RETROSPECT.
The Arians in India at an early time developed important spheres of
human nature into peculiar forms. In that tribal life, by no means
feeble of its kind, which they lived in the land of the Panjab, they
worshipped the spirits of fire, of light, of water; with deep religious
feeling they invoked these helpers, protectors, and judges, with
earnestness, zeal, and lively imagination. The movements of the
emigration and conquest of the Ganges, the acquisition of extensive
regions, led them forward on new paths. The emigrant tribes grew into
nations; greater monarchies grew up in the conquered territories. The
achievements of the forefathers were sung in heroic minstrelsy before
the princes and their companions, the wealthy warriors, the priests, and
the minstrels separated themselves from the peasants. The contrast
between the new masters of the valley of the Ganges and the ancient
population assisted in intensifying the distinction of orders among the
Arians. The fear of the spirits of night and drought, the conception of
the struggle of good and evil spirits, gave way before the abundance and
fertility of these new possessions. In the land of the Ganges the
sensuous perception of nature passed into fantastic ideas; the climate
inflamed the susceptible senses of the nation, while at the same time
it checked bodily activity and invited to contemplativeness. In
opposition to the multitude of the ancient divine forms and the gorgeous
variety of the new impressions of nature, rose the impulse to find the
unity of the divine essence, the need of combination. Abstraction
reacted on imagination, the spirit on the senses. The spirit in prayer,
the holy spirit, and the world-soul, that mighty breath which the
Brahmans seemed to find behind the changing phenomena of nature, were
amalgamated by the priesthood, and elevated to be the highest deity:
Indra, Varuna, Mitra must give way to Brahman as the nobles gave way to
the priests. Together with the new deity, who was at the same time the
order of the world, the Brahmans won for themselves the first position
in the state.
The theory of the emanation of the world from Brahman established for
ever the arrangement of the castes by the different participation of the
various orders in Brahman--an arrangement which otherwise, being the
result of natural changes, would in turn have been removed in the course
of development. The law and the state were arranged on the plan of the
divine order of the world which had assigned to every being his duties.
With the emanation of beings from Brahman came the demand for their
return thither, and the doctrine of regenerations, which were to cleanse
the creatures rendered impure by their nature and their sins till they
attained the purity of the world-soul. As Brahman was essentially
conceived as not-matter, not-nature, a severance of nature and spirit, a
contrast of the natural and the intellectual man was set up, which
subsequently became the turning-point in the religious and moral
development of the Indians. Ethics passed into asceticism, the courage
of battle into the heroism of penance. But man could not rest content
with the avoidance of sensuality or the mortification of the flesh. It
was not enough to torment and crush the body, the _Ego_, the
consciousness, must pass into Brahman. But, inasmuch as Brahman was all
things and again nothing definite, it possessed no quality to be
apprehended by thought; and along with the annihilation of individual
being absorption in this impersonal deity required the surrender of the
consciousness and perception of self, of the _Ego_ in order to obtain a
passage into this substance. Thus the crushing of the body by a pitiless
asceticism, the destruction of the soul by meditation without any
object, became the highest command, the ethical ideal of the Indians;
the devotion natural to their disposition became a self-annihilating
absorption into a soul-less world-soul. The energy of the Indians began
to consume itself in this contest; it was applied to the conquest of the
appetites, the crushing of the body, the annihilation of the soul. Under
the most smiling sky, in the midst of a luxuriant vegetation, was
enthroned a melancholy, gloomy, monastic view of the absolute corruption
of the flesh, the misery of life on earth.
The theory that every creature must fulfil the vocation imposed upon it
at birth, the commands of submissive observance of duties and patient
obedience placed absolute and despotic power in the hands of the kings
the more firmly because they also undermined activity and independence
of feeling; and owing to the extent of the ceremonial, the usages of
purification and penance, and the awful consequences of their neglect,
the people became accustomed to think more of the next world than of
this. As heaven alone was their home, the Indians had scarcely a real
world, or practical objects which it was worth while to strive after.
Without purpose or activity they were perpetually changing, they obeyed
an oppressive and exhausting despotism, which the theory of the Brahmans
justified as divine, and provided with the most acute regulations for
the maintenance and extension of its power. Thus the most beautiful and
luxuriant land on earth seemed really to become a vale of misery.
The scholasticism of the Indians concentrated their efforts on framing
ever new conceptions of the categories of spirit and nature, of matter
and the _Ego_, which perpetually changed without ever breaking loose
from them. Their philosophy gained no object beyond establishing more
firmly their hypothesis, separating ever more widely nature and spirit,
body and soul, the fleshly and the supernatural, and rooting more deeply
a perverse view of nature. No doubt the appetites compensated themselves
for the pain and privation of penances, for the torments of asceticism,
in luxurious enjoyment; the imagination sought relief from the necessity
of thinking of Brahman and nothing but Brahman in painting a motley
world of spirits beside and below Brahman, by confounding heaven and
earth, by the restless invention of grotesque charms and miracles, by
brilliant pictures on a measureless scale. In the same way the reason
compensated itself for its exclusion from philosophy and the compulsion
exercised upon it by the most acute distinctions; yet no healthy advance
could be made by the alternation of asceticism and enjoyment, by
oscillation between hollow abstractions and unbridled imagination, the
most irrational view of the world and the most subtle reflections.
Full of compassion for the sorrows of the multitude, distressed at the
sight of the oppression under which the people lay, repelled by the
cruel asceticism, the pride and exclusive scholasticism of the Brahmans,
Buddha undertook to provide the people with alleviation and bring help
to their pains. With him the world is Evil, and regeneration is the
eternity of evil. In order to escape this, as he was himself confined to
the current view of the world and philosophical systems, he could only
overthrow Brahman along with the gods; he could merely recommend the
restraint of the appetites and desires, patient suffering and
renunciation, flight from the world and the _Ego_, and in the last
instance a more complete annihilation of the _Ego_. It was nevertheless
a great gain that the body need no longer be tormented and destroyed,
that the difference of the castes was thrown into the background, that
the contempt of the higher born for the lower was laid aside. In the
place of an exclusive sense of caste came equality and brotherly love;
tolerance and gentleness in the place of ceremonial; expiations and
penances were superseded by a rational morality, and beneficial sympathy
with all creatures. To counteract the new doctrine which threatened the
entire position obtained after long struggles by the Brahmans, the
latter allowed the idea of Brahman to fall into the background, in order
to restore to the people the worship of living personal deities; they
were at pains to show that their deities also had the weal and woe of
mankind at heart; and if on the one hand they increased the merit of
asceticism and its requirements, they reduced on the other the value of
good works; they attempted to amalgamate Brahman and the theory of the
Buddhists by new speculations, and by means of a simple asceticism and a
mystical act of the spirit, to obtain readmission into the highest
being, and reunion with the world-soul. But even Buddhism provided its
doctrine, and its scepticism which denied everything beside matter and
the _Ego_, with a form of worship, not in the pilgrimages only, and the
worship of the relics of the Enlightened, but also in the apotheosis of
the teacher, and his elevation above the gods of the Brahmans.
While the doctrines of the Brahmans and Buddhism strove with each other,
the extension of the Aryas in the south and the occupation of the coasts
of the Deccan went steadily on, and the first shock which an external
enemy brought upon India, the attack upon and reduction of the land of
the Indus by Alexander the Great, after the most vigorous resistance,
exercised the most beneficial influence on the states of India.
Chandragupta succeeded not only in breaking down the rule of the
foreigner over the Indus, but in uniting the territory of India from the
Indus to the Gulf of Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas, into
one mighty kingdom. His grandson extended his kingdom over Surashtra,
Orissa, Kalinga; in the south his influence extended beyond the
Godavari. From this throne, three hundred years after the death of the
Enlightened, he announced his conversion to his faith, and proclaimed
his rules as laws of the state. This seemed to be the dawn of a happy
day for India. The combination of all the tribes could not but secure
the independence of the country; the oppression of the hereditary
despotism seemed to be softened by the prescripts of a rational
morality; a brisk trade with the West appeared to give the last blow to
the exclusiveness and rigidity of Brahmanism, and the religion of
equality and brotherly love seemed to assure the rise of a new social
order and a free movement of the intellectual powers of the people.
A sterner fate overtook the Indians. It is true that even at the time of
Açoka the powerful neighbouring kingdom of the Seleucidæ had begun to
fall to pieces; Parthia and Bactria had already attempted to assert
their independence, and though Antiochus the Great once more succeeded
in subjugating Bactria, and in the year 206 B.C. appeared with a
powerful army in the region of the Indus, Açoka's son and successor
Subhagasena (Polybius calls him Sophagasenus) was able at the price of a
number of elephants and some treasure to renew the league which his
grandfather Chandragupta had concluded with the first Seleucus, the
great-grandfather of Antiochus.[818] The re-established authority of the
Seleucidæ over Bactria was of very brief continuance. It was not attacks
from without, but the dissensions of the grandsons of Açoka that rent
asunder the great Indian empire; the dynasty of the Mauryas fell. A new
race, that of the Çungas, ascended the throne of Magadha in the year 178
B.C. with the kings Pushpamitra and Agnimitra, which thirty years after
had in turn to give place to the Guptas. Neither the power of the Çungas
nor that of the Guptas was sufficient to maintain the national unity,
and protect the regions of the West from the foreigner. The Greek
princes who ruled in Bactria conquered the lands of the Indus--native
Indian tradition presents us with armies of Yavanas on the right bank of
the Indus at this time[819]--and established a Græco-Indian empire,
which in the course of the second century B. C. carried its arms to the
Yamuna, and subjugated Cashmere as well as Surashtra to its rule.[820]
From the supremacy of Greek princes and the Greek character India
received various impulses of the most lively kind, especially in
architecture and plastic art; the influence of the Greek models extends
not only over the Panjab but even to Cashmere. This dominion of the
Greeks over the west of India was succeeded by other foreign empires,
that of the Sacæ from Arachosia (Sejestan), that of the Tibetan nomads,
the Yuechis, the Indo-scyths from Bactria. If Buddhism had advanced to
Bactria under the Mauryas, elements of the religious views of Iran now
forced their way from Sejestan, the worship of the god Mithra, on which
they laid especial stress, by means of the Maga-Brahmans, _i.e._ the
Magian Brahmans, into the Panjab and Cashmere.[821] But the land of the
Ganges maintained its independence, the civilisation of the Deccan was
not interrupted, and the national forces still sufficed to remove at
length the power of the foreigner even in the West.
For centuries after this date Buddhists and Brahmans stood side by side
in the Indian states of the West and East. Only the Guptas of Magadha
had worshipped Vishnu and Çiva;[822] the Sacan and Indo-Scythian princes
of the West were devoted to Buddhism. Yet Buddhism was unable finally to
triumph over the reformed doctrine of the Brahmans, supported as this
was by the worship of Vishnu or Çiva and the speculation and mysticism
of the Yoga. It had become divided into sects, of which the bases were
almost wholly of a dogmatic character; they rested on the different
philosophic foundations of the system. But the adherents of these sects
hated each other more than they hated the Brahmans, and the ethics of
the Buddhists preached only obedience, patience, submission, and
retirement from the world. It was no more adapted than the ethics of the
Brahmans to supply new impulses to the volition and activity of the
Indians, and in the end the bright world of gods and spirits of
Brahmanism, the magic powers and miracles of their ancient saints,
exercised a greater power of attraction on the hearts of the Indians
than the simpler doctrine of the Buddhists. The Veda, the Epos, and all
tradition was on the side of the Brahmans. The genuine Kshatriya could
not be satisfied with Buddha's peaceful doctrine; the Brahmans
maintained their position as presidents at the funeral feasts of the
tribes, and common interests of a very practical nature kept the sects
and even the schools of the Brahmans more closely together than was
possible among the various divisions of the Buddhists. When it had been
shown that Buddhism was not strong enough to overpower the old system,
the Brahmans succeeded in entirely overthrowing and expelling that
religion. The faith of the Enlightened maintained its ground in Cashmere
and Ceylon alone. Before its expulsion from its native home it had taken
such firm root in Nepal and Tibet, in further India and China, that it
was able from thence to humanise the manners of the nomads of Upper
Asia, and in the East to gain the most numerous adherents for the
religion of patience.
In the extent of their territory and the numbers of the population the
Indians possessed an adequate natural basis for periodical
regenerations. The despotic power which the princes had attained not
without the assistance of the Brahmans, and which had the more injurious
consequences, the more completely the will of the subjects was absorbed
in the governing caprice rather than elevated to any moral communion,
found on the one hand a certain counterpoise in the close communities
and families, and on the other was far from being strong enough, from
having sufficient activity and development, to repress and dominate all
spheres of life. It had not kept the rich gifts of the Indians at the
point which they reached at the time of the conquest of Buddhism; it
had not been able to prevent new attempts, a new rise, and the elevation
of the depressed powers of will and body. The strongest check was the
establishment of the system of castes in full power, the restriction of
the circulation of the blood in the body of the nation, the severe
repression of free activity and purpose by the supposed divine
arrangement of the vocations and orders, the exclusive direction of the
heart and will to objects beyond this world. In this way a lasting
prohibition was imposed on the free play of the powers, and a false aim
was set up; while the physical health of the national body, the moral
health of the national spirit, which can only be maintained by the
counterpoise and reciprocal action of moral and intellectual impulses,
and the exertion of the will for attainable objects, was destroyed and
undermined to such a degree that stagnation prevailed and the soil
became sterile.
Thus it happened that the state of the Aryans in the divided condition
in which they found themselves, and the limitations to which the
Brahmans had condemned their powers of will, in spite of the protected
position of their country and the numbers of the population, had not the
power to resist the attacks of Islam, and to prevent the erection of a
lasting alien empire on their soil, which finally subjugated the lands
of the Indus and the Ganges, and even the Deccan to a large extent,
almost indeed the whole of India, while it transplanted to the soil
numerous hordes of a foreign population. Precisely these districts which
had given the impulse to the development of the Indian nature, became in
the end the centre of this foreign dominion, while regions of the Deccan
peopled mainly by non-Arian races, who had been won over at a
comparatively late period by colonisation, made the most stubborn
resistance. The empire of the Great Mogul in the Deccan was able only
for a brief period to pass the Krishna to the south.
Though the Indians were not powerful enough to resist the arms of Islam
they did resist its mania for conversion. Heavily as this pressed upon
them from time to time, the habit of asceticism, the hope of escaping
from the fetters of the soul with the death of the body, enabled them to
withstand the fiercest tyranny. Even now the most cowardly Bengalee can
die with the most dauntless courage. Thus the Indians were able to
maintain their religion, the results of their history and civilisation,
their whole intellectual possessions, against their Moslem masters. It
is true that all advance was at an end, that the limits were fixed
irrevocably, and could not be overstepped; but the mobility of the
Indian spirit within these was not suppressed. Indian poetry could
develop into artistic lyrics, into the drama, and didactic works; the
formal subtlety of the nation laboured with effect in grammar, algebra,
and logic. Even if the services of philosophy were mainly extensions,
developments, and variations of the old ideas, though theology
maintained her supremacy, and put and discussed anew the old questions,
by such activity and such labours, the intellectual life of the Indians
was preserved from sterility; they have placed the Indians in possession
of a considerable literature of the second growth, and maintained
unbroken their peculiar civilisation.
The Pharaohs engraved the memorials of their reigns on artificial
mountains of stone, in order to preserve their deeds to the most remote
future; their subjects chiselled, painted, and wrote the remembrance of
their lives in their tombs, in order that no incident that had befallen
the dead might be forgotten. The Indians have not written their
history, because at a very early period they began to dedicate their
lives to the future world, and convinced themselves that the state was
nothing and religion everything. If among the Egyptians the name of a
man was to live for ever, and his body was to rest to all eternity in
its rocky grave, the Indians were tormented with exactly the opposite
desire: they wished to attain the end of the individual as quickly as
possible, to blot out existence without any return, and destroy the
remains of it as completely and rapidly as possible. The Egyptians
became painters, builders, masons, and sculptors; the Indians were
philosophers, ascetics, interpreters of dreams, mendicants, and poets.
The history of the Indians has passed into the acts of gods and saints;
it is lost in the chaos in which heaven and earth are confounded. Only
at home in heaven, in poetry, in philosophy, and imaginary systems, the
Indians had no ethical world on this side the grave, and therefore no
achievements of their princes, statesmen, or nations were worth the
trouble of recording.
Religion has dominated the life of the Indians more thoroughly than that
of almost any other nation. This result would not have been attained by
the Brahmans, who never rose to an organised hierarchy, and were always
limited to the advantages of their order, the influence of worship and
doctrine, had not the feeling and heart of the people met them half way.
The victory of Brahman over Indra decided the fate of the Indians. All
attempts, even the most vigorous, to abandon Brahman merely led to
modifications of the leading idea; they did not remove it. This
pantheistic theory weakened the resolution of the Indians in the region
of politics and action; the consequences so severely and zealously drawn
from it have checked the ethical productiveness of the Indian spirit
and prevented its advance.
The foundations of the Brahmanic system remain unmoved to this day. In
worship the Brahmans are tolerant. Every one is free to choose his
protecting deity; he may invoke Vishnu or Çiva, or any other god; he may
or may not go a pilgrimage to the Ganges, to Hurdwar, Jagannatha, and
other holy places; he may practise asceticism or omit it. In their
philosophy and schools they are also tolerant; one man may follow this
system, another that, provided that the world-soul is still retained.
But in the question of purification and the social question of caste
they are intolerant. The fixed scheme of the chief castes, to which the
Dvija is linked by investiture with the holy girdle, together with the
lower castes, the close castes of occupation within the main and
subordinate castes, and their numberless gradations, still remains. Even
now the castes which Manu's law destined to be servants observe this
command both towards natives of higher caste and foreigners. This
unnatural system is retained because in the eyes of the Indians it is
neither unrighteous nor unjust, but is rather the expression of divine
justice; birth in a higher or lower caste is the recompense for merit or
sin in earlier existences. Moreover, with the exception of the lowest
classes, the Pariahs and Chandalas, every man has an advantage over some
other class, and would lose by expulsion from his birthright as well as
by the suppression of the whole system. In India expulsion from the
caste means the surrender of all the relations of life; the loss of
social existence, of family, of the nearest connections; it implies a
fall to the lowest level, that of the expelled casteless man. No man has
any dealings with the expelled person; even his nearest relatives would
be denied if they gave him a draught of water. So careful are the
Indians of purity. The lowest Bengalee at the present day does not
hesitate, courteously but decidedly, to request the officer of the
ruling nation who visits his hut to leave it, that it may not be
defiled.
In their national life the Indians have exhibited down to our days their
long-practised and often-tried courage of patience. As the old system of
religion and morals has bidden defiance to centuries, so do we find in
the Indians that tenacity which long and severe oppression is wont to
create in originally vigorous natures, that power of resistance which
bends but does not break, united with a cunning and love of intrigue by
which the oppressed revenges himself on the oppressor, against whom
force avails nothing. With this they have retained a costly possession,
that inclination towards the highest intellectual attainments which runs
through their whole history. This treasure is still vigorous in the
hearts of the best Indians, and appears the more certainly to promise a
brighter future, as the government which now controls the nation has
come to an earnest though late resolution to rule with the help of the
Indians for the good of the people, while the intellectual force and
cultivation of their western tribesmen are disclosing themselves ever
more clearly to the eager activity of eminent Hindus.
FOOTNOTES:
[818] Polyb. 11, 34. _Supra_, 452.
[819] Wilson, "Vishnu-Purana," p. 470, 471.
[820] Strabo, p. 516.
[821] Communication from Prof. Albrecht Weber.
[822] _Supra_, p. 331, _n._
END OF VOL. IV.
BUNGAY: CLAY AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.
_J. D. & Co._
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
1. Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the chapters
in this text version.
2. Certain words use oe ligature in the original.
3. Obvious errors in punctuation have been silently corrected.
4. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
spelling, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.