THE ENDURING POWER OF HINDUISM
India's civilisation, intimately bound up from its birth with the great
social and religious system which we call Hinduism, is as unique as it
is ancient. Its growth and its tenacity are largely due to the
geographical position of a great and populous sub-continent, on its land
side exposed only to incursions from the north through mountainous and
desolate regions, everywhere difficult of access and in some parts
impenetrable, and shut in on the other two sides of a roughly isosceles
triangle by broad expanses of sea which cut it off from all direct
intercourse with the West until, towards the close of the Middle Ages,
European navigators opened up new ocean highways to the East. India owes
her own peculiar civilisation to the gradual fusion of Aryan races of a
higher type that began to flow down from Central Asia before the dawn of
history upon the more primitive indigenous populations already in
possession. Its early history has only now begun to emerge from the
twilight of myths and legends, and cannot even now be traced with any
assurance of accuracy nearly as far back as that of other parts of the
world which preceded or gave birth to our own much more recent
civilisation. The pyramids of Ghizeh and Sakkara and the monumental
temples of Thebes bore ample witness to the greatness of Egyptian
civilisation long before the interpretation of her hieroglyphics enabled
us to determine its antiquity, and the discovery of its abundant art
treasures revealed the high degree of culture to which it reached.
Excavations in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates have yielded an
almost equally valuable harvest in regard to Babylonian and Assyrian
civilisation, and Cnossus has told us its scarcely less wonderful story.
Yet the long line of Pharaohs was coming to an end and Egypt was losing
the national independence which she has never once recovered; Nineveh
had fallen and Jerusalem was destroyed; Greece and even Rome had already
started on their great creative careers before any approximately correct
date can be assigned to the stages through which Indian civilisation had
passed. India only becomes historical with the establishment of the
Sasunaga dynasty in the Gangetic kingdom of Magadha, which centred in
what is now Behar, about the year 600 B.C.
As to the state of India before that date, no sort of material evidence
has survived, or at any rate has yet been brought to light--no
monuments, no inscriptions, very little pottery even, in fact very few
traces of the handicraft of man; nor any contemporary records of
undoubted authenticity. Fortunately the darkness which would have been
otherwise Cimmerian is illuminated, though with a partial and often
uncertain light, by the wonderful body of sacred literature which has
been handed down to our own times in the Vedas and Brahmanas and
Upanishads. To none of these books, which have, for the most part,
reached us in various recensions often showing considerable
discrepancies and obviously later interpolations, is it possible to
ascribe any definite date. But in them we undoubtedly possess a genuine
key to the religious thought and social conceptions, and even
inferentially to the political institutions of the Aryan Hindus through
the many centuries that rolled by between their first southward
migrations into the Indian peninsula and their actual emergence into
history. The Vedic writings constitute the most ancient documents
available to illustrate the growth of religious beliefs founded on pure
Nature-worship, which translated themselves into a polytheistic and
pantheistic idea of the universe and, in spite of many subsequent
transformations, are found to contain all the germs of modern Hinduism
as we know it to-day--and, indeed, of all the religious thought of
India. In the Vedic hymns Nature itself is divine, and their pantheon
consists of the deified forces of Nature, worshipped now as Agni, the
god of Fire; Soma, the god and the elixir of life; Indra, the god of
heaven and the national god of the Aryans; and again, under more
abstract forms, such as Prajapati, the lord of creation, Asura, the
great spirit, Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer; and sometimes, again,
gathered together into the transcendent majesty of one all-absorbing
divinity, such as Varuna, whose pre-eminence almost verges on
monotheism. But the general impression left on the Western mind is of a
fantastic kaleidoscope, in which hundreds and even thousands of deities,
male and female, are constantly waxing and waning and changing places,
and proceeding from, and merging their identity in, others through an
infinite series of processes, partly material and partly metaphysical,
but ever more and more subject to the inspiration and the purpose of the
Brahman, alone versed in the knowledge of the gods, and alone competent
to propitiate them by sacrificial rites of increasing intricacy, and by
prayers of a rigid formalism that gradually assume the shape of mere
incantations.
This is the great change to which the Brahmanas bear witness. They show
no marked departure from the theology of the Vedas, though many of the
old gods continue to be dethroned either to disappear altogether, or to
reappear in new shapes, like Varuna, who turns into a god of night to be
worshipped no longer for his beneficence, but to be placated for his
cruelty; whilst, on the other hand, Prajapati is raised to the highest
throne, with Sun, Air, and Fire in close attendance. What the Brahmanas
do show is that the Brahman has acquired the overwhelming authority of a
sacerdotal status, not vested merely in the learning of a theologian,
but in some special attribute of his blood, and therefore transmissible
only from father to son. The Brahman was doubtless helped to this
fateful pre-eminence by the modifications which the popular tongue had
undergone in the course of time, and as the result more especially of
migration from the Punjab to the Gangetic plains. The language of the
Vedic hymns had ceased to be understood by the masses, and its
interpretation became the monopoly of learned families; and this
monopoly, like all others, was used by those who enjoyed it for their
own aggrandisement. The language that had passed out of common usage
acquired an added sanctity. It became a sacred language, and sacred
became the Brahman, who alone possessed the key to it, who alone could
recite its sacred texts and perform the rites which they prescribed, and
select the prayers which could best meet every distinct and separate
emergency in the life of man.
In the Brahmanas we can follow the growth of a luxuriant theology for
the use of the masses which, in so far as it was polytheistic, tended to
the infinite multiplication of gods and goddesses and godlings of all
types, and in so far as it was pantheistic invested not only men, but
beasts and insects and rivers and fountains and trees and stones with
some living particle of the divine essence pervading all things; and we
can follow there also the erection on the basis of that theology, of a
formidable ritual of which the exclusive exercise and the material
benefits were the appanage of the Brahman. But we have to turn to a
later collection of writings known as the Upanishads for our knowledge
of the more abstract speculations out of which Hindu thinkers, not
always of the Brahmanical caste, were concurrently evolving the esoteric
systems of philosophy that have exercised an immense and abiding
influence on the spiritual life of India. There is the same difficulty
in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of the later
ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological evolution
with which they coincided. Only some of the earliest ones are held by
many competent authorities to be, in the shape in which they have
reached us, anterior to the time when India first becomes, in any real
sense, historical; but there is no reason to doubt that they represent
the progressive evolution into different forms of very ancient germs
already present in the Vedas themselves. They abound in the same
extravagant eclecticism, leading often to the same confusions and
contradictions that Hindu theology presents. The Sankhya Darshana, or
system, recognising only a primary material cause from which none but
finite beings can proceed, regards the universe and all that exists in
it and life itself as a finite illusion of which the end is
non-existence, and its philosophic conceptions are atheistic rather than
pantheistic. In opposition to it the Vedantic system of mystic
pantheism, whilst also seeing in this finite world a mere world of
illusion, holds that rescue from it will come to each individual soul
after a more or less prolonged series of rebirths, determined for better
or for worse by its own spirituality according to the law of Karma, not
in non-existence, but in its fusion with God, whose identity with the
soul of man is merely temporarily obscured by the world illusion of
Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in
the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has
detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is
himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which
teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity,
mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable
mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the
means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and man. The
materialism of the Sankhya and the idealism of the Vedanta combine to
provoke the reaction of yet another system, the Mimansa, which stands
for the eternal and divine revelation of the Vedas, codifies, so to say,
their theology into liturgical laws, admits of no speculation or
esoteric interpretation, and seems to subordinate the gods themselves
to the forms of worship that consecrate their existence.
Of all the doctrines that these early speculations evolved, none has had
a more enduring influence on Hinduism than that of the long and indeed
infinite succession of rebirths through which man is doomed to pass
before he reaches the ultimate goal either of non-existence or of
absorption into the divine essence. For none has done more to fortify
the patriarchal principle which from the earliest times governed the
tribal family, and to establish the Hindu conception of the family as it
prevails to the present day. With that curious inconsequence which
frequently characterises Hindu thought, even when it professes to be
ruled by the sternest logic, the belief that every rebirth is
irrevocably determined by the law of Karma, _i.e._ in accordance with
the sum total of man's deeds, good and bad, in earlier existences, is
held to be compatible with the belief that the felicity of the dead can
only be assured by elaborate rites of worship and sacrifice, which a son
alone, or a son's son, can take over from his father and properly
perform. The ancient _patria potestas_ of tribal institutions has been
thus prolonged beyond the funeral pyre, and the ancient reverence for
the dead which originally found expression in an instinctive worship of
the ancestors has been translated into a ceremonial cult of the
ancestral manes, which constitutes the primary duty and function of
every new head of the family. Hence the Hindu joint family system which
keeps the whole property of the family as well as the governance of all
its members under the sole control of the head of the family. Hence also
the necessity of early marriage, lest death should overtake the Hindu
before he has begotten the son upon whose survival the performance of
the rites essential, not only to his own future felicity, but to that of
all his ancestors depends, and, as an alternative, to mitigate the awful
consequences of the default of heirs male of his own body, the
introduction of adoption under conditions that secure to the adopted
son precisely the same position as a real son would have enjoyed. Hence
again the inferiority of woman, whom early marriage tended to place in
complete subjection to man. Her chief value was that of a potential
breeder of sons. In any case, moreover, she passed on her marriage
entirely out of her own family into that of her husband, and terribly
hard was her lot if she were left a widow before having presented her
husband with a son. Even if she were left an infant widow of an infant
husband and their marriage could not possibly have been consummated, she
was doomed to an austere and humiliating life of perpetual widowhood,
whilst, on the other hand, if she died, her widowed husband was enjoined
to marry again at once unless she had left him a son. To explain away
this cruel injustice, her fate was supposed to be due to her own Karma,
and to be merely the retribution that had overtaken her for sins
committed in a former existence, which condemned her to be born a woman
and to die a childless wife, or worse still, to survive as a childless
widow. The misfortune of the widowed husband who was left without a son
should logically have been imputed in the same way to his own Karma, but
it was not. All through life, and in death itself, man was exalted and
woman occupied a much lower plane, though in practice this hardship was
mitigated for the women who bore sons by the reverence paid to them in
their homes, where their force of character and their virtues often gave
them a great and recognised ascendancy. However hard the laws that
governed the Hindu family might press on individual members, the family
itself remained a living organism, united by sacred ties--indeed more
than a mere living organism, for the actually living organism was one
with that part of it which had already passed away and that which was
still awaiting rebirth. It is undoubtedly in the often dignified and
beautiful relations which bind the Hindu family together that Hinduism
is seen at its best, and Hindu literature delights in describing and
exalting them.
Traditional usages, or Smriti, were ultimately embodied in codes of law,
of which the most famous is that of Manu; and though disfigured by many
social servitudes repugnant to the Western mind, they represent a lofty
standard of morality based upon a conception of duty, or Dharma,
narrowly circumscribed, but solid and practical. Though these codes of
law, and notably that of Manu in the form in which we possess them, are
of uncertain but probably much later date, they afford us, in
conjunction with the vast body of earlier religious and philosophic
literature, and with a certain amount of scientific literature dealing
with astronomy and astrology, with mathematics and specially with
geometry, and with grammar and prosody, sufficient materials for
appraising, with a fair measure of accuracy, the stage of progress which
the Aryan Hindus had reached in the sixth century B.C. When the world
was young, and they revelled in their recent conquest of a fair portion
in it, they delighted to worship the bright gods who had helped them to
possess it, and worship and war were the ties that kept their loose
tribal organisation together. Out of the primitive conditions of nomadic
and pastoral life, under the leadership of tribal elders who were both
priests and warriors, they gradually passed, after many vicissitudes of
peace and war, into more settled forms of agricultural life and
developed into distinct and separate polities of varying vitality, but
still united by the bond of common religious and social institutions in
the face of the indigenous populations whom they drove before them, or
reduced into subjection and slowly assimilated as they moved down
towards and into the Gangetic plain. As the conditions of life grew more
complex, with increasing prosperity and probably longer intervals of
peace, differentiation between classes and professions grew more marked.
There was time and leisure for thinking as well as for fighting, for
contemplation as well as for action. The "bright" gods that Nature had
conceived for the early Aryans were fashioned and refashioned by
speculations already laden with the gloom of melancholy and awesomeness
that pervades India. Caste, it may be inferred from the Sanskrit word
_Varna_, which means colour, originally discriminated only between the
Aryan conquerors of relatively fair complexion and the darker aborigines
they had subdued. It was extended to connote the various stratifications
into which Hindu society was settling, and in the stringent rules which
governed the constitution of each caste, and the relations between the
different castes, the old exclusiveness of tribal customs was
perpetuated and intensified.
To the supremacy which the Brahman, as the expounder of the scriptures
and of the laws deduced from them, and the ordained dispenser of divine
favour, through prayer and sacrifice, was able to arrogate to his own
caste, the code of Manu, above all others, bears emphatic witness:
The very birth of Brahmans is a constant incarnation of Dharma....
When a Brahman springs to light he is born above the world, the
chief of all creatures, assigned to guard the treasury of duties,
religious and civil. Whatever exists in the world is all in effect,
though not in form, the wealth of the Brahman, since the Brahman is
entitled to it all by his primogeniture and eminence of birth.
Every offence committed by a Brahman involves a relatively slight
penalty; every offence committed against him the direst punishment. Next
to the Brahman, but far beneath him, is the Kshatrya and beneath him
again the Vaishya. The Shudras are the fourth caste that exists chiefly
to serve the three twice-born castes, and above all the Brahman. As Sir
William Jones observes in the preface to the translation which he was
the first to make a little more than a century ago of these
extraordinarily full and detailed ordinances, they represent a system of
combined despotism and priestcraft, both indeed limited by law, but
artfully conspiring to give mutual support with mutual checks. But
though they abound with minute and childish formalities, though they
prescribe ceremonies often ridiculous, though the punishments they
enact are partial and fanciful, for some crimes dreadfully cruel, for
others reprehensibly slight, though the very morals they lay down, rigid
enough on the whole, are in one or two instances, as in the case of
light oaths and of pious perjury, dangerously relaxed, one must,
nevertheless, admit that, subject to those grave limitations, a spirit
of sublime devotion, of benevolence to mankind, and of amiable
tenderness to all sentient creatures pervades the whole work, and the
style of it has a certain austere majesty that sounds like the language
of legislation and extorts a respectful awe. Above all it is well to
remember that the ordinances of Manu still constitute to-day the
framework of Hindu society, and Brahman judges of the Indian High
Courts, who administer our own very different codes, still cling to them
in private life and quote them in political controversies as the
repositories of inspired wisdom.
It is on this background of tangled religious beliefs and abstruse
philosophic speculations and very precise and elaborate laws framed to
safeguard the twofold authority of priests and kings, but of the latter
always in subordination to the former, that we see men and cities and
organised states assume for the first time historic substance towards
the sixth century B.C. From that date onwards we are on firmer ground.
For though even in much later times the Hindus never produced historians
in the strict sense of the term, we are able to call in aid the valuable
testimony not only of a few indigenous chroniclers but also of Greek and
Chinese and Arab writers and travellers, as well as the authoritative
evidence supplied by epigraphy and numismatics; and though for many
centuries still very infrequently, the precious remains of ancient
monuments. But the original background is never effaced, for the whole
religious and social system, the whole philosophic outlook upon the
world of which I have sought to outline the long and laborious evolution
through prehistoric ages, remained fundamentally immune against change
until the advent of the British to India subjected them to the solvent
of Western civilisation.
One of the most striking peculiarities of Hinduism is that its origin
cannot be associated with any single great teacher or prophet, however
legendary. Still less can it be identified with the personal inspiration
of a Moses or a Christ, of a Confucius or a Mahomed. Only when we reach
the firmer ground of historic times does any commanding personality
emerge to leave a definite and abiding impress upon successive ages. The
first and the greatest is Buddha, and we can still trace to-day his
footsteps in the places where he actually stood and delivered his
message to the world. It was at Buddh Gaya that, after fleeing from the
pomp and luxury of his father's royal palace, he sat and meditated under
the Bo-tree on the vanity and misery of human life, but it was at
Rajagriha, "the King's House," that he first began to preach. Rajagriha,
about 40 miles S.S.E. of the modern Patna, was then the capital of one
of the many small kingdoms that had grown up in the broad valley of the
Ganges. It was already an ancient city of some fame, for the Mahabharata
mentions all the five hills which, as the first Chinese pilgrim,
Fa-Hien, puts it, "encompass it with a girdle like the walls of a town."
It was itself a walled city, and some of the walls, as we can still see
them to-day, represent most probably the earliest structure raised in
India by human hands that has survived down to our own times. They were
no jerry-builders then. Strengthened at sundry points by great square
bastions, the walls of Rajagriha measure in places over seventeen feet
in width and eleven or twelve feet in height, and they are faced with
undressed stones three to five feet in length, without mortar or cement,
but carefully fitted and banded together with a core of smaller blocks
not less carefully laid and packed. They merely supplemented and
completed the natural line of defences provided by the outer girdle of
hills, rising to 1200 feet, which shut off Rajagriha from the plain of
Bihar. On one of those peerless days of the cold season in Upper India
when there is not a cloud to break the serenity of the deep blue sky, I
looked up to the mountain Ghridrakuta, on whose slopes Buddha dwelt for
some time after he had found enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, and saw it
just as the second Chinese pilgrim to whom we owe most of our knowledge
of Rajagriha described it--"a solitary peak rising to a great height on
which vultures make their abode." Many had been the revolutions of the
wheel of time since Hiuen-Tsang had watched the circling of the vultures
round the sacred peak some twelve and a half centuries before me, and as
Buddha himself, another twelve and a half centuries earlier, must have
watched them when he miraculously stretched forth his hand through a
great rock to rescue his beloved disciple Ananda from the clutch of the
demon Mara, who had taken on the shape of a vulture. The swoop of those
great birds seemed to invest the whole scene with a new and living
reality. Across the intervening centuries I could follow King Bimbisara,
who reigned in those days at Rajagriha, proceeding along the causeway of
rough, undressed stones, which can be traced to-day to the foot of the
mountain and up its rocky flanks, after his men had "levelled the valley
and spanned the precipices, and with the stones had made a staircase
about ten paces wide," so that he should himself be carried up to wait
in his own royal person on the Lord Buddha. There, marked to the present
day by the remains of two large _stupas_, was the place where the king
alighted from his litter to go forward on foot, and farther up again the
spot where he dismissed his followers and went on alone to invite the
Buddha to come down and dwell in his capital.
That must have been about 500 B.C., and Buddha spent thereafter a
considerable portion of his time in the bamboo garden which King
Bimbisara presented to him on the outskirts of Rajagriha. There, and in
his annual wanderings through the country, he delivered to the poor and
to the rich, to the Brahman and to the sinner, to princes and peasants,
to women as well as to men, his message of spiritual and social
deliverance from the thraldom of the flesh and from the tyranny of
caste.
With the actual doctrines of Buddhism I do not propose to deal. There is
nothing in them that could not be reconciled with those of the Vedanta,
and they are especially closely akin to the Sankhya system. But the
driving force of Buddhism, as also of Jainism, which grew up at the same
time as Buddhism under the inspiration of another great reformer,
Mahavira, who is said to have been a cousin of King Bimbisara, was a
spirit of revolt against Brahmanical Hinduism, and a new sense of social
solidarity which appealed to all classes and castes, and to women as
well as to men. The Vedanta reserved the study of the scriptures to men
of the three "twice-born" castes, and placed it under the supreme
authority of the Brahmans. Both Buddha and Mahavira recognised no such
restrictions, though they did not refuse reverence to the Brahman as a
man of special learning. The religious orders which they founded were
open to all, and these orders included nuns as well as monks. This was
the rock on which they split with Hinduism. This was the social
revolution that, in spite of the religious and philosophical elasticity
of Hinduism, made Buddhists and Jains unpardonable heretics in the eyes
of the Brahmans, and produced a conflict which was to last for
centuries.
Though King Bimbisara welcomed the Buddha to his capital, and Buddhism
made rapid headway amongst the masses, he does not appear to have
himself embraced the new religion, and it is not till after Alexander
the Great's expedition had for the first time brought an European
conqueror on to Indian soil, and a new dynasty had transferred the seat
of government to Pataliputra, the modern Patna, on the Ganges, that
perhaps the greatest of Indian rulers, the Emperor Asoka, who reigned
from 272 to _circa_ 232 B.C., made Buddhism the state religion of his
Empire. Tradition has it, that when Buddha on his last wanderings
passed by the fort which King Ajatasatni was building at Pataliputra, he
prophesied for it a great and glorious future. It had already fulfilled
that prophecy when the Greek Ambassador, Megasthenes, visited it in 303
B.C. A few remains only are being laboriously rescued from the waters of
the Ganges, under which Pataliputra is for the most part buried. But at
that time it spread for ten miles along the river front; five hundred
and seventy towers crowned its walls, which were pierced by sixty-four
gates, and the total circumference of the city was twenty-four miles.
The palace rivalled those of the Kings of Persia, and a striking
topographical similarity has been lately traced between the artificial
features of the lay-out of Pataliputra and the natural features of
Persepolis, King Darius's capital in Southern Persia.
Pataliputra became the capital of India under Chandragupta Maurya, who,
soldier of fortune and usurper that he was, transformed the small
kingdom of Magadha into a mighty empire. Known to Greek historians as
Sandrokottos, young Chandragupta had been in Alexander's camp on the
Indus, and had even, it is said, offered his services to the Macedonian
king. In the confusion which followed Alexander's death, he had raised
an army with which he fell on the Macedonian frontier garrisons, and
then, flushed with victory, turned upon the King of Magadha, whom he
dethroned. After eighteen years of constant fighting he had extended his
frontiers to the Hindu Kush in the north, and nearly down to the
latitude of Madras in the south. He had, at the same time, established a
remarkable system of both civil and military administration by which he
was able to consolidate his vast conquests. His war office was
scientifically divided into six boards for maintaining and supplying his
huge fighting force of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, 9000 elephants,
and 8000 war chariots, besides fully equipped transport and commissariat
services. No less scientific was the system of civil government as
illustrated by the municipal institutions of Pataliputra. There, again,
there were six boards dealing respectively with trade, industries,
wages, local taxation, the control of foreign residents and visitors,
and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, with vital statistics. Equally
admirable was the solicitude displayed for agriculture, then, as now,
the greatest of Indian industries, and for its handmaid, irrigation. The
people themselves, if we may believe Megasthenes, were a model people
well worthy of a model government, though if he does not exaggerate, one
is driven to wonder at the necessity for such fearful penalties as were
inflicted for the most trivial breaches of the law. But behind
Chandragupta the power of the Brahman was still clearly entrenched, for
his chief minister was a Brahman, Chanakya, who had followed his
fortunes from their first adventurous beginnings.
The stately fabric which Chandragupta built up during his own
twenty-five years' reign, _circa_ 322-297 B.C., endured during the reign
of his son Bendusara, of whom scarcely anything is known, and at the end
of another twenty-five years passed on, undiminished, to his great
successor, Asoka, whose unique experiment would have been scarcely
possible had he not succeeded to an empire already firmly consolidated
at home and abroad. When he came to the throne, about 272 B.C., Asoka
had served his apprenticeship in the art of government as viceroy, first
in the north at Taxila, and then in the west at Ujjain. He had been
brought up by Brahmans in the manner befitting his rank. Buddhist
tradition would have us believe that until his conversion he was a
monster of cruelty; but there is scarcely enough to warrant that
indictment in the fact that he began his reign with a war of aggression,
for which he afterwards expressed the deepest remorse. It was, indeed,
from that moment that he determined to be henceforth a prince of peace;
but it is quite as probable that his determination inclined him more and
more to turn his ear to Buddhist teaching as that Buddhist teaching
prompted his determination.
No monarch has ever recorded the laws which he gave to his people in
such imperishable shape. They are to be seen to the present day cut into
granite pillars or chiselled into the face of the living rock in almost
every part of what was then the Empire of the Mauryas, from the Peshawar
district in the north to Mysore and the Madras Presidency in the south,
from the Kathiawar Peninsula in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the
east. The pillars are often at the same time monuments of artistic
design and workmanship, as, above all, the Garnath pillar near Benares
with its magnificent capital of the well-known Persepolitan type and its
four lions supporting the stone Wheel of the Law, first promulgated on
that spot. Many more of Asoka's monuments may yet be discovered, but the
eleven pillar edicts and the fourteen rock edicts, not to speak of minor
inscriptions already brought to light and deciphered, constitute a body
of laws which well deserve to have been made thus imperishable. For no
temporal sovereign has ever legislated so fully and exclusively and with
such evident conviction for the spiritual advancement and moral
elevation of his people. Scarcely less important is the autobiographical
value of these inscriptions, which enable one to follow stage by stage
the evolution of the Apostle-Emperor's soul. Within a year of the
conquest of the Kalinjas, for which he afterwards publicly recorded his
remorse, Asoka became a lay disciple of the Buddhist law, and two and a
half years later studied as a Buddhist monk. In 257 B.C., the thirteenth
year of his reign, he began to preach his series of sermons in
stone--sermons that were at the same time laws given to his Empire. His
profession of faith was as lofty as it was simple:
The gods who were regarded as true all over India have been shown
to be untrue. For the fruit of exertion is not to be attained by a
great man only, because even by the small man who chooses to exert
himself immense heavenly bliss may be won.... Father and mother
must be hearkened to. Similarly, respect for living creatures must
be firmly established. Truth must be spoken. These are the virtues
of the law of piety which must be practised.... In it are included
proper treatment of slaves and servants, honour to teachers,
gentleness towards living creatures, and liberality towards
ascetics and Brahmans.... All men are my children, and just as I
desire for my children that they may enjoy every kind of prosperity
and happiness in both this world and the next, so I desire the same
for all men.
These principles are applied in all the instructions to his officials.
He commends to their special care the primitive jungle folk and the
untamed people of the borderlands. He bestows much thought on the
alleviation of human suffering, and his injunctions in restriction of
the slaughter and maiming of animals and the preservation of life are
minute and precise. It is in this connection that the influence of
Buddhism on Hinduism has been most permanent, for whilst the primitive
Aryan Hindus were beef-eaters, their descendants carried the vegetarian
doctrines of Buddhism to the extreme length of condemning cow-killing as
the most awful of crimes, next to the killing of a Brahman.
Determined to preserve the unity and discipline of his own church,
Asoka's large tolerance sees some good in all creeds. He wishes every
man to have the reading of his own scriptures, and whilst reserving his
most lavish gifts for Buddhist shrines and monasteries, he does not deny
his benefactions to Brahmans and ascetics of other sects. Nor is he
content merely to preach and issue orders. His monastic vows, though
they lead him to forswear the amusements and even the field sports which
had been his youthful pastimes, do not involve the severance of all
worldly ties. He is the indefatigable and supreme head of the Church; he
visits in solemn pilgrimage all the holy places hallowed by the memory
of Buddha, and endows shrines and monasteries and convents with princely
munificence; he convenes at Pataliputra a great Buddhist council for
combating heresy. But he remains the indefatigable and supreme head of
the State. "I am never fully satisfied with my efforts and my despatch
of business. Work I must for the welfare of all, and the root of the
matter is in effort." He controls a highly trained bureaucracy not
unlike that of British India to-day, and his system of government is
wonderfully effective so long as it is informed by his untiring energy
and singular loftiness of purpose.
With Asoka Buddhism attained to a supremacy in India which may well be
compared with that of Christianity in Europe under Constantine; and it
is only by measuring the height to which Buddhism had then risen that we
can realise the enduring power of Hinduism, as we see it through
successive centuries slowly but irresistibly recovering all the ground
it had lost until Buddhism at last disappears almost entirely off the
face of India, whereas it continued to spread, though often in very
debased forms, over the greater part of Eastern Asia, and still
maintains its hold there over more than a third of the total population
of the globe.
As with most of the great rulers and conquerors that India has from time
to time thrown up, Asoka's life-work fell to pieces almost as soon as he
had passed away. Not only did the temporal empire which he built up
disintegrate rapidly in the hands of his feeble successors, but Buddhism
itself was dethroned within fifty years with the last of his dynasty,
slain by the usurper Pushyamitra Sunga, who, after consecrating himself
to the Hindu gods with the rites of _Rajasuya_, celebrated his advent to
Paramount Power by reviving the ancient ceremony of _Asvamedha_, the
Sacrifice of the Horse--one of the most characteristic of Brahmanical
rites.
It was not till after another great conquering inflow from Central Asia
in the first century of our era that Kanishka, the greatest of a new
dynasty which had set itself up at Purushpura, situated close to the
modern Peshawar, shed a transient gleam of glory over the decline of
Buddhism and even restored it to the position of a state religion. But
it was a Buddhism already far removed from the purity of Asoka's reign.
The most striking feature of this short-lived revival is the artistic
inspiration which it derived from Hellenistic sources, of which the
museums of Peshawar and Lahore contain so many remarkable illustrations.
The theory, at one time very widely entertained, that Alexander's brief
incursion into India left any permanent mark on Indian civilisation is
now entirely discarded by the best authorities. No Indian author makes
even the faintest allusion to him, nor is there any trace of Hellenic
influence in the evolution of Indian society, or in the elaborate
institutions with which India was endowed by the Mauryan dynasty that
followed immediately on the disruption of Alexander's empire. But the
Kushans, or Yueh Chis, during the various stages of their slow migration
down into Northern India, came into long and close contact with the
Indo-Bactrian and Indo-Parthian kingdoms that sprang up after Alexander.
The populations were never Hellenised, but their rulers were to some
extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation. They spoke
Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn
subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the
conquerors something of their own Greek veneer. In the second century of
our era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain,
where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its
cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra
a famous Buddhist saint, who converted him to Buddhism. But as these
Indo-Scythian kings had not been long enough in India to secure
admission to the social aristocracy of Hinduism by that slow process of
naturalisation to which so many ruling families have owed their Kshatrya
pedigrees, Kanishka, having himself no claim to caste, may well have
preferred for reasons of state to favour Buddhism as a creed
fundamentally opposed to caste distinctions. Whatever the motives of his
conversion, we have it on the authority of Hiuen-Tsang that he
ultimately did great things for Buddhism, and the magnificent _stupa_,
which he erected outside his capital, five-and-twenty stories high and
crowned with a cupola of diamonds, was still 150 feet high and measured
a quarter of a mile in circumference when the Chinese pilgrim visited
Purushpura five centuries later. To the present day there are traces
outside the northern gate of Peshawar of a great Buddhist monastery,
also built by Kanishka, which remained a seat of Buddhist learning until
it was destroyed by Mahomedan invaders; and it was only a mile from
Peshawar that the American Sanskritist, Dr. Spooner, discovered ten
years ago the casket containing some of Buddha's bones, which is one of
the most perfect specimens of Graeco-Buddhist art. The Buddhist statues
and bas-reliefs of that period are Greek rather than Indian in their
treatment of sacred history, and even the head of Gautama himself might
sometimes be taken for that of a young Greek god.
These exotic influences may indeed have acted as a further solvent upon
Buddhism. But in any case, its local and temporary revival as a dominant
state religion under Kanishka, whose empire did not long outlive him,
failed to arrest its steady resorption into Hinduism. On the one hand,
Buddhism itself was losing much of its original purity. The miraculous
legends with which the life of Buddha was gradually invested, the almost
idolatrous worship paid to him, the belief that he himself was but the
last of many incarnations in which the Buddha had already revealed
himself from the very beginning of creation--all these later accretions
represent, no doubt, the reaction upon Buddhism of its Hinduistic
surroundings. But they doubtless helped also to stimulate the growth of
the more definite forms of anthropomorphism which characterised the
development of Hinduism when the ancient ritual and the more impersonal
gods of the Vedas and of the Brahmanas gave way to the cult of such very
personal gods as Shiva and Vishnu, with their feminine counterparts,
Kali and Lakshmi, and ultimately to the evolution of still more popular
deities, some, like Skanda and the elephant-headed Ganesh, closely
connected with Shiva; others like Krishna and Rama, _av[=a]taras_ or
incarnations--and in many ways extremely human incarnations--of Vishnu.
At the same time, the Aryan Hindus, as they went on subduing the
numerous aboriginal races of India, constantly facilitated their
assimilation by the more or less direct adoption of their primitive
deities and religious customs. The two great epics, the Mahabharata,
with its wonderful episode, the Baghavat-Ghita, which is the apotheosis
of Krishna, and the Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama, show the
infusion into Hinduism of a distinctly national spirit in direct
opposition to the almost cosmopolitan catholicity of Buddhism,
sufficiently elastic to adapt itself even to the political aspirations
of non-Hindu conquerors as well as of non-Hindu races beyond the borders
of Hindustan, in Nepal and in Ceylon, in Burma and in Tibet, in China
and in Japan. The conflict between Buddhist and Hindu theology might not
have been irreconcilable, for Hinduism, as we know, was quite ready to
admit Buddha himself into the privileged circle of its own gods as one
of the incarnations of Vishnu. What was irreconcilable was the conflict
between a social system based on Brahmanical supremacy and one that
denied it--especially after Hinduism had acquired a new sense of Indian
patriotism which only reached fuller development in our own times when
it was quickened by contact with European nationalism.
Hindus themselves prefer, however, to-day to identify Indian nationalism
with the period when from another long interval of darkness, which
followed the downfall of the Kushan kingdom, Indian history emerges into
the splendour of what has been called "the golden age of Hinduism" in
the fourth and fifth centuries of our era under the great Gupta dynasty,
who ruled at Ujjain. Few Indian cities are reputed to be more ancient or
more sacred than the little town of Ujjain on the Sipra river, known as
Ozen[=i] to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as
Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves.
When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was,
for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere
ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the
sacrificial fire, which consumed her--the prototype of all pious Hindu
widows who perform _Sati_--in the presence of gods and Brahmans. Shiva,
maddened with grief, gathered up the bones of his unfortunate consort
and danced about with them in a world-shaking frenzy. Her scattered
bones fell to earth, and wherever they fell the spot became sacred and a
temple sprang up in her honour. One of her elbows fell on the banks of
the Sipra at Ujjain, and few shrines enjoy greater or more widespread
fame than the great temple of Maha-Kal, consecrated to her worship and
that of Shiva. Its wealth was fabulous when it was looted and destroyed
by Altamsh and his Pathan Mahomedans in 1235. The present buildings are
for the most part barely 200 years old, and remarkable chiefly for the
insistency with which the _lingam_ and the bull, the favourite symbols
of Shiva, repeat themselves in shrine after shrine. But it attracts
immense numbers of pilgrims, especially in every twelfth year, when they
flock in hundreds of thousands to Ujjain and camp as near as possible to
the river. The peculiarity of the Ujjain festival is that, in memory of
the form which Shiva took on when he wooed Uma, it attracts a veritable
army of Sanyasis, or mendicants, sometimes as many as fifty thousand,
from all parts of India. Seldom, except at the great Jaganath festivals
at Puri, is a larger congregation seen of weird and almost inhuman
figures; some clothed solely with their long unkempt hair, some with
their bodies smeared all over with white ashes, and the symbol of their
favourite deity painted conspicuously on their foreheads; some
displaying ugly sores or withered limbs as evidence of lifelong
mortification of the flesh; some moving as if in a dream and entirely
lost to the world's realities; some with frenzied eyes shouting and
brandishing their instruments of self-torture; some with a repulsive
leer and heavy sensuous jowls affecting a certain coquetry in the
ritualistic adornment of their well-fed bodies.
Chandragupta I., the founder of the great dynasty which Hindus extol
above all others, was only a petty chieftain by birth, but he was
fortunate enough to wed a lady of high lineage, who could trace a
connection with the ancient Maurya house of Magadha, and, thanks to this
alliance and to his own prowess, he was able at his death to bequeath
real kingship to his son, Samadragupta, who, during a fifty years'
reign, A.D. 326-375, again welded almost the whole of India north of the
Nerbudda river into one empire, and once even spoiled Southern India
right down to Cape Comorin. His victories are recorded--with an irony
perhaps not wholly accidental--beneath the Asokan inscription on the
Allahabad pillar. Of his zeal for Hinduism we have a convincing proof in
gold coins of his reign that preserve on the obverse in the figure of
the sacrificial horse a record of the _Asvamedha_, which he again
revived. Strange to say, however, his fame has never been so popular as
that of his son, Chandragupta II., Vikramadytia, the Sun of Power, who
reigned in turn for nearly forty years, and has lived in Hindu legend as
the Raja Bikram, to whom India owes her golden age. It was his court at
Ujjain which is believed to have been adorned by the "Nine Gems" of
Sanskrit literature, amongst whom the favourite is Kalidasa, the poet
and dramatist. Amidst much that is speculative, one thing is certain.
The age of Vikramadytia was an age of Brahmanical ascendancy. As has so
often happened, and is still happening in India to-day in the struggle
between Urdu and Hindi, the battle of religious and political supremacy
was largely one of languages. During the centuries of Brahmanical
depression that preceded the Gupta dynasty, the more vulgar tongue
spoken of the people prevailed. Under the Guptas, Sanskrit, which was
the language of the Brahmans, resumed its pre-eminence and took
possession of the whole field of literature and art and science as well
as of theology. Oral traditions were reduced to writing and poetry was
adapted to both sacred and profane uses in the Puranas, in the metrical
code of Manu, in treatises on sacrificial ritual, in Kalidasa's plays,
and in many other works of which only fragments have survived.
Astronomy, logic, philosophy were all cultivated with equal fervour and
to the greater glory of Brahmanism. Local tradition is doubtless quite
wrong in assigning to Raja Bikram the noble gateway which is the only
monument of Hindu architecture at its best that Ujjain has to show
to-day. But to that period may, perhaps, be traced the graceful, if
highly ornate, style of architecture, of which the Bhuvaneshwar temples,
several centuries more recent, are the earliest examples that can be at
all accurately dated. To the credit of Brahmanism be it said that in its
hour of triumph it remained at least negatively tolerant, as all purely
Indian creeds generally have been. Fa-Hien, who visited India during the
reign of Vikramadytia, though dismayed at the desolation which had
already overtaken many of the sacred places of Buddhism, pays a generous
tribute to the tolerance and statesmanship of that great sovereign. The
country seems, indeed, to have enjoyed real prosperity under a paternal
and almost model administration.
Yet the Gupta dynasty endured only a little longer than had that of the
Mauryas. Its downfall was hastened by the long reign of terror which
India went through during the invasion of the White Huns. Europe had
undergone a like ordeal nearly a century earlier, for when the Huns
began to move out of the steppes of Eastern Asia they poured forth in
two separate streams, one of which swept into Eastern Europe, whilst the
other flowed more slowly towards Persia and India. What Attila had been
to Europe, Mihiragula was to India, and though the domination of the
Huns did not long outlive him, the anarchy they left behind them
continued for another century, until "the land of Kuru," the cradle and
battle-field of so many legendary heroes, produced another heroic
figure, who, as King Harsha, filled for more than forty years (606-648)
the stage of Indian history with his exploits. He had inherited the
blood of the Gupta emperors from his mother, though his father was only
a small Raja of Thanesvar, to the north of Delhi. The tragic
circumstances in which he succeeded him made a man of him at the early
age of fourteen. By the time he was twenty he was "master of the five
Indias"--_i.e._ of nearly the whole of Northern India from Kathiawar to
the delta of the Ganges, and henceforth he proved himself as great in
peace as in war. In his case the knowledge we owe to Chinese sources is
supplemented by the valuable record left by the Brahman Bana, who lived
at his court and wrote the Harsha-Charita. Taxation, we are told, was
lightened, and the assessment of land revenue was equitable and
moderate. Security for life and property was enforced under severe but
effective penalties. Education received impartial encouragement whether
conducted by Brahmans or by Buddhist monks, and both as a patron of
literature, which he himself cultivated by composing dramas, and as a
philanthropic ruler King Harsha bestowed his favours with a fairly equal
hand on Hinduism and on Buddhism alike. For Buddhism still lingered in
the land, and Harsha, who was a mystic and a dreamer as well as a man of
action, certainly inclined during his later years towards Buddhism, or,
at least, included it in his own eclectic creed.
Hiuen-Tsang, who spent fifteen years in India during Harsha's reign,
searching for the relics of early Buddhism in a land from which it was
steadily disappearing, has given us a wonderful picture of a religious
state-pageant which makes Prayaga, at the triple confluence of the
Ganges and the Jumna with the sacred but invisible river, Saraswati,
near to the modern city of Allahabad, stand out as another striking
landmark in Indian history. Hindus attach great holiness to rivers and
their confluence, and this Triveni, or triple confluence, had been
specially consecrated by Brahma, who chose that spot for the first
_Asvamedha_. "From ancient times," says the Chinese chronicler, "the
kings used to go there to distribute alms, and hence it was known as the
Place of Almsgiving. According to tradition more merit is gained by
giving one piece of money there than one hundred thousand elsewhere." So
King Harsha having invited all alike, whether "followers of the law or
heretics, the ascetics and the poor, the orphans and the helpless," the
kings of eighteen subordinate kingdoms assembled there with their people
to the number of 500,000, and found immense refectories laid out for
their refreshment, and long rows of warehouses to receive silk and
cotton garments and gold and silver coins for distribution to them. "The
first day a statue of Buddha was placed in the shrine erected on the
Place of Almsgiving, and there was a distribution of the most precious
things and of the garments of greatest value, whilst exquisite viands
were served and flowers scattered to the sound of harmonious music. Then
all retired to their resting-places. On the second day a statue of the
Sun-god was placed in the shrine, and on the third day the statue of
Shiva," and the distribution of gifts continued on those days and day
after day for a period of over two months, ten thousand Brahmans
receiving the lion's share, until, having exhausted all his wealth, even
to the jewels and garments he was wearing, King Harsha borrowed a coarse
and much-worn garment, and having "adored the Buddhas of the ten
countries," he gave vent to his pious delight, exclaiming: "Whilst I was
amassing all this wealth I was always afraid lest I should find no safe
and secret place to stow it away. Now that I have deposited it by
alms-giving in the Field of Happiness I know that it is for ever in
safety. I pray that in my future lives I may amass in like manner great
treasures and give them away in alms so as to obtain the ten divine
faculties in all their plenitude."
Here one sees India as it was before the Mahomedan invasions, in the
days of the last of the great Indian rulers who succeeded for a time in
bending the whole of Northern India to his will. As always in India,
behind whatever form of temporal power might for the moment appear to be
paramount, religion and the social order which it consecrates
represented the real paramount power that alone endures. In this
extraordinary festival which marked the close of Harsha's reign the
picture left to us is singularly complete. The first day is a sort of
farewell tribute to the waning glory of Buddha, and the second to the
ancient majesty of the Vedic gods; but they only prepare the way for the
culminating worship, on the third day, of the terrific figure of Shiva,
who had already been raised to one of the highest, if not the highest,
throne in the Hindu pantheon, which he still retains--Shiva, the master
of life and death, whose favourite emblem is the phallus, and from whose
third eye bursts forth the flame which is one day to consume the world.
Around Harsha, and devouring his gifts until, at the end of two months,
they are wholly exhausted, are the Brahmans, "born above the world,
assigned to guard the treasury of duties, civil and religious," through
whom alone the wrath of angry gods can be appeased and present and
future life be made safe in the descending hierarchy of caste.
Shortly after Harsha's death in A.D. 648, India, as is her wont as soon
as the strong man's arm is paralysed, relapses once more into political
chaos. Her history does not indeed ever again recede into the complete
obscurity of earlier ages. We get glimpses of successive kingdoms and
dynasties rising and again falling in Southern India, as the Hindu
Aryans gradually permeate and subdue the older Dravidian races and
absorb the greater part of them, not without being in turn influenced by
them, into their own religious and social system. The most notable
feature of the post-Harsha period of Hindu history is the emergence of
the Rajput states, whose rulers, though probably descendants of
relatively recent invaders, not only became rapidly Hinduised, but
secured relatively prompt admission to the rank of Kshatryas in the
Hindu caste system, with pedigrees dated back to the Sun and Moon, which
to the popular mind were well justified by their warlike prowess and
splendid chivalry. I need only recall the name of Prithvi-Raja, the lord
of Sambhar, Delhi, and Ajmer, whose epic fame rests not less on his
abduction of the Kanauj princess who loved him than on his gallant
losing fight against the Mahomedan invaders of India. But fierce clan
jealousies and intense dynastic pride made the Rajputs incapable of
uniting into a single paramount state, or even into an enduring
confederacy fit to withstand the storm of which Harsha himself might
have heard the distant rumblings. For it was during his reign that
militant Islam first set foot in India, in a remote part of the
peninsula. Just at the same time as the Arabs, in the first flush of
victory, poured into Egypt, a small force crossed the Arabian Sea and
entered Baluchistan, and a century later the whole of Sind passed into
Arab hands. Another two centuries and the Mahomedan flood was pouring
irresistibly into India, no longer across the Arabian Sea, but from
Central Asia through the great northern passes, until in successive
waves it submerged for a time almost the whole of India.
Now if we look back upon the fifteen centuries of Indian history, of
which I have sought to reconstitute the chief landmarks before the
Mahomedan invasions, the two salient features that emerge from the
twilight are the failure of the Aryan Hindus to achieve any permanent
form of political unity or stability, and their success, on the other
hand, in building up on adamantine foundations a complex but vital
social system. The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in
prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of
a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic
to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and sufficiently
rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Of its marvellous tenacity
and powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the
elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous
uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed
under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the
Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, contemporary and
closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and
perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease
of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically quite
unimportant sect. But indomitably powerful as a social amalgam, Hinduism
failed to generate any politically constructive force that could endure
much beyond the lifetime of some exceptionally gifted conqueror. The
Mauryan and the Gupta dynasties succumbed as irretrievably to the
centrifugal forces of petty states and clans perpetually striving for
mastery as the more ephemeral kingdoms of Kanishka and Harsha. They all
in turn crumbled away, and, in a land of many races and languages and
climates, split up into many states and groups of states constantly at
strife and constantly changing masters and frontiers. Hinduism alone
always survived with its crowded and ever-expanding pantheon of gods and
goddesses for the multitude, with its subtle and elastic philosophies
for the elect, with the doctrine of infinite reincarnations for all,
and, bound up with it, the iron law of caste.
The caste system, though it may be slowly yielding in non-essentials to
the exigencies of modern life, is still vigorous to-day in all its
essential features, and cannot easily be extruded from their family life
even by the Western-educated classes. It divides up Indian society into
thousands of water-tight compartments within which the Hindu is born and
lives and dies without any possibility of emerging from the one to which
he has been predestined by his own deeds in his former lives. Each caste
forms a group, of which the relations within its own circle, as well as
with other groups, are governed by the most rigid laws--in no
connection more rigid than in regard to marriage. These groups are of
many different types; some are of the tribal type, some national, some
sectarian, some have been formed by migration, some are based upon a
common social function or occupation past or present, some on
peculiarities of religious beliefs and superstitions. A distinguished
French writer, M. Senart, has described a caste as a close corporation,
in theory at any rate rigorously hereditary, equipped with a certain
traditional and independent organisation, observing certain common
usages, more particularly as to marriage, food, and questions of
ceremonial pollution, and ruling its members by the sanction of certain
penalties of which the most signal is the sentence of irrevocable
exclusion or out-casting. The Census of 1901 was the first to attempt a
thorough classification of Indian castes, and the number of the main
castes enumerated in it is well over two thousand, each one divided up
again into almost endless sub-castes. The keystone of the whole caste
system is the supremacy of the _quasi_-sacerdotal caste of Brahmans--a
caste which constitutes in some respects the proudest and closest
aristocracy that the world has ever seen, since it is not merely an
aristocracy of birth in the strictest sense of the term, but one of
divine origin. An Indian is either born a Brahman or he is not. No power
on earth can make him a Brahman. Not all Brahmans were learned even in
the old days of Hinduism, though it was to their monopoly of such
learning as there then was that they owed their ascendancy over the
warrior kings. Nor do all Brahmans minister in the temples. Strangely
enough the minority who do are looked down upon by their own castemen.
The majority pursue such worldly avocations, often quite humble, as are
permissible for them under their caste laws. The Brahmans were wise
enough, too, to temper the fundamental rigidity of the system with
sufficient elasticity to absorb the new elements with which it came into
contact, and in most cases gradually to reabsorb such elements as from
time to time rebelled against it. The process by which new castes may be
admitted into the pale of Hinduism, or the status of existing castes be
from time to time readjusted to new conditions, has been admirably
explained by Sir Alfred Lyall. But the process can be worked only under
Brahmanical authority, and the supreme sanction for all caste laws rests
solely with the Brahmans, whilst of all caste laws the most inexorable
is the supremacy of the Brahman. Therein lies the secret of the great
influence which, for good as well as for evil, he has always wielded
over the masses. For though in theory there could be no escape from the
bondage of caste, individuals, and even a whole group, would sometimes
find ways and means of propitiating the Brahmans who ministered to their
spiritual needs, and the miraculous intervention of a favouring god or
the discovery of a long-lost but entirely mythical ancestor would secure
their social uplift on to a higher rung of the caste-ladder.
Such a system, by creating and perpetuating arbitrary and yet almost
impassable lines of social cleavage, must be fatal to the development of
a robust body politic which can only be produced by the reasonable
intermingling and healthy fusion of the different classes of the
community. It was perhaps chief among the causes that left Hinduism with
so little force of organised political cohesion that the Hindu states of
ancient India, with their superior culture and civilisation, were sooner
or later swept away by the devastating flood of Mahomedan conquest,
whilst the social structure of Hinduism, just because it consisted of
such an infinity of water-tight compartments each vital and
self-sufficing, could be buffeted again and again and even almost
submerged by the waves without ever breaking up.