THE AGE OF THE BRAHMANAS AND UPANISHADS
Centuries have passed since the hymns of the Rig-veda were composed.
The Aryans have now crossed the fateful ridge on the east of their
former settlements, and have spread themselves over the lands of
Northern Hindostan around the upper basins of the Ganges and Jamna,
reaching eastward as far as Bihar and southward down to the Vindhya
Mountains, and in the course of their growth they have absorbed not a
little of the blood of the dark-skinned natives. The old organisation
of society by tribes has come to an end, though the names of many
ancient tribes are still heard; the Aryans are now divided laterally
by the principle of what we call "caste," which is based upon a
combination of religious and professional distinctions, and vertically
by the rule of kings, while a few oligarchic governments still survive
to remind them of Vedic days. In these kingdoms the old tribes are
beginning to be fused together; from these combinations new States are
arising, warring with one another, constantly waxing and waning.
Society is ruled politically by kings, spiritually by Brahmans. With
the rise of the kingdom an Established Church has come into existence,
and the Brahman priesthood works out its principles to the bitterest
end of logic.
The Brahmans are now, more than they ever were before, a close
corporation of race, religion, and profession, a religious fraternity
in the strict sense of the words. While other classes of the Aryans
have mixed their blood to a greater or less degree with that of the
natives, the Brahmans have preserved much of the pure Aryan strain.
They, moreover, have maintained the knowledge of the ancient Vedic
language in which the sacred hymns of their forefathers were composed,
of the traditions associated with them, and of the priestly lore of
Vedic ritual. Proud of this heritage and resolved to maintain it
undiminished, they have knitted themselves into a close spiritual and
intellectual aristocracy, which stands fast like a lighthouse amidst
the darkness and storms of political changes. They employ all the arts
of the priest, the thinker, the statesman, and even the magician to
preserve their primacy; and around them the manifold variety of the
other castes, in all their divisions and subdivisions, groups itself
to make up the multi-coloured web of Indian life.
In course of time this priesthood will spread out octopus-like
tentacles over the whole of India. Becoming all things to all men, it
will find a place in its pantheon for all gods and all ideas,
baptising them by orthodox names or justifying them by ingenious
fictions. It will send forth apostles and colonies even to the
furthermost regions of the distant South, which, alien in blood and in
tradition, will nevertheless accept them and surrender its best
intellect to their control. It will even admit into the lower ranks of
its own body men of foreign birth by means of legal fictions, in order
to maintain its control of religion. Though itself splitting up into
scores of divisions varying in purity of blood and tradition, it will
still as a whole maintain its position as against all other classes of
society. That the Brahman is the Deity on earth, and other classes
shall accept this dogma and agree to take their rank in accordance
with it, will become the principle holding together a vast
agglomeration of utterly diverse elements within the elastic bounds of
Catholic Brahmanism.
But as yet this condition of things has not arrived. The Brahmans are
still comparatively pure in blood and homogeneous in doctrine, and
they have as yet sent forth no colonies south of the Vindhya. They are
established in the lands of the Ganges and Jamna as far to the east as
Benares, and they look with some contempt on their kinsmen in the
western country that they have left behind. They are busily employed
in working out to logical conclusions the ideas and principles of
their Rigvedic forefathers. They have now three Vedas; for to the old
Rig-veda they have added a Yajur-veda for the use of the sacrificant
orders of priests and a Sama-veda or hymnal containing Rigvedic hymns
arranged for the chanting of choristers. The result of these labours
is that they have created a vast and intricate system of sacrificial
ritual, perhaps the most colossal of its kind that the world has ever
seen or ever will see. What is still more remarkable, the logical
result of this immense development of ritualism is that the priesthood
in theory is practically atheistic, while on the other hand a certain
number of its members have arrived at a philosophy of complete
idealism which is beginning to turn its back upon ritualism.
The atheist is not so much the man who denies the existence of any god
as the man to whom God is not God, who looks upon the Deity as
subordinate to powers void of holiness and nobility, the man who will
not see in God the highest force in the world of nature and in the
realm of the spirit. In this sense the Brahmans are thorough atheists.
According to them, the universe with all that is in it--gods, men, and
lower things--is created and governed by an iron law of soulless
natural necessity. It has arisen by emanation from a cosmic Principle,
Prajapati, "the Lord of Creatures," an impersonal being who shows no
trace of moral purpose in his activity. Prajapati himself is not
absolutely the first in the course of nature. The Brahmanas, the
priestly books composed in this period to expound the rules and mystic
significance of the Brahmanic ceremonies, give us varying accounts of
his origin, some of them saying that he arose through one or more
intermediate stages from non-existence (TB. II. ii. 9, 1-10, SB. VI.
i. 1, 1-5), others deriving him indirectly from the primitive waters
(SB. XI. i. 6, 1), others tracing his origin back to the still more
impersonal and abstract Brahma (Samav. B. I. 1-3, Gop. B. I. i. 4).
All these are attempts to express in the form of myth the idea of an
impersonal Principle of Creation as arising from a still more abstract
first principle. We have seen the poets of the Rig-veda gradually
moving towards the idea of a unity of godhead; in Prajapati this goal
is attained, but unfortunately it is attained by sacrificing almost
all that is truly divine in godhead. The conception of Prajapati that
we find in the Brahmanas is also expressed in some of the latest hymns
of the Rig-veda. Among these is the famous Purusha-sukta (RV. X. 90),
which throws a peculiar light on the character of Prajapati. It is in
praise of a primitive Purusha or Man, who is, of course, the same as
Prajapati; in some mysterious manner this Purusha is sacrificed, and
from the various parts of his body arise the various parts of the
world. The idea conveyed by this is that the universe came into
existence by the operation of the mystic laws revealed in the
Brahmanic rituals, and is maintained in its natural order by the same
means. The Brahmanas do not indeed often assert on their own authority
that Prajapati was himself sacrificed in order to produce the world,
and in fact they usually give other accounts of the creation; but as
their authors live in a rarefied atmosphere of mystical allegory in
which fact and fancy are completely confused with one another and
consistency ceases to have any meaning, none of them would have
difficulty in accepting the Rigvedic statement that he was sacrificed.
Hence they tell us on the one hand that Prajapati has created the
world from a blind will for generation or increase, producing from
each of his limbs some class of beings corresponding to it (e.g. MS.
IV. vi. 3), or copulating with the earth, atmosphere, sky, and speech
(SB. VI. i. 2, 1), or that he brought it into existence indirectly by
entering with the Triple Science or mystic lore of the three Vedas
into the primeval waters and thence forming an egg from which was
hatched the personal Demiurge Brahma, who actually created the world
(SB. VI. i. 1, 10); and on the other hand they relate that he created
sacrifice and performed it, making of himself a victim in order that
the gods, his offspring, might perform the rites for their own
benefit, forming an image of himself to be the sacrifice, by which he
redeemed himself from the gods (SB. XI. i. 8, 2-4; cf. AB. VII. 19,
KB. XIII. 1, SB. III. ii. 1, 11), and that after creation he ascended
to heaven (SB. X. ii. 2, 1). The thought that lies underneath these
bewildering flights of fancy is one of mystic pantheism: all created
existence has arisen by emanation from the one Creative Principle,
Prajapati, and in essence is one with Prajapati; Prajapati is an
impersonal being, a creative force, in which are embodied the laws of
Brahmanic ritual, which acts only in these laws, and which is above
the moral influences that affect humanity; and the whole of created
nature, animate and inanimate, is controlled in every process of its
being by these laws, and by the priest who possesses the knowledge of
them. Thus there lies a profound significance in the title of "gods on
earth" which the Brahmans have assumed.
When we speak of sacrifice in India, we must clear our minds of the
ideas which we have formed from reading the Bible. The Mosaic
conception of sacrifice was that of a religious ceremony denoting a
moral relation between a personal God and His worshippers: in the
sin-offerings and trespass-offerings was symbolised a reconciliation
between man and his God who was angered by man's conscious or
unconscious breach of the laws which had been imposed upon him for
his spiritual welfare, while meat-offerings and peace-offerings
typified the worshipper's sense of gratitude for the Divine love and
wisdom that guarded him. Of such relations there is to be found in the
Brahmanas no trace. If we may use a modern figure of speech, they
conceive the universe of gods, men, and lower creatures as a single
immense electric battery, and the sacrifice as a process of charging
this battery with ever fresh electricity. The sacrifice is a process,
at once material and mystic, which preserves the order of nature as
established by the prototypic sacrifice performed by Prajapati. The
gods became divine and immortal through sacrifice (TS. VI. iii. 4, 7,
VI. iii. 10, 2, VII. iv. 2, 1, SB. I. vi. 2, 1, MS. III. ix. 4, AB.
VI. i. 1, etc.); and they live on the gifts of earth, as mankind lives
on the gifts of heaven (TS. III. ii. 9, 7, SB. I. ii. 5, 24). The
sacrifice is thus the life-principle, the soul, of all gods and all
beings (SB. VIII. vi. 1, 10, IX. iii. 2, 7, XIV. iii. 2, 1); or, what
amounts to the same thing, the Triple Science or the knowledge of the
ceremonies of the Three Vedas is their essence (SB. X. iv. 2, 21). As
Prajapati created the primeval sacrifice, and as the gods by following
this rule obtained their divinity, so man should seek to follow their
example and by means of sacrifice rise to godhead and immortality. As
one Brahmana puts it, the sacrifice leads the way to heaven; it is
followed by the _dakshina_, or fee paid by the sacrificer to the
sacrificant priests, which of course materially strengthens the
efficacy of the sacrifice; and third comes the sacrificer, holding
fast to the _dakshina_. This ascent of heaven is symbolised in the
ceremony called _durohana_, or "hard mounting" (AB. IV. 20, 21, KB.
XXV. 7), and it is ensured by the rite of _diksha_, or consecration,
in which the sacrificer is symbolically represented as passing through
a new conception, gestation, and birth, by which he is supposed to
obtain two bodies. One of these bodies is immortal and spiritual; the
other is mortal and material, and is assigned as a victim to all the
gods. He then ransoms his material body from the obligation of being
sacrificed, as did Prajapati, and thus ranks literally as a "god on
earth," with the certainty of becoming in due course a god in heaven.
When the student on reading the Brahmanas finds them full of
interminable ceremonial rules with equally interminable commentaries
interpreting them by wildest analogies as symbolical of details of
myths or of laws of nature and hence as conferring mystic powers,
besides all kinds of myths, some forcibly dragged into the
interpretation of the ritual because of some imaginary point of
resemblance, others invented or recast on purpose to justify some
detail of ceremony, and when moreover he observes that many of these
myths and some of the rites are brutally and filthily obscene, and
that hardly any of them show the least moral feeling, he may be
excused for thinking the Brahmanas to be the work of madmen. But there
is some method in their madness. However strangely they may express
them, they have definite and strictly logical ideas about the
sacrificial ritual and its cosmic function. It is more difficult to
defend them against the charge of want of morality. It must be
admitted that their supreme Being, Prajapati, is in the main lines of
his character utterly impersonal, and where incidentally he shows any
human feelings they are as a rule far from creditable to him. He
created the universe from mechanical instinct or blind desire, and
committed or tried to commit incest with his daughter (the accounts
are various). He has begotten both the gods and the demons, _devas_
and _asuras_, who are constantly at war with one another. The gods,
who are embodiments of "truth" (that is to say, correct knowledge of
the law of ritual), have been often in great danger of being
overwhelmed by the demons, who embody "untruth," and they have been
saved by Prajapati; but he has done this not from any sense of right,
but merely from blind will or favour, for he can hardly distinguish
one party from the other. The gods themselves, in spite of being of
"truth," are sadly frail. Dozens of myths charge them with falsehood,
hatred, lust, greed, and jealousy, and only the stress of the danger
threatening them from their adversaries the demons has induced them to
organise themselves into an ordered kingdom under the sovereignty of
Indra, who has been anointed by Prajapati. True, many of the offensive
features in this mythology and ritual are survivals from a very
ancient past, a pre-historic time in which morals were conspicuously
absent from religion; the priesthood has forgotten very little, and as
a rule has only added new rituals and new interpretations to this
legacy from the days of old. Nevertheless it must be confessed that
there is a tone of ritualistic professionalism in the Brahmanas that
is unpleasing; the priesthood are consciously superior to nature, God,
and morals by virtue of their "Triple Science," and they constantly
emphasise this claim. It is difficult for us to realise that these are
the same men who have created the Brahmanic culture of India, which,
however we may criticise it from the Western point of view, is
essentially a gentle life, a field in which moral feeling and
intellectual effort have born abundance of goodly fruit. Yet if we
look more closely we shall see that even these ritualists, besotted as
they may seem to be with their orgies of priestcraft, are not wholly
untouched by the better spirit of their race. Extremes of sanctity,
whether it be ritualistic or anti-ritualistic sanctity, always tend in
India--and in other countries as well--to produce supermen. And if
our priesthood in the Brahmanas feel themselves in the pride of
spiritual power lifted above the rules of moral law, they are not in
practice indifferent to it. Their lives are for the most part gentle
and good. Though "truth" in the Brahmanas usually means only
accordance with the ritual and mystic teachings of the Triple Science,
it sometimes signifies even there veracity and honesty also.
Truthfulness in speech is the hall-mark of the Brahman, says
Haridrumata Gautama to Satyakama Jabala (Chhand. Up. IV. iv. 5); and
even in the Brahmanas a lie is sometimes a sin. If conservatism
compels the priests to keep obscene old practices in their rituals,
they are not always satisfied with them, and voices begin to be heard
pleading that these rites are really obsolete. In short, a moral sense
is beginning to arise among them.
Now the moral law, in order that it may be feared, needs to be
embodied in the personality of a god. Most of their gods inspire no
fear at all in the souls of the Brahmans; but there is one of whom
they have a dread, which is all the greater for being illogical.
Prajapati is a vast impersonality, too remote and abstract to inspire
the soul with either fear or love. The other gods--Indra, Agni, Soma,
Varuna, Vishnu, and the rest--are his offspring, and are moved like
puppets by the machinery of the ritual of sacrifice created by him.
However much they may seem to differ one from another in their
attributes and personalities, they are in essence one and negligible
in the eyes of the master of the ritual lore. In the beginning, say
the Brahmanas, all the gods (except Prajapati, of course) were alike,
and all were mortal; then they performed sacrifices and thereby became
immortal, each with his peculiar attributes of divinity.[18] Thus at
bottom they are all the same thing, merely phases of the universal
godhead, waves stirred up by the current of the cosmic sacrifice. They
have no terrors for the priesthood. But there is one deity who
obstinately refuses to accommodate himself to this convenient point of
view, and that is Rudra, or Siva. By rights and logically he ought to
fall into rank with the rest of the gods; but there is a crossgrained
element in his nature which keeps him out. As we have seen, he comes
from a different source: in origin he was a demon, a power of terror,
whose realm of worship lay apart from that of the gods of higher
class, and now, although it has extended into the domains of orthodox
religion, an atmosphere of dread still broods over it.[19] Rudra
wields all his ancient terrors over a much widened area. The priests
have assigned him a regular place in their liturgies, and fully
recognise him in his several phases as Bhava, Sarva, Ugra, Maha-deva
or the Great God, Rudra, Isana or the Lord, and Asani or the
Thunderbolt (KB. VI. 2-9). Armed with his terrors, he is fit to be
employed in the service of conscience. Hence a myth has arisen that in
order to punish Prajapati for his incest with his daughter the gods
created Bhuta-pati (who is Pasu-pati or Rudra under a new name), who
stabbed him. The rest of the myth is as immaterial to our purpose as
it is unsavoury; what is important is that the conscience of the
Brahmans was beginning to feel slight qualms at the uncleanness of
some of their old myths and to look towards Rudra as in some degree an
avenger of sin. In this is implied an immense moral advance.
Henceforth there will be a gradual ennoblement of one of the phases of
the god's character. Many of the best minds among the Brahmans will
find their imaginations stirred and their consciences moved by
contemplation of him. To them he will be no more a mere demon of the
mountain and the wild. His destructive wrath they will interpret as
symbolising the everlasting process of death-in-life which is the
keynote of nature; in his wild dances they will see imaged forth the
everlasting throb of cosmic existence; to his terrors they will find a
reverse of infinite love and grace. The horrors of Rudra the deadly
are the mantle of Siva the gracious. Thus, while the god's character
in its lower phases remains the same as before, claiming the worship
of the basest classes of mankind, and nowise rising to a higher level,
it develops powerfully and fruitfully in one aspect which attracts
grave and earnest imaginations. The Muni, the contemplative ascetic,
penetrates in meditation through the terrors of Siva's outward form to
the god's inward love and wisdom, and beholds in him his own divine
prototype. And so Siva comes to be figured in this nobler aspect as
the divine Muni, the supreme saint and sage.
[Footnote 18: For the original mortality of the gods see TS. VII. iv.
2, 1, SB. X. iv. 33 f., XI. i. 2, 12, ii. 3, 6; for their primitive
non-differentiation, TS. VI. vi. 8, 2, SB. IV. v. 4, 1-4.]
[Footnote 19: Cf. e.g. KB. III. 4 & 6, VI. 2-9, and Ap. SS. VI. xiv.
11-13.]
While the worship of Siva is slowly making its way into the heart of
Brahmanic ritualism, another movement is at work which is gradually
drawing many of the keenest intellects among the Brahmans away from
the study of ritual towards an idealistic philosophy which views all
ritual with indifference. Its literature is the Upanishads.
The passing of the Rigvedic age has left to the Brahmans a doctrinal
legacy, which may be thus restated: a single divine principle through
a prototypic sacrifice has given birth to the universe, and all the
processes of cosmic nature are controlled by sacrifices founded upon
that primeval sacrifice. In short, the ritual symbolises and in a
sense actually _is_ the whole cosmic process. The ritual implies both
the knowledge of the law of sacrifice and the proper practice of that
law, _both understanding and works_. This is the standpoint of the
orthodox ritualist. But there has also arisen a new school among the
Brahmans, that of the Aupanishadas, which has laid down for its first
doctrine that _works are for the sake of understanding_, that the
practice of ritual is of value only as a help to the mystic knowledge
of the All. But here they have not halted; they have gone a further
step, and declared that _knowledge once attained, works become
needless_. Some even venture to hint that perhaps the highest
knowledge is not to be reached through works at all. And the knowledge
that the Aupanishadas seek is of Brahma, and _is_ Brahma.
The word _brahma_ is a neuter noun, and in the Rig-veda it means
something that can only be fully translated by a long circumlocution.
It may be rendered as "the power of ritual devotion"; that is to say,
it denotes the mystic or magic force which is put forth by the
poet-priest of the Rig-veda when he performs the rites of sacrifice
with appropriate chanting of hymns--in short, ritual magic. This
mystic force the Rigvedic poets have represented in personal form as
the god Brihaspati, in much the same way as they embodied the spirit
of the sacrifice in Vishnu. Their successors, the orthodox ritualists
of the Brahmanas, have not made much use of this term; but sometimes
they speak of Brahma as an abstract first principle, the highest and
ultimate source of all being, even of Prajapati (Samav. B. I. 1, Gop.
B. I. i. 4); and when they speak of Brahma they think of him not as a
power connected with religious ceremony but as a supremely
transcendent and absolutely unqualified and impersonal First
Existence. But the school of the Aupanishadas has gone further.
Seeking through works mystic knowledge as the highest reality, they
see in Brahma the perfect knowledge. To them the absolute First
Existence is also transcendently full and unqualified Thought. As
knowledge is power, the perfect Power is perfect Knowledge.
Brahma then is absolute knowledge; and all that exists is really
Brahma, one and indivisible in essence, but presenting itself
illusively to the finite consciousness as a world of plurality, of
most manifold subjects and objects of thought. The highest wisdom, the
greatest of all secrets, is to know this truth, to realise with full
consciousness that there exists only the One, Brahma, the infinite
Idea; and the sage of the Upanishads is he who has attained this
knowledge, understanding that he himself, as individual subject of
thought, is really identical with the universal Brahma. He has
realised that he is one with the Infinite Thought, he has raised
himself to the mystic heights of transcendental Being and Knowledge,
immeasurably far above nature and the gods. He knows all things at
their fountain-head, and life can nevermore bring harm to him; in his
knowledge he has salvation, and death will lead him to complete union
with Brahma.
The Aupanishadas have thus advanced from the pantheism of the orthodox
ritualists to a transcendental idealism. The process has been gradual.
It was only by degrees that they reached the idea of salvation in
knowledge, the knowledge that is union with Brahma; and it was
likewise only through slow stages that they were able to conceive of
Brahma in itself. Many passages in the Upanishads are full of
struggles to represent Brahma by symbols or forms perceptible to the
sense, such as ether, breath, the sun, etc. Priests endeavoured to
advance through ritual works to the ideas which these works are
supposed to symbolise: the ritual is the training-ground for the
higher knowledge, the leading-strings for infant philosophy. Gradually
men become capable of thinking without the help of these symbols:
philosophy grows to manhood, and looks with a certain contempt upon
those supports of its infancy.
The nature of Brahma as conceived in the Upanishads is a subject on
which endless controversies have raged, and we need not add to them.
Besides, the Upanishads themselves are not strictly consistent on this
point, or on others, for that matter; for they are not a single
homogeneous system of philosophy, but a number of speculations, from
often varying standpoints, and they are frequently inconsistent. But
there are some ideas which are more or less present in all of them.
They regard Brahma as absolute and infinite Thought and Being at once,
and as such it is one with the consciousness, soul or self, of the
individual when the latter rids himself of the illusion of a manifold
universe and realises his unity with Brahma. Moreover, Brahma is
bliss--the joy of wholly perfect and self-satisfied thought and being.
Since Brahma as universal Soul is really identical with each
individual soul or _atma_, and vice versa, it follows that each
individual soul contains within itself, _qua_ Brahma, the whole of
existence, nature, gods, mankind, and all other beings; it creates
them all, and all depend upon it. Our Aupanishadas are thoroughgoing
idealists.
Another new idea also appears for the first time in the early
Upanishads, and one that henceforth will wield enormous influence in
all Indian thought. This is the theory of _karma_ and _samsara_,
rebirth of the soul in accordance with the nature of its previous
works. Before the Upanishads we find no evidence of this doctrine: the
nearest approach to it is in some passages of the Brahmanas which
speak of sinful men dying again in the next world as a punishment for
their guilt. But in the Upanishads the doctrine appears full-fledged,
and it is fraught with consequences of immense importance. Samsara
means literally a "wandering to and fro," that is, the cycle of births
through which each soul must everlastingly pass from infinite time,
and Karma means the "acts" of each soul. Each work or act performed by
a living being is of a certain degree of righteousness or
unrighteousness, and it is requited by a future experience of
corresponding pleasure or pain. So every birth and ultimately every
experience of a soul is determined by the righteousness of its
previous acts; and there is no release for the soul from this endless
chain of causes and effects unless it can find some supernatural way
of deliverance. The Aupanishadas point to what they believe to be the
only way: it is the Brahma-knowledge of the enlightened sage, which
releases his soul from the chain of natural causation and raises him
to everlasting union with Brahma.
The teaching of the Upanishads has had two very different practical
results. On the one hand, it has moved many earnest thinkers to cast
off the ties of the world and to wander about as homeless beggars,
living on alms and meditating and discoursing upon the teachings of
the Upanishads, while they await the coming of death to release their
souls from the prison of the flesh and bring it to complete and
eternal union with Brahma. These wandering ascetics--_sannyasis_,
_bhikshus_, or _parivrajakas_ they are called--form a class by
themselves, which is destined to have an immense influence in
moulding the future thought of India. The teaching of Brahmanism is
beginning to recognise them, too. It has already divided the life of
the orthodox man into three stages, or _asramas_, studentship, the
condition of the married householder, and thirdly the life of the
hermit, or _vanaprastha_, to which the householder should retire after
he has left a son to maintain his household; and now it is beginning
to add to these as fourth stage the life of the homeless ascetic
awaiting death and release. But this arrangement is for the most part
a fiction, devised in order to keep the beggar-philosophers within the
scheme of Brahmanic life; in reality they themselves recognise no such
law.
The other current among the Aupanishadas is flowing in a very
different direction. We have seen how the worship of Rudra-Siva has
grown since the old Rigvedic days, and how some souls have been able
to see amidst the terrors of the god a power of love and wisdom that
satisfies their deepest hopes and longings, as none of the orthodox
rituals can do. A new feeling, the spirit of religious devotion,
_bhakti_ as it is called, is arising among them. To them--and they
number many Brahmans as well as men of other orders--Siva has thus
become the highest object of worship, Isvara or "the Lord"; and having
thus enthroned him as supreme in their hearts, they are endeavouring
to find for him a corresponding place in their intellects. To this end
they claim that Siva as Isvara is the highest of all forms of
existence; and this doctrine is growing and finding much favour. Among
the Aupanishadas there are many who reconcile it with the teaching of
the Upanishads by identifying Siva with Brahma. Thus a new light
begins to flicker here and there in the Upanishads as the conception
of Siva, a personal god wielding free grace, colours the pale
whiteness of the impersonal Brahma; and at last in the Svetasvatara,
which though rather late in date is not the least important of the
Upanishads, this theistic movement boldly proclaims itself: the
supreme Brahma, identified with Siva, is definitely contrasted with
the individual soul as divine to human, giver of grace to receiver of
grace. Later Upanishads will take up this strain, in honour of Siva
and other gods, and finally they will end as mere tracts of this or
that theistic church.
Yet another current is now beginning to stir men's minds, and it is
one that is also destined to a great future. It starts from Krishna.
The teaching of the Upanishads, that all being is the One Brahma and
that Brahma is the same as the individual soul, has busied many men,
not only Brahmans but also Kshatriyas, noblemen of the warrior order.
Some even say that it arose among the Kshatriyas; and at any rate it
is likely that they, being less obsessed with the forms of ritual than
the Brahmans and therefore able to think more directly and clearly,
have helped the Brahmans in their discussions to clear their minds of
ritual symbolism, and to realise more definitely the philosophic ideas
which hitherto they had seen only dimly typified in their ceremonies.
Krishna was one of these Kshatriyas. He belonged to the Satvata or
Vrishni tribe, living in or near the ancient city of Mathura.
Sometimes in early writings he is styled Krishna Devakiputra, Krishna
Devaki's son, because his mother's name was Devaki; sometimes again he
is called Krishna Vasudeva, or simply Vasudeva, which is a patronymic
said to be derived from the name of his father Vasudeva. In later
times we shall find a whole cycle of legend gathering round him, in
which doubtless there is a kernel of fact. Omitting the miraculous
elements in these tales, we may say that the outline of the
Krishna-legend is as follows: Krishna's father Vasudeva and his mother
Devaki were grievously wronged by Devaki's cousin Kamsa, who usurped
the royal power in Mathura and endeavoured to slay Krishna in his
infancy; but the child escaped, and on growing to manhood killed
Kamsa. But Kamsa had made alliance with Jarasandha king of Magadha,
who now threatened Krishna; so Krishna prudently retired from Mathura
and led a colony of his tribesmen to Dvaraka, on the western coast in
Kathiawar, where he founded a new State. There seems to be no valid
reason for doubting these statements. Sober history does not reject a
tale because it is embroidered with myth and fiction.
Now this man Krishna in the midst of his stirring life of war and
government found time and taste also for the things that are of the
spirit. He talked with men learned in the Upanishads about Brahma and
the soul and the worship of God; and apparently he set up a little
Established Church of his own, in which was combined something of the
idealism of the Upanishads with the worship of a supreme God of grace
and perhaps too a kind of religious discipline, about which we shall
say more later on. It must be confessed that we know sadly little
about his actual doctrine from first hand. All that we hear about it
is a short chapter in the Chhandogya Upanishad (iii. 17), where the
Brahman Ghora Angirasa gives a sermon to Krishna, in which he compares
the phases of human life to stages in the _diksha_ or ceremony of
consecration, and the moral virtues that should accompany them to the
_dakshina_ or honorarium paid to the officiating priests, and he
concludes by exhorting his hearer to realise that the Brahma is
imperishable, unfailing, and spiritual, and quoting two verses from
the Rig-veda speaking of the Sun as typifying the supreme bliss to
which the enlightened soul arises. This does not tell us very much,
and moreover we should remember that here our author, being an
Aupanishada, is more interested in what Ghora preached to Krishna than
in what Krishna accepted from Ghora's teaching. But we shall find
centuries later in the Bhagavad-gita, the greatest textbook of the
religion of Krishna, some distant echoes of this paragraph of the
Chhandogya.
The beginnings of the religion of Krishna are thus very uncertain. But
as we travel down the ages we find it growing and spreading. We see
Krishna himself regarded as a half-divine hero and teacher, and
worshipped under the name of _Bhagavan_, "the Lord," in association
with other half-divine heroes. We see him becoming identified with old
gods, and finally rising to the rank of the Supreme Deity whose
worship he had himself taught in his lifetime, the Brahma of the
philosophers and the Most High God of the theists. As has happened
many a time, the teacher has become the God of his Church.