form, men will grub within the earth for sub-
stitutes. Nor is there any creature so insignificant,
down to beetle and worm, but it has been some-
where supposed to guest a god. And if science
delights to discover the forces of gravitation and re-
pulsion in every atom, and the mysterious dynamics
of life in every organic molecule, may not the relig-
ious instinct well have sought to greet the divinity in
every form of being from the loftiest to the least?
The highest type of the idea is of course that of
Incarnation incamatiou in Man ; and this also is not ex-
inman. clusively rcvcalcd to any race, nor in any per-
son. It is human, as is also the faith that deity is in
sympathy with man, and uplifts him through experi-
ence of his needs and desires.
Of this assurance how various the forms in human
history, all more or less imperfect expressions of
the idea. For the Hindu, it was God manifest in
the Brahman, or divinely absorbed man ; for the
Hebrew and Mohammedan, in the prophetic man ; for
the Greek, in the Delphic man or woman, oracular
^
INCARNATION. ^M / 4,§S
and ecstatic; for the Celt, in the Druid man o^Ayo-
man ; for the modern Persian mystic, in the Bab, oi; >
man who represents the open " gate " of God ; for the
Christian, in the Christ, or man supposed to have
been the one only possible Form of God, or else
exclusively '"anointed " to be the central life of hu-
manity, or nucleus of its faith in God. Then for the
Roman Catholic, to meet the needs of that great
organization which had followed logically on the sub-
mission of mankind to this central Christ, it was in-
evitably the papal man.
But there are far broader and more spiritual forms
than any of these, — into which the idea of incar-
nation is now steadily advancinor. God becomes in-
carnate through the eternal principles that underlie
the conscience and the affections of man ; in his reason
and his faith ; organized into character as intellectual
light and noble love. And again God is incarnate in
the social man, in humanity itself, developed at once
in the individual and in the race, as is possible only
through the free intermingling and mutual balance of
all human elements, and inspiring institutions wdth
those principles of personal freedom and moral order
by which the human becomes one with the divine.
We are henceforth to find this unity in actual life ; in
wise, productive labor of brain and hand ; in an inte-
gral culture of the individual and the race, instead of
reading it as a tradition of the past, veiled behind my-
thology and philosophy, as an idealization or a divine
dream. For all the lofty sentences of Eastern wisdom
do not tell us how far men lived according to the best ;
and it would also seem that the more the New Testa-
ment is studied in a genuine spirit of historical re-
search, the less can be affirmed with certainty about
^86 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
that personal life which Christians have been taught
to adore.
But everywhere in some form recurs the assurance
that God is manifest in man. Ever since man, made
in the divine image, came to conscious spiritual life,
he has felt the necessity to find his nature indeed
divine ; to behold deity in it, transfiguring its outward
part in the shimmer of miracle, or else its inward and
spiritual part, and thence the body and its uses, in the
real splendor of truth and love. The aspiration never
dies out of the soul, because God and the soul are
essentially one.
And this, which Oriental instinct divined, was re-
cognized in many noble ways, not only in its relation
to the desire of progress, but as balance to the sense
of moral evil and spiritual need.
Emile Burnouf ^ thinks that incarnation in the com-
Aryanincar-plcts scusc is pre-eminently an Aryan belief;
nation. -j-]^^^ jj- jg easicr for an Arvan to conceive God
as incarnated in man than to conceive prophetic inspi-
ration in the Hebrew sense. ^ This is but to say that
the Ar3'an religious sentiment is pantheistic. And
the statement is true. There is a breadth and abso-
luteness in its conception of the unity of all truth,
which is not satisfied with leaving man outside divin-
ity, the mere recipient of gifts from a source apart
from his nature. The divine desire in the soul implies
the divinity of the soul. The object of worship is
more than object : it pre-existed in the worshipper,
and prompted the aim and the prayer. The yearnings
* A rt. on the Science of Religions, in the Revue des Deux MondeS'
2 As an illustration may be mentioned the Persian sect of Babists, already referred to,
which has spread over a large portion of Persia, and, like Sufism, engrafted upon Islamite
theism a pantheistic faith. See Gobineau, p. 477.
INCARNATION. 487
of the spirit are more than a sense of need : they are
the strength of an inward ideal seeking its own. And
the perception of this truth is* eminently Aryan. The
tendency of Indo-European philosophy to identify sub-
ject and object in the processes of existence is but
the sj^cctdative form of a profound instinct in this
race, which demands that culture shall express by its
freedom and fulness the essential unity of the human
with the divine.
Burnouf fails to appreciate this philosophical scope
of the fact he has attempted to state, when he ventures
to infer from it that the dogma of the divinity of ycstis
will stand permanently for all Aryan races as a truth
of positive religion. It is mainly from Aryan idealiza-
tion indeed that the dogma in question has proceeded.
Jesus himself was of Semitic descent : the earliest
records of his life are of similar origin, and form no,
exception to the instinctive reluctance of the Semite to
ascribe pure deity to the human. To effect this, they
required to be clothed in purely Aryan conceptions
from Greek and Oriental sources. And they were in
fact so transformed, in the Christian consciousness.
The ideal demand thus proved itself independent of
specific historical or biographical truth. But the fact
that it has been so at last becomes manifest, by the
progress of inquiry, to all ; and then the absoluteness
of this special personal symbol can no longer be main-
tained. It was provisional and temporary ; represent-
ing one stage only in the development of that Aryan
demand for incarnation in man, which passes on to
broader levels and maturer siofht.^
* This is fully recognized even in Babism, which Gobineau describes (p. 326) as defi-
nitely affirming that God has not willed humanity to believe that revelation had reached its
limitf or that its own revelation was shut up within a single personage.
488 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Of all personal incarnation that which man has
Incarnation ^^ost lovcd in all agGS is God manifest as
as Saviour. SavioiLT ; and it 'has as many forms as there
are stages and epochs in his comprehension of his
own spiritual and moral needs.
The Christian belief that God was incarnated once
for all for this purpose, undoubtedly contained, in its
earnestness and concentrative power, the germs of
broader and maturer conceptions than itself. These
have always been apparent in efforts, more or less
successful, to escape the limitations which as dogma
it affirms. The time has come when these efforts
have learned their own significance, and resulted in
an idea of incarnation, consistent with Universal
Religion.
To all such exclusive forms of the idea succeeds the
nobler faith that incarnation is the permanent fact of
human nature, and comes into special view wherever
beautiful and beneficent lives are lived, or thought is
uttered, in earnest accord with its universal laws ;
and that the "saving" power, which is neither more
nor less than the educating, humanizing power, and
coincident with culture, is, as power of God, one and
the same thing in them all. Whenever any part of
the world, spiritual or material, is redeemed to its
natural and so divine uses, there God, as man, becomes
Saviour. And who shall fathom how much of this there
has been in past human lives, or how much there is
in present ones?
The conception of this movement comes to absorb
into its unity, one by one, the manifold stages of
human progress ; and we apprehend deity as manifest
in each age under such forms as its knowledge of life
and nature have enabled it to reco^;nize.
INCARNATION. 489
In periods when a sense of degeneracy inevitably
possessed men, and they turned their faces The Hindu
backward to find golden ages in the past, ^'^^^^•
because there was as yet no foothold for practical con-
struction through the intercourse of energetic races ;
when the outward world therefore repelled them as
illusion, and refuge in the inward became a necessity,
— it is refreshing to find the belief that deity becomes
manifest as deliverer whenever man's needs reqitire^
or his aspirations and devotions enter the ever of en
door of a mystic union with omnipotence.
This instant access to the best was not through all
sainthood and heroism only, as these were then its universal
conceived by the traditional ideal. In the ^^'^"'^^^^•
oneness of all life, Hindu faith beheld everywhere the
Supreme sacrificing himself for all ; ^ "through de-
votion " taking on himself the whole possibility of
human misery and want. Brahma is in the form
of every element, every creature. He is their unity,
and it is his sacrifice that consecrates them all.
It was a redeeming element of Hindu caste itself,
that it constituted every saint an incarnation of Brah-
ma for the preservation of the world, in virtue of his
•
fulfilment of the ideal of sainthood. This equal
opportunity, even within the limits of a hereditary
class, was at least the recognition that fresh access to
union with deity by discipline and faith could never
be wholly foreclosed. Nor was any past form of
sainthood regarded as in permanent possession either
of supreme and final virtue, or of invincible authority.
Its throne was held provisionally, and liable to pass
to a stronger master in the sphere of "devotion."
1 Sec Sankara's Commentary on the BrUtad Upan-, where the Brahmana is quoted at
length.
490 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
This democratic element in Brahmanical holiness has
already attracted our interest. Under favoring cir-
cumstances, it would have reconciled incarnation with
liberty and progress. Although such instincts of
growth had little practical opportunity, and cannot
here receive the living meaning which a more en-
ergetic civilization would put into them, they were
nevertheless not wholly a dream. Their influence is
traceable through the whole course of Hindu religious
history.
The moral defects of an unrestrained play of the
idea of incarnation, in races and ages of imperfect
culture, are obvious. And, on the other hand, the
very limitations of this idea in the Christian conscious-
ness, its confinement to a single historic form, severely
simple and ethically noble, has been temporarily of
great service in sobering the sensuous imagination
and guiding the moral sentiment of mankind. Chris-
tian mythology, cautious and tame beside Hindu, is
proportionately purer. The virtue of a mythology,
however, considered as play of the religious imagina-
tion, lies not only in ethical purity, but in freedom and
scope also. Full justice to the religious nature of
man will recognize both these sides, and find germs of
permanent service in both.
As representing the freedom of deity to assume
Breadth of Hviug forms of manifestation. Christian my-
human re- ,, . ., i-ii r r ^•
lation. thology IS ccrtamly tame beside that oi India.
Its Virgin conceives her Child through the miraculous
overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. But the wives of
Dasaratha in the Ramayana conceive and bear sons
who are gods, simply by eating sacrificial food. And
Sita, who is the celestial Lakshmi in human form,
arises from the Earth in a silver vessel turned up by
INCARNATION. 49I
the plough in clearing a place for sacrifice ; for Sita
is the fiwrow^ and her worship as wife of Rama, the
incarnate preserver, divinizes the bounteous earth and
the labors that redeem it ; as her separation from him,
and disappearance in the arms of the earth itself,
amidst a divine flame that issues from the cloven
ground, expresses the sowing and death of the seed.
In similar recognition of physical uses, the gods churn
the sea of milk, throwing into it every kind of medi-
cinal plant that grows ; and out of the arnrita or im-
mortal food that com.es of this divine toil ascend
goddesses that bless mankind.
Oriental civilization being based on the family, we
are prepared to find much of the incarnation-lore of
India centering in the functions and destinies of kin-
dred. These may, in fact, almost be said to consti-
tute its tragedy and triumph, in epos and drama and
sacred song. Strife and reconciliation, duty and sacri-
fice, penalty and reward, find their divine expression
in the idealization of these simple relations. And
Kalidasa, with entire simplicity, describes the four
sons of Raghu shining by division of their father's
being, as jusdce, use, redemption, and love descended
from heaven to become incarnate in four human lives. ^
Rama, as incarnation of Vishnu for human deliver-
ance from evil, is hailed by aged saints, who vishnuas
die gladly when their eyes have seen the long Rama.
expected One.^ He supplants all the older gods, who
pour on their heads the dust that is under his feet. He
absorbs all their powers into himself; but it is because
he represents all functions and demands of Ife. He
passes through every phase of the Hindu sense of per-
sonal duty. He fulfils every relation recognized in the
1 Raghuvansa, X. ^ Ramdy.j III-
492 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Oriental ideal of service and of command, assuming
in succession the three stages of student, married, and
hermit life. He suffers all injustice, even to complete
deprivation of his natural rights. He condescends to
wear the bark dress, and to dig roots with a spade,
though born to a throne ; and this through obedience
to fihal love and duty, that a father's word, might not
be made void. His conviction is his life and strenn-th
and immortality. He brings out by his self-sacrifice a
soul of tenderness and magnanimity in his relatives ;
"overcomes mankind by fidelity, Brahmans by gen-
erosity, preceptors by his attention to duties, and all
enemies by the sword and bow." His forgiveness of
injury is not less perfect than his power to punish
it. He pays funeral honors to his bitterest foe. He
cherishes no anger against the false queen who has
deprived him of his crown, driven him into exile, and
brought his father to untimely death. He even seeks
excuses for her, and commends her to the care of his.
brother, on whom she has forced the crown that
belonged of right to himself. One who mourned
excessively for a lost -brother he admonishes thus: —
" Man must not be carried away by grief, but hasten to a better
mind. Thou hast shed tears : it is enough. Necessity is lord of
the world. But let man never forget the good on which he should
fix his eyes ; for fate embraces in its movement duty, use, and joy.
We have given what we ought to grief: now let us do what is
becoming."
His virtues are exaggerations, and conformed to
Oriental ideals and motives ; but, whatever its faults,
we must note, as the special nobility of this poetic
incarnation, which enters profoundly into the popular
faith, its effort to embody the whole duty, at once of
1 Rdrndy., IV.
INCARNATION. 493
a king, a husband, a son, a brother, a hero, a saint, a
deliverer of mankind from moral evil. He is adored
as "protector of the defenceless, extending mercy to
the oppressed."^ Even his foe, whom he is obliged
to slay, commits his son to his care in perfect trust,
at death. ^ When counselled to obtain the throne by
treachery, he replies : —
" Far from me as poison be a gain, even were it of the throne ot
heaven, which is obtained by the iniquity of destroying a friend."
A victor over his enemies by his superhuman powers,
he generously ascribes his success to his companions
in arms.
Rama's absolute sacrifice of his own interests to his
father's authority is an exaltation of the patriarchal
ideal above the Brahmanical. Social relations are
here shown to be amenable to a higher law than caste.
Here, as Michelet has enthusiastically said, "is a new
revelation ; God incarnate in a non-Brahmanic caste ;
the ideal of holiness transferred to a Kshattriya ; as
later, in Europe, St. Louis, a warrior, a king, becomes
the spiritual ideal, of whom a contemporary exclaims,
^O holy layman, whose deeds the priests should
emulate l'"^
Rama is indeed the universality of the divine life.
The arrow with which he slays the Satan of the epic,
Ravana, is "made from the spirit of all the gods."
He is intensely human. Overwhelmed by his afflic-
tions, he is consoled by the gods. " Having appeared
on earth in human form, his actions must accord with
those of human beings." Human he is to the point
of yielding to temptations now and then for the mo-
* AdJiyatma R&may. (the Vaishnava version of the epic). Wheeler, II. p. 308, 404.
• Ram&y.y IV. * Bible de PHmnanite, p. 52.
494 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
ment. Thus he puts away Sita after all her fidelity,
merely because her virtue had been exposed to peril
while in the hands of her demon ravisher, and suffers
her to enter the fire to prove her innocence ; a dra-
matic invention, to bring out the national sensitiveness
in regard to female chastity, at the same time that it
affords Rama the opportunity of naively reproaching
himself for injustice to her, and so makes his very
weakness inspire new affection, and associate him
with human and even childish experience.
" His face became like the moon in the month of snows : if he
had sent his queen from his palace for fear of evil speech, he had
not been able to banish her from his heait."^
There is at least a democratic touch in this feature
of the story. He explains the act by saying, " I knew
she was true ; but I put her to the test lest the people
should blame me " for lack of respect for the purity
of wifehood. So when in irritation he slays a Sudra,
the victim is transported in a beautiful form to para-
dise.2 Rama at last ascends to heaven from the banks
of the Sarayu, resuming his divine essence, amidst all
holy persons, revelations, powers, elements, in sight
of all the people and even the lower animals. In the
heavens appear all the gods, in infinite splendor,
amidst fragrant winds and rain of flowers. As Rama
enters the sacred waters, Brahma from the sky pro-
nounces the words : —
" Approach, O Vishnu ! enter thine own body, the eternal ether.
Thou art the abode of the worlds."^
By the blessing of Rama's name and through
Deliverance previous faith in him, all sins, according to
from sin. Valshuava belief, are remitted; and "every
* Raghuvansat'Kl'V . * Adhy. R5.viay. (Wheeler, p. 393).
» Ra.mciy.^ VII.
INCARNATION. 495
one, whatever his iniquities, whether a Brahman or a
Chandala, a king, or a beggar, who shall at death
pronounce this name with sincere worship, shall be
forgiven." The gods, conversing together of the re-
pentance and restoration, in this way, of an evil spirit
who had sought to compass the ruin of Rama, say : —
" Behold how this sinner has been saved ! Such is the benevo-
lence of Rama. What good actions has this demon performed that
he could deserve such happiness ? He has, from having resigned
his life at Rama's feet and beholding him, been absorbed into him." ^
Hindu theology understands even better than Chris-
tian how to shift off the burden of an evil conscience,
by trust in vicarious merits. This offence against the
t
moral laws in either case we are not commending to
an enlightened age. Yet in its origin the idea has
very plain relation to the sense of an omnipotent
power and purpose to relieve from crushing burdens
of moral and spiritual penalty. In the expression of
absoluteness in divine good-will, no form of incarna-
tion has attempted so wide a scope as the Rama of
this epic mythology, whose worst enemies, while they
are punished, after Hindu fashion, with much outlay
of terrific penalty, are yet all taken up into heaven at
last, through such force of good as may have once
been in them, and the all-embracing benignity and
mercy of the god.
These liberal and benignant elements are repro-
duced in the modern Vaishnava sects, founded _
Democratic
on the worship of Rama: such as those of and humane
Ramananda and Kabir, of Rai-Das and Dadu, "^""'"'"
of which further notice will be taken hereafter. These
teachers were for the most part men of the lowest
* Ad/iy Ramay., p 287.
49^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
castes ; and the mythology that has already gathered
about their names centres in the democratic reaction
against caste and ecclesiastical authority which has
gone steadily on throughout Hindu history. Of this
element Vishnu, ^2;^' Rdina, is the constant represen-
tative.
The relation of this humanitarian spirit to the
worship of Rama is illustrated by the charters of land
granted by the later Hindu kings, and written on
metallic tablets, which are constantly coming to light.
Their stereotyped phrase quotes Rama as declaring
that " to j^ive awav land is to cross oceans of sin ;
while to resume or reappropriate it is to fall back into
hells of transmiorration."
The incarnation of Vishnu as Krishna is of a more
complex character, and covers a still lariier
knsiuu. ... . . .
c^round of historic relation ; embracinij: in the
diversity of its phases the whole compass of Hindu ex-
perience. In Krishna every popular and every specula-
tive ideal, every instinct and every conviction that sought
religious sanction, has found its embodiment; each in
turn assuming this traditionally consecrated name. In
its service therefore, as well as in its sound, the name
corresponds with that of Christ in the religious history
of the Western nations. It has represented every stage
of progress, every degree of enlightenment, or of the
lack of it, in Hindu history. It is the divinization of
desire and hope trom lowest to highest level, the sport
of the superstitious fancy and of the devout imagina-
tion alike. They have made it mean whatever they
would. It is vain therefore to look for moral or spec-
ulative unity in what is plainly but a common name
for the whole of Hindu aspiration, exclusive only of
its most rationalistic side ; a thread by which it haii
INCARNATION. 497
given some semblance of continuity to its past. In
this respect it does not differ from the endless dis-
cordance of high and low ideals, which Christianity,
throurrh its asfes of sectarian strife, has comprehended
under the name of Christ, reaching back indeed
throucfh the earliest records of his life. If all these
had at some epoch been brought together into one
vast Christian Bible, in which the Church had ever
since been seeking by repeated elaborations and mys-
tical reinterpretations to preserve the continuity of its
faith, through the one term common to the whole, —
the name of Christ, — it would be analogous to what
has happened in this Krishna-worship of the Hindus.
An indefinite expansion of the name of Christ, to
cover all stages and forms of recognized faith, and all
sacred records on which they rest, is really the fact of
Christian history, although the whole process is not
concentrated in such a Bible as has been suggested.
So true is this, that the name has long since ceased
to be of service for convevinor an idea of the actual
reliirious belief of its confessors.
Now the Mahabharata is for the Hindu masses a
Bible somev/hat of this description, though The Krishna
by no means exclusively in honor of Krishna. ^'''^^■
It is an immense ocean, into which almost everv stream
of Hindu faith and feeling has by one path or another
found its way. Age after age, barbarous, heroic, or
ecclesiastical, has contributed its popular traditions, its
religious speculations, its morality and its faith, to
swell this colossal epic ; and it embodies, on a pro-
digious scale, every element of dramatic, intellectual,
and spiritual, as well as popular and national interest
familiar to the Hindu mind. It has probably under-
gone frequent readjustments to fresh experience under
32
49^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the influence of the reHofious classes. From time to
time fresh fragments of ethics and philosophy have
been interpolated, often in the strangest context : the
profoundest spirituality flows from the lips of dying
barbarians, and metaphysics are- sounded to tlieir
depths in the intervals of internecine strife.
The Bhagavata Purana ^ is another vast body of
incarnation myths and traditions, more especially de-
voted to the worship of Krishna, whose manifold
births and forms are traced throuo-h all cosmoi^onv,
theology, philosophy, and who here becomes the
universal absorbent and solvent of traditional beliefs.
Both Epic and Purana are the free play of Hindu
imagination and fancy, and turn past, present, and
future into song. They connect the national life with
the simple ages of minstrelsy, purporting to come
from the lips of bards.
The Krishna of the Epos might seem to be imperfect-
Krishnamy-ly defined as an incarnation, to the religious
thoiogy. sense. He seems sometimes to be man, some-
times God of gods. At one time his divinity is denied,
at another he seems unaware of it. He is opposed,
slighted, assailed, w^ounded. Even as incarnation, he
is but a hair from Vishnu's body. But in the Pura-
nas, he is the Supreme alone. ^ He is Vasudeva, God
with the world, in all beings, and without appeal.
He combines all exalted appellatives and powers, and
many that we should hold as quite other than exalted.
But through all incongruities the religious interest
is held fast to the person of Krishna, as central incar-
nation of protecting, and retributive deity, as well as
^ Translated by Eugene Bumouf.
* In the Brahma Vaivartta^ he is adored by all the gods. See Wilson's analysis in
Essays on Sansk. Lit.^ I. 94.
INCARNATION. 499
the embodiment of ideals and delights essentially
human. That much of personal biography is to be
discerned through this immeasurable haze of fable is
improbable enough. It seems quite as impracticable
to construct a positive basis or nucleus of historical
fact out of the mythology of the cowherd boy, or the
Kshattriya hero, as out of the supernaturalism of the
god. And certainly the moral value of the. Krishna
faith is in no degree determinable by tracing it back,
upon mythical authority, to somebody who was " orig-
inally a mere cowherd, stealing butter and performing
similar pranks when a boy, and rendering himself
famous by his amours when a man " ! -
The democratic character of this faith in its original
form has already been inferred ^ from the relation of
the name Krishna (or the black) to the color of the
lowest caste and of the aboriginal races of India. Its
suggestions of an ancient sense of brotherhood, and
of a powerful influence on Aryan faith from the side
of conquered or enslaved tribes, as well as the poetic
justice of which this worship of the black by the
white is a historic landmark, seem to me very im-
pressive.
The idyllic legends of the Krishna-Govinda (or
cowherd), his boyish pranks, his miraculous feats, and
amours among the cowherdesses, are evidently based
on the folklore of rude country tribes, like those of
the patriarchal Hebrew age. Their grotesque humor
reminds us of the miracle plays of the Middle Ages, in
which the New Testament myths, grown too familiar
to be venerated, were freely handled for the general
amusement ; and this wild jungle of tropic fable has
far more than the animal exuberance and lawless
* Wheeler's Hist, of India. ^ See chapter on the BhagavadgUci.
500 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
sportlveness of the "Arabian Nights." Doubtless the
coarseness of its natural meaning was spiritualized
away by the later, more enlightened, Krishna-wor-
shippers,^ just as the barbarities and sensualities of
the older Bible legends have been by later Jews and
Christians.
But in the main body of the epos, Krishna assumes
^, ,, , a nobler function. Throuijh all the fratricidal
Noble func- ^
tionsof horrors of the great war between kindred
Pandus and Kurus, the most tragic tale ever
told in song, he enacts the part of mediator and con-
soler : he is not a warrior, but a peace-maker ; inter-
feres in the strife purely in the interest of justice, and
mourns with the love of a brother over the fearful
consummation of evil-doing which all his efforts fail to
prevent. Though a Kshattriya in his human form, and
though other passages relate his tremendous exploits
in destroying the wicked, he refuses to fight in this
unnatural war ; will be only Arjuna's charioteer, on
the just side, if war viiisl be ; and Arjuna chooses his
presence, as of itself more than armies, and as fullest
assurance of victory. Though able to compel obe-
dience, he respects the freedom of those who choose
to disregard his wise and humane counsels, while he
strives to compose the bitter feud between brothers.
Warned that the attempt would be useless, he says : —
" To deliver the world from all this preparation for strife is the
highest of duties ; and it is right to give all one's efforts to such a
duty, whether they succeed or fail."
Sent to the hostile Kuru princes with this intent, he
is received with divine honors, in festival raiment, with
offerings of sandal-wood and perfume ; carpets are
' Bh&gav. Pur&7ia, X.
INCARNATION. 50I
strewn in his path, and the king goes out on foot to
meet him. Yet his advice is rejected, and his person
threatened. And when his hopes that kindredship
would have enabled him to save the infatuated Kura-
vas from destruction are proved vain ; when his tender
and noble appeals, and his prophecies of coming deso-
lation, alike fail, he returns sorrowing, after embracing
the noblest of these fated ones, with tears over the
bitter future that must come to them all.
When the multitude of Brahmans crave of him for-
giveness for sin, he answers, " If your hearts be pure
and single before God, there is hope of forgiveness
from Him." He consoles Arjuna for the loss of his
son, savinof- : '' His fame will endure for ever, and it
might be said that he is still alive. Children, like
worldly goods, are given to us by God; and he can
resume them at his pleasure."
He comforts a woman for a similar bereavement by
reminding her "how happy a mother should be whose
son has met so glorious a destiny." At the end of the
war he bids the victors administer justice to all the
oppressed, and promises them reward for their good
deeds in another life.
After the doom has fallen upon his people, and his
brothers and companions have perished, as he sits
alone in his sorrow in the forest, he is fatally wounded
by a careless hunter, whose remorse he seeks to allay
in the hour of his own death, saying, " Go thy way :
thine is not the blame." We should not expect that
very exalted- moral standards would be found inter-
woven • with a movem.ent of warfare so brutal and
ferocious as that of the Mahabharata, where the world
seems given over to the nemesis of wrathful and de-
structive passions ; yet it really abounds in noble
502 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
reconciliations, in heroic self-disciplines, in the loyal-
ties of tender affection. And in this epic Krishna is, in
his relations to the Pandu war, a redeeming presence
of justice, magnanimity, and mercy, which, spite of
all the monstrosities of supernaturalism, flows in a
golden thread of providential purport through the
retributive woof of wrong and pain.
This ideal incarnation aspires, therefore, to include
„ . . all nature and life, and to divinize all human
Partiapa-
tion in the duty by thc direct participation of deity in its
whole of life. ' r ^ i i
maniiold spheres.
" Priest, teacher, marriageable man, householder, and beloved
companion, because he is all this, therefore has Krishna been hon-
ored. Generosity, ability, sacred wisdom, heroism, humility, splen-
dor, endurance, cheerfulness, joyousness, exist constantly in this
unfailing one. It is Krishna who is the origin and end of all the
worlds. All this universe comes into being through him, the
eternal Maker, transcending all beings. And he enlightens and
gladdens the assembly, as a sunless place would be cheered by the
sun, or a windless spot by the wind." '
Krishna, in short, represented the genial and happy
sense of unity for all finite relations with the infinite
and eternal. The universality of the religious instinct,
shown in this combination 'of the cosmical with the
manifold human in one divine personality, is an ele-
ment of very great interest.
In absorbing the universe into their divinity, the
Krishna of Eastern, and the Christ of Western faith
are in their diverse ways analogous. The Christian
incarnation, however, while superior in spiritual ele-
vation, does not attempt to represent that ' o J '
sychosis. at intervals, on their importunate addresses.
And this is a source of the extraordinary propor-
tions assumed in Hindu thought by the idea of me-
' Ramay-, III.
TRANSMIGRATION. 5 1 7
tempsychosis. The belief that each human soul
passes through a succession of lives, in different
bodily forms, visible or invisible, and in ascending,
descending, or revolving series, — human, animal,
vegetable, or even cosmical, from the plant to the
star, — has perhaps been accepted, in some form, by
disciples of every great religion in the world. It
is common to Greek philosophers, Egyptian priests,
Jewish Rabbins, and several early Christian sects. It
appears in the speculations of the Kabbalists, of the
Neo-Platonists, of later European mystics, and even
of socialists like Fourier, who elaborates a fanciful
system of successive lives mutually connected by
numerical relations. It reaches from the Eleusinian
Mysteries down to the religions of many rude tribes
of North America and the Pacific isles. Not a few
noble dreams of the cultivated imagination are subtly
associated with it, as in Plato, Giordano Bruno,
Herder, Sir Thomas Browne ; and especially notable
is Lessing's conception of a gradual improvement of
the human type through metamorphosis in a series of
future lives. Its prominence in the faith of the Hindus
affords ample material for studying its natural grounds
and conditions, as well as its significance for the uni-
versal experience.
Metempsychosis, as an idea and a faith, has been
substantially the effort to express certain im- its higher
perishable intuitions and organic relations. elements.
At the root of it lay first the sense of immortality :
the idea of life as not only transcendinfj death, ,
•' . r3 ' Immortality.
but as multiplying itself through successive
forms of transient being, as if to emphasize and afiirm
its own necessity again and again; an entity which no
5l8 RELIGIOUS PHILbSOPHY.
bonds of material investment could hold fast and no
dissolution destroy, however low it might descend
in the scale of nature. The sense of immortality is
indeed always in some sort a sense of inherent exist-
ence^ and looks backward as well as forward, behind
birth as well as beyond death ; infers _^r(?-existence as
w^ell as j^c>5/-existence. It shrinks as much from an
absolute beginning of our being as from an end of it ;
and so must either leave the soul it is tracing back-
ward, in an impenetrable mystery, content with noting
its emergence thence, at the moment of what we call
birth, "trailing clouds of glory from- God, who is our
home," — or else follow its earlier adventures wdth
the eye of faith, through previous forms of being,
forgotten or dimly recollected.' And so the contem-
plative imagination of the Hindus loved to brood over
these possible forms of successive births in both dircc-
tio7is, from the island of this present life through
boundless oceans of the past and future. It was at
least a serene and immovable presumption of immor-
tality that made this dream-voyage through the
spheres of existence attractive and even possible.
Then there was the profound faith in immutable
Moral laws of moral sequence. "Action," says Ma-
sequence. j^^^ " vcrbal, corporcal, mental, bears good
or evil fruit, according to its kind : from men's deeds
proceed their transmigrations." ^ In the philosophical
language of the Hindu schools, the " bonds of action "
are but another name for the endless consequences of
conduct. It was natural to explain in this way those
present moral as well as physical inequalities among
men, their differing characters and destinies, which
could not be accounted for by the data at hand. The
1 Manu, XII. 3.
TRANSMIGRATION. 519
sense of justice demanded that there should be found
adequate grounds for these differences, in antecedent
good or bad conduct ; which of course could only have
made their marks in earlier states of existence. Such
speculations have been common in the Christian world
also ; as solutions to justify not merely these actual dif-
ferences in human destiny, but even those imaginary
ones of theological invention, for whose infiniteness
there seemed no rational ground in men's actual doings
in this world. Frpm Origen down to Edward Beecher,
the solution of this " conflict of an^es" has been soufjht
in ^re-existence, which one or another theory of
human nature and destiny had made a necessary
hypothesis, upon these constantly recognized princi-
ples of moral continuity and sequence.
We cannot wonder that the ancients satisfied their
instincts of justice by similar explanations of the mys-
teries of good and evil, both physical and moral.
It is the force of this ethical demand that every gift
or defect shall find its ground in positive de- Ethical de-
sert, shall point to some way in which it was "^"*^.^°''
^ -J pre-exist-
earned, — that so frequently causes gre-at per- ence.
sonal virtues or powers to impress the imagination as
spiritual resources that only pre-existence can explain ;
as heaped-up harvests of former lives, spent in noble
disciplines and toil ; while excessive forms of vice
seem to require similar accumulations of ^z^// tendency
through lives of correspondent tone.
Hereditary transmission is indeed the only answer
of science to these problems, — and this, in fact, is
transmigration of qualities and destinies, if not of
souls ; but it does not satisfy that demand of the moral
nature, which pre-existence, as we have seen, was
better suited to meet ; and so the solution of the in-
520 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
equalities in question goes over with us more wisely,
among the possibiHties of the life to come. Our oracle
is not memory, but growth.
The inadequacy of these backward-looking solutions
is shown especially in the injustice of supposing that
the evil in men's characters or circumstances is punish-
ment for sins committed in a previous life, and conse-
quently is simply their desert. It would seem to forbid
kindness and mercy as interferences with such ap-
pointed retribution. It would seem to eternize such
conditions of evil, and to make their abolition a
crime. Some have even traced the persistence of
caste in India to the force of this transmigration-faith,
and its associated theory of evil. The idea that evil
is always the sign and punishment of past sin was
not, however, peculiar to the Hindus, nor to the belief
in transmigration. It was held by the Hebrews also ;
and the protest of the natural heart and mind against
it is the central idea of the sublime drama of Job.
In fact the grand humanities of Hebrew thought
combine with those of Buddhism to prove that men
have not always allowed their belief in this theory of
evil as the punishment of sin to produce its logical
consequences by paralyzing the desire of moral prog-
ress and hardening the heart. We even find that
the sources of belief in transmio^ration reveal fjerms
of a quite opposite character, of which we shall pres-
ently speak.
In truth, neither hereditary transmission nor metemp-
. svchosis can explain these mysteries of o-ift
A present!- •' ^ j j=>
mentofsci- and defcct, or happiness and misery, which
entific truth. i j • • i i i -i j
depend on causes mconceivably subtle and
past fathoming. But not the less truly was the old
wide-spread belief in manifold births and lives an
TRANSMIGRATION. $21
earnest attempt to solve them on the principle of
inviolable moral consequences. And there is a sense
in v^^hich ancient dream and modern science are here
blended in a higher unity. Thus an Upanishad, relat
ing to birth, contains a description of the embryo soul,
as remembering former births and deeds, " having
eaten many forms of food and drunk at many
breasts ; " and as then, upon entering the v^'orld of
separate existence, losing the memory of these, while
yet the consequences remain.^ It would be hard to
find a fairer statement than this, at once of what we
know and what we dream, concerning the mystery of
our endowment from the past.
But the sense of immortality and the conviction of
inviolable moral sequence had in India a soil unity of
to work in, of which metempsychosis was the ^^^^•
natural and inevitable fruit. In the consciousness of
the Hindu, all life w^as included under one conception,
in one essence ; one ocean where individual forms and
grades of vitality were but transient waves that rose
and fell ; or, while holding their distinct and definite
being, were yet of like substance with the whole. It
was not so much that these individualities, or their
continued existence, could be actually denied ; but
rather that the emphasis was laid on life itself^ as
idea, as common ground of all lives; life^ the mystery
in them all, the fullness, the freedom, the infinite
capacity of metamorphosis, of protean play.
In this mystical brooding over the unity of all life,
this sympathetic affinity, and sense of even inmost
identity with the whole, there lay of course a power-
ful motive to the love of all living creatures. " The
* Garhha Upanishad, in Weber's Indische Stud.^ II. 69, 70.
522 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Indian, united with all nature by ties of brotherhood,
had his ears open on every side to the voice of com-
passion."^ And here was the reaction from ideal
dreams to interest in the .visible outward world, of
which, as I have already said, the transmigration
theory of the Hindus illustrates the naturalness and
even necessity.
Why should not the quiet anchorets, dreaming on
The animal ^his uuity of all living and even lifeless forms,
world. Qj^ ^j-^ig common experience that like the light
came back in myriad reflections from them all to the
dreaming mind and heart, suppose the brute creatures
bound to themselves by human ties? They stood in
much closer intimacy with these lower forms of being
than St. Francis of Assisi, who praised God '^ for our
brothers the sun, the wand, the air and cloud, by
which Thou upholdest life in all beings ; " who is said
to have made literal application of the text, " Go
preach the gospel to every creature," and to have
loved to linger along his way, that he might join his
"sisters, the birds, in singing praises to the Maker,"
and even remove worms from the path, lest they
should be crushed by the traveller's foot. The Hindu
hermits fed and tamed the forest creatures, and learned
their language. " The gentle roe-deer, taught to trust
in man, unstartled heard their voices."^ They saw
that upward striving towards man, on which modern
science itself hesitates to draw a line that shall sepa-
rate instinct and reason, and on which its comparative
biology founds the largest unities. They pitied the
dove torn by the eagle, the antelope fleeing from the
tiger. They saw tenderness in the eye of the bird ;
. and august serenity in the step of the elephant.
» Fr. V Schlegel. > ^akuntal&.
TRANSMIGRATION. 523
The Raghuvansa describes a good king as " con-
joining qualities which ordinarily interfere with each
other, in pure accord, as the creatures lay down their
natural antipathies when they come to the peaceful
hermitage of a saint." The alarm of one of these pet
antelopes at sight of the royal hunter's arrow is thus
depicted by Kalidasa : —
" Aye and anon his graceful neck he bends
To cast a glance at the pursuing car ;
And, dreading now the swift-descending shaft,
Contracts into itself his slender frame :
About his path, in scattered fragments strewn,
•The half-chewed grass falls from his panting mouth ;
See, in his airy bounds he seems to fly,
And leaves no trace upon the elastic turf."
The hermits interfere, and save their pretty charge.
" Now heaven forbid this barbed shaft descend
Upon the fragile body of a fawn,
Like fire upon a heap of tender flowers !
Can thy steel bolts no meeter quarry find
Than the warm life-blood of a harmless deer ?
Restore, great prince, thy weapon to its quiver.
More it becomes thy arms to shield the weak
Than to bring anguish on the innocent." ^
The mystery of animal instinct might well inspire a
certain awe and tender sympathy in such students of
it as these anchorets were ; so unerring is it, so finely
attuned to nature, so rich in presentiment and omen,
so magnetic in its fascinations. Montaigne quaintly
says : —
" It is yet to be determined where the fault lies that the beasts
and we don't understand each other ; for we understand them as
little as they do us ; and by the same reason they may think us
beasts, as we think them. From what comparison do we conclude
1 Williams's transl. of Sakunfalii.
524 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the stupidity we attribute to them ? When I play with my cat, who
knows whether I do not make her more sport than she does me ?
We mutually divert each other."
It is worth while, in view of this old and wide-spread
instinct for metempsychosis, to read his very sugges-
tive record of the points in which we must confess that
brutes are beyond us.^ What wonder is it that the
eager soothsayers ever3'where pried into the flight of
birds, the howling of dogs, the cackling of. geese, the
hooting of owls, the cawing of crows, and searched
the very entrails of beasts, to get at the secret that
places them in such ra^fort as they evidently inherit,
with human life? There was not a little true science
blended with the dreams and arts of the old haruspices ;
and there was still more of respect for the fine truth
and wisdom of instinct, in that persistent faith of the
people by which these auguries were sustained. In-
stinct knows its path ; is not deceived ; halts not, nor
wavers between opinions ; has the wisdom of artists
and lovers, of councillors and soldiers; listens and
divines like genius ; obeys an unseen guide through
solitary ways we cannot trace, "lone wandering, but
hot lost." Man himself — whose mature vision sees
here the sweet symbol of an invisible care, that " in the
long way that he must tread alone will guide his steps
aright" — hastened, even while ignorant of natural
laws, to honor and consult this mysteriously sympa-
thetic oracle. He explored this hieroglyphic of nat-
ure, even before he could read his own thought. We
can well understand how the oldest wisdom should
have found its place in the mouths of the brute creat-
ures. It was man's early recognition of the sacred-
ness of life in general, and specially of that veiled life
^ Essays, II. xii. (Apology /or Rnhnotid Sebonde.)
TRANSMIGRATION. 525
whose inarticulate speech was itself a kind of silence,
and intimated with double force the m^'stery that per-
vades and limits every form of language and com-
munion.^
We must remember, too, that the first preaching of
Nature is in types and symbols of man. She sympathies
, ., , , , - , . of man and
is the endless and ever-present parable oi his nature.
experience. And long before he understands how to
cultivate patience, fortitude, trust, and love, as recog-
nized forms of virtue, thev shine before him in divine
symbols that reflect his own spontaneous instincts, out
of the unfailing endurance of the' beasts of burden,
the loves and labors of the birds, the peaceful accord
of the wild creatures with those orderly laws of nature
which prescribe their roaming and their rest. Even the
wide-spreading, sheltering trees are human to these
poetic ethics, and the grass of the field has a life be-
yond itself, and the waterfalls and rocks are souls.
An older Sermon on the Mount was in man^ and
made him hearken gladly to worded lessons from the
lilies and the fowls ; for the voice of the teacher was
but an echo from his own childhood. There is tran-
scendent truth in the Hebrew myth that makes it man's
first dignity to divine the sense of the living creatures,
and to give them names.
The oldest books that delighted men, and gave life
a genial aspect, were the Fable Books. And
so richly and creatively did the imagination
flow in this direction, at the verv outset, that most of
our present stock of fables are somehow traceable
1 See Plutarch's Essay on Land and Water Animals (Goodwin's Plutarch, vol. v.)
The interest inherent in the subject is illustrated by the fact that Professor Abbot, in his
invaluable Bibliography of the DoctriTte of a Future Life-, gives account of nearly two
hundred works concerning the " Souls of Brutes."
526 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
back to primitive Eastern apologues. The oldest
known collections in the world are of Hindu oria:in.
The Sanskrit Hitopadesa, or "Good Counsels" of
Vishnu Sarma, and the still older Panchatantra (with
which recent discoveries are tending more and more
fully to identify it ^), have been freely translated into
most languages of the East and of the West, and have
made the name of Pilpay, or Bidpai, the beloved phy-
sician, to whom they are mythically ascribed, im-
mortal, and everywhere at home. The far East is
thus an ever-present teacher of civilization, appealing
in the simplest and most effective way to the plastic
mind of childhood, an unfailing fountain of practical
and humane wisdom. The Hindu works just men-
tioned form the basis and type of most literature of
this kind, although Greeks, Hebrews, Teutons, and
other races, have each a stock of primitive gnomic
apologues and maxims, of a more or less- original
cast.^
It is most interesting to note that the earliest real
wisdom of life, the opening of its practical and social
meaning, has been also an expression of human sym-
pathy with the animal world. The morality of the
Hindu fable-books is, as we have already seen, of
good quality ; and their hearty common sense redeems
Indian literature from the charge of being competent
to sentimental and speculative interests only. Their
frank and manly dealing with the facts of common
life make them a democratic protest, and an appeal
' See Benfey, in The Academy for April, 1872.
2 Deslongchamps (Essai sicr les Fables Indiennes) and Benfey [Einleit. z- Panis-
cJtntantrii) carefully trace the relations of Western apologues and tales to these popular
Hindu works. Lassen, IV. 902, even ascribes the Arabian Nights' Entertainments to
Hindu sources. Weber {IndiscJie Studien, III.) has endeavored to separate a portion of
the Indian fables from the rest, as derived from Greece ; but he does so only to assign them,
'further back, to a Semitic — still an Oriental — origin.
TRANSMIGRATION. 527
against social inequalities, in spite of their devotion to
royalty and other traditional institutions ; all of which
thev admonish, rebuke, and instruct, with a fearless-
ness and authority that is more refreshing than that
of the Hebrew prophets, in so far as it stands wholly
on the ground and in the strength of familiar ethical
laws. The half-humorous indirectness of these pro-
tests and appeals, sent through the lower creatures, is
as genial as it is sincere, and touches our sympathies
more strongly than sterner tones of denunciation.
The Persian compiler of the Anvar-i-Suhaili, which
consists of the substance of the Hitopadesa and the
Panchatantra, translated into Pehle\4 in the sixth
century, describing the original Indian work, says, —
" In the time of Kasra Nushirwan this intelligence became spread
abroad, that among the treasures of the kings of Hindustan there
is a book which they have compiled from the speech of brutes, —of
birds and reptiles and savage beasts ; and all that befits a king in
the matter of government is exhibited within the folds of its leaves,
and men regard it as the stock of all advice and the medium of all
advantage." '
These " Good Counsels " of the Brutes concern all
matters involved in social and personal relations, but
their special bearing is on the duties and opportunities
of kings. "The Fable, with the Hindus," says Professor
Wilson, " constitutes the science of Niti^ or polity;
rules for the good government of society in all matters
not religious, the reciprocal duties of members of an
organized body ; and is hence especially intended
for the education of princes." This is true not only of
the Hitopadesa and the Panchatantra, but to an extent
of the epics also, which have even been called nitisas^
tras, abounding as they do in political teaching, and
* Anvar-i-S-nJiaili^ Eastwick's transl., p. 6.
528 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
especially from the animals. For these old monitors,
kings are divinities ; but it is, after all, only the ideal
ruler that has honor, all unworthy kingcraft being
severely handled both in the fables and maxims.
How significant a fact, that the teaching of practical
ideals should have been referred to this world of lower
creatures, which we have been taught to regard as
without gift of choice or power of progress !
The use of the Apologue under despotic govern-
ments in the East as well as in the freer West (where
it is illustrated by the old German epos of Reynard
the Fox), to convey satire and rebuke without offence
to established powers, — or, in Oriental phrase, "that the
ear of authority may be approached by the tongue of
wisdom," — has been often exaggerated, though to an
extent real. But it is hardly possible to overstate the
freedom of play allowed the imagination by these half-
human spheres of a strange unfathomable life. The
stricdy ethical purpose of the Fable indeed imposes
certain limits upon the passion for hyperbole,^ as does
also that strong positive realism of animal qualities
and habits, which constitutes its material. But in
a religious and moral direction there was abundant
room for idealization in these mysterious fidelities
and powers.
And so we can easily understand how the later my-
Animaisym-thology aud popular poetry of India came to
boiism. represent the deities in their incarnations as
assuming the brute even oftener than the human form,
while yet maintaining therein the noblest human vir-
tues, or manifesting spiritual capacities vainly sought
^ Not always obeyed in these old fables, which are occasionally extravagant in their
descriptions of moral disciplines and sacrifices, — an argument, with Benfey, for their Budd-
histic origin.
TRANSMIGRATION. 529
among men. Thus that strange, long-lived, heavy-
winged creature, the crow,^ was held to be older than
years could record. Perched on a rock or tree, he is
the most venerable of devotees, meditating on the
marvellous lives he has passed through, and dispens-
ing to the eagle, monarch of birds, lessons of eternal
wisdom for the government of himself and his empire.^
The clumsy condor, sailing on massive wing over
Chimborazo, was held sacred by the Incas and carved
on their sceptres, as the eagle on those of the Ceesars.
No wonder the heavy crow, who climbs among ever-
lasting snows, is equally a wonder to the Hindu.
The Sanskrit language gives him no less than seventy
names. The serpent, worshipped by the aboriginal
Hindu tribes, and symbolic to the Aryans of w^is-
dom, healing, eternity, has a hundred names. '^ There
were leofends that consecrated the habits of the vul-
ture,* that careful and thorough efFacer of all revolting
signs of decay and death ; and of the fish, pathfinder
and leader of man through the watery wastes ; and of
the tortoise, broadbacked supporter that no burden
breaks down. The monkeys, those semi-human, self-
asserting proprietors of the primeval forests of the
Dekkan, become in the epics divine guides and deliv-
erers of man in his explorations of their pathless ex-
panses.^ The mythologist gave his god of wisdom
an elephant's head ; mounted the avenging goddess on
a tiger ; strung the bow of his Cupid with a thread of
honey bees ; inwove the habits of every creature with
the protean metamorphoses of divinity. As the Assy-
1 Michelet, The Bird, p. 161. 2 Ramay.., VII.
3 Pictet, Orig- Indo-Europ. ^
* See the beautiful tale, in the Rainayana, of the chivalrous attempt of the vultnre
king to protect Sita from Ravana, which costs him liis life.
" Ramay^, IV. V.
34
53^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
rian made and hallowed his cherubim, and the Egyp-
tian his sphinxes, by means of this sympathetic sense
of the unity of human and brute life, so the Hindu
took the ox and the cow as representative of the sanc-
tities of labor and beneficence ; an instinct of special
veneration common to India and Persia and Egypt
and the Teutonic North.
" May he who has done wrong to my brother Rama," .
says Bharata in the epic, "be the messenger of the
wicked ! May he kick his foot against a sleeping
cow I " ^ To this day the country people in some
districts of India put blades of grass between their
teeth when they would deprecate anger, to remind
those whom they fear, of the human protection and
regard to which the cow is supposed to appeal. ^ This
honor to the cow is the most ancient and universal
form of devotion to animals known in India. The
patient, faithful, bounteous creature was so essential
and dear to the Vedic herdsmen that they made her
attend the dead on his journey to the world of the
fathers, to help him across the deep, river, to guard
him from all foes.^ Even the gradual degeneracy
of mankind was quaintly enough symbolized by this
sacred animal standing in the golden age on four legs,
in the silver on three, in the brass on two, and in the
iron on one.
The zebus, or humpbacked cattle of India, are
indeed very beautiful animals, and may well have
e» inspired reverence among a primitive people. They
have mild, intelligent eyes, a kindly expression, and
their sides are covered with satinlike hair. As
working, a~Tid as milch cattle, they are of admirable
1 RAmayana, II. 2 Elliott's N. IV. India, I. p. 241.
2 See Pictet, II. 519; Muller in Zeiisch. d. D M. G., IX. Append.
TRANSMIGRATION.
531
quality ; and their walk is almost as fast as that of a
horse. ^ The primal gratitude and veneration has con-
tinued throughout Hindu history. Kalidasa describes
in a poetic strain the devotions rendered by a king to
the sacred milch cow of a hermitage, in recognition of
her "bearing in her full breast the means of paying the
offerings due to guests, to manes, and to gods." All
this was certainly natural enough to the Indo- Aryan,
from the earliest Vedic times when the heavens and
the earth were one great pasture ground for his divine
herdsmen, who milked the rain-clouds for his support,
down to the days of hermits whose still, patient, dreamy,
ruminant life irresistibly suggests the image. Even
the intolerable divine cows and bulls of Benares
testify of v^rhat was once a mingled sentiment of
natural sympath}', gratitude for bounty, and religious
awe.
Plutarch says the Egyptians called their sacred bull
Apis " the fair and beautiful image of the soul of
Osiris."
That the animal symbolism of the Egyptians and
Hindus was associated with agricultural interests and
astronomical signs is unquestionable. But this simply
indicates how profound was the impression made by
these relations of the animal world with the blessinofs
of the earth and the sky. It may be, too, that the
epical incarnations in bears and monkeys, and the pop-
ular avataras of Vishnu in the shapes of fish, tortoise,
lion, and boar, were, as a recent writer suggests, ^
connected in some way with the fre- Aryan worship of
animals among the native tribes of the Dekkan, as was
certainly the case with the widely spread veneration
* See U. S. Agricultural Report for 1865. 2 Wheeler's Hist, of Ittdia
532 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
for the serpent in India ; and that their celebration in
the Ramayana was but part of the appeal of Neo-Brah-
manism to popular beliefs for the purpose of expelling
Buddhism. But behind all these incidental causes
lies the deeper religiotis instinct which must explain
such traditional worship itself. This is the ground
of that strikinor difference which characterizes the
literatures of Europe and Asia, in their treatment of
brute nature. In the Hindu fables we find it instinc-
tively idealized : its best elements are gladly brought
out, and even the lowest treated with geniality. In
the Teutonic epic of Reynard the Fox, on the other
hand, the lowest are emphasized, and even the best
have little respect. In the East the brute world
belongs to religion ; in the West, to satire. In Brah-
manical legend, it has spiritual and moral validity in
itself: in the Christian and Jewish, its worth stands
mainly in its ministry to man, or as with the beast
shapes of St. Anthony's tempters, and the gargoyles
of Gothic architecture, as affording convenient mas-
querade for evil powers. It has been noted, too, as a
difference between the Hindu fables and the y^sopic
or Greek, that the former makesfree use of the animal
world indiscriminately for the representation of human
character and feeling, while the latter employs the
creatures in a more critical spirit, according to their
special traits.^ Yet this distinction may easily be
carried much too far for the truth.
It is not without reason that Michelet, pointing to
the functions of the cow and the ibis, the one to sup-
port human, the other to destroy reptile life, says :
" That which has saved India and Egypt through
1 Benfey, RinUit. z. Pantsch.
TRANSMIGRATION. 533
SO many misfortunes, and preserved their fertility, is
neither the Nile nor the Ganges : it is respect for
animal life by the mild and gentle heart of man." ^
" God made all the creatures, and gave them
Our love and our fear :
To show we and they are His children,
One family here."
The beautiful Isis-myth of Egypt binds the human,
animal, and inanimate worlds in common ties , , ^
In the Lgyp-
of tender sympathy with the divine. The god- tian isis-
dess is guided in her sorrowful search for the ^^^ '
lost Osiris by the divination of little children, and by
the instinct of the dog ; while the ark that holds his
sacred body is protected by the loving embrace of a
growing tree. And so all three forms of natural life
are consecrated through powers of service faithfully
used, and held dear to the heart of man by their sym-
pathetic relations with the gods.
So, in the Hindu epic, hosts of gigantic bears and
apes, endowed with magic powers to change j^ the
their forms at will and control the forces of ^'°'^" ^p°^-
nature, devote all their energies to aid the holy cause
of Rama in recovering his stolen Sita. There is no
obstacle too vast for their passionate zeal and might
to surmount, no service too noble or too delicate for
their love to render. The Indian poet dares ascribe
to the beasts of the forests, under this inspiration, all
the chaste and heroic virtues of chivalry ; and no
Minnesinger ever celebrated an ideal of purer honor
or nobler loyalty than "god-Hke Jatayus," the
vulture-king, or the titanic ape Hanuman,^ who
nevertheless tears up whole mountains in his arms,
1 TAe Bird, p. 148. « R&m&y., V.
534 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
destroys myriads of foes single-handed, and expands
his bulk at will, ten leagues at a time. And these
surpassingly helpful brutes are incarnations of gods ;
associated too with the elements, and forms of nature,
as sons of the sun, of the sky, of fire, of the wind.
So that the Hindu epic, like the Egyptian myth,
makes religion a bond of sympathy between the
brute, the human, and the natural w^orlds.
The Ramayana even beautifully interweaves this
tenderness towards the lower animals with the
origin of its own rhythmic movements as poetry.
The hermit Valmiki, seeing the distress of a female
heron whose partner has been shot by a hunter, utters
a reproof to the wanton sportsman for destroying the
bird that murmured so softly as it went ; and the gods
made that rhythm which the words of sorrow {soka)
spontaneously assumed the metre {sloka) in which he
should celebrate the praise of Rama.
I recall nothing in English literature that resembles
this delicacy of poetic sentiment, so much as Walter
Savage Landor's idyl of the peasant, who, striking
impatiently at a buzzing insect, " breaks the wing of a
bee and the heart of a hamadr3'ad at once."
In the Mahabharata legend of the exile of the Pan-
dava princes, one of these brothers, who are divine
incarnations, dreams that the wild creatures of the
forest come to him trembling and w^eeping, and im-
plore him to spare what few had escaped the terrible
hunters, that they might be free from terror, and
mukiply their race once more. And he is moved
with pity, and tells his brothers how the creatures
had implored his mercy ; whereat they depart from
the forest, and dwell in another place. ^
1 MaUbh., II.
TRANSMIGRATION. 535
" Beneath human castes," exclaims Michelet again,
who may be called the literary apostle of a new
gospel of sympathy with the animal creation, " there
lies an immense caste, the poor brute world, to be
delivered, to be lifted up. This is the triumph of
India, of Rama and the Ramayana. Hanuman
is the Ulysses and Achilles of this epic war. More
than any one else he delivers Sita. After the victory,
Rama crowns and celebrates him. Between the two
armies, before men and gods, Rdma and Hanuman
embrace. Talk no more of castes. The lowest of
men may say, Hanuman has freed me." ^ Modern
science, we may add, in the hands of our develop-
ment philosophy, may yet enforce from the physiolog-
ical side the genial lesson of this ancient song.
The mercy due from man to the brute life dependent
on his care, or ministering to his desires, is a lesson
111 11 iriT^ T* from the
mdeed only to be learned of the Jt^ast. it is E^st.
a touching and noble bequest she has laid up for ages,
and gives over at last to the proud civilization that in
other respects has outrun her, — in proof that she is
still able to inspire and advance mankind. Judaism
indeed had many noble humanities of this sort ; but
Christian teaching — almost, if not altogether, absorbed
in man — has seldom emphasized a tender brotherhood
with nature in her humbler living forms. " To bring
these things within the range of ethics," says Lecky,
" to create the notion of duties tow^ards the animal
world, has, so far as Christian countries are concerned,
been one of the peculiar merits of the last century,
and for the most part of Protestant nations. How-
ever fully we may recognize the humane spirit trans-
mitted to the world, in the form of legends, from the
1 Bible de V HuTna7iiU, pp. 59, 75.
53^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
saints of the desert, it must not be forgotten that the
inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale is
mainly the work of a recent and a secular age ; and
that the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have in this
sphere considerably surpassed the Christians." ^
After eighteen centuries of barbarity in this sphere
of our relations, — the revelations whereof, in its actual
condition, are to the last degree revolting, — the civ-
ilized West is just beginning to awake to the duty
of protecting our "dumb neighbors,"'^ and to ask
whether the " beasts that perish " do not turn the
tables, in the argument of immortality itself, upon
the master, whose cruelties towards them mock his
own special claim to be made in the image of God.
We may yet appreciate Landor's tender tribute to
his dog: "few saints have been so good-tempered,
and not many so wise."
And in this point of view Art has a mission, never
Amission acccpted, as it should have been, by Christian
for art. schools. It is interesting to note that Ruskin,
who regards sympathy with the lower animals as one
of the " great English gifts " in art, but admits that it is
yet " quite undeveloped," expresses the hope that " the
aid of physiology and the love of adventure will enable
us to give to the future inhabitants of the globe an
almost perfect record of the present forms of animal
life upon it, of which many are on the point of being
extinguished."
Under these larval masks, as the old philosophies
The masks affirmed, hide the dear and venerable gods
°fth^ go^s- themselves, or the spirits of men, who shall
^ European Morals^ H. i88.
2 There are now in Europe, as appears from a recent address at Philadelphia, between
one and two hundred societies for the protection of animals, composed largely of eminent
men and women ; and the number is rapidly increasing.
TRANSMIGRATION. 537
one day reveal their ancient lives, now under a tran-
sient ^spell of oblivion. And is not our own science
inquiring at this day, in pure respect for what educa-
tion is doing for the brute mind, and by the simple
logic that demands compensation in a future state for
unrelieved miseries in this, — if the brutes are not
immortal?
It is not easy, probably it is not possible, to discover
the sfecial fjrounds which led to the consecra- .
-^ ° . . Ongin of
tion of each form of animal life. The sym- animal wor-
bolism of the living world is past exhausting, ^^'^'
and cannot be dogmatically defined. Cicero's theory
that utility was the basis of animal worship is inade-
quate : the utility of a creature can never fully account
for its becoming an object of adoration. Plutarch's
divinations of its meaning in special cases are often
ingenious, but as often fanciful and unsatisfactory.
The faith of the Egyptians, according to Diodorus,
was that the gods, having while weak found refuge
from danger in animal forms, made these sacred out of
gratitude, when they came to their thrones.^ This is at
least an intimation of belief in sympathetic relations
and moral ties reaching from the highest to the lowest
forms of life. Plutarch ridicules the legend ; but his
own theory goes further, and more philosophically,
in the same direction. While condemning the excess
to which animal worship was carried in Egypt, he
touches what was doubtless the spiritual fact rudely
expressed by this form of religion, in the following
passage from his Isis and Osiris : " On the whole, we
should approve those who honor not so much those
creatures as the divine in them, and hold them as
clear and natural mirrors, the instrument and art of
1 Diod., I. 86.
53^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the all-ordaining God. Whatever nature lives and sees
and has motion in itself, and the knowledge of what is
proper for itself and for others, this nature derives,
as Heraclitus says, an efflux, or portion, from that
Ruler whose wisdom governs all."^ And Herodotus
confirms this hint of a universal idea, when he tells us
that all animals^ both wild and domestic, w^ere alike
sacred in Egypt. ^
Herbert Spencer's idea,^ that the habit of nicknam-
ing men from their resemblances to animals would
naturally result with their descendants in the notion
that these animals were in fact the ancestors, and
hence deserved religious honors, goes but a little
way in accounting for the piety of the ancients
towards inferior creatures. The processes here de-
scribed involve the very sentiment which they are
addu'ced to explain. We might as well suppose it to
be due to the equally ancient as well as modern habit
of naming animals for men, either in irony or w^him,
as we dub dogs and birds ; or for honor, like the great
names of famous race horses, formed upon those of
their owners, which we find recorded in old Latin
inscriptions ; or for protection, as the old Latian
herdsmen used to name duly every sheep or heifer,
sometimes after the most noted families in Italy. In
fact such solutions merely illustrate the closeness of
the ties which have always united man with the brute
creatures. They do not go to the root of the old
piety, which is explicable only as a natural instinctive
disposition in man to feel respect, not alone for what
is stronger, but for what is weaker than himself. The
1 De hide, LXXVI. « Herod., II. 65.
• Recent Discussions in Sciettce. So Lubbock, Origin of Civiliz., p. 178.
TRANSMIGRATION. 539
lowest tribes of savages have the custom of apologiz-
ing to the animals which they kill.^
The conditions required for a sympathetic and
relicfious feelinfj towards the animal world, ,,. ^
o o Hindu sensa
which have been described, were all supplied of the unity
by the mystical faith of the Hindus in the °
unity of life. All creatures were one ; one in the
sacredness of life as such, in its very idea ; ^ one in
the thread of intelligence that traversed its unbroken
chain of forms, and could not well be severed any-
where ; and one in those delicate relations and affi- -
nities which give ground for ethical and spiritual
symbolism. In these aspects, intensified by the love
of suppressing distinctions and melting barriers and
blending forms, the unity of life gave ample scope for
the play of metempsychosis, or the transmutation of
vital forces. We may perhaps define this almost
universal belief of races without scientific culture
as the earliest analogue of our modern doctrine of
the unity and correlation of forces.
The transmigration-faith was, therefore, so widely
spread in the elder world, because it had its „.
^ _ Resume,
roots in natural and profound aspirations. It
combined the twofold intuition of immortality and
moral sequence with that mystic sense of the unity
of being which is a germ of the highest religious
truth. And just as in ea'rly Christianity, which tended
to reject the outward world, and confined its sympathy
to the human and the angelic spheres, Origen had his
transmigrations and "circuits" of souls, — but through
those spheres only, — so in Hinduism a larger reach
* Lubbock, p. 184.
* See remarks on the unity of life, as conceived by the Egyptians, in H. Martineau's
Eastern Life (p. 212), one of the most remarkable works of the present century.
540 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
of the sense of oneness through the whole universe
made transmigration a circuit that swept animal and
even vegetable life also. And we are to bear in mind
also, how imperfect was the sense of individuality in
the mystical Hindu consciousness. It was only too
easy here to infer one's private destin}^ from the infinite
convertibility of forms in nature, the ceaseless flow,
and shift, and lapse, the protean play that seemed to
resolve all into one.
How the Hindus solved the subtle question —
^ , . whether that state could really be reo^arded
Relation to J o
individual as 3. Continuation of the personal existence,
in which all traces of the past were effaced
in new relations of being, and only the conse-
quences of previous conduct were retained as deter-
mining destiny — is not at all apparent. But the
imagination solves all problems that perplex the un-
derstanding. A certain delight in illusion itself is the
life of the transmigration mythology, and has every-
where associated it with magic, witchcraft, and the
power given by talismans and spells to assume animal
forms at pleasure.^ x\nd it is not probable that the
forward look beyond death became less real and earn-
est for these anticipations of what to us would seem so
like positive annihilation. Doubtless with the Hindus,
as afterwards with Pythagoras, Plato, and the Alex-
andrian philosophers,^ this whole belief hovered, in
poetic dream, in the blending lights of mythology,
rather than stood definite for the understanding, or in
that rigid application to details which modern habits
of thought would require. Yet it was not for that
reason less real, or less powerful to move the fears,
* See Apuleius's Golden Ass-
* Simon, Hui. de VEcok d'Alexandrie, I. 446, 590.
TRANSMIGRATION. 54I
the desires, or the affections of the masses of men. It
was not reserved for Tertullian ^ to reveal the fact that
the self-contradictions of a religious mystery make it
all the more fascinating to an unreasoning faith.
Regarding all life as at heart one and the same
with that which stirred within him, — and imprisoned
profoundly impressed by the sense of moral ^°"^^-
retribution, — the thought of immortality, too, brood-
ing over him past escape, — it was simply natural for
the hermit saint to cherish the belief that these lower
creatures, with their mysterious instincts appealing to
him in so many ways for protection, learning in so
many ways to comprehend his thought and fall in with
his habits, were the souls of his fathers and friends,
who, having yielded to the power of the senses, had
sunk into correspondent forms, and were now yearn-
ing back in mournfulness or remorse to the upright
manhood they beheld in him. At the same time a
certain awe of brute life as possibly incarnating deity,
the exploration of it to find intimations of spiritual
truth, of duty, and of love, prevented this actual ani-
mal world from seeming a 7nere field of retribution^
and threw transmigration for its harsher penalties
where Christianity also went for its hells, into vaguer
invisible spheres, in a world Jhat might with more pro-
priety be called future than these animal purgatories
could be.
It is important that we should note these influences
which associated transmig-ration with other ^ . .
^ Expiation
ideas and interests than those of retribution; andproba-
since the natural tendency of its fatalism would
be, if not counteracted, to make the present life itself
appear to be merely a process of expiating past of-
^ " Credo quia impossihile est "
542 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
fences, ignoring its invitations to future excellence.
Such stern bondage to foregone lives does not enter
into the theory of Christianity ; its place being sup-
plied in the creeds by a similar bondage to reward and
penalty in \h^ future life, through the belief that the
essence of the present is but " probation." In neither
case is free validity accorded to the living moment, as
the sphere and opportunity of the spirit. Both in the
East and the West, the affections have not failed to
make earnest protest, in divers ways, against the dis-
paragement. In this point of view the tender regard
of Brahmanical religion for the animal world, in which
it saw the fatalities of transmigration, is deserving of
special attention.
Metempsychosis, indeed, had no necessary connec-
tion with penalty, in ancient thought as such,
Incidental r J ' _ fc> »
relation to but covcrcd a broad cosmical conception;
penaty. namely, that oi the Unity of Life. In Egypt,
for example, it was conceived as a natural and orderly
circuit of soul through the various forms of life, to re-
turn again to a human body after three thousand years. ^
And in the funereal inscriptions of that country it is
nowhere found unmistakably associated with the idea
of punishment.^ P3'thagoras and Empedocles allude
to it as a natural rather than a retributory process.
The former " recognizes the voice of his friend in the
howl", of a beaten dog, and interferes to protect him.
And Empedocles declared himself to have been " a
boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, a fish," in illustration sim-
ply of the general truth that " the soul inhabits every
form of animal and plant." ^ Plato comes nearer the
notion of penalty ; yet in no wise of arbitrary punish-
ment, but of natural moral gravitation. Among the
* Herod., II. 123. ^ Kenrick, Anc. Egypt, I. 403. » Diog. Laert., B. viil.
TRANSMIGRATION. 543
*' souls that have lost their wings," those, he saj-s,
come first to full recovery who in the circuit of their
human births have insight and will to choose the nobler
lives. And he makes the same law preside in the pas-
sage through lozvcr ioxTCi?, of animated life ; each soul,
after a thousand years, choosing such form, bestial or
human, as it pleases.^ This sense of moral gravita-
tion, or of the natural consequences inherent in char-
acter, tends to interweave itself with all theories of
transmigration ; and w^e can frequently detect a natural
connection between certain types of character and the
special forms of animal life to which the law books
consign these types after death. ^ Yet we can by no
means do so as a general rule, for the reason that this
is only one of many elements in the composition of the
idea as a whole, which goes back upon a far deeper
ground for sympathy, as well as for hopes and fears.
The unity of life ^ more or less recognized by all races ^
made metamorphosis easy and simple ; a free field
for all spontaneities of human expectation and desire.
Thus negro slaves transported to America sought
refuge from their miseries in death, in the hope to be
born again in the body of a child in their native land.
Various North-American tribes believe that the soul
of a dying person may be drawn into the bosom of a
sterile woman, or blown by the breath into that of the
nearest relative, and so come again to birth in the way
that the receiver desires.^ It is of course needless to
do more than refer to the beautiful mythology of meta-
morphosis in which Greek poetry and Hindu fable
so thoroughly delighted, in illustration of the freedom
1 Phjedrus, c. 6i. » See Yajtiavalkya^ III. 210.
" Brinton, Myths of New Worlds p. 253.
544 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
of this field of human sympathy^ from all necessary
relation to retributory suffering.
In Hindu poetry, every creature that appears in the
vast tropical jungle of illusion through which you are
led is a soul in disguise ; a mask assumed by magic
spell or in personal caprice, for purposes good or evil,
or in pure love of changing one's form, and wander-
ing through the wdde chambers of life. The special
genius of the poet is shown in the surprise effected by
the fall of the mask, the swift escape into a new one ;
in the flit from life to life, as of a spirit everywhere at
home ; and in the swift revulsions of pleasure and
pain caused by the play of such illusion upon human
emotions. And this takes ofl:' the edge of the tragic
furore which makes so large a part of these old
epics, and which is carried to such a pitch of destruc-
tiveness that nothing but a constant sense of illusion
could render it endurable. Here too, as in Veda and
Upanishad, the perpetual lesson is the indestructibility
of life, the resilience of the soul from death, and its
power to pass unharmed through all the fires of ele-
mental change.
Yet, as has been already said, one inevitable ten-
Hindu dency of the contemplative life in India was to
theory of . ...
penalty, regard this convertibility of forms through the
oneness of being, in its specially moral aspects. The
poets who unfolded laws of spiritual emancipation, and
the ascetics who sought to fulfil them, would natu-
rally emphasize penalty in connection with bestial
transformation, assigning the future of human vices
and passions to those forms of animal life to which
they seemed to bear a resemblance. And the point
most worth our notice is, that, looking upon life in so
TRANSMIGRATION. 545
many of these forms as symbolical at least of punish-
ment, they yet showed a tenderness towards them
which could have no other cause than the desire to
alleviate this remedial pain, and to help on the process
of purgation, that the imprisoned souls might at last be
freed.
I speak of the Hindu Inferno as remedial : I do not
deny that the punishment of the worst is often spoken
of as if final. Herder's idea of a threefold division of
the forms of transmigration into ascending, descending,
and circular, will not serve as a basis for the classifica-
tion of systems. In the Hindu faith we find all three
combined. But the result of this very fact is that the
idea of ascent and final unity zuith God is predomi-
nant. The very notion of circuit and return implies
that the basis of penalty is preservation ; and the ab-
sorption of the whole into a divine unity points clearly
to an instinctive resolution of evil into good.
The Hindu imagination indeed, like Christian
Dante's, brooded over the capabilities of penal suffer-
ing in the spiritual organization of man.^ Manu
represents the vital spirit of the wicked, as furnished
with a coarser body, expressly provided with nerves
susceptible of extreme torment ; while that of the good
shall have a body formed of pure elementary particles,
as closely related to delight in the celestial spheres.^
And according as the qualities of goodness, passion,
or darkness prevail, do these spirits become deities, or
men, or beasts, after death. In proportion as sensual
desire* are indulged, does the acuteness of these
sheathed and preparatory senses become intensified.^
1 For the dismal record of transmigration penalties, see Manu, ch. xii. and Yajna-
valkya. III. 206-215.
2 Ma7m, XII. 20, 40.
3 Compare Buckle's account of Calvinism, Hist, of Civil.., vol. ii.
35
54^ RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Eastern imagination herein, as in other matters,
Its limits ^^^<^ws itself freer scope to paint the horrors of
penalty, from the fact that it is so unconscious
of any thing like literal and practical intention ; a
palliative more or less admissible in the case of any
religion, when we would interpret its dogmas of future
retribution. In addition to this last, perhaps question-
able, protective element, a certain tenderness and plas-
ticity of the natural sensibilities comes in, to save the
Hindus from affirming everlasting penalty as a complete
and conscious principle of faith.
To say nothing of the inevitable return of the uni-
verse, through whatsoever " wombs of pain," to the
bosom of the Supreme, emphasized by the mystical
Vedanta as the substance of faith, the Law of Manu
itself in one passage distinctly affirms the " restoration
of the wicked." ^ Yajnavalkya also describes the re-
turn of the vicious through these purgations to' their
original better status and to new opportunity .^
At worst this Inferno of Transmigration, with all
its fantastic torments and their inconceivable durations,
has not so relentless a spirit towards the offender as is
involved in the developed Christian dogma of endless
punishment. And it is by no means so likely to sug-
gest itself to the reader of the Vedas, the philosophies,
the epics, or the dramas, that deity was held to be
glorified by the joy of saints over these penal miseries
of the wicked, as that a certain compassionate love, as
of a protector, and deliverer, was thought due from
man to the lower creatures ; though they must have
been regarded as representatives of a doom justly
inflicted upon human vice.
* Manu, XII. 22. See Elphinstone, quoted in Allen's India, p. 430.
2 Yajnav; III. 217, 218.
TRANSMIGRATION. 547
On the other hand, as the system became more and
more elaborate, it must, like analogous schemes in
other religions, have lent abundant material for the
purposes of- the priesthood ; whose control over these
tremendous mysteries of a future life secured them
mastery over mind and conscience in the present.
Bishop Heber, in view of these and kindred super-
stitions, denounced the Hindu religion as the worst he
ever heard of. Yet he has himself paid high tributes
to the virtues that could grow in its soil. And the
records of Christianity might well make us beware of
judging a whole faith by its least creditable fruits. It
may help to a fairer judgment, even of metempsychosis,
to recall the fine Mahabharata legend of King Judish-
thira ; who, after the woful strife of kindred chiefs is
over, striving to reach separation from the World by
journeying to the holy mountain, and seeing all his
noble brothers fall by the way, because not redeemed
by their sufferings from pride, or ambition, or over-
weening affections, reaches the presence of Indra,
followed only by his dog : heaven opens before him,
but he will not enter without this faithful companion.
" Away with that felicity whose price is to abandon the faithful,
. Yon poor creature, in fear and distress, hath trusted in my power
to save it.
Not for e'en Hfe itself will I break my phghted word."
Admitted by Indra, he finds his lost relatives are not
in heaven, but consigned to the regions of torment;
whither descending he bids the angel leave him, that he
may share their misery ; then wakes to find the spec-
tacle an illusion, to test the constancy of his love.^
Hardly less significant is the mythical account, in
1 Mahahh., VI. The story may be found in Alger's Oriental Poetry^ with a striking
translation of the passage.
548 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the same epic, of the renewal of human life itself
after the great Deluge of Manu, through the tender-
ness of this saint towards the lower creatures. He
saves a little fish pursued by larger ones, which
proves to be Brahma in disguise ; and after transfer-
ring it from place to place as it grows, till at last the
Ganges cannot hold it, he receives from its gratitude
the reward of his labors. The now gigantic fish
warns him of the coming destruction of mankind, and
guides his ark through the great waters, from which
he emerges to repeople the earth.
We have indicated the origin of this profound
Spiritual Oriental belief, in genuine religious and moral
significance, instiucts. How far other experiences of a more
subtle character may have helped to suggest it, — such
as the peculiar sense of reminiscence and recognition,
as of former states of being, which physicists ascribe
to the double action of the brain, — it is now impossi-
ble to determine. But, whatever its relation to a future
life, transmigration, or at least metamorphosis, is cer-
tainly a spiritual fact, true of the present life. " Be
not," says Sir Thomas Browne, in his quaint way,
"under any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest
and walkest about erectly under the form of man.
Leave it not disputable at last, since thou art a com-
position of man and beast, how thou hast predomi-
nantly passed thv days." " When men lose their
virtue," asks Boethius still more plainly, "do they not
also lose their human nature ? You cannot esteem
him to be a man, whom you see transformed by his
vices Whoever leaves off to be virtuous ceases to
be human. And, since he cannot attain to a divine
nature, he is turned into a beast." ^
* Consol. of Philosophy, IV. iv.
TRANSMIGRATION.
549
That the lower types of animal life are somehow
taken up as constituent elements of the human is an
instinct of sentiment and a fact of scientific observa-
tion. Embryological stages alone might almost war-
rant a literal truth to that old mystical philosophy
which makes every man carry a beast within his body,
" wherewith, being plagued or else amused, the captive
soul doth bring itself into a bestial figure."-^ Dire
possibilities suggest themselves in the reflection that
we are equally ignorant how the brute came to exist
outside us, as an express image of our rude instincts,
and how it came to appear within us, as larval phase
and moral quality. That there are limits in human
nature to actual transmutation in the descendinor line
may fairly be presumed, at least so long as science
fails, with all its intimations and inferences, to show
us even the animal man in the act of ascending out
of the brute. And more than this : our personality
is a spiritual essence that resists solution ; a mystery
as indefinable by science as by superstition ; a secret
that has not yielded either to the dream of metemp-
sychosis or to the study of specific origin, to divina-
tion of the future or to exploration of the past.
Darwin may track it this way, or Manu that : the
subtle genius will not be hunted to its lair.
But the interweavincr of the hicrher and lower lives,
the divine and the bestial, remains : it was as real to
the earlier as to the later consciousness of man, that
he is the microcosm of life, from the god to the
worm. There was evermore a warning instinct, the
ceaseless providence of a secret whisper, " Beware
the beast thou bearest within."
* Jacob Behmen's Mysterium Magnum,
550 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Half in insight, half in fear, he wove his impression
into dogma ; and on that arose metempsychosis. Its
colossal system of powers and penalties weighed
heavily on his soul. For its round of ages and forms
was a bitter one to travel ; its claim for all types of
life to exercise influence on his destinies was an over-
whelming demand ; and his constant yearning was to
escape this circulation through the manifold stages
of existence, and to mount at once by a directer path
to immortal good. Brahmanism and Buddhism, with
their kindred philosophies have sought to provide
such ways of escape, as Christianity also has had its
fine evasions of its own dismal lore of eternal punish-
ment.
But metempsychosis had its nobler side. It asso-
ciated itself with all the tenderness of yearning and
regret. It served to bring out man's kindly senti-
ments, and expand them through the whole world
of animated forms. And it must have quickened
the agsthetic and poetic sense by teaching him to
trace the paths of that tender mystery of creative
genius, which is one and the same in the weaving of
a sparrow's nest and the transitions of human birth
and death.
I return to the point which I proposed to illustrate.
Sanity of This circuit of metempsychosis is the clearest
nature. possiblc cvidcncc, for our study of the early
world, before practical science was, that man cannot
withdraw himself, even by religious influence, from
a saving balance, inherent in his own spiritual ten-
dencies and demands. The Hindu, dreamer as he
was, was forced, as we have seen, to recognize the
visible world he repelled, and to find religious purpose
TRANSMIGRATION. 55 1
in its forms and forces, after all. He could not make
the living universe flow^ into the divine life, w^ithout
acknowledging the flow of deity through the whole
living universe. Such the sanity of nature, justifier
alike of soul and sense.
VII.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. .
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY.
/CHRISTIANITY indulges the hope of absorbing
^^ other historical religions, and sinking their christian
sacred names and symbols in its own. This ^''p^"^*'^"^-
anticipation demands our notice, as bearing directly on
the interests of Universal Religion.
It means, substantially, that Christianity has confi-
dent faith in its own adequacy to meet universal needs.
A like self-reliance is to be noted in all great historic
religions. They would not be religions, had they
not this instinct of universality. . In proportion to the
earnestness of its conviction has each refused to hide
its treasure, and hastened forth with the glad tidings
of one all-sufficing gospel. Judaism made the world
ring with its cry to the nations to come up and serve
Jehovah. Buddhism has swept a third of mankind
into its wide-open folds of brotherhood. Confucius
sways an empire of empires, and China entitles her-
self the "Central Kingdom." The religions of Moses,
Jesus, Mohammed, — religions of the Desert as they
are, summoning men apart to intense concentration
on personal needs and exaltations, to a burning thirst
for living waters,- — have transformed their passionate
egotism into a boundless absolutism, claiming divine
556 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
right by " special revelation " to impose their formulas
upon all mankind. Even Persian Babism parcels out
the nations of the earth already, by anticipation, among
its ambitious chieftains.^
All great religions involve this assurance of a right
.to master the world ; and the method is now the sword,
now love and sacrifice, now prophetic affirmation, now
the proclamation of a dogma or a name. However
delusive the hope, there is a deeper truth than its own
exclusiveness allows it to apprehend, seeking expres-
sion in its dream.
For what all these religions are really affirming,
however unconsciously, is the adequacy of the human
faculties to find whatever, as spiritual forces, they re-
quire. The confessors of each faith hold their own
mode of satisfaction to be valid for all men, only be-
cause they know that all men have one nature. But
this implies that the power and the right of obtaining
such satisfactory solution cannot be limited to them-
selves. So that when the instinct of expansion which
impels them comes to be really comprehended, all
beliefs that assume the common human nature to be
inadequate should drop away ; and all exclusive claims
on the part of distinctive religious traditions and sym-
bols to represent it should be resigned.
And this time has now come, more fully and effec-
tively than at any former period, in the progress of
mutual recognition between the diverse religions of
mankind. Such claims are now a real bar to sympa-
thy, and can form no element of that unity which all
our experience expects. All distinctive religions —
and Christianity in the whole histQry of its relations
with Judaism and other faiths has assumed itself to be
* Gobineau, p. 193.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 557
one of these — are fragmentary and imperfect: if
not in certain ideal aspects, they are yet positively so
when regarded as alternatives to each other ; that is,
when claiming the right of supplanting and excluding
each other's definite names, symbols, and historical
associations in the world's regard. Civilization ac-
knowledges its debt to each, respects the validity of
each as aspiration on the same ample basis of a com-
mon spiritual nature ; but holds them all in abeyance
before those universal ideas and that complete human
culture, of which their specialities, whether personal,
dogmatical, or mythological, were but germs. No
distinctive religion can fulfil the universal functions of
our civilization. The plea that it is itself identical with
civilization, or exclusively entitled to speak in its name,
cannot now be entered even by the best of these special
organs of the religious sentiment. It cannot monopo-
lize truths implicitly contained in all great forms of
faith ; and, however natural the desire to make it cover
all that is for the "glorj^ of God," it cannot ignore the
history of man. Here the zeal of the Christian dis-
ciple confounds things difierent and unequal. The
terms Christianity and civilization are not identical ;
since civilization reports the whole experience of
mankind, whereof this concentration on the person of
Jesus, whether in its recognized or its heretical forms,
is but a fragment. Distinctive Christianity has in fact
had little or no success outside the Aryan family of
nations ; and in the most advanced of these it is losinoj-
its hold, and passing on into a freer theism. Only
the blindness of an exclusive faith can expect that
the hundreds of millions of the Oriental w^orld, now
brought to our doors, are to bow down to the name of
Jesus, and adopt Christian symbolism ; and this at a
558 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
time when historical criticism is claiming for Judaism
much of that very ethical and spiritual wisdom which
has hitherto been supposed original with the prophet
of Nazareth. As well expect Christendom to worship
God under the sole name of Brahma, or Mahomet as
His only prophet.
The very fact that Christianity makes exclusive
claims in the name of a central historical person, to
say nothing of positive church or creed, proves that it
cannot become the universal religion. Nothings indeed
is more irrational than to expect old civilizations to
exchange their ancestral scriptures and mediatorial
names foi' those of other races. It is as nearly im-
possible as any change can well be. They will escape
their own idolatries in this kind, not to fall into others,
but to be freed into that religion of universal and
eternal truth which transcends all such limitations.
"This is my religion," said a Siamese nobleman to a
Christian missionary : "to be so little tied to the world
that I can leave it without regret ; to keep my heart
sound ; to live doing no injustice to any, but deeds of
compassion to all." To convince him that he had so
sinned as to need salvation through Jesus Christ was
beyond the power of the proselyter, who succeeded
only in making him the more certain that his own
religion was the better of the two.^
I can conceive no reason for believing that either
, , the Tews, the Chinese, or the Hindus are des-
Inadequacy *'
of distinctive tiucd to bccomc members of what is called the
reigions. « j3ocly of Christ." The Spirit has something
better in store for mankind than to hang fastened on
one historical name or idealization. The various reli-
gions, like the various races, are brought together at
* Bowring's JourTtal of Embassy to Stain, I. 378.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 559
last, to rebuke conceit of special claims, and secure
the largest appreciation of God in Man. To stand
where this appreciation is possible is the first of duties.
"The leaves of God's book," says a Moslem proverb,
"are the religious persuasions." It is time to read that
book with open heart and mind. And there is no
enforcement of the lesson more convincing than that
which is coming in the almost total failure of mission-
ary effort in the great empires of the East.
Poor Abbe Dubois, after thirty years' devoted mis-
sionary labor in India, not only pronounced his . .
belief that the Hindus could not be converted, missions in
and that Christianity had done its work in the
direction of heathenism, — but confessed, " with shame
and confusion," that he " did not remember any Hindu
who had embraced Christianity from conviction and
from disinterested motives," and that those converts
who continued in the church were " the very worst in
his flock." That the Protestant missions have even
less to boast of than the Catholic, in the matter of past
success or present promise, will be sufficiently clear
to any one who glances over the pages of Tennent,
Anderson, or Kaye.
I do not propose to enter into this special topic fur-
ther than to notice what is generally admitted, — that
the converts to Christianity in India come almost exclu-
sively from among that miserable portion of the popu-
lation which is naturally open to the influences of
any missionary enterprise, of whatsoever faith. Mr.
Wheeler says ^ that the current of national religious
ideas, " flowing in channels unknown and unappreciated
by the Western w^orld, has rendered Christianity less
acceptable to the civilized Hindus of the plains than to
^ Hist, of India., II. 66i.
560 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the barbarous aborigines who inhabit the hills." " Of
the one hundred and twelve thousand converts in the
whole of India," wrote Monier Williams in 1861,
"ninety-one thousand have been obtained in the south,
and of these not more than three thousand belong to
the race of Hindus proper. The greatest missionary
success has been among the Shanars, a low caste
not Hindus by race or religion, whose -business is
to extract the juice used for toddy from the palmyra
palm."^ "In all Bengalese converts not a Mohamme-
dan is on record."^
On the intelligent and reflecting class Christianity
makes little or no impression. "Though the Hindus
respect the precepts of Christianity," says Miss Car-
penter very candidly,^ " and hold the morality of the
Bible in high esteem, to the reception of Christianity
they feel insuperable difficulties. Their faith in their
own sacred writings having been shaken, they do not
willingly accept any other revelation," — naturally
enough, we should say. " It is impossible for them
to accept miracles under any circumstances," — -a still
more obvious necessity, having had quite enough to
do with them already. "And they regard a Christian
convert as a renegade," — very much as a Christian
sect regards those who abandon it for another, it
may be. But in these and other ways this estimable
philanthropist, whose efforts for the practical education
of the Hindus, and especially for the emancipation of
women from their present deplorable condition, are
deserving of all praise, endeavors to explain the unde-
niable failure of missionary efforts among the better
classes in India.
^ Lecture on the Study of Satiskrit, p. 39.
* Tennent's Christianity iti Ceylon, p. 64.
* Six Mo7itIis in hidia, II. 71, 72.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 56 1
Mr. Kaye points to another serious obstacle to
these efforts, which simply proves what intelligent
Hindus have had good chances to learn, the vanity
of all pretensions on the part of special religiohs to
monopolize " saving " power. " During the first cen-
tury of our connection with India, not only was noth-
ing done for Christianity, but much against it. We
found the name of Christian little better than synonyme
for devil. Compared with the lives of our own peo-
ple, those of the natives really appeared to glow with
excellent morality."^ If it be true that, as an intel-
ligent American traveller observes, "India is rising
from degradation through intercourse with Christian
nations," while yet "the dealings of England with
India have been any thing but Christian," — it is cer-
tainly natural that the Hindus should discover that the
good which Western civilization is bringing them does
not depend on the power of its special religious
doctrines over the conduct of their confessors. What
divine authority to rule men can they ascribe to a re-
ligion which forbids caste, — while the Englishman,
pluming himself on its monopoly of God, contemns
their wisest men for their heathen birth and culture,
or expects every Hindu to " make him a salaam " as
he passes by?
Absurd and irrational dogmas, assumptions of
divine right to prescribe forms of belief and personal
allegiance, are as readily detected by intelligent Hin-
dus as by other men ; and, when enforced by the
threat of eternal punishment by a foreign God for non-
belief in a Christ who is made their representative,
must be in the highest degree repulsive and even con-
temptible to all thoughtful people in India, whether
^ Christianity in India, pp. 41, 43.
36
562 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
believers m the national religion or not. I pass over
this cause of missionary failure, as too obvious to be
dwelt on.
The discord of Christian sects probably stands in
the way of missionary success as much as the charac-
ter of Christian dogma. When the Protestant preach-
ers represent the Catholic as little better than the
heathen, the Hindus honestly ask, "Why should we
become Christians, when you tell us that three-quar-
ters the Christian world have adopted a creed no
better than our own? "^ The Jesuits forged a Veda,
which they called Ezourvedam. The Dutch cut off
the nose of the statue of St. Thomas the apostle,
presumed founder of Christianity in India, knocked it
full of nails, and shot it out of a mortar. Denounc
ing each other's creeds. Christians have been ready to
make money out of the heathenism they agree to
pronounce fatal to the soul. "Little brass images
of Krishna before which Hindu women bow come
from Birmingham."^ The East India Company took
tribute from the festivals of Jagannath. Add to the
pronounced enmity between Catholics and Protestants
the mutual animosities of Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Baptists, Methodists, and the bitter strife waged by
the sects on the soil of India and Ce3don, and the
expectations of the Christian Church will appear pre-
posterous indeed.^
Mr. Wheeler says that the influence of the epics
_ alone on the masses is infinitely pfreater than
Deep roots -^ ^
of native that of thc Biblc on modern Europe. They
are represented at village festivals ; their sto-
* Bevon, TJiirty Years in India, II. 290; Tennent's Ceylon, I. 545.
2 Caileton's A'fJTy Way riniiid the World, p. 165.
* See Tennent's Christianity in Ceylon.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 563
ries are chanted aloud at almost every social gath-
ering, and indeed form the topic of conversation
amongst Hindus generally. "They are all that the
library, the newspaper, and the Bible are to the Euro-
pean ; w^hllst the books themselves are regarded with
a superstitious reverence which far exceeds that which
has been accorded to any other revelation, real or sup-
posed. [?] It is the common belief that to peruse or
merely to listen to the perusal of the Mahabharata or
the Ram^lyana will ensure prosperity in this world
and eternal happiness hereafter. At the same time
they are cherished by the Hindus as national prop-
erty, and as containing the records of the deeds of
their forefathers in the da3^s when the gods held fre-
quent communion with the children of men." ^
In truth, though there has been scarcely an age in
Hindu history which has not been marked by reli-
gious ferment and change, no revolution of this kind
has ever made a deep or lasting impression on the
Hindu mind which has not been of native origin. So
vigorous is the natural growth that it refuses to be
grafted. According to the statements in Anderson's
recent work on Foreign Missions, the thirty societies
interested in the conversion of India, with their five
hundred and eighty missionaries and four hundred
stations, have, after this long period of British sway
over these vast multitudes, resulted in about fifty
thousand communicants, and two hundred and sixty
thousand "nominal Christians," with one hundred thou-
sand children in the mission schools. ^ And this in a
population of one hundred and fifty millions I Perhaps
even these figures are too large. Mr. Ward (India
and Hindus) estimated in 185 1 "that the whole num-
1 Hist. 0/ India, I. 4. 2 Also Sir J. Bowring's journal, I. 352, 378.
564 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
ber of converts, exclusive of tlie Roman Catholics,
cannot exceed ten thousand." We can hardly wonder
that the Calcutta ^' Christian Observer," describing a
conference of missionaries,, held in that city in 1855,
should admit that "an air of sombreness overspread the
w^hole, and that the lesson it emphatically conve3^ed
was that of showing how little we could do."^
After this review of Hindu philosophy and faith, we
,. cannot wonder that at the present time, as afres
Present reli- ■"■ ^
gious reform ago iu thc great Buddhist reformation, the re-
^ ° '^' ligious genius of this race asserts its capacity
for progress. The influence of Western missions in
setting aside Hindu for Christian forms of religious
association and doctrine has been infinitesimal ; but
the all-sufiicient germs of pure theism contained in the
national mind, and its normal activity, from earliest
times, are now bearing fresh fruit, in efforts to over-
throw the degenerate polytheism of the modern Hindus
and the miserable social institutions that accompany it.
It is on these purely Hindu associations that many
sects have recently arisen in India, which denounce
the popular divinities and the social inequality and
barbarism now prevalent ; " substituting a moral for a
ceremonial code, and addressing their prayers to the
only God."''^
It was the ancient faith of the Vedas and the Upan-
Rammohun ishads that Rammohun Roy sought to restore,
Roy- when in the early part of the present century
he attempted to purify the religious life of his people.
He translated the substance of this grand theism of
his fathers from its original Sanskrit into the languages
of the masses; unfolding a philosophy and piety which
1 Missionary IntelUg., VIII. 288.
2 Wilson, Essays on tiie Religion 0/ tJie Hindus, II. 76.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 565
amply justified him in declaring that " the superstitious
practices which deform the Hindu religion have nothing
to do with the pure spirit of its dictates." ^ "Though
Vedas, Puranas, and Tantras, frequently assert the
existence of a plurality of gods and goddesses, and
prescribe modes of their worship for men of insufficient
understanding, yet they also have declared in a hun-
dred other places that these passages are to be taken
in a figurative sense." ^ In his subsequent controversy
with Dr. Marshman, who depreciated his faith, upon
the ground that he did not accept Christianity in its
trinitarian form, he manfully maintains not only the
substantial truth and purity of his Hindu theism, but
even for the low popular conceptions of it equal rea-
sonableness with those affirmed in the Christian trinity.
If Christians affirm God to be One, though in three
persons, "they ought in conscience to refrain from
accusincT Hindus of Polvtheism ; for everv Hindu, we
daily observe, confesses the unlt\^ of the Godhead,"
even while making it consist of " millions of substances
assuming offices " according to the various forms of
"Divine Providence."^ It should be noted that Ram-
mohun Roy, while devoutly admiring the ''Precepts of
Jesus," which he translated into his native tongue,
did not admit them to be in any wise inconsistent with
the spiritual faith which he drew from native foun-
tains ; and that he never " broke with Hinduism nor
adopted Christianity by any outward act or rite, even
to the directions given for his burial ; "^ and this while
in sympathy with the, English Unitarians in their devo-
tion to the person and teachings of Jesus. And, even
1 Pref. to The Vedant, or Resolution 0/ the Veds. 2 ibid., p. 86.
3 Appeals in Defence 0/ " Precepts ofjestis^* p. 172.
* Frances Power Cobbe, Hojtrs of Work a7id Play, p. 69.
566 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
while carefully avoiding any thing like denial of the
New Testament miracles, he was equally careful to in-
sist on the impossibility of using them as evidences
of Christianity, to the mind of a people who had rec-
ords of much more wonderful miracles, handed down,
upon what they regarded as unquestionable authority,
from their own traditional saints.^
There can be no question that the personal isolation
Subsequent o^ Rammohuu Roy in his own country, and
reformers, ^^i^ hostility arouscd by his zeal for religious
and social reform, drove him into closer relations with
Christianity as a specific faith than his spiritual needs
required. The numerous religious reformers, who
have sprung up in the same line of thought since
his time in India, have not followed his lead in this
respect ; having found ample grounds for their move-
ment in the national mind and its traditional instincts,
while advancing beyond its bibliolatry and tradition-
alism into the domains of free, universal religion.
Thus the Raja Radhakanta Deva Bahadur — whose
moral attainment was as remarkable as his intellectual,
the earliest native helper of the education of woman,
and the first to provide school books for the people,
of whom it was said that he not only never made an
enemv, but earned the love and admiration of all —
remained a Hindu in his religious faith. ^
Most writers and observers have recognized a
The theistic stroug dispositiou in the modern Hindus to in-
movement. dependent religious criticism, to rationalistic
investigation and a free acceptance of the principles
of natural religion. They have described it in various
^ Appeals^ &c , p. 226. Rev. J. Scott Porter, in his funeral discourse, afTirnis that Ram*
mohun Roy, before his death, expressed his entire faitli in the New Testament miracles.
Last Days of Ram- Roy in En^^land, p. 226.
* See Proceedings of R. A. S. of Bengal for May, 1867.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 567
ways, each from his own point of view. Thus Dr.
Allen tells us, in his valuable work on India, that
there are many deists among the educated Hindus,
many who have no faith in the Sastras ; that their
libraries are furnished with English deistical works ;
that they discuss Christianity and treat Christian doc-
trines with levity ; that they control the native press,
and propose an eclectic system of faith from all re-
ligions, adapted to the present state of knowledge.^
According to Dr. Anderson's work on Eastern Mis-
sions, " the Hindus have discovered what it is to be
intellectually free ; and, confounding distinctions of
right and wrong, antagonize the truth of God [2.^.,
the dogmatic theology of the missionaries]. There
is cause for anxiety lest educated Hindus, ceasing to
be idolaters, become stereotyped in skepticism."^ Edi-
torial tourists notice that " the educated Hindu usually
throws over idols, and becomes free-thinker; that he
does not adopt Christianity, which would lead to
ostracism, but rationalism rather; since by rejecting
myths and superstitions he does not lose social posi-
tion." ^ These subtle brains slip easily out of all nets
of conversion. The earliest result of the Ancrlo-
Indian college of Calcutta, an institution for the in-
struction of the Hindus in English branches of study,
was the importation and rapid sale of a thousand
copies of Paine's "Age of Reason," whose market
value quintupled on the hands of the sellers.'* Miss
Carpenter reports in general terms that " educated
Hindus acknowledge One God and Heavenly Father,"
and that they always responded to her " appeal
to Him." "The Prathana Samaj"'^ [pure theism],
1 Allen's India, pp. 581-584. 2 Anderson, pp. 237, 238.
3 Carleton's Rawid tJie World, p. 209. * Christian Missioitary Intelligencer, IX. 98.
568 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
says a Bombay journal, " is destined to be the re-
ligion of the whole world." ^
We must here take into view the inevitable result of
Fusion of that intermixture of races and beliefs of which
religions, modcm India has been the theatre. Islam has
doubtless done much to concentrate reliorious feelino-,
and give it definiteness of moral and democratic
purpose. The full religious toleration established by
the Mogul emperor, Akbar, opened India in the six-
teenth century to the largest freedom of speculation and
faith. Akbar was a believer by conviction in the
rights of mind and the sympathies of religions ; and
no nobler words than his, to this effect, have been
recorded by history. Under his government that
legacy of thirty centuries, the old Aryan schism,
ceased ; and Persians and Indians were reunited in
a common worship. He was the great peacemaker,
the " guardian of mankind." On account of the free
discussion of beliefs by the learned men of all relig-
ions whom he brought together to speak before the
people, the custom of publicly reading comments on
the Koran was laid aside, and the sciences became
current in its place. ^ It was said of him that " he
mingled the best and purest part of every religion for
his own faith." His preference was for the Zoroastrian
system ; but we see in him quite as strong evidence
of the capabilities of Oriental Islam for religious
hospitality and fusion. Of this tendency the Dabis-
tan, composed in the next century after Akbar, is a
wonderful monument; and its charmino- review of all
the great religions of the time is conceived in the
broadest and most genial spirit. Its author. Mohsan
* Six Months in India, II. 70, 71. 3 £)abistan, ch. x.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 569
Fane, declares truly that he writes to give the " out-
ward and inward meaning of all beliefs, free of all
party spirijt, without envy, hate, or scorn."
" The varieties of the rules of prophets proceed only from the
diversity of names. The time of a prophet is a universal one,
having neither before nor after, neither morn nor eve." *
The fusion of Semitic monotheism with Aryan
dualism and pantheism in the East has developed a
degree of religious universality yet to be appreciated.
The Puranas, especially the Vishnu and the Bhaga-
yata, have in many respects spiritualized the popular
creeds and mythologies of India, and absorbed them
into vast mystical unities with boundless scope of
affinity, in accordance with the genius of the race.
This wealth of material for a native breadth of relior-
ious sympathy is strikingly illustrated by the later
" Vaishnava " sects, which are widely extended in
Central and Northern India, and of which a fuller
account will be given in another section of this work.
Those especially of Ramanand, Kabir, Dadu, have
been described by Professor Wilson in his very interest-
ing essay on the Religious Sects of the Hindus. As
might be expected from their origin in the traditions
of the old worship of Vishnu, these schools for the
most part teach universal toleration, and have sought
to unite the different race-elements in Hindustan in
religious sympathy. This was eminently the aim of
Nanak also, the founder of the Sikh religion, in the
fifteenth century, whose peaceful and humane philos-
ophy combined an almost Vedantic mysticism with
practical benevolence and brotherhood. It was only
under the influence of \3itQr g-icms, or teachers, and of
^ Dabistan, ch. xii.
570 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
Mohammedan persecution, that the Sikhs were trans-
formed into a nation of soldiers, with aspirations for
material conquests. Nanak said : — ,
" He alone is a true Hindu whose heart is just, and he only a
good Mohammedan whose life is pure," — " Be true, and thou shalt
be free. Truth belongs to thee, and thy success to the Creator." '
The Sikh Bible says : —
" God will not ask man of what race he is. He will ask what
he has done."
" Heed not the command of the impure man, though among the
nobles ; but of one who is pure among the most despised will
Nanak become the footstool."
" Put on the armor that harms no one. Let thy coat of mail be
reason, and convert thy enemies to friends. All founders of sects
are mortal. God alone endures for ever. Men may read Vedas
and Korans, but only in Him is salvation."
It was said that, " when men listened to Nanak, they
forgot that mankind had any religion but one." So
when Kabir died, the Dabistan tells us, both Hindus
and Mohammedans assembled, the ones to bury, the
others to burn his body, each supposing him to have
been of their own faith. At last a fakir stepped into
the midst and said, " Kabir was a holy man, inde-
pendent of both religions ; but, having during his life
satisfied you, he must also, after death, meet your
approval," — whence the proverb : —
" Live so as to be claimed after death to be burned by the Hindus,
and to be buried by the Moslem."
The followers of Baba-lal, who unite elements of
the Vedanta with the mystical devotion of the Sufis,
adorins" One God without confinement to forms of
worship, say, " God is the creed of those who love
1 Dabist&ttt ch. ii.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 571
Him ; and to do good is best, for the followers of
every faith." ^
The fine speculative quality of the Hindu brain is
in natural affinity with the freedom of inquiry Ethnic
which animates the present age. This native qualities,
genius, quickened by opportunities of dealing with the
largest philosophy and boldest criticism of modern time,
and finding abundant analogies for these in the litera-
ture already familiar to it, is rapidly emancipating Hin-
duism from the degradation and lethargy of the past.
Frances Power Cobbe, a most competent authority on
the subject, has called attention to the facts, that " the
common tendency of conquered nations to adopt the
religion of the victorious race exists very slightly, if
at all, among the educated Hindus ; " and that, in the
words of the " Contemporary Review," there is even
" a growing silent alienation of the younger generation
of Englishmen in India from Christian worship and
communion ; " and this, too, among those "whose lives
are pure, who exhibit least of the worldly self-seeking
spirit, who are among the most thoughtful and culti-
vated."''^ Whatever feelings these facts may excite in
the missionary, or distinctively Christian mind, nothing
could afford more impressive proof of the power of
native Hindu genius, speculative and religious, to re-
generate the national character by its own natural
methods, without adopting an alien form of religious
faith. It is finding its own way out of special exclu-
sive confessions into the open day of Universal Relig-
ion. It has been said that the Gayatri, the morning
and evening prayer of all Brahmans, " might with
slight alteration be converted into a Christian prayer."
It needs 7io alteration whatever to become a part of
1 Wilson, I, 352. 2 Hours 0/ Work and Play ^ p. 64.
572 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
the free Bible of Humanity. " Let us meditate on the
excellent Light in the divine Sun, and may his beams
illumine our minds."
There is unmistakable evidence of all this in the
The Brah- gi'owth of the Bra/wia-Saniaj, or " Church of
ma-samaj. ^|-^g OwQ, God ; " Certainly a movement, which
for noble and generous purpose, for profound earnest-
ness of religious faith, and for significance in the
present epoch of intellectual and spiritual transition, is
unsurpassed, and which deserves the name of inspira-
tion as truly as any thing in history. By this statement
1 do not mean to exaggerate any of its actual merits,
any more than I w^ould affirm the absence of defects
which a distance of half the circumference of the earth
may hide from us. Its essential meaning and purpose
demand no less a tribute than I have accorded it.
Here is a perfected theistic faith, growing up on purely
Hindu grounds, and rapidly expanding throughout
India ; inheriting the grandest affirmations of the
Vedic Scriptures, yet nowise bound thereby ; blend-
ing the old mystic fervor with the purest practical
morality ; aiming at the entire religious and social
regeneration of India, at the abolition of caste and
polytheism, at the elevation of woman, through the
reform of marriage customs and domestic servitudes,
and the largest opportunity of culture and occupation.
Its spirit is thoroughly democratic, and it demands of
the Brahman that he throw away at once the sacred
thread that designates the twice-born man of the elect
caste, and consecrate himself to the service " not of
the wise and gifted, whose lives have already been a
boon, but to the poor, the stupid, and the sinful."
Originating in the pious scholarship and benevolence
of Rammohun Roy, in his effort to return to the sub-
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 573
stance of the old Vedic faith, and to engraft thereon
the universal ethics of love and justice, it has placed
itself on a broader basis than even he expected ; re-
cognizing that the aim should be not to become
merged in Christianity as a specific faith, nor in the
centralization of religious union in a discipleship of
Jesus ; but, in the words of its present enlightened
and enthusiastic leader, in his letter to the " Free
Religious Association" of American liberals, to
'' propagate the universal and absolute religion, w^hose
cardinal doctrines are the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man, and which accepts the truths of
all scriptures and honors the prophets of all nations ; "
and by "promoting the intellectual, moral, and social
reformation of individuals and nations, to make theism
the religion of life." ^
The practical earnestness and profound conviction
of this remarkable man has done much to Keshub
, . , , ■ , Chunder
brmg to clear and strong purpose the vague se
sen.
yearnings of the intelligent classes in India, and
direct the ferment of reform into productive channels.
Unwearied in his missionary and literary efforts,
founding churches all over India, and inspiring his
co-laborers by the pulpit and the pen for ten years
past, he has found the fields ripe for his harvests, and
with prophetic faith recognizes the tendency of the
age in India to be, as elsewhere in the civilized
world, towards free and natural theism. Upwards of
sixty of these churches already exist in the various
provinces of India ; earnest missionaries, supported
by voluntary contributions, are preaching these pure
ethics and spiritual intuitions to the masses ; several
periodicals are maintained and widely circulated ; and,
^ See Proceedings of Free Relig. Assoc, for 1868 (Boston, Adams & Co.)-
574 RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY.
if we may accept the testimony of one who has earned
the highest credence on subjects of this nature, " all the
educated youth of India (save a certain number wholly
skeptical in their tendencies) are in sentiment favor-
able to Brahmoism, and gradually fall into its ranks
as the indulgence or death of their fathers may permit
them to abandon Hindu rites." ^ The "skepticism"
here referred to is, in most cases, the free rationalism
of positive science, or that large personal liberty that
finds its sphere outside all church organizations.
Thus approaches the final justification for whatsoever
Promise of l^^s bccu of bcst promisc in Eastern wisdom
India. ^^^ faith ; a new dawn after centuries of com-
parative death and night. It is nothing less than such
a grand form of religion as this, very far in advance
of the prevailing creeds of Christendom, that now
reaches its spiritual hands across the seas of race and
mind — just as the electric wire is encircling the mate-
rial globe, just as all the relations of trade and science
and politics are becoming oecumenical — to our own
natural religion in the West, now escaping the Chris-
tian and the Judaic dogma, as itself has the Brahman-
ical, upon the ground of those inherent, inalienable,
and immutable relations that unite Man with God. It
is through such elements as these that the future faith
of the world is germinating in the mysterious unities
of progress ; the new spiritual climate of science and
freedom ; the communion of races and beliefs.
I gladly add the ardent words in which Chunder
Sen announces this common prophecy of the East and
the West : —
^ F. p. Cobbe, Hours of Work and Play, p. 78. Similar testimony was given by the
students of the Presbyterian Colleges in Calcutta, in reply to questions put them in turn
by the correspondent of tlic London Times.
RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALITY. 575
"The future religion of the world which I have described will be
the common religion of all nations, but in each nation it will have an
indigenous growth and assume a distinctive and peculiar character.
No country will borrow or mechanically imitate the religion of
another country ; but from the depths of the life of each nation its
future church will grow up. In common with all other nations and
communities, we shall embrace the theistic worship, creed, and
gospel of the future church. But we shall do this on a strictly
national and Indian style. One rehgion shall be acknowledged by
all men ; one God shall be worshipped throughout the length and
breadth of the world ; the same spirit of faith and love shall per-
vade all hearts ; all nations shall dwell together in the Father's
house ; yet each shall have its own peculiar and free mode of action.
There shall, in short, be unity of spirit, but diversity of forms ; one
body, but different limbs ; one vast community with members la-
boring in different ways, and according to their respective resources
and peculiar tastes, to advance their common cause, ' the Fathei
hood of God and the brotherhood of Man.' "
III.
BUDDHISM.
-oojafrioo-
I.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES.
37
\
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES.
TN defining the Hindu mind as the Brain of the East,
■^ I have not intended to deny that it possesses Balance of
muscular and nervous elements also. These ^atui^e-
are relatively in defect, while the cerebral is in excess.
But nature always seeks true balance. This brain is
of Aryan substance ; and we have already found its
quality suggestive of most forms of Indo-European
development, many-sided as that is. We have seen
that the practical energy which belongs to this family
of nations under cooler skies is hinted by many vigor-
ous reactions both in earlier and later times upon the
mystical quietism of Indian life. Of this nature were
the belief in active incarnation from age to age, as
often as virtue needed reinstatement by discipline,
strength, or love ; the interest felt by Brahman hermits
in living creatures ; the sympathetic realism of poets
in describing the more subtle phenomena of nature.
Such aptitudes are the more striking, in view of
their association with philosophies which turn the visi-
ble world into dream. We may add to these the na-
tional taste for dramatic and ornomic literature, the
exuberance of its flow into proverbs, fables, and
plays, as well as the acknowledged skill of the modern
»
J
580 BUDDHISM.
Hindus in many difficult and delicate handicrafts, and
the business tact and enterprise conceded to the mer-
chants of Calcutta and Bombay.
The earliest Aryans were, as we have seen, an
Ma "ai d independent, energetic race. The later hero
democratic of the cpic wars resembles those of the Scan-
qualities. j- • i -i tt •
dmavian sagas and the Homeric poems, in
his bold bearing towards the gods. He demands pro-
tection as a right : he does not hesitate to defy fate,
and to unsheathe his weapons against the lightnings of
angry deities. Still later the belief prevailed that not
only Brahman devotees, but Kshattriya chiefs, could
awaken the jealousy of these superhuman masters,
and even force them from their seats. The Mahab-
harata declares that neither penitence nor wisdom can
bestow such bliss as they attain who die on the field
of battle. " Remember," sa^^s the mother of the Panda-
vas to her sons, "that you are Kshattriyas, — not born
to till the ground, nor trade, nor beg for bread, but to
use the sword, to slay or be slain ; and that it is a
thousand times better to be slain with honor than to
live in disgrace. Prove to the world that Kunti is the
mother of a noble race." The modern Sikh or Raj-
put, who worships his sword and his shield, is a true
representative of the epic Pandu and Kuru chiefs.
The heroic deeds of Krishna and Rama were sung by
rhapsodists at the courts of the petty Indian kings long
before some Hindu Pisistratus gathered and arranged
their effusions, to be stamped with the symbolical
names of Valmiki and Vyasa.^ In fact the whole
history of the martial element in India, ancient and
modern, strikingly resembles the growth of the same
element in Greece and Northern Europe.
* Lassen, Ind. Alt-^ I. pp. 482, 839.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 581
We have seen, further, that the ancient system of
independent village communities, which has held its
ground in India down to the present time, w^as a sys-
tem replete with vigorous germs of self-government.
We have observed that the constitution and usages of
the caste S3^stem bear resemblance in certain respects
to those of the ancient Germanic tribes, especially in
the independence of each caste in matters which con-
cern its own organization and internal affairs ; ^ and we
have traced the democratic forces which have disin-
tegrated the system itself.
It is a long w^ay from Indra, the lightning-God
of the old Veda, to Brahma, the contemplative Spirit
adored in the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita. But,
at every step in the transition, the practical and ener-
getic side of the Aryan character, of which Indra was
the typical deity, maintained its ground, in some form
of reaction on the tendency to inertness and dream.
We pass to the most important of all these reactions
in belief and institution, to that most impressive move-
ment in all Asiatic history, where the practical philan-
thropy of the West may find itself anticipated within
the most abstract philosophy of the East, — the Budd-
hist Reformation.
Every positive religion begins in a natural aspi-
ration, which is also a true inspiration. It is xhe process
embodied in the Prophet, who is wont to be a°^^^^^sions.
poet, and lover of men. Gradually it gathers about
it the machinery of organization. The common un-
derstanding among its believers becomes a principle
of mutual supervision to protect its interests and assure
its triumph. The common faith ceases to be one with
all life and law, the free growth of the person, and is
^ See Buyers's Recoil. 0/ Northern India, p. 457. ♦
582 BUDDHISM.
set off as a special commandment from without and
from above, to comply with certain conditions and ac-
complish certain objects. It is embodied in a Church
with holy names, books, fixed creeds, formulas, sym-
bols, all of which have become fetiches at last ; also
in the functionary of the same, the Priest. But fresh
aspirations are aroused by the process itself, since the
soul cannot be driven into permanent dotage ; and
these strike off' from it, finding their way upward,
pushing aside its forms, and even its name. A new
meaning will first be sought in the old formulas,
nearer, it is fondly dreamed, to their original meaning.
But it is soon found that the new wine is not for the
old vessels ; that the age 'is not content to give its new
children the quaint names their grandfathers were
called by, out of the old Bibles ; and so the dead
labels are thrown aside, as having served their pur-
poses in the world. So there come to be many relig-
ions in human history, though all go back to a
common root and an inmost identity.
Somehow the veil of priesthood is rent ; the divine
right of special names, creeds, and persons, is ex-
ploded ; and the people make fresh way for themselves,
with new affirmation of what is human and universal.
Theology is converted into gospel. This third stage
is embodied in the Sfij'ittial Reformer ^ whose inspi-
ration is not less real because it is not exclusivelv his,
but belongs also to his age. He is reformer of the
old paths, prophet of the new. This is the historic
law.
Such was the history of Judaism, and the passage
thence into Christianity ; of Catholicism, and the escape
into Protestantism ; of each Protestant Church and the
churches that came out of it. Such is now the history
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 583
of Christianity itself and the universal religion that
supplants its distinctive claims ; as yet taking no name,
let us hope ; and, as identical with all true human life,
. surely needing none. We are now to trace the anal-
ogous process in Brahmanism.
That contemplative religion began in a profound
sense of the mystery of existence. It was Brahman-
absorbed in the incessant recurrence of growth aspiration.
and decay, the endless transitions of life and death,
the solemn flow of all things into the unseen, till it
was possessed by a sense of unreality and dream.
But this weight forced up the opposite pole of thought ;
the very restlessness guaranteed rest ; the doom of
change pressed home the sense of the eternal. So
sound is nature in man : he sees how all things pass
away ; he wdll live for what cannot pass away. This
the aspiration of Brahmanism, — an inspiration of
faith in the everlastincr.
We found this even in early Vedic hymns which
taught the mystic unity of the gods ; in later thought-
ful musings on the origin of the universe, and its
return into the bosom of the life whence it came ; in
the devout poet's philosophy that saw and felt all
things and all beings as for ever in God. It sent the
saints of Brahma to their aspiring penance and ascetic
triumphs under those shadowy banyans, w^hose in-
numerable descending boughs and ascending roots,
interlaced in one living whole, were a mystic symbol
of spiritual being as masked by the manifold ties of
life and bonds of action ; and it held them there in
patient effort to lose definite desires and thoughts in
perfect union with the one infinite and eternal life
which these but veiled. Remote as its method was
from what now becomes us, it was an inspiration of
584 BUDDHISM.
thought and sacrifice and prayer ; and so it has left to
the ages those subHme responses that make amends
for all extravagance and superstition in its devotees.
The seers to whom we owe the Upanishads were
none the less true believers in their vision, for the
Brahmanical absolutism that was growing up around
them.
We have seen that large freedom of discussion and
Organiza- spcculatiou prevailed in the Hindu schools from
tion. very early times. And it is obvious from the
nature of thought that this mystical worship of the One
and Everlasting could hardly have embodied itself in
a sharply organized Church. Yet caste involved the
distinction of priestly and lay classes. The spiritual
relations of men became vicarious. The dogma grew
definite. The Hymns, preserved in official memory
as verbally inspired, were laden with comment and
ritual that swelled into new Veda as sacred as the
first. The ascetic rule became more systematic and
relentless : the original contempt of the saint for the
changing world grew into contempt of all social rela-
tions. Caste, not organized by the priesthood, was
elaborated by that class, in its own interest ; and the
uninitiated classes were rigidly excluded from reading
or teaching the Veda. The Brahmanical caste was
debarred by its limits as a hereditary body from any
effort to enlarge its own membership. The fewer its
numbers, the diviner would it seem ; and the higher
would be the prestige of unity. Like the priesthoods
of all religions, it cherished its spiritual light as too
precious to be trusted to the untaught mind ; holding
it in custody of a mediatorial authority, by whose
service its virtue was to be made effective for the
common salvation. The multitude was its footstool
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 585
on earth, and its dominion reached on through the life
to come. Brahmanism was not a system to recognize
the necessity of proselyting. If was the effort of the
individual to lift himself out of illusion into real life, and
its only associative principle was that of caste. Far
from having any idea of proselytism, it was aristocratic
and unsocial ; the climate suppressing practical energy
in the thinker : and the contemplative spirit tending
to personal isolation. It had its fraternities and
schools, and numberless . hermitages sprinkled the
forests of India ; but these schools were not founded to
share the light of Brahmanical wisdom with other
than the higher or "twice-born" classes, nor were
hermitages planted in the spiritual interest of the
aborigines, except in so far as, being admitted into
the body politic as Sudras, these lower races were to
be saved by the meritorious disciplines of its priestly
devotees. Its steady tide of monasticism, setting
southwards into the wilderness, measured the force
with which it repelled the social sympathies. Chris-
tianity, it is well known, had a similar monastic phase
in its history. There were elements of Brahmanism,
however, which helped to counteract or weaken this
tendency to isolation : some of these have already
been mentioned in our section on the Laws. Budd-
hism, notwithstanding its democratic spirit, used the
name of Brahman with respect, as representative of
purity and the true path of life ; ^ and defended it
from discredit at the hands of those who claimed
exclusive title to it. Many circumstances indicate
that the system had hardly reached the stage of strict
and effective organization, when it began to be checked
by the definite' protest of Buddhism; to which it
1 Dhammapadii. See also Sykes, in Jourtuxl Roy. As. Soc, vi. p. 406.
586 BUDDHISM.
yielded so readily that a few centuries seem to have
sufficed to give the latter religion the control of
Northern India.
The social sympathies cannot be abolished. Under
Reaction to whatevcr national or climatic conditions, prac-
universaiity. i\q^\ democratic instincts will make themselves
heard. No race nor religion has the monopoly of
forces so essential to the justification of human nature.
To some vigorous spirit the abstract truths of contem-
plation will become forces of his own active realism :
they will become hands and feet, and demand to be
used. Organized into his moral being, these medita-
tions, these divine dreams, carry him straightway out
of his spiritual cell, to say to the whole world :
What is mine is yours also : the great all-reconciling
light that shone down to me on the mountain-top, in
the desert stillness, in the night of self-abandonment
to the best, this was not for me, it was for all mankind.
Then the spiritual aristocracy has to learn that the
truths it was hoarding are greater than itself; that
they refuse its patronage and custod}^ and go home
to the universal heart. It has to deal as it best can,
even in these finer and subtler spheres of thought,
with democratic reform.
That a practical, humanitarian spirit has been the
natural outgrowth of mystical and pantheistic devo-
tion has been already noted in previous pages of this
volume. In Brahmanical history, this justification, so
early and rapid that it indicates the great strength of
these elements in the Hindu mind, was Buddhism.
And Comparative Religion hardly affords a more in-
teresting study than the process by which its health-
ful reaction struggled forth out of the abyss of abstract
ideas and ascetic disciplines.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 587
From what has now been said it will be readily in-
ferred that to define Buddhism or assign a date .
'-' Buddhism a
for Its origin Is far from easy. It is an el e- constant ele-
ment, rather than a special movement ; and °'^°*"
perhaps we should not greatly err If we used the
name to designate the ever-varying forms of a prot-
estant, democratic, humane quality in the Oriental
mind, as natural to it as the contemplative, and usually
interw^oven therewith. Scholars are agreed In tracing
it, as a philosophy, back to Kapila and the Sankhya,
which may yet prove to have been the oldest of the
great Hindu systems.^ Buddhist tradition Itself refers
the birth of Gotama Buddha to Kapllavastu (the dwell-
ing of Kapila) , and throws the old rationalistic phi-
losopher back into a very remote era. We have
already seen that Kapila was, In all essential respects,
at variance with Brahmanical excluslveness, with
idolatry of traditions and texts, if he did not abso-
lutely refuse all authority to the Vedas ; that he in-
sisted on the validity of individual being against
absorption into the universal ; and that he had a
democratic reliance on the adequacy of the human
faculties to test and reveal truth. These are certainly
oferms of the libertv and humanity of Buddhism, if
not of all Its speculative tenets. The birth-time of the
Sankhya has never yet been found. We may reason-
ably trace It back to primitive qualities In the Aryan
race ; to the Independence and self-reliance conspicu-
ous both In the Rig Veda hymns, and In the self-
governing communities that have so firmly held their
own, as a necessity of Hindu life. This theory is con-
firmed bv Buddhist tradition, which identifies Got-
ama, both as to descent and to the early scenes of his
* Lassen, Ind. Alt., II. 60; Weber, Vorlesungen^ p. 24S.
588 BUDDHISM.
mission, with the heroic Kshattriya race of the Sakyas,
and with the locaHties of the epic wars.
The Vedanta, as well as the Sankhya, shows germs
of Buddhism. They appear in its devotion to abstract
speculation, and in its recognition that the soul needed
the Vedas but for a time, and could be satisfied only
by a life in the eternal, where all distinctions of rank
and caste would of course be lost for ever. And, more
than this, the Buddhists are even charged by the
Brahmans with plagiarizing the idea of universal
brotherhood from their sacred books, and then turn-
ing it against them.^
The protest against ecclesiastical authority as em-
Anti-ecciesi- bodied in the priesthood, reappears at every
asticisra. stage of Hiudu history. The Vedic legend
of Visvamitra, or the -people's fi' lend ^ and his contest
with Vasishtha, or the best, a superlative which means
orthodox sainthood, has a development co-extensive
in time with the national religious literature. Many
other vestiges point to a struggle of some kind in
early times between the sacerdotal and secular classes.
This schism, of which some account has already been
given, was probably a continuous one, commencing
as soon as the two classes became distinctly organized
for political and religious ends ; and of tiiis the war-
fare waged by Buddhism against the whole caste sys-
tem, in the interest of the humblest classes as well as
of woman, was but the extension.
Certain " atheists and scorners of the Veda," whom
Manu expels from the company of the righteous, as
addicted to heretical books, are supposed to have been
Buddhists by those who ascribe a comparatively late
origin to the code.''^ With more probability they may be
1 Miiller, Sanks. Lit., p- 85. ^ Wheeler, I. 451 ; Manu., II. ix.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 589
said to prove, that the rationalistic tendency was active
some centuries at least before Buddha.
Buddhism has a twofold aspect, practical and specu-
lative ; and great injustice has been done by Buddhism
judging it from one or the other point of view twofold.
exclusively. In its earliest definite form, it was mainly,
, 59*^'^ /
miorht be called the Calvinism of Brahmanioal doctriii'^'./ , <
The postulate of ail profound philosophy from Derpo- •/
critus to Fichte, — that the highest knowledge is con-" -
ditioned by a conviction of ignorance, — it carried out '
more thoroughly than the system it sought to supplant.
Brahmanism, having done its utmost to abolish all
pretence of reaching knowledge through transient
forms, or reality in phenomenal existence, had found
compensation and rest in its intuition, its fervor, its
poetic affirmativeness, its mystical awe, and its devout
self-surrender to the One. Regardless of these ele-
ments, Buddhism applied its rationalistic tests to the
definite conceptions they still protected, and confidently
struck out for an ideal goal, even beyond that silent
sea of Brahma.
How did it deal with the forms of belief which it
found in the way of its purpose?
We must recall the fact that Hindu consciousness
was pervaded by a sense of the unity of all ^he burden
life. Under this inspiration, it had conceived ^'^'^ ""^^^s^-
the continuity of personal existence as transmigra-
tion through countless forms and changes of being.
It was an immeasurable pilgrimage for the soul to
contemplate, and saddened throughout by the same
doom of pain and death which made the present life
seem a burden and a dream. Gotama, besought by
his father to give up his purpose of renouncing his
throne and the world, with promises that he should
receive whatever he desired, answers: "O king!
grant me four things, and I will remain with you : to
be free from old age, from sickness, from decay, from
death ; and if you cannot give me these, then accord
me another not less needful, to be free from transmi-
2'ration when I die." ^
^
* St. Hilaire, Le Bouddha, p. 17.
592 BUDDHISM.
And here is his joyful cry of release at the moment
of becoming The Buddha^ or Enlightened One : —
" Through many births have I run,
Seeking the maker of this tabernacle.
Painful is birth again and again ;
But now, maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen.
Thou canst not build for me another house :
Thy rafters are broken, thy ridgepole destroyed ;
I have reached the extinction of desire."
The thought of endless duration, of immortal des-
tinies, brooded over these contemplative minds, just as
the idea of present material and social opportunity
possesses the modern world. With what weary sense
of bondage must the imagination, thus bound to the
one ever-recurring idea, have dwelt on these innum-
erable returns to birth ; these inevitable and endless
"bonds of action," these consequences of conduct
transmitted from world to world and form to form ;
of which death was again and again only a fresh
resurrection, and every new phase of existence the
thrall ! It was this heavy burden of care and pain —
this monotone of thought, pursuing an endless coming
and going and coming again, a bondage to decay and
death, through immeasurable time — from which both
Brahmanism and Buddhism sought escape, and from
which each found deliverance in its own way. But it
is plain that the tcnity of all forms of existence, ad-
mitted by both, allowed of no escape, but to trans-
cend them all. Existence itself, in a certain sense, \
I
must be overpassed. In other words, emancipation
could come only through a purely ideal conception,
illumination, absorption, the substance whereof must
be, — to think away from, to work out of, to disci- i
pline, purify, exalt one's self from, existence in the i
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 593
sense given the word by the doctrine of transmigra-
tion ; that is, existence in the sense of dream, of
bondage to decay, death, and return ; existence in all
conceivable forms of transient life, as being not really
life, not inalienable certainty, but obliged to point for
these beyond itself. To the Vedantists this transcend-
ent liberty from changing form, this ideal bliss over
which transmigration had no sway, was im7nortal life
m Bj'ahnia. To the Buddhist, w^ho boldly refused to
except Brahma, as a form of existence, from his logic
of negation, it was nirvana.
Transmigration was -pravritti^ a state of change :
freedom was fiii'vritti, no more change. The Buddha
represented intellectual essence, "perfect knowledge ;"
and the nirvritti at which he arrived was therefore
mind independent of matter,^ of embodied shape, of
the perceptive faculties in their conceivable relations
wdth the world, in which they are necessarily condi-
tional and finite. This was not essentially different from
the Sankhya idea of the "independence of Purusha,"
though wdth an absoluteness of protest against the
mutable, which Kapila would not have allowed. It
means a witness-soul, which he also affirms ; but, so
absorbed in the fulness of its emancipation, that it
refuses to be defined by positive conceptions of exist-
ence, all of which would remand it to dependence on
what is transient. Hence the fascination of tracking
these fugitive conceptions through all phases, in the
confidence of a power beyond, to criticise and dissolve
them. The most metaphysical form of Buddhism
makes the wisdom of the saint nearest nirvana to
consist in ^^ 7iot seizing the form."^
^ Hodgson, Trans. R. A. 6"., II. 249.
2 Prajna Paramita. See Burnouf s Introd.^ p. 470.
38
594 BUDDHISM. 1
That a law of bondage forces man into a gospel of |
From law freedom is the inspiring fact that continually |
to gospel, appears in religious history. As in the Judaism !
of Paul, so here, it was an overwhelming legalism that i
enforced deliverance by its pressure. It was the " bonds i
of action," those inexorable sequences of penalty, that j
made the burden of transmigration intolerable. To 1
believe that the wrong deed bears only evil fruit, and
this for ever ; that its results pass over through an un-
ending succession of lives, — is absolute slavery and
despair of finding release ; unless there enters, to com- '
plete the conception of spiritual laws, the assurance
that there is some divine chemistry, some redeeming
leaven, to which that inexorable rule of like from like i
is subordinate. How man shall thus find escape from
the moral burden of every imperfect action in his past, '
and in the sum total of human life, which has gone to
make his present, — and which in this aspect may be
called his own ^^ fast lives ^'^ — how he shall offset the \
strict application of such moralism to the endless !
detail of conduct, in works done wrongly or to be
done rightly, in sins of omission and commission, —
depends on his special ethnic constitution and the
peculiarities of the stage of civilization at which he
has arrived. But that he does find such emancipating j
force, and hold it as one of the very deepest and surest !
of forces, one of the substantial laws and facts of
spiritual being, is a truth of universal religion. Of
course a purely s-peciilative ideal, such as a contem-
plative race must form, is of itself inadequate to this
end ; while the Christian dogma of salvation by the j
merits of another person is not only inadequate, but,
to human reason at least, essentially irrational and j
vicious. But it must not be forgotten that nirvana as i
new
soul.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 595
a speculative ideal does not represent the whole of
the Buddhist vision of emancipation, just as the dogma
of atonement does not cover the whole Christian
conception of " salvation," even in the great body of
believers who make it the central point of their creed.
The peculiar form under which Buddhism, at least
in its later forms, conceived the process of ^he
transmigration^ was an effort at once to recog-
nize its moral values, and to step forth from the bond-
age of its stern legalism. Those fateful fetters of
endless sequence, penal issues from actions, " the
wombs of pain ; " those recurring births and deaths,
which expressed the continuity of moral law and life ;
that solemn ring of each stroke of conduct upon the
whole future, — it did not admit merely, but carried
out to their fullest requirement. The Buddhist karma
is the whole moral effect of one's (supposed) past lives,
concentrated in his individual organization ; a presid-
ing genius or destiny, determining the form personality
shall assume.^ Sooner or later the tree of conduct
thus transmitted from seed to seed bears its own full
fruit. Though, as Gotama is made to say in one of
the sutras, during the -process a man who has done
good may be brought into a place of punishment be-
cause of certain evil deeds, and one who has done
evil may be found in one of the heavens by reason of
certain good ones, yet sooner or later both the good
and the evil ripen in his experience.^ But, impossible
as it might seem, an escape was effected from this stern
legalism and this interminable bondage. For the
earlier Buddhists there was a form of release in the
assurance of nirvana, of which I shall speak farther
» Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, 394, 445. Karman means action or work.
2 Koeppen, Religion d- Buddha^ I. 301.
59^ BUDDHISM.
on. But the later form to which reference is here
made was by a step which is to me incomprehensible,
except as what we may call a declaration of independ-
ence ; a bold counterstroke of the spirit in behalf of '
its invaded and captured liberty ; a reprisal of spon- I
taneity upon fate. It can hardly be other than a direct i
severing of the logical knot, an appeal from the pro- j
cesses of the understanding to that mystic realm of
ideal power in which all spiritual release is guar- '
anteed. That step was to declare that the individual
thus invested by karma, thus positively constituted by
the moral order, was 72ot the same as before, but a new '
soul; its personality being a transmission indeed of :
the old unpaid account with the moral laws, yet in
such wise as to be properly a new independent force, i
and somehow distinct from the former product of the :
good and bad habits in question, who is there only as
a new creation. j
It is a strange and subtle thought, the meaning i
whereof must be thoughtfully considered. \
"Transmigration," it was well said, "here be- ]
comes transformation, and metempsychosis metamor- ;
phosis." ^ But it cannot mean literally the release i
of one individual from the consequences of conduct j
by creation of another out of his cast-oft^ bonds and \
dues ; nor, on the other hand, can it mean that all per-
sonal existence perishes at death, which would contra- j
diet the whole spirit of Buddhism and its theory of \
the attainment of nirvana. It cannot mean to abolish j
moral responsibility in the act of attaining spiritual j
release, to contradict the very idea of moral order in •
\
* Koeppen, Religion des Buddha^ I. 302. A valuable and comprehensive work, unsur- j
passed, if not unequalled, in the literature of the present subject. See also Bigandet's
Legend of the Burmese BuddJta (1866), pp. 21, 468.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 597
stating its process. The fact of responsibility is not
lost sight of through this apparent change of personal
identity ; and, if the former self-consciousness is in a
sense denied passage to the new form of being, the
mo7'al identity at least is carried forward thither, and
enters its claims to represent the substance of personal-
ity itself. Indeed the Buddhist saints are constantly
spoken of as maintaining personal identity through all
stages of their progress through successive births.^
It must be remembered, in order to arrive at the mean-
ing oi karma, that, as the whole sense of individuality
hovers vaguely in the Hindu mind, the same charac-
ter must be found in its sense of transition from one
form of life or world of forms to another. Terms ex-
pressive of this are in fact used with great mystical
freedom and breadth of meaning. The " new soul "
involved in this Buddhist karma can mean nothing
else than a new starting-foint, a reaction of some sort
on the inevitable and indispensable bonds of former
conduct ; some hint, perhaps a real instinct, that there
is more in man's spiritual experience than the con-
sciousness of past merit or demerit as his own; an
effort, in short, to affirm that spontaneity in his spirit-
ual essence which he must not press the fact of re-
sponsibility so far as to ignore ; the liberty that resides
in every moment to cast off the burden of the past,
and begin reconstruction of experience itself.
With this assertion of freedom, if I am right in in-
terpreting it as such, the Buddhist idea oi kar- ,^ , ,
^ ^ I Moral rela-
?;/« sought to combine full acceptance of the tionsof
facts of moral order. It is the inextino-uish-
able vitality of the moral seed, passing beyond the
harvests of a single lifetime, that is here insisted on,
1 Hardy, Mantuil, p. 398. .
598 BUDDHISM.
as not negatived by the fact that we have no conscious'
ness of a -previous state of being. We are " new
souls," yet not the less are past lives now living on in
ours, and we in a sense take up their accounts with
moral and natural laws, where these left them. Kar-
ma means that the continuity of the race, the endless
succession of its births, is really a form of the perpetual
productivity of moral causes. We have here then an
instinctive Oriental presentiment or analogue of the
modern science of heredity ; except that the parentage
it deals with is primarily morale not physical, and that
it pushes the truth that we are ignorant as to the past
grounds of our present organization to the point of
apparently making us the mere consequence of a series
of acts unknown, and by us unknowable. It even
presumes a creative power in them adequate to pro-
duce our consciousness itself. But this is the im-
aginative form in which a deep conviction of the
omnipotence of moral laws was expressed ; and we
have already noted how decisively the rights of spon-
taneity came in to counteract a too absolute deter-
minism.
" The practical tendency of the Krishna faith has its counter-
part in the Yatnika school of Buddhism, which teaches that all
obstacles can be mastered. While the Swabhavika school yields
itself with resignation, in the faith that the Supreme Essence [Fate]
governs all, the Yatnika admonishes to energetic action, since,
though man cannot withdraw himself from karma^ he can never-
theless influence its course. The ripened fruit of conduct must be
eaten ; but it depends on the will to sow such seeds, that a pleasant
fruit shall grow up, or such, as falling from the tree of life, shall
give assurance of immortality." *
The reader will recall a very similar tone in the
proverbial philosophy of the Fable-books, which are
* Bastian, Reisen in Chitia, p. 618.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 599
largely due to Buddhist influences, and show how
el-astic to the demands of freedom are even this strong
sense of the transient and unreal, and this stringent
assertion of moral destinies.
It is not meant that this intuition of moral order, this
veneration for moral cause and consequence, Freedom in
left full scope for human freedom. Destiny was determinism.
more or less master of the Oriental- mind. But while
we recognize this, we must not forget to inquire what
elements of freedom lie in the very conception of des-
tiny, what power this master has to arouse and initiate
mastership in its subject. There is recognition of
divine necessity in every great step of protest, in all
philosophy of reform. Hero and saint are free only
through the inevitable, the predetermined, the irresist-
ible ; through the all-absorbing and supplanting Right.
Fate is the principle of progress in all religion ; and in
India as in Greece, in Buddha as in Prometheus, this,
as supreme Moral Order, calls the old forms of deity
to judgment, and leads forward to new fields of faith.
It is in and through a .sense of destiny, a genius
neither to be ignored nor disobeyed, that the soul ever
and again substantiates its freedom afresh ; enforces
the right of its new vision to unmake the creeds and
masters that old wants had made for it ; affirms its lien
on the resources of the universe, its right of eminent
domain in its own household of worship and work.
And so the time came when all the divinities of Brah-
manism, even up to the " eternal Brahma " himself, had
to meet the unsparing logic of an idea, the very sub-
stance of which was necessary law.
Buddhism put the whole faith of the time through
this crucible of kar?iia^ or moral order and Omnipo-
destiny. This explains its later cosmogony momi order
and mythology. The revolutions oi matter, i" Karma.
600 BUDDHISM.
the destructions and renovations of the universe, with
which it marked the track of endless ages, were but
the play of this transcendent force, the product of
moral determinations. Out of these imperishable
germs of essential right, these loyalties of time and
force to eternal law, comes the wind that breathes in
the spaces of desolation from all sides, to renew the
worlds ; out of these the primitive energies which at
enormous kalpa intervals destroy the " worlds of form "
up to the very borders of "the formless," nearest nir-
vana the supreme abode ; and through the kalpa of
" emptiness " which intervenes between this destruction
and the new birth of things, these moral destinies
endure, the only germs of reconstruction.^ They are
like the Scandinavian "golden dice of destiny," found
again, and unharmed, after the "Twilight of the gods,"
in the growing grass of a new-risen earth.
This is stupendous fatalism ; but how it clings to
, .^ ,. those eternal distinctions by which the con-
its idealism. -^
science lives ! It is at least pure idealism : it
makes sense the outcome of spiritual fact and experi-
ence ; 'and the energy of its protest, criticism, and
reconstructive power will show us that it was not such
a fatalism as must of itself abolish freedom.
The older Sutras speak of the gods as rejoicing at
Buddha's revelation. Their heavens trembled,
Negation
for positive whcu the great light shone through them ;
yet Brahma told them the glad tidings of
release, which were for them also, and a cry arose,
"The might of the gods increases, the might of the
asuras (evil powers) fails." ^ The legend shows at
least the geniality with which Buddhism did its work.
* Koeppen, I. 268-284.
2 Dharmasastra Sutras, in yourttdl Asiatique for 1870, p. 377.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 6oi
But its work was a radical one. Its pungent logic
invented even more destructive terms for the illuso-
riness of phenomenal life than Brahmanism. Its
founder himself, as a visible person, was made to
issue from the womb of the beautiful Mayadevi, the
" Perfection of Illusion." It exalted the dignity of
Buddhahood as the attainment of truth, far beyond the
recoofnized sainthood or what it adored. As Brahma
had supplanted the Vedic gods, so the stern logic of
time and death now supplanted Brahma. Accepting
without difficulty the whole series of divinities, popular
and speculative, as phenomena. Buddhism swept them
all into that common category of subjection to change
and death, from which Brahmanism had excepted the
world of Brahma alone. All names and forms with
which definite conceptions had become associated were
alike summoned to receive their sentence, and yield
to a greater than themselves.
For within this unsparing logic of negation there
w^as a positive faith : a sense of eternal being made
it bold to affirm wherein all these names and forms
failed to satisfy the highest demand. The Buddha,
the "illumined, awakened" man, alone could know,
in nirvana beyond them all, the purpose and goal of
life.
The Brahmans, It is true, soon came to regard the new
movement as atheism. And this was natural ; since
it does not appear that Gotama and his earliest follow-
ers spent their thought on defining or even conceiving
a new form of deity. It was precisely the absence of
such definite form that their religious sentiment itself
demanded ; and they preached their ideal good simply
as independence of the limits they criticised. It was
counted atheism in Kapila when he denied an Iswara,
6o2 BUDDHISM.
ai> external Lord and interfering Providence. And
here were others who dethroned all existing forms
under which deity was conceived ; who denied that
even Brahma could offer an asylum in his own nature
from the sorrowful doom of change and death that
swept through all existence. To every recognized
form of being; to every conception which had become
fixed by usage or by instituted worship within definite
lines of meaning, they applied one test, and the an-
swer was always the same. They could admit no
definite idea of deity, therefore, and no Name. But
what was it, again let me ask, that could have affiled
this test of transiency, but an ever-present sense of
the eternal? Of not less moment is the question:
Does belief in deity reside essentially in definite ideas
or names ?^
It does not yet appear that there is any just ground
No absolute either in historic fact or rational thought for
atheism. attributing absolute atheism to any people.
Behind the most positive assertions of it, even in
speculative philosophy, there seems to be very clear
indication, or else implication, of the necessity, in
every sane mind, to recognize a moral order, and an
eternal principle of Rightness in some form sovereign
in the universe, and competent to at least every result
^ D'Alwis {Buddhist Nlrv&na, p. 13) thinks that the doctrine of Buddhism from the
outset was ^^point-blank Atheism.^'' Yet he admits that the belief in a First Cause is in-
eradicably "implanted in the soul ; " that the savage and the Buddhist thinker are alike
conscious of it; and that Buddha himself "did not ignore it." This First Cause, how-
ever, is (p 60) " nothing." (!) In other words, the representative of an ineradicable neces-
sity for believing in something is — nothing at all ; and that for a quarter of the human race.
I, of course, would neither misrepresent the views of this evidently accomplished scholar,
nor ascribe to them a manifest absurdity. The incongruity of the statements above
quoted arises, I presume, from limiting the idea of God, which is ineradicable, to that
of a definite creator (Iswara) or Beginner, at a Jirst moment of time; an idea which
is as certainly quite outside the Buddhist line of vision, and is by tio means ineradi-
cable.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 603
which we are wont in ordinary speech to ascribe to
intelligence, and to intelligence alone.
Koeppen, himself an important authority on the
history of Buddhism, gives a long list of co- Buddhist
authorities who affirm that it has "absolutely "-thebm."
no trace of the idea of a God." ^ And this is the
prevailing opinion of the Christian world. But writers
who speak of a God will always be found to have
given a meaning to the idea of God which involves
more or less distinctly the Hebrew and Christian
theory of an original creation, proceeding at a given
time from a divine pre-existent Will. Buddhism, on
the other hand, recognizes no such beginning, either
to the chain of transient causes and effects, or to the
revolutions of the worlds; and is therefore, by the
theory in question, pure atheism.^ But we must reflect
that Mind considered in the former sense — as his-
torically pre-existent to manifestation, and choosing
it at a definite moment in its continuous life — is in
reality thereby represented as subject to the conditions
of time. It is not eternal in a true sense, since eter-
nity knows no Before nor After. And such creative
act at a definite moment, as the aforesaid critics insist
on, would be, as Buddhism replies, but one of a series
of acts in time, itself requiring a previous act, and so
cannot reveal an original nor an eternal cause. And
Buddhism may go further still. It may maintain that
its own conception of a limitless process of becoming f
a manifestation of cause and effect without beginning
or end, — although excluding creation in the Semitic
1 Koeppen, I. 228. See also Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters^ T. p. 229.
* Its attribution of birth and form, as such, to avidya., or ignorance, does not seem to
be the admission of a first cause ; since this reasoning has relation only to the generation
of conceptions in the human mind. On the other hand, see D''Aliuis, p. 15.
• Koeppen, I. 230.
604 BUDDHISM.
or the Christian sense, as well as an Iswara^ or in-
dividual Lord, — does not in any sense exclude eter-
nal Beings which must, on the contrary, be assumed
as ground for the endlessness of the Becoming. So
much for the metaphysics of the question.
But, , however other religions and civilizations may
interpret their speculation, the Buddhists as a whole
do somehow find their way to the satisfaction of an
instinct which we may properly call universal ; of
which, at all events, we cannot, without the strongest
evidence, conceive whole races and generations to be
destitute. Koeppen has himself quoted passages in
which the Buddha is addressed as "God of Gods,
Brahma of Brahmas, Indra of Indras, Father of the
world. Almighty and All-knowing, Ruler and Re-
deemer of all." ^
The same writer asserts that the earliest Buddhists
offered no prayer, because Buddha had entered nir-
vana and could not hear ; and that their so-called
prayers were really only formulas of confession,
hymns of praise, pious ejaculations, blessings, and
uttered longings.^ But devout aspirations are the
proper substance of prayer, and are none the less
recognition of a source of strength higher than human,
for not consciously defining this in objective personal
form, nor even taking the shape of direct invocation or
address. There is more religion in one divine desire
than in manybeseechings. Later, as Koeppen himself
concedes, the " Thou " was added ; and the northern
Buddhists, especially, have abundant forms of prayer,
in which either Gotama Buddha, or the divine Triad
of later ecclesiastical origin, or the earlier Buddhas
> Koeppen, I. 430. So Hardy, Manual, pp. 360, 384, 386.
« Koeppen, I. 554, 555; Wuttke, II. 544. AIsq Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Thibet.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 605
of this half a (age of the world), are addressed as
conscious hearers of their worshippers ; and it is
added that a very slight alteration would render these
effusions suitable for Christian worship J In illustra-
tion, a Mongolian prayer is quoted, ^ of which I give
a portion : —
" O Thou in whom all creatures trust, Buddha, perfected amidst
countless revolutions of worlds, compassionate towards all, and
their eternal salvation, beijd down into this our sphere, with all thy
society of perfected ones. Thou law of all creatures, brighter than
the sun, in faith we humble ourselves before thee. Thou who com-
pletest all pilgrimage, who dwellest in the world of rest, before
whom all is but transient, descend by thy almighty power, and
bless us."
Every attribute of deity, the creative only excepted,
is freely ascribed to the Buddha by his worshippers :
omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect love and bliss. ^
The modern schools of the south generally believe in
"absorption into the supreme and infinite Buddha." ^
Ritter does not hesitate to affirm the essential feature
of Buddhism to be, that a man, freeing himself from
obstacles of nature by holiness, may save his fellow-man
from the corruption of the times and become supreme
God."^ Here, just as in Christianity, the religious
sentiment, while concentrating itself on a human deity,
nevertheless really invested his humanity with an
infinite meaning. So far indeed as the concentration
is exclusive in either case, exacting worship as the
due of this one man, in absolute distinction from all
other actual or possible men, it indicates imperfect
recognition of that divineness of the human, on which
» Koeppen, I. 554, 555 ; Wuttke, II. 544. 2 Pallas, II. 386.
' Franck, Etudes Orientales, p. 46.
* Bigandet, Legend of the Biirmese Buddha, p. 320.
• Hist. Anc- Philos.., I. 94-96.
6o6 BUDDHISM.
it substantially rests ; and this defect only freedom
and intelligence can correct. But in none of these
crude forms of belief can the idealization which puts
a historical person in the place of the Infinite be
properly called atheism. To the Buddha of the East
as to the Christ of the West were really ascribed
those powers which made up the popular conception
of Deity.
It is to be observed, further, that Buddhahood itself
is held to be perpetual reproduction of an eternal fact.
An endless succession of Buddhas must associate the
idea itself with infinity, and lift Buddha-worship above
the evanescence that will attach to all these personal
forms in their individual capacity. The particular
Buddha must be to an extent lost, for the worshipper,
in the exhaustless productivity of that Intelligence of
which he is but one expression.
This deeper logic of faith cannot, it is true, wholly
overcome the tendency to concentrate worship on
some one personage ; a tendency which is found in
all positive religions, and is associated with natural
gratitude and love. Yet Buddhism has been fertile in
the production of new centres of worship, adapted to
different ages and races. Its later mythology in the
north is not wanting in names of ideal saints, Dhyani
Bodhisattvas^ who have been venerated like Gotama.
The most important of these are Amitahha ^ or Ever-
lasting Light ; Mandshusri^ the mild Holy One ; and
Avalokiteswai'a^ iho. " Lord who looks down on men : "
to w^hom it is believed the Thibetans address their
sacred formula, Oni mani -padmi hdm^ — "6? the
Jewel in the Lotus.'''' ^
Avalokiteswara is the manifested deity in Thibetan
' * Koeppen, II. 20-28. 60.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 607
Buddhism ; who vows " to manifest himself to every
creature in the universe ; to deliver all men from the
consequences of sin, and never to arrive at Buddha-
hood till all are born into the divine rest, receiving
answer to their prayers." " He himself hears and
answers every prayer, and they who trust in him
are secure."^
It is interesting to notice how similar are the forms
which an immature theism has assumed in the Buddhist
efforts of very dissimilar races to fix the relig- trinities.
ious ideal in one personality, and develop its faith and
cultus around this centre. Thus a divine triad has
been adored by the Buddhists both of the North and
of the South, from comparatively early times. Just
as the first Christians combined their devotion to
Christ with veneration for his gospel and his apostles,
so Buddha was united with Dharma^ the Law, and
Samgha^ the teachers, or the Assembly.^ Out of
these elements was developed a metaphysical trinity :
Intelligence ; Law, as its manifestation ; and the unity
of the two in Holiness.^ Cosmological triads also are
found in northern Buddhism ; such as mind, matter,
and their unity.* In Nepal and Thibet the forms of
trinity become distinctly personal ; and some of them
startle the European traveller by their resemblance to the
ontological speculations of the later German schools,'^
as well as to forms of the Christian Trinitarian dogma. '^
Koeppen calls these theories "Buddhistic but in name,"
as derived from Sivaistic or other influences ; but they
1 Seal's Catena of Buddhist Scripture, pp. 376, 406.
2 Lassen, II. 1084, Koeppen, I. 373; Hardy, Eastern Monachism, p. 209; Bigan-
det, p. I. Most Buddhist works begin with invocation to these three.
3 Abel Remusat, Sur la Relig. Sanianietme.
* Cunningham, Bhilsa Topes., p. 36.
fi Koeppen, I. 550-553. 6 Catena of Bttddhist Scriptures., pp. 103, 104.
6o8 BUDDHISM.
are certainly made up of Buddhist elements ; and, if
not found in the earlier phases of this religion, they
are none the less natural growths within it, accom-
panying its metaphysical canon, and tend to refute the
charge that it involves, of necessity, even speculative
atheism.
Indo-Scythian coins and the temples of Nepal
;^M. ...u afford proof that the belief in a supreme, all-
seeing Buddha, represented by two Eyes as
symbols of intelligence, was current in those regions
at least as early as the beginning of the Christian era.^
The Nepalese say that ^^ Swayambhu, the self-exist-
A
ent, called Adibuddha, was when nothing else was.
He wished to become many, and produced the Budd-
A
has through union with his desire. Adibuddha was
never seen. He is pure light." ^ In the topes dedi-
cated to this deity, no deposits of relics have been
found ; but the symbolic Eyes were placed on the sides
or the crown of the edifice.^ Lassen even believes
that the recognition of supreme Mind can be traced
back by these vestiges alone to the earliest Budd-
A
hists.* The school which worships Adibuddha is
perhaps confined to regions where external influences
have been active.^ Bastian, however, in his recent
work on Central Asia, an immense collection of per-
sonal observations, tells us that the Buddhists generally,
in that part of the world, worship Abida, as the highest
God, to whom all perfections are ascribed. " Abida's
thought is almighty. All spirits of thought are subject
to his sway. He, the father of the gods, knows all,
past, present, and to come." ^
1 Lassen, II. 1084. 2 Hodgson in Transact. R. A. Soc, 11. 232, 238.
3 BhHsa Topes, p. 8. * Ut supra.
" Koeppen, II. 28, 29, 366; Wilson's Relig- 0/ Hindus, II. 361.
' Bastian, p. 567. See also, for theislic sects, Salisbury's Essay in Hist, of Buddhism,
in Anier. Or. Journ- for 1849.
SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. 609
That later Buddhist metaphysics sometimes, as in
the Prajnd Pdrafmtd, press the sense of tran-
'^ . - ^ , . Nihilism.
science and illusion to the pomt of declarmg
that " even the highest names are but words, not signs
of realities," is true.^ One school affirms Buddha's
personal appearance to have been illusion, as the
Docetists did that of Jesus. So their dialectic, as we
have seen, deals in the antinomies of the understand-
ina and nama, " body and soul " (///., form and
name), involves the " distinct denial of a soul," in any absolute sense. Mr. D' Al wis 's care-
ful enumeration of forty-six words descriptive of nirvana is of great value ; but their literal
meaning, even as he gives it, fails to convince me of the justice of his conclusion. Here
are some of them : "To shine;" "island, whence lot or state, of safety ; " "destruction
of desire;" "freedom from annoy ; " " the dreadless [state] ; " " the endless;" "protec-
tion ; " " sleep ; " " the path ; " " the other shore." To some a negative sense is ascribed
by what seems to be a materialistic assumption. Thus " the formless " is further defined as
NIRVANA. 623
Dhammapada is full of exhortations to detachment
from perishable things, and to the taming of passions
and selfish desires, as well as to practical goodness,
in order to attain its joy and peace and liberty.
It is observable that nirvana is always coupled with
the active experiences of virtues, and powers Relations of
over sense. the word.
" He who has entered the void (or, who knows the uncreated),
and has renounced all desires."
" He who has attained the end, and who is fearless, having de-
molished the thorns of existence." *
To similar efl'ect is a passage from the Vinaya,
which D'Alwis (p. 35) translates thus: —
"He who has cut off the roots has made himself nonentity, and
has acquired the nature of freedom from regeneration."
The same critic quotes this passage also as proving
nirvdna to be pure negation : —
"In nirvana, of which the mind alone can form a conception,
which the eye cannot see, which is endless and every way glorious,
there is neither earth, water, fire, nor air, small nor great, good
nor evil ; and vijnana (consciousness) is extinguished."
It is obvious that extinction and negation are here
conceived in a sense not inconsistent with invisible spir-
itual life, real enough to be " endless and glorious."
" that which is invisible to the senses, — a nonentity ;'''' "not well brought together" as
" non-being ; " and " the unseen " as " that which has no example and no existence ; " a
synonymy which the authority of the most capable scholar could not induce us to accept.
Nirvana is promised in this life ; whence Mr. D'Alwis infers that there must have been an
imperfect form of nirvana. The promise would seem at least as competent to prove that
true nirvana was believed to be consistent with life. The use of phrases implying a posi-
tive state he explains by the necessity of metaphorical language for all definition. But
unfortunately the metaphors do not even sjcggest nonentity. Childers also (.Notes on
Dhanimapt Jotirn. R. A. S., 1871) argues that there were two forms of nirvana, a par-
tial and a complete ; and that the word is used in both these senses : which may be quite
true, yet does not make it probable that the complete form was something diametrically
contrary, in its very essence, to the incomplete.
1 Ibid., 97, 351.
624 BUDDHISM.
We should naturally expect a greater emphasis on
Other testi- ^hc negative side, a deeper sense of the perish-
monies. ableucss of forms, in the beginning of this
great protest against them, than when later familiarity
with the thought should bring in the natural longing
for positive issues of life, and results of moral en-
deavor. It is therefore especially significant that
even in this earliest record of Buddhism we find such
intense aspiration after reality through w^hatsoever
sacrifice of phenomenal existence. Later stages of
the faith are believed to show nirvana still more defi-
nitely as a positive state. The " Lotus of the Good
Law " tells of saints who have not only entered it in
the present life, but reappeared in after ages to listen
to the preaching of its tidings ; ^ and the legends rep-
resent the Buddha himself as rejoicing at having
attained this extinction of desire, and afterwards
travelling from place to place, needing no other food
than " the fruition oif nirvana." ^ In his youth he says :
" When I have reached supreme wisdom, I wall assem-
ble all living beings, and show them the -path of im-
mortality ; withdrawing them from the ocean of
creation, I will establish them in patience, and give
them the pure eye of the law." '^ And before his
death, he promises to reveal to his followers his shin-
ing form, after having passed from them into final
beatitude.* Even centuries afterwards, he is still
looked to as worker of miracles, and addressed as
beholder and guide of human afiairs. St. Hilaire's
explanation, that there are two forms of nirvana, a
complete and an incomplete, does not meet these
* Lotus, ch. xi. See also the legend of Kfisyapa, yourn. R. A. 6"., XX. 203.
* Hardy, Manrtal, pp. 179-182. Miiller, Chips, I. 233. The meaning of these refer-
ences, however, does not seem to be very clear.
' St. Hilaire, p. 11. * Lotus., ch. x.
NIRVANA. 625
instances, where the siifreyne end of sainthood is
represented as positive and active existence.
''In nirvana" [with the northern Buddhists], says
Bastian, " is no longer either birth or death : only the
essence of life remains. Nirvana is nowhere (in no
special place), only because it is all-embracing and
all-pervading."^ "Far from being annihilation, as
such, it is in fact annihilation of delusion, and therefore
the real itself."^ Baur gives a similar interpretation :
" Nirvana is the purely immaterial and absolute ; the
state to which the soul attains, when it has freed
itself from all relation to material forms." ^
" No one," says Bigandet, of the Burmese, "openly
admits in practice that neibban and annihilation are
synonymous terms : the perfected being is believed to
retain his individuality, but is merged, as it were, in
the abstract truth, in w^hich he lives and rests for ever."
The same writer, however, thinks that annihilation is
plainly taught in the philosophical works.*
Sangermano gives an account of the laws of
Gotama, drawn up by a Burmese talapoin in 1763,
in which nirvana is defined as " a state exempt from
birth, old age, sickness, and death. Nothing can give
an idea of it ; but exemption from these and a perfect
security are the things in which it consists."^
"The Siamese," says Alabaster,^ " always refer to
nirvana as to something existing. It is a place of
comfort, where there is no care." " Lovely is the
glorious realm of nii'vdna, the jewelled realm of
happiness." But the ordinary Siamese do not trouble
^ Reisen in China, p. 490. He mentions also works which specify two kinds of nirvana.
2 Die Weltauffassung der Buddfiisten (Berlin, 1870), p. 22.
3 Die Christliche Gnosis, p. 58. * Bigandet, p. 321.
' Descript. of the Burvrt- Ewip.^ p. 80. 6 Wheel of the Law, p. 165
40
626
BUDDHISM.
themselves about it : they believe virtue will be re-
warded by going to heaven.^
Chinese works describe this " condition in which
is neither birth nor death." "Nirvana is not like the
pitcher not yet made, nor like the pitchers nothingness
when it is broken ; nor like the hair of a tortoise,
something imaginary. It is nothingness defined as
absence of something different from itself; of covet-
ousness, aversion, delusion."^ The Chinese Budd-
hists translate nirvana by a word that means absolute
stillness and rest.^ The Thibetans all interpret it as
"emancipation."^
Gotama is recorded in the Lalitavistara to have
learned from a Brahman the way to " the place where
there are neither ideas nor the absence of ideas ; "
and the Brahmanical descriptions of " deliverance "
deal in similar negations of all possible forms of cog
nition. In view of all this, it is but reasonable to
believe that we have, as the ideal of this Buddhist
extinction, more or less clearly conceived, a complete
ahsor-ption into freedom, from which all definite form
was excluded more rigidly than m the Brahmanical,
as possibility of bondage to death ; a state of abso-
lute security from renewal of a life subject to fatal
changes ; an escape from the limitations of conscious-
ness and the illusions of separate existence into that
inefTable life in the eternal, which to mvstic faith in all
ages waits beyond such death. ^ It is certain that " ex-
tinction" and "absorption" were left equally undefined
in Hindu faith, and tlie distinction between them may
have consisted in an intenser sense of the facts of
* Wheel of the Law, xxxviii. - TJeal, Catena of Buddhist Scri/'tures, p. 174.
8 Neumann, Catechism of the Shamatis, p. 40. * Burnouf, ji. 19.
* Franck, Etudes Orientnles, p. 41;.
NIRVANA. 627
sorrow, pain, and death on the part of the Buddhists
than of the Brahmans ; prompting them to stronger
emphasis on the negative aspect of deHverance from
these woes, on the hope that these should be no more,
and at the same time to more earnest philanthropy
in proclaiming the deliverance to mankind.
^hTiifitrvdna, his divine relief, was, Gotama himself
does not seem to have attempted to explain.- How
was it possible, save in the general way of absolute
trust in its all-sufficiency, as shown in the sentences
of the Dhammapada? And all the negations of his
speculative followers do but serve to point us back to
some deeper sense of infinite reality which no forms
could satisfy and no terms define. It is but the old
inevitable cry of renunciation, and its answering
prophecy and release.
" Stop the stream valiantly, drive away the desires, O Brahmana !
When you have understood the destruction of all that was made,
you will understand that which was not made." ^
The steps by which, in later developments of the
contemplative life, nirvana was to be attained. Testimony
indicate that these negations were very far anas^ *^ ^'
from being conceived in an absolute sense. In his
spiritual progress, the ascetic passes through the four
dJiydnas, or " powers of abstraction," which correspond
with the gnosis of the Greeks, and may be defined
somewhat as follows : (i) satisfaction in processes of
reasoning; (2) withdrawal from these into the peace
and joy of contemplation ; (3) gradual release from def-
inite forms of self-consciousness and from limitations of
memory, through indifference to them, into the infinite
illuminating power of the faculties, still accompanied
* St. Hilaire, p. 132. * Dhatntnapada, v. 383.
628 BUDDHISM.
by enjoyment of the soul's relations to the senses ;
(4) perfect fulfilment of these energies, with escape
from all dependence on the senses. — So far, we have
steps in the " world of forms." After these follow the
" formless worlds," through which the ecstatic con-
templation of the saint leads him upward, in succes-
sion : (i) The infinity of space; (2) of intelligence;
(3) non-existence; (4) non-existence of ideas, and
the nothingness even of that fact; (5) the hindrance;
(6) " nirvana." ^ Impossible as it is to follow Orien-
tal reverie through these regions of its flight, it is yet
certain that the saint passes through " nonentity " again
and again, yet is in a state of contemplation still.
What can the " extinction " be to which such " non-
existence " can lead? The shadowy w^ord-pla}- can
prove only that entity and nonentity had no such
strictness of meaning in this contemplative devotion
as they have in the analytic mind of the West.
The endless repetitions and recurrences of niunbcrs
„ . in Buddhist mytholosry are not to be taken in
Meaning of j ^j
these stages a literal sense: they indicate simply the per-
of devotion. ,1 , 1 i.*1a1j '•
petual jjionolone by v/hich the dreamers imagi-
nation is limited, and to which it perpetually returns.
So these successive stages in the path of liberation,
ever returning to some new formula of the same
constant idea of " nonentity," and again and again
attempting closer approximation to the statement of it,
can hardly be supposed to indicate real processes of
transition, a definite order and series of experiences.
They seem to mean that the dreamer's soul was for
ever haunted by boundless discontent with all defi-
nite forms under which life could present itself to
' For these stages, see account given in Koeppen, I. 587-592. Burnouf 's Lotus, S14,
543, 824. St. Hilaire (p- 15S) omits the fiflli stage-
NIRVANA. 629
minds without practical knowledge of the laws of
nature, in their dealing with hereditary belief in end-
less transmigration and " bonds of action." They
mean the inevitable, ever-recurring aspiration for
release from this sad cadence which marred every
utterance of the past, present, or future. In everyone
of these stacres, in the last as well as the first, in the
innermost ultimate forms to which the " nothingness " of
ideas and of worlds could be traced, there still remained
the soul itself: contemplation was still the fact of
facts ; and " deliverance " was a living hope till it
became a full fruition.
But we have other evidence to the same effect. "^
The nearly perfect saint, on reachino- " the
•^ ^ , f* Return from
hindrance," may be. impelled by his own thevergeof
nobler desires — then more than ever active '^^^^'
and inspired, as it would seem, with the love of life's
uses and opportunities — to return into new paths of
discipline ; and this after passing through so many
forms of " nonentity " ! Beyond him are other classes
of saints, some of whom have delivered themselves
from the " bonds of existence," and others have
freed multitudes of their fellow-men. Yet whoever
has reached the brink of fruition can, if he will,
forego it for the benefit of mankind, and pass again
through the sorrowful bondage with his brethren, to
share with them the sure release. Now these Bod-
hisattvas (essential saints), thus able, at their own
will, did they but choose to exert it, to pass into ex-
tinction at a step, after all these stages of approximate
"nonentity," are found possessed of what qualities?
"Morality, contemplation, wisdom, patience, com-
passion, energy!"^ If this is an approach to"ex-
^ Koeppen, I. 424- These are the " paramitas," or six "transcendent virtues."
630 BUDDHISM.
tinction," it is manifest that the word must take quite
other than its current meaning in our modern speech.
Does it not refer us rather, once more, to the "beati-
tude " of the old Christian mystics, who loved to say,
" In nothincrness is all" ?
The intense, unqualified language of contemplative
Intelligence pi^ty, which kuows uo shadcs of degree or
of t^e^^^^^^- kind, describes the «r//a/ (advanced saint) as
one " whose virtues have lifted him above all the
worlds;" as "looking over, at death, into nirvana,
free from all attachment ; regarding gold and dust as
alike ; knowing no difference of great and small ;
turned away from existence, from honor, pleasure,
gain, yet worshipped and blessed by all divine
beings."^ How does he indicate that the " lamp of
existence and intelligence " is about to be " extin-
guished," after all these preparatory steps to that end?
By the ebbing away of the last waves of d}'ing
mind? The very opposite. He is "acquainted with
all science, and possessed of perfect insight." Here
are his gifts. The science of transformations, or
occult powers ; the divine eye, beholding all beings
and worlds at a glance ; the divine ear, hearing all
sounds in all worlds ; knowledge of the thoughts of
all creatures ; remembrance of all earlier forms of
existence ; foresight of all future births.^ And these
powers are acquired by the combination of " indiffer-
ence with intense attention ! " ^ All this ma}^ be a
child's dream of omnipotence, or a glimpse of man's
infinite relations, or a hyperbole of man-worship
which only Oriental habits of thought can explain.
But it cannot be believed that a path which culminated
in this could have been believed lo lead 07i, zvith one
1 Hardy, Manual^ p. 38 ; Koeppen, I. 406. ^ ibid. ^ Lotu%^ 819.
NIRVANA. 6^1
O
ste^ more, into the nirvana of Burnoitf and St.
Hi I a ire.
In fine, I must say that Bunsen seems to me to come
much nearer the satisfactory solution of the ^, .
♦^ The mex-
ideal goal of Buddhist faith, when he calls nir- pressibie
vana ^' inward feace," and even maintains that no ^°° '
thouorht can be farther from it than that of annihilation
of being, as we should understand this. The author
of the "Catena of Buddhist Scriptures" admits that
"the idea of nirvana as annihilation must be confined
to one period in the history of the system, during
which scholastic refinement sought to dejine the con-
dition of the Infinite.''^ The schools have certainly
pursued the negation of forms, qualities, experiences,
through every path accessible to thought ; a boundless
dissatisfaction with their limits, often reaching out
into mere gratification of the, logical faculty in this
direction by giving it free play to net the worlds
throuo'h and throu2"h with its threads and webs of
denial. Yet no religious mj'thology has so peopled
them with swarming life, nor piled them in such
endless series through infinite space. The earliest
nirvana is the " place of the freed soul : " the latest is
the "paradise of imagination."
It is plain that our language cannot convey to us
the actual sense of the conception, as it shone in the
Oriental mind : a divine antidote, compensation, refuge,
release ; the redemption from those oppressive dreams
of human destiny, which more energetic and practical
races have escaped. This, however, is to me quite
certain.. The beatific crowning vision, which lay
spread before the Buddhist like a waveless sea, was
1 God hi History, p. 348 A very appreciative view of Buddhism is also given in
Alger's Hist. 0/ tJie Doct- of Put. Life (Part II. ch. vi.)-
632 BUDDHISM.
positive, not negative. The devotee might hken nir-
vana to the "blowing out of a lamp," or insist on its
vacuity and its pure nullity ever so strongly. His
very delight in the process of freeing himself from
recognizing the reality of conceptions which imposed
the " bonds of action and transmigration " was itself a
reality^ and refilled every vacuum which he created by
that process in the very instant of its creation. It is
but a little way that metaphysical terms can go towards
fathoming the experience or stating the necessities of
the spirit. Not " extinction," not even a dreamless
"rest," can define a highest good^ that had only to be
presented to millions to be hailed and accepted. For-
ever true is it that men do not spend their lives in
preaching, laboring, proselyting, in love and sacrifice,
— in behalf of w^hat has no positive substantial being
for them to lay hold on. Despair of existence and
longing for torpidity cannot inspire them w^ith the love
of uses and the ardor to help and deliver mankind.
That for which they invent a name, to be glorified,
even as it is elsewhere a praise to glorify the name of
God, must not be thought "the horrible faith that wor-
ships nonentity." ^ Let us do better justice to a spir-
itual phase, which modern habits of thought are but
too likely to misjudge.
But why this discontent with the conditions of exisi-
Outward ence, this rejection of all its relations, this
Buddiifst^^ insistence on misery as universal?. It is easy
negation, to sce what made the Hindu conception of life
a burden. Transmigration, that endless monotone ;
^ St. Hilaire, BiiddJia et sa Relig., p, 140. It must appear singular, on this hypothesis,
that such elaborate compends as the PrcUimoksha {Ritual 0/ Chinese Buddhists^
R. A. 6"., vol. xix.) should not have one word expressive of the blessings of being
annihilated.
NIRVANA. 6;^^
transmission of moral consequence through an inter-
minable future, not lighted by the hopes that social
progress inspires ; caste and superstition, overshadow-
ing all thought, motive, and labor, dominating this
life and the future ; the barbarities of law and of sac-
rifice, cheapening the estimate of life ; absence of
personal liberty and social opportunity ; no scientific
comprehension of those benignities of natural law,
which alleviate the common lot of disease, decay, and
death ; depressing languors of a tropical climate ; its
incidents of cheap food and rapidly multiplying popu-
lation, and the results in enormous rents and interest
rates, and the lowest- possible wages ; crises of famine ;
extremes of social condition ; the accumulated social
oppression and m.isery that weighed upon the life of
India for centuries, — these surely were adequate out-
ward motive for the mighty protest of Buddhism against
the conditions of human existence. It was the in-
stinctive reaction of the soul ajjainst these issues of
ignorance, inactivity, and wrong; its unconscious cry
for science ; its appeal to the ideal, the infinite, the
inconceivable even, for the liberty denied it in every
attainable form of actual life. It was, further, the
nemesis of an inveterate contempt for things visible
and concrete ; the old Brahmanical notion of their
unrealit}' brought to its ultimate terms ; driving man's
ideals of contemplation from a world they had no
power nor will to use ; pronouncing a world on these
conditions to be, as a form of cognition^ thoroughly
null and void ; yet only to reinstate it in a new form ;
to justify it on another plane ; to make it real as a
field of uses, through the power of humane sentiment
and the might of moral purpose. The unity of all
D34 BUDDHISM.
being, which had before meant the common insignifi-
cance of each and all, now meant the one appeal that
came to every heart from a universal sorrow and
need. What contemplation had to surrender, pity
saved.
This reaction from overwhelming social misery to
a spirit of humanity, to pity, forgiveness, and
moral consecration, has a counterpart six
centuries afterwards in the birth of Christianity, and
its call to brotherhood amidst the political and spiritual
miseries of the Roman Empire. Other points of rela-
tion are no less impressive. Both religions had their
rejection of " this world," turning from hopeless con-
ditions (as they seemed) to an invisible ideal refuge,
" the other shore." In Christianity the call to forsake
all and follow the Master grew into an asceticism as
thoroucrh as the Buddhist. As a ffoal of human
destiny, nirvana in its utmost supposed negation is
not the saddest conceivable. Annihilation is a bless-
ing compared with everlasting penalties and pains ;
and the " atheism " of Buddhism, were it as abso-
lute as it has been supposed, would be piety com-
pared with the worship of a God who could inflict
them.
As refuge from the vanities and miseries that in
all ages have turned so much of human life into
weariness and utter failure, whirling it awav like
chafl:^ all great religions have pointed to some form
of spiritual rest. Nor can I think the nirvana of
the compassionate Buddha all unrelated to that in-
ward calm, that divine release, which the voice of a
noble woman has made so real and so genial for
all of us : —
NIRVANA. 635
" O earth so full of dreary noises,
O men with wailing in your voices,
O delved gold the wallers heap,
O strife, O curse that o'er it fall ! —
God makes a silence through you all :
He giveth his beloved sleep."
Pourna, the son of a freedman, become a disciple
of Buddha, determines to convert a wild tribe xhe affirma-
to the law of peace and love. Buddha, having ^^'''^•
suggested to him the perils in this enterprise, and
finding him prepared to meet them in the spirit of
absolute self-sacrifice, dismisses him with these words :
"It is well, Pourna, thou art worthy of this work.
Go then ; having delivered thyself, deliver others ;
having reached the other shore ^ bring others thither ;
arrived at complete nirvana^ cause others to arrive
there like thyself''''^
No dreamless sleep in this ideal of duty ; but per-
petual return from the brink of fruition to the sacrifice
and service, w^hereof none can see the completion ;
constant obedience to the impulse to teach and share
and save, through worlds on worlds. Wearisome it
may be to think, even, of this eternal sense of tasks
unaccomplished, of this endless didactic function, this
unremitting manipulation of the moral element in all
mankind ; but it is at least vital and positive, and fills
immortality with meaning and demand. It gives, I
think, adequate answer, in its very definition, to the
judgment of Miiller, that nirvana^ in Buddha's mind,
" if not annihilation, was yet nothing but metaphysical
selfishness ; a relapse into that being which is nothing
but itself." 2
* St. Hilaire, p. 97. » Chips, &c., I. 287.
6z6
BUDDHISM.
And even the dhyanas — which, like the "gnosis" of
certain Christian heretical sects, claim to be paths for
the liberation of the soul through interior vision —
become, in the light of this practical earnestness and
ardor, enduring gates, not into " nonentity," but into
wisdom ; though it be of the Oriental, not of the Saxon
nor the Hebrew kind.
in.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES.
^TZE pass from the speculative to the practical
^ ^ aspect of Buddhism.
"The Four Supreme Truths are Pain, the Cause
of Pain, the Extinction of Pain, and the Way The tragedy
to the Extinction of Pain." ^ To "turn the°^^^^*-
wheel of these four truths " is the sum of virtue and
power, of tlie Buddha's word and work.^
" Birth is pain ; sickness, sorrow, death, are pain ; union with
the hated, separation from the loved, not to reach what one desires,
all that makes perception, is pain ; the passing away of all that is
born is pain." ^
Pain the very substance of life ! Absolute renun-
ciation of attachment {tcpdddna) to forms of exist-
ence, the only path of release ! Release itself
definable by no definite form of human joy ! Was
not the salvation sadder than the doom from which
it freed? Had not this Hindu dream-work ended
logicall}' in practical despair? It has seemed so to
most observation from Christian points of view. But
let us look further.
^ Bumouf, p. 629.
2 This phrase was probably used in contrast to the " wheel of transmigration," whose
endless revolution of births the counter-movement of the law of Buddha should arrest.
Leon Feer in Journ. Asiat. for 1870, p. 438.
* Ibid. (p. 367), from DJuirmasakrasutras. So Wuttke, II. 537.
640 BUDDHISM.
Buddhism has well been called the most tragical
of human faiths. It accepted the brooding sense of
change and death, into which science and social en-
ergy had not yet entered, to give foothold for ideals
of progress. It would not evade the facts. Is the
world then nought? Is "the body like foam ; sense a
bubble ; consciousness a circle on a stream ; action
the shadow that falls on it ; knowledge the pla}^ of
illusions"? Let us accept the consequences of that
truth, though all the old landmarks of faith be swept
away, and the gods above, with their heavens, turn to
mortalities like the rest. Transmigration shall go to
the tests of moral order, and end in a truth deeper
than itself. That test at least shall abide, though the
interests of personality disappear, and not a chink be
left open for freedom. If there is no smile in the uni-
verse, let us make the most of the frown, nor fear but
good ending shall come of that; nay, turn the frown
itself into a dream, and so overcome the world.
This is tragedy; and it is heroism also, which is
an essential part of tragedy. Out of an unfathomable
loss, an absolute renunciation, to win not stoical resig-
nation only, but a purpose that should fill life with
present good, and so disprove the premise of despair !
*' Let us live happily then, not hatin^^ those who hate us : let us
dwell free from hatred among men who hate."
" Let us live happily, free from greed among the greedy."
*' Let us live happily, though we call nothing our own. We
shall be like the bright gods, feeding on happiness."
"He who has given up both victory and defeat, — he, the con-
tented, is happy."
" He who applies l:^imself to the doctrine of Buddha brightens
this world, like the moon when free from clouds." '
* Dhainniap.^ vv. 197-201, 382.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 64I
But life meant more than happiness. It was not
enough for the Buddhist to emancipate himself from
pain. The universal doom of sorrow must touch his
heart with a sympathy as universal. He could not
rest till he had tauf]rht the w^hole world the secret of
reconciliation with destiny. Suffering, in that early
day also, led out into a.- gospel of universal love.
And so the substance of what seemed lost — of per-
sonality, of freedom, of faith — was, in one sense at
least, saved.
For the Buddha came, as all Buddhas had come,
" to save the human race " from its miseries ; The gospel
and Buddhahood itself lay open to every one. °^ ^°^®-
Gotama, it is constantly affirmed, knew but one human
nature, and all men as brothers.
" My law is a law of mercy for all." ^
" Proclaim it freely to all men : it shall cleanse good and evil,
rich and poor alike ; it is large as the spaces of heaven, that ex-
clude none." '
" Whoever loves will feel the longing to save not himself
alone, but all others. Let him say to himself: When others are
learning the truth, I will rejoice at it, as if it were myself. When
others are without it, I will mourn the loss as my own. We shall
do much, if we deliver many ; but more, if we cause them to deliver
others, and so on without end. So shall the healing word embrace
the world, and all who are sunk in the ocean of misery be saved." ^
All ; for the Buddhist scriptures teach that even
in the hells there are " heavens of refuge " for souls
that are expiating their sins, in which they are pre-
served from catastrophes that befall the world as a
whole, at the end of a kalpa-period. There is ever a
Brahma in the universe, even though a Buddha be not
living in the kalpa ; and " he protects his abode." *
^ Bumouf, pp. 198, 205-211. * Koeppen, p. 130, from Thibetan collection.
3 Tsing-tu-tien in Wuttke, II. 563. * Mahavansa (Upham), note to ch. xix.
41
642 BUDDHISM.
Gotama compares himself to " a father, who rescues
his children from a burning house ; " to " a guide who
leads a caravan to fortunate lands ; " to " a physician
who cures the blind with herbs brought from the holy
Himalayas ; " to " the friendly cloud, that brings rain
to thirsty plants." -^
It was pure democracy.''^ The veil of the Hindu
Religious temple was rent. Eternal principles brought
democracy, class privilege to judgment ; and the unity of
an idea swept the field clear of all exclusive claims.
Gotama took his disciples from the lowest, as readily
as from the highest class. This prince came down
from his throne, and walked with poor and outcast
people ; joined the hands which caste forbade to touch
each other; reached out his own to the pariah, who
forthwith arose out of the dust, the equal of kings.
Did not Sudra and Brahman stand under one destinv,
one law of right and wrong, one reward and one
penalty? For all one path of duty, — "to live poor
and pure."
" Look closely, and you shall see no difference between the body
of a prince and the body of a slave. What is essential is that
which may dwell in the most miserable frame, and which the wisest
have saluted and honored. The Brahman like the Chandala is
born of woman : where see you the difference, that one should be
noble and the other vile ? " ^
Moral distinctions effaced all others. All tests
merged in the test of character : all words found
honor or shame in this ordeal alone. ^
" The talk of ' high and low castes,' of ' the pure Brahmans,
the only sons of Brahma,' is nothing but sound : the four castes
are equal." *
^ Lotus of the Good Latti^ ch. Hi. v. vii. 2 Lassen, II. 440.
* Burnouf, p. 209, 376. ■* See Dhammap.., ch. xix.
' Sutras, quoted in Hardy's Manual, pp. 80, 81.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 643
" It has been said that it is better to give alms to a Brahman
than to a man of mean birth. But Gotama denies this, saying,
*As the husbandman sows in wet weather on the hills, and in dry-
weather in the valleys, and at all times in the ground that can be
at all times watered, so the man who would be blessed in both
worlds will give alms to all ; nor do birth and eminence make the
right to be honored." ^
"He is vasala [a low person], who cherishes hatred, torments
living beings, steals or kills or commits impurity ; who does not
pay his debts, maltreats aged parents, or fails to support them ;
who gives evil counsel, hides truth, does not return hospitality nor
render it, exalts himself and debases others, ignores their virtues,
is impatient of their success. Not by birth, but by conduct, is one
a vasala.^''
" A chandala, by his virtues, was born in a Brahma world ; but
the Brahman who is vicious is in shame now, and suffers hereafter ;
and his caste shall not release him.""-^
A
" Ananda, one of the earhest disciples [and a very noble char-
acter], sitting once beside a well, asked a drink of water from a
Chandala woman, who was drawing from the well. She answered,
' How dost thou ask water of me, an outcast, who may not touch
thee without offence 1 ' Ananda answered : ' My sister, I ask not
of thy caste : I ask thee water to drink.' And Buddha took her
among his disciples." ^
The equality of the sexes in Buddhism ^ is ascribed
to the influence of Ananda over his master, who is
said to have conceded to women the right to enter
the religious profession in the twenty-fifth year of his
teaching.^ But it is not easy to see how, upon his
principles, he could have opposed it in the first. No
distinction of sex more than of castes could have been
valid, for such a gospel.^ The following legend is
from the Singhalese Sutras : —
1 Hardy, p. 80.
2 Sutra, quoted by D'Alwis, pp. 123-125. 3 Bumouf, p. 205.
* With the one exception of the Buddhaship itself, which is a privilege of male*.
Christianity, too, allows pure Christhood only to a man. Hardy's Manual, p. 104.
fi Bumouf, p. 278; Koeppen, I. 104.
* Franck, Etudes Oricntales, p. 39.
644 BUDDHISM.
" The wives of five hundred princes, whose husbands had
become disciples, desired to follow their example ; and the mother
of Buddha requested of him their admission. It was clearly seen
by him that former Buddhas had admitted women ; but he feared
it would give occasion for speaking against his institutions [so his
disciples interpreted him], and did not at once accede to the request.
Then Prajapati (his mother) said to them : ' Children, Buddha has
thrice refused to " admit us to profession : " let us take it on our-
selves, and then go to him ; and he cannot but receive us.' So
they cut off their hair, put on the proper robe, and taking earthen
bowls journeyed with painful feet to Buddha. And Ananda, seeing
them, was filled with sorrow, and again brought their petition to
Buddha, who said : ' Are the Buddhas born only for the benefit of
men ? Have not Wisakha, and many others, entered the paths ?
The entrance is open for women as well as for men.' " '
In the " Lotus," the Buddha appears on his holy
mountain, surrounded by multitudes of deities and
disciples ; and among them are six thousand female
saints. In the legends generally, he admits men
and women alike to the bliss of nirvana.^ Although,
in one or two of these, a female becomes a male in
order to .obtain sainthood, such individual case 'must
not be taken as representing the Buddhist idea of
equality.'^
There are rules in the Sutras commanding kindness
to servants, and even the emancipation of slaves after
they shall have labored a given time.* The Maha-
vansa describes a damsel of supernatural beauty, who,
thouirh born of the lowest orrade of outcasts, was
loved and espoused by a prince, and who had acquired
her charms by such good works as sweeping and
cleaning the floor at the foot of a banyan, for the sake
of worship.^
* Hardy's Manva^, p. 3ro. ^ Ibid., 314; Lotus, ch. xi.
3 See Bastian, Reisen in China, &c., p. 586. Deal's Buddhist Pilgrims, ch. xvii.
* Hardy, 482- '' J\Iahav., ch. xxxiii.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 645
What possibility of exclusive distinctions in a creed
which affirms that the most degraded person may one
day become ruler of the highest heavens ; that the
loftiest king may sink below the least of his subjects ;
and that more than thirty saints have transmitted the
true doctrine from the time of the Buddha, belonging
indifferent! v to all the castes?
Like other religious reformers, Gotama appealed to
the poor, both from sympathy and tenderness and as
finding them more open to his word.
" Hard it is for a rich man to know the way, easy for a poor one."
" A poor man filled his scrip with a handful of flowers ; but the
rich poured in thousands of bushels in vain."
" Of all the lamps lighted in his honor, one only, brought by a
poor woman, lasted through the night." '
It would appear from the study of the earliest
Buddhist writings, that, while the philosophical teach-
ings of the school were delivered, as we should sup-
pose them likely to be, ift the sacred language of the
Brahmans, whenever specially addressed to them, —
the people were taught the moral and spiritual sub-
stance of the faith of the reformers in their own
different dialects, and in a thoroughly popular style.^
And we may be sure that this gospel had its pente-
costal gift of tongues for all the waiting tribes of
northern India. This assumption of the people's
cause, this direct appeal to their mind and heart,
which constitutes an essential part of the prophet's
inspiration in all religions, was probably the main
element of Gotama's personal work. Fifteen hun-
dred years afterwards Dante wrote his great poem, —
1 Koeppen, 131.
2 Lassen, II. 492 ; Duncker, II. 194; Weber's Vorlesu7ige7iy 258; lAvia^Sansk. TextSx
II.
646 BUDDHISM.
wherein day broke on the ecclesiastical slavery of the
Middle Ages, as it rose in Gotama's gospel on that of
the East, — in the people's own Italian, not in the
learned tongue. The preachers whom Buddha sent
out to lay open a long sealed life and hope to the
people, and to rebuke the indolence and exclusiveness
of the clergy, remind us of Wiclif 's itinerant " poor
priests," sent out for a like purpose in England when
two thousand years had gone by. And this was the
burden of their prophecy : —
" Forsake all evil, bring forth good, mastei' thy own thought :
such is Buddha's path to end all pain." ^
There is an old ballad literature of Buddhism, called
the gdlhds, — fragments of which appear through-
out the great Sutras of the faith. They are in an
obsolete language of mixed dialects, and are believed
to be the production of ancient bards, probably suc-
cessors of Buddha, who went about singing the new
gospel in these simple strains, which must have come
from the heart of the people and gone straightway to
it. They are always quoted with great respect, in
later writings.'-^ So natural and so genial the impulse
of Buddhism that it flowed at once into song ; and in
the earlier works, like the Lotus and the Lalitavistara,
the doctrine first stated in prose is always repeated in
poetic form.
It was an impulse to convert the whole world to a
Universal philosophy and a faith that should bring de-
love. liverance from the woes of life. The Lotus
says : "it is much less criminal to do injury to a Budd-
ha for ages, than to say an unkind word to a simple
* Koeppcn, I. p. 224; DhamntaJ>ada, ch. xiv.
* See Muir, II. 125.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 6^7
teacher who is instructing any one in the law."
There is no parallel to this missionary zeal, this bound-
less pity and love, but in Christianity ; nor yet in
Christianity in its earliest form ; but only when Paul's
protest of ethnic sympathy broke down the wall be-
tween Jew and Gentile, bond and free. In Buddha
was neither Chinese nor Mongol nor Hindu : neither
Brahman nor Chandala, prince nor slave. What
injustice we shall do to this immense purpose which
swept over all Eastern Asia, if we imagine it was
only a gospel of self-annihilation and miserable de-
spair, after all, that these apostles had to offer ! Do not
tell us that mere love of self-destruction, or despair
of life, will make men take the whole world into their
hearts, and forsake the meditations in which they place
their own salvation, to share their truth with all other
men. A similar ardor has been held to be sufficient
evidence to prove that the early Christians were sus-
tained by a glorious hope. The Brahmans charge
Buddha with saving:, " Let all the sins ever committed
fall on me, that the world may be saved." ^
" As a mother, so long as she lives, watches over her child, her
only child, so among all beings let boundless good-will prevail. If
a man be of this mind, as long as he is awake, whether standing or
walking, or sitting or lying, there comes to pass the saying : ' This
place is the abode of holiness.' " ^
The four virtuous inclinations, according to the
Siamese Buddhists, are: (i) seeking for others the
happiness one desires for himself; (2) compassionate
interest in all creatures; (3) love for, and pleasure
in, all beings ; (4) impartiality.^
* Kumarila^ quoted by Miiller, ^S". Lii.^ p. 80.
• Kuddakapatluz, in Jour7t. R. A. S. (1868).
3 Alabaster's Wheel 0/ the Law, p. 198.
648 BUDDHISM.
Buddhism and Christianity originated in ages of
despondency, when men, having few recognized civil
and poHtical interests, turned naturally to personal
sympathy with each other, and the desire of render-
ing moral and spiritual help. In both cases, such
circumstances tended to produce contempt for the
outward world, and a certain subjection to the darker
side of life ; an eye to destructive, or saddening des-
tinies : — for the one religion centering in a sense of
transiency in every form of being ; for the other, in
a sense of moral evil, of "sin" at the root of every
soul. The history of these two great gospels of love
has, of course, revealed the effect of such excessive
forms of discouragement, on the quality of spiritual
methods and promises of deliverance.
That the Buddhists preached sad tidings instead
of glad ones, universal pain and utter self-abnegation,
must not cover the fact that they preached liberty and
humanity : we must, on the contrary, derive from this
latter fact some happier interpretation of what seems
enfeebling and even heart-crushing in their theory
of life.
If this belief was indeed so hopeless, then it is only
the more creditable to human nature that the sympa-
thies should not have been paralyzed by it, but softened
and expanded with tenderest pity. Let Christendom
ask itself what would be likely to become of those af-
fections which it claims to have unfolded and set free,
but which its religious education makes so largely
dependent on faith in a future heaven, if its confessors
should be compelled to accept what they hold to be the
nirvana of Buddhist hope in place of these agreeable
expectations. Yet nirvana has given to millions of
those heathen souls a peace which " heaven " fails to
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 649
supply for millions of these Christian ones. The less
it promises of happiness, the more it throws love back
on its own nobility for support. If "cold speculation,"
"hfeless negation," "atheism," "nihilism," can stir
such vital warmth as Buddhism can show, is it not a
stronger evidence of the upward pressure of the soul,
than for faith in a personal Father, who watches over
all his children, to stir much more? "I do not hesi-
tate," says Burnouf, "to translate the Buddhist mditri
by the term ^universal love.'"^
Yes : we will call it tragedy, and of no mean sort.
I know of nothincr in the history of reliction ^
o -/ o Inspires re-
more pathetic; yet there are few things that spectfor
should suggest such respect for the soul. This
darkness of a dreamer's thought of change and death,
what a pall it spread over life ! " Once," says the
legend, "Buddha smiled, and the beam of that smile
irradiated the universe ; but instantly came forth a voice
saying. It is vain, it cannot stay." Religion indeed
has not been wont to recognize pleasure as compatible
with sainthood ; and yet the smile is even further from
the Buddha than from the Christ. But in this shadow
of contemplation what unquenchable light shines !
"Than Buddha," says even St. Hilaire, who believes
it possible to construct his biography histori- ^^^^.^^^.^^
cally, and has attempted to do so, "there is, ofoppo-
with the sole exception of the Christ, no purer ''^"^''
nor more touching figure among the founders of re-
ligions. His life is without blemish : he is the finished
model of the heroism, the self-renunciation, the love,
the sweetness he commands."^ Abel Remusat grants
that to call Buddhism the Christianity of the East is to
give, on the whole, a good idea of the importance of
^ LottiSy p. 300. * Le BouddJia, Introd.-, p. v.
650 BUDDHISM.
the services rendered by this form of religion to man-
kind.^ Cunningham, who loosely styles it " an im-
posture," yet defines it as "an enthusiasm and a
benevolence " [strange qualities for imposture] ; and
describes its "peaceful progress, illuminated by the
cheerful faces of the sick, the crippled, and the poor,
in monastic hospitals, and by the smiles of travellers
reposing in Dharmasalas by the waysides." ^ "The
Buddhists," says Wuttke, "are the only heathen peo-
ple who have conceived of peacefully converting all
mankind to one belief: theirs alone in heathen history
is a religion, not of one people, but of humanity."^
"The only heathen people ;" yet, as he allows, appar-
ently without noticing what the fact involves, a people
far outnumbering any other body of heathen ; and,
he might have added, rivalling Christianity in the
count of its disciples and its sects.
This love of all beings, which Buddhism, like
Its active Christianity, declares to be the sum of its mo-
^ elements, tives, is not the mere dreamy passive sentiment
its aim at detachment from the world and life would,
for our modes of thought, imply. It has been said
to "reach beyond Christianity," at least theoretically,
*' since it embraces not men only, but all the creat-
v^ ures."* Its earliest commands, the first lesson to the
convert, were indeed prohibitions only : not to kill,
nor steal, nor commit unchaste actions, nor lie, nor be
drunken. But these were initiatory to more positive
duty. Its six cardinal virtues (paramitas) are com-
passion, morality, patience, energy, contemplation,
wisdom.^ And its moral disciplines were as positive
as possible.
1 Melanges Posthumes, p. 237. 2 Bhilsa Topes, p. 54.
* Geschichte d. Heidenthums^ II. 563. * Koeppeu, I. 313. •* Ibid., 450.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 65 1
" Never is wrath stilled by wrath, only by reconciliation : this is
an everlasting law."
" Overcome evil with good, the avaricious with generosity, the
false with truth."
" Thoughtful heed is the way of immortality : indolence of
death."
" Attack vigorously what is to be done : a careless pilgrim only
scatters the dust of his passions more widely."
" As the plant sheds its withered flowers, so men should shed
passions and hates."
" One day of endeavor is better than a hundred years of sloth."
" Thy self is its own defence, its own refuge ; it atones for its
own sins ; none can purify another."
" Watch thyself with all diligence, and hold thyself in as the
spirited steed is held by its owner."
" Well-makers lead the water ; fletchers bend the arrow ; carpen-
ters break the wood ; and the wise fashion themselves."
"Master thyself: so mayest thou teach others, and easily tame
them, after having tamed thyself; for self is hardest to tame."
" Never forget thy own duty for the sake of another's, however
great."
" Give, if thou art asked, from the little thou hast, and thou shalt
go near the gods."
" Haste to do good : the slothful in virtue learns to love evil."
"Rouse thyself: be not idle. Follow the law of virtue."
"Think not lightly of evil ; drop by drop the jar is filled : think
not lightly of good ; the wise is filled with purity, gathering it drop
by drop." ^
These are sentences from one of the oldest of
the sacred books of Buddhism, the Dhamma-xhe Dham-
pada. Its earnest dealing with life and duty m^pada.
may be noted in the titles of some of its chapters :
"Reflection;" "the Fool;" "the Wise;" "Evil;"
"Punishment;" "Old Age;" "Self;" "The World;"
" the Awakened ; " " Pleasure ; " " Anger ; " " Impu-
rity ; " "the Downward Course;" "Thirst;" "the
1 Dkammajiada, w. 5, 223, 21, 313. 112, 377, 165, 379-3S0, 145, iS7-iS9. 166, 224, ii6,
168, 121.
/
652 BUDDHISM.
Way." It rouses the moral sense to note the essential
qualities and consequences of conduct. It tells those
who are inclined to detraction that, " while they look
after the faults of others, their own are growing ; " that
"body, tongue, and mind must be controlled." It tells
the slayer, the liar, the drunkard, the thief, the man
who covets his neighbor's wife, that they "pull up
their own life by the root." It reminds the thoughtless
that "his sin will come back upon him, like fine dust
throw^n against the wind ; that the universe has no
place where it will not find him out." It warns the
self-indulgent that "what is good and wholesome for
the life is hard to win ; " that "the body and the royal
chariot alike decay, but the virtue of the righteous,
which makes us to know what is good, never grows
old."
" Mean is the scent of sandal-wood : best to the gods is the
fragrance that rises from the good." *
This " way of release " is indeed in detachment of
the soul from all finite relations. The burden of its
teaching is : — whoso loveth father or mother more
than me, and leaveth not all desires to follow me, is
not worthy of me. In its repulsion of the pleasures
of sense, it goes so far as to say, "Love nothing. If
thou wouldst be free from bonds." ^ Yet It can speak
tenderly of human relations when it would enforce the
immortality of virtue.
"As friends and kindred hail the long absent at his return in
health, so when the just man goes from this world to another, his
good deeds receive him, as friend greets friend."*
* D/tamma^ada, 253, 246-7, 125-7, 163, 151, 56.
* Ibid., 211. 8 Ibid., 219, 220.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 653
Nor in the humanities which it inculcates does
Buddhism fail to recognize either the full de- Buddhist
mands of all human ties, whether of kindred- humanities,
ship or sympathy, or the delight that comes with their
service.
"As the bee, without destroying the color or perfume of the
flower, gathers the sweetness with his mouth and wings, so the
riches of the true friend gradually accumulate; and the increase is
constant, like the growth of the hillock which the white ant steadily
builds."
" The wise man searches for the friend thus gifted, as the child
seeks its mother." ^
The domestic virtues are far from being disparaged
in Buddhist writings, or in the practice of The domes-
Buddhist communities. On the contrary, they ^'^ virtues,
are strictly enjoined and enforced. Notwithstanding
the sanctity of celibacy in his law, the great impor-
tance believed to have been ascribed by Gotama to
filial sentiment, and indeed to every domestic duty,
has been of great service in maintaining the moral
inviolability of the family. He refused to receive into
the ministry those who had not the consent of their
parents.^ The legends record his tenderness to his
mother's memory ; and his visit to the heaven where
she dwelt, to teach her the " law of salvation ; " and
his declarations, that, "next to that law, the father and
mother are, for a son, deity itself," — that "it is better
for him to honor them than the gods of heaven and
earth," — and that, "if he should carry them on his
shoulders for a hundred years, he could not repay
them for their care."^ Buddhism discourages polyg-
amy : so that throughout its dominions this custom
^ Hardy, p. 484.
2 Bennett's Lzye of Gandama, front the Burmese {Am. Or. Journ., III.).
s Koeppen, I. 473 ; St. Hilaire, p. 92.
654 BUDDHISM.
is exceptional, endured rather than allowed, even in
the rich and powerful ; and in Ceylon, Siam, and else-
where, monogam}' orily is legal. ^
It makes the wife the companion of the husband,
assisrnino; her a freedom unknown to other Oriental re-
ligions, and she shares his public and private activity.^
There is significance in the legend already mentioned,
that Gopa, the wife of Gotama, renounced the use of
the veil as soon as married, on the ground that it was
unworthy of a woman, who knew her modesty and
virtue to be open to the gods, to hide her face from the
world. ^ "Women in Burmah have the custodv of
their husbands' cash, and do the chief part of all
buying and selling ; and their intercourse with foreign-
ers as well as countrymen is open and unrestricted.
Private schools for girls are not uncommon, and no
obstacle is placed in the, way of female education.
Females of the higher classes do not contemn in-
dustrv, nor affect the listlessness of some Orientals."^
In Siam, men of all ranks are greatly aided by the
energy of their wives, especially in public affairs.
Women retail goods and make trading voyages on
their own account, and are as free in their movements
as men.*
The -polyandry of the Thibetan tribes is not a Budd-
hist institution : it is ascribed to the poverty of the
steppes, which renders it difficult for one man to sup-
port a family ; to tlie necessity of protection to the wife
duriniT the lonnf absence of the husband on tradin"!
journeys, and to the inferiority of females to males in
point of numbers.^
* See authorities in Koeppen, I. 474. 2 gt. Hilaire, Le BmiddJui, p. 9.
8 Malcom's Travels in Burvtan Eittpire : Notes, ch. iii.
* yournal of Indian A rchipdago ( 1 S47) .
^ Lloyd's Himalayas., Koeppen, 476.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 655
No teacher ever accorded a higher place to modesty
and to chastity than Gotama. His monks, in the Modesty
extravagance of ascetic discipHne, were even ^"'^^^^^^'^y-
forbidden to look upon a woman, and, if they spoke
to one, were to say inwardly, "In a corrupt world, I
ought to be a lotus without spot." The Dhammapada
declares that "so long as the love of man towards
woman is not destroyed, so long is his mind in bond-
age." Yet, by a turn not uncommon in this Oriental
preaching of superlatives and absolutes, these same
monks are bidden to "treat older w^omen as their
mothers, those but a little older than themselves as
elder sisters, and those a little younger as their younger
sisters."
The excessive care with which the relations of the
sexes were guarded was indeed a part of the moral
reaction of Buddhism on a social condition, the char-
acter of which may be inferred from the habit of the
Brahmanical ascetics to go naked. Against this cus-
tom, Gotama protested with special energy. His
mendicants must be clothed, however starved or desti-
tute ; and there are legends of very early date expres-
sive of his indignation at the opposite custom.^ There
is a tone of satire in the language of the Dhammapada
on these uncivilized ways of attaining sainthood. " Not
nakedness, nor dirt, nor fasting, nor lying on the
ground, nor rubbing with dust, nor sitting in one
posture, can purify a mortal who has not overcome
his desires."^ In an old Buddhist legend, a damsel,
seeing some of these offensive ascetics, cries out, "O
mother ! if these are saints, what must sniners be
like?"
^ Bumouf, p. 312. 2 DJiammapadat v. 141.
656 BUDDHISM.
Its admission of women into the religious life ^ en-
abled Buddhism to enforce these better ideas of social
decency. It may here be observed that the very
earliest notices we have of Buddhism ^ those of Me-
gasthenes, and Clement of Alexandria — mention the
devotees and philosophers of this faith as consisting
of women as well as men.^
The Buddhist idea oi friendship is thus given in
Friendship. Singhalese Sutras : —
" The true friend is he who is faithful in prosperity and adversity,
a friend who brings his sympathy. He prevents you from doing
wrong, urges you to do well ; tells you what you did not know, and
teaches you to enter the true paths ; defends you when he hears
you disparaged ; saves you from low habits ; soothes your fears ;
divides his substance with you."^
" When any one tells what he heard here or there, to put friends
at enmity or sow dissension, or by insinuation leads friends to ques-
tion each other's sincerity, it is slander, and will be punished in
future births." *
As in Stoicism, so here, personal independence is
made to teach the finer uses of companionship, and
the real substance of mutual help.
"If a traveller does not meet with one who is his better or his
equal, who is wise and sober, let him walk alone, like a lonely ele-
phant, like a king."
"If one wise man be associated with another, he will at once
perceive the truth, as the tongue a taste."
" He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquillity is
free from fear. Trust is the best of relatives. [Yet] if he find a
prudent companion, he may walk with him, overcoming all dangers."
" Friends are pleasant ; pleasant is mutual enjoyment ; a good
work is pleasant in the hour of death ; pleasant the state of a
father, pleasant the state of a mother."
* See Hardy, Manual, 39, 311. ' Kruse's Indiens Alte Geschichte, p. 124.
3 Hardy, Manual, o. 484. * Ibid., p. 471.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 657
" If you see a wise man who shows what is to be avoided, and
who administers reproofs, follow that wise man."
" Have for friends the best of men, — men of pure life, who are
not 'slothful." 1
Gotama in the legends is perpetually serving others,
in every kind of emergency ; not the least Buddha's
frequent form of his service being the recon- humanity.
ciliation of enemies, in accordance with the precept
ascribed to him from the beginning, " Hatred does
not cease by hatred at any time : hatred ceases by
love."^ He is indeed believed to have voluntarily
endured infinite trials, through numberless ages and
births, that he might deliver mankind ; foregoing the
right to enter nirvana^ and casting himself again and
again into the stream of human life and destiny, for
this purpose alone, — of teaching the one way of de-
liverance from pain into freedom.^
"This way was preached by me, when I had understood the
removal of the thorns."
"And you yourself must make effort. The Buddhas are but
preachers. It is the thoughtful that are freed from the bondage of
Mara (the tempter)." ^
This persistent moral energy is the ideal held before
the Buddhist devotee. Positive helpfulness, through
real sacrifice and lowly service, is the core of the
doctrine.
"One does not belong to himself: how much less do his sons
and wealth belong to him ! "
" The good delights .in this world and the next ; he delights in
his own work ; happy when he thinks of that which he does ;
happier still when going on the good path."
1 Dhammap.^ 61, 329, 65, 204, 205, 331, 332, 76, 78, 375-
2 Ibid., 5. See Hiirdy, passim ; Buddhaghosha's Parables, &c.
8 Hardy, Manual, p. 98. * D/iamr/iOp., 275, 276.
42
658 BUDDHISM.
" Like a well-trained steed, touched by the whip, be active ; and
by faith, virtue, energy, meditation, and discernment, you will over-
come, perfected in knowledge and in conduct." ^
It has been thought that earlier Buddhism shows no
traces of a definite belief in future places of punish-
ment for the wicked ; that this dogma grew up with
the growth of a hierarchy. ^ If such was the fact, it
must have been so for the reason that the first apostles
of this faith were too much absorbed in the zeal of
pity to find room for prophesying wrath. But, while
even the later forms of Buddhism do not assert the
dogma of eternal punishment,*^ the opinion just stated
is hardly confirmed by the documents of the earlier
time which are within our reach. Buddhism found
the transmigration-hells in full currency, in Brahmani-
cal faith. The Dhammapada consigns the wicked
thither after death with great directness of speech.'*
Yet, in all description of moral penalty, it refers the
evil-doer to the essential quality and present effects of
vice, not to an arbitrary punishment in the future.
"The evil-doer burns by his own deeds, as if burnt by fire."
" All that we are is the result of what we have thought : it is
founded on our thoughts, made up of our thoughts. If a man
speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows, as the wheel the foot
of liim who draws the carriage."
"Him who hves seeking pleasure and uncontrolled, the tempter
will overcome, as the wind throws down a weak tree."
" The evil-doer mourns when he sees the evil of his own work.
He suffers when he thinks of the evil he has done : he suffers more
when going on the evil path."
" Thoughtlessness is the path of death. They who are thought-
less are dead already. An evil deed follows the fool, smouldering
like fire covered by ashes."
^ DJiammap.^ 62, 16, 18, 144. 2 Koeppen, I. 239.
3 Bastian, VVeUauff. d. Buddh.^ p. 18 ; Miiller's Dhamtnap.^ p. xciv.
* Ibid., V. 140.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 659
" It crushes the wicked, as a diamond breaks a stone : it brings
him down, as a creeper the tree it surrounds." '
" The wrong-doer, thinking on his conduct, is constantly in fear.
Even crimes committed long ago trouble him ; as the shadow of a
great rock reaches far into the distance at the setting of the sun." ^
The extravagant strain in which the Master's self-
sacrifice and humanity are described in later n^ exagger-
mythology must weaken the practical influence ^^^^ *°"^-
of the moral law on the lives of his followers ; just as
those elements in the New Testament representation of
Jesus, which take him outside human experience and
sympathy, have issued in much sentimental worship
of a far-off preternatural ideal, in place of respect for
the real laws of human character. Yet it is to be
remembered that for Buddhism this exaggerated tone
is not, as it is for Western civilization, out of keeping
with ordinary, habitual thought, with common sense
and real intercourse ; and therefore creates no re-
action of indifTerence, irresponsibility, skepticism, or
contempt.
The Dhammapada emphasizes moral personality as
strongly as Stoicism or Platonism ; insisting ^^^^^^^ ^
on its independence and self-sustainment, on
its authority as source of all other values, and on the
bliss of its inward life.
"All that we are is the issue of our thought."
" Poison affects not one who has no wound ; nor is there evil for
one who does no evil."
" Not even a god, not Mara, nor Brahma, could change into defeat
the victory of a man over himself"
" Self is the lord of self: who else could be the lord ? "
" Let no one forget his own duty for the sake of another's."
" Better than ruling the world, better than going to heaven, than
lordship over all, is the reward of the first step in virtue."
* Dhamtnap.., w. 136, i, 7, 15, 17, 21, 71, 123, 161, 162.
' Singhalese Sutra, Hardy, 485.
66o BUDDHISM.
" The fields are damaged by weeds, and man by wishing."
" From greed comes grief, from greed comes fear."
"As a rock is not shaken by the wind, so the wise falter not in
praise or blame : they are serene like a deep lake."
"The just man, who speaks truly, and does his own work, the
world will love."
"The gift of the law excels all other gifts, its sweetness all
sweetness, its joy all joys." ^
It declares personality the substance of power also.
" The scent of flowers travels not against the wind ; but the
fragrance of goodness travels even against the wind. A good man
pervades every place.
" The good, like snowy mountains, shine from afar : the bad, like
arrrows shot by night, are not seen." *
The motive power of love, which depends on its
sense of opportunity, is most impaired by disparage-
ment of man's moral capacity. But Buddhism said
with Plato, — Only open the eyes, the will cannot re-
fuse to follow the light.
" The taint, worse than all others, is ignorance
5>3
Nor has any religion more clearly separated mo-
rality from ritual, or more firmly emphasized the spirit
of conduct, as compared with the form.
" He who would put on the yellow robe without cleansing himself
from sin, disregarding temperance and truth, is unworthy to wear it.
" Better a moment's homage to a man of wise spirit than sacrifice
for a hundred years.""*
" It is not platted hair, nor family, nor birth, that consecrates
thee a Brahmana. He in whom there is truth and right-doing, he is
the blessed Brahmana.
"What will platted hair profit thee, O foolish one ! or the raiment
of goatskins ? Within thee is the abyss, while thou art making
clean the outside."
* Dhammap.^ vv. i, 124, 105, 160, 166, 178, 359, 216, 81-82, 217, 354. ' Ibid., 54, 304.
• Ibid., 243. * Ibid., 9, 106.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 66l
" Whoso has burst all fetters and is without fear ; who guiltless
suffers shame and smiting in silence ; from whom desire and hatred,
pride and envy, have dropped ; who strives not for his own gain, and
who doubts not when he has seen the truth ; who has risen above all
bondage to the gods, whose even spirit nought can ruffle ; who has
come to know the way that is without death ; the manly, the hero,
the conqueror, the pure, the awakened, him call I indeed a Brah-
mana." ^
Among the parables ascribed to Gotama in the
"Lotus" is one which teaches that spiritual light is
better than miracle : —
" A man bhnd from birth denied the existence of the world which
he could not see, until miraculously cured ; when he went to the
opposite extreme, and boasted that he knew every thing, despising
all other men as blind. Thereupon he was rebuked by wiser persons,
who proved to him that with all his outward seeing he as yet knew
nothing, since no outward miracle wrought on his eyes could give
him power to discern truth from error, or to dissipate the greater
darkness within him. Ashamed of his vanity, the man desired to
know the way of life, and obtained spiritual wisdom."
Gotama, charged by a Brahman with idling away
his time instead of ploughing and sowing, replied :
" I do plough and sow, reaping thence fruit that is im-
mortal." — "Where are your implements, O Gotama ! "
— "My field is the law; the weeds I clear away are
the cleaving to life ; my plough is wisdom ; the seed I
sow is purity ; my work, attention to the precepts ;
my harvest, nirvana J'^'^
The reader may judge from these illustrations
whether it is just to call the morality of Budd- christian
hism merely negative or merely passive ; and ^"^^'^^*
what to think of comparisons, common among Chris-
tian writers in treating this subject, of a character like
the following : —
^ Dhamtna^.% The Brahmana Chapter. ' Milinda Prasna.
662 BUDDHISM.
" The Christian does wrong to no one, because he
loves the neighbor ; the Buddhist, because he commis-
erates the man. True moraHty seeks to create some-
what ; but Buddhistic moraHty is mere renunciation
and inaction : its virtue is in leaving undone." ^
"Vice had no intrinsic hideousness, and virtue was
but another name for calculating prudence ; while love
was little more than animal sympathy. The Budd-
hist could only say, * I must : ' he could not say, ^ I
ought."'(!)2
So St. Hilaire knows no end of charges against this
faith of three hundred millions of souls. It is " skep-
ticism, nihilism, atheism, materialism, fatalism ; un-
belief in the good in man, in the world; without notion
of duty, or distinction of man from vilest matter."*^
Yet he is constrained to add, after all, concerning it:
" By the way of pain, as by every other, man may
arrive at God. The way is more grievous for our
weakness, but it is no less sure."* How much wiser
this word than those sweeping condemnations, without
insight, sympathy, or faith !
Buddhism, on its side, may have something to say
in regard to the morality of Christian and Jewish the-
ology. And the conversations of the " Modern Budd-
hist," before referred to, with Dr. GutzlafF and other
missionaries, afford a good idea of the impression made
by much of it on his simple rationalism.
" How," asks this modern Buddhist, " can we assent
to the doctrine that a man can be received into heaven
while his nature is yet full of impurity, by virtue of
sprinkling his head with water, or cutting off by cir-
» Wuttke, Gesch. d. Heidenth.y II. 576-7.
2 Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters^ I. 239.
" Du Bouddhisnie (Paris, 1855). * Du Bouddhisme, p. 236.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 663
cumcision a small piece of his skin? I do not see
that any one who is baptized nowadays is free from
the 'curse of Adam,' or escapes toil and grief, and
sickness and death, more than those who are not bap-
tized. So far as I see, the unconverted flourish ; but
the converted are continually in debt and bondage.
They continually pray to God ; but it seems nothing
happens according to their prayer." He combats
eternal damnation on the ground that " there is no
being who has not done something good ; and that it
would be to deny to good works the same power of
producing fruit that is ascribed to evil works."
"How," he asks further, " can we believe that God
made this inconceivable multitude of immense stars in
one day, yet required five days to make this little
world, this mere drop in the great ocean?" "And
why does your scriptural account of the creation differ
from the teaching of philosophers who show that the
world is a revolving globe?" .
" The Lord Buddha taught, saying : ' All you who are in doubt
whether there be a future life had better believe there is one.'
" ' Do not believe merely because you have heard, but, when of
your own conscience you know a thing to be evil, abstain from it.
Do not believe because the written statement of some old sage is
produced : nor, in what you have fancied, think that because an
idea is extraordinary it must have been implanted by a divine
being. You must know of yourselves.'
11 1
The proselyting energy of Buddhism is sufficient
evidence that its moral ideal was far from „ , .
Proseli'tism.
being a merely passive one. Unquestionably
its purpose was the taming of wild races by gentle-
ness and endurance, and the deliverance of the masses
in India from a social tyranny which violent resistance
1 Mod. Buddhist, in The Wheel 0/ the Law.
664 BUDDHISM.
would have only made more cruel. In these respects,
certainly, its passive qualities were not without their
uses. All religions depend in large measure for their
special elements on local and temporary circum-
stances. One of these conditions determinative of
the tone of Buddhism deserves special study. -
Its love, we must remember, has a vast background
Inspiration o^ paiu. Pity was the inspiration of these
of pity. early philanthropists. Buddha is filled with
pity for the multitudes sunk in perplexity and pain ;
and it is this feeling of compassion which conquers
his own fears, and even decides him to accept his
mission.^ That " helpfulness towards the neighbor,
hospitality to the stranger, reverence before age,
gentleness towards servants, forbearance towards
conquered enemies," which made the burden of his
teaching, flowed from a keen sense of the wants and
miseries of human destiny. Hence the stress laid on
kindness as due to the fallen and weak. " Of the
whole two hundred and fifty virtuous deeds, the high-
est is to spare a living being." ^ Hence the legends
of Gotama, as well as the Buddhist fable-books, which
push this perception of the possibilities of suffering so
far as to make light of all actual forms of it in one's
own person. Their Oriental extravagance is not with-
out a symbolic basis of dignity, absurd as it may look
to us. Thus he is related to have met a tigress, too
weak with hunger to attack him : whereat he tore off
his own skin, and suffered her to lick the blood from
it, and then put himself into her claws to be torn in
pieces.
" When a good man is reproached, he is to think within himself:
* These are certainly good people since they do not beat me.' If
1 St. Hilaire, p. 33. * Wuttke, II. 581.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 665
they begin to beat him with fists, he will say, ' They are mild and
good, because they do not beat me with clubs.' If they proceed to
this, he says, ' They are excellent, for they do not strike me dead.'
If they kill him, he dies saying, ' How good they are in freeing me
from this miserable body ! ' "
Certainly persecution was wasted on resistance like
this. "The Cynic," says Epictetus, also no senti-
mentalist, " must love those who beat him, as the
father, as the brother of all."
We can easily pardon excesses in the mythologic play
of this instinct of forgiveness, when we find ^he nobility
that the spirit of love is really the one creative °^ ^°''^-
force of Buddhist literature. The legends of Buddha,
in all their extravagance, are filled with a certain di-
vine innocence, and a childlike love that seems to
have no conception of any limit to its own power.
We can afford to let childish fancy run its wild way,
for the sake of the many refreshing stories of Budd-
ha's mildness towards his enemies ; overcoming evil
with good, and reconciling hostile armies and divided
friends. 1
"When surrounded by all his retinue of followers, and glorified
by the whole world, he never thought, ' These privileges are mine '; '
but did good, just as the shower brings gladness, yet reflects not on
its work." ^
What delicacy of sentiment is in these proverbs,
ascribed to him ! —
" The true sage dwells on earth as the bee that gathers sweetness
with his mouth and wings, without harming the color and perfume
of the flower."^
" The swans [wild fowl ?] go on the path of the sun : they go
through the ether, by their miraculous power [instinct]. So are the
* Hardy, passim. * Ibid., 374. ' Dhammapada^ 49.
666 BUDDHISM.
wise led out of this world, when they have conquered Mara (the
tempter) and his train." *
" The heart of love and faith accompanying good actions spreads
a beneficent shade through all the worlds." ^
Fahian relates that Buddha, fleeing his Brahmanical
enemies, met a poor Brahman asking alms. Having
nothing to give, he had himself bound and delivered
over to his enemies, that his ransom might serve as alms
for this member of a class who were persecutors of his
faith. The Burmese relate that, hearincj all livincT
beings singing his praises, Gotama called Ananda,
and said : "All this is unworthy of me : no such vain
homage can accomplish the commands of the law.
They who do righteously pay me most honor, and
please me most."^
Passing into his nirvana^ this Master leaves his
^, disciples assurance that there is a divinity in
Tne endless ^ •'
process of man that for ever works for universal and
remedial ends. " When I am gone, O Ananda !
you must not think there is no Buddha. For my
words shall be your Buddha."
He has uttered his song of triumph over the
senses : —
" Painful are repeated transmigrations ;
But now have I beheld the architect.
Thou shalt not build me another house :
Thy rafters are broken, thy roof-timbers scattered.
My mind is detached from all.
I have attained the extinction of desire." ^
His accumulated merits, the kai'ma^ or embodied
powers of his past moral attainments, flow forth, as
* Dhamm., 175. * BuddJiagosha?s Parables, p. i6. ' Bigandet, p. 299.
* Hardy's Manual, p. 180. "The architect" here is simply a poetic expression for
the causes of successive birtlis. Miiller's DhamniaJ)., p. ciii.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 667
if set free from private limits, into the worlds, and
renew all living creatures.
He passes away, and there is no return in the flesh.
" Freed from illusions of joy and of pain,
He comes not and goes not, He comes not again."
But not for that reason is the eternal law of release
by love to fail. " Its substance exists for ever without
change." Nirvana cannot touch this essentially human
and inevitable force. The process is repeated, after
his assumption of it, as it had been again and again
before his day. "One lamp is extinguished," say the
Chinese Buddhists, "but the light is not put out; for
the flame is imparted to another." Men press by
myriads towards the goal of power, to the verge of
Buddhahood, with like stress of redeeming sacrifice."^
" Genuine Buddhism has no priesthood : the saint
despises the priest, and scorns the aid of mediators."''^
Another and another Buddha comes, with the old
blessing and promise. It is the prolific virtue of
human nature that is here affirmed, the endless har-
vest of the heart. The millions of incomparable
Buddhas are the throbs of its eternal love. So it was
that the East conceived this love ; and men rejoiced
in it, dreamed of it,* lived, toiled, and died, by faith
in it.
Finally, incarnation itself, in the Buddhist system,
is conceived as moral incentive, not as theo- ^
Incarnation
lo2;ical dog^ma. Gotama, like all the Buddhas moral and
before him, is originally a man. And in viola-
tion of all theories of mere outward fatalism, having
attained deity, he chooses to throw himself anew into
the chain of causes and effects, for the deliverance
* See Wilson's Essays on Religion of the Hindus^ II. 361. 2 Hodgson.
668 BUDDHISM.
of mankind from pain. Love here pronounces itself
lord of Fate. Buddha assumes human suffering and
death with moral freedom, and from inward spiritual
energy. The Man heco^nes God again ^ through self-
devoting will. And this is not regarded as miracu-
lous nor exceptional ; but as natural power and law
of life, since all other men may do the same.^
"There is no difference between the true saints and Buddha
himself. All are Buddhas."^
Nor is this faith without its forward look. One future
The coming I^uddha is already foreknown, and all the sects
good. have honored this hope of the ages. After
five thousand years, Gotama will be followed by Mait-
reya, the Compassionate One,*^ who will restore all
that is lost in these sad deeps of illusion and vanity,
and rehabilitate virtue and bliss. ^ Fahian found
Maitreya honored in India in the fourth century of
our era ; and Hiouen Tshang's prayer was that he
might dwell in this redeemer's bosom, and love and
serve him for ever.^
In fine, where we had been led to expect suppres-
Compensa- siou of all moral energy, we find a heroic
tion. spirit of universal love. Must we not recog-
nize that one and the same law of providential educa-
tion covers all races and religions, when we see the
crushing moral discouragements that are so commonly
believed inherent in the Buddhist doctrines of fate and
of merit thus counteracted and compensated, and the
nobler powers saved?
As in previous reactions against the priesthood,
» Wuttke, II. 567.
* Hodgson, Sketch of Buddhism (Transact. R. A. S., II. 243).
* Compare Persian Mitra (mercy). * Koeppen, I. 327. 6 st. Hilaire, p. 293.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 669
recorded in the Brahmanas, the protestants had be-
longed to the Kshattriya race,^ so Gotama also Relation to
was a prince. We should infer from the ^"''^"^^^'''
earlier Sutras that he did not undertake the definite
abolition of caste, which indeed does not seem to have
been strictly organized in Magadha, where his preach-
ing first found success.'^ But he ignored it in the
choice of a wife and of disciples : he rejected its prin-
ciple in the whole substance of his gospel ; and the
first compiler of his precepts, Upali, was a Sudra.
Caste, for Gotama, could have no meaning. It was
simply not worth his recognition : it faded before the
common destiny, the common need, the common hope.
He aimed at no political revolution. His very phil-
osophy was rooted, like the mystical banyan, in the
natural soil of Hindu thought.^ It developed this so
as to show that the only solution of its dark and deep
riddles was in love and labor. His protest proved
that the severest social constraints must bring reaction
to liberty and brotherhood in some form ; that the
brain cannot be kept from asserting its need of the
heart. Thus, although a natural result of Hindu in-
tellect, Buddha's gospel struck at all aristocratic foun-
dations in Hindu society. So far as the latter had
become organized in the form we find in Manu, it
must have been speedily shorn, in large m.easure, of
many despotic elements, by the immense energy
of this levelling and humanizing force ; and the state
of India, as described by later authorities, Greek and
Chinese, affords striking evidence of the fact. This
thorough democracy fully rejected the theoretic basis
on which castes were founded, and substituted others,
which could allow them at best only a temporary
1 MuUer, Sansk. Lit.^ p. 80. 2 Weber, Varies.^ p. 250. » Ibid., pp. 248-250.
670 BUDDHISM.
authority. They were declared to have grown up
accidentally, or else by free suffrage, setting individ-
uals to special functions for the common good ; all
men being originally of one race, " all brahmas," and
equally pure, — Sudras, for instance, being simply
persons who chose to live by the chase, — and the
later subordinations having no warrant in divine or
human law.-^ They were also closely associated with
a supposed fall of man from primal purity.^ From
the very beginning of Buddhism, the Sudra had equal
honor, as a convert, with the Kshattriya or Brahman.
All that the pride of thought had hoarded should go
to the most despised. The more heavily an exclusive
tradition presses, the more radical will be the remedy.
The whole Brahmanical system was put to the test of
practical service. Buddhism, as we have said, made
democratic application of every product of Hindu
thought.^ It insisted that this demand of mankind
and the age should be heard, and that the dead Veda
should bury its dead. Buddha, musing in the shadow
of his fig-tree, under vow " not to rise till he had found
the way to end the misery of the world," learned that
more was to be done than muse.
The celestial dream of strife subdued and hatred
abolished, and the joyless return of the " bonds of ac-
tion " brought to an end, and pain and death con-
quered for ever, should not come to a few dreamers,
reposing under the banyans till moss grew over them,
but was also for the miserable Sudras and Chandala
outcasts, who, hopeless of any release from their social
destiny, came to gaze in awe at these absorbed saints
and bring them fruits and herbs. So he arose, and
1 See Jonrn. R. A . S., vol. vi. p. 361. Hardy, Manual, ch. iii.
2 Wuttke, II. 534. • Lassen, II. 440.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 67 1
went out to preach his " mercy to all ; " ^ and bade all
idle saints get up and come out of their ascetic seclu-
sion, and do likewise. What a tocsin to ring in the
old slumbering woods of India ! The idle saints got
up in dismay and came out, but it was for the most
part, if the Buddhist Sutras and traditions report truly,
not to preach a gospel, but to silence the bold reformer,
by force of words, if not of arms. Doubtless there was
effort, as there always is under such temptation for
the functionaries of an old religious system, to excite
the ignorant and fanatical against him, and to cast
him forth, root and branch. And yet we must be-
ware of ascribing too much of the spirit of violence
and persecution to the Brahmanical priesthood. It
would appear that, on the whole, the revolution was
peaceful ; its progress was extremely rapid, as if the
soil favored it ; in a few centuries it had mastered
most of the Hindu states ; and more than a thousand
years elapse from the time of Buddha, before the
persecution arises which expels his followers from
India.
In truth this radicalism was a powerful appeal to all
that was earnest and real in the old belief Brahmanical
itself, and naturally found a deep response, sympathies.
All the Buddhist books significantly record that Brah-
ma himself sustained and encouraged Gotama when
oppressed by the magnitude of the work before him,
and urged him to open the door of nirvana to the
people of Magadha, who were benighted and despond-
ent, expecting all things to go to ruin and nature itself
to fail.^ The new interpretation schooled the Brahman
in principles which he had been affirming without com-
* Burnouf, p. ig8.
* Feer in Journ. Asiat. (1866), p. 95 ; Bigandet, p. 105 ; Lalitav., &c.
672 BUDDHISM.
prehending them. The root of his own rehgion was
in this democratic Buddha, after all ; for eternal truths
belong to human nature and must go to the people,
and pantheism knows no essential distinction of souls.
The brave preacher plainly convicted the Brahman-
ical fraternity of abusing their own doctrine : perhaps
he reproved their leaders for hypocrisy and charla-
tanry,^ with salutary effect upon the single-minded.
• He was a better Hindu than the best of them ; for he
saw that the principle of all Hindu philosophy —
" knowing truth is in becoming it " — forbade mo-
nopoly, and honored mind everywhere. He was a
better Aryan than the best of them ; for he understood
that right of mind to test the traditional gods which
was hinted so simply when the Vedic herdsman called
on Indra and Agni, in the olden time, to come down
and sit beside him on the sacrificial grass.
The hardest saying for functionaries of the Veda
and of caste to accept, was doubtless his warn-
Protest ^ ^ '
against au- ing that the world did not want their exclusive
* °"^^' . mediation with eternal truth. Yet this also had
been heard from Kapila and others, and rationalism
has always found an echo in Hindu society. Buddha
was clear and unmistakable on such points. " The Ve-
das," he nmst have said, " are no absolute authority for
me ; my truth is of my own experience ; the old rishis
cannot enlighten me much about my duties to this
living, suffering world. I have probed their dogmas
and disciplines, and find them inadequate. To every
soul, not to the ' twice-born ' only, its own burden ; and
through its own wisdom and virtue, its release. ^ Your
laws forbid the people to read the Vedas ; but better
than all that books can teach is it to see that there is no
* St. Hilaire, p. 43. * Dhammapaday vv. 165, 169, 3S0.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 673
distinction of persons in the sorrow that besets human
life; and this misery both you, and those you bar out
from sacred things, must be taught to dispel. Come
all who will, the saving truth is free. Your Brah-
manical hermitages are not the best asylums : the
truth that delivers men from evil, that is the best
asylum.^ Gather others to hear of the way to liber-
ation ; gather them into schools, fraternities, monas-
teries ; gather them in the city and the country : let
every soul be fed. Your fastings, sacrifices, repe-
titions of sacred texts, will not open your eyes nor
loose your bonds : they are vain without love. Your
animal sacrifices are against your own theory of mercy
to all creatures, and the sacredness of the One Life in
all life. You rank by caste : I proclaim the natural
order, the oldest and best first. You are seeking
your own deliverance : I demand the deliverance of
mankind."
Burnouf has translated an old Pali-Sutra, in which
the reformer condemns the habits of luxury and the
superstitious divinations for gain into which the Brah-
manic priesthood had fallen, as well as the passion
for the theatre and for games of chance ; a very
Puritan reaction it would seem.^ His protest against
intemperance and sensuality was uncompromising.
Such the substance of Buddha's criticism, according
to the oldest Sutras, which go back, in written form^
no further than to the time of king Asoka, 250 b.c ;
but which were then, according to universal tradition,
formed out of earlier materials by the Buddhist teach-
ers, and unquestionably represent the purport of the
teacher's gospel.^
^ Burnouf, i86. * Lotus, p. 464.
3 See Koeppen, I. 184; Weber, Vorles.y 253; Lassen, II. 8; Miiller, Sansk. Lit.,
260-301.
43
674 BUDDHISM.
If this aroused opposition, it must also have stirred
much profound sympathy in the best of the Brahman-
ical schools. But that so searching a reform could
have found foothold at once, and marched on to the
ascendency it seems to have won within a few centu-
ries in the greater part of India, is proof that Bi'ah-
manical ecclesiasticisin in no wise shaded the decker
currents of Hindu feeling and life. The scope
of its work can hardly be better given than in the
language of Koeppen, to whose admirable volumes all
future research on the subject must be incalculably
indebted : —
" It put spiritual brotherhood in place of hereditary priesthood ;
personal merit in place of distinctions of birth ; human intelli-
gence in place of authoritative Vedas ; the self-perfected sage in
place of the gods of the old theology ; morality in place of ritual-
ism ; a popular doctrine of righteousness in place of scholasticism ;
a monastic rule in place of isolated anchoret life ; and a cosmopol-
itan spirit in place of the old national exclusiveness."
That the strife of ecclesiastical Brahmanism aorainst
Buddhist reform must have been the main fact
Signs of
peaceful dis- of Hiudu history after the sixth centurj^ B.C.
would seem to be obvious. Yet there is no
positive record of its being stained with bloodshed ;
and what little we do know of the far-away thousand
years of Buddhist history in India but confirms our
faith that these preachers of peace and love knew how
to master the world by fulfilling their own precepts ;
while, on the other hand, if the Brahmanical party
appealed to violence to put down the heretical sect,
they have destroyed all evidences of the fact. The
Greek writers, who are our main authorities for the
state of Indian society from the time of Alexander
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 675
down to the Christian era, give no hint of strife be-
tween the two forms of faith.
Their descriptions of the religious caste, or class,
apply to the Buddhists as fairly as to the Brahmans ;
in some respects, even better. Arrian, for instance,
reports that it was open to all who chose to enter it ; ^
which would lead us to suppose that Brahmanical ex-
clusiveness had quite given way to Buddhistic liberty.
Nearchus, a companion of Alexander, relates that
women took part in the philosophical discussions of
the Brahmans ; and this fact again would seem to
bring the two religions upon common ground. Strabo
simply speaks of the PramncB^ a " disputatious [ration-
alistic] " sect opposed to the Brahmans. ^ Clement of
Alexandria, in the second century, describes both by
name, but, again, without intimation of hostility be-
tween them.^ Coming down to the fifth century after
Christ, we have the testimony of the "Chinese Pilgrim,"
Fahian,^ followed by that of Hiouen Thsang in the
1 Hist, hid., XII.
2 De Situ Orbis, XV. Pramanam is logical proof, as opposed to revelation.
8 Strotnata, I. c. xv.
* Three Chinese Buddhists, Fabian, Soungyun, and Hiouen Thsang, traversed India at
intervals of about one hundred years ; and the information they afford us of the religious
condition of that country from the fifth to the seventh century is of the highest value. The
destruction of Buddhist works in the Chinese civil wars led to the mission of Fahian, which
lasted fifteen years, and covered thirty kingdoms (including a visit to Ceylon), all of which
he describes with great simplicity and fidelity, especially whatever was consecrated by
Buddhist tradition. His great work, the Fokoiteki^ is of the highest reputation in China ;
md the pious zeal that sustained him through great and continual perils places him beside
the most devoted apostles of other faiths. His wonderful record has been brought before
the western world by the labors of Remusat, Landresse, and Beal, and is of inestimable
value as a source of light on the progress of Buddhism, and as an epoch in Hindu history
otherwise wholly in the dark. Of equal importance is the pilgrimage of Hiotien Thsang,
whom similar Buddhistic needs in China sent forth in like manner, to the holy places of his
faith, to obtain its sacred books and learn its fortunes. The result was a more detailed, as
well as a more extended, description than Fabian's ; comprehending the whole of India,
covering nearly twenty years of time (a.c. 630-650), and more than a hundred distinct states,
of which he sought to give a full account, geographical, social, political, historical, and re-
ligious. His zeal in collecting sacred writings was prodigious. He is said to have returned
to China with no less than six hundred books, translations of which were carefully made
676 BUDDHISM.
seventh ; between which two epochs Brahmanism
seems to have been gradually advancing, though in
no wise gaining the day over Buddhism. But Fahian
does not speak of any thing like open collision be-
tween these religions. He finds the worship of Budd-
ha everywhere flourishing ; nearly all the kings of
northern India honoring his priests, whose temples
were magnificent, and whose numbers were, as Soung-
yun afterwards describes them, like "the gathering of
clouds." The Brahmans were "heretics," but, except
in Java, not, as a whole, offering serious resistance to the
true faith. He even mentions the adoration of Buddha
by Brahmans of " great wisdom and purity," in the
old time, and ascribes to them zeal in the preservation
of his relics ; nowhere speaking of their heresy with
bitterness or hatred. Soungyun did not hesitate to go
to the Brahmans to obtain charms for the relief of his
mind. And, in Hiouen Thsang's time, the two re-
ligions were side by side in all northern India, that of
Gotama greatly in the ascendent. Still no report is
given of any thing like physical strife ; though the
zealous apostle, upheld by Buddhist kings, found
plenty of opponents, and gained great glory in refut-
ing them. These opponents were in fact for the most
part not Brahmans at all, but Buddhists like himself,
though of a different school. And it is on their heresy
and presented by imperial command. No reader of his life and labors can withhold admira-
tion of the singleness and purity of their purpose, however clouded by superstition, and the
beauty of the spirit in which he investigates the beliefs, of others. He was as familiar with
the writings of the Brahmans as with those of his own faith, and as carefully collected them
for the enlightenment of his countrymen. St. Hilaire calls him one of the "elect souls in
history, few of whom have been able to carry disinterestedness so far towards that limit
where nothing is known but the pure idea of goodness." The substance of his record has
recently been translated by Stanislas Julien. These " Chinese Pilgrims " must hereafter bo
the main authorities, as regards both mythology and history, for the period just preced-
ing the revival of Brahmanism and the expulsion of the Buddhists from India.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 677
that he lays most emphasis, apparently holding the
Brahmans as of smaller account.
But the most noticeable feature of the relations of
these different faiths in the time of Hiouen Thsano; is
the absolute toleration and even mutual respect with
which their controversies were conducted. They were
in no sense a war of passions, but a sober and peace-
ful discussion, and bear the marks of an enlightened
love of free inquiry and faith in its results. A "king
of kings," we are told, assembles the rulers who paid
him tribute, and representatives of all the different
religions in his dominions, together with the orphans
and the poor, upon a " Great Field of Alms." There
he celebrates a high festival, at which vast treasures
w^ere distributed, according to Buddhist custom, among
the needy. First the various forms of worship were
solemnly inaugurated in due order, by their respective
disciples, on successive days, with equal respect from
all. Next came distribution of gifts to the poor of
each, in proportion to their numbers, — to the Budd-
hists, the Brahmans, the heretics, the mendicants of far
countries. This prodigal charity is described as last-%
ing for weeks ; its care for the most indigent and
friendless classes, alone, occupying a full month. The
same monarch, Siladitya, holds a grand religious con-
ference at which two thousand Brahmans are present,
and free opportunity is given to all advocates. At this
the ardent Hiouen Thsang himself presides, is pro-
tected against personal enemies by the determination
of the king to see fair play, and makes many converts
to his own belief. The Brahmans, .however, do not
seem to have entered the lists, to any great extent, in
these controversies. Their religion, we should infer
from Hiouen Thsang, had but little hold on the people ;
678 BUDDHISM.
and Buddhism was still in the full confidence of a fixed
supremacy, which its principles forbade it to use in a
spirit of persecution. This real mastery of the Hindu
mind it had maintained, according to these excellent
Chinese apostles, for the whole ten or twelve centu-
ries since the ascension of Buddha into nirvana. And,
during all this period, w^e have, in fact, no record of
hostile relations with Brahmanism. Yet within a
very short period of Hiouen Thsang's mission, certainly
not more than two or three centuries, Buddhism, as a
distinctive faith, appears to have been expelled from
India, and its followers dispersed into such other lands
as had proved accessible to their principles.^ How far
this was owing to a revival of Brahmanism in the
ninth century by its great leader, Sankara Acharya,
and how far to differences between Buddhism and
other sects like the Jainas, into whom its free spirit
had passed, is not easy to determine. But it is a
singular phenomenon, in view of our Chinese account
of the firm position of the faith but a few centuries
before, and of the peaceful hold it had maintained
from the beginning.
This remarkable record of an almost undisputed
DoubtM in- asccndcucy has led to the inference that
ferences. Buddhism was iu fact the older religion of the
two ; and that the strict Brahmanical church is but of
recent growth, originating mainly in the movement of
Sankara Acharya.'-^ There are evidences that caste at
least did not stand organized on strict Brahmanical
principles during many centuries subsequent to Buddha.
Thus Arrian's account of the classes does not at all
correspond with these principles. Fahian describes
"^ Lassen, IV. 708.
* Sykes, R- A. Journal, vol. vi. Wilson, Intrvd. to Vishnu Pur&na.
ETHICS AND HUMANITIES. 679
the four classes^ in Ceylon as gathering to hear the law
of Buddha three times a month. He found countries
whose kings were Sudras. The oldest inscriptions
in India are Buddhist, and the oldest coins too are
marked with Buddhist symbols. Prinsep satisfied
himself that the earliest monarchs of India are not
associated with Brahmanical creeds or dynasties.
Finally, to justify the inference that Brahmanism was
of late origin, the Laws of Manu have been, though
on insufficient evidence, brought down to a recent date,
or, perhaps more correctly, referred to a small tract of
country inhabited by an isolated body of priests.
Although this reasoning would seem to carry us too
far, it must at least be allowed that Buddhistic „ ,
Results.
liberty is traceable far back in Hindu history,
beyond the era of Buddha ; though not distinctly visi-
ble as a special religious movement till after Brah-
manical ideas and even institutions had been developed
out of the study of the Vedas in the hands of a priest-
hood. As for the four castes of the orthodox system,
we have seen that it is doubtful if they ever had posi-
tive and permanent reality as a social organization, in
the strict form in which they stand in the ancient
codes ; and that from the beginning they were subject
to continual interference and modification from im-
pulses of freedom and humanity.
It is to be observed also that the word "Buddha" must
be as old as "Brahman." Both are primeval, Buddha and
and grew up together, I am inclined to be- brahman.
lieve, as expressions respectively for the rational^ or
human side of religion, and for the siifernal^ or divine.
The one stands for knowledge, the other for prayer.
Both these tendencies of course entered into the
* Beal (^Translation, p. 155) supposes that classes of believers are here meant.
68o BUDDHISM.
substance of the faith which preceded Gotama ; and,
at whatever special epochs the one or the other may
have ripened into a definite system, the elements of
the two great religions of India are united by mutual
interaction at every step in the history of the national
mind.
IV.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN.
nPHE name " Buddha " is derived from the root
"*- btidh, to know, and means "enlightened," Name and
"wakened out of dreams into certainty." Its ^^^®-
wide currency, both in history and mythology, ^ indi-
cates great energy of spiritual reaction amidst the
inertia of Oriental faith. It was the name for mind
in all Hindu philosophy, and the title of honor given
to the sage. In the Brahmanical as well as the Budd-
histic writings, this is a common term for sainthood.*-^
"The Buddha," like "the Christ," is thus not a per-
sonal name, but an official title ; yet conveying a less
exclusive sense than the latter word has received from
Christendom, being applied to innumerable ideal per-
sonages, a series reaching through incalculable time.
This latitude in the use of the name is one cause of
the differences among Buddhists themselves, as to the
epoch of the special Buddha to whom the Hindu relig-
ious reformation is referred. The Thibetans have as
many as fourteen' accounts of the time of his death,
ranging between 2422 B.C. and 546 B.C. The Chi-
nese and Japanese insist on the tenth century, and the
Singhalese on the sixth. This last date (543 B.C.)
substantiated by an agreement among the southern
' Pococke, India in Greece. ^ Weber, Varies., pp. 27, i6i.
684 BUDDHISM.
Buddhists, has been generally accepted by European
scholars as approximately correct.^ Yet Miiller and
Lassen have shown that dogmatic requirements, re-
puted prophecies, and other errors, have had much to
do with fixing the recognized dates, after all.
His Sutras (sentences or discourses) were collected
Written after his death by the earliest synod of his fol-
records. lowcrs.^ But tlicsc havc been to an extent
recast b}' somewhat later hands, and Miiller believes
that the story of Buddhism down to its -political
triumph, in the third century B.C., was supplied out
of the heads of its disciples in that epoch, rather
than from authentic records.^ Yet, in common with
other scholars, he regards the substance of the oldest
Sutras as good material for history, accepting the
main features of their report of Gotama, notwith-
standing Professor Wilson's skepticism even as to his
existence.* St. Hilaire, following the Lalitavistara,
one of the earliest works of the canon, ^ for the period
of his youth, and combining various Sutras with the
reports of the " Chinese Pilgrims " for that of his
ministry, has endeavored to separate truth from fiction,
and to present a life of the reformer free from mytho-
logical additions, — just as Baur, Renan, Schenkel,
and others, have sought to eliminate similar tributes of
the religious imagination from the records of the life
of Jesus. It is manifest, however, that there are even
greater difficulties in the way of this effort than in that
of extracting pure history from the Christian gospels.
1 Lassen^ II. 57-60; St. Hilaire; Biirnouf; Weber, Vor/es., p. 251. Miiller says 477
B.C. See Sansk- Lit-, pp. 260-301.
2 Koeppen, II. lo ; Lassen, II. 8. 8 Sansk. Lit.^ p. 260.
* Sansk. Lit., 79, S2 ; Chips, I. 217, 219.
" Dating beyond all question earlier than the Christian era (St. Hil., Introd., xiv.; Miiller,
Chips, I. 205), and translated out of Sanskrit into Chinese in the first century of our era.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 685
Of the use of writing for religious purposes in the
earliest ages of Buddhism, we have no evi- , ..
'^^ _ , Wnting.
dence. The traditions of the first three coun-
cils do not mention it, and the monumental edicts of
Asoka, which belong to the third century B.C., are the
oldest inscriptions as yet found in India. "The Tri-
-pitaka, or Three Baskets" (the Buddhist Gospels) —
comprising Sutras (discourses), Vinaya (discipline),
and Abhidharma (metaphysics) — current in the Pali
language in Ceylon, contains much of the oral tra-
dition of the oldest times ; but it cannot be referred as
a whole to a period previous to the' time of Asoka.
Of more marked originality is the Nepalese collection,
written in Sanskrit, and in corresponding though not
identical divisions. Much of this also shows signs
of elaboration, only possible in an advanced stage of
monastic life.^ The Pali history of Ceylon refers the
Tripitaka to the close of the "period of inspiration''
(106-74, B.C.). The Dhammapada bears stronger
marks of originality, and its sentences are evidently
collected from primitive sources. They answer to the
logia^ which Matthew is reported in early Christian
traditions to have preserved, and which, so far as they
are discoverable in the gospel now bearing his name,
must form our earliest data for the life of Jesus.
That other enlightened persons received the ven-
erated name of " Buddha " in earlier times, and in
regions north of India, is very probable. The theory
of Buddhism affirms an "apostolic succession," de-
scending from rerqotest ages ; and Gotama himself is
quoted in proof of it. The name Tathdgata con-
1 Bumouf, p. 125; Wassiljew, Le BmiddJiisme, p. 19; Pillon, in L'^Annee Philoso-
j>hique for 1S6S, p. 37S-382 ; Miiller, Chips, I. 196 ; Sanks. Lit.', p. 520 ; Feer in yotirnal
Asiatique for 1867 and 1870.
6S6 BUDDHISM.
stantly given him signifies " he who has pursued the
path of his predecessors." Fahian reports three earlier
Buddhas, describes a tower in Oude, where the reHcs
of one of them were preserved, and even quotes here-
tics who rejected Gotama in the name of these earlier
saints. He was supposed to have chosen the special
scene of his labors in accordance with a proverb that
"a Buddha must always be turning the wheel of the
law at Benares."^
Whatever becomes of the claims of Buddhism to
an ancient "apostolic succession," there can be no
doubt that the distinctive revolution in Hindu thought,
we are now describing, was embodied in a real re-
former ; and that his moral traits, if not his words
and actions, have been, on the whole, truly handed
down by his earliest disciples, whose testimonies on
this point substantially agree. ^
They report him a prince of the royal race of the
Personal Sakyas, and the great solar race of the Go-
traditions. tamas ; — a truly "Messianic" origin. He is
born at Kapilavastu, a city of Magadha, the centre of
heroic and sacred legend. His true name is said to
have been Siddhdrta^ " the victorious ; " but this is
more probably a later title of honor, like Buddha,
given him by disciples. At the age of thirty, oppressed
by the sense of human misery from disease, old age, and
death, and the transiency of all things, and absorbed
by the longing to deliver mankind from these evils
and the successive future births which involved their
return, he abdicates all his royal rights, escapes with
difficulty from his father's court, exchanges his robes
* Accessible authorities are, for northern Buddhism, Beal's Biiddhist Pilgritns^ Bur-
nouPs Lotus de la BoTine Lot, and Foucaux's Lalitavistara ; and for southern, Tumour's
Mahava7isa.
* Lassen, II. 65-75; St. Hilaire, oh. i; Duncker, II. iSo.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 687
for the dress of a woodsman, and gives himself up to
meditation. He studies at the feet of renowned Brah-
mans, but soon exhausts the wisdom of their Brah-
manas and Upanishads ; yet consents to try the ascetic
. path, and pursues its discipHnes for six years, attended
by five Brahman disciples. But, after confounding
all teachers and overcoming all temptations, he is
no nearer content: the way is not found. Not so is
human misery to be met, not so to be followed to its
root. To waste the body does not enlighten the
mind. He abandons fasting and penance, to the horror
of his Brahman followers, who flee from his blooming
countenance, as if it proved him possessed by an evil
spirit. Refreshed by food, he reclines on a carpet
of grass-blades under one of those mystical fig-trees,
or fiffalas^ whose heart-shaped leaves, attached to
slender stalks, and shivering in the lightest breeze,
seem to have been suggestive to the Hindu of the
fluctuation of all outward things ; resolved never to
rise again till the way of emancipation shall have be-
come plain ; and there, motionless for a day and a
night, a silent, waiting mind, he receives at daybreak
the illumination which makes him the "Awakened
One." He is now not only "Sakyamuni," the Her-
mit-prince, but a "Buddha" of salvation.
Yet he is overwhelmed at the thought of the great-
ness of the task before him. To teach thoughtless
and ignorant multitudes that ignorance and thought-
lessness were the root of all evil ; to lead their minds
through the long chain-work of causes and effects, be-
ginning with " ignora7ice^''' and ending in the woes of
existence, — by appreciation of which they could free
themselves into the path of nirvana^ seems impossible ;
and he despairs. But all nature and soul hasten to
688 BUDDHISM.
animate and urge forward the redeeming power for
which they long. The very gods, Brahma and Indra,
all that men have trusted in, confess their own defect,
and entreat him to take courage and reveal the mighty
secret of release.
His early preaching in Magadha is a failure. The
Sutras tell of sixty days of doubts, temptations, exalta-
tions, discouragements ; of the celebrated doctors to
whom he appealed in vain ; of the outcry of heresy,
and even insanity, that arose against him ; of the ne-
cessity to leave his own countr}^ where he had no
honor, and "turn the wheel of the law" at the holy
city of Varanasi (Benares) .
From this moment all is victory : all things are pre-
pared for him. Kings greet him with honor, and
provide structures for the propagation of the faith ;
and the people rejoice in the waters of life at last
dispensed freely.
The world is renewed by this gospel revealed in the
stillness of meditation, this solution of the problem of
human misery by freedom, thoughtfulness, and love.
We see the man who has dethroned the gods, for forty
years journeying through northern India, preaching
and reforming, clearing men's minds and opening their
hearts and doing wonderful works ; converting kings,
saints, and scholars, and drawing the multitudes by the
charm of his personal appearance and intercourse, his
eloquence and his matchless virtues.
In his eightieth year he remembers that it is the
time appointed for him to enter into 7iirvdna; predicts
to his disciples that in three months he shall be taken
from them ; consoles their sorrow ; admonishes them
to fresh zeal, and bids them gather up his precepts
when he is gone, and proclaim them to the whole
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 6S9
world. At the appointed time and place, he dies in a
holy grove, surrounded by his chosen apostles, exhort-
ing them " to remember that all things are passing
away, and to prepare themselves quickly for what is
imperishable." They in turn promise that they will
preach his word fearlessly, enduring to the end.^
After the burning of his body, the strife of eight
kmgs for his relics is appeased only by Ananda's ad-
monition to remember the spirit of the master, and by
their distribution among; the whole.
The legend of Gotama follows the great common
track of Oriental inspiration, familiar in its Analogies
^ general features to all students of Comparative "J^^^chrS*
Religion ; though in his case profusely heaped tian legend,
with the flowers of a tropical fancy. Its resemblance
to the New Testament mythology, limited of course
by contrasts of style and detail growing out of the dif-
ference of race, is yet sufficient to show decisively
that the elements available for the mythopoeic faculty
in different religions are substantially the same. We
have the story ^ of the Buddha's celestial choice to enter
the world for its salvation ; of his strict fulfilment of all
the fore-ordained conditions necessary to meet the ideal
of Buddhahood, as to nationality, family, times and
places of birth, and ministry ; of his mother's vir-
ginity, and the descent of the divine child into her
bosom, approaching her in the form of a white ele-
phant bearing a lil}^ thus taking up into this nativity
consecration the life of the beasts and the flowers, —
and of his birth amidst joyful adoration by all divine
powers and the transfiguration of nature to welcome
redeeming soul ; of the saint who discerns upon him
the manifold marks of incarnation, and rejoices and
* LotttSf p. 165. 2 See Burnouf, St. Hilaire, and Hardy.
44
690 BUDDHISM.
weeps hy turns as he describes the long-looked-for
glory he has been privileged, so far, to behold ; of the
perfections of his childhood ; of his six years' fasting
in the wilderness ; of his conflicts with the spirit of
evil, Mara, who comes to test his pretensions, and
dissuade him from his purpose by bribes and terrors,
and even by armed hosts, whose weapons, as they
rain upon the firm heart and will, are turned to flow-
ers ; of his miraculous gifts, used always for beneficent
ends ; of his controversies with the Brahmans, who
sought in all ways to overreach, or silence, and even
in some cases to destroy him ; of his predictions and
exhortations, relative to his own death and its conse-
quences for mankind ; of the wonders that attended
the burning of his body, on earth and through all the
worlds.
The seclusion of the Buddhist monasteries gave
opportunity for the growth of a luxuriant mythology
about his person, greatly enlarged and enriched by
the wide geographical expansion of the faith, and the
division of the believers into a multitude of sects.
Similar influences have produced analogous results on
the person of " the Christ " in the Western world, but
with a difference that should be carefully noted. The
growth of legend about the earthly life of Jesus has
been checked by the historic sense peculiar to West-
ern civilization, and by the circulation of a written
record. The mythopoeic current, thus diverted from
the ground of his actual life, has poured itself, in an
almost Oriental flood, in the generation of an ideal, all-
pervading '^ Christ," or rather a forever-changing ideal
of perfection ; bound somehow to get itself reconciled,
however, with the record of Jesus as its norm and
source, and to remain so, constructing all spiritual
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 69I
symbolism to conform to this record, in ordei* that the
historical Jesus may be retained as indwelling life of
his Church. To this personal ideal, thus constructed,
which is put, like that of Buddha, in the place of
deity, the Christian imagination ascribes all past, all
actual, and all hoped-for good. The defect of the
Buddhist mythology is thus of a very different char-
acter from that of the Christian ; the one consisting in
the absence of restraint by the laws of historical ex-
perience, and the other in arrest and custody of the
spiritual sense by artificial historic limits. The value
of both is in claiming, up to a certain point, spiritual
and moral significance for the natural world.
And here the Buddhist ideal maintains, through all
the wild, rank license of its fancy, a severe ethical
purity, more surprising under such circumstances,
than that which has been secured to the Christian
by the far greater sobriety of Semitic and European
imagination.
The analogy m method between the two mythologies
holds, as far back as the records of either allow us
to go. The pre-existing type of the Buddha life lay
in the consciousness of the early Buddhist Church,
just as the Messianic idea lay in that Hebrew con-
sciousness to which we owe so much of the earliest
biography of Jesus. " The Buddha must perform
certain acts, visit certain places at certain times, work
certain prescribed miracles ; " ^ and it was but the
natural tribute of faith to make his biography accord
with these conditions. In all mythological construc-
tion, the soul has made good its own prophetic desire,
more or less freely, by the creative word, "This was
done that it might be fulfilled." First, a few general
1 See Koeppen, I. 95 ; St. Hilaire, ch. ii. ; BeaPs BuddJiist Pilgrims, ch. xxii.
692 BUDDHISM.
tj^pical features or moulds were supplied by the living
hope of the age ; then these, having found some
personal centre round which they could gather, were
wrought out by later demands in the desired variety
and prodigality of product.^
To what extent the Founder of a faith himself has
contributed to the development of the pre-existent
ideal through sharing its hope, and believing him-
self appointed to fulfil it, is in all cases difficult to
determine. The remote life of Gotama of course
affi)rds no exception to the rule.
The eight}^ apostles he is believed to have sent forth
The hour to preach his gospel of "mercy to all" are
and the man. probably but a mythical expression of the
fact that the age awaited it. The voice of a com-
mon aspiration must have been heard in his appeal,
as in all gospels that have survived in the faith of
generations. Buddha represented, as did Jesus after-
wards, a great demand of his time ; partly by his
actual personality, and still more as the centre of
that idealizing process by which the demands of a
relio;ious crisis know how to create their own satis-
faction out of a few ill-defined and therefore plastic
materials. Before describing this demand in the in-
stance of Buddhism, there is a word to be said about
the significance of this relation between the Hour and
the Man.
All the historical religions, even Mohammedanism
Significance and Christianity, run back to comparatively
of a great ^nhistorlcal ao^es and obscure personal rela-
rehgious de- '-' *■
mand. tlous. To say that the more this veil is re-
* Thus the legend associates with Buddha's life all the holy places of northern India.
•' He is born at Kapilavaslu ; reaches perfection at Magadha ; turns the wheel of the
Law at VaranSbi (Benares) ; and is freed from pain at Kaci."
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 693
moved from the age of the Hindu reformer, the
less of that universal element in Buddhism that
makes it a religion will be found traceable to his ex-
cltLsive influence, and the more to profound tendencies
and necessities in the life of his epoch and his race, —
is but to apply a universal law. The further we pene-
trate towards the apparent sources of any great relig-
ious movement, the more strongly the disposition to
ascribe it, as a whole, to the personal power of the
so-called "Founder," will be reproved. And this not
because the initial impulses of great reformations
were not really felt in the depths of elect souls, nor
because personal force is of less moment than we are
wont to suppose ; but because the tendenc}^ of a relig-
ious veneration which lasts for ages is to overlook or
depreciate the 7nanifold personal forces of which a
great religious transition is made up, in the exclusive
interest of one. All universal results must come from
universal elements, and such elements could only have
been expressed in the infinite variety of characters
and aims that made up the spirit of an age. History
brings round this needed lesson in the democracy of
the soul, at last. It will not suffer the honor due to
human nature to be for ever absorbed or monopolized
by a few. The progress of inquiry dissipates these
illusions of distance ; but it is only to substitute better
knowledge of the providential laws.
This is illustrated in the study of the origin of
Christianit}^. What have been loosely called origin of
mere " preparations for the coming of the Christianity.
Lord"-^ are found to have been grand creative instincts
^ Even Miiller occasionally expresses such partialism, which seems out of accord wth
his large culture and spiritual as well as philosophical insight. See Sansk- Lit., p. 32;
ChiJ>s\ I. p. 373.
694 BUDDHISM.
in the depths of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman civiliza-
tion, moving millions more or less definitely in one
and the same direction, and shaping an ideal, ready
to crown the head which should be conspicuous enough
to attract its attention, yet obscure enough to baffle
criticism, — these spiritual tendencies of the age se-
cretly moving the teacher and his apostles, and de-
veloping his religious genius for its work. Not only
are the moral and spiritual truths he was believed
to have imported into the time, and even into human
nature, found to have been fermenting in the society
into which he was born, but that all-controlling funcr
tion in opening the new moral era which has been
ascribed to his personal life fails of historical evidence.
His nobility and sweetness are seen to have followed
the natural laws of human influence.^ All the more
evident becomes the divine impulse that was moving
that whole wonderful age.^
Thus inevitably are exacted all dues that have been
^ ,. ., , withheld from the common nature, whereof all
Individual
anduniver- rcligious and their founders are outgrowths,
ims. Y(^|- heroism and sainthood are none the less
spontaneous ; nor has genius the less of individuality
and original power. And this inevitable absorption
of the personal centres of religious tradition into the
humanity of their times, at the touch of historical in-
quiry, can no longer surprise us when we remember
that every exclusive claim has defrauded personality
itself, by setting aside that ideal value which belongs
to it in each and every efficient human life.
^ See, for further illustration of these points, the author's work on The Worship of
ycsus (Boston, 1868).
* See Denis, TJiiories et Idies Morales de VAntiquiii; and Lecky's European
Morals.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 695
Buddhism may have found foothold in some strong
civil or political reaction against the ^^^^^o^'ity Foot,,o]dof
of a priestly caste. Of this we have no ac- Buddhism
count. But we know that the civil power "" ^ ^ ^^^'
sustained the movement, and that princes bore as
important a part in propagating it as they did in the
growth of the Christian Church eight hundred ye^rs,
and in that of Protestantism two thousand years, after-
wards. We know of Kandragupta,^ the great Hindu
chief, who^expelled the Greeks from India in the third
century B.C., and conquered an empire which included
the whole of Aryavarta, the Holy Land of Hindu
tradition, and the birthplace of Gotama himself, and
founded the famous dynasty of the Mauryas with
which the latter was connected by subsequent legend
as Sakyamuni ; that he was of low caste, probably
a Sudra, and that his accession must have given great
impulse to the preaching of social equality in the name
of religion. And we find in his grandson, Asoka,
the Constantine of the Buddhist church. All ac-
counts agree in reporting some of Gotama's earliest
converts to have been men of the highest rank and
distinction. Kings were his champions and almoners.
Hiouen Thsang saw the ruins of a hall of conference
at Sravasti, which had been built for him by the
king of Kosala, and tells of other structures in
the midst of beautiful gardens erected for his public
preaching by men of great wealth and benevolence in
different parts of northern India. The secular ele-
ment could indeed hardly have been attracted by the
speculative principles of Buddhism, which do but
follow the Brahmanical track into depths where the
common mind could not easily find food. But these
1 Lassen, II. 196.
696 BUDDHISM.
fine-spun metaphysics were largely of later growth :
they did not constitute its motive force. The practical
democratic tone of its new preaching, on the other
hand, must have been welcomed, both b}^ the masses
who saw mutual love and service substituted for
priestly mediation as the path to beatitude, and by
the secular -powers^ which would greet a religion so
antagonistic to the rival caste. But we must not
underestimate the capacity of the people to become
interested even in speculative reforms. Miiller does
not hesitate to say that " in India less than in any other
country would people submit to a monopoly of truth ;
and the same millions who were patiently bearing the
yoke of a political despotism threw off the fetters of
an intellectual tyranny." We have already seen that
the political despotism itself was not so complete as
has commonly been thought.
The old religious institutions had doubtless lost
much of their power. ^ Brahmanism was no
Roots of ^
Buddhism longer the profound faith it had been ; or
m tie past. ^^^^^ 'i- ^^g passiug iuto the freer spirit of the
Upanishad, an ever open "sitting" for new reve-
lations. It had already gone through many phases,
and its pantheistic spirit left it open in many directions
to great freedom of speculation. Its Brahmanas and
Upanishads abound in Buddhistic terms and doctrines. ^
It is certain that the reformers held its spiritual essence
in respect. There is good evidence that, as late as the
time of Asoka, Buddha was still associated with it,
and regarded as in some sort its pupil. He was a
sitter at the feet of Brahmans, and his earliest follow-
ers were of that class. Famous Brahman teachers
are associated with him in both these ways.^ The
* Lassen, II. 462. * Weber, Varies^, p. 249. ' Ibid.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 697
oldest Sutras seek to ennoble the name of Brahman.
The Dhammapada, describing the true Buddhist saint
says, " Him call I the true Brahmana." Our amiable
Chinese pilgrims bear no malice towards believers
in the older faith. Fahian praises a great Brah-
manical teacher. Hiouen Thsang describes the
Brahmans as "men of spotless life, who make purity
the basis of their doctrine ; " and has other good
words for thern whenever he speaks of them as a
whole. ^ The Sutras represent Gotama as seeking
to purify the lives of many, whose doctrine he does
not assail. The Buddhists seem indeed to have used
this ancient word to convey the sense of pure relig-
ion ; objecting to the pretence of a technical Brah-
manic priesthood to appropriate it. It has on their
lips a certain ancestral sanctity, in view of which such
ecclesiastical pretensions were childish : so that one
cannot well avoid the belief that we are here dealing
with one of those simplest and most natural terms for
the inward life, which, like our own words, God and
Nature^ overpass special creeds, and associate the
speaker with the whole religious experience of his
people. Even while deposing Brahma himself as
special deity, the Buddhist would seem to have held
fast to the old significance of this root-word of re-
ligion. "Buddhism," says Max Miiller, "was origi-
nally but a modification of Brahmanism, and grew
slowly up to the position of a rival and opposing sys-
tem." ^ The statement may easily be strengthened by
the analogies of history. Christianity was, in its ori-
gin, a form of Judaism. The continuity of religious
life is steadily maintained through all transitions.
* Mem. des Voy. de Hioiten Thsang, I. 76, 80.
2 Sansk. Lit.., p. 262.
698 BUDDHISM.
There is no " supernatural " violation of this sacred
sanity of growth.
But there was other soil than that of distinctive
Brahmanism to quicken the new tree. We have seen
that rationalistic reactions had already, before the
time of Buddha, combined with the introspective
tendencies of Hindu thought, as in Kapila. Budd-
hism inherited largely from the Sankhya, and was, in
the main, a democratic use of its speculative belief.^
The rise of new divinities in the faith of the people,
such as the. worship of Krishna Vishnu,'-^ and the re-
action of aboriginal beliefs on the language, social
habits, and religious sentiment of the Aryan con-
querors, — must have weakened the hold of Brahma,
as an exclusive conception of deity. The practical faith
of the people has at all times exerted an influence
on contemporaneous forms of philosophy ; and even
Hindu abstractions were not free from this social
accountability.
The most impressive fact in Indian Buddhism is
. ,. a complete dethronement of the old deities in
And m ^
Aryan char- the uamc of {huddJii^ humau intelligence.
The legend shows these elder gods kneeling
around the mother of Gotama, at his birth, in homage
to a Human Life that brought with it a profounder
insiorht than their own. This secularist courac^e of the
Buddhist lay in his ethnic descent. To hold special
conceptions and names of deity in abeyance to the
energies of mind was but a phase of that self-reliance
which determines all forms of activity in Aryan races.
Not onlv has there been in them all a he^-oic element
that dared to lift itself to the level of reco^rnized divin-
ities ; not only do all their epics delight to exalt the
1 Weber, Ind. Stud.^ I. 434- ^ Lassen, II. 464.
//
/
4^
/
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. (
V ^
/
interest of human strife by bringing in the immortals
to share the perils and bear the fortunes of the day ; *
this challenge to the Pantheon in the clash of Aryan
arms was natural for bold and ardent races ; the gods
of the hero are ever provisional. But there was a
like instinct of self-affirmation in the religious element
also. It divinized the authority of truth, as Thought;
and this, for the more introversive qualities of Aryan
mind, would mean truth as contemplation, or devotion.
And so the unsteadily seated Vedic and Brahmanical
deities were amenable to a force more potent than
the Kshattriya's sword. ' It was the very force by
which they had earned their thrones. That concen-
tration of mind on the eternal bv reaction from the
transient, which, as represented in them, constituted
their deity, continued to hold them responsible to itself.
It was an idea, a universal fact for ever seeking fresh
expression and more perfect embodiment. In other
words, devotion made them : an intenser devotion
could unmake, could supplant them.
It is not meant by this statement that the ascetic
mental disciplines themselves, which consti- ^ ,
^ Dethrone-
tuted the "devotion" of the Hindu saint, were mentofthe
themselves regarded as the highest object of ° ^''2° ^•
worship. These subjective processes of the individ-
ual were doubtless, as profound aspirations always
are, lost to the consciousness by absorption in the
universal idea which they pursued. Thought /;/
itself^ as spiritual contemplation, was true deity, was
creative essence ; and the more there was of this, the
more of real being and sovereignty, which all special
forms of existence must obey.
The rishi who shall surpass one of these deities in
devotion, who shall reach a completer sacrifice of im-
'^?-,
^OO BUDDHISM.
perfect desires and aims, shall dispossess him of the
divinity claimed for him ; and this of course is pm-ely
by virtue of the divine itself, as always greater than
any of its manifestations. Thus all special forms of
deity were subject to the instinct of fj'ogress^ in this
pantheistic worship of contemplation, this faith in the
endless productivity of devotion. The old m3^th of the
■pitris^ or fathers, curiously illustrates what is here
meant. This class of divine human beings were
believed to be the sons of the gods ; but placed above
them by Brahma, as having proved holier than they.
Thenceforward they were acknowledged as fathers by
their own parents. Being more divine, they were
essentially older. Does not the long procession of
religions, the line of special names and forms by
which man has sought to express his changing
thought of deity, present the same law on a majestic
scale? Ever the child takes the father's place. The
newest authority stands for the root of being and of
history : its very birth and parentage are held to have
been its own work. Man affirms, in every fresh en-
largement of his religious ideal, somewhat ancestral
and primeval ; because it is in its adequacy that the
problem of existence is solved for him, and the essence
of creative power revealed. So the older God gives
way to the new light from Man. And deity may be
said to judge its own past, as the Idea of the Holy
advances in human consciousness.
This is the process of spiritual freedom. In differ-
Theiawof ^"^^ stages of development, its forms are difter-
liberty. gj^^^ j^-g intelligence less or greater. But the
soul's mastership of its homestead is constantly as-
serted in one or another way ; whether it be (to
apply a distinction that has been well drawn) through
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 70I
the illusive aim of primitive speculation to coerce
the supernatural powers which an imaginative faith
created, or through that " command of nature by
obeying her laws which is the practical issue of
modern science."'
Every step in religious progress is a reaffirmation of
the authority of the ideal element in man, as represen-
tative of deity, to judge and reshape its conceptions of
the divine. And, however partial these conceptions
may be, it is through their changes that we are lifted
beyond t/iein, and know that the Infinite itself is
objectively real.
Its inspiration of the human faculties, as the Idea
of the Divine, advances in all x\ryan civilizations with
special freedom, boldly substituting fresh forms and
names of deity for older ones, from time to time found
inadequate. The speciality of the Hindu process is
that the idea thus exercising eminent domain in wor-
ship is contemplative. From contemplation and its
energies there was in Indian faith no appeal. My-
thology and ritual were constantly destroyed and
reconstructed by its breath. Ever dissatisfied with
its own forms, it pressed on to abstraction more thor-
ough and more intense ; as we see not only in the
difference between Brahmanical and Buddhistic specu-
lation, but in the constant liability of the deities to be
supplanted by a more perfect sainthood. Yet it must
be recognized that the abstraction was thoroughly
competent to creation not only of positive belief, but
of moral aspiration and endeavor. These new masters
of faith and heaven are held with singular strictness to
the validity of moral authority. Devotees enter deity by
prayer, discipline, and service ; and saints alarm the
1 Westminster Review on *' Magic and Astrology" (January, 1864).
702 BUDDHISM.
gods by their virtues, as well as their penances, into
sending seductions and dissuasives, such as nymphs,
called the weapons of Indra, to bend them from their
victorious march. Their imprecations sway the course
of nature and human life.^ In the Ramayana, the poet
does not hesitate to make the older gods contempt-
ible through their immoralities ; while Vishnu only, the
later deity who had supplanted them, is exalted as the
perfect moral ideal, and thereby commended to wor-
ship. The antagonism involved in this possibility of
supplanting the old divinity by new human energies,
and the arduousness of the test, has its representative
victim in the mythologic king Trisanku, whose ambi-
tious virtue, offending the gods, caused him to be flung
back from heaven, whither he had ascended, towards
the earth ; but, being caught on his way by the power-
ful Visvamitra, he remained suspended in space, form-
ing a constellation in the southern sky.
Such being the recognized authority of the contem-
Buddhisin pl^tive and moral ideals, to supplant their own
the ultimate past .forms with higher ones, it was natural
of Hindu . , ^ . ...,.,
contempia- that 3. aeiinite negative should come at last, to
tion. sweep away every claim of everlastingness in
the existent objects of Hindu faith ; to disparage the
old divinities more than the boldest war-chiefs had
done, and to give law even to Brahma, through a
force of abstraction profounder than that which his
name had signified or his perfection involved. It was
natural that contemplation itself, pressing freely to its
utmost limit, should find its own nirvana^ and be, as it
were, set free of its distinctive self, into universalit}^
both speculative and moral ; so that out of the depths
* See the whole plot of Sakuntala, which is founded on an event of this sort. Also
the story of Sunda and Upasunda in the Mahabh&mta.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 703
of philosophical pantheism, out of utmost isolation
and abstraction, should arise this wonderful Budd-
hism, this " awakening," this " illumination " of idea
and purpose, with the grand sweep of its affirmation :
" All that lives and breathes shall become Buddha ; "
with its faith that whenever a Buddha passes into
nirvana^ his karma is poured through the worlds as
a fulness of living moral energies ; ^ its summons to
every one to master evil and make his own destiny ;
and its tender and earnest impulse to save all men, its
world-wide gospel to the poor.
Can we wonder that a gospel whose essence lay in
the experience that thought can reach its final purpose,
and existence its solution, only in service of mankind,
should have been heard so gladly by the teeming
populations of the East? Sublime demonstration that
the soul, even in its dreams, finds a path to universal-
ity, both in sympathy and faith.
Most naturally too, as we have seen, arose this
radical self-affirmation of the Jmman^ ^^^^'^^S^ Seif-affirma-
all negation towards special objects of faith, tion of the
As Brahmanical piety was absorbed in the '™^"
idea of God, so there seems to have always existed
by the side of it, in India, some form of protest and
reaction in the name of man. Its earnestness and
courage are seen in such proverbs as these from the
Dhammapada : —
" Neither God nor Gandharva, nor Mara (the spirit of evil), with
Brahma combined, can make that man's victory a defeat, who has
constantly ruled himself."
" Even the gods envy the thoughtful, calm, awakened ones."
" Better than lordship over all worlds is to take the first step in
virtue."
1 Bastian, Die WcUauffassung der Buddhisten (Berlin, 1870), p. 23.
704 BUDDHISM.
The Buddha is in origin purely human ; 3x1 contem-
plation exalts him above all gods. His human energy
masters all special forms of being and power in all
worlds. His personal will chooses to postpone his
hard-earned nirvana^ that he ma}^ share it with all
mankind ; that he may teach the whole world the way
to its blessedness. This is like the divine love as-
cribed to Jesus in Christian creeds. But between the
two religions that correspond to these two ideals there
is this difference. In Buddhism the moral grandeur
redounds purely and unmistakably to the honor of
human nature, since it has always been maintained
that Gotama was essentially human. ^ Christianity, on
the other hand, has not rested the virtue of Jesus on the
natural capacity of man ; however it may imply, in
holding him to be the manifestation of deity, that a
human form may, for once, be transfigured by special
divine influx.
This coming of the human to positive self-assertion
^ ,. in Buddhism was, as I have said, in part a
Earlier ... .
germs of protcst agaiust disparaging man in the name ot
God. But we must not carry this explanation
of it too far. We should, for instance, be quite wrong
in regarding it as the extreme reaction from an absolute
denial of the Human in Brahmanism to an absolute de-
nial of the Divine. This Would be to overstate both sides
as forms of negation. We have already seen that Budd-
hism was not atheistic ; and it is equally true that its
claim for man was not an absolute revolution in Hindu
philosophy. It was indeed adequate to give fresh
direction to the thought and life of the people. It was
^ See Hardy, Manual^ p. 363. " To remove tlie doubts of all beings, to show that
what he does is not by tlie power of irdhi, or miraculous gift, he receives Buddhaship as a
man, born from the womb."
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. 7^5
a new expansive force, a stimulus to zeal and sacrifice.
The soul always seeks a true balance of its activities ;
and so contemplative devotion enforced a demand for
enthusiasm and the inspiration of work. Hence the
Buddhist's appeal to the masses, his fearless rejection
of the old divinities that slumbered in the bosom of
caste. But there was in that older contemplative piety
itself, it must be remembered, the germ of a profound
recognition of the Human. Spiritual Pantheism, in its
substantial meaning, exalts and reveres soul, as soul.
Its logic can never quite escape a democratic, universal
form. Its God in India was not this Brahman nor that
rishi, but " All in all." Therefore, as we have seen, its
development naturally brought rationalistic and free
mystical tendencies, caste-disintegration, and, in a
word. Buddhism itself, in definite, constructive form,
as .the concurrence of all these, notwithstanding every
thing that ecclesiasticism could do to prevent them.
We must note that it was only as special divinities
that the elder gods were liable to be supplanted Limits of
by the spiritual disciplines of special saints. It this claim of
was only as a god that Brahma was dethroned '^ '™^°'
by the Buddhist test of transiency, not as God. It is
not to be inferred therefore that the attitude of censor-
ship we have described involved ignorance or rejection
of an eternal essence beyond the power of human
criticism to change, or of human achievement to sup-
plant. Only the pursuit of such transcendent moral
reality could have enforced the criticism of specific
objects of worship, and the effort to achieve their sub-
jection by a higher truth and virtue than their own.
It is true that the gods, thus declared to be merely
temporary, were also held to be actual beings and
powers in the universe : so that in the treatment of all
45
7o6 BUDDHISM.
such definite forms of deity as provisional there lay the
danger of dissolving objective truth in the self-asser-
tion of the critical faculty ; and of claiming not only
that man makes and unmakes his special conception
of God, but that God, as God, is nothing else than a
human conception. But these perils of negation were
held in check by a profound veneration in the Oriental
mind for the independence of the eternal, absolute,
and infinite. It was but as forms of personal will that
the gods were held to be thus provisional, and subject to
the demand for more perfect fulfilment of the religious
ideal.
The Buddhist has not therefore committed the weak-
ness of holdinop Brahma or Vishnu to be true
Imperfect "
sense of and pcrfcct Deity, while at the same time
^'*^* subjecting him" to human criticism and even
mastership. Yet, when Buddha himself came to be
the centre of religious faith and mythologic creation,
he was regarded as subject to human influence and
even control, with little respect for the self-adequacy
of the divine. So Vishnu is described by Kalidasa as
"greater than the self-existent," when choosing a mortal
shape, to save mankind. ^ To this imperfect sense of
the meaning of deity all religions are subject, in con-
centrating worship on a definite personal will. In the
same way, the Christ practically supplants the Father
in the faith and service of Christians ; and God be-'
comes only an "impalpable effluence," from the person
of his own Son ! It hardly becomes Christendom to
rebuke Buddhism for putting a man in place of God.
Luther said that God had "tied himself to man by
bonds of prayer ;" Montalembert, that "prayer equals,
sometimes surpasses, the power of God, triumphing
1 Sakuntald, Act. VII.
THE HOUR AND THE MAN. *]0*J
over His will, His wrath, and even over His justice.'*
"God," says Ruskin, "is a Being who can be reasoned
with, moved by entreaties, angered by our rebellion,
alienated by our coldness, pleased by our love, and
glorified by our labor." All this is certainly to
worship the conditional and finite. It would sub-
ject the moral order of the universe to the infirmi-
ties of human desire. It is also, on the other hand,
however unconscious and perverted, a kind of claim
justly entered by the human to determine the paths of
freedom and progress. Both these forces manitestly
involve criticism and even supersedure of what has
been held the adequate object of worship. But they
are perverted, if not suppressed, in so far as the claim
amounts to a pretension of moving and changing deity '
itself; in so far as it is assumed that one who can
be thus criticised, changed, convinced, improved, and
even supplanted, has in very fact exhausted the idea
of infinite, absolute Being. Such, however, is the per-
verted form under which the claim of the human to
shape its religious ideal appears, not in the distin-
guished instances only that have just been given,
but in the general tenor of Christian praying and
preaching.
And the sincerity and devoutness, which is found to
be compatible therewith in the Christian world, should
prepare us to believe that a similar failing in later
Buddhism is not without its aspirations to freedom
and its sentiment of reverence and faith.
V.
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA.
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA.
T TARDLY any thing in the history of religion is
-*- -'- more impressive than the energy with Extension of
which Buddhism was propagated for centuries Buddiiism.
after the time of Sakyamuni, and its success in revo-
lutionizing the religious life of the great and little
states into which northern India was divided. All
the oldest inscriptions on Hindu monuments are not
only written in dialects of popular language, but are
shown to be Buddhist by their spirit also, as well as
by the emblems which in many cases are associated
with them : the chaitya, or relic temple, the tree, the
wheel, the cross, the seated Buddha. And the same
conclusion holds of the old coins of India, so far as
they have been brought to light. Fahian speaks of
Buddhism as "the law of India;" and the immense
treasures of sacred literature with which Hiouen
Thsang returned to China prove that the resources of
the faith were in his time almost unlimited. Yet the
practical missionary zeal which it demanded of its
converts could not be contented with the passive spirit
of Hindu civilization. That restless ardor to deliver
all mankind drove them to expend most of their force
on distant regions. Gradually, too, after many cen-
turies of depression, there came a revival of Brahman-
712 BUDDHISM.
ism, of which we have no very clear explanation.
Doubtless the hold it had at the earlier period in
the inertia of established system was not wholly lost
through the palmy days of Buddhist ascendency.
Doubtless it learned to quote the radical metaphysics
and thorough rationalism of its rival with disparaging
effect before a people naturally reverent towards tra-
dition, profoundly mystical, and open to recognize
somewhat authoritative in an ancient title to the Vedas,
those fountains of national faith. But the disappear-
ance of Buddhism from the soil of India is a conse-
quence not so much of this revival of Brahmanism —
which has, after all, never been very effectual — as of
its own absorption into numerous sects, which have
transferred much of its spirit into new forms of popular
faith. It is not easy to say how much of the disinte-
gration of caste described in an earlier part of this
work as going on in later times, and which is manifest
in nearly all important sects of recent formation, is
due to the direct influence of distinctive Buddhism.
Though it has failed to eradicate the idea of caste-
subordination from the Hindu mind, so that even in
Cevlon, where its effect on manners and life has been
very great, the lowest, or Chandala caste, still re-
mains;^ yet the separation of that idea from religloiis
faith and institution has been a marked result of the
forces which it set in motion.
Buddhism was still more effectual in its reaction
Influence on ^g^i^st the sacHfices of auimals, which had
sacrifices, succecdcd thosc simplc Vedic rites, so seldom
stained with blood. Even the cakes, butter, and soma-
juice of those early days were abjured by these
thorough Puritans, who allowed no rite but the ofler-
^ Tennenl's Ceylon-
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA. 713
ing of flowers to their perfected Buddhas. And even
the great Brahmanical revival has not restored the ani-
mal sacrifices thus interrupted, except in rare instances,
and, as some affirm, in a single province. The Hindus
have, as a people, returned to the old Vedic ways, and
^bring their offerings from the dairy and the field. ^
The inspiration of Buddhism was, moreover, in its
practical energy, its faith in liberty and in ^g hold
active work; and with these the climate of°'^^°'^^^-
India was less congenial than that of regions to the
north and west. Its apostles were attracted by the
rude and unsettled condition of the tribes of middle
Asia, as strongly as they were repelled from Hindustan
by fixed ideas and systems. Yet the influences of cli-
mate, tradition, and organization combined, failed for
twelve centuries to dislodge Buddhism from the coun-
try of its birth. The special causes of its disappear-
ance from India, in or about the ninth century, are
still unknown. This epoch is the dark age of Hindu
history. Its scanty traditions hint of merciless relig-
ious persecutions ; but of these, if they really occurred,
all definite record has been effaced.^ Of crusades
against Buddhism by teachers like Sankara and Ku-
marila Bhatta, and of quarrels with the kindred school
of the Jainas, we have little more than vague rumors.
These Dark Ages were times of intestine strife among
the principalities of India. They were followed by the
all-commingling flood of Mohammedan invasion ; and,
when the old sects and schools reappeared, it was under
new names, and as results of a ferment and fusion
not now to be traced. Buddhism has but been exiled
in name : the substance remained, and told decisively
on the theology, literature, and life of the Hindu race.
* See Wheeler, I. 159. 2 Lassen, IV. 708.
714 BUDDHISM.
The Bhagavadglta is an evidence of this influence,
for the period previous to the expulsion. It
Shown in ^ •■• ^
the Biiaga- is Brahmauism making such concessions to
va gita. Buddhism as were necessary to save its own
life ; recognizing the duty of eclectic liberality, and
yielding a surprising amount of moral consideration
and respect to the lower castes. The Yoga system of
Patanjali, probably one of the outgrowths of Budd-
hism, or at least a successor in the same line, had in
one sense equalized men,- by exalting ascetic life as
such above the distinctive functions assigned by the
older faith to the several castes. The Bhagavadgita,
while it disparaged these exclusive claims of ascetic
discipline, yet obeyed the democratic impulse of
Buddhism in another way ; eniphasizing the duty of
action and the demands of society on the individual.
It reduced the whole mythological world to unity ;
and, with Buddhistic thoroughness, absorbed the whole
universe of gods and men into the abyss of apparent
annihilation. "As torrents rush into the ocean, so the
heroes of the human race enter the flaming mouths,
the fire of death." ^ Brahma could never have appeared
under so terrible a form, — that eremite God of eternal
rest. The thought of evanescence must have been
deepened by some powerful educational force. The
universal energy of death is even declared in plain
words to be greater than Brahma himself.^ And we
have here, without doubt, the gigantic shadow cast
upon Brahmanism by the Buddhist JVirvdna, as well as
by the terrors of the popular theology, which were
not to be wholly escaped. But when that abysmal
deity changes his form, and appears at once as Krishna,
incarnation of Vishnu, the preserving Spirit, bidding
1 J5^£: G.y ch. xi. » Ibid.
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA.
715
Arjuna look on him "free from fear, with happy
heart," — it is impossible not to recognize in this no-
blest avatdra, counselling to manly human service,^
to absolute disinterestedness, to liberation from the
Vedas, to the worship of eternal truth, ^ an effort of
Brahmanism to combine with its aspirations toward
an immortal life the practical love and freedom en-
forced by the Buddhist gospel.
" Without action you cannot reach freedom from action : whoso
restrains the senses and acts unselfishly, without interest in the
fruits, yet who acts, seeking the good of mankind, attains peace.
His path leads to tiirvdna in the Supreme Spirit." ^
This is certainly as near Buddhism as Brahmanism
could be expected to arrive. Krishna says further : —
" It is the mind liberated from the Vedas that reaches true con-
templation. Seek refuge in thy mind." •*
" Even Vaisyas and Sudras take the highest path, if they turn
to me. How much more, then, Brahmans and Kshattriyas ! " °
It is Arjuna, the Kshattrij^a king, who is prom-
ised the highest unity with deity, and admitted to
visions hidden from all other men.^ Such conces-
sions to the lower castes, however imperfect, indicate
democratic influences which the hereditary priesthood
had been unable to resist.
All this is none the less true because the caste sys-
tem is still maintained in the Bhagavadgita, the whole
theory of action qualified thereby, and the duty of
the warrior to his caste asserted, and emphatically
urged. Nor is it the less true because the poem indi-
cates none of that aversion to bloodshed which was
characteristic of Buddhism. The other points that
1 Bhag. G.I ch. iii. xii. ^ Ibid., ch. ii. ^ Ibid., ch. iii. ii.
* Ibid., ch. ii. * Ibid., ch. ix. 6 ibid., ch. xi.
7l6 BUDDHISM.
have been noted amply suffice to show a profound
influence proceeding from this religion, in the phi-
losophy and ethics of an age five centuries after its
birth.
Some have supposed that the R^mayana originated
intheRa- ^^ ^ Brahmauical reaction against Buddhism.^
mayana. Q^ ^}^|g thcory, Rama's war with the Rak-
shasas, and his triumphant invasion of Ceylon, aided
by supernatural apes and bears, was a poetic version
of the expulsion of the Buddhists out of southern
India, by a religious crusade, assisted by aboriginal
tribes of the Dekkan. The old gods of the Rig Veda,
and those of the native races, as well as the tradi-
tional heroes of the warrior caste, were all brought
in to effect the restoration of the older faith ; all these
popular religious associations being wrought up with
dramatic effect in the beautiful tale of Rama's re-
covery of his lost Sita from the ravisher Ravana,
which forms the second half of the epic. The proofs
of such a connection, however, do not seem at all
satisfactory. The harpy-like, blood-thirsty Raksha-
sas, especially, could hardly have been suggested by
Buddhism. Yet the Ramayana bears striking marks
of the influence of this faith on the Brahmanical sys-
tem. The concessions to popular mythology in which
it abounds, though written in the interest of the priest-
hood ; the recognition of older and later incarnations ;
the democratic spirit shown by the people's taking
an active interest in affliirs of state, giving advice to
the king, urging their desires on his ministers, and
even jeering and reproaching him ; the introduction
of Sudras into public ceremonies, and the pouring of
water on the heads of princes at their inauguration,
* Wheeler's History of India^ II., Introd., p. Ixxvii.
AFTER-LIFE IN INDIA. 717
by all the castes, — show that Brahmanism had been
reduced to recognizing equalities that had no place in
its system ; a change that must be due to Buddhism.
After this, too, we hear more about gods of the
-people?- They were in many respects such as inthepopu-
might be expected from the many causes of^^'^^^^^^^sy-
demoralization in India during modern times ; yet
their number and their frommence alike indicate that
the exclusiveness of Brahmanism had to give way to
the demand of the popular mind for freedom. The
people transformed the old deities of the Veda ; and
even the later ones, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, were
merged in Krishna and Rama. The priesthood were
obliged to elaborate the popular deities in combination
with their Brahma into a form of trinity ; and even to
subordinate Brahma to Vishnu and Siva. In the com-
mon mind they remained separate, and each had his
sect of worshippers. Vishnu, a Vedic god, who had
come to represent the bounty and serenity of nature,
grew into the beneficent divinity of the Ganges popu-
lation ,2 embodying in his avatar as the noble faith
that God descends to save the world, whenever evil
wins the upper hand. The worship of Vishnu-Jagan-
nath, "protest of the equality of men before God," —
making all castes eat together, celebrating traditions
of the most humane and democratic spirit, — whose
very breadth has opened it to excesses by a few minor
sects, which all classes condemn, — is now shown to
be largely the result of Buddhism, and associated with
its earliest struggles.^
^ Lassen, IV. 594. 2 Duncker, IT. 232.
' Mr. Hunter, from whose interesting work on Orissa these statements are drawn, speaks
in the highest terms of the behavior of the pilgrims of Jagannath, and of the influence of
his worship on the customs of the people. The lines of research, so ably opened by Mr.
Hunter, promise real light on the darkest periods in the history of Buddhism in India.
7l8 BUDDHISM.
It is in coming down to these later times that we
The modern I'ealize how immense a variety of tendencies
sects. jg covered by the common name Hinduism,
and how large and free has been the growth of this
tropical religious nature. Wilson's enumeration of
the principal sects alone runs up to nearly sixty.
Scarcely one of the dogmas of older schools has
Their free cscapcd denial. Freedom of thought and spec-
criticism, ulation has been as perfect as ever in the
world.
There are Vaishnava sects, as well as others, that
deny the absolute unity of deity, and repudiate mok-
sha, or absorption into the One, carrying the Sank-
hyan principle of individuality to its furthest extreme ;^
others that reject asceticism, passing over to the op-
posite pole, and in some instances, we must add, into
sensuality under religious sanctions ; ^ others that hold
themselves bound, in view of the dogma of incarnation,
to reverence the guru, or spiritual guide, as not only
one with God, but greater even than Krishna him-
self; ^ others that consider ascetics as persons who are
suffering the penalties of sins committed in former
lives, and deny the possibility of avatdras^ since God
can neither be subject to transmigration nor to union.*
There are sectaries who say jokingly, when they
hear the Vedas recited, "These are sick people, in a
painful fit, or hired journeymen in an uproar ; " and
when they see the sacred thread on the neck of a
Brahman, "A cow will not be without a rope."°
There are others who "recognize the being of God in
mankind, know no being more perfect than man-
* Madhwas. * VallabhSchftryas and S5ktas.
8 Chaitanyas, Kartabhajas. * School of Piranah (Dabistii?t, II. viii.).
' Charvaks {Dadisidn, II. ix.).
THE LATER SECTS. 7^9
kind, and think that it contains nothing of a bad
nature."^
Nor is the disintegration of traditions less mani-
fest in the sphere of sentiment than in that inmythoi-
of dogma.
One issue of the old democratic movement of Budd-
hism is to be traced in the chaos of the later mythol-
ogy, which awaits some centralizing and spiritualizing
power.
This very luxuriance proves the richness of the
native soil. We may therefore be sure that ^^^^.^^ ^ .^_
the reconciling principle, after all this disinte- ituai resour-
gration, will spring from Hindu, not foreign, "^^^^
associations. The total failure of distinctively Chris-
tian propagandism was to be expected. How^ should
this rich and free symbolism be supplanted by exclu-
siveness in type and form? Morality, science, free-
dom, humanity, will speak to the Hindus in those
universal aspects which belong to the age ; but it must
be through their own native experience. The foot-
hold must be found in their natural associations and
descent.
This free spirit is illustrated by the Sikhs, or dis-
ciples, at first a religious sect, then roused by ^he sikhs.
persecution into a nation of soldiers, fight-
ing for liberty of conscience, and establishing a free
state in the Panjab, which they held for centuries,
until it passed under English rule. No race in India
has shown a braver or more independent spirit, in
thought or in conduct, than the Sikhs. They date
their history from Nanak, a native Hindu teacher of
the fifteenth century, a grain factor by trade, who
threw aside Vedas and Koran, denounced caste, sati^
1 Manushya Bhakta (Ibid., xii.)-
720 BUDDHISM.
and all other degrading customs and institutions, and
preached pure Theism, broad humanity, and a code
of morals nowhere surpassed. Renouncing the ascet-
ic garb, he spent his life in domestic relations, and
after a long ministry, in the cause of right and noble
living, of large tolerance, and devout aspiration, died,
like Buddha, surrounded by devoted disciples, the
founder of a new religion. Rebuked for sleeping
with his feet towards a temple, this teacher asked :
" Whither shall I turn my feet, if I would point them
where God's house is not?" Like Buddha, he is
believed to have had previous lives on earth. The
following story from the Dabistan ^ is thoroughly
Buddhistic : —
" When Nanak died, he saw two roads, the one to heaven, the
other to hell. He chose the latter, and descending thither brought
all the inhabitants out. But God said, * These sinners cannot enter
heaven : you must return into the world, and liberate them. There-
fore Nanak came into this world, and his followers are those former
inhabitants of hell : the guru (teacher) comes and goes, until that
multitude shall have found their salvation."
A
The Sikh Bible, Adi Granth^ compiled by Arjuna,
a subsequent gurii^ in the next century, and written
in a now obsolete tongue,^ contains contributions from
the teachings of twenty-five persons, of all orders
and pursuits ; among them a leather-dresser, a cloth-
printer, a barber, a butcher, and a musician ; also a
woman. It teaches the unity of God, the moral laws,
and liberty of thought and worship; forbids all vices,
and commands the practical virtues and universal
love.^
This Bible speaks of God as " one, sole, self-exist-
» Dab., II. p. 269.
' Trumpp, in Joiirnal 0/ Royal As. Soc for 1871, p. 198.
• Asiatic Researches, I. 292.
THE LATER SECTS. 721
ent, the meaning and the cause of all, who has seen
numberless creeds and names come and go."
Nanak says : —
" The true name is the Creator, the Being without fear, without
enmity, the everlasting (timeless) One, the Self-existing."
" From his beneficence comes clothing ; from his merciful
glance, the gate of salvation. If He be praised, heard, and revered
in the heart, He will take away pain and bring comfort."
" His worshippers rejoice always : to hear him is the end of sin
and pain."
" He is not found in names, readings, austerities. If I knew
Him, I would speak it ; but the story cannot be told. What his
power, what his thought ? I cannot come up to it."
" What pleases Thee, that is a good work. If the heart is de-
filed by sin, it is washed in the dye of God^s name. They who have
done a deed, themselves have set it down. They sow themselves
and reap themselves."
" What word may be spoken by the mouth, which having heard
He may bestow love ? "
" Early reflect on the greatness of the true Name."
" Remember the truth that is from the beginning of the world, —
the truth that is and will be for ever : not by meditation can truth
be reached, nor by silence, though I keep up continual devotion.
The wall of falsehoods is broken by walking in the commandments
of God."
" They say there are four races ; yet all are of the seed of Brah-
ma. The four races shall be one, and all shall call on the
Teacher. Think not of thy caste, but abase thyself, and be
saved."
" Fight with no weapon but the word of God ; use no means but
a pure faith."
" Devotion is not in ragged garments, nor staff, nor ashes, nor
shaven head, nor sounding horns."
" He is pure who does no evil, is intent on good, and ever giveth
to the poor."
" Be true, and thou shalt be free : to be true belongs to thee ;
thy success, to the Creator." '
1 Cunningham's History of tJie Sikhs; L.uSlowh Briiisk India, vol. i. ; Trumpp, w/
supra.
46
722 BUDDHISM.
Other Sikh gurus have left these sayings : —
" My mind dwells on One, who gave the body and soul."
" Many Brahmans have wearied themselves with studying the
Veds, but found not the value of an oil-seed."
" With slayers of their daughters, whoever has intercourse, him
I hold accursed."
" Not they are sati who perish in the flames, but they, O Nanak !
who die of broken hearts."
" Fall at God's feet : in senseless stone God is not."
" God heard the cry of virtue, and Nanak was sent into the
world : the four castes became one, the high and the low equal."
" The Sikh should set his heart on charity and purity."
" He who takes the goods of sister or daughter, who oppresses
the poor, is punished. He who gives not to the needy shall not
see God."
" He is of the faithful who protects the poor, combats evil, re-
members God ; who is wholly unfettered, who ever wages battle,
who slays the Turk, and extends the faith." ^
The last sentence is from Govinda, a warlike guru,
"who wore two swords in his girdle, the one to avenge
his father, the other to destroy the miracles of Mo-
hammed."^ The peaceful Nanak brought, after all,
" not peace, but a sword ; " and Govinda, the tenth-
teacher, must change the name Sikhs (disciples) to
Singhs (lions) , and organize his people to defend the
faith. Nanak has also, like Buddha and Jesus, been
transformed in the faith of his later followers from the
simply philanthropic reformer into the chief of divine
emanations, and the way ordained for the redemption
of the world.
But Govinda was theologically free and thoroughly
in earnest.
" Since he fell at God's feet, no one has appeared great in his
eyes : Ram and Ruheen, Purans and Koran, have many votaries ;
but neither does he regard."
1 Cunningham; Ludlow; ut s^ufra. ^ Dabist&n, II. 273.
THE LATER SECTS. *J2^
" Smritis, Shastras, and Veds differ in many things : not one
does he heed."
" O God ! under thy power all has been done : nought is of
myself."
Not less sincere and fervent is the faith of the mod-
ern Sikhs, whose religious services have been de-
scribed as pervaded by a peculiar enthusiastic joy,
and their prayers by a spirit of self-examination,
moral discipline, and universal love.^
The strict monotheism of the Sikhs has a strongly
Mohammedan tone ; but their freedom of spec-
. Seed m
ulation and protest, as regards Hindu tradition, Buddhist
points plainly to that element in the national ^^^^*
character of which Kapila and Gotama were earlier
exponents. The Hindu sects of the last six centuries
are marked by a democratic spirit, which may rightly
be called the after-life of Buddhism in a people who
had rejected its form and its name. Has this harvest
sprung from the ashes of a martyred Church? Is this
the meaning of that prescience of " a further shore "
beyond the ocean of death?
All the important forms of Vishnu-worship ^ continue
the impulse of these early reformers, who came to be
themselves regarded as his incarnations. Rdind-
nanda^ in the fifteenth century, followed their example
in renouncing caste. His disciples form the largest
sect in Gangetic India. ^ The numerous followers of
Kahir reject polytheism and the service of images,
and ridicule the honors paid to pandits and Vedas.
The yamas, whose special relations with Buddhism
have not been clearly made out, certainly combined
* Wilkins, As. Res., I. 289.
2 Lassen, IV. 608-616 ; Stevenson, Journ. R. A. S., vii. pp. 64-73 ; Wilson's Essays
on Religmt of tJie Hindus, vol. i.
• Wilson, p. 67.
724 BUDDHISM.
with Sankhya categories and formulas many Buddhis-
tic elements ; such as deliverance of the soul through
pure knowledge alone, rejection of the Vedas, sup-
pression of the Brahmanical gods, and substitution
of a series oi jinas or sages \_jiiia is itself a title of
Buddha], in their place. ^ Admission to their body
was independent of caste. ^ Their moral code is con-
tained in five great duties, — truth, chastity, abstinence
from destroying life, honesty, mastery of desires ; in
four dharmas^ or forms of good work, — liberality,
gentleness, penance, and piety; and in three forms
of restraint, — government of the mind, of the tongue,
and of tlie person.^ All these are wholly Buddhistic,
and make the admitted hostility of the Jainas to tech-
nical Buddhism the more remarkable. It is perhaps
simply the sign that no ecclesiastical bonds could con-
fine these elements of moral and spiritual universality.
The revival of Brahmanism itself, which seems to have
represented a general movement towards more positive
theism than the Buddhist affirmed, caught his demo-
cratic impulse ; and Sankara, the great Vedantist
leader, is said to have broken up the four original
castes in Malabar into seventy-two, which was a
great step towards destroying the principle itself.
Lassen sums up the more favorable features of later
, ., . , Hindu sects under three heads. They lav
Liberties of J J
the later greater stress on piety and morality than on
outward forms of worship, and make protest
against ritualism. They undermine the S3'Stem of
caste by admitting persons of all classes to religious
communion. Their founders and teachers make use
of the popular dialects, in writing and in speech.^
1 Lassen, IV. 735-787. 2 Wilson, p. 335.
* Wilson, pp. 317, 335. * Lassen, IV. 643-
THE LATER SECTS. 725
These later schools resume the many elements
which have preceded them ; freely intermingling
pantheistic, rationalistic, and skeptical forms of Hin-
duism with the monotheism of the old Mohammedans
and the devout mysticism of the Sufis.
Great numbers of maths, or monasteries of the
Vaishnava sects, are scattered over India, gov- TheVaish-
erned and supported very much in the same ''^^^^•
way as similar Catholic institutions in the Middle Ages.
But they are open to all travellers or mendicants ; and,
for the members, ingress and egress are perfectly free
at all times, " any thing like restraint upon personal
liberty seeming never to have entered into the concep-
tion of any of the religious legislators of the Hindus."
" Their tenants are most commonly of a quiet, inoffen-
sive character ; and the mahants, or superiors, espec-
ially, are men of talents and respectability." ^
The Saivas, or Sivaite sects, for the most part rep-
resent more exclusive interests, being- a fruit _ / .
/ _ '-' The Saivas.
of Sankara's great Brahmanical revival in the
eighth century.- With few exceptions, their writings
are not in the popular tongue ; and they avoid proselyt-
ing among the masses. In such works as the Tamil
" Gnan-Potham"^ all the mystical philosophy of Brah-
ma-worship is transferred to Siva, yet not without
Buddhist elements to which the change of deity is, after
all, not improbably due. The least exclusive sect of
Saivas is that which worships Siva under the emblem
of the linga, a very old cult, and, in general, by na
means the immoral one it has been represented.
But the Vaishnava sects have always been demo-
cratic. They have made their ideas free to ^he vaisb-
the people by rejecting a specially sacred and ^^^^•
^ Wilson, p. 50-53. 2 Lassen, IV. 618. » See Amer. Or- jfourn., vol. iv.
726 BUDDHISM.
learned tongue, and opening the function of teacher to
all persons. A large part of the literature of the
Mahrattas, who have proved the manly qualities of
a Hindu race, is written in vernacular Prakrit, and
almost all this portion is due to the Vaishnavas.
One of these democratic poets wrote a commentary on
the Bhagavadgita. Another was famous for his satires
on caste and ceremonial forms ; while a third was him-
self from the lowest of the outcasts, and a fourth was
a slave girl. The influence of the ethical and relig-
ious teachings of these Mahratta poets on the middle
and lower strata of society in central India is said
to have been very important.^
The Bauddha-Vaishnavas believe that all castes
should eat together on religious occasions. " At the
temple door all the castes become one." They have a
legend of Vishnu, that he brought saints from heaven,
who had been low-caste laborers, and placed them at
a banquet beside the Brahmans, himself sitting at the
head, and even eating the particles of rice that they
let fall. Another story is of a householder who made
a feast in honor of his ancestors, and gave part of their
portion to a poor -pariah at his gate : whereat the
Brahmans present departed from the feast in contempt ;
but the ancestors themselves came down to take their
places, and the table was filled. — Idolatrous rites are
very sternly reproved by these sects.
" There are priests who command you to cut down a living plant
to crown a lifeless stone. They call every thing deity, yet cut down
trees for oblation. They have girdles for their loins with jinghng
bells, but they are dumb in divine knowledge. Ceremonies, aus-
terities, and holy places are trifles compared with the praise of
God."
* Stevenson, on Maratha Literature in Joum. of the Bomb. Branch of R. A. 5".,
vol. i.
THE LATER SECTS. ^2^
One of the Vaishnava sages is represented as not
only forgiving men who had robbed and maimed him,
but as pleading with Vishnu to release them from the
penalty, and give them a place in heaven.^
The chief disciples of Ramananda were twelve in
number, and for the most part men of the ^, ^.
^ Kabir.
lower and most laborious castes : among them
were a weaver, a currier, a barber, and a basket-
maker. The most famous of all was Kabir, per-
haps the most radical reformer in Hindu history ;
though it is possible his name, which is an appellative
of respect, may be mythical, and simply representative
of a great movement of democratic reaction.^
The Dabistan relates the following stories of
Kabir : —
" Hearing some learned Brahmans, who had been praising the
miraculous power of the Ganges water to wash away all sins, call
for some of this water for themselves, he ran to the river, and
brought back his own wooden cup filled with this sacred element,
which he offered to the Brahman. But being of a caste from whose
hands a Brahman cannot take either food or drink, his gift was re-
fused, upon which he observed : ' You have just now declared that
this water purifies body and soul, and makes all foulness of evil
disappear ; but if it cannot render pure this wooden vase, it cer-
tainly does not deserve your praises.' "
" Seeing once a gardener's wife collecting flowers for the image
of a deity, he said to her : ' In the leaves of the flower Hves the
soul of vegetation, and the idol to whom thou offerest flowers is
without feeling and dead : the vegetable is superior to the mineral.
If the idol possessed a soul, it would chastise the cutter, who, when
dividing its substance, placed his foot on the idol's breast. Go,
and venerate a wise and perfect man, who is a manifestation of
Vishnu.' " 3
The following sentences'* from Kabir and his
^ These illustrations are from Stevenson, and taken from the Bhakta Vijaya.
2 Wilson, pp. SS, 68. * Dabistan, ch. II. viii.
* Taken from Wilson's selections in Essays, &c., ut supra, pp. 79-90.
tj2S BUDDHISM.
immediate followers will convey an idea of his
teaching : —
" My word is from the beginning ; it has been deposited in life ;
there is provided a basket for the flowers."
" He who knows what life is will seize the essence of his own :
such as it is now, he will not possess it again. The travellers are
hurrying on, expecting to purchase where there will be neither trade
nor market."
" Man wanders astray till he finds the gateway of the word. But
he who has made himself acquainted with the word has done his
work."
" Live according to your knowledge : fetch water for your own
drinking, nor demand it from others."
" Life (the world) sells pearls; but with him who knows not their
value, what can be done ? "
" The goose (man) abandons the lake, and would lodge in a water-
jar ! Kabir has called aloud, ' Repair to your own place, nor destroy
your habitation.' "
" The dwelling of Kabir is on a mountain peak, and a narrow
path leads up to it : an ant cannot put his foot on it, but a pious man
may drive up an ox."
" He who sows Rama never puts forth the buds of wrath. He
values not the worthless, and he knows not pleasure nor pain."
" That a drop falls in the ocean, all can perceive ; but that the
drop and the ocean are one, few can comprehend. You and I are
of one blood ; one hfe animates us both ; from one mother is the
world born : what knowledge is this that makes us separate ? Kabir
has said, ' I have cried aloud from friendship to mankind : from not
knowing the name of Rama, the world has been swallowed up in
death.' "
" Of what avail is it to shave your head, prostrate your body on
the ground, or immerse your body in the stream ? Whilst you shed
blood, you call yourself pure, and boast of virtues you never display.
Of what benefit is cleaning your mouth, counting your beads, and
bowing yourself in temples, when, whilst you mutter your prayers,
or journey to Mecca, deceitfulness is in your heart? The Hindu
fasts every eleventh day ; the Mussulman during the Ramazan.
Who formed the remaining months, that you should venerate but
one ? If the Creator dwell in tabernacles, whose residence is the
universe .'' Who has beheld Rama seated amongst images, or found
THE LATER SECTS. 729
him at the shrine to which the pilgrim has directed his steps ? The
city of Hari is to the east, that of AH to the west ; but explore
your own heart; for there are both Rama and Karim."
" Who talks of the Hes of the Veds and Tebs ? Those who
understand not their essence. Behold but One in all thmgs : it is
the second that leads you astray. Every one is of the same nature
with yourself He whose is the world, and whose are the children
of Ali and Ram, — He is my teacher,"
" Poison still remains in the soil, though ambrosia be sprinkled
a hundred times : man quits not his evil habits."
" If you are a true dealer, open the market of veracity : keep
clean your inward man, and repel oppression afar off."
" Many there are that talk, but few that take care to be found :
let him pass on without regard, who practises not what he pro-
fesses."
" Check the tongue, associate with the wise, investigate the
teacher's words."
" Affection is the garment in which man dresses for the dance :
consign yourself, hand and foot, to him whose body and soul are
truth."
" Let truth be your rate of interest, and fix it in your heart."
" A real diamond should be purchased : the mock gem is waste
of capital."
" Pride of intellect is manifold : now a thief, now a liar, now a
murderer ; men, sages, gods, have run after it in vain. Its mansion
has a hundred gates."
" When the bhnd lead the blind, both fall into the well."
"Yet the master is helpless when the scholar is inapt. It is
blowing through a bamboo to teach wisdom to the dull."
" The tree bears not fruit for itself, nor for itself does the stream
collect its waters : for the good of others only does the sage assume
a bodily shape."
" I have wept for mankind, but no one has wept with me : he will
join in my tears, who comprehends the word."
" Kabir cries aloud to his fellows : ' Ascend the sandal ridge ;
whether there be a road prepared or not, what matters it to me .' ' "
" All have exclaimed, ' Master, master,' but to me this doubt
arises : how can they sit down with the master whom they do not
know?"
It is noteworthy that while the disciple of this sect
is bound to devote himself to his spiritual guru or
730 BUDDHISM.
teacher, with implicit obedience, he is warned not to do
so till he has thoroughly investigated his character and
doctrine : to act blindly and slavishly is the highest
wrong.
Another sect of Rama worshippers is that of Dadu,
the cotton-cleaner, also a disciple of Kabir.
Here are a few of his sentences:^ —
" He is my God, who maketh all things perfect. Meditate on
Him in whose hands are life and death. He provideth for all. He
is my friend."
" In all your thoughts, words, and actions, let there be faith in
God. O foolish one ! God is not far from you. You are ignorant ;
but he knovveth every thing, and is careful in bestowing."
" Care can avail nothing : it devoureth life ; for those things shall
happen which God shall direct."
"He who causes all living things to be giveth milk to their
mouths, while yet in the womb."
" Oh, forget not, my brother, that God's power is always with you :
there is a formidable pass within you, and crowds of evil passions
flock to it ; therefore comprehend God."
" He who hath but one grain of the love of God shall be re-
leased from all his sinful doubts and actions. Who need cook or
grind ? Wherever you cast your eyes, ye may see provisions."
" I take for my spiritual food the water and the leaf of Ram ; for
the world I care not, but God's love is unfathomable."
" Whatever is God's will shall surely happen : therefore do not
destroy yourselves by anxiety, but listen."
" Fix your heart on God, and be humble as though you were
dead."
" Have no desires, but accept what circumstances may bring you :
whatever God pleaseth to direct can never be wrong. Go not
about, tearing from the tree which is invisible."
" Dadu saith, ' Do unto me, O God ! as thou thinkest best : I am
obedient unto thee. . My disciples, behold no other God, go no-
where but to Him.' "
" Condemn nothing the Creator hath made. We are not creators.
He can make what He will : we can make nothing."
' Wilson, ui supra, pp. 106-113. From Siddons's translation in the Journal of the
Bengal Society-
THE LATER SECTS. 731
" Meditate on the mysterious affinity between God and the soul."
" Even as you see your countenance reflected in a mirror, or
your shadow in still water, so behold Ram in your minds, because
He is with all."
" He that formed the mind made it as it were a temple for him-
self to dwell in. Receive that which is perfect into your hearts :
abandon all things for the love of God."
" God ever fostereth his creatures ; even as a mother serves her
offspring, and keepeth it from harm."
" O God who art the truth ! grant me contentment, love, devotion,
faith. Thy servant Dadu prayeth for true patience, and that he
may be devoted to thee.
" Dadu saith, ' My earnings are God. He is my food and my
supporter. God is my clothing and my dwelling. He is my ruler,
my body, and my soul.' "
" Listen to God's admonitions, and you will care not for hunger
nor thirst, for heat nor cold. If ye subdue the imperfections of
your flesh, you will think only of God. When you cease to call on
Him, they will return to you."
" Dadu loved Rama without ceasing : he partook of his spiritual
essence, and constantly examined the mirror within him ; he over-
came all evil inclinations : wherefore the light of Rama will shine
upon him."
"Sit humbly at the foot of God, and rid yourselves of bodily
impurity."
" Be fearless and guide yourselves towards the light of God :
there neither sword nor poison have power to destroy, and sin
cannot enter."
" Afford help also to the poor stranger."
" Meditate on Him by whom all things were made. Pundits and
Qazis are fools : of what avail are the heaps of books they have
compiled ? "
" Wear not away your lives by studying the Vedas. Meditate on
God, the beginning and the end."
" Do nothing, O man ! till thou hast thoroughly sifted thy inten-
tions : acquaint thyself thoroughly with the purity of thy wishes,
that thou mayest be absorbed in God. Endeavor to gain Him : nor
hesitate to restore your soul, when required, to that abode from
whence it came."
The belief of the followers of Bdbd-ldl is a combina-
^32 BUDDHISM.
tion of the Vedanta and Sufi tenets. It illustrates in
like manner that union of speculative m\^s-
Baba-lal. . ^ t
ticism with practical benevolence, of which
Buddhism was the earliest expression. This teacher,
when asked which is the best religion, replied : —
" The creed of the lover differs from other creeds. God is the
faith and creed of those who love him. To do good is the best for
the follower of every faith. And, as Hafiz says, — The object of
all relidons is alike : all men seek their beloved. What is the
difference between prudent and wild ? All the world is love's dwell-
ing : why talk of a mosque or a church ? "
The following sentences ^ illustrate his teaching : —
" With whom should the fakir cultivate intimacy ? With the
lord of loveliness. To whom be a stranger? To covetousness,
anger, envy, falsehood, malice. Should he wear garments or go
naked ? Nudity is excusable only in the insane. The love of God
does not depend on a cap or a coat. How conduct himself.'' He
should perform what he promises, and not promise what he cannot
perform."
" Should evil be done to evil-doers ? He should do evil to none.
Hafiz says, ' The repose of the two worlds depends on two rules,
kindness to friends and gentleness to foes.'"
" Is it necessary for a fakir to withdraw from the world .'* What
is the world ? Forgetfulness of God, not clothes, nor wealth, nor
wife, nor offspring."
" What is the fakir's passion ? Knowledge of God. What his
power ? Impotence. What his wisdom ? Devotion of the heart
to the heart's Lord. What is the fakir's dwelling ? God's creatures.
His kingdom ? God."
'• How do the supreme soul and the living [individual] soul differ ?
The supreme soul is beyond accident, but the living soul is afflicted
by sense and passion. Happiness is attained only in reunion with
the One, when the dispersed portions combine again with it, as the
drops of water with the parent stream."
" The body only separates from God. Blessed be the moment
when I shall lift the veil from off that face. The veil of tlie face
of my beloved is the dust of my body."
* Wilson, I. 349, 350.
VI.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION,
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION.
A S a distinctive religion, Buddhism has vanished
"^^^ from its native soil ; surviving only in ^
o J Expansion.
those qualities of thought and sentiment out of
which it grew, and to which, in their Hindu forms, it
gave fresh vigor. But, in the view of universal relig-
ion, this is its real triumph. Positive religions affirm
their own substance to be sacrifice, — of the lower to
the higher, of the special to the ideal. Nature takes
them at their word. Their formulas, that seemed
final, pass ; their sacred names are no longer pro-
nounced with awe ; their proscriptive masterships are
set aside ; their body perishes, and they are changed.
But their after-life is their best. The shell of symbol
thrown aside, the immortal essence escapes, to work
freely as a universal force, and in the whole move-
ment of human life.
So with Buddhism in India. Its harma passed into
a new soul. Its sainthood returned from the gates of
nirvdfia, to assume fresh forms ; veiled by new names
and relations, wherein the closer eye may discern its
life-beyond-death. But its distinctive triumphs have
been without the limits of India. It justified itself also
by its expansive power. In the seventh century Hiouen
Thsang found, even in the most flourishing Buddhist
736 BUDDHISM.
states, many signs of its approaching decay, — power-
ful heresies, deserted monasteries, and fallen shrines.
Two more centuries, and the faith of fifteen hundred
years is cast out: the name of Gotama Buddha, in
India, has had its day. The peaceful debates of its
schools, that had divided every great Hindu state,
the polemics of its moral and metaphysical sects, the
G7'eat and Little Vehicles^ shall no more be heard.
The first act of a darker drama has swept away the
preachers of peace : the second is at hand ; for the
conquering Moslem approaches from the north. The
persecution of the Buddhists is the natural precursor
of a social disunity which lays this magnificent em-
pire at the mercy of a horde of invaders.
Persecution onlv roused the zeal of those messen-
gers of mercy and release. They flocked north, south,
east, and west ; bearing the relics of their saints, and
the writings of their schools, and planting their seats
of culture in the desert and the populous place. But
they had not waited for persecution. For two centu-
ries or more from the death of Gotama, there are no
records of Buddhist expansion, nor signs of the use
of written memorials by the new faith. ^ Yet at the
end of that time it had become the state reliej-ion of
northern India. At the close of the first Christian
century it had gone far towards converting Ceylon,
Kashmir, Kabulistan, and southern Tartary. Even
in China, princes had adopted it, and translations of
Buddhist writings overflowed this empire of rational-
ists.^ The earliest missionaries had appeared in the
third century B.C. Six centuries afterwards India was
a holy land of Chinese pilgrimage. From Ceylon
this living and welcome belief spread on to further
* Koeppen, I. 1S4. ^ Lassen, II. 1078
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 737
India, Burmah, Siam, and the Eastern Archipelago.
From northern India it reached away over the Thi-
betan steppes; from China to Korea and Japan. ^
Certain Chinese records of the fifth century, combined
with a few shght analogies, mythological and other,
have been held sufficient, with not a few scholars, to
prove that it must have penetrated even to Mexico.^
As it would be difficult to find a civilization more in
contrast with Buddhism than the Mexican, such theo-
ries can only be regarded as signs of the impression
made by the expansive energy of this religion on the
European mind."^ They are quite unimportant beside
the marvellous record of history, that, after twenty-five
centuries of life, Buddhism is, with all its gospel of sor-
row, at present the most widely spread religion of the
East ; that its adherents outnumber those of Brahma
three to one ; and that they constitute at the lowest
estimate a quarter of the human race.
How impressive is Father Hue's account of the
wandering Lamas, a body of men whose vocation is
not indeed that of preaching, but who carry with them
their opinions and ceremonies, and are doubtless the
practical propagators of the faith ! " They visit all
accessible countries. There is not a river they have
not crossed, a mountain they have not ascended, a
people among whom they have not lived, and of
whom they do not know the manners and the lan-
guage. One would say they are under the influence
of some mysterious power which drives them on-
1 Lassen, IV. 710; Miiller, Sc. of Lang.., I. 147; Journ. R. A. S., VI. 278.
2 This theory, for which see Lassen (IV. 754) and Wuttke (I. 348), has been fully dis-
posed of by J. G. Miiller, Gesch. d. Amer. Urreligionen (Basel, 1S67), pp. 9, 490.
8 So Pococke [Itidia in Gf'eece, London, 1852) displayed great ingenuity in an attempt
to trace every name in Greek mythology, geography, and history to a Buddhist origin, on
linguistic grounds alone.
47
738 BUDDHISM.
wards ; and it seems as if God had caused to flow
in their veins something of that motive force which
moves worlds forwards in their course."^ This mys-
terious instinct has possessed Buddhism from the
beginning. It must spring in part from a sense of
universality, — of duties, needs, sympathies, and hopes,
felt as common to all mankind. It is the thirst for com-
munion, a democratic religious faith that knows no
bounds of country, creed, nor name. Even that vaga-
bond life, that vague, restless roving which reminded
this Christian missionary of "The Wandering Jew,"
is evidently a relic of the primitive ardor of Buddhism
to emancipate the world. What motive power it must
have had in the day of its definite and conscious
aims !
The direct efTects of Gotama's practical, peaceful,
philanthropic gospel are to be studied in the
edicts of king Asoka, inscribed on monumental
rocks and pillars in various parts of northern India.^
These inscriptions record at once the legislation of
this Buddhist ruler, and his convictions and motives.
They announce themselves as his own words, cut in
the stone at his command, and their authenticity is
beyond question. The history of Asoka, as derived
from Singhalese records and from these monuments,
is a wonderful one. About the middle of the third
1 Hue's Journey, &c., I. 117.
2 For the substance of these remarkable records, and the evidences of their antiquity
and authorship, see Lassen, II. 214-270; Muir's Sansk. Texts., vol. ii. ; and Koeppen, I.
173-178' Consult also Sykes's Notes, &c., in Journ. R. A. S., vol. vi. Professor Wilson
reviewed Prinsep's translation of them, in Jo7irn. R. A. 6"., vol. xii. In a later review
(vol. xvi) he withdraws his doubts as to their Buddhistic origin. Buddhism is not men-
tioned by name, but the emblems are unmistakable. The inscriptions are written in a
" corrupt Sanskrit," closely resembling Pali, the language in which the oldest works of
Buddhism are written, and which was vernacular in northern India when it arose (Muir,
II. 72, 104)- The name they give the king is Piyadasi (the benevolent), a terra applied
to Asoka, in Buddhist writings. Lassen, II. 223.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 739
century B.C. a prince succeeded to the crown of
Pataliputra, whose passions earned him the title of
"//^^ zv7'athfidy He was a devoted follower of the
Brahmans, but stained, according to tradition, with
the blood of a brother, who stood in the way of
his succession to the throne. In four years he had
become a Buddhist disciple. His character changed
with his faith. Instead of "the wrathful" he was
called "the just." "Every good man," he said, "will
I hold as my own child." He caused inns to be built,
and wells opened, and trees planted along the public
roads, to give shelter and refreshment for man and
beast. He regulated the treatment of animals through-
out his dominions according to Buddhist precepts, and
forbade their slaughter for sacrificial purposes. It is
probable that he abolished the death penalty, and
certain that he gradually narrowed its use, until
it became almost, if not quite, obsolete. His treat-
ment of prisoners taken in war was of the most hu-
mane nature. He recognized freedom of thought and
established universal toleration.
The inscriptions say : —
" The king, beloved of the gods, honors every form of religious
faith ; but considers no gift nor honor so much as the increase of
the substance of religion ; whereof this is the root, — to reverence
one's own faith, and never to revile that of others. Whoever acts
differently injures his own religion, while he wrongs another's. The
texts of all forms of religion shall be followed, under my protection.
Duty is in respect and service. Alms and pious demonstrations
are of no worth compared with the loving-kindness of religion.
The festival that bears great fruit is the festival of duty. The
king's purpose is to increase the mercy, charity, truth, kindness,
and piety of all mankind. There is no gift like the gift of virtue.
Good is liberality ; good it is to harm no living creature ; good to
abstain from slander ; good is the care of one's parents, kindness
to relatives, children, friends, slaves. — That these good things may
740 BUDDHISM.
increase, the king and his descendants shall maintain the law.
Ministers of morals shall everywhere aid the charitable and good.
I will always hear my people's voice. I distribute my wealth for
the good of all mankind, for which I am ever laboring." ^
*To the Brahmans, whose disciplines he had re-
nounced, he paid respect, and gave substantial favors
to such of them as he thought sincere and liberal in
their spirit. He built monasteries for the Buddhists ;
regulated their cultus ; held their most important
synod, to whose labors the oldest sutras are probably
due ; and spared no effort to make their preaching
effectual. He is believed to have erected eighty-four
thousand topes, or relic shrines ; probably a mystical
number. He sent friendly embassies to foreign lands,
to propagate the faith. His civil regulations showed
the highest regard for justice and humanity. He
appointed a corps of officers to keep him informed, at
all times, of every thing in the condition of his people
that required his attention, fearing only lest any pri-
vate pleasure should distract his mind from the care
of their peace. He instituted another class of officers
for the purpose of preventing crime; placing them
at the outskirts of towns where crowds were wont
to assemble, commissioned to dissuade people from
wrong-doing without resorting to violence. Finally,
he declared that he could not, with all these endeavors,
satisfy his sense of responsibility, as a king, for his
people's moral and social condition, nor his inmost
desire for their good. " There is no higher duty than
to work for the good of the whole world."
Such are the earliest products of Buddhism in
personal life, which at this distance of time can be
^ These extracts are from Wilson's revision of Prinsep's translation, and from Lassen's
fiill account of As'oka.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 74I
clearly discerned. Asoka has been called "the Budd-
hist Constantine " from his temporal services to this
gospel of the East ; but, as a ruler, he seems to re-
semble the great heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius,
far more than that most unscrupulous patron of Chris-
tianity. And even if the records of his life and
government were less fully accredited than, as a
whole, they really are, the conception of such a mon-
arch, at that epoch and in that quarter of the world,
w^ould be a fact quite as interesting as the actual
man.
The story of his son, Kunala (so called from the
beauty of his eyes), who, after being deprived
of these organs in consequence of the false
testimony of an unprincipled and cruel woman, inter-
cedes to save her from the consequences of her crimes,
may or may not be historical, but has a like value as
testimony to a moral ideal.
The account given in the Mahavansa, of Dushta-
gamini, who reigned in Ceylon in the second Dushtaga-
century B.C., is involved, as indeed is this ^'^'^•
whole sacred chronicle, in a mass of mythical legend ;
but it bears witness none the less positively to the
practical excellence of Buddhism.^ This monarch,
also, is reported to have been a model of devotion to
the interests of his people, moral, industrial, social,
and aesthetic. He especially furthered agriculture,
and opened roads through his dominions. Like
Asoka, he built hospitals, and endowed monasteries
with the greatest zeal. Both these kings seem to
have contributed to the improvement of Hindu archi-
tecture, by erecting religious edifices on a magnificent
* See Lassen, II. 421-430 ; Mahavansa (Tumour), ch. xxiv.-xxxiii.
742 BUDDHISM.
scale. The description of Dushtagamini's pious la-
bors in erecting the stupendous dagop of Ruanvelli, to
fulfil the prediction of his ancestors regarding his
own reign, reminds us in many ways of the building
of Solomon's Temple to Jehovah ; but the mythical
splendors that invest the Buddhist work are novv^ise
paralleled by Hebrew tradition. The noble edict is
recorded of this king, that no part of his great work
should be accomplished by unpaid labor. ^ When, at
the close of life, his good deeds to the poor and in fur-
therance of his faith, are enumerated in his presence, in
order to overcome his natural shrinking from death, —
he replies : '*With these works I am not satisfied: the
two alms-deeds which I did while I was in want, and
which I performed without regarding my life, I prefer
to the whole." Then, calling his brother, who is to
be his successor, he charges him not only to complete
the religious works thus begun, failing in no form of
benevolence or of care for the faith, but to ^'do no
harm to the people, and to rule the kingdom with jus-
tice ; " and then lies silently down to die, facing the
dagof he had made, while the devatas (celestial
beings) invite him in the air, saying, " Our lord is
glorious and possesses longer life : come then hither,
come then hither." Beseeching them to suffer him,
as long as he lives, to hear the teaching of the faith,
he raises his hand. The movement is mistaken by
the priests for a gesture of fear, and they say to one
another : " There is no one that does not fear death."
But the king, having expired, is borne away in a
chariot, like a man awakened out of a deep sleep ;
and then, to show his glory to the people, he reappears
in splendor, driving thrice around the sacred pile,
^ Mahav-i ch. xxx.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 743
that they may see the heavenly glory he has at-
tained. ^
It is an unreliable version which ascribes to this
king a harem of Solomonic proportions : there is not,
in the whole story of his reign, the faintest sign of sen-
suality nor of any other personal vice.
A similar record is given of several other Buddhist
rulers of Ceylon in the continuation of the ceyionese
Mahavansa. Some of these were scholars legends.
and writers, and all were patrons of literature and
art.^ Traditions of the same moral tone celebrate
the virtues of the earliest Buddhist rulers of Thibet.^
One of the Singhalese kings is described as having,
among other marvellous powers, such as bringing on
rain by his piety, a much better one ; namely, that of
converting rogues by good counsel. He thus puts a stop
to the bad practices of great numbers of thieves, while
satisfying his people, who insist on their punishment,
by showing dead bodies, on which those penalties
had been inflicted which the law would have visited
on the living offenders."* Another king, of very bar-
barous tendencies, dissuaded from war by Buddhist
priests, who teach him the superior virtue of peace and
harmony, thereupon gives up the country he has won,
and returns to his ovvn.^
Leaving these old traditions, we turn to the present
Buddhists of Thibet. All travellers testify to Buddhism
their simplicity, gentleness, and freedom from i^ Thibet.
sensual excesses. Hue tells us their theory is that
"all men are brothers."^ "The regent of Lha-Ssa,"
he says, "did not appear surprised at any thing
1 Mahavansa, ch. xxxii- ^ See abstract in Lassen, IV, 279-350.
3 Koeppen, II. 65, 73. « Makdv., ch. xxxvi. 6 Ibid. (Upham), ch. Ixx.
^ Travels through Thibet, I. 43, 170, II. 40, 107.
744 BUDDHISM.
in Christian teaching, but incessantly repeated, ^ Your
religion is like our own : the truths are the same, we
only differ in the explanation.' " The good mission-
ary indeed found it not easy to understand the panthe-
ism into which this liberal and hospitable faith resolved
itself. Yet nothing could be finer, even as manners
only, than the cordiality and courage with which the
Buddhist ruler entered into free inquiry as to the
respective merits of his own and the foreign belief,
promising to adopt the latter, if it should appear to be
the better one.^ The Thibetans exhibit none of that ex-
clusiveness towards foreigners which the Chinese and
other Asiatic nations have been driven into adopting.
They seem to have even a careful interest in strangers,
and lose no opportunity of kindly service. The mis-
sionaries, near to perishing of hunger and wet in the
desert, for lack of fire and fuel, were accosted by a
band of Tartars, leading a laden camel: "My lords
Lamas, the sky has fallen to-day : doubtless you have
not been able to light your fire ; but men are all brothers
and belong to one another, and the lay should serve
the holy ; so we are come to light your fire for you."^
When the animals of a caravan go astray, whoever
is in the neighborhood must go seek them ; and, if they
cannot be found, give others in their place. ^ " We
will search for your horses," said the Tartar chief to-
Hue, " and, if they are not found, you shall choose
at pleasure from all our herds. We wish you to leave
us in peace as you came." Contrast these civil tribes
with their ancestors, the barbarian hordes of Tschingis-
khan, following the wolf's head on their banners to
incessant ravin, piling pyramids of human heads
along their path, merciless alike to the weak and the
1 Travels through Thibet, II. 203. « Ibid., I. 43. ^ ibid., I. 64.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 745
strong.^ Security of life and property reigns among
them to a degree undreamed of in Europe during the
Middle Ages ; and the change is almost entirely the
work of Lamaism.2 "The humane doctrine of
Buddha has greatly softened, if it has not eradicated
their old savage traits.^ Thus women in Tartary are
in a more independent position than is usual in the
'East. They come and go as they please, are active,
cheerful, and of free bearing, notwithstanding the old
marriage regulations which still oppress the sex.*
Hue says that all but the highest classes are in a mild
form of slavery ; but it is hard to understand in what
sense this is true, since their mode of life is precisely
that of their masters, and, if they enter the tents of
the latter, they are always offered the customary
courtesies.
It was through Buddhism that literature and law
were introduced amonsf the rude tribes of Thi-
° Thibetan
bet. The traditions tell us of a hundred Hterature
translators and teachers of the sacred books ^'^ ^'^'
invited from India in the ninth century, who at last
completed this new gospel in a hundred folio vol-
umes,^ to be revised and retranslated five centuries
later under the auspices of the great Buddhist monarch,
Kublai Khan. Previous to this time, Buddhist scholars
had constructed a new alphabet for the Mongolian
tribes.^
The superstitious and savage Mongols who mas-
tered these highlands in the thirteenth century were
met and controlled by the devotion of a Buddhist
monk, Thsong-kha-pa, who revived the best elements
1 Wuttke, I. 244-248. 2 Koeppen, I. 482. 3 Ibid., from Neumann.
* Hue, I. 185. A similar position is accorded to women in Siam. journal 0/ Indian
Archipelago, 1847.
5 Lassen, IV. 716. ^ Koeppen, II. 99-101.
74^ BUDDHISM.
of primitive Buddhism, then rapidly yielding to the
superstitions of a degraded form of Siva-worship.
This earnest preacher of devout meditation and social
order and harmony, setting bounds to the coarse feti-
chism of the nomads, directed the religious sentiment
to ideas, and to the broader forms and disciplines that
ideas demand. He was in fact the father of the real
Catholic Church of Central Asia. The true Thibetan
papacy of the "yellow hat" Lamas, as distinguished
from the older and ruder "red hat" priests, goes back
to Thsong-kha-pa. He came to be venerated as first
incarnation of the phenomenal portion of the Buddha,
which perpetually renews itself by transmigration, to
preserve the unity of his Church, in an endless suc-
cession of Dalai Lamas, or " Oceans of Sanctity."^
It is not easy to overestimate the benefits of that
incessant emphasis on benevolent, and even
Civilizing •■■
power of tender and compassionate sentiments, which
Buddhism. ■, • i ^i rr i j
everywhere accompanied the efiort to unite
these tribes in a universal church. Through all the
grossness into which Buddhism has degenerated, we
can trace the invincible leaven of practical humanity,
everywhere neutralizing ignorance, inertia, and de-
spair. An ample collection of testimonies to this
effect may be read in Koeppen's masterly work, from
which I select a few examples. Such are the reports
given by Symes and others, of the manners of the
Burmese, as in some respects wild and barbarous, but
in others exhibiting the delicate sensibilities of a culti-
vated people,^ — thoughtful for the sick, the weak, and
the old, placable towards enemies and hospitable to
* Lassen, IV. 725 ; Koeppen, II. 70, 112.
' Malcotn {Travels in Burntah) says: "During my whole residence in this country, I
never saw an immodest act or gesture in man or woman."
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. ^47
strangers ; — by Crawford, of the kindness of the
Siamese and Burmese to the shipwrecked, now re-
garded as a rehgious duty towards those whom they
were used to despoil; — by Pallegoix, of the custom
with private persons in Siam of placing hospitals and
night-lodgings along the roadsides and rivers, for the
use of wayfarers, while large vessels are daily filled
with water, by the peasant w^omen, for their refresh-
ment ; — and by travellers generally, of the condem-
nation of crimes like theft and murder, by the Siamese
as a people, notwithstanding the great number of
rogues and vagabonds that infest the country.^ "Vast
numbers of the poor in Christian countries," says a
competent witness,^ " may well envy the correspond-
ing class in Siam."
Wherever Buddhism has extended, even where it
has fallen from the simplicity of its earliest ,
^ "^ Its vestiges.
inspirations into manifold mummeries and
fanaticisms, there still remains this redeeming pres-
ence of the spirit of brotherhood. "Popular educa-
tion has reached a considerable degree of advancement
in all Buddhist countries. Every town, almost every
secluded village, has its monastery occupied by monks,
who, either with or without pay, give instruction to
children, affording to all the means of acquiring ele-
mentary knowledge ; so that it is really rare to find
persons who can neither read nor write." -^ There are
institutions everywhere for the sick, orphaned, and
poor ; wells in every desert ; shady groves along every
dusty road ; everywhere missionaries of comfort and
relief; everywhere tender mercies towards the lower
1 Koeppen, I. 455-486. See also Nevins's China, pp. 214-228.
2 Alabaster, Wheal of the Law, p. Ivi.
3 Bastian, Weltaiiff. d. Buddh. (Berlin, 1870), p. 37. St. Hilaire, p. 400.
748 BUDDHISM.
creatures ; and this not confined to regulations in re-
straint of their wanton abuse and destruction, but car-
ried even to that extravagance of care and protection
which naturally belongs to an idealism without sense
of practical limits. Buddhism has everywhere sought
to abolish bloody sacrifices, and in most Asiatic coun-
tries with success ; bringing, in place of these barbar-
ities of religious service, mystical and fragrant incense,
and the tender beauty of flowers. And with the same
endeavor to refer sacrifice to its true conception, as a
consecration by love, the believers, from the first, con-
tributed alms to the priests ; gifts for the support of the
temples ; milk, butter, cheese, and various kinds of
drink, according to their occupations and means. But
these gifts were never to be burned, nor poured out as
libations, nor given with any idolatrous notion that they
were eaten or drunk by the Buddhas, as the older Sem-
ites believed their blood offerings were by Baal and
Jehovah. If animals are sometimes offered in Budd-
hist countries, it is never to the Buddha.^ Deity in-
deed, to accord with the conception of nirvana^ must
be as profoundly independent of outward tributes as,
for the Semitic idea, it is dependent on them ; and, if
allowing slighter hold than this idea for personal rela-
tions with the worshipper, it at least did not force the
imagination to divine the unknown and indefinite de-
mands of a jealous master ; a demoralization by fear
in which the most degrading forms of sacrifice have
originated. The instincts of love and devotion were
left to find their own spontaneous expression.
"The worship of the Hindu deities in Ceylon," says
Tennent, " is devoid of the obscenities and cruelty by
which it is characterized on the continent of India
^ Koeppen, I. 561.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 749
and it would almost appear as if these had been
discontinued by the Brahmans in compliment to the
superior purity of the worship with which their own
had been fortuitously connected."^ Slaves have been
received even by Buddhist monasteries in this island,
where caste has not wholly yielded to the civilizing
influences of that humane faith ; but Singhalese slav-
ery, according to the same observer, "is domestic,
not predial. It was so mild that, when, in 1845, Lord
Stanley abolished it, no claim was made by masters
for compensation."^ 1
Wherever Buddhism has penetrated, it has abolished \
human sacrifice, which still prevails in portions of ?'
India never yet subjected to its influence. It has con- \
stantly discouraged capital punishment ; and in many
parts of Asia it has succeeded, at various times and
for longer or shorter periods, in setting the death
penalty aside.
" Buddhism has been violently persecuted at various
times and in various countries. It appears
^ ^ Peaceful
never to have dreamed of revenge."^ It has and tolerant
been faithful to its principle that truth is not to ^^'"*"
be imposed by violence ; that opinion must be free. Its
rejection of bloodshed has been absolute. Beside the
history of its peaceful progress, the records of Islam
and Christianity are black with tyranny and hate. If
it has not prevented civil wars in a colossal empire like
China, we must remember that its essential ideas have
been a constant restraint on them, and probably con-
, tributed, as much as any thing, to that social order and
national unity through nearly four thousand years,
which has been in many respects the most marvellous
fact in the political history of mankind.
* Tennent's Ceylon^ I. 536. * Ibid., ch. i. ^ St. Hilaire, p. 400,
750 BUDDHISM.
Buddhism reached the conception that all religions
. . have been apprehensions, with s^jreater or less
Recognition ^ ^ ^^ .
of universal distinctness, of one eternal faith ; so that it has
reigion. £.^j^ ^ kindlj ycaming towards all of them,
sought to find their common good elements, and
to give each a place in the theory of its dharma or
Law. It assigns one of its highest heavens to the
virtuous of other religions. It knows no heathen
hated of God, only a common humanity seeking for
eternal life. " When Sakyamuni came to earth,"
say the Lamaists, " he found that all peoples were not
equally capable of receiving his whole law. He
therefore gave to each what truths it was able to
apprehend, and so spread his blessing over all. And
of all these, not one that follows its own light, shall
be lost. "1 The Mahavansa relates of Dushtagamini,
that, among the images of deities in act of homage to
Buddha, which he made to adorn his great dagop,
was that of the Buddhist Satan, ascending humbly,
with his host of followers, to praise with the rest the
power of goodness he had vainly striven to overturn.^
The legend of the conversion of Kashmir makes the
Nagas (water serpents) oppose the civilizing gospel
and attempt to destroy its apostles. Not only are
their stones and arrows turned to flowers as they fall,
but their chiefs, instead of being annihilated, are con-
verted^ to rejoice in a land which from a desert has
been transformed into a garden.^
Towards Christians Buddhism has always shown
* Bergmann, in Koeppen, I. 462 ; Bastian, ut supra, p. 26.
2 Mahdvafisa, ch. xxx. The reply of the priests to the scruples of this king at having
destroyed thousands of lives in war, that "heretics" were "no better than wild beasts"
{Ma/tav. ch. xxv), is at once condemned by the chronicler: a fact not mentioned by
Hardy, who quotes the saying to discredit Buddhism. {Eastern Motuichism, p. 415.)
3 J our 71. Asiatique, for 1865, pp. 490, 505. In Indian mythology, serpents stand for
rude primitive powers, whether of man or nature ; while the eagle, ^ar«
ence. esscucc of the faith.
According to most Christian writers, this is be-
cause the essence of Buddhism is "indifference in
religion." The injustice of such a charge against the
* Tennent's Ceylon, II. 545. * St Hilaire, p. 301-306.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 755
most ardent missionaries in the ancient world is too
evident to be discussed. Others find the explanation
in the " negative " spirit of this religion. " How should
they who believe the highest truth is in knowing noth-
ing, persecute others for knowing less than them-
selves? Intolerance grows out of the necessities of
an actual Church and an actual State. How should
they persecute, to whom both Church and State are
unreal? " ^ But the supposed " nihilism " of the Budd-
hists has already received our attention. Even were
there more justice in the imputation than there is, the
fact remains to be explained that they who are so in-
tensely devoted to the propagation of nihilism should
exhibit such liberality towards the intensest opponents
thereof. If knowing nothing is the highest good, then
the pretence of knowing any thing is the utmost mis-
chief; and it is hard to say why he who finds motive
for zeal in love of the one should not find motive for
severity in hatred of the other. However unreal in
essence Church and State may be for the Buddhist
mind, it is to the extension of the Church and the
conversion of the State that it has been devoted for
more than a thousand years, and there must be some-
thing more positive and potent than rnere insensibility
to the worth of right knowledge, which has kept it
broad and sweet, hospitable and tolerant to all oppos-
ing creeds. An attitude of negation is essentially an
attitude of opposition ; and the path of opposition is
the path to enmity just in proportion to the degree in
which the affirmative and receptive spirit is excluded
from it. How, then, is the tolerance of Buddhism to
be explained as a fruit of its negative qualities? How
is it we have not here a set of morose and bitter misan-
thropes, skeptical of all good in their fellow-men?
1 See Wuttke, II. 586.
756 BUDDHISM.
St. Hilaire, who believes these millions to be pure
nihilists, utterly "without one trace of the idea of a
God," is very naturally unable to explain the fact that
" so much ignorance should be accompanied by a vir-
tue that seems to demand so much light and so rare
a sense of justice." And he contents himself with
recognizing the fact without attempting to solve it,
except by stating it to have been in part " an imitation
of the tolerant spirit of Brahmanism."^
Some, again, have ascribed this liberal tone of
Other Buddhism to an inability to appreciate the
theories, "sinfulucss of siu ; " which might indeed be a
sufficient reason for expecting men to manifest such
easily besetting sins as uncharitableness, but hardly
explains the victory over it, especially when, as here,
this result is attended by a painful perception of moral
penalties and a rigid moral discipline.
Others, more rationally, refer us to the peculiar cir-
cumstances under which Buddhism was compelled to
struggle into life ; to a resistance in ancestral institu-
tions which it could not hope to overcome by any out-
ward force at its command.
More significant, however, is the truth that is now
Freedom beginning to be recognized by students of
fromrehg- Qomparatlvc Relifjion, that intolerance is an
lous mon- ^ "
archism. incident of distinctive mojiotheism or vionarch-
isni. The belief that the law of duty is the imposed
will of a Being external to man and the world, having
its authority in his right and power to send down his
special edicts to a separate and subject race, and to
secure recognition and obedience to his exclusive
messengers, — this belief, standing as the substance
of religious obligation, is the inevitable parent of per-
* Le Bouddha, p. 286. *
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 757
sedition. With whatever good elements it may be
combined, the right of an imposed, external divine Will
issues in human Inquisitions, and the conrpelle intrare
of the Church. It is the energetic infusion of this
monarchism in Judaism and Christianity, which has
made intolerance their perpetual vice or their subtle
tendency. On the other hand, and by reason of the
total absence of this monarchical interest, whatever
the perils that attend pantheism, or any other form of
belief which tends to identify the substance of the
human and the divine, this of attempting forcible
entrance on the domain of reason and conscience, in
the name of sovereign will, is not one of them. Now
if Buddhism is not strictly pantheistic, if it does not in
terms identify the substance of the human with the
divine, it in fact assumes their unity to be essential,
and not arbitrary nor imposed. It seeks the divine
through the human, and makes the self-abnegation
through which it is .attained a strictly human volition.
Nirvana, whatever be its peculiar meaning, certainly
expresses the free choice and fulfilled capacity of the
Buddha. In other words, it is Man ^^ awakened^^ to
his real being. Buddhism, therefore, appeals to no,
monarchical will absolutely external to human nature.
And, when it denies validity to every definite form of
human thought and being, this is not that it may
affirm the infinite to be altogether af art from man;
but that it may find the infinite, somehow, involved in
his process of emancipation from all dreams and illu-
sions into the reality of his essential Buddhahood.
And no exclusive messenger to human nature is here
possible, since humanity is itself defined as having no
real being apart from this process and result. For
these reasons, if for no other, Buddhism can assert no
758 BUDDHISM.
authority but such as is awarded it by the free con-
sciousness of man : its doctrines must rest on their
own intrinsic merits, and their appeal must be to
reason, not to force. Its starting point is not in an
external command, but in an inward free aspiration.
And this was indeed historically its origin. It was
Origin in a spontaneous protest, metaphysical and practi-
free protest ^^| acraiust the twofold tvranny of trausmi (^ra-
and aspira- ' & J J o
tion- tion and caste. It was the reaction of the human
against an idea of deity crystallized in texts, in institu-
tions, in endless minute legislation for thought and life.
It was an appeal from authority claiming to descend
upon man to the force of aspiration in man.
But it was not merely the assertion of a human
right. It was the cry of human sympathy;
brotherly the summous of compassion to the rescue of
mankind from pain that seemed as wide and
deep as life itself. Surely intolerance would be a
strange fruit to come from such seed. Surely it would
be unaccountable if they, who go out solely to heal
suffering and to break bonds, should take with them
the crudest scourge of body and mind. We may
easily believe that such instincts of brotherhood as im-
pelled the Buddhist, — being wholly free from that
sense of a commission to maintain the exclusive claims
of a mediator and a monarchical dogma, which has so
often darkened Christianity and Islam with its per-
secuting spirit — could not fail, however otherwise
enfeebled, to reap the benefit of this indemnity in a
broader and sweeter flow.
The tolerant attitude of Buddhism requires no other
Result explanation, apart from the natural tendency of
the Hindu mind as shown also in Brahman-
ism, than the essential quality and aim of the Budd-
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 759
hist movement itself. It is but a part of that humane
impulse, which must be fully recognized as substan-
tially its motive power, before either its metaphysical
negations or its positive moral ardor can be fairly
understood.
As inclusive of all other practical benefits from the
propagation of Buddhism, we must add the unifying
fact, that it has been a vast force of associa- ^°''*^^-
tion ; an ideal centre of unity among the rude and
isolated races of Asia. With all its pliancy to local
peculiarities, and through all diversities of phase, it
has given them a common starting-point of religious
interest, in place, in time, and in personal homage ;
and, to no slight extent, a common dogma, a common
tradition, and a common literature. It has thus done
much in accomplishing that -preliminary stage in re-
ligious growth for the Eastern world which Christianity
has so well effected for the West. It has brought
the tribes together by missions, explorations, and pil-
grimages to distant and widely separated shrines. It
has taught them orderly routines, patient disciplines,
permanent friendly relations between classes, and,
in such defective ways indeed as Oriental genius
conditioned and an undeveloped perception of nat-
ural laws required, aided them to distinct social and
political aims.^ It is not true that its call to forsake
the world as vanity, and to immure life in the con-
vent or the cell, has made it a mere force of social
disintegration. The conventual life was a step to-
wards definite and constructive communion. A large
proportion of the Buddhist priests lived in the towns
1 The crude and coarse material, which was to be leavened, explains that strange mixt-
ure of moral elevation with trivial and even repulsive details of special prescription, which
characterizes such Buddhist works as the Catechism of the Chinese Shamatis-
760 BUDDHISM.
and cities, were not eremites but cenobites, avoiding
the old isolation of the Brahmanical ascetics ; ^ and
whether as mendicants, or as private teachers, or as
employed in other professional services, everywhere
formed a real centre for the interests of the people.
They are to this day the instructors of the children
of the poor in all towns and villages in Buddhist
countries.^ Their preaching of the vanity of life was
at loidist. fr cachings and gathered the multitudes as they
had never been gathered before, to breathe the mag-
netic atmosphere of a common purpose, and feel the
thrill of democratic appeal. The degree to which
this sense of social equality, this democratic element,
exists in China, in India, and even in Central Asia, is
yet to be appreciated by the Western nations ; and
Buddhism has been, to an extent which is equally un-
recognized, at once its expression and its education.
" Nipal is covered with vihdras (monasteries) ; but these ample
abodes have long resounded with the hum of industry and the
pJeasant voices of women and children. The convents are always
open to new-comers, and for the departure of those who are tired
of their vows. Women are regarded as equally worthy of admis-
sion with men."^
The Nepalese priests have abandoned ascetic prac-
tices, and have exclusive inheritance of the pro-
fessions and trades. The chief maintenance of the
lamas of Thibet is their own industry. They are
artists, schoolmasters, artisans, and laborers in every
kind.^ The dependent condition involved in the men-
dicancy of the Buddhist priesthood exposes this class
to popular contempt, which is to a great degree oflset
^ Koeppen, II. 262.
* Bastiaii, Weltaitff. d- Budd/i.., p. 37 ; St. Hilaire, p. 401.
' Hodgson, Transact, of Royal As- Soc, II. 256.
* Wilson, Essays, II. 374; Koeppen, II. 275 ; Hue, II. 90.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. *j6l
by the many ways in which they make themselves
of general service. In most Buddhist countries, the
Festival of the Plough is held annually with great
honor, all classes, from the monarch down, paying rev-
erence to this symbol of the dignity of labor. In
Siam, on these occasions, a "king of the husband-
men" is chosen, who represents the highest authority,
and is made the centre of various singular rites.
During his brief sovereignty, he receives as his per-
quisite all fines paid for violating the law against
doing work on this festal day.^
These bold pioneers, these active colonizers, these
sturdy democrats, making^ the far expanses of ^. .^
•^ !D i: Signincance
a continent vocal even with their tidings of a of Buddhist
silent world, and alive and prolific by a gospel p''^^^""^"
which actually proclaimed them empty and dead, —
v^hat a rebuke they are to all narrow, negative form-
ulas for interpreting the facts of religious history !
That they preached absolute renunciation of life, en-
forced thereto by the absence of science and practical
freedom, was really the sign that these two elements
were indispensable to the dignity and desirability of
life, and that man's ideal nature refused to honor even
existence itself on the conditions it then and there
presented. And was the instinctive protest wholly
blind to this, its own inner meaning? Mark what
these idealists did.
They struck out a new doctrine and discipline, be-
cause the old was stiff and unsocial. They Achieve-
proselyted for it with an energy never equalled ™^"^^*
before or since, save by that of Catholic Rome. They
preached tidings of salvation to the low-caste arti-
sans and laborers ; encouraged agriculture, and taught
^ Crawford's Mission to Siam.
762 BUDDHISM.
writing and humane manners to the rude rovers of
the north. ^ They planted peaceful monasteries for
study and contemplation, gathered colossal libraries,
created immense bodies of literature, in India, in
Nepal, in Thibet, in Ceylon, in China ; and they re-
freshed with tides of positive enterprise and emigra-
tion, in the interest of an ideal aim, all Eastern Asia
from Korea to Siam. Architecture and sculpture in
central and southern Asia are mainly of their crea-
tion. The indications of writing in India commence
with their revolution in the interest of the masses. ^
Their recognition of the value of letters is illustrated
in their mythical genesis of "the sacred syllable.'*
"First the world was void. The first light was atun;
thence the alphabet, the seeds of the universe."^
They may even be said to have created history in
India by the civil, social, and political agitations
which they produced.
Their uninterrupted chronicle of Ceylon, covering
nearly the whole period of Buddhist sway in that island,
with its valuable chronological data, is, notwithstand-
ing its mythical elements, one of the most important
historical documents in Oriental literature. The
Buddhist canon in China is seven hundred times as
large as the New Testament. Hiouen Thsang's trans-
lation of a single set of Sutras is twenty-five times the
amount of the Christian Bible. The canonical books
of the Thibetans are of dimensions beside which those
of other races and religions are insignificant.^ They
number thousands of works, gathered into hundreds
of volumes ; and the Bible of the southern Buddhists
^ See St. Hilaire, 370; Koeppen, I. 1S6, 481 ; VVuttke, I. 24S, II. 559.
* Miiller's Sa?isk. Lit., p. 519. ^ Hodgson, Trans. R. A. S., II. 232.
* A summary of the hundred volumes of the Kah-gyur is given by Csoma Korosi, in
Altai. Researches^ vol. xx.
BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 7^3
is equally enormous.^ Both treat of all forms of
Oriental speculation, science, and art.^ In the sixth
century two thousand Buddhist works had been trans-
lated into Chinese.^ The literary industry of these
(theoretic) unbelievers in work was immeasurable.
It was the necessity of agricultural development, to
meet the practical requirements of a religion which
prohibited the taking of life, that stimulated manual
toil, and covered Ceylon with reservoirs and conse-
crated lakes for the irrigation of the country. It was
this that measured the praise of the Buddhist kings
by the number of tanks and canals, sometimes amount-
ing to thousands, which they had constructed for the
"benefit of the country," or "out of compassion for
livinfi creatures," or to enrich the Church and main-
tain its priesthood. Here was a theoretic indolence,
that taught kings to plant gardens and reclaim lands ;
to provide by systematic cultivation the means for
gratuitously supplying food to travellers in their
dominions ; to organize the democratic village com-
munities, with their simple and regular administration
of justice ; and even to labor in the rice fields with
their own hands, "to make their gifts more meritori-
ous I"* Here was a contempt for nature and all
fleeting forms, that could surround cities with gardens,
and bury lofty temples to their summits under votive
heaps of flowers, and make every day's especial at-
mosphere of prayer and praise refresh the worshippers
with a new and distinct aroma, from the wealth of
their floral world ! ^ Here was a metaphysical nega-
1 The Singhalese Tripitaka (Three Baskets) contains 350,000 verses. St. Hilaire,
p. 380.
2 Weber's Vorlesungen, p. 194 ; Koeppen, II. 278-280.
3 Beal's Buddhist Pilgrhiis, p. xxxiii.
* Mahavansa, ch. xxxiv. 6 Tennent.
764 BUDDHISM.
tlon of all light and joy, that could come out into
recognition of these very things as elements of relig-
ious architecture and ritual, far transcending that ac-
corded them by the Christian world ; lifting its airy
pagodas in the pleasantest sites, enclosed with cheerful
galleries and luxuriant gardens and groves ; enliven-
ing its vikd7'as, and even the gloom of its rock exca-
vations, with endless carving and painting of symbolic
imagery drawn from nature, the animal world, and
the arts of social life ; performing its sacred rites to the
sound of inspiring music, and celebrating periodical
feasts of lamps, of images, of birthdays, and of the
opening spring ! ^ *
There is scarcely any movement in the history of
Historic religious enterprise that can be compared to
paraUeis. \\^\^^ cxccpt the labors of the Benedictine
monks, whose rise made the sixth century of the
Christian era memorable, just as the first preaching
of Buddhism signalized the sixth century before it.
That band of devoted missionaries, who carried Chris-
tianity into the wilds of northern Europe, raised wo-
man to equality of ecclesiastical position with man,
and opened asylums to outcasts and serfs ; who tran-
scribed and diffused copies of their own Scriptures with
prodigious industry ; who founded schools of music,
painting, and architecture ; who preserved art and
science through the mediaeval night, and organized
agriculture on a gigantic scale, as acceptable service
of God and ennobling work of man, — are the near-
est western analogue to these oriental enthusiasts ;
and not without special resemblance in the proof they
afford that man cannot help relucting with vigor
* Koeppen, I. 560-585, II. 300; Lassen, II. 1170. Wilson, Jojirn. R- A. S. (Bom-
bay Branch), vol. iv. On the growth of Buddhist art in Orissa, from mere holes in rocks
to temples covered with beautiful imagery, see Hunter, vol. i.
* BUDDHIST CIVILIZATION. 765
against all his own theoretic postulates of the " vanity
of life."
We should mention also the Moravian brethren, a
more recent instance of practical zeal in the service
of an ideal that apparently disparaged the present
world ; — penetrating the remotest regions of barbar-
ism, and piercing Himalayan solitudes, to surmount
those colossal heights, and stand side by side with
Buddhism on the sacred plateaux of Central Asia.
VII.
ECCLESIASTICISM,
ECCLESIASTICISM.
'TnHE practical energy and humanity of Buddhism in
its early days, and these later vestiges of ^
'J " ' o Degeneracy.
a civilizing power which even its degeneracy
cannot hide, thoroughly refute the charge that its in-
tellectual skepticism was spiritual despair. They are
the cheering signs of a healthful effort of nature to
counteract the inertia of the Eastern races ; to over-
come the physical conditions that held them apart ;
to compensate for the absence of scientific and social
opportunity, and for the inveteracy of institutions; to
relieve the monotony of contemplation, endlessly re-
volving fixed forms of thought, and cycles of destiny.
It was from these invincible conditions of race, cli-
mate, experience, identified with life itself, that men
sought refuge in negations, whose very thoroughness
was a path of emancipation, and led out into the gran-
deur of compassion, sacrifice, love. Yet without
science, without friction of races, without the stir of
a more ardent life, these conditions were invincible.
The social status could not supply material for forms
of permanent culture which would justify life, as life^
to man's ideal sense. So this negation penetrated
even the humane instincts, and made them subser-
vient to ascetic aims. The Buddhist priesthood be-
49
770 BUDDHISM.
came, after an Oriental way, men of action, and
constructive forces in the living world ; but it was to
persuade others to abandon action and renounce the
world. ^ The salvation they preached was escape from
life, not discovery of its inherent practical values, out-
ward or inward. It was the same in a very- large
degree with Christianity ; but the ethnic connections
and opportunities of Christianity, unlike those of Budd-
hism, have been capable of counteracting the other-
worldHness of its own prescribed ideal. The Buddhist
priesthood, on the other hand, are still children of the
jungle and the steppe, of the brooding Oriental fate.
Their active enterprise, their organized efficiency,
their democratic zeal, trail with the old languor of the
Yogi life in its endless strain against an endless con-
sciousness, moving through nature in a somnambulic
way, like the anchoret pacing under his banyan
shades. They fail of our Western magnetic sense
of the outward capabilities of the actual world, so
needful to the evolution of its spiritual uSes.
Against these disadvantages, they have put a per-
sistent adherence to their traditions of benevolence as
the purpose of life. But even this has proved but an
imperfect defence against the inevitable degeneracy
of a -positive religion^ in its passage through definite
cultus into the form of authoritative institution ; while
on the other hand they have lacked the energy in
secular aims which Western races have known how
to oppose to this process, and to make available for
a continual reconstruction of the religious ideal. They
are monks, mendicants, dreamers still, but without
^ " Leaving all pleasures behind, calling nothing his own, going from his home to a
homeless state, and no longer clinging to any thing, the wise will set himself free-" —
Dhannnap.^ vv. 87-89. Yet the Pratinioksha forbids disparagement of life or coiiiinen-
dation of death, however common suicide may have been in later Buddhism. See Ijcal,
Budd. Pilgrims, p. xlii.
DEGENERACY. 77l
the enthusiasm of the founders of their faith ; still
apostles of negation, but not now in the old way
of earnest protest and quickening demand. Their
metaphysics are not so much the keen sense that per-
ception is of the unreal, as a traditional acquiescence
in that conclusion and its results. P'or the swarming
functionaries of a Church two thousand years old,
and the hundreds of millions who perform its rites,
the dogma of the nothingness of things visible, how-
ever conceived, has indeed come to its own self-con-
tradiction both in faith and practice ; though certainly
not, thus far, in the interest of their proper reality.
The world, pronounced a phantom because it is so
transient, has become a flood-tide of minute Nature's
and busy ceremonial observances ; it pours '^°"y-
upon these preachers of the Void immeasurable de-
tails of mythologic and symbolic imagery ; it buries
them under a tropical rankness of legend, to be com-
pared only with the colossal flora of the carboniferous
epoch of the planet. What irony ! A God in nir-
vana blooming into a tropic summer of resplendent
fable, flowering inexhaustibly in personal portrait-
ure, miracle, metamorphosis ! The human body
renounced as worthless, vindicating; itself in a stu-
pendous veneration of statues and relics ! The long-
ing for absolute rest as the crown of virtue, issuing in
unbounded devotion to miraculous energies, supposed
to flow from saints who have departed for such a rest !
Believers in the emptiness of all forms, and even
actions, driven by an insatiable passion for multiplying
prayers, to actual mechanical contrivances for work-
ing oft' the greatest number of them in the shortest
time by movements of the lips, or strings of beads, or
the many-colored prayer-cylinder {hirdu) stuffed with
772 BUDDHISM.
formulas on paper slips, or with the books of the law,
and turned by hand ! These are nature's own reven-
dications, enforcements of rights suppressed or disal-
lowed, in such ways as remain possible ; proving at
least that the balance of spiritual forces cannot be
destroyed. In the very extravagance of such self-
contradictions and perversions there is a blind pres-
sure of the instincts towards immeasurableness, which
affirms man's innate relation to the infinite.
Swarms of images standing above millions of pros-
trate men, or heaps of bones, ashes, jewels.
Veneration ^ ^ ^ _ -'
of relics and vases, coius, dcvoutly laid up in topes, those
images. bubble-shapes that deny the validity of what
they hold, are but illustrations of the spectacle that every
distinctive religion has presented in degenerating from
its first inspiration. Neither Buddhism nor Catholi-
cism, however, must be supposed to teach mere idolatry
of dead objects. Pure fetichism belongs only to the
lowest stages of the religious sentiment ; and every
historical faith carries with it traditional idealism
enough to forbid recurrence to the mere dread of
volitions inherent in the dead wood and stone. The
w^orship rendered these images and relics looks
through them to their consecration by some superior
presence, some subtle guardianship, some association
that holds them to what was once a personal relation.
It differs far less than is wont to be supposed from
sentiments familiar to all civilized people. The ex-
treme demonstrativeness in these rituals, which seems
to indicate no less than real adoration of the statues
and relics themselves, is in fact habitual to the Oriental
mind, and does not by any means imply that the merely
symbolic meaning of the object is lost in sheer idolatry.
"The intelligent Burman,'"' says Malcom, "claims that
IMAGERY AND RELICS. 773
he regards images as papists do a crucifix : he places
no trust in them, but uses them to remind him of Got-
ama, and in comphance with his commands." ^
Buddhism, in fact, subjects this form of service to
special restraints. Its devotion was centered its limita-
in love and gratitude to a man. Its oldest g^^^^^
temples are without visible objects, even of art.
this form of piety. ^ But an old legend describes
the Buddha as directing his picture, inscribed with
the precepts of the law, to be sent by one king to
another, as the best of gifts, and as a means of
conversion, causing his shadow to be cast on a
surface for the purpose.^ The earliest images to
which the tributes of this faith in human forces
were naturally directed were in human form : far
from such monstrous combinations as Hinduism has
allowed its later sects, they were confined to the
Buddha preaching, meditating, resting ; to the figures
of his saints, and to human representations of his
church and his law. The Sutras abound in praises
of his personal beauties ; reckoning them by 4iundreds,
defining and classifying them ; covering his /V/(f«/ image ■
with every conceivable symbol of supernatural strength
and grace and sweetness ; ^ yet a wonderful soberness,
suggestive of heartfelt respect for the human and the
real, reigns throughout the world of actual Buddhist
statuary. The earnestness of that profound sense of
the limits of outward perception and possession, of that
call to an unseen path of release and rest, which gave
meaning to the teacher's life and word, would seem to
have made these colossal forms, ^ lifted above the gath-
1 Notes on the Biirman Empire, ch. vi. 2 gee yourn. R. A. 6"., vol. viii. p. 42.
3 Buruouf, p. 340-344. * Hardy, Man-iuil, p. 367.
" Great numbers of these statues, in all Buddhist countries, are from twenty to forty
feet high, and many are far larger : they will ordinarily measure from twelve to twenty.
Koeppen, I. 509.
^74 BUDDHISM.
^
ered relics of the mortal part, its enduring home.
Contrast this absence of pretension and display, this
calm reliance on the bare truth of inward thought and
purpose, these quiet gestures of teaching, these folded
hands of meditation, with the boundless license of
symbolic expression in the popular statues of Brahma,
Vishnu, and Siva. The lifted finger commends to
silence ; the half-closed eyes recall to self-discipline
and self-restraint; the sitting posture, a restfulness not
of death nor sleep, but of life, affirms the still patience
of law that abides in the depths of all existence ; the
benign aspect pervades them with human love.^ This
limitation has its moral value ; holds religious feeling
and fancy to a certain realistic interest. Art in Budd-
hist countries, especially in Japan, shows rare fidelity
to nature, and surprising sense of all vital energies ;
and its tender patience in elaboration is referable in
part, one cannot help thinking, to the influence of a
religious sentiment which constantly insists on cor-
responding moral qualities and disciplines.^
Veneration of relics is here combined, as in Catholic
„ . ^ Christianity, with prayers for the dead, inter-
Meaning of *' r j
relic wor- ccssiou of saiuts, and other related forms of
^ '^' devotion to personal ties. It is, in reality,
to be explained as the natural cling of private affec-
tions, unenlightened by science, to the senses ; as their
protest against being severed by death from the out-
ward objects with which they have been associated.
Escape from supernaturalism does not destroy this
interest, but simply frees it from extravagance : it is
changed from a superstition to a sentiment, and its
^ The Buddhist sculptor is required to give the Teacher such a countenance as becomes
the " Father of all creatures." Koeppen, p. 505. The elaborate symbolism of later figures
indicates Sivaite influences. Schlagintweit shows that the figures of Buddha and his saints,
in Thibet, are of high Aryan type.
2 On the realism of Japanese art, see Jarves's Art Thmights, ch. ix.
IMAGERY AND RELICS. 775
object from a miracle to a memento. This result is
simply due to the fact that science renders the required
justice to the senses yrojn the side of reason^ releasing
the emotional nature from that anxious watch over
their interests which it could not otherwise abandon.
I do not wonder, therefore, at the dimensions attained
by relic-worship, under the influence of a religion like
Buddhism, which theoretically rejects the claims of the
senses, at the same time giving a prominent place to the
distinctively human and personal ; in other words, to
sensibilities and affections which inevitably adhere to
these claims. It is the struggle of the sentiments
to hold their own ; their cling to associations threat-
ened with destruction by the sense of the transiency
and unreality of phenomena.
I do not think we need carry this thought so far as
to suppose with Burnouf, that the intense attach-
ment of the Buddhists to the relics of their saints
grew out of the feeling that these dead bones were
all that remained of the beings they had loved ; thus
making it an argument to prove that nirvana was an-
nihilation. Would not belief in such a nirvana have
abolished interest in these mere mementos of decay,
in place of stimulating it? That, on the other hand,
relics were piously gathered up, to the last fragment,
and abundantly supplied by the imagination where
they were wanting, would seem to demonstrate that
those whom they represented were still cherished as
individuals whose life was bound up with the hopes
and desires of their followers. It would thus come in
evidence against Burnouf's theory, rather than for it.
It is also to be noted that the relics of kiftgs, who cer-
tainly could not have been thought to have passed into
nirvana, were honored in the same way. The con-
H
76 BUDDHISM.
servation of relics was not wholly unknown to Brah-
manism ; but it became from the first the special
characteristic of Buddhism, measuring the intensity
of its sense of change, decay, and death, as a sorrow-
ful destiny, 'to be in every way, symbolically and spirit-
ually, mastered and set aside.
So the dead body of the loved Buddha, who had
passed into nirvana^ was idealized beyond measure :
Its extent in the fears and hopes of millions gave enor-
Buddhism. mous proportions to the mythopoetic faculty
in this direction, and scattered his members, like
those of Egyptian Osiris, over the world. ^ Every
organ, feature, atom of his body, alive or dead, is
sacred. . He throws up his beautiful locks and his
royal garments into the air when abandoning the
world ; and they are caught devoutly as they ascend,
by a Brahma, and borne away to a grand relic shrine
in the Brahma heavens where all the angels can adore
them.^ He distributes every thing he can detach
from his person to his disciples during his life. At
his death, whatever has passed through the funeral
fires is divided into eight portions, to satisfy as many
contending nations ; then follow the miraculous resto-
rations and multiplications which assure his presence
wherever his name is praised. His skull is in India ;
his shoulder-blade, in Ceylon ; the apples of his eyes
are in a cloister in Nagara ; his hairs, nails, fingers, in
various cities of the East; his very shadow is shown
in several caves of Western China; and his foot-prints
are visited by crowds of pilgrims on the highest peaks
of Asia accessible to devotion. His water-jar is
laid up to work miracles at the Singhalese capital;
his wash-bowl, staff, and mantle are scattered in mani-
* St. Hilaire, 294. ^ n/'ftggi ^ ^^ Law, p. 103.
IMAGERY AND RELICS. 777
fold shapes over vast empires. His left eye-tooth in
early times converted an army. A Brahman king
tried to destroy it; burnt, beat, buried, stamped it out
under the feet of elephants ; but in vain. It would
reappear, on some lotus-leaf, no mere perishable eye-
tooth, but an indestructible element of the ascended
Buddha. Finally, wearied and overpowered, the im-
perial enemy gave in and built it a splendid temple,
where it wrought indescribable miracles. Bloody wars
were fought for that eye-tooth of the Buddha. In the
fifth century, Fahian, the Chinese pilgrim, saw it car-
ried about in pomp ; long lines of elephants were
taught to kneel when it passed by, and flowers were
strewn by the people along the ways. At last it fell
to the British, who tried to destroy it, but failed like
the rest ; and so it is still honored with magnificent
ceremonies, in Mahd-Nuwara, or the Great City, in
Ceylon,^ where it was displayed, in 1858, amidst pros-
trate crowds, to Burmese priests sent to compare it
with a rival tooth preserved at Ava.^
All this has its analogies in Christian history. And
though a mystery rested on the disposal of the actual
body of Jesus, which protected it from this kind of
mythology, till veneration for his person had changed
it, in popular faith, into the very substance of deity,
yet the worship of relics has approached as nearly as
possible to the same point, in the wonder-working of
his sepulchre, his manger, and his cross ; even of his
foot-prints on the Mount of Olives, in the houses of
Jerusalem, and in various Catholic Churches of
France.^ At the close of the fourteenth century,
1 See the account of the deppsition of Gotama's relics in the great dagop of Ruanvelli,
by Dushtagamini, and of the accompanying miracles, in the thirty-first chapter of the
Mahavattsa.
2 St. Hilaire, p. 417. ^ Maury, LSgendes Pieuses, p. 214.
778 BUDDHISM.
the Abbey of St. Denis presented a piece of the head
of St. Hilary to the city of Poitiers : the chin had
already been obtained. St. Andrew's head was wor-
shipped for centuries at Patros. "Kings died for the
purchase of it. It was carried in procession to Rome.
The heads of Peter and Paul would have been borne
forth to meet it, but the gold and iron which enshrined
them were too heavy. At the Milvian Bridge, the
Pope made an eloquent address to the Head, entreat-
ing its aid in overcoming the Turks. It was conveyed
in splendor to St. Peter's, and deposited under the high
altar." ^ No Vigilantius has arisen in the East to
rebuke the " rag and dust worship " of Buddhist Je-
romes ; no Luther to thunder against the venders of
sacred images that swarm in all Buddhist states. But
even the freer and more practical understanding of
the European races did not save them from an almost
Oriental mania for this kind of traffic and this form of
devotion ; and in the ninth century the sale of relics
had become the main part of the trade of Rome.
It is probable that far more of conscious imposture
The to es ^^^ mingled with these operations of the Cath-
olic Church than with those of Buddhism in
the same direction. It is a desire for the preservation,
rather than for the sale, of relics, that has covered
southern Asia with lopes, or dagoj^s? from Samarkand
and Cabul to the extremities of China and further
India. The oldest topes are in the form of a bubble,
surmounted by an umbrella, symbolical of sovereignty.
In later times several figures of the latter kind were
placed one above another, in a series typical of the
several stages of the religious life, or of the triple
1 Milman's Latin Christianity^ VIII. 221.
2 Topes, or stupas (heaps) are tumuli: dagobas are relic-shrines. The one term is PSli,
the other Singhalese ; but their meaning is substantially the same.
MYTHOLOGY. 779
form under which the religious ideal was conceived,
as person, as law, as church. In this way the Chinese
pagoda grew up out of the Indian dagop or stiipa,
which contains its elements, but whose emblematic
bubble is not adapted to the realistic taste of the Chi-
nese. Between these styles is the pyramidal, which
is less common. The dagofs are in grottoes or in
the open air, near the vihdras, or places of assembly
and temporary sojourn ; and these last also, although
built for convenience in the form of a parallelogram
or square, exhibit the bubble-shape in the most sacred
portion, the apse. Under these singular monuments,
significant at once of utter weakness and sovereign
power, of the transient and the eternal, the relics were
buried in cells, with the prayer that they might remain
for ever closed ; probably in the hope that they might
be undisturbed till the coming of the next Buddha,
thousands of years in the future.^
The mythology of Buddhism presents the same
boundless yearnincr for the infinite and eternal ^. .,
*' ^ Significance
amidst the fleeting of phenomenal forms, of Buddhist
Mythology is always prophetic: it is t:he"^^^°°^'
child's play of intuition and imagination, and dimly
divines those essential relations of man and nature,
which science afterwards reaches slowly and presents
clearly in detail ; so that, as we look backward, man
seems to have been predicting them all through the
ages. Even in this, the most extravagant imagery
of religious fafth that ever grew, such instinctive pre-
sentiment of the latest facts and the broadest laws is
too plain to be mistaken. This revel of the imagina-
tion in pathless and endless wastes of number was
astronomy and microscopy in ideal dream. " The
^ On Buddhist relics, statuary, '&c., see Bastian's Siam^ pp. 119-163.
780 BUDDHISM.
world," it said, " rests on a lotus-leaf, which carries
also innumerable worlds beside it. So with every
other leaf of the flower. Out of the atmospheric deep
in which this lotus floats, arise so many similar flow-
ers, that it requires unity followed by four millions of
ciphers to designate their number. And every leaf
of every one of these flowers bears as many worlds as
the first. But this one atmosphere is but an atom to
the whole. There are as many more as there are
flowers in this, and each is as full of worlds." When
science would refute the theological fictions of a begin-
ning of time, and of a creation a few thousand years
ago, it points to the ancient geological layers, count-
ing these backwards till the definite sense of num-
bers is lost. The Buddhist imagination, not obliged,
like science, to fill out its spaces with historical facts
and conditions, goes further ; it strikes away the no-
tion of a beginning, at one sweep, and marks immeas
urableness as inherent in time itself. It recalls, as
if it were no earlier than yesterday, an event declared
to have occurred ten quadrillion times a hundred
quadrillions of kalpas ago,- each kalpa being thirteen
hundred and forty-four millions of years ! So of the
prolific power of virtue in every atom of its own sub-
stance. " Buddha caused a beam of lif^ht to 2:0 forth
out of every one of the eighty thousand pores of his
body, and on the top of each beam was a flower,
in which sat a Buddha teaching his disciples." "Four
things are immeasurable : space ; the number of
worlds therein ; the number of sentient creatures ;
and the wisdom of the Holv One."
The miracles of Buddha are colossal, penetrate all
Its pure worlds, supplaut all physical laws and pow-
moraiity. ^j-g . ^^^ ^^^ ncvcr violatc the eternal laws of
MYTHOLOGY. 78 I
morality, but in all possible forms affirm their authority
and all-sufficiency. The freedom which love and
wisdom claim in the universe, their power to make the
little great, the distant near, the atom reveal infinity,
shines through all this delirium of fable ; a deeper
sanity that binds it to the heart and conscience of
more sober races, and to forms of imagination more
ripe and calm with the experience of natural law.
It is all concentrated in Gotama Buddha ; but its
very fertility and plasticity save it from crystal- itsuniver-
lizing definitely and exclusively, as a closed ^^^''y-
series of prodigies, around this earlier human divinity,
as Protestant supernaturalism centered and confined the
miracle in its Christ. The love and wisdom of Gotama
are one and the same thing with love and wisdom in all
arhats and hodhisattvas; in all the saints who walk
in the great " Way of Release ; " one and the same
thing for all, in its power over the elements, and in the
gift of transforming itself into all forms and forces for
the good of man. It is through the me^'it of all beings
in these higher stages of attainment that the "worlds
are renewed ; " as it is through the vice of all degraded
beings that they are destroyed. The heavens and hells
of Buddhism, with their tremendous imagery, go be-
hind all Buddhas ; for thev rest on the essential nature
of virtue and vice.
The miraculous legends of Gotama's birth and in-
fancy indeed, like corresponding forms of the myth
in relation to other Eastern saviours, isolate him in
celestial splendor above all beings ; yet only as cele-
brating, in this as in other religions, the divine right of
holiness and love, and the loyalty of the visible uni-
verse to their redeeming power. Thus at his birth ten
thousand worlds are moved. He takes seven steps, as a
782 BUDDHISM.
si^rn that he would have the seven constituents of the
highest knowledge ; and Brahma holds over his head
the white parasol of kingly power, to show that he
would arrive at the perfection of all saintly fruits of
emancipation.^ The older gods — magi, bringing
their tribute to the child who shall supplant them —
lay the powers of a rejoicing universe at his feet. We
have already noticed the similarity of these legends to
those of the birth and infancy of Jesus. We have
only to allow for the difference between the redun-
dance of Oriental fancy and the sobriety of Hebrew
and Greek, and the points of resemblance certainly
appear remarkable : the royal genealogy of Gotama ;
the supernatural conception without sexual passion ;
the salutation of the mother by guardian devas; the
worship of the new-born babe by all the powers and
elements of nature. In this moment of rapture at the
birth of nature's lord was concentrated by Buddhism
all that Christian mythology scattered more slowly
along the life of Jesus, and infinitely more to a similar
purpose. The material body of the holy mother be-
came transparent, and disclosed him, fair as a flower,
leaning on his hands within it. At his birth prisoners
were released, the fires of hell put out, the living creat-
ures forgot their hates, and sea and land were strewn
with flowers. To explain these messianic correspond-
ences, we need only remember that the religious
imagination in both cases had to deal with the same
faith in the authority of holiness and love, the same
wonderful and prophetic fact of their entrance into
humanity, and the same ignorance of natural laws.
Oriental worship of miracle has remained colossal
Whence its ^^ compaHsou with Christian mythology, be-
extent. causc it is a more profoundly real sentiment ;
* WJieel of the Law, p- 103. ,
MYTHOLOGY. . 783
not weakened by that sense of divided allegiance to
which the latter is subjected by the increasing percep-
tion of positive law. Its mythology does not inti-
mate a divine interference with the universe by reason
of evil, nor convey any implication against nature,
either as of break in its order, or of supplement to its
imperfection ; but is co-extensive and even identical
with nature. It is not evidence of dogma nor com-
pulsion to belief, so much as spontaneous faith in the
power of mind to change the appearances of things,
the ideality of wonder and delight. "Miracles," says
Gobineau, "being regarded in the East simply as ever-
possible manifestation of power acquired by men over
the changeable methods of nature, are not regarded as
proving any thing in behalf of the religious belief of the
performer." ^ So that nature may well be a free play-
ground for the gigantic transformations of mythology.
Asoka cuts a slip from the Buddha's holy Tree,
surrounded by a thousand kings. With golden
pencil he draws a vermilion stripe around a bough,
and it separates from the tree by the virtue of
prayer and the predestination of Buddha's law.
Planted in a golden vessel, it instantly takes root, at
which miracle all gods, men, and beasts, and the very
earth itself, utter a shout of praise. Then proceeds
the sacred bough, emitting many-colored rays, under
convoy of persons of every caste, to Ceylon, on a ship,
safely guided by the divine powers of a chief priestess,
entrusted with this charge. Placed on the sacred earth
prepared for it, the tree ascends into the sky, sending
rays to the highest heavens of the gods, and there
stands till sunset, converting ten thousand souls at a
time.^ Other relics ascend in the same way to shine
^ Relig. de FAsie Centrale, p. 298. * Tumour's Mahavansa, ch. xviii.-xix.
784 ^ BUDDHISM.
like the sun for a while ; after which the earth heaves
itself up to receive them with tumultuous joy. When
the great temple of Ruanwelli is to be dedicated, the
relics of Buddha are adored amidst celestial flowers
and perfumes by gods and men, with music that fills
the sky ; they ascend into the atmosphere and are
transformed into the natural shape of the Buddha,
whose multitudinous qualities form themselves around
him in a nimbus of glory, the mere sight of which
converts innumerable beings into saints.^ Palaces in
the heavens are described as seen by the eyes of saints,
of dimensions and splendors that strangely contrast
with that service of dead bones by which they are
attained. Yet what associates such relics with the
joys of paradise is hinted in the tale of Bhirani, a
slave girl, who for her benevolence to the -poor was
born again in a heaven of delight, the queen of one
of these divine mansions, described as forty-eight
leag^ues in circumference. ^
Shall we wonder more at such idealization of the
relics of mortality, or at such absolute faith in the
supremacy of love? In either way, this infantile im-
agination plays with nature as a child with the blocks
which he builds into structures that grow colossal in
his dream.
But the mythology of Buddhism, like its worship
^, ^„. of imaores and relics, cfrew up under other
The fall mto ^ ^ ^ ...
ecciesiasti- influcnces besides its oriorinal motive. Like
cism. Brahmanism it fell from its stage of prophecy
to its stage of priesthood, from inspiration to ritualism ;
and what was at first the spontaneous play of earnect
instincts, however blind, crystallized into the polity of
* Tumour's Mahdvartsa, ch. xxxi. 2 jbid., ch. xxvii.
ECCLESIASTICISM. 785
a church. In tracing the process, we detect in its
insidious steps the perils of ecclesiastical organiza-
tion, and the necessity for constant reconstruction of
religion from free inward centres of personal life.
Gotama, so far as is known, instituted no cultus.
His main work must have been itinerant steps of the
preaching of his practical ethics and his phil- process.
osophy of life to w^homsoever he found prepared to
hear ; and this novel function in India must have freely
chosen such methods as occasions prompted or allowed.
Special religious rites were a small matter to one who
so strongly emphasized every moral duty. So far as
they entered into his public ministry at all, they must
have borrowed the prevailing terms and symbols of
Brahmanism ; and how much ritualism he was likely to
have taken from these may be inferred from the sentence
ascribed to him from earliest times : " Brahma dwells
in the homes where children honor their parents."^
The offerings of flow^ers and perfumes, the sound of
music and the utterance of devout ejaculations, which
have always been main features of the Buddhist ser-
vice, are precisely such forms as might have grown
up spontaneously in those earliest popular gatherings
around the beloved teachers of a gospel like this.
Yet with the increase of his disciples, and the growth
of a definite purpose in their minds, Gotama may have
established some kind of arrangement among them,
which developed itself into later distinctions of a more
positive character. We find his assembly consisting of
bhixus (mendicants), called also sramanas (ascetics),
all of whom, men or women, are received on equal
terms. 2 Yet it is said that "some comprehended more
^ Bumouf, p. 338.
* Ibid., p. 278. From sratnan (diligent) is derived the Chinese " shaman " or priest.
50
786 BUDDHISM.
of the doctrine, others less, though all were absorbed
alike in the Buddha and his law."^ Here was already
ground for distinctions. His furthest step in that
direction seems to have been classification of his
followers according to age and worth. ~* We find
sthavii'as, or elders, distinguished by these qualifica-
tions, teaching in the earliest schools and presiding at
the assemblies.^ From the whole body of srdvakas, or
hearers, there soon comes to be set off an elect class,
called arhats ; but this was also a distinction founded
on wisdom and its supposed power over nature, — the
word itself signifying 7nerit^ The earliest schism,
however, resulting in the exodus of a body of sthaviras
and the conversion of Kashmir to the faith, is believed
to have originated in the rebellion of the younger
disciples against the growing authority of these
"elders."^ Veneration for "the master" was another
path towards ecclesiasticism. It was natural to gather
up his relics, to divide them as a common legacy
among as many as possible ; to multiply them for the
same purpose ; to proselyte with images and pictures ;
to add the relics of early apostles of the faith to his ;
to locate them in shrines ; and to develop out of all
this a prescribed system of pilgrimages and a mass of
mythical traditions. It was natural that converts
should divide into monks and laity ; ^ that they should
gather into small fraternities, choose abbots or spiritual
fathers, and classify men according to their progress
in the faith, as "the unsanctified" and "the holy;""^
that they should meet yearly in larger conclave, and
* Burnouf, p. 290. ' Lassen, II. 456; Weber, Varies., p. 265. ^ Koeppen, I. 383.
* Burnouf, p. 297. The Mahavansa (ch. iil-) sjieaks of the first council held imir.edi-
ately after Gotama's death, as an assembly of arhats ; but its whole account is mani-
festly legendary.
* See Journ. Asiatique, for 1870, p. 465. ' Bhixus and Upasakas.
' Prilhagdjanas and Aryas.
ECCLESIASTICISM. 787
hold periodical "assemblies of liberation," to discuss
questions of policy in the conduct of this great mission-
ary movement, and to gather up contributions for the
same ; an aim that proved so successful as in after
times to qivq the institution the title of "the Field of
Alms." It was natural that monasteries and nunneries
should multiply, and prove stiff defenders of ortho-
doxy ; and legislative synods try to make ecclesi-
asticism complete. Three of these were held within
two hundred and fifty years after Buddha's death, to
define errors in discipline, custom, and faith, and
affirm the true Buddhist Law. In the absence of.
written documents relative to the original faith, heresies
could not be wanting. In less than two centuries,
seventeen different sects had appeared.^ There were
schools of strict and schools of lax discipline ; schools
holding to the oldest Sutras only, and schools accept-
ing also the later metaphysics ; ^ schools of speculation,
and schools resting on faith alone. ^ Quite as inevit-
able it was that there should come a Grand Council,
somewhat of the Nicene Christian type, to settle finally
wdiat was orthodox, who were to be encouraged, and
who to be held heretical, though not, as in Western
dogmatic differences, to be suppressed by force.
Buddhism was the Protestantism of India, and a mul-
tiplication of heresies followed its larger liberty ; but
not less distinctly did all profess to hold the original
faith, and appeal to the name of the Buddha. These
were natural tendencies to consolidation : doubtless
they were strengthened by a common opposition on
the part of all Buddhist sects to Brahmanism. Of
the synods, to which all the traditions testify, the
J Tumour's Makdvansa, xx. * SSutrantikas and Vaibhashikas.
* Koeppen, I. 157, 158.
788 BUDDHISM.
natural result must have been some kind of hierarchy.
That it did not develop into a great Hindu Church
is one of the most wonderful things in the history
of this wonderful movement. Outside of India,
wherever a state embraced Buddhism, a patriarch
established himself at the court. ^ The argument of
convenience and expedition in the machinery of
missionary work must have combined with personal
ambition, to produce elements of official despotism out
of grades of authority, that had begun in the natural
gravitation of respect to age, worth, eloquence, and
devotion.'^ All this w^as of course contrary to the
democratic spirit of the early faith, to its philosophy
and its morality ; and the history of Buddhism in
India shows how powerfully those elements of free-
dom could work in counteraction of the ecclesiastical
process.
During the thousand years of Btiddhist ascendency
„ . in hidia^ that -process was never develoi)ed. In
Resistance -^ -^
toconsoii- the time of Hiouen Thsang, the early democ-
racy of the faith was still vigorous. Thirteen
centuries had elapsed since the first preaching of this
word, and yet there was scarcely a sign of consoHda-
tion ; there was no national church, no hierarchy, no
ecclesiastical centre or headship.^ The only unity
was spiritual, the only authority was unseen. Every
vihdra was a free centre of religion, like those free
■political wmX.^^ the 'Willage communities." And, with
all this independent local life, the peninsula shone with
flourishing- Buddhist institutions of culture and human-
ity. Could ecclesiasticism have come and gone again?
We can hardly believe it. We read the record with
^ Rdmusat, RIelanges Posthumes. ^ Koeppen, I. 3S2.
' St. Hilaire, p. 298
ECCLESIASTICISM. 789
admiration, and ask ourselves if the history of any
reHgion affords its parallel.
But in Thibet the process of organization was
furthered by a traditional respect for patri- ^, , .
•^ ■•■ *■ ^ The ecclesi-
archal institutions.^ It was therefore inevit- astidsm of
able that a succession of infallible pontiffs
should at last be set up in proof of the antiquity and
dignity of the faith. Further combinations with the
old beliefs in transmigration and incarnation issued in
the Dalai-Lama of this eastern papacy, and his equal,
if not superior, the Bogdo of southern Thibet : ever
renewed and propagated by miraculous tokens and
special inspirations of his college of priests, a hier-
archy of no less than nine distinct orders. ^ The par-
allel with Christian history may be pursued further : —
to the rivalries of different Buddhist popes ; to their
political intrigues for building up a vast temporal
power ; to the contentions of Red and Yellow Lamas ;
and to the ambition of every important convent to pos-
sess an authoritative Lama (^Chubilghan) of its ovvn.^
We may add to this series of analogues with Western
Catholicism the fall of the Lamaist Church under the
dominion of a foreign power, namely, the Chinese
Lnperial Master who now "protects" Lha Ssa, that
Oriental Rome ; and the idle dream of its present
pontifl^ that supernatural aid is at hand to subject civ-
ilization to his sway.^
Thus Buddhist organization in Thibet ends, like
Brahmanical caste in India, in dismteg^rative ^.^ .
^ 1 he issues
forces. They are found, after all the phases of ecciesias-
of consolidation, all-powerful in this as in
ticism.
^ Bastian, Reisen in China, p. 619. * Ibid., p. 572.
8 yourn. Asiat. Soc-, XVI. 254.
* See the interesting account of Modern Lamaism in Koeppen, II. 105-242. Also
Bastian, Reise?i in China, pp. 571-580, and Schlagintweit's Buddhism in Thibet.
790 BUDDHISM.
other distinctive communions, showinof how vain is
that assumption of finality which is always made by
Institutional Religion.
The steps of degeneracy involved in this process
were the same which every effort to organize a re-
ligious faith on a great scale and in permanent form
has inevitably pursued. The first simple precepts of
the teacher multiplied into a mass of ritualism and
petty discipline, filling fifteen volumes of the enormous
Thibetan canon, which amounts in all to three hun-
dred and sixty books. "^ This scripture, outside Thibet,
is no loncrer read to the nations in their own tonfrues.^ i
The representatives of the non-resistant Sakyamuni
now inflict cruel punishments on their subjects.^ The
perfect democracy of the earlier time was slowly yet
steadily modified, till slaves could not be admitted to
the Church without consent of their masters ; and the
doors were fast closed to a diseased person, or one of
uncertain origin, or one who had slain a priest, or
made trouble in the priesthood.* Recruited in perpe-
tuity, by the custom that one lama shall come out of
every family which has more than one son, the priest-
hood at last directs the whole private life of the people,
officiating on all domestic occasions, performing the
part of physicians, astrologers, conjurers, intercessors
for the dead. And the profligacy which is inherent
in the unnatural relations of monasticism is not want-
ing, though prevented in great measure by the ease
with which, under Buddhist rules, ^ a discontented
monk or nun can return into the world. The sim-
plicity of the early faith is moreover corrupted by
intermixture with the popular polytheism, whose dei-
1 Bastian, p. 575. * Koeppen, II. 2S8. s Ibid., p. 331.
* Hardy, Eastern Monachism^ p. 210. 6 Koeppen, I. 584, 354.
ECCLESIASTICISM. 79I
ties have been referred to spheres below the Buddhas
and Bodhisattvas, yet receive a modified form of wor-
ship. Buddhism has, however, its rationaHstic develop-
ment also, as in China ; where the hierarchical system
has never been developed, and the theoretic elements
it depended on, such as incarnation and transmigra-
tion, have never taken root. Although China as a
political master is believed to dictate the succession to
the Dalai Lamaship and to control the priesthood of
Thibet, the actual relations of the people of the " Mid-
dle Kingdom " with this spiritual centre are in fact
very remote. As a natural result, many of the oppres-
sive rules and personal vices of the mendicant and
monkish class just mentioned are, in China, to a con-
siderable extent, escaped. The mendicancy of the
Buddhist priesthood, of course a mark of dependence,
will greatly tend to their downfall in the present age :
they however, especially in Ceylon, compare favor-
ably in morals with the clergy of other religions, not-
withstanding the peculiar perils to which their celibacy
and their mendicancy alike expose them.^
The old and constant record of distinctive religions is
their passage from Inspiration to Ritualism and Buddhist
thence to Ecclesiastical Despotism. Yet the ^"^^ c^ns-
r tian aualo-
resemblance of Thibetan Buddhism to Roman gies.
Catholicism has often been supposed to prove a direct
influence of the latter, on the former, of these religions.
There is no more need of such an explanation than
there is evidence of its truth. Such evidence is wholly
wanting. The cross, the mitre, the rosary, censers,
bells at the altar, tonsure, exorcism, celibacy, fasts,
holy water, baptism, confession, benediction by laying
on of hands, are thoroughly Oriental symbols, indige-
nous to the soil. So the custom of going on pilgrim-
' St. Hilaire, p. ^03.
^p2 BUDDHISM.
ages is much older than Christianity. In the third
century India was and had long been the resort of
Buddhist pilgrims from all northern Asia. The idea
of prayer to saints, as well as that of compelling their
aid, is familiar to Hindu faith from earliest times.
Confession in the Buddhist Church is very well de-
scribed as growing out of the maxim, "Live hiding
your good works, and proclaiming your evil ones ; "
which is certainly in the true spirit of the sutras.
Confession is spoken of as a custom in the oldest
legends of Buddhism, and even represented as made
before the whole assembly, at certain seasons, and
under the direction of Buddha himself.
That mediaeval Christianity originated these and other
forms of Thibetan Lamaism, through the teaching of
Nestorian monks, is asserted upon no other evidence
than conjecture.^ It is much less improbable that the
facts are the other way, — that Christian symbolism
is very largely of Oriental origin.^ Buddhism is, as
our whole account has shown, genuinely Indian.^ It
made its way into Western Asia some time previous
to the Christian era. Its influence in moulding
Gnostic, Manichsean, and Neo-Platonic teachers is
unquestionable.*
We may observe also, in passing, that the re-
semblances between Gnostic systems on the one
1 Tennent gives many legends from the Mahavansa strikingly resembling those of the
Old and New Testaments, which he ascribes to, the influence of Malabar Jews and Nes-
torian Christians. But why may not this resemblance have grown out of that common
movement of the religious sentiment in man, which must explain tlie analogies of Thibetan
Buddhism with Romanism in dogma and ritual? On the other hand, Ferguson (/?«^
Stone Motmments^ p. 499) thinks that nine-tenths the changes introduced into Christianity
in the Middle Ages were of Buddhist origin ! It is very easy to go much too far in the
direction of historic derivation.
2 Lassen ; Prinsep ; Koeppen ; Thomson's Introd. to Bhag. Gitd.
8 Bumouf; Colebrooke ; St. Hilaire.
* Lassen, III. 354-405, 440. Baur's Christliche Gnosis (1S35), pp. 54-60.
ECCLESIASTICISM. ^93
hand, and the Buddhist and Sankhya on the other,
are of a very profound character. Amone^
° Influence on
these are their common opposition to the christian
material and changing world ; their sue- ^^^^^"^*
cessive potencies emanating in descending series ; the
idea of creation as originating in the fall of a beam
from the world of light ; the recognition of justice as
ruling the processes of existence ; the threefold division
of qualities ; the faith in liberation through knowledge ;
and the separation of the soul from ' nature ' into its
own self-subsistence. Then the very point of contact
for the Oriental with the Greek mind was provided in
the great trade-emporium of Alexandria, where Gnos-
ticism arose contemporaneously with the recorded em-
bassies of the Hindus, commercial and other, to the
West.^ It is matter of history also that Buddhism
was well known in Babylon, just before the appear-
ance of Mani and his dualistic faith ; ^ and that the
Neo-Platonists sought very earnestly and successfully
to acquaint themselves with Oriental systems.^
The whole process of reasoning from moral and
spiritual resemblances in different religions, to a his-
torical connection between them, is, however, to be
handled with great caution. When used, as it so
frequently is, in the interest of a special faith, it has
been very apt to turn its sharpest edge against the
user. But why should it be ignored, in religions
history alone, that like causes must breed like effects?
The similarity may well run into minute details even,
since the great shaping moulds of human nature and
religious relation are alike in all races..
Thus, in the East and in the West, ecclesiastical
1 Strabo, Pliny, and others, quoted in Lassen, III. 57-73.
* Lassen, IIL p. 407. s Matter's ^co& d"" Alexandria II. 368.
794 BUDDHISM.
organization naturally enough presents the same es-
^, . . . sential features and processes of dee^eneracy.
Cnnstianity ■•■ o ^
andBudd- Comparative religion shows us a similar pict-
ure in the history of Christianity to that which
we have been studying.
Jesus apparently organized no religious machinery,
no positive cultus. On the contrary, he preached and
worked in a personal, prophetic way ; announcing an
approaching end of this world and the coming of a
kingdom that was not of it ; and calling on men to
accept his claim as Messiah to judge between the just
and the unjust, in that day. Of the institutional meaning
of the approaching change, and of the special wa3^s
in which his own name would be exalted therein, his
record gives no sign that he had the least presentiment.
How could he or his immediate disciples anticipate its
grand hierarchy, ecclesiastical councils, machinery of
association for the coercion of private judgment? It
lay involved^ indeed, in his original, claim of authority
vested in one exclusive Lord and Master of salvation,
just as Buddhistic ecclesiasticism, in its peculiar form,
^rew out of the concentration of Buddhism around
one personal name. If there be but one church and
One Head thereof, it naturally follows that there
should always be a representative of this Head, visible
as the church itself. On this there further follows an
all-controlling mechanism to perpetuate the idea. But
at first Christianity knew simply the congregation,
choosing its own teachers, and managing its own con-
cerns ; under apostolic advice, it is true, and perhaps, to
a certain extent, dictation. A few simple forms ; some
sli'ght conditions of membership, deemed necessary
in days of weakness and peril from false brethren ;
the Jew-Christians indeed insisting on circumcision,
ECCLESIASTICISM. 795
yet unable to impose it on the Gentile world ; friendly
or admonitory letters passing from church to church,
with contributions from the strong in aid of the weak ;
— this was all the machinery in its age of inspiration
by the original motive. But contentions began early,
over what Jesus was and what he willed. Churches
multiplied. Bishops meddled with each other's flocks.
Councils were necessary to settle the faith, and, after
quarrelling their utmost, imposed their decisions on
the people. Metropolitans managed or browbeat the
country pastors, settling and unsettling ministers,
lobbying and levying, ^r^jscribing and _^r6'scribing.
Gradually the political prestige of the Metropolitan
of Rome made him Head of the Church visible,
representative of the One Invisible Head. Strong
men like Victor and Gregory sat in the imaginary
Peter's-seat, mastered the councils and the state, fulmi-
nated decrees and settled points of ritual, till the
Roman Catholic Church, with its strange mixture of
mummery and devotion, of pomp and humility, be-
came for its season a soverei"ht and art. The wheel stands whirlinnr
before the door, to greet the stranger with its admoni-
tion. It whirls on the house-tops, a sign that even
the routines of domestic life are a swift motion that
escapes us while we seek to grasp and to hold it fast.
It whirls on the hearth by the draft of the fire ; and it
whirls in the running stream by force of water ; and
men carry it whirling as they walk. It whirls as
vicarious religious machinery, adopted into the formal-
ism of meritorious works ; and, as with symbolism in
general, other superstitions have doubtless very much
obscured its primary meaning. For even so does man
relieve himself from the vanity of for ever contemplat-
ing a restless whirl of vicissitude, where nothing abides
but change itself.
Yet what is this symbol, after all, but admonition to
seek th*e eter^nal, and to trust in the law that The Budd-
rounds all change with preserving renewal Wst wheel.
and return? Nor can we doubt that such deeper
798 . BUDDHISM.
meanings have given rest and courage to thousands
of meditative watchers of the Buddhist Wheel.
The Wlieel was in fact not only the accepted em-
blem of transmigration and its returns to birth, but
also, as associated with the Disk (which indicates the
strength of the arm that sets it rolling, perhaps also
the orb of the sun), an emblem of universal dominion.
It was the sacred mark seen on the hands and feet
of the infant Buddha, by which the sages were able
to predict his divine destiny to " roll the wheel " of
unlimited sway.^ Rama also is called " the Wheel."
Thus the symbol of the transiency of all things be-
comes itself representative of the one only life that
can overcome it; that is, of the almighty and ever-
lasting. The very " prayer cylinder " represents the
universe ; and on its turning axle, bringing many sides
successively to view, the types of all living creatures
impartially revolve.^ " A hundred and eight sacred
figures are the guard of honor around the holy wheel."
" The wheel has ignorance and desire for its axis,
predisposition for its spokes, decrepitude and death for
its tire."^ To be master of their revolutions was to be
a lord of life.
There was also a favorite architectural symbol for
this worship of the duty that is rounded with a dream.
That dome-like shape, — now sunk like a cushion for
slumber, as on the Buddhist pillars ; now swelling, as
on the stuj)as, into a definite sphere ; now active, now
at rest ; mobile in assuming either attitude, and long-
ing, apparently, for both, — what an emblem it is of
this mystical faith, so strangely combining practical
^ See Sykes on the Political State of Ancient India. Journal R. A . S., vol. vi.
2 Bastian, Reisen in China, p. 565.
' Wheel of the Law., pp. 113, 241.
UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 799
energy and contemplative calm ! It is the Bubble,
purest type of the transient and unreal ; yet this mere
evanescence, thisvery emptiness, this nothing, if it but
breaks, — is in fact held from breaking, fixed in en-
during forms of art and use.^ Such the lesson that
comes to us from vihdra and dago-p, where the hearts
of millions find impulse, and their longings and sor-
rows, rest.
The Brahmanic symbol, on the other hand, was the
Banyan, whose vast shadow expands and The Ban-
deepens with the multiplication of stems that ^^'^'
shoot downward to refasten themselves in the earth.
Hindu thought perpetually recurs to the inward
shadows of that self-renewing mystery of change,
which grows with the multiplication of visible forms
and finite desires. Hew down these banyans of
the mind, it says, and reach the eternal life they veil.
Banyan and Bubble ! Such the symbolism of a
philosophy too deeply immersed in contempla-
tion to find the full validity of the world and and the
life. But we have seen that the forward look ^^^**
is not wanting ; we have traced the disintegration of
old social and religious systems, and the living germs
of freedom in pantheistic belief; we have noted the
force of Buddhist expansion, and its faith in a future
that shall bring on earth the fulness of that peace and
love which is the Buddhist heaven. The earnestness
of this faith is illustrated by the abolition of slavery by
the present king of Siam. The contact of the practi-
cal West with the introversive East must brinfj mutual
impulse, and help to balance the human globe, as
the continents the physical.
* It is even made emblematic, in the three hemispheres that constitute the chaiiyas, or
telic- temples, of the triple form of deity, Buddha, the Law, and the Church.
800 BUDDHISM.
Bubble and Banyan mean more than dream. Is not
^ . , that spheric form the emblem of a world-wide
Practical ^
and contem- unity of Hfc and purpose? That dim pillared
plative races, r i. • r • i i. j •.
forest IS irom a smgle root; and, as it grows,
do not its airy branches turn back incessantly to the
soil it loves, as if to hold earth and heaven united by
imperishable ties? So with the faith which these
natural symbols subserved. — The reaction of Brah-
manism to Buddhism demonstrated that there were
germs of democratic energy in the nature of contem-
plation itself. The Buddhist -piffala^ or Bo-tree^
symbolizes the power of human nature to burst every
bond of apathy. " Its vitality is extraordinary ; its
roots will crack and rend buildings, and only preserve
their memory by the huge fragments which they
retain for centuries clasped in their embrace." So the
abstract idea fled into interior deeps only to find the
need of social communion," to learn that man cannot
live by meditation only, and to rend and burst its own
ancient structures with the invincible energy of noble
purpose. That mystical instinct of the Unity of Life,
which formed the constant matrix of Hindu thought,
— unconscious of its own inevitable relations, un-
aware that science should one day fulfil its substantial
meaning in endless practical correlations and uses, —
ruled life with an exclusiveness that depressed energy
and threatened morality. Yet even then its very
sense of a common bondage and misery in all living
beings became a sympathetic impulse that reached
throughout existence ; an ardor of love and pity, that
knew no limit, and no repose.
The wide extension of Buddhism, as compared with
Signs of Brahmanical aristocracy and caste, indicates
promise. \\12X vci Eastcm civilizatiou itself these oppres-
UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 8oi
sive elements are less natural to man than the instincts
of fellowship and equality. Malcom tells us of a numer-
ous and growing sect of reformers in Burmah, whose
founder, Kolan, revised the Buddhist law, about
seventy years ago, and taught the " worship of wis-
dom." " This sect discard the use of images, and
have neither priests nor sacred books. Their teachers
rise from time to time, always from among the laity,
and gain many followers."^ St. Hilaire describes a
powerful reaction in Ceylon, from later superstitions
to the simplicity of early Buddhism ; a d.^mocratic
revolution arising from the effort of the state, nearly a
hundred years since, to confine the right of entrance to
the priesthood within a single powerful caste. One of
the lower castes, the Tchaliyas, had the spirit and
intelligt-nce to rebel against this innovation, and, being
well provided with means, made an effective stand for
puritan principles. About the end of the last cen-
tury, these reformers imported from Burmah a body
of priests, devoted, like themselves, to the simplicity
of primitive Buddhism ; and the movement received
fresh impulse. Special changes insisted on by the
reformers were these : — an open door into the minis-
try for all classes ; freedom from state interference
with religion ; abandonment of astrology ; reading
of the books of the faith freely to all. This "sect
of Amarapura," so called from the Burmese city
whence it received its teachers, has been verv sue-
cessful in its efforts to purify Buddhism from polythe-
ism and caste, and made numerous converts in different
provinces of the kingdom. Other sects make other
demands, and Ceylonese Buddhism seems to be alive
with religious discussion and heretical zeal.^ Another
^ Notes on Burmese Empire', ch. vi. * St. Hilaire, p. 407.
51
802 BUDDHISM.
impressive illustration has recently appeared in Siam.
Large numbers of Buddhists in that country have
thrown aside negative speculation and ecclesiastical
authoritv, and the whole miraculous element in their
traditions. They have not been content with this
individual emancipation, but have proceeded to found
free churches on the moral teachings of Buddha, and
the practical brotherhood which they require.^ Surely
these brave steps, apparentl\' due to native impulses, —
and, if furthered by contact with Christianity, yet
showing no sign of conversion to that special faith, —
point directly towards the free communion of Universal
Religion.
J Weber's Indische' Studien^ II. 320; Koeppen, I- 468. The efforts of the late king
in this direction, and the writings of his minister, ( The Modern Buddhist) have already
been noticed.
Cauibriilge: Press of John Wilson ainl Sou.
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