BOOK III

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HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH

BY SIR CHARLES ELIOT

In three volumes VOLUME I

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London,

E.C.4.

_First published_ 1921 _Reprinted_ 1954 _Reprinted_ 1957 _Reprinted_

1962

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

LUND HUMPHRIES LONDON • BRADFORD

PREFACE

The present work was begun in 1907 and was practically complete when the

war broke out, but many circumstances such as the difficulty of

returning home, unavoidable delays in printing and correcting proofs,

and political duties have deferred its publication until now. In the

interval many important books dealing with Hinduism and Buddhism have

appeared, but having been resident in the Far East (with one brief

exception) since 1912 I have found it exceedingly difficult to keep in

touch with recent literature. Much of it has reached me only in the last

few months and I have often been compelled to notice new facts and views

in footnotes only, though I should have wished to modify the text.

Besides living for some time in the Far East, I have paid many visits to

India, some of which were of considerable length, and have travelled in

all the countries of which I treat except Tibet. I have however seen

something of Lamaism near Darjeeling, in northern China and in Mongolia.

But though I have in several places described the beliefs and practices

prevalent at the present day, my object is to trace the history and

development of religion in India and elsewhere with occasional remarks

on its latest phases. I have not attempted to give a general account of

contemporary religious thought in India or China and still less to

forecast the possible result of present tendencies.

In the following pages I have occasion to transcribe words belonging to

many oriental languages in Latin characters. Unfortunately a uniform

system of transcription, applicable to all tongues, seems not to be

practical at present. It was attempted in the _Sacred Books of the

East_, but that system has fallen into disuse and is liable to be

misunderstood. It therefore seems best to use for each language the

method of transcription adopted by standard works in English dealing

with each, for French and German transcriptions, whatever their merits

may be as representations of the original sounds, are often misleading

to English readers, especially in Chinese. For Chinese I have adopted

Wade's system as used in Giles's _Dictionary_, for Tibetan the system of

Sarat Chandra Das, for Pali that of the Pali Text Society and for

Sanskrit that of Monier-Williams's _Sanskrit Dictionary,_ except that I

write ś instead of s. Indian languages however offer many difficulties:

it is often hard to decide whether Sanskrit or vernacular forms are more

suitable and in dealing with Buddhist subjects whether Sanskrit or Pali

words should be used. I have found it convenient to vary the form of

proper names according as my remarks are based on Sanskrit or on Pali

literature, but this obliges me to write the same word differently in

different places, e.g. sometimes Ajâtaśatru and sometimes Ajâtasattu,

just as in a book dealing with Greek and Latin mythology one might

employ both Herakles and Hercules. Also many Indian names such as

Ramayana, Krishna, nirvana have become Europeanized or at least are

familiar to all Europeans interested in Indian literature. It seems

pedantic to write them with their full and accurate complement of

accents and dots and my general practice is to give such words in their

accurate spelling (Râmâyana, etc.) when they are first mentioned and

also in the notes but usually to print them in their simpler and

unaccented forms. I fear however that my practice in this matter is not

entirely consistent since different parts of the book were written at

different times.

My best thanks are due to Mr R.F. Johnston (author of _Chinese

Buddhism_), to Professor W.J. Hinton of the University of Hong Kong and

to Mr H.I. Harding of H.M. Legation at Peking for reading the proofs and

correcting many errors: to Sir E. Denison Ross and Professor L. Finot

for valuable information: and especially to Professor and Mrs Rhys

Davids for much advice, though they are in no way responsible for the

views which I have expressed and perhaps do not agree with them. It is

superfluous for me to pay a tribute to these eminent scholars whose

works are well known to all who are interested in Indian religion, but

no one who has studied the early history of Buddhism or the Pali

language can refrain from acknowledging a debt of gratitude to those who

have made such researches possible by founding and maintaining during

nearly forty years the Pali Text Society and rendering many of the texts

still more accessible to Europe by their explanations and translations.

C. ELIOT.

TOKYO,

_May_, 1921.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

The following are the principal abbreviations used:

Ep. Ind. Epigraphia India.

E.R.E. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (edited by Hastings).

I.A. Indian Antiquary.

J.A. Journal Asiatique.

J.A.O.S. Journal of the American Oriental Society.

J.R.A.S. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

P.T.S. Pali Text Society.

S.B.E. Sacred Books of the East (Clarendon Press).

CONTENTS

BOOK I

INTRODUCTION

1. INFLUENCE OF INDIAN THOUGHT IN EASTERN ASIA xi

2. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF HINDUISM xiv

3. THE BUDDHA xix

4. ASOKA xxii

5. EXTENSION OF BUDDHISM AND HINDUISM BEYOND INDIA xxiv

6. NEW FORMS OF BUDDHISM xxix

7. REVIVAL OF HINDUISM xxxiii

8. LATER FORMS OF HINDUISM xl

9. EUROPEAN INFLUENCE AND MODERN HINDUISM xlvi

10. CHANGE AND PERMANENCE IN BUDDHISM xlviii

11. REBIRTH AND THE NATURE OF THE SOUL l

12. " " " " lviii

13. " " " " lxii

14. EASTERN PESSIMISM AND RENUNCIATION lxv

15. EASTERN POLYTHEISM lxviii

16. THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF HINDUISM lxx

17. THE HINDU AND BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES lxxii

18. MORALITY AND WILL lxxvi

19. THE ORIGIN OF EVIL lxxix

20. CHURCH AND STATE lxxxi

21. PUBLIC WORSHIP AND CEREMONIAL lxxxiv

22. THE WORSHIP OF THE REPRODUCTIVE FORCES lxxxvi

23. HINDUISM IN PRACTICE lxxxviii

24. BUDDHISM IN PRACTICE xcii

25. INTEREST OF INDIAN THOUGHT FOR EUROPE xcv

BOOK II

EARLY INDIAN RELIGION: A GENERAL VIEW

I. RELIGIONS OF INDIA AND EASTERN ASIA 5

II. HISTORICAL 15

III. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INDIAN RELIGION 33

IV. VEDIC DEITIES AND SACRIFICES 50

V. ASCETICISM AND KNOWLEDGE 71

VI. RELIGIOUS LIFE IN PRE-BUDDHIST INDIA 87

VII. THE JAINS 105

BOOK III

PALI BUDDHISM

VIII. LIFE OF THE BUDDHA 129

IX. THE BUDDHA COMPARED WITH OTHER RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 177

X. THE TEACHING OF THE BUDDHA 185

XI. MONKS AND LAYMEN 237

XII. ASOKA 254

XIII. THE CANON 275

XIV. MEDITATION 302

XV. MYTHOLOGY IN HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM

INTRODUCTION

1. _Influence of Indian Thought in Eastern Asia_

Probably the first thought which will occur to the reader who is

acquainted with the matters treated in this work will be that the

subject is too large. A history of Hinduism or Buddhism or even of both

within the frontiers of India may be a profitable though arduous task,

but to attempt a historical sketch of the two faiths in their whole

duration and extension over Eastern Asia is to choose a scene unsuited

to any canvas which can be prepared at the present day. Not only is the

breadth of the landscape enormous but in some places it is crowded with

details which cannot be omitted while in others the principal features

are hidden by a mist which obscures the unity and connection of the

whole composition. No one can feel these difficulties more than I do

myself or approach his work with more diffidence, yet I venture to think

that wide surveys may sometimes be useful and are needed in the present

state of oriental studies. For the reality of Indian influence in

Asia—from Japan to the frontiers of Persia, from Manchuria to Java, from

Burma to Mongolia—is undoubted and the influence is one. You cannot

separate Hinduism from Buddhism, for without it Hinduism could not have

assumed its medieval shape and some forms of Buddhism, such as Lamaism,

countenance Brahmanic deities and ceremonies, while in Java and Camboja

the two religions were avowedly combined and declared to be the same.

Neither is it convenient to separate the fortunes of Buddhism and

Hinduism outside India from their history within it, for although the

importance of Buddhism depends largely on its foreign conquests, the

forms which it assumed in its new territories can be understood only by

reference to the religious condition of India at the periods when

successive missions were despatched.

This book then is an attempt to give a sketch of Indian thought or

Indian religion—for the two terms are nearly equivalent in extent—and of

its history and influence in Asia. I will not say in the world, for that

sounds too ambitious and really adds little to the more restricted

phrase. For ideas, like empires and races, have their natural frontiers.

Thus Europe may be said to be non-Mohammedan. Although the essential

principles of Mohammedanism seem in harmony with European monotheism,

yet it has been deliberately rejected by the continent and often

repelled by force. Similarly in the regions west of India[1], Indian

religion is sporadic and exotic. I do not think that it had much

influence on ancient Egypt, Babylon and Palestine or that it should be

counted among the forces which shaped the character and teaching of

Christ, though Christian monasticism and mysticism perhaps owed

something to it. The debt of Manichaeism and various Gnostic sects is

more certain and more considerable, but these communities have not

endured and were regarded as heretical while they lasted. Among the

Neoplatonists of Alexandria and the Sufis of Arabia and Persia many seem

to have listened to the voice of Hindu mysticism but rather as

individuals than as leaders of popular movements.

But in Eastern Asia the influence of India has been notable in extent,

strength and duration. Scant justice is done to her position in the

world by those histories which recount the exploits of her invaders and

leave the impression that her own people were a feeble, dreamy folk,

sundered from the rest of mankind by their sea and mountain frontiers.

Such a picture takes no account of the intellectual conquests of the

Hindus. Even their political conquests were not contemptible and were

remarkable for the distance if not for the extent of the territory

occupied. For there were Hindu kingdoms in Java and Camboja and

settlements in Sumatra[2] and even in Borneo, an island about as far

from India as is Persia from Rome. But such military or commercial

invasions are insignificant compared with the spread of Indian thought.

The south-eastern region of Asia—both mainland and archipelago—owed its

civilization almost entirely to India. In Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Camboja,

Champa and Java, religion, art, the alphabet, literature, as well as

whatever science and political organization existed, were the direct

gift of Hindus, whether Brahmans or Buddhists, and much the same may be

said of Tibet, whence the wilder Mongols took as much Indian

civilization as they could stomach. In Java and other Malay countries

this Indian culture has been superseded by Islam, yet even in Java the

alphabet and to a large extent the customs of the people are still

Indian.

In the countries mentioned Indian influence has been dominant until the

present day, or at least until the advent of Islam. In another large

area comprising China, Japan, Korea, and Annam it appears as a layer

superimposed on Chinese culture, yet not a mere veneer. In these regions

Chinese ethics, literature and art form the major part of intellectual

life and have an outward and visible sign in the Chinese written

characters which have not been ousted by an Indian alphabet[3]. But in

all, especially in Japan, the influence of Buddhism has been profound

and penetrating. None of these lands can be justly described as Buddhist

in the same sense as Burma or Siam but Buddhism gave them a creed

acceptable in different forms to superstitious, emotional and

metaphysical minds: it provided subjects and models for art, especially

for painting, and entered into popular life, thought and language.

But what are Hinduism and Buddhism? What do they teach about gods and

men and the destinies of the soul? What ideals do they hold up and is

their teaching of value or at least of interest for Europe? I will not

at once answer these questions by general statements, because such names

as Hinduism and Buddhism have different meanings in different countries

and ages, but will rather begin by briefly reviewing the development of

the two religions. I hope that the reader will forgive me if in doing so

I repeat much that is to be found in the body of this work.

One general observation about India may be made at the outset. Here more

than in any other country the national mind finds its favourite

occupation and full expression in religion. This quality is geographical

rather than racial, for it is possessed by Dravidians as much as by

Aryans. From the Raja to the peasant most Hindus have an interest in

theology and often a passion for it. Few works of art or literature are

purely secular: the intellectual and aesthetic efforts of India, long,

continuous and distinguished as they are, are monotonous inasmuch as

they are almost all the expression of some religious phase. But the

religion itself is extraordinarily full and varied. The love of

discussion and speculation creates considerable variety in practice and

almost unlimited variety in creed and theory. There are few dogmas known

to the theologies of the world which are not held by some of India's

multitudinous sects[4] and it is perhaps impossible to make a single

general statement about Hinduism, to which some sects would not prove an

exception. Any such statements in this book must be understood as

referring merely to the great majority of Hindus.

As a form of life and thought Hinduism is definite and unmistakeable. In

whatever shape it presents itself it can be recognized at once. But it

is so vast and multitudinous that only an encyclopedia could describe it

and no formula can summarize it. Essayists flounder among conflicting

propositions such as that sectarianism is the essence of Hinduism or

that no educated Hindu belongs to a sect. Either can easily be proved,

for it may be said of Hinduism, as it has been said of zoology, that you

can prove anything if you merely collect facts which support your theory

and not those which conflict with it. Hence many distinguished writers

err by overestimating the phase which specially interests them. For one

the religious life of India is fundamentally monotheistic and Vishnuite:

for another philosophic Sivaism is its crown and quintessence: a third

maintains with equal truth that all forms of Hinduism are tantric. All

these views are tenable because though Hindu life may be cut up into

castes and sects, Hindu creeds are not mutually exclusive and repellent.

They attract and colour one another.

2. _Origin and Growth of Hinduism_

The earliest product of Indian literature, the Rig Veda, contains the

songs of the Aryan invaders who were beginning to make a home in India.

Though no longer nomads, they had little local sentiment. No cities had

arisen comparable with Babylon or Thebes and we hear little of ancient

kingdoms or dynasties. Many of the gods who occupied so much of their

thoughts were personifications of natural forces such as the sun, wind

and fire, worshipped without temples or images and hence more indefinite

in form, habitation and attributes than the deities of Assyria or Egypt.

The idea of a struggle between good and evil was not prominent. In

Persia, where the original pantheon was almost the same as that of the

Veda, this idea produced monotheism: the minor deities became angels and

the chief deity a Lord of hosts who wages a successful struggle against

an independent but still inferior spirit of evil. But in India the

Spirits of Good and Evil are not thus personified. The world is regarded

less as a battlefield of principles than as a theatre for the display of

natural forces. No one god assumes lordship over the others but all are

seen to be interchangeable—mere names and aspects of something which is

greater than any god.

Indian religion is commonly regarded as the offspring of an Aryan

religion, brought into India by invaders from the north and modified by

contact with Dravidian civilization. The materials at our disposal

hardly permit us to take any other point of view, for the literature of

the Vedic Aryans is relatively ancient and full and we have no

information about the old Dravidians comparable with it. But were our

knowledge less one-sided, we might see that it would be more correct to

describe Indian religion as Dravidian religion stimulated and modified

by the ideas of Aryan invaders. For the greatest deities of Hinduism,

Siva, Krishna, Râma, Durgâ and some of its most essential doctrines such

as metempsychosis and divine incarnations, are either totally unknown to

the Veda or obscurely adumbrated in it. The chief characteristics of

mature Indian religion are characteristics of an area, not of a race,

and they are not the characteristics of religion in Persia, Greece or

other Aryan lands[5].

Some writers explain Indian religion as the worship of nature spirits,

others as the veneration of the dead. But it is a mistake to see in the

religion of any large area only one origin or impulse. The principles

which in a learned form are championed to-day by various professors

represent thoughts which were creative in early times. In ancient India

there were some whose minds turned to their ancestors and dead friends

while others saw divinity in the wonders of storm, spring and harvest.

Krishna is in the main a product of hero worship, but Śiva has no such

historical basis. He personifies the powers of birth and death, of

change, decay and rebirth—in fact all that we include in the prosaic

word nature. Assuredly both these lines of thought—the worship of nature

and of the dead—and perhaps many others existed in ancient India.

By the time of the Upanishads, that is about 600 B.C., we trace three

clear currents in Indian religion which have persisted until the present

day. The first is ritual. This became extraordinarily complicated but

retained its primitive and magical character. The object of an ancient

Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce

them by certain acts and formulae[6]. Secondly all Hindus lay stress on

asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying the soul and

obtaining supernatural powers. They have a conviction that every man who

is in earnest about religion and even every student of philosophy must

follow a discipline at least to the extent of observing chastity and

eating only to support life. Severer austerities give clearer insight

into divine mysteries and control over the forces of nature. Europeans

are apt to condemn eastern asceticism as a waste of life but it has had

an important moral effect. The weakness of Hinduism, though not of

Buddhism, is that ethics have so small a place in its fundamental

conceptions. Its deities are not identified with the moral law and the

saint is above that law. But this dangerous doctrine is corrected by the

dogma, which is also a popular conviction, that a saint must be a

passionless ascetic. In India no religious teacher can expect a hearing

unless he begins by renouncing the world.

Thirdly, the deepest conviction of Hindus in all ages is that salvation

and happiness are attainable by knowledge. The corresponding phrases in

Sanskrit are perhaps less purely intellectual than our word and contain

some idea of effort and emotion. He who knows God attains to God, nay he

is God. Rites and self-denial are but necessary preliminaries to such

knowledge: he who possesses it stands above them. It is inconceivable to

the Hindus that he should care for the things of the world but he cares

equally little for creeds and ceremonies. Hence, side by side with

irksome codes, complicated ritual and elaborate theology, we find the

conviction that all these things are but vanity and weariness, fetters

to be shaken off by the free in spirit. Nor do those who hold such views

correspond to the anti-clerical and radical parties of Europe. The

ascetic sitting in the temple court often holds that the rites performed

around him are spiritually useless and the gods of the shrine mere

fanciful presentments of that which cannot be depicted or described.

Rather later, but still before the Christian era, another idea makes

itself prominent in Indian religion, namely faith or devotion to a

particular deity. This idea, which needs no explanation, is pushed on

the one hand to every extreme of theory and practice: on the other it

rarely abolishes altogether the belief in ritualism, asceticism and

knowledge.

Any attempt to describe Hinduism as one whole leads to startling

contrasts. The same religion enjoins self-mortification and orgies:

commands human sacrifices and yet counts it a sin to eat meat or crush

an insect: has more priests, rites and images than ancient Egypt or

medieval Rome and yet out does Quakers in rejecting all externals. These

singular features are connected with the ascendancy of the Brahman

caste. The Brahmans are an interesting social phenomenon without exact

parallel elsewhere. They are not, like the Catholic or Moslem clergy, a

priesthood pledged to support certain doctrines but an intellectual,

hereditary aristocracy who claim to direct the thought of India whatever

forms it may take. All who admit this claim and accord a nominal

recognition to the authority of the Veda are within the spacious fold or

menagerie. Neither the devil-worshipping aboriginee nor the atheistic

philosopher is excommunicated, though neither may be relished by average

orthodoxy.

Though Hinduism has no one creed, yet there are at least two doctrines

held by nearly all who call themselves Hindus. One may be described as

polytheistic pantheism. Most Hindus are apparently polytheists, that is

to say they venerate the images of several deities or spirits, yet most

are monotheists in the sense that they address their worship to one god.

But this monotheism has almost always a pantheistic tinge. The Hindu

does not say the gods of the heathen are but idols, but it is the Lord

who made the heavens: he says, My Lord (Râma, Krishna or whoever it may

be) is all the other gods. Some schools would prefer to say that no

human language applied to the Godhead can be correct and that all ideas

of a personal ruler of the world are at best but relative truths. This

ultimate ineffable Godhead is called Brahman[7].

The second doctrine is commonly known as metempsychosis, the

transmigration of souls or reincarnation, the last name being the most

correct. In detail the doctrine assumes various forms since different

views are held about the relation of soul to body. But the essence of

all is the same, namely that a life does not begin at birth or end at

death but is a link in an infinite series of lives, each of which is

conditioned and determined by the acts done in previous existences

(karma). Animal, human and divine (or at least angelic) existences may

all be links in the chain. A man's deeds, if good, may exalt him to the

heavens, if evil may degrade him to life as a beast. Since all lives,

even in heaven, must come to an end, happiness is not to be sought in

heaven or on earth. The common aspiration of the religious Indian is for

deliverance, that is release from the round of births and repose in some

changeless state called by such names as union with Brahman, nirvana and

many others.

3. _The Buddha_

As observed above, the Brahmans claim to direct the religious life and

thought of India and apart from Mohammedanism may be said to have

achieved their ambition, though at the price of tolerating much that the

majority would wish to suppress. But in earlier ages their influence was

less extensive and there were other currents of religious activity, some

hostile and some simply independent. The most formidable of these found

expression in Jainism and Buddhism both of which arose in Bihar in the

sixth century[8] B.C. This century was a time of intellectual ferment in

many countries. In China it produced Lao-tz[u] and Confucius: in Greece,

Parmenides, Empedocles, and the sophists were only a little later. In

all these regions we have the same phenomenon of restless, wandering

teachers, ready to give advice on politics, religion or philosophy, to

any one who would hear them.

At that time the influence of the Brahmans had hardly permeated Bihar,

though predominant to the west of it, and speculation there followed

lines different from those laid down in the Upanishads, but of some

antiquity, for we know that there were Buddhas before Gotama and that

Mahâvîra, the founder of Jainism, reformed the doctrine of an older

teacher called Parśva.

In Gotama's youth Bihar was full of wandering philosophers who appear to

have been atheistic and disposed to uphold the boldest paradoxes,

intellectual and moral. There must however have been constructive

elements in their doctrine, for they believed in reincarnation and the

periodic appearance of superhuman teachers and in the advantage of

following an ascetic discipline. They probably belonged chiefly to the

warrior caste as did Gotama, the Buddha known to history. The Pitakas

represent him as differing in details from contemporary teachers but as

rediscovering the truth taught by his predecessors. They imply that the

world is so constituted that there is only one way to emancipation and

that from time to time superior minds see this and announce it to

others. Still Buddhism does not in practice use such formulae as living

in harmony with the laws of nature.

Indian literature is notoriously concerned with ideas rather than facts

but the vigorous personality of the Buddha has impressed on it a

portrait more distinct than that left by any other teacher or king. His

work had a double effect. Firstly it influenced all departments of Hindu

religion and thought, even those nominally opposed to it. Secondly it

spread not only Buddhism in the strict sense but Indian art and

literature beyond the confines of India. The expansion of Hindu culture

owes much to the doctrine that the Good Law should be preached to all

nations.

The teaching of Gotama was essentially practical. This statement may

seem paradoxical to the reader who has some acquaintance with the

Buddhist scriptures and he will exclaim that of all religious books they

are the least practical and least popular: they set up an anti-social

ideal and are mainly occupied with psychological theories. But the

Buddha addressed a public such as we now find it hard even to imagine.

In those days the intellectual classes of India felt the ordinary

activities of life to be unsatisfying: they thought it natural to

renounce the world and mortify the flesh: divergent systems of ritual,

theology and self-denial promised happiness but all agreed in thinking

it normal as well as laudable that a man should devote his life to

meditation and study. Compared with this frame of mind the teaching of

the Buddha is not unsocial, unpractical and mysterious but human,

business-like and clear. We are inclined to see in the monastic life

which he recommended little but a useless sacrifice but it is evident

that in the opinion of his contemporaries his disciples had an easy

time, and that he had no intention of prescribing any cramped or

unnatural existence. He accepted the current conviction that those who

devote themselves to the things of the mind and spirit should be

released from worldly ties and abstain from luxury but he meant his

monks to live a life of sustained intellectual activity for themselves

and of benevolence for others. His teaching is formulated in severe and

technical phraseology, yet the substance of it is so simple that many

have criticized it as too obvious and jejune to be the basis of a

religion. But when he first enunciated his theses some two thousand five

hundred years ago, they were not obvious but revolutionary and little

less than paradoxical.

The principal of these propositions are as follows. The existence of

everything depends on a cause: hence if the cause of evil or suffering

can be detected and removed, evil itself will be removed. That cause is

lust and craving for pleasure[9]. Hence all sacrificial and sacramental

religions are irrelevant, for the cure which they propose has nothing to

do with the disease. The cause of evil or suffering is removed by

purifying the heart and by following the moral law which sets high value

on sympathy and social duties, but an equally high value on the

cultivation of individual character. But training and cultivation imply

the possibility of change. Hence it is a fatal mistake in the religious

life to hold a view common in India which regards the essence of man as

something unchangeable and happy in itself, if it can only be isolated

from physical trammels. On the contrary the happy mind is something to

be built up by good thoughts, good words and good deeds. In its origin

the Buddha's celebrated doctrine that there is no permanent self in

persons or things is not a speculative proposition, nor a sentimental

lament over the transitoriness of the world, but a basis for religion

and morals. You will never be happy unless you realize that you can make

and remake your own soul.

These simple principles and the absence of all dogmas as to God or

Brahman distinguish the teaching of Gotama from most Indian systems, but

he accepted the usual Indian beliefs about Karma and rebirth and with

them the usual conclusion that release from the series of rebirths is

the _summum bonum_. This deliverance he called saintship (_arahattam_)

or nirvana of which I shall say something below. In early Buddhism it is

primarily a state of happiness to be attained in this life and the

Buddha persistently refused to explain what is the nature of a saint

after death. The question is unprofitable and perhaps he would have

said, had he spoken our language, unmeaning. Later generations did not

hesitate to discuss the problem but the Buddha's own teaching is simply

that a man can attain before death to a blessed state in which he has

nothing to fear from either death or rebirth.

The Buddha attacked both the ritual and the philosophy of the Brahmans.

After his time the sacrificial system, though it did not die, never

regained its old prestige and he profoundly affected the history of

Indian metaphysics. It may be justly said that most of his philosophic

as distinguished from his practical teaching was common property before

his time, but he transmuted common ideas and gave them a currency and

significance which they did not possess before. But he was less

destructive as a religious and social reformer than many have supposed.

He did not deny the existence nor forbid the worship of the popular

gods, but such worship is not Buddhism and the gods are merely angels

who may be willing to help good Buddhists but are in no wise guides to

religion, since they need instruction themselves. And though he denied

that the Brahmans were superior by birth to others, he did not preach

against caste, partly because it then existed only in a rudimentary

form. But he taught that the road to salvation was one and open to all

who were able to walk in it[10], whether Hindus or foreigners. All may

not have the necessary qualifications of intellect and character to

become monks but all can be good laymen, for whom the religious life

means the observance of morality combined with such simple exercises as

reading the scriptures. It is clear that this lay Buddhism had much to

do with the spread of the faith. The elemental simplicity of its

principles—namely that religion is open to all and identical with

morality—made a clean sweep of Brahmanic theology and sacrifices and put

in its place something like Confucianism. But the innate Indian love for

philosophizing and ritual caused generation after generation to add more

and more supplements to the Master's teaching and it is only outside

India that it has been preserved in any purity.

4. _Asoka_

Gotama spent his life in preaching and by his personal exertions spread

his doctrines over Bihar and Oudh but for two centuries after his death

we know little of the history of Buddhism. In the reign of Asoka

(273-232 B.C.) its fortunes suddenly changed, for this great Emperor

whose dominions comprised nearly all India made it the state religion

and also engraved on rocks and pillars a long series of edicts recording

his opinions and aspirations. Buddhism is often criticized as a gloomy

and unpractical creed, suited at best to stoical and scholarly recluses.

But these are certainly not its characteristics when it first appears in

political history, just as they are not its characteristics in Burma or

Japan to-day. Both by precept and example Asoka was an ardent exponent

of the strenuous life. In his first edict he lays down the principle

"Let small and great exert themselves" and in subsequent inscriptions he

continually harps upon the necessity of energy and exertion. The Law or

Religion (Dhamma) which his edicts enjoin is merely human and civic

virtue, except that it makes respect for animal life an integral part of

morality. In one passage he summarizes it as "Little impiety, many good

deeds, compassion, liberality, truthfulness and purity." He makes no

reference to a supreme deity, but insists on the reality and importance

of the future life. Though he does not use the word _Karma_ this is

clearly the conception which dominates his philosophy: those who do good

are happy in this world and the next but those who fail in their duty

win neither heaven nor the royal favour. The king's creed is remarkable

in India for its great simplicity. He deprecates superstitious

ceremonies and says nothing of Nirvana but dwells on morality as

necessary to happiness in this life and others. This is not the whole of

Gotama's teaching but two centuries after his death a powerful and

enlightened Buddhist gives it as the gist of Buddhism for laymen.

Asoka wished to make Buddhism the creed not only of India but of the

world as known to him and he boasts that he extended his "conquests of

religion" to the Hellenistic kingdoms of the west. If the missions which

he despatched thither reached their destination, there is little

evidence that they bore any fruit, but the conversion of Ceylon and some

districts in the Himalayas seems directly due to his initiative.

5. _Extension of Buddhism and Hinduism beyond India_

This is perhaps a convenient place to review the extension of Buddhism

and Hinduism outside India. To do so at this point implies of course an

anticipation of chronology, but to delay the survey might blind the

reader to the fact that from the time of Asoka onward India was engaged

not only in creating but also in exporting new varieties of religious

thought.

The countries which have received Indian culture fall into two classes:

first those to which it came as a result of religious missions or of

peaceful international intercourse, and second those where it was

established after conquest or at least colonization. In the first class

the religion introduced was Buddhism. If, as in Tibet, it seems to us

mixed with Hinduism, yet it was a mixture which at the date of its

introduction passed in India for Buddhism. But in the second and smaller

class including Java, Camboja and Champa the immigrants brought with

them both Hinduism and Buddhism. The two systems were often declared to

be the same but the result was Hinduism mixed with some Buddhism, not

_vice versâ_.

The countries of the first class comprise Ceylon, Burma and Siam,

Central Asia, Nepal, China with Annam, Korea and Japan, Tibet with

Mongolia. The Buddhism of the first three countries[11] is a real unity

or in European language a church, for though they have no common

hierarchy they use the same sacred language, Pali, and have the same

canon. Burma and Siam have repeatedly recognized Ceylon as a sort of

metropolitan see and on the other hand when religion in Ceylon fell on

evil days the clergy were recruited from Burma and Siam. In the other

countries Buddhism presents greater differences and divisions. It had no

one sacred language and in different regions used either Sanskrit texts

or translations into Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian and the languages of

Central Asia.

1. Ceylon. There is no reason to doubt that Buddhism was introduced

under the auspices of Asoka. Though the invasions and settlements of

Tamils have brought Hinduism into Ceylon, yet none of the later and

mixed forms of Buddhism, in spite of some attempts to gain a footing,

ever flourished there on a large scale. Sinhalese Buddhism had probably

a closer connection with southern India than the legend suggests and

Conjevaram was long a Buddhist centre which kept up intercourse with

both Ceylon and Burma.

2. Burma. The early history of Burmese Buddhism is obscure and its

origin probably complex, since at many different periods it may have

received teachers from both India and China. The present dominant type

(identical with the Buddhism of Ceylon) existed before the sixth

century[12] and tradition ascribes its introduction both to the labours

of Buddhaghosa and to the missionaries of Asoka. There was probably a

connection between Pegu and Conjevaram. In the eleventh century Burmese

Buddhism had become extremely corrupt except in Pegu but King Anawrata

conquered Pegu and spread a purer form throughout his dominions.

3. Siam. The Thai race, who starting from somewhere in the Chinese

province of Yünnan began to settle in what is now called Siam about the

beginning of the twelfth century, probably brought with them some form

of Buddhism. About 1300 the possessions of Râma Komhëng, King of Siam,

included Pegu and Pali Buddhism prevailed among his subjects. Somewhat

later, in 1361, a high ecclesiastic was summoned from Ceylon to arrange

the affairs of the church but not, it would seem, to introduce any new

doctrine. Pegu was the centre from which Pali Buddhism spread to upper

Burma in the eleventh century and it probably performed the same service

for Siam later. The modern Buddhism of Camboja is simply Siamese

Buddhism which filtered into the country from about 1250 onwards. The

older Buddhism of Camboja, for which see below, was quite different.

At the courts of Siam and Camboja, as formerly in Burma, there are

Brahmans who perform state ceremonies and act as astrologers. Though

they have little to do with the religion of the people, their presence

explains the predominance of Indian rather than Chinese influence in

these countries.

4. Tradition says that Indian colonists settled in Khotan during the

reign of Asoka, but no precise date can at present be fixed for the

introduction of Buddhism into the Tarim basin and other regions commonly

called Central Asia. But it must have been flourishing there about the

time of the Christian era, since it spread thence to China not later

than the middle of the first century. There were two schools

representing two distinct currents from India. First the Sarvâstivâdin

school, prevalent in Badakshan, Kashgar and Kucha, secondly the Mahâyâna

in Khotan and Yarkand. The spread of the former was no doubt connected

with the growth of the Kushan Empire but may be anterior to the

conversion of Kanishka, for though he gave a great impetus to the

propagation of the faith, it is probable that, like most royal converts,

he favoured an already popular religion. The Mahâyâna subsequently won

much territory from the other school.

5. As in other countries, so in China Buddhism entered by more than one

road. It came first by land from Central Asia. The official date for its

introduction by this route is 62 A.D. but it was probably known within

the Chinese frontier before that time, though not recognized by the

state. Secondly when Buddhism was established, there arose a desire for

accurate knowledge of the true Indian doctrine. Chinese pilgrims went to

India and Indian teachers came to China. After the fourth century many

of these religious journeys were made by sea and it was thus that

Bodhidharma landed at Canton in 520[13]. A third stream of Buddhism,

namely Lamaism, came into China from Tibet under the Mongol dynasty

(1280). Khubilai considered this the best religion for his Mongols and

numerous Lamaist temples and convents were established and still exist

in northern China. Lamaism has not perhaps been a great religious or

intellectual force there, but its political importance was considerable,

for the Ming and Manchu dynasties who wished to assert their rule over

the Tibetans and Mongols by peaceful methods, consistently strove to win

the goodwill of the Lamaist clergy.

The Buddhism of Korea, Japan and Annam is directly derived from the

earlier forms of Chinese Buddhism but was not affected by the later

influx of Lamaism. Buddhism passed from China into Korea in the fourth

century and thence to Japan in the sixth. In the latter country it was

stimulated by frequent contact with China and the repeated introduction

of new Chinese sects but was not appreciably influenced by direct

intercourse with Hindus or other foreign Buddhists. In the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries Japanese Buddhism showed great vitality,

transforming old sects and creating new ones.

In the south, Chinese Buddhism spread into Annam rather late: according

to native tradition in the tenth century. This region was a battlefield

of two cultures. Chinese influence descending southwards from Canton

proved predominant and, after the triumph of Annam over Champa, extended

to the borders of Camboja. But so long as the kingdom of Champa existed,

Indian culture and Hinduism maintained themselves at least as far north

as Hué.

6. The Buddhism of Tibet is a late and startling transformation of

Gotama's teaching, but the transformation is due rather to the change

and degeneration of that teaching in Bengal than to the admixture of

Tibetan ideas. Such admixture however was not absent and a series of

reformers endeavoured to bring the church back to what they considered

the true standard. The first introduction is said to have occurred in

630 but probably the arrival of Padma Sambhava from India in 747 marks

the real foundation of the Lamaist church. It was reformed by the Hindu

Atîśa in 1038 and again by the Tibetan Tsong-kha-pa about 1400.

The Grand Lama is the head of the church as reorganized by Tsong-kha-pa.

In Tibet the priesthood attained to temporal power comparable with the

Papacy. The disintegration of the government divided the whole land into

small principalities and among these the great monasteries were as

important as any temporal lord. The abbots of the Sakya monastery were

the practical rulers of Tibet for seventy years (1270-1340). Another

period of disintegration followed but after 1630 the Grand Lamas of

Lhasa were able to claim and maintain a similar position.

Mongolian Buddhism is a branch of Lamaism distinguished by no special

doctrines. The Mongols were partially converted in the time of Khubilai

and a second time and more thoroughly in 1570 by the third Grand Lama.

7. Nepal exhibits another phase of degeneration. In Tibet Indian

Buddhism passed into the hands of a vigorous national priesthood and was

not exposed to the assimilative influence of Hinduism. In Nepal it had

not the same defence. It probably existed there since the time of Asoka

and underwent the same phases of decay and corruption as in Bengal. But

whereas the last great monasteries in Bengal were shattered by the

Mohammedan invasion of 1193, the secluded valley of Nepal was protected

against such violence and Buddhism continued to exist there in name. It

has preserved a good deal of Sanskrit Buddhist literature but has become

little more than a sect of Hinduism.

Nepal ought perhaps to be classed in our second division, that is those

countries where Indian culture was introduced not by missionaries but by

the settlement of Indian conquerors or immigrants. To this class belong

the Hindu civilizations of Indo-China and the Archipelago. In all of

these Hinduism and Mahayanist Buddhism are found mixed together,

Hinduism being the stronger element. The earliest Sanskrit inscription

in these regions is that of Vochan in Champa which is apparently

Buddhist. It is not later than the third century and refers to an

earlier king, so that an Indian dynasty probably existed there about

150-200 A.D. Though the presence of Indian culture is beyond dispute, it

is not clear whether the Chams were civilized in Champa by Hindu

invaders or whether they were hinduized Malays who invaded Champa from

elsewhere.

8. In Camboja a Hindu dynasty was founded by invaders and the Brahmans

who accompanied them established a counterpart to it in a powerful

hierarchy, Sanskrit becoming the language of religion. It is clear that

these invaders came ultimately from India but they may have halted in

Java or the Malay Peninsula for an unknown period. The Brahmanic

hierarchy began to fail about the fourteenth century and was supplanted

by Siamese Buddhism. Before that time the state religion of both Champa

and Camboja was the worship of Śiva, especially in the form called

Mukhalinga. Mahayanist Buddhism, tending to identify Buddha with Śiva,

also existed but enjoyed less of the royal patronage.

9. Religious conditions were similar in Java but politically there was

this difference, that there was no one continuous and paramount kingdom.

A considerable number of Hindus must have settled in the island to

produce such an effect on its language and architecture but the rulers

of the states known to us were hinduized Javanese rather than true

Hindus and the language of literature and of most inscriptions was Old

Javanese, not Sanskrit, though most of the works written in it were

translations or adaptations of Sanskrit originals. As in Camboja,

Śivaism and Buddhism both flourished without mutual hostility and there

was less difference in the status of the two creeds.

In all these countries religion seems to have been connected with

politics more closely than in India. The chief shrine was a national

cathedral, the living king was semi-divine and dead kings were

represented by statues bearing the attributes of their favourite gods.

6. _New Forms of Buddhism_

In the three or four centuries following Asoka a surprising change came

over Indian Buddhism, but though the facts are clear it is hard to

connect them with dates and persons. But the change was clearly

posterior to Asoka for though his edicts show a spirit of wide charity

it is not crystallized in the form of certain doctrines which

subsequently became prominent.

The first of these holds up as the moral ideal not personal perfection

or individual salvation but the happiness of all living creatures. The

good man who strives for this should boldly aspire to become a Buddha in

some future birth and such aspirants are called Bodhisattvas. Secondly

Buddhas and some Bodhisattvas come to be considered as supernatural

beings and practically deities. The human life of Gotama, though not

denied, is regarded as the manifestation of a cosmic force which also

reveals itself in countless other Buddhas who are not merely his

predecessors or destined successors but the rulers of paradises in other

worlds. Faith in a Buddha, especially in Amitâbha, can secure rebirth in

his paradise. The great Bodhisattvas, such as Avalokita and Mañjuśrî,

are splendid angels of mercy and knowledge who are theoretically

distinguished from Buddhas because they have indefinitely postponed

their entry into nirvana in order to alleviate the sufferings of the

world. These new tenets are accompanied by a remarkable development of

art and of idealist metaphysics.

This new form of Buddhism is called Mahâyâna, or the Great Vehicle, as

opposed to the Small Vehicle or Hînayâna, a somewhat contemptuous name

given to the older school. The idea underlying these phrases is that

sects are merely coaches, all travelling on the same road to salvation

though some may be quicker than others. The Mahayana did not suppress

the Hinayana but it gradually absorbed the traffic.

The causes of this transformation were two-fold, internal or Indian and

external. Buddhism was a living, that is changing, stream of thought and

the Hindus as a nation have an exceptional taste and capacity for

metaphysics. This taste was not destroyed by Gotama's dicta as to the

limits of profitable knowledge nor did new deities arouse hostility

because they were not mentioned in the ancient scriptures. The

development of Brahmanism and Buddhism was parallel: if an attractive

novelty appeared in one, something like it was soon provided by the

other. Thus the Bhagavad-gîtâ contains the ideas of the Mahayana in

substance, though in a different setting: it praises disinterested

activity and insists on faith. It is clear that at this period all

Indian thought and not merely Buddhism was vivified and transmuted by

two great currents of feeling demanding, the one a more emotional

morality the other more personal and more sympathetic deities.

I shall show in more detail below that most Mahayanist doctrines, though

apparently new, have their roots in old Indian ideas. But the presence

of foreign influences is not to be disputed and there is no difficulty

in accounting for them. Gandhara was a Persian province from 530 to 330

B.C. and in the succeeding centuries the north-western parts of India

experienced the invasions and settlements of numerous aliens, such as

Greeks from the Hellenistic kingdoms which arose after Alexander's

expedition, Parthians, Sakas and Kushans. Such immigrants, even if they

had no culture of their own, at least transported culture, just as the

Turks introduced Islam into Europe. Thus whatever ideas were prevalent

in Persia, in the Hellenistic kingdoms, or in Central Asia may also have

been prevalent in north-western India, where was situated the university

town of Taxila frequently mentioned in the Jâtakas as a seat of Buddhist

learning. The foreigners who entered India adopted Indian religions[14]

and probably Buddhism more often than Hinduism, for it was at that time

predominant and disposed to evangelize without raising difficulties as

to caste.

Foreign influences stimulated mythology and imagery. In the reliefs of

Asoka's time, the image of the Buddha never appears, and, as in the

earliest Christian art, the intention of the sculptors is to illustrate

an edifying narrative rather than to provide an object of worship. But

in the Gandharan sculptures, which are a branch of Græco-Roman art, he

is habitually represented by a figure modelled on the conventional type

of Apollo. The gods of India were not derived from Greece but they were

stereotyped under the influence of western art to this extent that

familiarity with such figures as Apollo and Pallas encouraged the Hindus

to represent their gods and heroes in human or quasi-human shapes. The

influence of Greece on Indian religion was not profound: it did not

affect the architecture or ritual of temples and still less thought or

doctrine. But when Indian religion and especially Buddhism passed into

the hands of men accustomed to Greek statuary, the inclination to

venerate definite personalities having definite shapes was

strengthened[15].

Persian influence was stronger than Greek. To it are probably due the

many radiant deities who shed their beneficent glory over the Mahayanist

pantheon, as well as the doctrine that Bodhisattvas are emanations of

Buddhas. The discoveries of Stein, Pelliot and others have shown that

this influence extended across Central Asia to China and one of the most

important turns in the fortunes of Buddhism was its association with a

Central Asian tribe analogous to the Turks and called Kushans or

Yüeh-chih, whose territories lay without as well as within the frontiers

of modern India and who borrowed much of their culture from Persia and

some from the Greeks. Their great king Kanishka is a figure in Buddhist

annals second only to Asoka. Unfortunately his date is still a matter of

discussion. The majority of scholars place his accession about 78 A.D.

but some put it rather later[16]. The evidence of numismatics and of art

indicates that he came towards the end of his dynasty rather than at the

beginning and the tradition which makes Aśvaghosha his contemporary is

compatible with the later date.

Some writers describe Kanishka as the special patron of Mahayanism. But

the description is of doubtful accuracy. The style of religious art

known as Gandharan flourished in his reign and he convened a council

which fixed the canon of the Sarvâstivâdins. This school was reckoned as

Hinayanist and though Aśvaghosha enjoys general fame in the Far East as

a Mahayanist doctor, yet his undoubted writings are not Mahayanist in

the strict sense of the word[17]. But a more ornate and mythological

form of religion was becoming prevalent and perhaps Kanishka's Council

arranged some compromise between the old and the new.

After Aśvaghosha comes Nâgârjuna who may have flourished any time

between 125 and 200 A.D. A legend which makes him live for 300 years is

not without significance, for he represents a movement and a school as

much as a personality and if he taught in the second century A.D. he

cannot have been the _founder_ of Mahayanism. Yet he seems to be the

first great name definitely connected with it and the ascription to him

of numerous later treatises, though unwarrantable, shows that his

authority was sufficient to stamp a work or a doctrine as orthodox

Mahayanism. His biographies connect him with the system of idealist or

nihilistic metaphysics expounded in the literature (for it is more than

a single work) called Prajñâpâramitâ, with magical practices (by which

the power of summoning Bodhisattvas or deities is specially meant) and

with the worship of Amitâbha. His teacher Saraha, a foreigner, is said

to have been the first who taught this worship in India. In this there

may be a kernel of truth but otherwise the extant accounts of Nâgârjuna

are too legendary to permit of historical deductions. He was perhaps the

first eminent exponent of Mahayanist metaphysics, but the train of

thought was not new: it was the result of applying to the external world

the same destructive logic which Gotama applied to the soul and the

result had considerable analogies to Śankara's version of the Vedanta.

Whether in the second century A.D. the leaders of Buddhism already

identified themselves with the sorcery which demoralized late Indian

Mahayanism may be doubted, but tradition certainly ascribes to Nâgârjuna

this corrupting mixture of metaphysics and magic.

The third century offers a strange blank in Indian history. Little can

be said except that the power of the Kushans decayed and that northern

India was probably invaded by Persians and Central Asian tribes. The

same trouble did not affect southern India and it may be that religion

and speculation flourished there and spread northwards, as certainly

happened in later times. Many of the greatest Hindu teachers were

Dravidians and at the present day it is in the Dravidian regions that

the temples are most splendid, the Brahmans strictest and most

respected. It may be that this Dravidian influence affected even

Buddhism in the third century A.D., for Aryadeva the successor of

Nâgârjuna was a southerner and the legends told of him recall certain

Dravidian myths. Bodhidharma too came from the South and imported into

China a form of Buddhism which has left no record in India.

7. _Revival of Hinduism_

In 320 a native Indian dynasty, the Guptas, came to the throne and

inaugurated a revival of Hinduism, to which religion we must now turn.

To speak of the revival of Hinduism does not mean that in the previous

period it had been dead or torpid. Indeed we know that there was a Hindu

reaction against the Buddhism of Asoka about 150 B.C. But, on the whole,

from the time of Asoka onwards Buddhism had been the principal religion

of India, and before the Gupta era there are hardly any records of

donations made to Brahmans. Yet during these centuries they were not

despised or oppressed. They produced much literature[18]: their schools

of philosophy and ritual did not decay and they gradually made good

their claim to be the priests of India's gods, whoever those gods might

be. The difference between the old religion and the new lies in this.

The Brâhmanas and Upanishads describe practices and doctrines of

considerable variety but still all the property of a privileged class in

a special region. They do not represent popular religion nor the

religion of India as a whole. But in the Gupta period Hinduism began to

do this. It is not a system like Islam or even Buddhism but a parliament

of religions, of which every Indian creed can become a member on

condition of observing some simple rules of the house, such as respect

for Brahmans and theoretical acceptance of the Veda. Nothing is

abolished: the ancient rites and texts preserve their mysterious power

and kings perform the horse-sacrifice. But side by side with this,

deities unknown to the Veda rise to the first rank and it is frankly

admitted that new revelations more suited to the age have been given to

mankind.

Art too enters on a new phase. In the early Indian sculptures deities

are mostly portrayed in human form, but in about the first century of

our era there is seen a tendency to depict them with many heads and

limbs and this tendency grows stronger until in mediaeval times it is

predominant. It has its origin in symbolism. The deity is thought of as

carrying many insignia, as performing more actions than two hands can

indicate; the worshipper is taught to think of him as appearing in this

shape and the artist does not hesitate to represent it in paint and

stone.

As we have seen, the change which came over Buddhism was partly due to

foreign influences and no doubt they affected most Indian creeds. But

the prodigious amplification of Hinduism was mainly due to the

absorption of beliefs prevalent in Indian districts other than the homes

of the ancient Brahmans. Thus south Indian religion is characterized

when we first know it by its emotional tone and it resulted in the

mediaeval Sivaism of the Tamil country. In another region, probably in

the west, grew up the monotheism of the Bhâgavatas, which was the parent

of Vishnuism.

Hinduism may be said to fall into four principal divisions which are

really different religions: the Smârtas or traditionalists, the

Sivaites, the Vishnuites and the Śâktas. The first, who are still

numerous, represent the pre-buddhist Brahmans. They follow, so far as

modern circumstances permit, the ancient ritual and are apparent

polytheists while accepting pantheism as the higher truth. Vishnuites

and Sivaites however are monotheists in the sense that their minor

deities are not essentially different from the saints of Roman and

Eastern Christianity but their monotheism has a pantheistic tinge.

Neither sect denies the existence of the rival god, but each makes its

own deity God, not only in the theistic but in the pantheistic sense and

regards the other deity as merely an influential angel. From time to

time the impropriety of thus specially deifying one aspect of the

universal spirit made itself felt and then Vishnu and Śiva were adored

in a composite dual form or, with the addition of Brahmâ, as a trinity.

But this triad had not great importance and it is a mistake to compare

it with the Christian trinity. Strong as was the tendency to combine and

amalgamate deities, it was mastered in these religions by the desire to

have one definite God, personal inasmuch as he can receive and return

love, although the Indian feeling that God must be all and in all

continually causes the conceptions called Vishnu and Śiva to transcend

the limits of personality. This feeling is specially clear in the growth

of Râma and Krishna worship. Both of these deities were originally

ancient heroes, and stories of love and battle cling to them in their

later phases. Yet for their respective devotees each becomes God in

every sense, God as lover of the soul, God as ruler of the universe and

the God of pantheism who is all that exists and can exist.

For some time before and after the beginning of our era, north-western

India witnessed a great fusion of ideas and Indian, Persian and Greek

religion must have been in contact at the university town of Taxila and

many other places. Kashmir too, if somewhat too secluded to be a

meeting-place of nations, was a considerable intellectual centre. We

have not yet sufficient documents to enable us to trace the history and

especially the chronology of thought in these regions but we can say

that certain forms of Vishnuism, Śivaism and Buddhism were all evolved

there and often show features in common. Thus in all we find the idea

that the divine nature is manifested in four forms or five, if we count

the Absolute Godhead as one of them[19].

I shall consider at length below this worship of Vishnu and Śiva and

here will merely point out that it differs from the polytheism of the

Smârtas. In their higher phases all Hindu religions agree in teaching

some form of pantheism, some laying more and some less stress on the

personal aspect which the deity can assume. But whereas the pantheism of

the Smârtas grew out of the feeling that the many gods of tradition must

all be one, the pantheism of the Vishnuites was not evolved out of

pre-buddhist Brahmanism and is due to the conviction that the one God

must be everything. It is Indian but it grew up in some region outside

Brahmanic influence and was accepted by the Brahmans as a permissible

creed, but many legends in the Epics and Puranas indicate that there was

hostility between the old-fashioned Brahmans and the worshippers of

Râma, Krishna and Śiva before the alliance was made.

Śâktism[20] also was not evolved from ancient Brahmanism but is

different in tone from Vishnuism and Sivaism. Whereas they start from a

movement of thought and spiritual feeling, Śâktism has for its basis

certain ancient popular worships. With these it has combined much

philosophy and has attempted to bring its teaching into conformity with

Brahmanism, but yet remains somewhat apart. It worships a goddess of

many names and forms, who is adored with sexual rites and the sacrifice

of animals, or, when the law permits, of men. It asserts even more

plainly than Vishnuism that the teaching of the Vedas is too difficult

for these latter days and even useless, and it offers to its followers

new scriptures called Tantras and new ceremonies as all-sufficient. It

is true that many Hindus object to this sect, which may be compared with

the Mormons in America or the Skoptsy in Russia, and it is numerous only

in certain parts of India (especially Bengal and Assam) but since a

section of Brahmans patronize it, it must be reckoned as a phase of

Hinduism and even at the present day it is an important phase.

There are many cults prevalent in India, though not recognized as sects,

in which the worship of some aboriginal deity is accepted in all its

crudeness without much admixture of philosophy, the only change being

that the deity is described as a form, incarnation or servant of some

well-known god and that Brahmans are connected with this worship. This

habit of absorbing aboriginal superstitions materially lowers the

average level of creed and ritual. An educated Brahman would laugh at

the idea that village superstitions can be taken seriously as religion

but he does not condemn them and, as superstitions, he does not

disbelieve in them. It is chiefly owing to this habit that Hinduism has

spread all over India and its treatment of men and gods is curiously

parallel. Princes like the Manipuris of Assam came under Hindu influence

and were finally recognized as Kshattiyas with an imaginary pedigree,

and on the same principle their deities are recognized as forms of Siva

or Durga. And Siva and Durga themselves were built up in past ages out

of aboriginal beliefs, though the cement holding their figures together

is Indian thought and philosophy, which are able to see in grotesque

rustic godlings an expression of cosmic forces.

Though this is the principal method by which Hinduism has been

propagated, direct missionary effort has not been wanting. For instance

a large part of Assam was converted by the preaching of Vishnuite

teachers in the sixteenth century and the process still continues[21].

But on the whole the missionary spirit characterizes Buddhism rather

than Hinduism. Buddhist missionaries preached their faith, without any

political motive, wherever they could penetrate. But in such countries

as Camboja, Hinduism was primarily the religion of the foreign settlers

and when the political power of the Brahmans began to wane, the people

embraced Buddhism. Outside India it was perhaps only in Java and the

neighbouring islands that Hinduism (with an admixture of Buddhism)

became the religion of the natives.

Many features of Hinduism, its steady though slow conquest of India, its

extraordinary vitality and tenacity in resisting the attacks of

Mohammedanism, and its small power of expansion beyond the seas are

explained by the fact that it is a mode of life as much as a faith. To

be a Hindu it is not sufficient to hold the doctrine of the Upanishads

or any other scriptures: it is necessary to be a member of a Hindu caste

and observe its regulations. It is not quite correct to say that one

must be born a Hindu, since Hinduism has grown by gradually hinduizing

the wilder tribes of India and the process still continues. But a

convert cannot enter the fold by any simple ceremony like baptism. The

community to which he belongs must adopt Hindu usages and then it will

be recognized as a caste, at first of very low standing but in a few

generations it may rise in the general esteem. A Hindu is bound to his

religion by almost the same ties that bind him to his family. Hence the

strength of Hinduism in India. But such ties are hard to knit and

Hinduism has no chance of spreading abroad unless there is a large

colony of Hindus surrounded by an appreciative and imitative

population[22].

In the contest between Hinduism and Buddhism the former owed the victory

which it obtained in India, though not in other lands, to this

assimilative social influence. The struggle continued from the fourth to

the ninth century, after which Buddhism was clearly defeated and

survived only in special localities. Its final disappearance was due to

the destruction of its remaining monasteries by Moslem invaders but this

blow was fatal only because Buddhism was concentrated in its monkhood.

Innumerable Hindu temples were destroyed, yet Hinduism was at no time in

danger of extinction.

The Hindu reaction against Buddhism became apparent under the Gupta

dynasty but Mahayanism in its use of Sanskrit and its worship of

Bodhisattvas shows the beginnings of the same movement. The danger for

Buddhism was not persecution but tolerance and obliteration of

differences. The Guptas were not bigots. It was probably in their time

that the oldest Puranas, the laws of Manu and the Mahabharata received

their final form. These are on the whole text-books of Smârta Hinduism

and two Gupta monarchs celebrated the horse sacrifice. But the

Mahabharata contains several episodes which justify the exclusive

worship of either Vishnu or Siva, and the architecture of the Guptas

suggests that they were Vishnuites. They also bestowed favours on

Buddhism which was not yet decadent, for Vasubandhu and Asanga, who

probably lived in the fourth century, were constructive thinkers. It is

true that their additions were of the dangerous kind which render an

edifice top-heavy but their works show vitality and had a wide

influence[23]. The very name of Asanga's philosophy—Yogâcârya—indicates

its affinity to Brahmanic thought, as do his doctrines of Alayavijñâna

and Bodhi, which permit him to express in Buddhist language the idea

that the soul may be illumined by the deity. In some cases Hinduism, in

others Buddhism, may have played the receptive part but the general

result—namely the diminution of differences between the two—was always

the same.

The Hun invasions were unfavourable to religious and intellectual

activity in the north and, just as in the time of Moslim inroads, their

ravages had more serious consequences for Buddhism than for Hinduism.

The great Emperor Harsha (†647), of whom we know something from Bâna and

Hsüan Chuang, became at the end of his life a zealous but eclectic

Buddhist. Yet it is plain from Hsiian Chuang's account that at this time

Buddhism was decadent in most districts both of the north and south.

This decadence was hastened by an unfortunate alliance with those forms

of magic and erotic mysticism which are called Śâktism[24]. It is

difficult to estimate the extent of the corruption, for the singularity

of the evil, a combination of the austere and ethical teaching of Gotama

with the most fantastic form of Hinduism, arrests attention and perhaps

European scholars have written more about it than it deserves. It did

not touch the Hinayanist churches nor appreciably infect the Buddhism of

the Far East, nor even (it would seem) Indian Buddhism outside Bengal

and Orissa. Unfortunately Magadha, which was both the home and last

asylum of the faith, was also very near the regions where Śâktism most

flourished. It is, as I have often noticed in these pages, a peculiarity

of all Indian sects that in matters of belief they are not exclusive nor

hostile to novelties. When a new idea wins converts it is the instinct

of the older sects to declare that it is compatible with their teaching

or that they have something similar and just as good. It was in this

fashion that the Buddhists of Magadha accepted Śâktist and tantric

ideas. If Hinduism could summon gods and goddesses by magical methods,

they could summon Bodhisattvas, male and female, in the same way, and

these spirits were as good as the gods. In justice it must be said that

despite distortions and monstrous accretions the real teaching of Gotama

did not entirely disappear even in Magadha and Tibet.

8. _Later Forms of Hinduism_

In the eighth and ninth centuries this degenerate Buddhism was exposed

to the attacks of the great Hindu champions Kumâriḷa and Śankara, though

it probably endured little persecution in our sense of the word. Both of

them were Smârtas or traditionalists and laboured in the cause not of

Vishnuism or Śivaism but of the ancient Brahmanic religion, amplified by

many changes which the ages had brought but holding up as the religious

ideal a manhood occupied with ritual observances, followed by an old age

devoted to philosophy. Śankara was the greater of the two and would have

a higher place among the famous names of the world had not his respect

for tradition prevented him from asserting the originality which he

undoubtedly possessed. Yet many remarkable features of his life work,

both practical and intellectual, are due to imitation of the Buddhists

and illustrate the dictum that Buddhism did not disappear from India[25]

until Hinduism had absorbed from it all the good that it had to offer.

Śankara took Buddhist institutions as his model in rearranging the

ascetic orders of Hinduism, and his philosophy, a rigorously consistent

pantheism which ascribed all apparent multiplicity and difference to

illusion, is indebted to Mahayanist speculation. It is remarkable that

his opponents stigmatized him as a Buddhist in disguise and his system,

though it is one of the most influential lines of thought among educated

Hindus, is anathematized by some theistic sects[26].

Śankara was a native of southern India. It is not easy to combine in one

picture the progress of thought in the north and south, and for the

earlier centuries our information as to the Dravidian countries is

meagre. Yet they cannot be omitted, for their influence on the whole of

India was great. Greeks, Kushans, Huns, and Mohammedans penetrated into

the north but, until after the fall of Vijayanagar in 1565, no invader

professing a foreign religion entered the country of the Tamils. Left in

peace they elaborated their own version of current theological problems

and the result spread over India. Buddhism and Jainism also flourished

in the south. The former was introduced under Asoka but apparently

ceased to be the dominant religion (if it ever was so) in the early

centuries of our era. Still even in the eleventh century monasteries

were built in Mysore. Jainism had a distinguished but chequered career

in the south. It was powerful in the seventh century but subsequently

endured considerable persecution. It still exists and possesses

remarkable monuments at Sravana Belgola and elsewhere.

But the characteristic form of Dravidian religion is an emotional

theism, running in the parallel channels of Vishnuism and Śivaism and

accompanied by humbler but vigorous popular superstitions, which reveal

the origin of its special temperament. For the frenzied ecstasies of

devil dancers (to use a current though inaccurate phrase) are a

primitive expression of the same sentiment which sees in the whole world

the exulting energy and rhythmic force of Siva. And though the most

rigid Brahmanism still flourishes in the Madras Presidency there is

audible in the Dravidian hymns a distinct note of anti-sacerdotalism and

of belief that every man by his own efforts can come into immediate

contact with the Great Being whom he worships.

The Vishnuism and Śivaism of the south go back to the early centuries of

our era, but the chronology is difficult. In both there is a line of

poet-saints followed by philosophers and teachers and in both a

considerable collection of Tamil hymns esteemed as equivalent to the

Veda. Perhaps Śivaism was dominant first and Vishnuism somewhat later

but at no epoch did either extinguish the other. It was the object of

Śankara to bring these valuable but dangerous forces, as well as much

Buddhist doctrine and practice, into harmony with Brahmanism.

Islam first entered India in 712 but it was some time before it passed

beyond the frontier provinces and for many centuries it was too hostile

and aggressive to invite imitation, but the spectacle of a strong

community pledged to the worship of a single personal God produced an

effect. In the period extending from the eighth to the twelfth

centuries, in which Buddhism practically disappeared and Islam came to

the front as a formidable though not irresistible antagonist, the

dominant form of Hinduism was that which finds expression in the older

Puranas, in the temples of Orissa and Khajarao and the Kailâsa at

Ellora. It is the worship of one god, either Siva or Vishnu, but a

monotheism adorned with a luxuriant mythology and delighting in the

manifold shapes which the one deity assumes. It freely used the

terminology of the Sânkhya but the first place in philosophy belonged to

the severe pantheism of Śankara which, in contrast to this riotous

exuberance of legend and sculpture, sees the highest truth in one Being

to whom no epithets can be applied.

In the next epoch, say the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, Indian

thought clearly hankers after theism in the western sense and yet never

completely acquiesces in it. Mythology, if still rampant according to

our taste, at least becomes subsidiary and more detachable from the

supreme deity, and this deity, if less anthropomorphic than Allah or

Jehovah, is still a being who loves and helps souls, and these souls are

explained in varying formulae as being identical with him and yet

distinct.

It can hardly be by chance that as the Hindus became more familiar with

Islam their sects grew more definite in doctrine and organization

especially among the Vishnuites who showed a greater disposition to form

sects than the Sivaites, partly because the incarnations of Vishnu offer

an obvious ground for diversity. About 1100 A.D.[27] the first great

Vaishnava sect was founded by Râmânuja. He was a native of the Madras

country and claimed to be the spiritual descendant of the early Tamil

saints. In doctrine he expressly accepted the views of the ancient

Bhâgavatas, which had been condemned by Śankara, and he affirmed the

existence of one personal deity commonly spoken of as Nârâyana or

Vâsudeva.

From the time of Śankara onwards nearly all Hindu theologians of the

first rank expounded their views by writing a commentary on the Brahma

Sûtras, an authoritative but singularly enigmatic digest of the

Upanishads. Śankara's doctrine may be summarized as absolute monism

which holds that nothing really exists but Brahman and that Brahman is

identical with the soul. All apparent plurality is due to illusion. He

draws a distinction between the lower and higher Brahman which perhaps

may be rendered by God and the Godhead. In the same sense in which

individual souls and matter exist, a personal God also exists, but the

higher truth is that individuality, personality and matter are all

illusion. But the teaching of Râmânuja rejects the doctrines that the

world is an illusion and that there is a distinction between the lower

and higher Brahman and it affirms that the soul, though of the same

substance as God and emitted from him rather than created, can obtain

bliss not in absorption but in existence near him.

It is round these problems that Hindu theology turns. The innumerable

solutions lack neither boldness nor variety but they all try to satisfy

both the philosopher and the saint and none achieve both tasks. The

system of Śankara is a masterpiece of intellect, despite his

disparagement of reasoning in theology, and could inspire a fine piety,

as when on his deathbed he asked forgiveness for having frequented

temples, since by so doing he had seemed to deny that God is everywhere.

But piety of this kind is unfavourable to public worship and even to

those religious experiences in which the soul seems to have direct

contact with God in return for its tribute of faith and love. In fact

the Advaita philosophy countenances emotional theism only as an

imperfect creed and not as the highest truth. But the existence of all

sects and priesthoods depends on their power to satisfy the religious

instinct with ceremonial or some better method of putting the soul in

communication with the divine. On the other hand pantheism in India is

not a philosophical speculation, it is a habit of mind: it is not enough

for the Hindu that his God is lord of all things: he must _be_ all

things and the soul in its endeavour to reach God must obtain

deliverance from the fetters not only of matter but of individuality.

Hence Hindu theology is in a perpetual oscillation illustrated by the

discrepant statements found side by side in the Bhagavad-gîtâ and other

works. Indian temperament and Indian logic want a pantheistic God and a

soul which can transcend personality, but religious thought and practice

imply personality both in the soul and in God. All varieties of

Vishnuism show an effort to reconcile these double aspirations and

theories. The theistic view is popular, for without it what would become

of temples, worshippers and priests? But I think that the pantheistic

view is the real basis of Indian religious thought.

The qualified monism of Râmânuja (as his system is sometimes called) led

to more uncompromising treatment of the question and to the affirmation

of dualism, not the dualism of God and the Devil but the distinctness of

the soul and of matter from God. This is the doctrine of Madhva, another

southern teacher who lived about a century after Râmânuja and was

perhaps directly influenced by Islam. But though the logical outcome of

his teaching may appear to be simple theism analogous to Islam or

Judaism, it does not in practice lead to this result but rather to the

worship of Krishna. Madhva's sect is still important but even more

important is another branch of the spiritual family of Râmânuja,

starting from Râmânand who probably flourished in the fourteenth

century[28].

Râmânuja, while in some ways accepting innovations, insisted on the

strict observance of caste. Râmânand abandoned this, separated from his

sect and removed to Benares. His teaching marks a turning-point in the

history of modern Hinduism. Firstly he held that caste need not prevent

a man from rightly worshipping God and he admitted even Moslims as

members of his community. To this liberality are directly traceable the

numerous sects combining Hindu with Mohammedan doctrines, among which

the Kabir Panthis and the Sikhs are the most conspicuous. But it is a

singular testimony to the tenacity of Hindu ideas that though many

teachers holding most diverse opinions have declared there is no caste

before God, yet caste has generally reasserted itself among their

followers as a social if not as a religious institution. The second

important point in Râmânand's teaching was the use of the vernacular for

religious literature. Dravidian scriptures had already been recognized

in the south but it is from this time that there begins to flow in the

north that great stream of sacred poetry in Hindi and Bengali which

waters the roots of modern popular Hinduism. Among many eminent names

which have contributed to it, the greatest is Tulsi Das who retold the

Ramayana in Hindi and thus wrote a poem which is little less than a

Bible for millions in the Ganges valley.

The sects which derive from the teaching of Râmânand mostly worship the

Supreme Being under the name of Râma. Even more numerous, especially in

the north, are those who use the name of Krishna, the other great

incarnation of Vishnu. This worship was organized and extended by the

preaching of Vallabha and Caitanya (c. 1500) in the valley of the Ganges

and Bengal, but was not new. I shall discuss in some detail below the

many elements combined in the complex figure of Krishna but in one way

or another he was connected with the earliest forms of Vishnuite

monotheism and is the chief figure in the Bhagavad-gîtâ, its earliest

text-book. Legend connects him partly with Muttra and partly with

western India but, though by no means ignored in southern India, he does

not receive there such definite and exclusive adoration as in the north.

The Krishnaite sects are emotional, and their favourite doctrine that

the relation between God and the soul is typified by passionate love has

led to dubious moral results.

This Krishnaite propaganda, which coincided with the Reformation in

Europe, was the last great religious movement in India. Since that time

there has been considerable activity of a minor kind. Protests have been

raised against abuses and existing communities have undergone changes,

such as may be seen in the growth of the Sikhs, but there has been no

general or original movement. The absence of such can be easily

explained by the persecutions of Aurungzeb and by the invasions and

internal struggles of the eighteenth century. At the end of that century

Hinduism was at its lowest but its productive power was not destroyed.

The decennial census never fails to record the rise of new sects and the

sudden growth of others which had been obscure and minute.

Any historical treatment of Hinduism inevitably makes Vishnuism seem

more prominent than other sects, for it offers more events to record.

But though Sivaism has undergone fewer changes and produced fewer great

names, it must not be thought of as lifeless or decadent. The lingam is

worshipped all over India and many of the most celebrated shrines, such

as Benares and Bhubaneshwar, are dedicated to the Lord of life and

death. The Śivaism of the Tamil country is one of the most energetic and

progressive forms of modern Hinduism, but in doctrine it hardly varies

from the ancient standard of the Tiruvacagam.

9. _European Influence and Modern Hinduism_

The small effect of European religion on Hinduism is remarkable. Islam,

though aggressively hostile, yet fused with it in some sects, for

instance the Sikhs, but such fusions of Indian religion and Christianity

as have been noted[29] are microscopic curiosities. European free

thought and Deism have not fared better, for the Brahmo Samaj which was

founded under their inspiration has only 5504 adherents[30]. In social

life there has been some change: caste restrictions, though not

abolished, are evaded by ingenious subterfuges and there is a growing

feeling against child-marriage. Yet were the laws against sati and human

sacrifice repealed, there are many districts in which such practices

would not be forbidden by popular sentiment.

It is easy to explain the insensibility of Hinduism to European contact:

even Islam had little effect on its stubborn vitality, though Islam

brought with it settlers and resident rulers, ready to make converts by

force. But the British have shown perfect toleration and are merely

sojourners in the land who spend their youth and age elsewhere. European

exclusiveness and Indian ideas about caste alike made it natural to

regard them as an isolated class charged with the business of Government

but divorced from the intellectual and religious life of other classes.

Previous experience of Moslims and other invaders disposed the Brahmans

to accept foreigners as rulers without admitting that their creeds and

customs were in the least worthy of imitation. European methods of

organization and advertisement have not however been disdained.

The last half century has witnessed a remarkable revival of Hinduism. In

the previous decades the most conspicuous force in India, although

numerically weak, was the already mentioned Brahmo Samaj, founded by Ram

Mohun Roy in 1828. But it was colourless and wanting in constructive

power. Educated opinion, at least in Bengal, seemed to be tending

towards agnosticism and social revolution. This tendency was checked by

a conservative and nationalist movement, which in all its varied phases

gave support to Indian religion and was intolerant of European ideas. It

had a political side but there was nothing disloyal in its main idea,

namely, that in the intellectual and religious sphere, where Indian life

is most intense, Indian ideas must not decay. No one who has known India

during the last thirty years can have failed to notice how many new

temples have been built and how many old ones repaired. Almost all the

principal sects have founded associations to protect and extend their

interests by such means as financial and administrative organization,

the publication of periodicals and other literature, annual conferences,

lectures and the foundation of religious houses or quasi-monastic

orders. Several societies have been founded not restricted to any

particular sect but with the avowed object of defending and promoting

strict Hinduism. Among such the most important are, first the Bharat

Dharma Mahamandala, under the distinguished presidency of the Maharaja

of Darbhanga: secondly the movement started by Ramakrishna and Swami

Vivekananda and adorned by the beautiful life and writings of Sister

Nivedita (Miss Noble) and thirdly the Theosophical Society under the

leadership of Mrs Besant. It is remarkable that Europeans, both men and

women, have played a considerable part in this revival. All these

organizations are influential: the two latter have done great service in

defending and encouraging Hinduism, but I am less sure of their success

in mingling Eastern and Western ideas or in popularizing Hinduism among

Europeans.

Somewhat different, but described by the Census of 1911 as "the greatest

religious movement in India of the past half century" is the Arya Samaj,

founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand. Whereas the movements mentioned above

support Sanâtana Dharma or Orthodox Hinduism in all its shapes, the Arya

Samaj aims at reform. Its original programme was a revival of the

ancient Vedic religion but it has since been perceptibly modified and

tends towards conciliating contemporary orthodoxy, for it now prohibits

the slaughter of cattle, accords a partial recognition to caste, affirms

its belief in karma and apparently approves a form of the Yoga

philosophy. Though it is not yet accepted as a form of orthodox

Hinduism, it seems probable that concessions on both sides will produce

this result before long. It numbers at present only about a quarter of a

million but is said to be rapidly increasing, especially in the United

Provinces and Panjab, and to be remarkable for the completeness and

efficiency of its organization. It maintains missionary colleges,

orphanages and schools. Affiliated to it is a society for the

purification (shuddhi) of Mohammedans, Christians and outcasts, that is

for turning them into Hindus and giving them some kind of caste. It

would appear that those who undergo this purification do not always

become members of the Ṡamaj but are merged in the ordinary Hindu

community where they are accepted without opposition if also without

enthusiasm.

10. _Change and Permanence in Buddhism_

Thus we have a record of Indian thought for about 3000 years. It has

directly affected such distant points as Balkh, Java and Japan and it is

still living and active. But life and action mean change and such wide

extension in time and space implies variety. We talk of converting

foreign countries but the religion which is transplanted also undergoes

conversion or else it cannot enter new brains and hearts. Buddhism in

Ceylon and Japan, Christianity in Scotland and Russia are not the same,

although professing to reverence the same teachers. It is easy to argue

the other way, but it can only be done by setting aside as non-essential

differences of great practical importance. Europeans are ready enough to

admit that Buddhism is changeable and easily corrupted but it is not

singular in that respect[31]. I doubt if Lhasa and Tantrism are further

from the teaching of Gotama than the Papacy, the Inquisition, and the

religion of the German Emperor, from the teaching of Christ.

A religion is the expression of the thought of a particular age and

cannot really be permanent in other ages which have other thoughts. The

apparent permanence of Christianity is due first to the suppression of

much original teaching, such as Christ's turning the cheek to the smiter

and Paul's belief in the coming end of the world, and secondly to the

adoption of new social ideals which have no place in the New Testament,

such as the abolition of slavery and the improved status of women.

Buddhism arising out of Brahmanism suggests a comparison with

Christianity arising out of Judaism, but the comparison breaks down in

most points of detail. But there is one real resemblance, namely that

Buddhism and Christianity have both won their greatest triumphs outside

the land of their birth. The flowers of the mind, if they can be

transplanted at all, often flourish with special vigour on alien soil.

Witness the triumphs of Islam in the hands of the Turks and Mughals, the

progress of Nestorianism in Central Asia, and the spread of Manichaeism

in both the East and West outside the limits of Persia. Even so Lamaism

in Tibet and Amidism in Japan, though scholars may regard them as

singular perversions, have more vitality than any branch of Buddhism

which has existed in India since the seventh century. But even here the

parallel with Christian sects is imperfect. It would be more complete if

Palestine had been the centre from which different phases of

Christianity radiated during some twelve centuries, for this is the

relation between Indian and foreign Buddhism. Lamaism is not the

teaching of the Buddha travestied by Tibetans but a late form of Indian

Buddhism exported to Tibet and modified there in some external features

(such as ecclesiastical organization and art) but not differing greatly

in doctrine from Bengali Buddhism of the eleventh century. And even

Amidism appears to have originated not in the Far East but in Gandhara

and the adjacent lands. Thus the many varieties of Buddhism now existing

are due partly to local colour but even more to the workings of the

restless Hindu mind which during many centuries after the Christian era

continued to invent for it novelties in metaphysics and mythology.

The preservation of a very ancient form of Buddhism in Ceylon[32] is

truly remarkable, for if in many countries Buddhism has shown itself

fluid and protean, it here manifests a stability which can hardly be

paralleled except in Judaism. The Sinhalese, unlike the Hindus, had no

native propensity to speculation. They were content to classify,

summarize and expound the teaching of the Pitakas without restating it

in the light of their own imagination. Whereas the most stable form of

Christianity is the Church of Rome, which began by making considerable

additions to the doctrine of the New Testament, the most stable form of

Buddhism is neither a transformation of the old nor a protest against

innovation but simply the continuation of a very ancient sect in strange

lands[33]. This ancient Buddhism, like Islam which is also simple and

stable, is somewhat open to the charge of engaging in disputes about

trivial details[34], but alike in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, it has not

only shown remarkable persistence but has become a truly national

religion, the glory and comfort of those who profess it.

11. _Rebirth and the Nature of the Soul_

The most characteristic doctrine of Indian religion—rarely absent in

India and imported by Buddhism into all the countries which it

influenced—is that called metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul

or reincarnation. The last of these terms best expresses Indian,

especially Buddhist, ideas but still the usual Sanskrit equivalent,

_Saṃsâra_, means migration. The body breaks up at death but something

passes on and migrates to another equally transitory tenement. Neither

Brahmans nor Buddhists seem to contemplate the possibility that the

human soul may be a temporary manifestation of the Eternal Spirit which

comes to an end at death—a leaf on a tree or a momentary ripple on the

water. It is always regarded as passing through many births, a wave

traversing the ocean.

Hindu speculation has never passed through the materialistic phase, and

the doctrine that the soul is annihilated at death is extremely rare in

India. Even rarer perhaps is the doctrine that it usually enters on a

permanent existence, happy or otherwise. The idea underlying the

transmigration theory is that every state which we call existence must

come to an end. If the soul can be isolated from all the accidents and

accessories attaching to it, then there may be a state of permanence and

peace but not a state comparable with human existence, however enlarged

and glorified. But why does not this conviction of impermanence lead to

the simpler conclusion that the end of physical life is the end of all

life? Because the Hindus have an equally strong conviction of

continuity: everything passes away and changes but it is not true to say

of anything that it arises from nothing or passes into nothing. If human

organisms (or any other organisms) are mere machines, if there is

nothing more to be said about a corpse than about a smashed watch, then

(the Hindu thinks) the universe is not continuous. Its continuity means

for him that there is something which eternally manifests itself in

perishable forms but does not perish with them any more than water when

a pitcher is broken or fire that passes from the wood it has consumed to

fresh fuel.

These metaphors suggest that the doctrine of transmigration or

reincarnation does not promise what we call personal immortality. I

confess that I cannot understand how there can be personality in the

ordinary human sense without a body. When we think of a friend, we think

of a body and a character, thoughts and feelings, all of them connected

with that body and many of them conditioned by it. But the immortal soul

is commonly esteemed to be something equally present in a new born babe,

a youth and an old man. If so, it cannot be a personality in the

ordinary sense, for no one could recognize the spirit of a departed

friend, if it is something which was present in him the day he was born

and different from all the characteristics which he acquired during

life. The belief that we shall recognize our friends in another world

assumes that these characteristics are immortal, but it is hard to

understand how they can be so, especially as it is also assumed that

there is nothing immortal in a dog, which possesses affection and

intelligence, but that there is something immortal in a new born infant

which cannot be said to possess either.

In one way metempsychosis raises insuperable difficulties to the

survival of personality, for if you become someone else, especially an

animal, you are no longer yourself according to any ordinary use of

language. But one of the principal forms taken by the doctrine in India

makes a modified survival intelligible. For it is held that a new born

child brings with it as a result of actions done in previous lives

certain predispositions and these after being developed and modified in

the course of that child's life are transmitted to its next existence.

As to the method of transmission there are various theories, for in

India the belief in reincarnation is not so much a dogma as an instinct

innate in all and only occasionally justified by philosophers, not

because it was disputed but because they felt bound to show that their

own systems were compatible with it. One explanation is that given by

the Vedânta philosophy, according to which the soul is accompanied in

its migrations by the _Sûkshmaśarîra_ or subtle body, a counterpart of

the mortal body but transparent and invisible, though material. The

truth of this theory, as of all theories respecting ghosts and spirits,

seems to me a matter for experimental verification, but the Vedânta

recognizes that in our experience a personal individual existence is

always connected with a physical substratum.

The Buddhist theory of rebirth is somewhat different, for Buddhism even

in its later divagations rarely ceased to profess belief in Gotama's

doctrine that there is no such thing as a soul—by which is meant no such

thing as a permanent unchanging self or _âtman_. Buddhists are concerned

to show that transmigration is not inconsistent with this denial of the

_âtman_. The ordinary, and indeed inevitable translation of this word by

soul leads to misunderstanding for we naturally interpret it as meaning

that there is nothing which survives the death of the body and _a

fortiori_ nothing to transmigrate. But in reality the denial of the

_âtman_ applies to the living rather than to the dead. It means that in

a living man there is no permanent, unchangeable entity but only a

series of mental states, and since human beings, although they have no

_âtman_, certainly exist in this present life, the absence of the

_âtman_ is not in itself an obstacle to belief in a similar life after

death or before birth. Infancy, youth, age and the state immediately

after death may form a series of which the last two are as intimately

connected as any other two. The Buddhist teaching is that when men die

in whom the desire for another life exists—as it exists in all except

saints—then desire, which is really the creator of the world, fashions

another being, conditioned by the character and merits of the being

which has just come to an end. Life is like fire: its very nature is to

burn its fuel. When one body dies, it is as if one piece of fuel were

burnt: the vital process passes on and recommences in another and so

long as there is desire of life, the provision of fuel fails not.

Buddhist doctors have busied themselves with the question whether two

successive lives are the same man or different men, and have illustrated

the relationship by various analogies of things which seem to be the

same and yet not the same, such as a child and an adult, milk and curds,

or fire which spreads from a lamp and burns down a village, but, like

the Brahmans, they do not discuss why the hypothesis of transmigration

is necessary. They had the same feeling for the continuity of nature,

and more than others they insisted on the principle that everything has

a cause. They held that the sexual act creates the conditions in which a

new life appears but is not an adequate cause for the new life itself.

And unless we accept a materialist explanation of human nature, this

argument is sound: unless we admit that mind is merely a function of

matter, the birth of a mind is not explicable as a mere process of cell

development: something pre-existent must act upon the cells.

Europeans in discussing such questions as the nature of the soul and

immortality are prone to concentrate their attention on death and

neglect the phenomena of birth, which surely are equally important. For

if a soul survives the death of this complex of cells which is called

the body, its origin and development must, according to all analogy, be

different from those of the perishable body. Orthodox theology deals

with the problem by saying that God creates a new soul every time a

child is born[35] but free discussion usually ignores it and taking an

adult as he is, asks what are the chances that any part of him survives

death. Yet the questions, what is destroyed at death and how and why,

are closely connected with the questions what comes into existence at

birth and how and why. This second series of questions is hard enough,

but it has this advantage over the first that whereas death abruptly

closes the road and we cannot follow the soul one inch on its journey

beyond, the portals of birth are a less absolute frontier. We know that

every child has passed through stages in which it could hardly be called

a child. The earliest phase consists of two cells, which unite and then

proceed to subdivide and grow. The mystery of the process by which they

assume a human form is not explained by scientific or theological

phrases. The complete individual is assuredly not contained in the first

germ. The microscope cannot find it there and to say that it is there

potentially, merely means that we know the germ will develop in a

certain way. To say that a force is manifesting itself in the germ and

assuming the shape which it chooses to take or must take is also merely

a phrase and metaphor, but it seems to me to fit the facts[36].

The doctrines of pre-existence and transmigration (but not, I think, of

karma which is purely Indian) are common among savages in Africa and

America, nor is their wide distribution strange. Savages commonly think

that the soul wanders during sleep and that a dead man's soul goes

somewhere: what more natural than to suppose that the soul of a new born

infant comes from somewhere? But among civilized peoples such ideas are

in most cases due to Indian influence. In India they seem indigenous to

the soil and not imported by the Aryan invaders, for they are not

clearly enunciated in the Rig Veda, nor formulated before the time of

the Upanishads[37]. They were introduced by Buddhism to the Far East and

their presence in Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Sufiism and ultimately in

the Jewish Kabbala seems a rivulet from the same source. Recent research

discredits the theory that metempsychosis was an important feature in

the earlier religion of Egypt or among the Druids[38]. But it played a

prominent part in the philosophy of Pythagoras and in the Orphic

mysteries, which had some connection with Thrace and possibly also with

Crete. A few great European intellects[39]--notably Plato and

Virgil—have given it undying expression, but Europeans as a whole have

rejected it with that curiously crude contempt which they have shown

until recently for Oriental art and literature.

Considering how fixed is the belief in immortality among Europeans, or

at least the desire for it, the rarity of a belief in pre-existence or

transmigration is remarkable. But most people's expectation of a future

life is based on craving rather than on reasoned anticipation. I cannot

myself understand how anything that comes into being can be immortal.

Such immortality is unsupported by a single analogy nor can any instance

be quoted of a thing which is known to have had an origin and yet is

even apparently indestructible[40]. And is it possible to suppose that

the universe is capable of indefinite increase by the continual addition

of new and eternal souls? But these difficulties do not exist for

theories which regard the soul as something existing before as well as

after the body, truly immortal _a parte ante_ as well as _a parte post_

and manifesting itself in temporary homes of human or lower shape. Such

theories become very various and fall into many obscurities when they

try to define the nature of the soul and its relation to the body, but

they avoid what seems to me the contradiction of the created but

immortal soul.

The doctrine of metempsychosis is also interesting as affecting the

relations of men and animals. The popular European conception of "the

beasts which perish" weakens the arguments for human immortality. For if

the mind of a dog or chimpanzee contains no element which is immortal,

the part of the human mind on which the claim to immortality can be

based must be parlously small, since _ex hypothesi_ sensation, volition,

desire and the simpler forms of intelligence are not immortal. But in

India where men have more charity and more philosophy this distinction

is not drawn. The animating principle of men, animals and plants is

regarded as one or at least similar, and even matter which we consider

inanimate, such as water, is often considered to possess a soul. But

though there is ample warrant in both Brahmanic and Buddhist literature

for the idea that the soul may sink from a human to an animal form or

_vice versâ_ rise, and though one sometimes meets this belief in modern

life[41], yet it is not the most prominent aspect of metempsychosis in

India and the beautiful precept of ahimsâ or not injuring living things

is not, as Europeans imagine, founded on the fear of eating one's

grandparents but rather on the humane and enlightened feeling that all

life is one and that men who devour beasts are not much above the level

of the beasts who devour one another. The feeling has grown stronger

with time. In the Vedas animal sacrifices are prescribed and they are

even now used in the worship of some deities. In the Epics the eating of

meat is mentioned. But the doctrine that it is wrong to take animal life

was definitely adopted by Buddhism and gained strength with its

diffusion.

One obvious objection to all theories of rebirth is that we do not

remember our previous existences and that, if they are connected by no

thread of memory, they are for all practical purposes the existences of

different people. But this want of memory affects not only past

existences but the early phases of this existence. Does any one deny his

existence as an infant or embryo because he cannot remember it[42]? And

if a wrong could be done to an infant the effects of which would not be

felt for twenty years, could it be said to be no concern of the infant

because the person who will suffer in twenty years time will have no

recollection that he was that infant? And common opinion in Eastern

Asia, not without occasional confirmation from Europe, denies the

proposition that we cannot remember our former lives and asserts that

those who take any pains to sharpen their spiritual faculties can

remember them. The evidence for such recollection seems to me better

than the evidence for most spiritualistic phenomena[43].

Another objection comes from the facts of heredity. On the whole we

resemble our parents and ancestors in mind as well as in body. A child

often seems to be an obvious product of its parents and not a being come

from outside and from another life. This objection of course applies

equally to the creation theory. If the soul is created by an act of God,

there seems to be no reason why it should be like the parents, or, if he

causes it to be like them, he is made responsible for sending children

into the world with vicious natures. On the other hand if parents

literally make a child, mind as well as body, there seems to be no

reason why children should ever be unlike their parents, or brothers and

sisters unlike one another, as they undoubtedly sometimes are. An Indian

would say that a soul[44] seeking rebirth carries with it certain

potentialities of good and evil and can obtain embodiment only in a

family offering the necessary conditions. Hence to some extent it is

natural that the child should be like its parents. But the soul seeking

rebirth is not completely fixed in form and stiff: it is hampered and

limited by the results of its previous life, but in many respects it may

be flexible and free, ready to vary in response to its new environment.

But there is a psychological and temperamental objection to the doctrine

of rebirth, which goes to the root of the matter. Love of life and the

desire to find a field of activity are so strong in most Europeans that

it might be supposed that a theory offering an endless vista of new

activities and new chances would be acceptable. But as a rule Europeans

who discuss the question say that they do not relish this prospect. They

may be willing to struggle until death, but they wish for

repose—conscious repose of course—afterwards. The idea that one just

dead has not entered into his rest, but is beginning another life with

similar struggles and fleeting successes, similar sorrows and

disappointments, is not satisfying and is almost shocking[45]. We do not

like it, and not to like any particular view about the destinies of the

soul is generally, but most illogically, considered a reason for

rejecting it[46].

12.

It must not however be supposed that Hindus like the prospect of

transmigration. On the contrary from the time of the Upanishads and the

Buddha to the present day their religious ideal corresponding to

salvation is emancipation and deliverance, deliverance from rebirth and

from the bondage of desire which brings about rebirth. Now all Indian

theories as to the nature of transmigration are in some way connected

with the idea of _Karma_, that is the power of deeds done in past

existences to condition or even to create future existences. Every deed

done, whether good or bad, affects the character of the doer for a long

while, so that to use a metaphor, the soul awaiting rebirth has a

special shape, which is of its own making, and it can find re-embodiment

only in a form into which that shape can squeeze.

These views of rebirth and karma have a moral value, for they teach that

what a man gets depends on what he is or makes himself to be, and they

avoid the difficulty of supposing that a benevolent creator can have

given his creatures only one life with such strange and unmerited

disproportion in their lots. Ordinary folk in the East hope that a life

of virtue will secure them another life as happy beings on earth or

perhaps in some heaven which, though not eternal, will still be long.

But for many the higher ideal is renunciation of the world and a life of

contemplative asceticism which will accumulate no karma so that after

death the soul will pass not to another birth but to some higher and

more mysterious state which is beyond birth and death. It is the

prevalence of views like this which has given both Hinduism and Buddhism

the reputation of being pessimistic and unpractical.

It is generally assumed that these are bad epithets, but are they not

applicable to Christian teaching? Modern and medieval Christianity—as

witness many popular hymns—regards this world as vain and transitory, a

vale of tears and tribulation, a troubled sea through whose waves we

must pass before we reach our rest. And choirs sing, though without much

conviction, that it is weary waiting here. This language seems justified

by the Gospels and Epistles. It is true that some utterances of Christ

suggest that happiness is to be found in a simple and natural life of

friendliness and love, but on the whole both he and St Paul teach that

the world is evil or at least spoiled and distorted: to become a happy

world it must be somehow remade and transfigured by the second coming of

Christ. The desires and ambitions which are the motive power of modern

Europe are, if not wrong, at least vain and do not even seek for true

peace and happiness. Like Indian teachers, the early Christians tried to

create a right temper rather than to change social institutions. They

bade masters and slaves treat one another with kindness and respect, but

they did not attempt to abolish slavery.

Indian thought does not really go much further in pessimism than

Christianity, but its pessimism is intellectual rather than emotional.

He who understands the nature of the soul and its successive lives

cannot regard any single life as of great importance in itself, though

its consequences for the future may be momentous, and though he will not

say that life is not worth living. Reiterated declarations that all

existence is suffering do, it is true, seem to destroy all prospect of

happiness and all motive for effort, but the more accurate statement is,

in the words of the Buddha himself, that all clinging to physical

existence involves suffering. The earliest Buddhist texts teach that

when this clinging and craving cease, a feeling of freedom and happiness

takes their place and later Buddhism treated itself to visions of

paradise as freely as Christianity. Many forms of Hinduism teach that

the soul released from the body can enjoy eternal bliss in the presence

of God and even those severer philosophers who do not admit that the

released soul is a personality in any human sense have no doubt of its

happiness.

The opposition is not so much between Indian thought and the New

Testament, for both of them teach that bliss is attainable but not by

satisfying desire. The fundamental contrast is rather between both India

and the New Testament on the one hand and on the other the rooted

conviction of European races[47], however much Christian orthodoxy may

disguise their expression of it, that this world is all-important. This

conviction finds expression not only in the avowed pursuit of pleasure

and ambition but in such sayings as that the best religion is the one

which does most good and such ideals as self-realization or the full

development of one's nature and powers. Europeans as a rule have an

innate dislike and mistrust of the doctrine that the world is vain or

unreal. They can accord some sympathy to a dying man who sees in due

perspective the unimportance of his past life or to a poet who under the

starry heavens can make felt the smallness of man and his earth. But

such thoughts are considered permissible only as retrospects, not as

principles of life: you may say that your labour has amounted to

nothing, but not that labour is vain. Though monasteries and monks still

exist, the great majority of Europeans instinctively disbelieve in

asceticism, the contemplative life and contempt of the world: they have

no love for a philosopher who rejects the idea of progress and is not

satisfied with an ideal consisting in movement towards an unknown goal.

They demand a religion which theoretically justifies the strenuous life.

All this is a matter of temperament and the temperament is so common

that it needs no explanation. What needs explanation is rather the other

temperament which rejects this world as unsatisfactory and sets up

another ideal, another sphere, another standard of values. This ideal

and standard are not entirely peculiar to India but certainly they are

understood and honoured there more than elsewhere. They are professed,

as I have already observed, by Christianity, but even the New Testament

is not free from the idea that saints are having a bad time now but will

hereafter enjoy a triumph, parlously like the exuberance of the wicked

in this world. The Far East too has its unworldly side which, though

harmonizing with Buddhism, is native. In many ways the Chinese are as

materialistic as Europeans, but throughout the long history of their art

and literature, there has always been a school, clear-voiced if small,

which has sung and pursued the joys of the hermit, the dweller among

trees and mountains who finds nature and his own thoughts an

all-sufficient source of continual happiness. But the Indian ideal,

though it often includes the pleasures of communion with nature, differs

from most forms of the Chinese and Christian ideal inasmuch as it

assumes the reality of certain religious experiences and treats them as

the substance and occupation of the highest life. We are disposed to

describe these experiences as trances or visions, names which generally

mean something morbid or hypnotic. But in India their validity is

unquestioned and they are not considered morbid. The sensual scheming

life of the world is sick and ailing; the rapture of contemplation is

the true and healthy life of the soul. More than that it is the type and

foretaste of a higher existence compared with which this world is

worthless or rather nothing at all. This view has been held in India for

nearly three thousand years: it has been confirmed by the experience of

men whose writings testify to their intellectual power and has commanded

the respect of the masses. It must command our respect too, even if it

is contrary to our temperament, for it is the persistent ideal of a

great nation and cannot be explained away as hallucination or

charlatanism. It is allied to the experiences of European mystics of

whom St Teresa is a striking example, though less saintly persons, such

as Walt Whitman and J.A. Symonds, might also be cited. Of such mysticism

William James said "the existence of mystical states absolutely

overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and

ultimate dictators of what we may believe[48]."

These mystical states are commonly described as meditation but they

include not merely peaceful contemplation but ecstatic rapture. They are

sometimes explained as union with Brahman[49], the absorption of the

soul in God, or its feeling that it is one with him. But this is

certainly not the only explanation of ecstasy given in India, for it is

recognized as real and beneficent by Buddhists and Jains. The same

rapture, the same sense of omniscience and of ability to comprehend the

scheme of things, the same peace and freedom are experienced by both

theistic and non-theistic sects, just as they have also been experienced

by Christian mystics. The experiences are real but they do not depend on

the presence of any special deity, though they may be coloured by the

theological views of individual thinkers[50]. The earliest Buddhist

texts make right rapture (sammâ samâdhi) the end and crown of the

eight-fold path but offer no explanation of it. They suggest that it is

something wrought by the mind for itself and without the co-operation or

infusion of any external influence.

13.

Indian ideas about the destiny of the soul are connected with equally

important views about its nature. I will not presume to say what is the

definition of the soul in European philosophy but in the language of

popular religion it undoubtedly means that which remains when a body is

arbitrarily abstracted from a human personality, without enquiring how

much of that personality is thinkable without a material substratum.

This popular soul includes mind, perception and desire and often no

attempt is made to distinguish it from them. But in India it is so

distinguished. The soul (âtman or purusha) _uses_ the mind and senses:

they are its instruments rather than parts of it. Sight, for instance,

serves as the spectacles of the soul, and the other senses and even the

mind (manas) which is an intellectual _organ_ are also instruments. If

we talk of a soul passing from death to another birth, this according to

most Hindus is a soul accompanied by its baggage of mind and senses, a

subtle body indeed, but still gaseous not spiritual. But what is the

soul by itself? When an English poet sings of death that it is "Only the

sleep eternal in an eternal night" or a Greek poet calls it [Greek:

atermona nêgreton hupnon] we feel that they are denying immortality. But

Indian divines maintain that deep sleep is one of the states in which

the soul approaches nearest to God: that it is a state of bliss, and is

unconscious not because consciousness is suspended but because no

objects are presented to it. Even higher than dreamless sleep is another

condition known simply as the fourth state[51], the others being waking,

dream-sleep and dreamless sleep. In this fourth state thought is one

with the object of thought and, knowledge being perfect, there exists no

contrast between knowledge and ignorance. All this sounds strange to

modern Europe. We are apt to say that dreamless sleep is simply

unconsciousness[52] and that the so-called fourth state is imaginary or

unmeaning. But to follow even popular speculation in India it is

necessary to grasp this truth, or assumption, that when discursive

thought ceases, when the mind and the senses are no longer active, the

result is not unconsciousness equivalent to non-existence but the

highest and purest state of the soul, in which, rising above thought and

feeling, it enjoys the untrammelled bliss of its own nature[53].

If these views sound mysterious and fanciful, I would ask those

Europeans who believe in the immortality of the soul what, in their

opinion, survives death. The brain, the nerves and the sense organs

obviously decay: the soul, you may say, is not a product of them, but

when they are destroyed or even injured, perceptive and intellectual

processes are inhibited and apparently rendered impossible. Must not

that which lives for ever be, as the Hindus think, independent of

thought and of sense-impressions?

I have observed in my reading that European philosophers are more ready

to talk about soul and spirit than to define them[54] and the same is

true of Indian philosophers. The word most commonly rendered by soul is

_âtman_[55] but no one definition can be given for it, for some hold

that the soul is identical with the Universal Spirit, others that it is

merely of the same nature, still others that there are innumerable souls

uncreate and eternal, while the Buddhists deny the existence of a soul

_in toto_. But most Hindus who believe in the existence of an âtman or

soul agree in thinking that it is the real self and essence of all human

beings (or for that matter of other beings): that it is eternal _a parte

ante_ and _a parte post_: that it is not subject to variation but passes

unchanged from one birth to another: that youth and age, joy and sorrow,

and all the accidents of human life are affections, not so much of the

soul as of the envelopes and limitations which surround it during its

pilgrimage: that the soul, if it can be released and disengaged from

these envelopes, is in itself knowledge and bliss, knowledge meaning the

immediate and intuitive knowledge of God. A proper comprehension of this

point of view will make us chary of labelling Indian thought as

pessimistic on the ground that it promises the soul something which we

are inclined to call unconsciousness.

In studying oriental religions sympathy and a desire to agree if

possible are the first requisites. For instance, he who says of a

certain ideal "this means annihilation and I do not like it" is on the

wrong way. The right way is to ascertain what many of our most

intelligent brothers mean by the cessation of mental activity and why it

is for them an ideal.

14. _Eastern Pessimism and Renunciation_

But the charge of pessimism against Eastern religions is so important

that we must consider other aspects of it, for though the charge is

wrong, it is wrong only because those who bring it do not use quite the

right word. And indeed it would be hard to find the right word in a

European language. The temperament and theory described as pessimism are

European. They imply an attitude of revolt, a right to judge and

grumble. Why did the Deity make something out of nothing? What was his

object? But this is not the attitude of Eastern thought: it generally

holds that we cannot imagine nothing: that the world process is without

beginning or end and that man must learn how to make the best of it.

The Far East purged Buddhism of much of its pessimism. There we see that

the First Truth about suffering is little more than an admission of the

existence of evil, which all religions and common sense admit. Evil

ceases in the saint: nirvana in this life is perfect happiness. And

though striving for the material improvement of the world is not held up

conspicuously as an ideal in the Buddhist scriptures (or for that matter

in the New Testament), yet it is never hinted that good effort is vain.

A king should be a good king.

Renunciation is a great word in the religions of both Europe and Asia,

but in Europe it is almost active. Except to advanced mystics, it means

abandoning a natural attitude and deliberately assuming another which it

is difficult to maintain. Something similar is found in India in the

legends of those ascetics who triumphed over the flesh until they become

very gods in power[56]. But it is also a common view in the East that he

who renounces ambition and passion is not struggling against the world

and the devil but simply leading a natural life. His passions indeed

obey his will and do not wander here and there according to their fancy,

but his temperament is one of acquiescence not resistance. He takes his

place among the men, beasts and plants around him and ceasing to

struggle finds that his own soul contains happiness in itself.

Most Europeans consider man as the centre and lord of the world or, if

they are very religious, as its vice-regent under God. He may kill or

otherwise maltreat animals for his pleasure or convenience: his task is

to subdue the forces of nature: nature is subservient to him and to his

destinies: without man nature is meaningless. Much the same view was

held by the ancient Greeks and in a less acute form by the Jews and

Romans. Swinburne's line

Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things

is overbold for professing Christians but it expresses both the modern

scientific sentiment and the ancient Hellenic sentiment.

But such a line of poetry would I think be impossible in India or in any

country to the East of it. There man is thought of as a part of nature

not its centre or master[57]. Above him are formidable hosts of deities

and spirits, and even European engineers cannot subdue the genii of the

flood and typhoon: below but still not separated from him are the

various tribes of birds and beasts. A good man does not kill them for

pleasure nor eat flesh, and even those whose aspirations to virtue are

modest treat animals as humble brethren rather than as lower creatures

over whom they have dominion by divine command.

This attitude is illustrated by Chinese and Japanese art. In

architecture, this art makes it a principle that palaces and temples

should not dominate a landscape but fit into it and adapt their lines to

its features. For the painter, flowers and animals form a sufficient

picture by themselves and are not felt to be inadequate because man is

absent. Portraits are frequent but a common form of European

composition, namely a group of figures subordinated to a principal one,

though not unknown, is comparatively rare.

How scanty are the records of great men in India! Great buildings

attract attention but who knows the names of the architects who planned

them or the kings who paid for them? We are not quite sure of the date

of Kâlidâsa, the Indian Shakespeare, and though the doctrines of

Śankara, Kabir, and Nânak still nourish, it is with difficulty that the

antiquary collects from the meagre legends clinging to their names a few

facts for their biographies. And Kings and Emperors, a class who in

Europe can count on being remembered if not esteemed after death, fare

even worse. The laborious research of Europeans has shown that Asoka and

Harsha were great monarchs. Their own countrymen merely say "once upon a

time there was a king" and recount some trivial story.

In fact, Hindus have a very weak historical sense. In this they are not

wholly wrong, for Europeans undoubtedly exaggerate the historical

treatment of thought and art[58]. In science, most students want to know

what is certain in theory and useful in practice, not what were the

discarded hypotheses and imperfect instruments of the past. In

literature, when the actors and audience are really interested, the date

of Shakespeare and even the authorship of the play cease to be

important[59]. In the same way Hindus want to know whether doctrines and

speculations are true, whether a man can make use of them in his own

religious experiences and aspirations. They care little for the date,

authorship, unity and textual accuracy of the Bhagavad-gîtâ. They simply

ask, is it true, what can I get from it? The European critic, who

expects nothing of the sort from the work, racks his brains to know who

wrote it and when, who touched it up and why?

The Hindus are also indifferent to the past because they do not

recognize that the history of the world, the whole cosmic process, has

any meaning or value. In most departments of Indian thought, great or

small, the conception of [Greek: telos] or purpose is absent, and if the

European reader thinks this a grave lacuna, let him ask himself whether

satisfied love has any [Greek: telos]. For Hindus the world is endless

repetition not a progress towards an end. Creation has rarely the sense

which it bears for Europeans. An infinite number of times the universe

has collapsed in flaming or watery ruin, aeons of quiescence follow the

collapse and then the Deity (he has done it an infinite number of times)

emits again from himself worlds and souls of the same old kind. But

though, as I have said before, all varieties of theological opinion may

be found in India, he is usually represented as moved by some

reproductive impulse rather than as executing a plan. Śankara says

boldly that no motive can be attributed to God, because he being perfect

can desire no addition to his perfection, so that his creative activity

is mere exuberance, like the sport of young princes, who take exercise

though they are not obliged to do so.

Such views are distasteful to Europeans. Our vanity impels us to invent

explanations of the Universe which make our own existence important and

significant. Nor does European science altogether support the Indian

doctrine of periodicity. It has theories as to the probable origin of

the solar system and other similar systems, but it points to the

conclusion that the Universe as a whole is not appreciably affected by

the growth or decay of its parts, whereas Indian imagination thinks of

universal cataclysms and recurring periods of quiescence in which

nothing whatever remains except the undifferentiated divine spirit.

Western ethics generally aim at teaching a man how to act: Eastern

ethics at forming a character. A good character will no doubt act

rightly when circumstances require action, but he need not seek

occasions for action, he may even avoid them, and in India the

passionless sage is still in popular esteem superior to warriors,

statesmen and scientists.

15. _Eastern Polytheism_

Different as India and China are, they agree in this that in order not

to misapprehend their religious condition we must make our minds

familiar with a new set of relations. The relations of religion to

philosophy, to ethics, and to the state, as well as the relations of

different religions to one another, are not the same as in Europe. China

and India are pagan, a word which I deprecate if it is understood to

imply inferiority but which if used in a descriptive and respectful

sense is very useful. Christianity and Islam are organized religions.

They say (or rather their several sects say) that they each not only

possess the truth but that all other creeds and rites are wrong. But

paganism is not organized: it rarely presents anything like a church

united under one head: still more rarely does it condemn or interfere

with other religions unless attacked first. Buddhism stands between the

two classes. Like Christianity and Islam it professes to teach the only

true law, but unlike them it is exceedingly tolerant and many Buddhists

also worship Hindu or Chinese gods.

Popular religion in India and China is certainly polytheistic, yet if

one uses this word in contrast to the monotheism of Islam and of

Protestantism the antithesis is unjust, for the polytheist does not

believe in many creators and rulers of the world, in many Allahs or

Jehovahs, but he considers that there are many spiritual beings, with

different spheres and powers, to the most appropriate of whom he

addresses his petitions. Polytheism and image-worship lie under an

unmerited stigma in Europe. We generally assume that to believe in one

God is obviously better, intellectually and ethically, than to believe

in many. Yet Trinitarian religions escape being polytheistic only by

juggling with words, and if Hindus and Chinese are polytheists so are

the Roman and Oriental Churches, for there is no real distinction

between praying to the Madonna, Saints and Angels, and propitiating

minor deities. William James[60] has pointed out that polytheism is not

theoretically absurd and is practically the religion of many Europeans.

In some ways it is more intelligible and reasonable than monotheism. For

if there is only one personal God, I do not understand how anything that

can be called a person can be so expanded as to be capable of hearing

and answering the prayers of the whole world. Anything susceptible of

such extension must be more than a person. Is it not at least equally

reasonable to assume that there are many spirits, or many shapes taken

by the superpersonal world spirit, with which the soul can get into

touch?

The worship of images cannot be recommended without qualification, for

it seems to require artists capable of making a worthy representation of

the divine. And it must be confessed that many figures in Indian

temples, such as the statues of Kâlî, seem repulsive or grotesque,

though a Hindu might say that none of them are so strange in idea or so

horrible in appearance as the crucifix. But the claim of the iconoclast

from the times of the Old Testament onwards that he worships a spirit

whereas others worship wood and stone is true only of the lowest phases

of religion, if even there. Hindu theologians distinguish different

kinds of _avatâras_ or ways in which God descends into the world: among

them are incarnations like Krishna, the presence of God in the human

heart and his presence in a symbol or image (_arcâ_). It may be

difficult to decide how far the symbol and the spirit are kept separate

either in the East or in Europe, but no one can attend a great

car-festival in southern India or the feast of Durgâ in Bengal without

feeling and in some measure sharing the ecstasy and enthusiasm of the

crowd. It is an enthusiasm such as may be evoked in critical times by a

king or a flag, and as the flag may do duty for the king and all that he

stands for, so may the image do duty for the deity.

16. _The Extravagance of Hinduism_

What I have just said applies to India rather than to China and so do

the observations which follow. India is the most religious country in

the world. The percentage of people who literally make religion their

chief business, who sacrifice to it money and life itself (for religious

suicide is not extinct), is far greater than elsewhere. Russia[61]

probably comes next but the other nations fall behind by a long

interval. Matter of fact respectable people—Chinese as well as

Europeans—call this attitude extravagance and it sometimes deserves the

name, for since there is no one creed or criterion in India, all sorts

of aboriginal or decadent superstitions command the respect due to the

name of religion.

This extravagance is both intellectual and moral. No story is too

extraordinary to be told of Hindu gods. They are the magicians of the

universe who sport with the forces of nature as easily as a conjuror in

a bazaar does tricks with a handful of balls. But though the average

Hindu would be shocked to hear the Puranas described as idle tales, yet

he does not make his creed depend on their accuracy, as many in Europe

make Christianity depend on miracles. The value of truth in religion is

rated higher in India than in Europe but it is not historical truth. The

Hindu approaches his sacred literature somewhat in the spirit in which

we approach Milton and Dante. The beauty and value of such poems is

clear. The question whether they are accurate reports of facts seems

irrelevant. Hindus believe in progressive revelation. Many Tantras and

Vishnuite works profess to be better suited to the present age than the

Vedas, and innumerable treatises in the vernacular are commonly accepted

as scripture.

Scriptures in India[62] are thought of as words not writings. It is the

sacred sound not a sacred book which is venerated. They are learnt by

oral transmission and it is rare to see a book used in religious

services. Diagrams accompanied by letters and a few words are credited

with magical powers, but still tantric spells are things to be recited

rather than written. This view of scripture makes the hearer uncritical.

The ordinary layman hears parts of a sacred book recited and probably

admires what he understands, but he has no means of judging of a book as

a whole, especially of its coherency and consistency.

The moral extravagance of Hinduism is more serious. It is kept in check

by the general conviction that asceticism, or at least temperance,

charity and self-effacement are the indispensable outward signs of

religion, but still among the great religions of the world there is none

which countenances so many hysterical, immoral and cruel rites. A

literary example will illustrate the position. It is taken from the

drama Mâdhava and Mâlatî written about 730 A.D., but the incidents of

the plot might happen in any native state to-day, if European

supervision were removed. In it Mâdhava, a young Brahman, surprises a

priest of the goddess Châmundâ who is about to immolate Mâlatî. He kills

the priest and apparently the other characters consider his conduct

natural and not sacrilegious. But it is not suggested that either the

police or any ecclesiastical authority ought to prevent human

sacrifices, and the reason why Mâdhava was able to save his beloved from

death was that he had gone to the uncanny spot where such rites were

performed to make an offering of human flesh to demons.

In Buddhism religion and the moral law are identified, but not in

Hinduism. Brahmanical literature contains beautiful moral sayings,

especially about unselfishness and self-restraint, but the greatest

popular gods such as Vishnu and Śiva are not identified with the moral

law. They are super-moral and the God of philosophy, who _is_ all

things, is also above good and evil. The aim of the philosophic saint is

not so much to choose the good and eschew evil as to draw nearer to God

by rising above both.

Indian literature as a whole has a strong ethical and didactic flavour,

yet the great philosophic and religious systems concern themselves

little with ethics. They discuss the nature of the external world and

other metaphysical questions which seem to us hardly religious: they

clearly feel a peculiar interest in defining the relation of the soul to

God, but they rarely ask why should I be good or what is the sanction of

morality. They are concerned less with sin than with ignorance: virtue

is indispensable, but without knowledge it is useless.

17. _The Hindu and Buddhist Scriptures_

The history and criticism of Hindu and Buddhist scriptures naturally

occupy some space in this work, but two general remarks may be made

here. First, the oldest scriptures are almost without exception

compilations, that is collections of utterances handed down by tradition

and arranged by later generations in some form which gives them apparent

unity. Thus the Rig Veda is obviously an anthology of hymns and some

three thousand years later the Granth or sacred book of the Sikhs was

compiled on the same principle. It consists of poems by Nanak, Kabir and

many other writers but is treated with extraordinary respect as a

continuous and consistent revelation. The Brahmanas and Upanishads are

not such obvious compilations yet on careful inspection the older[63]

ones will be found to be nothing else. Thus the Brihad Aranyaka

Upanishad, though possessing considerable coherency, is not only a

collection of such philosophic views as commended themselves to the

doctors of the Taittiriya school, but is formed by the union of three

such collections. Each of the first two collections ends with a list of

the teachers who handed it down and the third is openly called a

supplement. One long passage, the dialogue between Yâjnavalkya and his

wife, is incorporated in both the first and the second collection. Thus

our text represents the period when the Taittirîyas brought their

philosophic thoughts together in a complete form, but that period was

preceded by another in which slightly different schools each had their

own collection and for some time before this the various maxims and

dialogues must have been current separately. Since the conversation

between Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi occurs in almost the same form in two

collections, it probably once existed as an independent piece.

In Buddhist literature the composite and tertiary character of the Sutta

Pitaka is equally plain. The various Nikayas are confessedly collections

of discourses. The two older ones seem dominated by the desire to bring

before the reader the image of the Buddha preaching: the Samyutta and

Anguttara emphasize the doctrine rather than the teacher and arrange

much the same matter under new headings. But it is clear that in

whatever form the various sermons, dialogues and dissertations appear,

that form is not primary but presupposes compilers dealing with an oral

tradition already stereotyped in language. For long passages such as the

tract on morality and the description of progress in the religious life

occur in several discourses and the amount of matter common to different

Suttas and Nikayas is surprising. Thus nearly the whole of the long

Sutta describing the Buddha's last days and death[64], which at first

sight seems to be a connected narrative somewhat different from other

Suttas, is found scattered in other parts of the Canon.

Thus our oldest texts whether Brahmanic or Buddhist are editions and

codifications, perhaps amplifications, of a considerably older oral

teaching. They cannot be treated as personal documents similar to the

Koran or the Epistles of Paul.

The works of middle antiquity such as the Epics, Puranas, and Mahayanist

sutras were also not produced by one author. Many of them exist in more

than one recension and they usually consist of a nucleus enveloped and

sometimes itself affected by additions which may exceed the original

matter in bulk. The Mahâbhârata and Prajñâpâramitâ are not books in the

European sense: we cannot give a date or a table of contents for the

first edition[65]: they each represent a body of literature whose

composition extended over a long period. As time goes on, history

naturally grows clearer and literary personalities become more distinct,

yet the later Puranas are not attributed to human authors and were

susceptible of interpolation even in recent times. Thus the story of

Genesis has been incorporated in the Bhavishya Purana, apparently after

Protestant missionaries had begun to preach in India.

The other point to which I would draw attention is the importance of

relatively modern works, which supersede the older scriptures,

especially in Hinduism. This phenomenon is common in many countries, for

only a few books such as the Bhagavad-gîtâ, the Gospels and the sayings

of Confucius have a portion of the eternal and universal sufficient to

outlast the wear and tear of a thousand years. Vedic literature is far

from being discredited in India, though some Tantras say openly that it

is useless. It still has a place in ritual and is appealed to by

reforming sects. But to see Hinduism in proper perspective we must

remember that from the time of the Buddha till now, the composition of

religious literature in India has been almost uninterrupted and that

almost every century has produced works accepted by some sect as

infallible scripture. For most Vishnuites the Bhagavad-gîtâ is the

beginning of sacred literature and the Nârâyaṇîya[66] is also held in

high esteem: the philosophy of each sect is usually determined by a

commentary on the Brahma Sutras: the Bhagavata Purana (perhaps in a

vernacular paraphrase) and the Ramayana of Tulsi Das are probably the

favourite reading of the laity and for devotional purposes may be

supplemented by a collection of hymns such as the Namghosha, copies of

which actually receive homage in Assam. The average man—even the average

priest—regards all these as sacred works without troubling himself with

distinctions as to _śruti_ and _smṛiti_, and the Vedas and Upanishads

are hardly within his horizon.

In respect of sacred literature Buddhism is more conservative than

Hinduism, or to put it another way, has been less productive in the last

fifteen hundred years. The Hinayanists are like those Protestant sects

which still profess not to go beyond the Bible. The monks read the

Abhidhamma and the laity the Suttas, though perhaps both are disposed to

use extracts and compendiums rather than the full ancient texts. Among

the Mahayanists the ancient Vinaya and Nikayas exist only as literary

curiosities. The former is superseded by modern manuals, the latter by

Mahayanist Sutras such as the Lotus and the Happy Land, which are

however of respectable antiquity. As in India, each sect selects rather

arbitrarily a few books for its own use, without condemning others but

also without according to them the formal recognition received by the

Old and New Testaments among Christians.

No Asiatic country possesses so large a portion of the critical spirit

as China. The educated Chinese, however much they may venerate their

classics, think of them as we think of the masterpieces of Greek

literature, aS texts which may contain wrong readings, interpolations

and lacunae, which owe whatever authority they possess to the labours of

the scholars who collected, arranged and corrected them. This attitude

is to some extent the result of the attempt made by the First Emperor

about 200 B.C. to destroy the classical literature and to its subsequent

laborious restoration. At a time when the Indians regarded the Veda as a

verbal revelation, certain and divine in every syllable, the Chinese

were painfully recovering and re-piecing their ancient chronicles and

poems from imperfect manuscripts and fallible memories. The process

obliged them to enquire at every step whether the texts which they

examined were genuine and complete: to admit that they might be

defective or paraphrases of a difficult original. Hence the Chinese have

sound principles of criticism unknown to the Hindus and in discussing

the date of an ancient work or the probability of an alleged historical

event they generally use arguments which a European scholar can accept.

Chinese literature has a strong ethical and political flavour which

tempered the extravagance of imported Indian ideas. Most Chinese systems

assert more or less plainly that right conduct is conduct in harmony

with the laws of the State and the Universe.

18. _Morality and Will_

It is dangerous to make sweeping statements about the huge mass of

Indian literature, but I think that most Buddhist and Brahmanic systems

assume that morality is merely a means of obtaining happiness[67] and is

not obedience to a categorical imperative or to the will of God.

Morality is by inference raised to the status of a cosmic law, because

evil deeds will infallibly bring evil consequences to the doer in this

life or in another. But it is not commonly spoken of as such a law. The

usual point of view is that man desires happiness and for this morality

is a necessary though insufficient preparation. But there may be higher

states which cannot be expressed in terms of happiness.

The will receives more attention in European philosophy than in Indian,

whether Buddhist or Brahmanic, which both regard it not as a separate

kind of activity but as a form of thought. As such it is not neglected

in Buddhist psychology: will, desire and struggle are recognized as good

provided their object is good, a point overlooked by those who accuse

Buddhism of preaching inaction[68].

Schopenhauer's doctrine that will is the essential fact in the universe

and in life may appear to have analogies to Indian thought: it would be

easy for instance to quote passages from the Pitakas showing that

_taṇhâ_, thirst, craving or desire, is the force which makes and remakes

the world. But such statements must be taken as generalizations

respecting the world as it is rather than as implying theories of its

origin, for though _taṇhâ_ is a link in the chain of causation, it is

not regarded as an ultimate principle more than any other link but is

made to depend on feeling. The Mâyâ of the Vedanta is not so much the

affirmation of the will to live as the illusion that we have a real

existence apart from Brahman, and the same may be said of Ahaṃkâra in

the Sânkhya philosophy. It is the principle of egoism and individuality,

but its essence is not so much self-assertion as the _mistaken_ idea

that this is _mine_, that _I_ am happy or unhappy.

There is a question much debated in European philosophy but little

argued in India, namely the freedom of the will. The active European

feeling the obligation and the difficulties of morality is perplexed by

the doubt whether he really has the power to act as he wishes. This

problem has not much troubled the Hindus and rightly, as I think. For if

the human will is not free, what does freedom mean? What example of

freedom can be quoted with which to contrast the supposed non-freedom of

the will? If in fact it is from the will that our notion of freedom is

derived, is it not unreasonable to say that the will is not free?

Absolute freedom in the sense of something regulated by no laws is

unthinkable. When a thing is conditioned by external causes it is

dependent. When it is conditioned by internal causes which are part of

its own nature, it is free. No other freedom is known. An Indian would

say that a man's nature is limited by Karma. Some minds are incapable of

the higher forms of virtue and wisdom, just as some bodies are incapable

of athletic feats. But within the limits of his own nature a human being

is free. Indian theology is not much hampered by the mad doctrine that

God has predestined some souls to damnation, nor by the idea of Fate,

except in so far as Karma is Fate. It is Fate in the sense that Karma

inherited from a previous birth is a store of rewards and punishments

which must be enjoyed or endured, but it differs from Fate because we

are all the time making our own karma and determining the character of

our next birth.

The older Upanishads hint at a doctrine analogous to that of Kant,

namely that man is bound and conditioned in so far as he is a part of

the world of phenomena but free in so far as the self within him is

identical with the divine self which is the creator of all bonds and

conditions. Thus the Kaushîtaki Upanishad says, "He it is who causes the

man whom he will lead upwards from these worlds to do good works and He

it is who causes the man whom he will lead downwards to do evil works.

He is the guardian of the world, He is the ruler of the world, He is the

Lord of the world and He is myself." Here the last words destroy the

apparent determinism of the first part of the sentence. And similarly

the Chândogya Upanishad says, "They who depart hence without having

known the Self and those true desires, for them there is no freedom in

all worlds. But they who depart hence after knowing the Self and those

true desires, for them there is freedom in all worlds[70]."

Early Buddhist literature asserts uncompromisingly that every state of

consciousness has a cause and in one of his earliest discourses the

Buddha argues that the Skandhas, including mental states, cannot be the

Self because we have not free will to make them exactly what we

choose[71]. But throughout his ethical teaching it is I think assumed

that, subject to the law of karma, conscious action is equivalent to

spontaneous action. Good mental states can be made to grow and bad

mental states to decrease until the stage is reached when the saint

knows that he is free. It may perhaps be thought that the early

Buddhists did not realize the consequences of applying their doctrine of

causation to psychology and hence never faced the possibility of

determinism. But determinism, fatalism, and the uselessness of effort

formed part of the paradoxical teaching of Makkhali Gosala reported in

the Pitakas and therefore well known. If neither the Jains nor the

Buddhists allowed themselves to be embarrassed by such denials of free

will, the inference is that in some matters at least the Hindus had

strong common sense and declined to accept any view which takes away

from man the responsibility and lordship of his own soul.

19. _The Origin of Evil_

The reader will have gathered from what precedes that Hinduism has

little room for the Devil[72]. Buddhism being essentially an ethical

system recognizes the importance of the Tempter or Mâra, but still Mâra

is not an evil spirit who has spoilt a good world. In Hinduism, whether

pantheistic or polytheistic, there is even less disposition to personify

evil in one figure, and most Indian religious systems are disposed to

think of the imperfections of the world as suffering rather than as sin.

Yet the existence of evil is the chief reason for the existence of

religion, at least of such religions as promise salvation, and the

explanation of evil is the chief problem of all religions and

philosophies, and the problem which they all alike are conspicuously

unsuccessful in solving. I can assign no reason for rejecting as

untenable the idea that the ultimate reality may be a duality—a good and

an evil spirit—or even a plurality[73], but still it is unthinkable for

me and I believe for most minds. If there are two ultimate beings,

either they must be complementary and necessary one to the other, in

which case it seems to me more correct to describe them as two aspects

of one being, or if they are quite separate, my mind postulates (but I

do not know why) a third being who is the cause of them both.

The problem of evil is not quite the same for Indian and European

pantheists. The European pantheist holds that since God is all things or

in all things, evil is only something viewed out of due perspective:

that the world would be seen to be perfect, if it could be seen as a

whole, or that evil will be eliminated in the course of development. But

he cannot explain why the partial view of the world which human beings

are obliged to take shows the existence of obvious evil. The Hindus

think that it is possible and better for the soul to leave the vain show

of the world and find peace in union with God. They are therefore not

concerned to prove that the world is good, although they cannot explain

why God allows it to exist. The Upanishads contain some myths and

parables about the introduction of evil but they do not say that a

naturally good world was spoilt[74]. They rather imply that increasing

complexity involves the increase of evil as well as of good. This is

also the ground thought of the Aggañña Sutta, the Buddhist Genesis (Dig.

Nik. XXVII.).

I think that the substance of much Indian pantheism—late Buddhist as

well as Brahmanic—is that the world, the soul and God (the three terms

being practically the same) have two modes of existence: one of repose

and bliss, the other of struggle and trouble. Of these the first mode is

the better and it is only by mistake[75] that the eternal spirit adopts

the latter. But both the mistake and the correction of it are being

eternally repeated. Such a formulation of the Advaita philosophy would

no doubt be regarded in India as wholly unorthodox. Yet orthodoxy admits

that the existence of the world is due to the coexistence of Mâyâ

(illusion) with Brahman (spirit) and also states that the task of the

soul is to pass beyond Mâyâ to Brahman. If this is so, there is either a

real duality (Brahman and Mâyâ) or else Mâyâ is an aspect of Brahman,

but an aspect which the soul should transcend and avoid, and for whose

existence no reason whatever is given. The more theistic forms of Indian

religion, whether Sivaite or Vishnuite, tend to regard individual souls

and matter as eternal. By the help of God souls can obtain release from

matter. But here again there is no explanation why the soul is

contaminated by matter or ignorance.

It is clearly illogical to condemn the Infinite as bad or a mistake.

Buddhism is perhaps sometimes open to this charge because on account of

its exceedingly cautious language about nirvana it fails to set it up as

a reality contrasted with the world of suffering. But many varieties of

Indian religion do emphatically point to the infinite reality behind and

beyond Mâyâ. It is only Mâyâ which is unsatisfactory because it is

partial.

Another attempt to make the Universe intelligible regards it as an

eternal rhythm playing and pulsing outwards from spirit to matter

(pravritti) and then backwards and inwards from matter to spirit

(nirvritti). This idea seems implied by Śankara's view that creation is

similar to the sportive impulses of exuberant youth and the

Bhagavad-gîtâ is familiar with _pravritti_ and _nirvritti_, but the

double character of the rhythm is emphasized most clearly in Śâkta

treatises. Ordinary Hinduism concentrates its attention on the process

of liberation and return to Brahman, but the Tantras recognize and

consecrate both movements, the outward throbbing stream of energy and

enjoyment (bhukti) and the calm returning flow of liberation and peace.

Both are happiness, but the wise understand that the active outward

movement is right and happy only up to a certain point and under certain

restrictions.

That great poet Tulsi Das hints at an explanation of the creation or of

God's expansion of himself which will perhaps commend itself to

Europeans more than most Indian ideas, namely that the bliss enjoyed by

God and the souls whom he loves is greater than the bliss of solitary

divinity[76].

20. _Church and State_

I will now turn to another point, namely the relations of Church and

State. These are simplest in Buddhism, which teaches that the truth is

one, that all men ought to follow it and that all good kings should

honour and encourage it. This is also the Christian position but

Buddhism has almost always been tolerant and has hardly ever

countenanced the doctrine that error should be suppressed by force[77].

Buddhism does not claim to cover the whole field of religion as

understood in Europe: if people like to propitiate spirits in the hope

of obtaining wealth and crops, it permits them to do so. In Japan and

Tibet Buddhism has played a more secular role than in other countries,

analogous to the struggles of the mediaeval European church for temporal

authority. In Japan the great monasteries very nearly became the chief

military as well as the chief political power and this danger was

averted only by the destruction of Hieizan and other large

establishments in the sixteenth century. What was prevented in Japan did

actually happen in Tibet, for the monasteries became stronger than any

of the competing secular factions and the principal sect set up an

ecclesiastical government singularly like the Papacy. In southern

countries, such as Burma and Ceylon, Buddhism made no attempt to

interfere in politics. This aloofness is particularly remarkable in Siam

and Camboja, where state festivals are usually conducted by Brahmans not

by Buddhist ecclesiastics. In Siam, as formerly in Burma, the king being

a Buddhist is in some ways the head of the Church. He may reform lax

discipline or incorrect observances, but apparently not of his own

authority but merely as an executive power enforcing the opinion of the

higher clergy.

Buddhism and Hinduism both have the idea that the monk or priest is a

person who in virtue of ordination or birth lives on a higher level than

others. He may teach and do good but irrespective of that it is the duty

of the laity to support the priesthood. This doctrine is preached by

Hinduism in a stronger form than by Buddhism. The intellectual

superiority of the Brahmans as a caste was sufficiently real to ensure

its acceptance and in politics they had the good sense to rule by

serving, to be ministers and not kings. In theory and to a considerable

extent in practice, the Brahmans and their gods are not an _imperium in

imperio_ but an _imperium super imperium_. The position was possible

only because, unlike the Papacy and unlike the Lamas of Tibet, they had

no Pope and no hierarchy. They produced no à'Beckets or Hildebrands and

no Inquisition. They did not quarrel with science but monopolized it.

In India kings are expected to maintain the priesthood and the temples

yet Hinduism rarely assumes the form of a state religion[78] nor does it

admit, as state religions generally have to admit, that the secular arm

has a co-ordinate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters. Yet it affects

every department of social life and a Hindu who breaks with it loses his

social status. Hindu deities are rarely tribal gods like Athene of

Athens or the gods of Mr Kipling and the German Emperor. There are

thousands of shrines specially favoured by a divine presence but the

worshippers think of that presence not as the protector of a race or

city but as a special manifestation of a universal though often

invisible power. The conquests of Mohammedans and Christians are not

interpreted as meaning that the gods of Hinduism have succumbed to alien

deities.

The views prevalent in China and Japan as to the relations of Church and

State are almost the antipodes of those described. In those countries it

is the hardly dissembled theory of the official world that religion is a

department of government and that there should be regulations for gods

and worship, just as there are for ministers and etiquette. If we say

that religion is identified with the government in Tibet and forms an

_imperium super imperium_ in India, we may compare its position in the

Far East to native states under British rule. There is no interference

with creeds provided they respect ethical and social conventions:

interesting doctrines and rites are appreciated: the Government accepts

and rewards the loyal co-operation of the Buddhist and Taoist

priesthoods but maintains the right to restrict their activity should it

take a wrong political turn or should an excessive increase in the

number of monks seem a public danger. The Chinese Imperial Government

successfully claimed the strangest powers of ecclesiastical discipline,

since it promoted and degraded not only priests but deities. In both

China and Japan there has often been a strong current of feeling in the

official classes against Buddhism but on the other hand it often had the

support of both emperors and people, and princes not infrequently joined

the clergy, especially when it was desirable for them to live in

retirement. Confucianism and Shintoism, which are ethical and ceremonial

rather than doctrinal, have been in the past to some extent a law to the

governments of China and Japan, or more accurately an aspect of those

governments. But for many centuries Far Eastern statesmen have rarely

regarded Buddhism and Taoism as more than interesting and legitimate

activities, to be encouraged and regulated like educational and

scientific institutions.

21. _Public Worship and Ceremonial_

In no point does Hinduism differ from western religions more than in its

public worship and, in spite of much that is striking and interesting,

the comparison is not to the advantage of India. It is true that temple

worship is not so important for the Hindus as Church services are for

the Christian. They set more store on home ceremonies and on

contemplation. Still the temples of India are so numerous, so

conspicuous and so crowded that the religion which maintains them must

to some extent be judged by them.

At any rate they avoid the faults of public worship in the west. The

practice of arranging the congregation in seats for which they pay seems

to me more irreligious than the slovenliness of the heathen and makes

the whole performance resemble a very dull concert.

Protestant services are in the main modelled on the ritual of the

synagogue. They are meetings of the laity at which the scriptures are

read, prayers offered, sermons preached and benedictions pronounced. The

clergy play a principal but not exclusive part. The rites of the Roman

and Eastern Churches have borrowed much from pagan ceremonial but still

they have not wholly departed from the traditions of the synagogue.

These have also served as a model for Mohammedan ritual which differs

from the Jewish in little but its almost military regularity.

But with all this the ordinary ritual of Hindu temples[79] has nothing

in common. It derives from another origin and follows other lines. The

temple is regarded as the court of a prince and the daily ceremonies are

the attendance of his courtiers on him. He must be awakened, fed, amused

and finally put to bed. This conception of ritual prevailed in Egypt but

in India there is no trace of it in Vedic literature and perhaps it did

not come into fashion until Gupta times. Although the laity may be

present and salute the god, such worship cannot be called

congregational. Yet in other ways a Hindu temple may provide as much

popular worship as a Nonconformist chapel. In the corridors will

generally be found readers surrounded by an attentive crowd to whom they

recite and expound the Mahabharata or some other sacred text. At

festivals and times of pilgrimage the precincts are thronged by a crowd

of worshippers the like of which is hardly to be seen in Europe,

worshippers not only devout but fired with an enthusiasm which bursts

into a mighty chorus of welcome when the image of the god is brought

forth from the inner shrine.

The earlier forms of Buddhist ceremonial are of the synagogue type

(though in no way derived from Jewish sources) for, though there is no

prayer, they consist chiefly of confession, preaching and reading the

scriptures. But this puritanic severity could not be popular and the

veneration of images and relics was soon added to the ritual. The former

was adopted by Buddhism earlier than by the Brahmans. The latter, though

a conspicuous feature of Buddhism in all lands, is almost unknown to

Hinduism. In their later developments Buddhist and Christian ceremonies

show an extraordinary resemblance due in my opinion chiefly to

convergence, though I do not entirely exclude mutual influence. Both

Buddhism and Roman Catholicism accepted pagan ritual with some

reservations and refinements. The worship has for its object an image or

a shrine containing a relic which is placed in a conspicuous position at

the end of the hall of worship[80]. Animal sacrifices are rejected but

offerings of flowers, lights and incense are permitted, as well as the

singing of hymns. It is not altogether strange if Buddhist and Catholic

rituals starting from the same elements ended by producing similar

scenic effects.

Yet though the scenic effect may be similar, there is often a difference

in the nature of the rite. Direct invocations are not wanting in Tibetan

and Far Eastern Buddhism but many services consist not of prayers but of

the recitation of scripture by which merit is acquired. This merit is

then formally transferred by the officiants to some special object, such

as the peace of the dead or the prosperity of a living suppliant.

The later phases of both Hinduism and Buddhism are permeated by what is

called Tantrism[81], that is to say the endeavour to attain spiritual

ends by ritual acts such as gestures and the repetition of formulae.

These expedients are dangerous and may become puerile, but those who

ridicule them often forget that they may be termed sacramental with as

much propriety as magical and are in fact based on the same theory as

the sacraments of the Catholic Church. When a child is made eligible for

salvation by sprinkling with water, by the sign of the cross and by the

mantra "In the Name of the Father," etc., or when the divine spirit is

localized in bread and wine and worshipped, these rites are closely

analogous to tantric ceremonial.

The Buddhist temples of the Far East are in original intention copies of

Indian edifices and in the larger establishments there is a daily

routine of services performed by resident monks. But the management of

religious foundations in these countries has been much influenced by old

pagan usages as to temples and worship which show an interesting

resemblance to the customs of classical antiquity but have little in

common with Buddhist or Christian ideas. A Chinese municipal temple is a

public building dedicated to a spirit or departed worthy. If sacrifices

are offered in it, they are not likely to take place more than three or

four times a year. Private persons may go there to obtain luck by

burning a little incense or still more frequently to divine the future:

public meetings and theatrical performances may be held there, but

anything like a congregational service is rare. Just so in ancient Rome

a temple might be used for a meeting of the Senate or for funeral games.

22. _The Worship of the Reproductive Forces_

One aspect of Indian religions is so singular that it demands notice,

although it is difficult to discuss. I mean the worship of the

generative forces. The cult of a god, or more often of a goddess, who

personifies the reproductive and also the destructive powers of nature

(for it is not only in India that the two activities are seen to be

akin) existed in many countries. It was prominent in Babylonia and Asia

Minor, less prominent but still distinctly present in Egypt and in many

cases was accompanied by hysterical and immoral rites, by mutilations of

the body and offerings of blood. But in most countries such deities and

rites are a matter of ancient history: they decayed as civilization

grew: in China and Japan, as formerly in Greece and Rome, they are not

an important constituent of religion. It is only in India and to some

extent in Tibet, which has been influenced by India, that they have

remained unabashed until modern times.

If it is right to regard with veneration the great forces of nature,

fire, sun and water, a similar feeling towards the reproductive force

cannot be unphilosophic or immoral. Nor does the idea that the supreme

deity is a mother rather than a father, though startling, contain

anything unseemly. Yet it is an undoubted fact that all the great

religions except Hinduism, though they may admit a Goddess of

Mercy—Kuan-yin or the Madonna—agree in rejecting essentially sexual

deities. Modern Europe is probably prudish to excess, but the general

practice of mankind testifies that words and acts too nearly connected

with sexual things cannot be safely permitted in the temple. This remark

would indeed be superfluous were it not that many millions of our Hindu

fellow-citizens are of a contrary opinion.

Such practices prevail chiefly among the Śâktas in Bengal and Assam but

similar licence is permitted (though the theoretical justification and

theological setting are different) in some Vishnuite sects. Both are

reprobated by the majority of respectable Hindus, but both find educated

and able apologists. And though it may be admitted that worship of the

linga may exist without bad effects, moral or intellectual, yet I think

that these effects make themselves felt so soon as a sect becomes

distinctly erotic. Anyone who visits two such different localities as

Kamakhya in Assam and Gokul near Muttra must be struck with the total

absence in the shrines of anything that can be called beautiful, solemn

or even terrible. The general impression is of something diseased,

unclean and undignified. The figure of the Great Goddess of life and

death might have fired[82] the invention of artists but as a matter of

fact her worship has paralyzed their hands and brains.

Nor can I give much praise to the Tantras as literature[83]. It is true

that, as some authors point out, they contain fine sayings about God and

the soul. But in India such things form part of the common literary

stock and do not entitle the author to the praise which he would win

elsewhere, unless his language or thoughts show originality. Such

originality I have not found in those Tantras which are accessible. The

magical and erotic parts may have the melancholy distinction of being

unlike other works but the philosophical and theological sections could

have been produced by any Hindu who had studied these branches of Indian

literature.

23. _Hinduism in Practice_

After reviewing the characteristics of a religion it is natural to ask

what is its effect on those who profess it. Buddhism, Christianity and

Islam offer materials for answering such a question, since they are not

racial religions. In historical times they have been accepted by peoples

who did not profess them previously and we can estimate the consequences

of such changes. But Hinduism has racial or geographical limits. It

proselytizes, but hardly outside the Indian area: it is difficult to

distinguish it from Indian custom, as the gospel is distinguished from

the practice of Europe: it is superfluous to enquire what would be its

effect on other countries, since it shows no desire to impose itself on

them and they none to accept it. It is, like Shinto in Japan, not a

religion which has moulded the national character but the national

character finding expression in religion. Shinto and Hinduism are also

alike in perpetuating ancient beliefs and practices which seem

anachronisms but otherwise they are very different, for many races and

languages have contributed their thoughts and hopes to the ocean of

Hinduism and they all had an interest in speculation and mysticism

unknown to the Japanese.

The fact that Hinduism is something larger and more comprehensive than

what we call a religion is one reason why it contains much of dubious

moral value. It is analogous not to Christianity but to European

civilization which produces side by side philanthropy and the horrors of

war, or to science which has given us the blessings of surgery and the

curse of explosives. There is a deep-rooted idea in India that a man's

daily life must be accompanied by religious observances and regulated by

a religious code, by no means of universal application but still

suitable to his particular class. An immoral occupation need not be

irreligious: it simply requires gods of a special character. Hence we

find Thugs killing and robbing their victims in the name of Kali. But

though the Hindu is not at ease unless his customs are sanctioned by his

religion, yet religion in the wider sense is not bound by custom, for

the founders of many sects have declared that before God there is no

caste. A Hindu may devote himself to religion and abandon the world with

all its conventions, but if like most men he prefers to live in the

world, it is his duty to follow the customs and usages sanctioned for

his class and occupation. Thus as Sister Nivedita has shown in her

beautiful writings, cooking, washing and all the humble round of

domestic life become one long ritual of purification and prayer in which

the entertainment of a guest stands out as a great sacrifice. But though

religion may thus give beauty and holiness to common things, yet

inasmuch as it sanctifies what it finds rather than prescribes what

should be, it must bear the blame for foolish and even injurious

customs. Child marriages have nothing to do with the creed of Hinduism,

yet many Hindus, especially Hindu women, would feel it irreligious, as

well as a social disgrace, to let a daughter become adult without being

married.

A comparison of Indian Mohammedans and Hindus suggests that the former

are more warlike and robust, the latter more intellectual and ingenious.

The fact that some Mohammedans belong to hardy tribes of invaders must

be taken into account but Islam deserves the credit of having introduced

a simple and fairly healthy rule of life which does not allow every

caste to make its own observances into a divine law. Yet it would seem

that the medical and sanitary rules of Hinduism deserve less abuse than

they generally receive. Col. King, Sanitary Commissioner of the Madras

Presidency, is quoted as saying in a lecture[84]: "The Institutes of

Vishnu and the Laws of Manu fit in excellently with the bacteriology,

parasitology and applied hygiene of the West. The hygiene of food and

water, private and public conservancy, disease suppression and

prevention, are all carefully dealt with."

Hinduism certainly has proved marvellously stimulating to the intellect

or—shall we put it the other way?--is the product of profound, acute,

and restless minds. It cannot be justly accused of being enervating or

melancholy, for many Hindu states were vigorous and warlike[85] and the

accounts of early travellers indicate that in pre-mohammedan days the

people were humane, civilized and contented. It created an original and

spiritual art, for Indian art, more than any other, is the direct

product of religion and not merely inspired by it. In ages when original

talent is rare this close relation has disadvantages for it tends to

make all art symbolic and conventional. An artist must not represent a

deity in the way that he thinks most effective: the proportions,

attitude and ornaments are all prescribed, not because they suit a

picture or statue but because they mean something.

Indian literature is also directly related to religion. Its extent is

well-nigh immeasurable. I will not alarm the reader with statistics of

the theological and metaphysical treatises which it contains. A little

of such goes a long way even when they are first-rate, but India may at

least boast of having more theological works which, if considered as

intellectual productions, must be placed in the first class than Europe.

Nor are religious writings of a more human type absent—the language of

heart to heart and of the heart to God. The Ramayana of Tulsi Das and

the Tiruvwçagam are extolled by Groâse, Grierson and Pope (all of them

Christians, I believe) as not only masterpieces of literature but as

noble expressions of pure devotion, and the poems of Kabir and Tukaram,

if less considerable as literary efforts, show the same spiritual

quality. Indian poetry, even when nominally secular, is perhaps too much

under religious influence to suit our taste and the long didactic and

philosophic harangues which interrupt the action of the Mahabharata seem

to us inartistic, yet to those who take the pains to familiarize

themselves with what at first is strange, the Mahabharata is, I think, a

greater poem than the _Iliad_. It should not be regarded as an epic

distended and interrupted by interpolated sermons but as the scripture

of the warrior caste, which sees in the soldier's life a form of

religion.

I have touched in several places on the defects of Hinduism. They are

due partly to its sanction of customs which have no necessary connection

with it and partly to its extravagance, which in the service of the gods

sees no barriers of morality or humanity. But suttee, human sacrifices

and orgies strike the imagination and assume an importance which they

have not and never had for Hinduism as a whole. If Hinduism were really

bad, so many great thoughts, so many good lives could not have grown up

in its atmosphere. More than any other religion it is a quest of truth

and not a creed, which must necessarily become antiquated: it admits the

possibility of new scriptures, new incarnations, new institutions. It

has no quarrel with knowledge or speculation: perhaps it excludes

materialists, because they have no common ground with religion, but it

tolerates even the Sânkhya philosophy which has nothing to say about God

or worship. It is truly dynamic and in the past whenever it has seemed

in danger of withering it has never failed to bud with new life and put

forth new flowers.

More than other religions, Hinduism appeals to the soul's immediate

knowledge and experience of God. It has sacred books innumerable but

they agree in little but this, that the soul can come into contact and

intimacy with its God, whatever name be given him and even if he be

superpersonal. The possibility and truth of this experience is hardly

questioned in India and the task of religion is to bring it about, not

to promote the welfare of tribes and states but to effect the

enlightenment and salvation of souls.

The love of the Hindus for every form of argument and philosophizing is

well known but it is happily counterbalanced by another tendency.

Instinct and religion both bring them into close sympathy with nature.

India is in the main an agricultural country[86] and nearly

three-quarters of the population are villagers whose life is bound up

with the welfare of plants and animals and lies at the mercy of rivers

that overflow or skies that withhold the rain. To such people

nature-myths and sacred animals appeal with a force that Europeans

rarely understand. The parrots that perch on the pinnacles of the temple

and the oxen that rest in the shade of its courts are not intruders but

humble brothers of mankind, who may also be the messengers of the gods.

24. _Buddhism in Practice_

As I said above, it is easier to estimate the effects of Buddhism than

of Hinduism, for its history is the chronicle of a great missionary

enterprise and there are abundant materials for studying the results of

its diffusion.

Even its adversaries must admit that it has many excellent qualities. It

preaches morality and charity and was the first religion to proclaim to

the world—not to a caste or country—that these are the foundation of

that Law which if kept brings happiness. It civilized many nations, for

instance the Tibetans and Mongols. It has practised toleration and true

unworldliness, if not without any exception[87], at least far more

generally than any other great religion. It has directly encouraged art

and literature and, so far as I know, has never opposed the progress of

knowledge. But two charges may be brought against it which deserve

consideration. First that its pessimistic doctrines and monastic

institutions are, if judged by ordinary standards, bad for the welfare

of a nation: second that more than any other religion it is liable to

become corrupt.

In all Buddhist lands, though good laymen are promised the blessings of

religion, the monastic and contemplative life is held up as the ideal.

In Christendom, this ideal is rejected by Protestants and for the Roman

and Oriental Churches it is only one among others. Hence every one's

judgment of Buddhism must in a large measure depend on what he thinks of

this ideal. Monks are not of this world and therefore the world hateth

them. If they keep to themselves, they are called lazy and useless. If

they take part in secular matters, they meet with even severer

criticism. Yet can any one doubt that what is most needed in the present

age is more people who have leisure and ability to think?

Whatever evil is said of Buddhist monks is also said of Mt Athos and

similar Christian establishments. I am far from saying that this

depreciation of the cloistered life is just in either case but any

impartial critic of monastic institutions must admit that their virtues

avoid publicity and their faults attract attention. In all countries a

large percentage of monks are indolent: it is the temptation which

besets all but the elect. Yet the Buddhist ideal of the man who has

renounced the world leaves no place for slackness, nor I think does the

Christian. Buddhist monks are men of higher aspirations than others:

they try to make themselves supermen by cultivating not the forceful and

domineering part of their nature but the gentle, charitable and

intelligent part. The laity treat them with the greatest respect

provided that they set an example of a life better than most men can

live. A monastic system of this kind is found in Burma. I do not mean

that it is not found in other Buddhist lands, but I cite an instance

which I have seen myself and which has impressed most observers

favourably.

The Burmese monks are not far from the ideal of Gotama, yet perhaps by

adhering somewhat strictly to the letter of his law they have lost

something of the freedom which he contemplated. In his time there were

no books: the mind found exercise and knowledge in conversation. A

monastery was not a permanent residence, except during the rainy season,

but merely a halting-place for the brethren who were habitually

wanderers, continually hearing and seeing something new. Hermits and

solitary dwellers in the forests were not unknown but assuredly the

majority of the brethren had no intention of secluding themselves from

the intellectual life of the age. What would Gotama have done had he

lived some hundreds or thousands of years later? I see no reason to

doubt that he would have encouraged the study of literature and science.

He would probably have praised all art which expresses noble and

spiritual ideas, while misdoubting representations of sensuous beauty.

The second criticism—that Buddhists are prone to corrupt their faith—is

just, for their courteous acquiescence in other creeds enfeebles and

denaturalizes their own. In Annam, Korea and some parts of China though

there are temples and priests more or less deserving the name of

Buddhist, there is no idea that Buddhism is a distinct religion or mode

of life. Such statements as that the real religion of the Burmese is not

Buddhism but animism are, I think, incorrect, but even the Burmese are

dangerously tolerant.

This weakness is not due to any positive defect, since Buddhism provides

for those who lead the higher life a strenuous curriculum and for the

laity a system of morality based on rational grounds and differing

little from the standard accepted in both Europe and China, except that

it emphasizes the duties of mankind to animals. The weakness comes from

the absence of any command against superstitious rites and beliefs. When

the cardinal principles of Buddhism are held strongly these accessories

do not matter, but the time comes when the creeper which was once an

ornament grows into the walls of the shrine and splits the masonry. The

faults of western religions are mainly faults of self-assertion—such as

the Inquisition and opposition to science. The faults of Indian

religions are mainly tolerance of what does not belong to them and

sometimes of what is not only foreign to them but bad in itself.

Buddhism has been both praised and blamed as a religion which

acknowledges neither God nor the soul[88] and its acceptance in its

later phases of the supernatural has been regarded as proving the human

mind's natural need of theism. But it is rather an illustration of that

craving for personal though superhuman help which makes Roman Catholics

supplement theism with the worship of saints.

On the whole it is correct to say that Buddhism (except perhaps in very

exceptional sects) has always taken and still takes a point of view

which has little in common with European theism. The world is not

thought of as the handiwork of a divine personality nor the moral law as

his will. The fact that religion can exist without these ideas is of

capital importance[89]. But any statements implying that Buddhism

divorces morality from the doctrine of immortality may be misunderstood

for it teaches that just as an old man may suffer for the follies of his

youth, so faults committed in one life may be punished in another.

Rewards and punishments in another world were part of the creed of Asoka

and tradition represents the missionaries who converted Ceylon as using

this simple argument[90]. It would not however be true to say that

Buddhism makes the value of morality contingent on another world. The

life of an Arhat which includes the strictest morality is commended on

its own account as the best and happiest existence.

European assertions about Buddhism often imply that it sets up as an

ideal and goal either annihilation or some condition of dreamy bliss.

Modern Buddhists who mostly neglect Nirvana as something beyond their

powers, just as the ordinary Christian does not say that he hopes to

become a saint, lose much of the Master's teaching but do it less

injustice than such misrepresentations. The Buddha did not describe

Nirvana as something to be won after death, but as a state of happiness

attainable in this life by strenuous endeavour—a state of perfect peace

but compatible with energy, as his own example showed.

25. _Interest of Indian Thought for Europe_

We are now in a better position to answer the question asked at the

beginning of this introduction, Is Indian thought of value or at least

of interest for Europe?

Let me confess that I cannot share the confidence in the superiority of

Europeans and their ways which is prevalent in the west. Whatever view

we take of the rights and wrongs of the recent war, it is clearly absurd

for Europe as a whole to pose in the presence of such doings as a

qualified instructor in humanity and civilization. Many of those who are

proudest of our fancied superiority escape when the chance offers from

western civilization and seek distraction in exploration, and many who

have spent their lives among what they consider inferior races are

uneasy when they retire and settle at home. In fact European

civilization is not satisfying and Asia can still offer something more

attractive to many who are far from Asiatic in spirit. Yet though most

who have paid even a passing visit to the East feel its charm, the

history, art and literature of Asia are still treated with ignorant

indifference in cultured circles—an ignorance and indifference which are

extraordinary in Englishmen who have so close a connection with India

and devote a disproportionate part of their education to ancient Greece

and Rome. I have heard a professor of history in an English university

say that he thought the history of India began with the advent of the

British and that he did not know that China had any history at all. And

Matthew Arnold in speaking of Indian thought[91] hardly escaped meriting

his own favourite epithets of condemnation, Philistine and _saugrenu_.

Europeans sometimes mention it as an amazing and almost ridiculous

circumstance that an educated Chinese can belong to three religions,

Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. But I find this attitude of mind

eminently sensible. Confucianism is an admirable religion for State

ceremonies and College chapels. By attending its occasional rites one

shows a decent respect for Heaven and Providence and commits oneself to

nothing. And though a rigid Confucianist may have the contempt of a

scholar and statesman for popular ideas, yet the most devout Buddhist

and Taoist can conform to Confucianism without scruple, whereas many who

have attended an English coronation service must have wondered at the

language which they seemed to approve of by their presence. And in China

if you wish to water the aridity of Confucianism, you can find in

Buddhism or Taoism whatever you want in the way of emotion or philosophy

and you will not be accused of changing your religion because you take

this refreshment. This temper is not good for creating new and profound

religious thought, but it is good for sampling and appreciating the

"varieties of religious experience" which offer their results as guides

for this and other lives.

For religion is systematized religious experience and this experience

depends on temperament. There can therefore be no one religion in the

European sense and it is one of the Hindus' many merits that they

recognize this. Some people ask of religion forgiveness for their sins,

others communion with the divine: most want health and wealth, many

crave for an explanation of life and death. Indian religion accommodates

itself to these various needs. Nothing is more surprising than the

variety of its phases except the underlying unity.

This power of varying in sympathetic response to the needs of many minds

and growing in harmony with the outlook of successive ages, is a

contrast to the pretended _quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab

omnibus_[92] of Western Churches, for in view of their differences and

mutual hostility it can only be called a pretence. Indians recognize

that only the greatest and simplest religious questions can be asked now

in the same words that came to the lips more than two thousand years ago

and even if the questions are the same, the answers of the thoughtful

are still as widely divergent as the pronouncements of the Buddha and

the Brahmans. But nearly all the propositions contained in a European

creed involve matters of history or science which are obviously affected

by research and discovery as much as are astronomy or medicine, and not

only are the propositions out of date but they mostly refer to problems

which have lost their interest. But Indian religion eschews creeds and

will not die with the spread of knowledge. It will merely change and

enter a new phase of life in which much that is now believed and

practised will be regarded as the gods and rites of the Veda are

regarded now.

I do not think that there is much profit in comparing religions, which

generally means exalting one at the expense of the others, but rather

that it is interesting and useful to learn what others, especially those

least like ourselves, think of these matters. And in religious questions

Asia has a distinct right to be heard.

For if Europeans have any superiority over Asiatics, it lies in

practical science, finance and administration, not in thought or art. If

one were collecting views about philosophy and religion in Europe, one

would not begin by consulting financiers and engineers, and the

policeman who stands in the middle of the street and directs the traffic

to this side and that is not intellectually superior to those who obey

him as if he were something superhuman. Europeans in Asia are like such

a policeman: their gifts are authority and power to organize: in other

respects their superiority is imaginary.

I do not think that Christianity will ever make much progress in Asia,

for what is commonly known by that name is not the teaching of Christ

but a rearrangement of it made in Europe and like most European

institutions practical rather than thoughtful. And as for the teaching

of Christ himself, the Indian finds it excellent but not ample or

satisfying. There is little in it which cannot be found in some of the

many scriptures of Hinduism and it is silent on many points about which

they speak, if not with convincing authority, at least with suggestive

profundity. Neither do I think that Europe is likely to adopt Buddhist

or Brahmanic methods of thought on any large scale. Theosophical and

Buddhist societies have my sympathy but it is sympathy with lonely

workers in an unpopular cause and I am not sure that they always

understand what they try to teach. There is truth at the bottom of the

dogma that all Buddhas must be born and teach in India: Asiatic doctrine

may commend itself to European minds but it fits awkwardly into European

life.

But this is no reason for refusing to accord to Indian religion at least

the same attention that we give to Plato and Aristotle. Every idea which

is held strongly by any large body of men is worthy of respectful

examination, although I do not think that because an opinion is

widespread it is therefore true. Thus the idea that in the remote past

there was some kind of paradise or golden age and that the span of human

life was once much longer than now is found among most nations. Yet

research and analogy suggest that it is without foundation. The fact

that about half the population of the world has come under the influence

of Hindu ideas gives Indian thought historical importance rather than

authority. The claim of India to the attention of the world is that she,

more than any other nation since history began, has devoted herself to

contemplating the ultimate mysteries of existence and, in my eyes, the

fact that Indian thought diverges widely from our own popular thought is

a positive merit. In intellectual and philosophical pursuits we want new

ideas and Indian ideas are not familiar or hackneyed in the west, though

I think that more European philosophers and mystics have arrived at

similar conclusions than is generally supposed.

Indian religions have more spirituality and a greater sense of the

Infinite than our western creeds and more liberality. They are not

merely tolerant but often hold that the different classes of mankind

have their own rules of life and suitable beliefs and that he who

follows such partial truths does no wrong to the greater and

all-inclusive truths on which his circumstances do not permit him to fix

his attention. And though some Indian religions may sanction bad

customs, sacrifice of animals and immoral rites, yet on the whole they

give the duty of kindness to animals a prominence unknown in Europe and

are more penetrated with the idea that civilization means a gentle and

enlightened temper—an idea sadly forgotten in these days of war. Their

speculative interest can hardly be denied. For instance, the idea of a

religion without a personal God may seem distasteful or absurd but the

student of human thought must take account of it and future generations

may not find it a useless notion. It is certain that in Asia we find

Buddhist Churches which preach morality and employ ritual and yet are

not theistic, and also various systems of pantheism which, though they

may use the word God, obviously use it in a sense which has nothing in

common with Christian and Mohammedan ideas.

India's greatest contribution to religion is not intellectual, as the

mass of commentaries and arguments produced by Hindus might lead us to

imagine, but the persistent and almost unchallenged belief in the

reality and bliss of certain spiritual states which involve intuition.

All Indians agree that they are real, even to the extent of offering an

alternative superior to any ordinary life of pleasure and success, but

their value for us is lessened by the variety of interpretations which

they receive and which make it hard to give a more detailed definition

than that above. For some they are the intuition of a particular god,

for others of divinity in general. For Buddhists they mean a new life of

knowledge, freedom and bliss without reference to a deity. But apart

from such high matters I believe that the mental training preliminary to

these states—what is called meditation and concentration—is well worth

the attention of Europeans. I am not recommending trances or catalepsy:

in these as in other matters the Hindus are probably prone to exaggerate

and the Buddha himself in his early quest for truth discarded trances as

an unsatisfactory method. But the reader can convince himself by

experiment that the elementary discipline which consists in suppressing

"discursive thought" and concentrating the mind on a particular

object—say a red flower—so that for some time nothing else is present to

the mind and the image of the flower is seen and realized in all its

details, is most efficacious for producing mental calm and alertness. By

such simple exercises the mind learns how to rest and refresh itself.

Its quickness of apprehension and its retentive power are considerably

increased, for words and facts imprinted on it when by the suppression

of its ordinary activities it has thus been made a _tabula rasa_ remain

fixed and clear.

Such great expressions of emotional theism as the Râmâyana of Tulsi Das

are likely to find sympathetic readers in Europe, but the most original

feature of Indian thought is that, as already mentioned, it produces

systems which can hardly be refused the name of religion and yet are

hardly theistic. The Buddha preached a creed without reference to a

supreme deity and the great Emperor Asoka, the friend of man and beast,

popularized this creed throughout India. Even at the present day the

prosperous and intelligent community of Jains follow a similar doctrine

and the Advaita philosophy diverges widely from European theism. It is

true that Buddhism invented gods for itself and became more and more

like Hinduism and that the later Vedantist and Sivaite schools have a

strong bent to monotheism. Yet all Indian theism seems to me to have a

pantheistic tinge[93] and India is certainly the classic land of

Pantheism. The difficulties of Pantheism are practical: it does not lend

itself easily to popular cries and causes and it finds it hard to

distinguish and condemn evil[94]. But it appeals to the scientific

temper and is not repulsive to many religious and emotional natures.

Indeed it may be said that in monotheistic creeds the most thoughtful

and devout minds often tend towards Pantheism, as witness the Sufis

among Moslims, the Kabbalists among the Jews and many eminent mystics in

the Christian Church. In India, the only country where the speculative

interest is stronger than the practical, it is a common form of belief

and it is of great importance for the history and criticism of religion

to see how an idea which in Europe is hardly more than philosophic

theory works on a large scale.

Later Buddhism—the so-called Mahayana—may be justly treated as one of

the many varieties of Indian religion, not more differentiated from

others than is for instance the creed of the Sikhs. The speculative side

of early Buddhism (which was however mainly a practical movement) may be

better described as an Indian critique of current Indian views. The

psychology of the Pitakas has certainly enough life to provoke

discussion still, for it receives both appreciative treatment and

uncompromising condemnation at the hands of European scholars. To set it

aside as not worth the labour spent on elucidating it, seems to me an

error of judgment. As a criticism of the doctrine developed in the

Upanishads, it is acute and interesting, even if we hold the Upanishads

to be in the right, and no serious attempt to analyze the human mind can

be without value, for though the facts are before every human being such

attempts are rare. It is singular that so many religions should

prescribe and prophecy for the soul without being able to describe its

nature. Hesitation and diffidence in defining the Deity seem proper and

natural but it is truly surprising that people are not agreed as to the

essential facts about their own consciousness, their selves, souls,

minds and spirits: whether these are the same or different: whether they

are entities or aggregations. The Buddha's answers to these questions

cannot be dismissed as ancient or outlandish, for they are practically

the conclusions arrived at by a distinguished modern psychologist,

William James, who says in his _Psychology_[95], "The states of

consciousness are all that psychology requires to do her work with.

Metaphysics or theology may prove the soul to exist, but for psychology

the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous"

and again "In this book the provisional solution which we have reached

must be the final one: The thoughts themselves are the thinkers."

Equally in sympathy with Buddhist ideas is the philosophy of M. Bergson,

which holds that movement, change, becoming is everything and that there

is nothing else: no things that move and change and become[96]. Huxley

too, speaking of idealism, said "what Berkeley does not seem to have so

clearly perceived is that the non-existence of a substance of mind is

equally arguable.... It is a remarkable indication of the subtlety of

Indian speculation that Gautama should have seen deeper than the

greatest of modern idealists[97]."

Even Mr Bradley says "the soul is a particular group of psychical events

in so far as those events are taken merely as happening in time[98]."

There is a smack of the Pitakas about this, although Mr Bradley's

philosophy as a whole shows little sympathy for Buddhism but a wondrous

resemblance both in thought and language to the Vedânta. This is the

more remarkable because there is no trace in his works of Sanskrit

learning or even of Indian influence at second hand. A peculiarly

original and independent mind seems to have worked its way to many of

the doctrines of the Advaita, without entirely adopting its general

conclusions, for I doubt if Sankara would have said "the positive

relation of every appearance as an adjective to reality and the presence

of reality among its appearances in different degrees and with different

values—this double truth we have found to be the centre of philosophy."

But still this is the gist of many Vedantic utterances both early[99]

and late. Gauḍapâda states that the world of appearance is due to

_svabhâva_ or the essential nature of Brahman and I imagine that the

thought here is the same as when Mr Bradley says that the Absolute is

positively present in all appearances.

Among many coincidences both in thought and expression, I note the

following. Mr Bradley[100] says "The Perfect ... means the identity of

idea and existence, accompanied by pleasure" which is almost the verbal

equivalent of _saccidânanda_. "The universe is one reality which appears

in finite centres." "How there can be such a thing as appearance we do

not understand." In the same way Vedantists and Mahayanists can offer no

explanation of Maya or whatever is the power which makes the universe of

phenomena. Again he holds that neither our bodies nor our souls (as we

commonly understand the word) are truly real[101] and he denies the

reality of progress "For nothing perfect, nothing genuinely real can

move." And his discussion of the difficulty of reconciling the ideas of

God and the Absolute and specially the phrase "short of the Absolute,

God cannot rest and having reached that goal he is lost and religion

with him" is an epitome of the oscillations of philosophic Hinduism

which feels the difficulty far more keenly than European religion,

because ideas analogous to the Absolute are a more vital part of

religion (as distinguished from metaphysics) in India than in

Europe[102].

Nor can Indian ideas as to Maya and the unreality of matter be dismissed

as curious dreams of mystical brains, for the most recent phases of

Physics—a science which changes its fundamental ideas as often as

philosophy—tend to regard matter as electrical charges in motion. This

theory is a phrase rather than an explanation, but it has a real

affinity to Indian phrases which say that Brahman or Śakti (which are

forces) produce the illusion of the world.

I am not venturing here on any general comparison of European and Indian

thought. My object is merely to point out that the latter contains many

ideas to which British philosophers find themselves led and from which,

when they have discovered them in their own way, they do not shrink. It

can hardly then be without interest to see how these ideas have been

elaborated, often more boldly and thoroughly, in Asia.

BOOK II

EARLY INDIAN RELIGION

A GENERAL VIEW

BOOK II

In this book I shall briefly sketch the condition of religion in India

prior to the rise of Buddhism and in so doing shall be naturally led to

indicate several of the fundamental ideas of Hinduism. For few old ideas

have entirely perished: new deities, new sects and new rites have arisen

but the main theories of the older Upanishads still command respect and

modern reformers try to justify their teaching from the ancient texts.

But I do not propose to discuss in detail the religion of the Vedic

hymns for, so far as it can be distinguished from later phases, it looks

backward rather than forward. It is important to students of comparative

mythology, of the origins of religion, of the Aryan race. But it

represents rather what the Aryans brought into India than what was

invented in India, and it is this latter which assumes a prominent place

in the intellectual history of the world as Hinduism and Buddhism. The

ancient nature gods of the wind and the dawn have little place in the

mental horizon of either the Buddha or Bhagavad-gîtâ and even when the

old names remain, the beings who bear them generally have new

attributes. Still, Vedic texts are used in modern worship and in many

respects there is a real continuity of thought.

In the first chapter I enquire whether there is any element common to

the religions of India and to the countries of Eastern Asia and find

that the worship of nature spirits and the veneration of ancestors

prevail throughout the whole of this vast region and have not been

suppressed by Buddhism or Brahmanism. Then coming to the purely Indian

sphere, I have thought it might not be amiss to give an epitome of such

parts of Indian history as are of importance for religion. Next I

endeavour to explain how the social institutions of India and the unique

position acquired by the Brahman aristocracy have determined the

character of Hindu religion—protean and yet unmistakeably Indian in all

its phases—and I also investigate the influence of the belief in

rebirth, which from the time of the Upanishads onwards dominates Indian

thought. In the fourth and fifth chapters I trace the survival of some

ancient ideas and show how many attributes of the Vedic gods can be

found in modern deities who are at first sight widely different and how

theories of salvation by sacrifice or asceticism or knowledge have been

similarly persistent. In the sixth chapter I attempt to give a picture

of religious life, both Brahmanic and non-Brahmanic, as it existed in

India about the time when the Buddha was born. Of the non-Brahmanic

sects which then flourished most have disappeared, but one, namely the

Jains, has survived and left a considerable record in literature and

art. I have therefore devoted a chapter to it here.

My object in this book is to discuss the characteristics of Indian

religion which are not only fundamental but ancient. Hence this is not

the place to dwell on Bhakti or relatively modern theistic sects,

however great their importance in later Hinduism may be.

CHAPTER I

RELIGIONS OP INDIA AND EASTERN ASIA

The countries with which this work deals are roughly speaking India with

Ceylon; Indo-China with parts of the Malay Archipelago; Japan and China

with the neighbouring regions such as Tibet and Mongolia. All of them

have been more or less influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and in hardly

any of them is Mohammedanism the predominant creed[103], though it may

have numerous adherents. The rest of Asia is mainly Mohammedan or

Christian and though a few Buddhists may be found even in Europe (as the

Kalmuks) still neither Hinduism nor Buddhism has met with general

acceptance west of India.

In one sense, the common element in the religion of all these countries

is the presence of Indian ideas, due in most cases to Buddhism which is

the export form of Hinduism, although Brahmanic Hinduism reached Camboja

and the Archipelago. But this is not the element on which I wish now to

insist. I would rather enquire whether apart from the diffusion of ideas

which has taken place in historical times, there is any common

substratum in the religious temperament of this area, any fund of

primitive, or at least prehistoric ideas, shared by its inhabitants.

Such common ideas will be deep-seated and not obvious, for it needs but

little first-hand acquaintance with Asia to learn that all

generalizations about the spirit of the East require careful testing and

that such words as Asiatic or oriental do not connote one type of mind.

For instance in China and Japan the control of the state over religion

is exceptionally strong: in India it is exceptionally weak. The

religious temperaments of these nations differ from one another as much

as the Mohammedan and European temperaments and the fact that many races

have adopted Buddhism and refashioned it to their liking does not

indicate that their mental texture is identical. The cause of this

superficial uniformity is rather that Buddhism in its prime had no

serious rivals in either activity or profundity, but presented itself to

the inhabitants of Eastern Asia as pre-eminently the religion of

civilized men, and was often backed by the support of princes. Yet one

cannot help thinking that its success in Eastern Asia and its failure in

the West are not due merely to politics and geography but must

correspond with some racial idiosyncrasies. Though it is hard to see

what mental features are common to the dreamy Hindus and the practical

Chinese, it may be true that throughout Eastern Asia for one reason or

another such as political despotism, want of military spirit, or on the

other hand a tendency to regard the family, the clan or the state as the

unit, the sense of individuality is weaker than in Western Asia or

Europe, so that pantheism and quietism with their doctrines of the

vanity of the world and the bliss of absorption arouse less opposition

from robust lovers of life. This is the most that can be stated and it

does not explain why there are many Buddhists in Japan but none in

Persia.

But apart from Buddhism and all creeds which have received a name,

certain ideas are universal in this vast region. One of them is the

belief in nature spirits, beings who dwell in rocks, trees, streams and

other natural objects and possess in their own sphere considerable

powers of doing good or ill. The Nagas, Yakshas and Bhutas of India, the

Nats of Burma, the Peys of Siam, the Kami of Japan and the Shen of China

are a few items in a list which might be indefinitely extended. In many

countries this ghostly population is as numerous as the birds of the

forest: they haunt every retired spot and perch unseen under the eaves

of every house. Theology has not usually troubled itself to define their

status and it may even be uncertain whether respect is shown to the

spirits inhabiting streams and mountain peaks or to the peaks and

streams themselves[104].

They may be kindly (though generally requiring punctilious attention),

or mischievous, or determined enemies of mankind. But infinite as are

their variations, the ordinary Asiatic no more doubts their existence

than he doubts the existence of animals. The position which they enjoy,

like their character, is various, for in Asia deities like men have

careers which depend on luck. Many of them remain mere elves or goblins,

some become considerable local deities. But often they occupy a position

intermediate between real gods and fairies. Thus in southern India,

Burma and Ceylon may be seen humble shrines, which are not exactly

temples but the abodes of beings whom prudent people respect. They have

little concern with the destinies of the soul or the observance of the

moral law but much to do with the vagaries of rivers and weather and

with the prosperity of the village. Though these spirits may attain a

high position within a certain district (as for instance Maha Saman, the

deity of Adam's Peak in Ceylon) they are not of the same stuff as the

great gods of Asia. These latter are syntheses of many ideas, and

centuries of human thought have laboured on their gigantic figures. It

is true that the mental attitude which deifies the village stream is

fundamentally the same as that which worships the sun, but in the latter

case the magnitude of the phenomenon deified sets it even for the most

rustic mind in another plane. Also the nature gods of the Veda are not

quite the same as the nature spirits which the Indian peasants worship

to-day and worshipped, as the Pitakas tell us, in the time of the

Buddha. For the Vedic deities are such forces as fire and light, wind

and water. This is nature worship but the worship of nature generalized,

not of some bold rock or mysterious rustling tree. It may be that a

migratory life, such as the ancient Aryans at one time led, inclined

their minds to these wider views, since neither the family nor the tribe

had an abiding interest in any one place. Thus the ancestors of the

Turks in the days before Islam worshipped the spirits of the sky, earth

and water, whereas the more civilized but sedentary Chinese had genii

for every hamlet, pool and hillock.

It is difficult to say whether monotheism is a development of this

nature worship or has another origin. In Japanese religion the

monotheistic tendency is markedly absent. The sun-goddess is the

principal deity but remains simply _prima inter pares_. But in the

ancient religion of China, T'ien or Heaven, also called Shang-ti, the

supreme ruler, though somewhat shadowy and impersonal, does become an

omnipotent Providence without even approximate rivals. Other superhuman

beings are in comparison with him merely angels. Unfortunately the early

history of Chinese religion is obscure and the documents scanty. In

India however the evolution of pantheism or theism (though usually with

a pantheistic tinge) out of the worship of nature forces seems clear.

These gods or forces are seen to melt into one another and to be aspects

of one another, until the mind naturally passes on to the idea that they

are all manifestations of one force finding expression in human

consciousness as well as in physical phenomena. The animist and

pantheist represent different stages but not different methods of

thought. For the former, every natural object which impresses him is

alive; the latter concurs in this view, only he thinks the universe is

instinct with one and the same life displaying itself in infinite

variety.

One difficulty incidental to the treatment of Asiatic religions in

European languages is the necessity, or at any rate the ineradicable

habit, of using well-known words like God and soul as the equivalents of

Asiatic terms which have not precisely the same content and which often

imply a different point of view. For practical life it is wise and

charitable to minimize religious differences and emphasize points of

agreement. But this willingness to believe that others think as we do

becomes a veritable vice if we are attempting an impartial exposition of

their ideas. If the English word God means the deity of ordinary

Christianity, who is much the same as Allah or Jehovah—that is to say

the creator of the world and enforcer of the moral law—then it would be

better never to use this word in writing of the religions of India and

Eastern Asia, for the concept is almost entirely foreign to them. The

nature spirits of which we have been speaking are clearly not God: when

an Indian peasant brings offerings to the tomb of a deceased brigand or

the Emperor of China promotes some departed worthy to be a deity of a

certain class, we call the ceremony deification, but there is not the

smallest intention of identifying the person deified with the Supreme

Being, and odd as it may seem, the worship of such "gods" is compatible

with monotheism or atheism. In China, Shang-ti is less definite than

God[105] and it does not appear that he is thought of as the creator of

the world and of human souls. Even the greater Hindu deities are not

really God, for those who follow the higher life can neglect and almost

despise them, without, however, denying their existence. On the other

hand Brahman, the pantheos of India, though equal to the Christian God

in majesty, is really a different conception, for he is not a creator in

the ordinary sense: he is impersonal and though not evil, yet he

transcends both good and evil. He might seem merely a force more suited

to be the subject matter of science than of religion, were not

meditation on him the occupation, and union with him the goal, of many

devout lives. And even when Indian deities are most personal, as in the

Vishnuite sects, it will be generally found that their relations to the

world and the soul are not those of the Christian God. It is because the

conception of superhuman existence is so different in Europe and Asia

that Asiatic religions often seem contradictory or corrupt: Buddhism and

Jainism, which we describe as atheistic, and the colourless respectable

religion of educated Chinese, become in their outward manifestations

unblushingly polytheistic.

Similar difficulties and ambiguities attend the use of the word soul,

for Buddhism, which is supposed to hold that there is no soul, preaches

retribution in future existences for acts done in this, and seeks to

terrify the evil doer with the pains of hell; whereas the philosophy of

the Brahmans, which inculcates a belief in the soul, seems to teach in

some of its phases that the disembodied and immortal soul has no

consciousness in the ordinary human sense. Here language is dealing with

the same problems as those which we describe by such phrases as the

soul, immortality and continuous existence, but it is striving to

express ideas for which we have little sympathy and no adequate

terminology. They will be considered later.

But one attitude towards that which survives death is almost universal

in Eastern Asia and also easily intelligible. It finds expression in the

ceremonies known as ancestor worship. This practice has attracted

special attention in China, where it is the commonest and most

conspicuous form of religious observance, but it is equally prevalent

among the Hindus, though less prominent because it is only one among the

many rites which engage the attention of that most devout nation. It is

one of the main constituents in the religions of Indo-China and Japan,

though the best authorities think that it was not the predominant

element in the oldest form of Shinto. It is less prominent among the

Tibeto-Burmese tribes but not absent, for in Tibet there are both good

and evil ghosts who demand recognition by appropriate rites. It is

sometimes hard to distinguish it from the worship of natural forces. For

instance in China and southern India most villages have a local deity

who is often nameless. The origin of such deities may be found either in

a departed worthy or in some striking phenomenon or in the association

of the two.

The cult of ghosts may be due to either fear or affection, and both

motives are found in Eastern Asia. But though abundant examples of the

propitiation of angry spirits can be cited, respect and consideration

for the dead are the feelings which usually inspire these ceremonies at

the present day and form the chief basis of family religion. There is no

need to explain this sentiment. It is much stronger in Asia than in

Europe but some of its manifestations may be paralleled by masses and

prayers for the dead, others by the care bestowed on graves and by

notices _in memoriam_. As a rule both in China and India only the last

three generations are honoured in these ceremonies. The reason is

obvious: the more ancient ancestors have ceased to be living memories.

But it might be hard to find a theoretical justification for neglecting

them and it is remarkable that in all parts of Asia the cult of the dead

fits very awkwardly into the official creeds. It is not really

consistent with any doctrine of metempsychosis or with Buddhist teaching

as to the impermanence of the Ego. In China may be found the further

inconsistency that the spirit of a departed relative may receive the

tribute of offerings and salutations called ancestor worship, while at

the same time Buddhist services are being performed for his deliverance

from hell. But of the wide distribution, antiquity and strength of the

cult there can be no doubt. It is anterior not only to Brahmanism but to

the doctrines of transmigration and karma, and the main occupation of

Buddhist priests in China and Japan is the performance of ceremonies

supposed to benefit the dead. Even within Buddhism these practices

cannot be dismissed as a late or foreign corruption. In the

Khuddaka-pâṭha which, if not belonging to the most ancient part of the

Buddhist canon, is at least pre-Christian and purely Indian, the dead

are represented as waiting for offerings and as blessing those who give

them. It is also curious that a recent work called _Raymond_ by Sir O.

Lodge (1916) gives a view of the state after death which is

substantially that of the Chinese. For its teaching is that the dead

retain their personality, concern themselves with the things of this

world, know what is going to happen here and can to some extent render

assistance to the living[106]. Also (and this point is specially

remarkable) burning and mutilation of the body seem to inconvenience the

dead.

Early Chinese works prescribe that during the performance of ancestral

rites, the ghosts are to be represented by people known as the

personators of the dead who receive the offerings and are supposed to be

temporarily possessed by spirits and to be their mouthpieces. Possession

by ghosts or other spirits is, in popular esteem, of frequent occurrence

in India, China, Japan and Indo-China. It is one of the many factors

which have contributed to the ideas of incarnation and deification, that

is, that gods can become men and men gods. In Europe the spheres of the

human and divine are strictly separated: to pass from one to the other

is exceptional: a single incarnation is regarded as an epoch-making

event of universal importance. But in Asia the frontiers are not thus

rigidly delimitated, nor are God and man thus opposed. The ordinary dead

become powers in the spirit world and can bless or injure here: the

great dead become deities: in another order of ideas, the dead

immediately become reincarnate and reappear on earth: the gods take the

shape of men, sometimes for the space of a human life, sometimes for a

shorter apparition. Many teachers in India have been revered as partial

incarnations of Vishnu and most of the higher clergy in Tibet claim to

be Buddhas or Bodhisattvas manifest in the flesh. There is no proof that

the doctrine of metempsychosis existed in Eastern Asia independently of

Indian influence but the ready acceptance accorded to it was largely due

to the prevalent feeling that the worlds of men and spirits are divided

by no great gulf. It is quite natural to step into the spirit world and

back again into this.

It will not have escaped the reader's attention that many of the

features which I have noticed as common to the religions of Eastern

Asia—such as the worship of nature spirits and ancestors—are not

peculiar to those countries but are almost, if not quite, universal in

certain stages of religious development. They can, for instance, be

traced in Europe. But whereas they exist here as survivals discernible

only to the eye of research and even at the beginning of the Christian

era had ceased to be the obvious characteristics of European paganism,

in Asia they are still obvious. Age and logic have not impaired their

vigour, and official theology, far from persecuting them, has

accommodated its shape to theirs. This brings us to another point where

the linguistic difficulty again makes itself felt, namely, that the word

religion has not quite the same meaning in Eastern Asia as in Mohammedan

and Christian lands. I know of no definition which would cover

Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism and the superstitions of African

savages, for the four have little community of subject matter or aim. If

any definition can be found it must I think be based on some superficial

characteristic such as ceremonial. Nor is there any objection to

refusing the title of religion to Buddhism and Confucianism, except that

an inconvenient lacuna would remain in our vocabulary, for they are not

adequately described as philosophies. A crucial instance of the

difference in the ideas prevalent in Europe and Eastern Asia is the fact

that in China many people belong to two or three religions and it would

seem that when Buddhism existed in India the common practice was

similar. Paganism and spiritual religion can co-exist in the same mind

provided their spheres are kept distinct. But Christianity and Islam

both retain the idea of a jealous God who demands not only exclusive

devotion but also exclusive belief: to believe in other Gods is not only

erroneous; it is disobedience and disloyalty. But such ideas have little

currency in Eastern Asia, especially among Buddhists. The Buddha is not

a creator or a king but rather a physician. He demands no allegiance and

for those who disobey him the only punishment is continuance of the

disease. And though Indian deities may claim personal and exclusive

devotion, yet in defining and limiting belief their priests are less

exacting than Papal or Moslim doctors. Despite sectarian formulas, the

Hindu cherishes broader ideas such as that all deities are forms and

passing shapes of one essence; that all have their proper places and

that gods, creeds and ceremonies are necessary helps in the lower stages

of the religious life but immaterial to the adept.

It does not follow from this that Hindus are lukewarm or insincere in

their convictions. On the contrary, faith is more intense and more

widely spread among them than in Europe. Nor can it be said that their

religion is something detachable from ordinary life: the burden of daily

observances prescribed and duly borne seems to us intolerable. But

Buddhism and many forms of Hinduism present themselves as methods of

salvation with a simplicity and singleness of aim which may be

paralleled in the Gospels but only rarely in the national churches of

Europe. The pious Buddhist is one who moulds his life and thoughts

according to a certain law: he is not much concerned with worshipping

the gods of the state or city, but has nothing against such worship: his

aims and procedure have nothing to do with spirits who give wealth and

children or avert misfortune. But since such matters are of great

interest to mankind, he is naturally brought into contact with them and

he has no more objection to a religious service for procuring rain than

to a scientific experiment for the same purpose. Similarly Confucians

follow a system of ethics which is sufficient for a gentleman and

accords a decorous recognition to a Supreme Being and ancestral spirits.

Much concession to superstition would be reprehensible according to this

code but if a Confucian honours some deity either for his private

objects or because it is part of his duties as a magistrate, he is not

offending Confucius. He is simply engaging in an act which has nothing

to do with Confucianism. The same distinction often applies in Indian

religion but is less clear there, because both the higher doctrine as

well as ordinary ceremonial and mythology are described under one name

as Hinduism. But if a native of southern India occasionally sacrifices a

buffalo to placate some village spirit, it does not follow that all his

religious notions are of this barbarous type.

Asiatic ideas as to the relations between religions are illustrated by

an anecdote related to me in Assam. Christianity has made many converts

among the Khasis, a non-Hindu tribe of that region, and a successful

revival meeting extending over a week was once held in a district of

professing Christians. When the week was over and the missionaries gone,

the Khasis performed a ceremony in honour of their tribal deities. Their

pastors regarded this as a woeful lapse from grace but no disbelief in

Christianity or change of faith was implied. The Khasis had embraced

Christianity in the same spirit that animated the ancient disciples of

the Buddha: it was the higher law which spoke of a new life and of the

world to come. But it was not understood that it offered to take over

the business of the local deities, to look after crops and pigs and

children, to keep smallpox, tigers and serpents in order. Nobody doubted

the existence of spirits who regulate these matters, while admitting

that ethics and the road to heaven were not in their department, and

therefore it was thought wise to supplement the Christian ceremonies by

others held in their honour and thus let them see that they were not

forgotten and run no risk of incurring their enmity.

My object in this chapter is to point out at the very beginning that in

Asia the existence of a duly labelled religion, such as Buddhism or

Confucianism, does not imply the suppression of older nameless beliefs,

especially about nature spirits and ghosts. In China and many other

countries we must not be surprised to find Buddhists honouring spirits

who have nothing to do with Buddhism. In India we must not suppose that

the doctrines of Râmânuja or any other great teacher are responsible for

the crudities of village worship, nor yet rashly assume that the

villager is ignorant of them.

CHAPTER II

HISTORICAL

It may be useful to insert here a brief sketch of Indian history, but

its aim is merely to outline the surroundings in which Hindu religion

and philosophy grew up. It, therefore, passes lightly over much which is

important from other points of view and is intended for reference rather

than for continuous reading.

An indifference to history, including biography, politics and geography,

is the great defect of Indian literature. Not only are there few

historical treatises[107] but even historical allusions are rare and

this curious vagueness is not peculiar to any age or district. It is as

noticeable among the Dravidians of the south as among the speakers of

Aryan languages in the north. It prevails from Vedic times until the

Mohammedan conquest, which produced chronicles though it did not induce

Brahmans to write them in Sanskrit. The lacuna is being slowly filled up

by the labours of European scholars who have collected numerous data

from an examination of inscriptions, monuments and coins, from the

critical study of Hindu literature, and from research in foreign,

especially Chinese, accounts of ancient India.

At first sight the history of India seems merely a record of invasions,

the annals of a land that was always receptive and fated to be

conquered. The coast is poor in ports and the nearest foreign shore

distant. The land frontiers offer more temptation to invaders than to

emigrants. The Vedic Aryans, Persians, Greeks and hordes innumerable

from Central Asia poured in century after century through the passes of

the north-western mountains and after the arrival of Vasco da Gama other

hordes came from Europe by sea. But the armies and fleets of India can

tell no similar story of foreign victories. This picture however

neglects the fact that large parts of Indo-China and the Malay

Archipelago (including Camboja, Champa, Java and even Borneo) received

not only civilization but colonists and rulers from India. In the north

too Nepal, Kashmir, Khotan and many other districts might at one time or

another be legitimately described as conquered or tributary countries.

It may indeed be justly objected that Indian literature knows nothing of

Camboja and other lands where Indian buildings have been discovered[108]

and that the people of India were unconscious of having conquered them.

But Indian literature is equally unconscious of the conquests made by

Alexander, Kanishka and many others. Poets and philosophers were little

interested in the expeditions of princes, whether native or foreign. But

if by India is meant the country bounded by the sea and northern

mountains it undoubtedly sent armies and colonists to regions far beyond

these limits, both in the south-east and the north, and if the expansion

of a country is to be measured not merely by territorial acquisition but

by the diffusion of its institutions, religion, art and literature, then

"the conquests of the Dhamma," to use Asoka's phrase, include China,

Japan, Tibet and Mongolia.

The fact that the Hindus paid no attention to these conquests and this

spread of their civilization argues a curious lack of interest in

national questions and an inability to see or utilize political

opportunities which must be the result of temperament rather than of

distracting invasions. For the long interval between the defeat of the

Huns in 526 A.D. and the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni about 1000 A.D. which

was almost entirely free from foreign inroads, seems precisely the

period when the want of political ideas and constructive capacity was

most marked. Nor were the incursions always destructive and sterile. The

invaders, though they had generally more valour than culture of their

own, often brought with them foreign art and ideas, Hellenic, Persian or

Mohammedan. Naturally the northern districts felt their violence most as

well as the new influences which they brought, whereas the south became

the focus of Hindu politics and culture which radiated thence northwards

again. Yet, on the whole, seeing how vast is the area occupied by the

Hindus, how great the differences not only of race but of language, it

is remarkable how large a measure of uniformity exists among them (of

course I exclude Mohammedans) in things religious and intellectual.

Hinduism ranges from the lowest superstition to the highest philosophy

but the stages are not distributed geographically. Pilgrims go from

Badrinath to Ramesvaram: the Vaishnavism of Trichinopoly, Muttra and

Bengal does not differ in essentials, the worship of the linga can be

seen almost anywhere. And though India has often been receptive, this

receptivity has been deliberate and discriminating. Great as was the

advance of Islam, the resistance offered to it was even more remarkable

and at the present day it cannot be said that in the things which most

interest them Indian minds are specially hospitable to British ideas.

The relative absence of political unity seems due to want of interest in

politics. It is often said that the history of India in pre-Mohammedan

times is an unintelligible or, at least, unreadable, record of the

complicated quarrels and varying frontiers of small states. Yet this is

as true of the history of the Italian as of the Indian peninsula. The

real reason why Indian history seems tedious and intricate is that large

interests are involved only in the greatest struggles, such as the

efforts to repulse the Huns or Mohammedans.

The ordinary wars, though conducted on no small scale, did not involve

such causes or principles as the strife of Roundheads with Cavaliers.

With rare exceptions, states and empires were regarded as the property

of their monarchs. Religion claimed to advise kings, like other wealthy

persons, as to their duties and opportunities, and ministers became the

practical rulers of kingdoms just as a steward may get the management of

an estate into his hands. But it rarely occurred to Hindus that other

persons in the estate had any right to a share in the government, or

that a Raja could be dispossessed by anybody but another Raja. Of that,

indeed, there was no lack. Not only had every sovereign to defend

himself against the enemies in his own house but external politics

seemed based on the maxim that it is the duty of a powerful ruler to

increase his territory by direct and unprovoked attacks on his

neighbours. There is hardly a king of eminence who did not expand his

power in this way, and the usual history of a royal house is successful

aggression followed by collapse when weaker hands were unable to hold

the inherited handful. Even moderately long intervals of peace are rare.

Yet all the while we seem to be dealing not with the expansion or

decadence of a nation, but with great nobles who add to their estates or

go bankrupt.

These features of Indian politics are illustrated by the Arthaśâstra, a

manual of state-craft attributed to Câṇakya, the minister of Candragupta

and sometimes called the Indian Macchiavelli. Its authenticity has been

disputed but it is now generally accepted by scholars as an ancient work

composed if not in the fourth century, at least some time before the

Christian era. It does not, like Manu and other Brahmanic law-books,

give regulations for an ideal kingdom but frankly describes the practice

of kings. The form of state contemplated is a small kingdom surrounded

by others like it and war is assumed to be their almost normal relation,

but due to the taste or policy of kings, not to national aspirations or

economic causes. Towards the Brahmans a king has certain moral

obligations, towards his subjects and fellow monarchs none. It is

assumed that his object is to obtain money from his subjects, conquer

his neighbours, and protect himself by espionage and severe punishments

against the attacks to which he is continually exposed, especially at

the hands of his sons. But the author does not allow his prince a life

of pleasure: he is to work hard and the first things he has to attend to

are religious matters.

The difficulty of writing historical epitomes which are either accurate

or readable is well known and to outline the events which have occurred

in the vast area called India during the last 2500 years is a specially

arduous task, for it is almost impossible to frame a narrative which

follows the fortunes of the best known Hindu kingdoms and also does

justice to the influence of southern India and Islam. It may be useful

to tabulate the principal periods, but the table is not continuous and

even when there is no gap in chronology, it often happens that only one

political area is illuminated amid the general darkness and that this

area is not the same for many centuries.

1. From about 500 to 200 B.C. Magadha (the modern Bihar) was the

principal state and the dominions of its great king Asoka were almost

the same as British India to-day.

2. In the immediately succeeding period many invaders entered from the

north-west. Some were Greeks and some Iranians but the most important

were the Kushans who ruled over an Empire embracing both north-western

India and regions beyond it in Afghanistan and Central Asia. This Empire

came to an end in the third century A.D. but the causes of its collapse

are obscure.

3. The native Hindu dynasty of the Guptas began to rule in 320 A.D. Its

dominions included nearly all northern India but it was destroyed by the

invasions of the Huns in the fifth and sixth centuries.

4. The Hindu Emperor Harsha (606-647 A.D.) practically reconstituted the

Gupta Empire but his dominions split up after his death. At the same

time another Empire which extended from Gujarat to Madras was founded by

Pulakeśin, a prince from the south, a region which though by no means

uncivilized had hitherto played a small part in the general history of

India.

5. From 650 to 1000 A.D. India was divided among numerous independent

kingdoms. There was no central power but Bengal and the Deccan were more

prominent than previously.

6. After 1000 A.D. the conquests of Mohammedan invaders became important

and the Hindu states of northern and central India collapsed or grew

weak. But the Hindus held out in Rajputana, Orissa, and above all in

Vijayanagar.

7. In 1526 came the invasion of the Mughals, who founded an Empire which

at its zenith (1556-1707) included all India except the extreme south.

In its decadence the Marathas and Sikhs became powerful and Europeans

began to intervene.

It is generally agreed that at a period which, though not fixed, was

anterior to 1000 B.C.[109] a body of invaders known as Aryans and nearly

akin to the ancient Iranians entered India through the north-western

mountains. They found there other tribes not deficient in civilization

but unable to offer any effective resistance. These tribes who retired

southwards are commonly known as Dravidians[110] and possibly represent

an earlier invasion of central-Asiatic tribes allied to the remote

ancestors of the Turks and Mongols[111]. At the time when the earlier

hymns of the Rig Veda were composed, the Aryans apparently lived in the

Panjab and did not know the sea, the Vindhya mountains or the Narbudda

river. They included several tribes, among whom five are specially

mentioned, and we hear that a great battle was fought on the Ravi, in

which a confederation of ten kings who wished to force a passage to the

east was repulsed by Sudas, chief of the Tritsus. Still the

south-eastern movement, across the modern United Provinces to the

borders of Bengal, continued and, so far as our records go, it was in

this direction rather than due south or south-west, that the Aryans

chiefly advanced[112]. When the Brâhmaṇas and earlier Upanishads were

composed (c. 800-600 B.C.) the principal political units were the

kingdoms of the Pancâlas and Kurus in the region of Delhi. The city of

Ayodhyâ (Oudh) is also credited with a very ancient but legendary

history.

The real history of India begins with the life of the Buddha who lived

in the sixth century B.C.[113] At that time the small states of northern

India, which were apparently oligarchies or monarchies restricted by the

powers of a tribal council, were in process of being absorbed by larger

states which were absolute monarchies and this remained the normal form

of government in both Hindu and Moslim times. Thus Kosala (or Oudh)

absorbed the kingdom of Benares but was itself conquered by Magadha or

Bihar, the chief city of which was Pataliputra or Patna, destined to

become the capital of India. We also know that at this period and for

about two centuries later the Persian Empire had two satrapies within

the limits of modern India, one called "India," including the country

east of the Indus and possibly part of the Panjab, and the other called

Gândhâra (Peshawar) containing Takshaśilâ[114], a celebrated university.

The situation of this seat of learning is important, for it was

frequented by students from other districts and they must have felt

there in early times Persian and afterwards Hellenistic influence. There

are clear signs of Persian influence in India in the reign of Asoka. Of

Magadha there is little to be said for the next century and a half, but

it appears to have remained the chief state of northern India.

In 327 B.C. Alexander the Great after over-throwing the Persian Empire

invaded India, where he remained only nineteen months. He probably

intended to annex Sind and the Panjab permanently to his Empire but he

died in 323 and in the next year Candragupta, an exiled scion of the

royal house of Magadha, put an end to Macedonian authority in India and

then seized the throne of his ancestors. He founded the Maurya dynasty

under which Magadha expanded into an Empire comprising all India except

the extreme south. Seleucus Nicator, who had inherited the Asiatic

possessions of Alexander and wished to assert his authority, came into

collision with Candragupta but was completely worsted and about 303 B.C.

concluded a treaty by which he ceded the districts of Kabul, Herat and

Kandahar. Shortly afterwards he sent as his ambassador to the court of

Pataliputra a Greek named Megasthenes who resided there for a

considerable time and wrote an account of the country still extant in a

fragmentary form. The grandson of Candragupta was Asoka, the first ruler

of all India (c. 273-231 B.C.). His Empire extended from Afghanistan

almost to Madras and was governed with benevolent but somewhat

grandmotherly despotism. He was an ardent Buddhist and it is mainly

owing to his efforts, which are described in more detail below, that

Buddhism became during some centuries the dominant faith in India.

Asoka's Empire broke up soon after his death in circumstances which are

not clear, for we now enter upon one of those chaotic periods which

recur from time to time in Indian history and we have little certain

information until the fourth century A.D. Andhra, a region including

large parts of the districts now called the Northern Circars, Hyderabad

and Central Provinces, was the first to revolt from the Mauryas and a

dynasty of Andhra kings[115], who claimed to belong to the Śâtavâhana

family, ruled until 236 A.D. over varying but often extensive

territories. What remained of the Maurya throne was usurped in 184 B.C.

by the Sungas who in their turn were overthrown by the Kaṇvas. These

latter could not withstand the Andhras and collapsed before them about

27 B.C.

Alexander's invasion produced little direct effect, and no allusion to

it has been found in Indian literature. But indirectly it had a great

influence on the political, artistic and religious development of the

Hindus by preparing the way for a series of later invasions from the

north which brought with them a mixed culture containing Hellenic,

Persian and other elements. During some centuries India, as a political

region, was not delimitated on the north-western side as it is at

present and numerous principalities rose and fell which included Indian

territory as well as parts of Afghanistan.

These states were of at least three classes, Hellenistic, Persian or

Parthian, and Scythian, if that word can be properly used to include the

Sakas and Kushans.

Bactria was a Persian satrapy before Alexander's invasion but when he

passed through it on his way to India he founded twelve cities and

settled a considerable number of his soldiers in them. It formed part of

the Empire of Seleucus but declared itself independent in 250 B.C. about

the same time that the Parthians revolted and founded the Empire of the

Arsacidae. The Bactrian kings bore Greek names and in 209 Antiochus III

made peace with one of them called Euthydemus, in common cause against

the nomads who threatened Western Asia. Demetrius, the son of this

Euthydemus, appears to have conquered Kabul, the Panjab and Sind (c. 190

B.C.) but his reign was troubled by the rebellion of a certain

Eukratides and it is probable that many small and contending

frontier-states, of which we have a confused record, were ruled by the

relatives of one or other of these two princes. The most important of

them was Menander, apparently king of the Kabul valley. About 155 he

made an incursion to the east, occupied Muttra and threatened

Pataliputra itself but was repulsed. He is celebrated in Buddhist

literature as the hero of the Questions of Milinda but his coins, though

showing some Buddhist emblems, indicate that he was also a worshipper of

Pallas. Shortly after this Hellenic influence in Bactria was overwhelmed

by the invasion of the Yüeh-chih, though the Greek principalities in the

Panjab may have lasted considerably longer.

In the reign of Mithridates (c. 171-138 B.C.) the Parthian Empire was

limitrophe with India and possibly his authority extended beyond the

Indus. A little later the Parthian dependencies included two satrapies,

Aracosia and the western Panjab with capitals at Kandahar and Taxila

respectively. In the latter ruled kings or viceroys one of whom called

Gondophores (c. 20 A.D.) is celebrated on account of his legendary

connection with the Apostle Thomas.

More important for the history of India were the conquests of the Sakas

and Yüeh-chih, nomad tribes of Central Asia similar to the modern

Turkomans[116]. The former are first heard of in the basin of the river

Ili, and being dislodged by the advance of the Yüeh-chih moved

southwards reaching northwestern India about 150 B.C. Here they founded

many small principalities, the rulers of which appear to have admitted

the suzerainty of the Parthians for some time and to have borne the

title of satraps. It is clear that western India was parcelled out among

foreign princes called Sakas, Yavanas, or Pallavas whose frontiers and

mutual relations were constantly changing. The most important of these

principalities was known as the Great Satrapy which included Surashṭra

(Kathiawar) with adjacent parts of the mainland and lasted until about

395 A.D.

The Yüeh-chih started westwards from the frontiers of China about 100

B.C. and, driving the Sakas before them, settled in Bactria. Here

Kadphises, the chief of one of their tribes, called the Kushans,

succeeded in imposing his authority on the others who coalesced into one

nation henceforth known by the tribal name. The chronology of the Kushan

Empire is one of the vexed questions of Indian history and the dates

given below are stated positively only because there is no space for

adequate discussion and are given with some scepticism, that is desire

for more knowledge founded on facts. Kadphises I (c. 15-45 A.D.) after

consolidating his Empire led his armies southwards, conquering Kabul and

perhaps Kashmir. His successor Kadphises II (c. 45-78 A.D.) annexed the

whole of north-western India, including northern Sind, the Panjab and

perhaps Benares. There was a considerable trade between India and the

Roman Empire at this period and an embassy was sent to Trajan,

apparently by Kanishka (c. 78-123), the successor of Kadphises. This

monarch played a part in the later history of Buddhism comparable with

that of Asoka in earlier ages[117]. He waged war with the Parthians and

Chinese, and his Empire which had its capital at Peshawar included

Afghanistan, Bactria, Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan[118] and Kashmir. These

dominions, which perhaps extended as far as Gaya in the east, were

retained by his successors Huvishka (123-?140 A.D.) and Vasudeva

(?140-178 A.D.), but after this period the Andhra and Kushan dynasties

both collapsed as Indian powers, although Kushan kings continued to rule

in Kabul. The reasons of their fall are unknown but may be connected

with the rise of the Sassanids in Persia. For more than a century the

political history of India is a blank and little can be said except that

the kingdom of Surashṭra continued to exist under a Saka dynasty.

Light returns with the rise of the Gupta dynasty, which roughly marks

the beginning of modern Hinduism and of a reaction against Buddhism.

Though nothing is known of the fortunes of Pataliputra, the ancient

imperial city of the Mauryas, during the first three centuries of our

era, it continued to exist. In 320 a local Raja known as Candragupta I

increased his dominions and celebrated his coronation by the institution

of the Gupta era. His son Samudra Gupta continued his conquests and in

the course of an extraordinary campaign, concluded about 340 A.D.,

appears to have received the submission of almost the whole peninsula.

He made no attempt to retain all this territory but his effective

authority was exercised in a wide district extending from the Hugli to

the rivers Jumna and Chambal in the west and from the Himalayas to the

Narbudda. His son Candragupta II or Vikramâditya added to these

possessions Malwa, Gujarat and Kathiawar and for more than half a

century the Guptas ruled undisturbed over nearly all northern India

except Rajputana and Sind. Their capital was at first Pataliputra, but

afterwards Kausambi and Ayodhya became royal residences.

The fall of the Guptas was brought about by another invasion of

barbarians known as Hûnas, Ephthalites[119] or White Huns and apparently

a branch of the Huns who invaded Europe. This branch remained behind in

Asia and occupied northern Persia. They invaded India first in 455, and

were repulsed, but returned about 490 in greater force and overthrew the

Guptas. Their kings Toramâṇa and Mihiragula were masters of northern

India till 540 and had their local capital at Sialkot in the Panjab,

though their headquarters were rather in Bamyin and Balkh. The cruelties

of Mihiragula provoked a coalition of Hindu princes. The Huns were

driven to the north and about 565 A.D. their destruction was completed

by the allied forces of the Persians and Turks. Though they founded no

permanent states their invasion was important, for many of them together

with kindred tribes such as the Gurjaras (Gujars) remained behind when

their political power broke up and, like the Sakas and Kushans before

them, contributed to form the population of north-western India,

especially the Rajput clans.

The defeat of the Huns was followed by another period of obscurity, but

at the beginning of the seventh century Harsha (606-647 A.D.), a prince

of Thanesar, founded after thirty-five years of warfare a state which

though it did not outlast his own life emulated for a time the

dimensions and prosperity of the Gupta Empire. We gather from the

account of the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan Chuang, who visited his court at

Kanauj, that the kings of Bengal, Assam and Ujjain were his vassals but

that the Panjab, Sind and Kashmir were independent. Kalinga, to the

south of Bengal, was depopulated but Harsha was not able to subdue

Pulakeśin II, the Câlukya king of the Deccan.

Let us now turn for a moment to the history of the south. It is even

more obscure both in events and chronology than that of the north, but

we must not think of the Dravidian countries as uninhabited or

barbarous. Even the classical writers of Europe had some knowledge of

them. King Pandion (Pândya) sent a mission to Augustus in 20 B.C.[120]

Pliny[121] speaks of Modura (Madura) and Ptolemy also mentions this town

with about forty others. It is said[122] that there was a temple

dedicated to Augustus at Muziris, identified with Cranganore. From an

early period the extreme south of the peninsula was divided into three

states known as the Pândya, Cera and Cola kingdoms[123]. The first

corresponded to the districts of Madura and Tinnevelly. Cera or Kerala

lay on the west coast in the modern Travancore. The Cola country

included Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Madras, with the greater part of Mysore.

From the sixth to the eighth century A.D. a fourth power was important,

namely the Pallavas, who apparently came from the north of the Madras

Presidency. They had their capital at Conjeevaram and were generally at

war with the three kingdoms. Their king, Narasimha-Varman (625-645 A.D.)

ruled over part of the Deccan and most of the Cola country but after

about 750 they declined, whereas the Colas grew stronger and Rajaraja

(985-1018) whose dominions included the Madras Presidency and Mysore

made them the paramount power in southern India, which position they

retained until the thirteenth century.

As already mentioned, the Deccan was ruled by the Andhras from 220 B.C.

to 236 A.D., but for the next three centuries nothing is known of its

history until the rise of the Câlukya dynasty at Vatapi (Badami) in

Bijapur. Pulakeśin II of this dynasty (608-642), a contemporary of

Harsha, was for some time successful in creating a rival Empire which

extended from Gujarat to Madras, and his power was so considerable that

he exchanged embassies with Khusru II, King of Persia, as is depicted in

the frescoes of Ajanta. But in 642 he was defeated and slain by the

Pallavas.

With the death of Pulakeśin and Harsha begins what has been called the

Rajput period, extending from about 650 to 1000 A.D. and characterized

by the existence of numerous kingdoms ruled by dynasties nominally

Hindu, but often descended from northern invaders or non-Hindu

aboriginal tribes. Among them may be mentioned the following:

1. Kanauj or Pancâla. This kingdom passed through troublous times after

the death of Harsha but from about 840 to 910 A.D. under Bhoja (or

Mihira) and his son, it became the principal power in northern India,

extending from Bihar to Sind. In the twelfth century it again became

important under the Gaharwar dynasty.

2. Kanauj was often at war with the Palas of Bengal, a line of Buddhist

kings which began about 730 A.D. Dharmapala (c. 800 A.D.) was

sufficiently powerful to depose the king of Kanauj. Subsequently the

eastern portion of the Pala kingdom separated itself under a rival

dynasty known as the Senas.

3. The districts to the south of the Jumna known as Jejâkabhukti

(Bundelkhand) and Cedi (nearly equivalent to our Central Provinces) were

governed by two dynasties known as Candels and Kalacuris. The former are

thought to have been originally Gonds. They were great builders and

constructed among other monuments the temples of Khajarao. Kîrtivarman

Chandel (1049-1100) greatly extended their territories. He was a patron

of learning and the allegorical drama Prabodhacandrodaya was produced at

his court.

4. The Paramara (Pawar) dynasty of Malwa were likewise celebrated as

patrons of literature and kings Munja (974-995) and Bhoja (1018-1060)

were authors as well as successful warriors.

5. Though the Câlukyas of Vatapi were temporarily crushed by the

Pallavas their power was re-established in 655 and continued for a

century. The Eastern Câlukyas, another branch of the same family,

established themselves in Vengi between the Kistna and Godaveri. Here

they ruled from 609 to 1070 first as viceroys of the Western Câlukyas

and then as an independent power till they were absorbed by the Colas.

Yet another branch settled in Gujarat.

6. The Câlukyas of Vatapi were overthrown by the Râshṭrakûṭas who were

masters of the Deccan from about 750 to 972, and reigned first at Nasik

and then at Manyakheta (Malkhed). Krishna I of this dynasty excavated

the Kailasa temple at Ellora (c. 760) but many of his successors were

Jains. During the ninth century the Râshṭrakûṭas seem to have ruled over

most of western India from Malwa to the Tungabhadra.

7. The Râshṭrakûṭas collapsed before a revival of the Câlukya dynasty

which reappears from 993 to 1190 as the Câlukyas of Kalyani (in the

Nizam's dominions). The end of this dynasty was partly due to the

usurpation of a Jain named Bijjala in whose reign the sect of the

Lingâyats arose.

We must now turn to an event of great historical importance although its

details are not relevant to the subject of this book, namely the

Mohammedan conquest. Three periods in it may be recognized. First, the

conquest of Sind in 712 A.D. by the Arabs, who held it till the eleventh

century but without disturbing or influencing India beyond their

immediate neighbourhood. Secondly, the period of invasions and dynasties

which are commonly called Turki (c. 1000-1526 A.D.). The progress of

Islam in Central Asia coincided with the advance to the west and south

of vigorous tribes known as Turks or Mongols, and by giving them a

religious and legal discipline admirably suited to their stage of

civilization, it greatly increased their political efficiency. The

Moslim invaders of India started from principalities founded by these

tribes near the north-western frontier with a military population of

mixed blood and a veneer of Perso-Arabic civilization, and apart from

the greater invasions, there were incursions and settlements of Turkis,

Afghans and Mongols. The whole period was troublous and distracted. The

third period was more significant and relatively stable. Baber, a

Turkish prince of Fergana, captured Delhi in 1526 and founded the power

of the Mughals, which during the seventeenth century deserved the name

of the Indian Empire.

The first serious Moslim incursions were those of Mahmud of Ghazni, who

between 997 and 1030 made many raids in which he sacked Kanauj, Muttra,

Somnath and many other places but without acquiring them as permanent

possessions. Only the Panjab became a Moslim province. In 1150 the

rulers of Ghor, a vassal principality near Herat, revolted against

Ghazni and occupied its territory, whence the chieftain commonly called

Muhammad of Ghor descended on India and subdued Hindustan as well as the

Panjab (1175-1206). One of his slaves named Kutb-ud-Din Ibak became his

general and viceroy and, when Muhammad died, founded at Delhi the

dynasty known as Slave Sultans. They were succeeded by the Khilji

Sultans (1290-1318) the most celebrated of whom was the capable but

ferocious Ala-ud-Din and these again by the Tughlak dynasty. Muhammad

Adil, the second of this line, attempted to move the capital from Delhi

to Daulatabad in the Deccan. In 1398 northern India was convulsed by the

invasion of Timur who only remained a few months but sacked Delhi with

terrible carnage. Many years of confusion followed, and a dynasty known

as the Saiyids ruled in greatly diminished territories. But in 1451

arose the Lodi or Afghan dynasty which held the Panjab, Hindustan and

Bundelkhand until the advent of the Mughals. These five royal houses do

not represent successive invasions from the west. Their founders, though

of diverse origin, were all leaders engaged in the troubled politics of

northern India, and they all reigned at Delhi, round which a tradition

of Empire thus grew up. But the succession was disputed in almost every

case; out of thirty-four kings twelve came to a violent end and not one

deserved to be called Emperor of India. They were confronted by a double

array of rivals, firstly Hindu states which were at no period all

reduced to subjection, and, secondly, independent Mohammedan states, for

the governors in the more distant provinces threw off their allegiance

and proclaimed themselves sovereigns. Thus Bengal from the time of its

first conquest by Muhammad Bakhtyar had only a nominal connection with

Delhi and declared itself independent in 1338. When Timur upset the

Tughlak dynasty, the states of Jaunpur, Gujarat, Malwa and Khandesh

became separate kingdoms and remained so until the time of Akbar. In the

south one of Muhammad Adil's generals founded the Bahmani dynasty which

for about a century (1374-1482) ruled the Deccan from sea to sea. It

then split up into five sultanates with capitals at Bidar, Bijapur,

Golkonda, Ahmadnagar and Elichpur.

In the twelfth century, the Hindu states were not quite the same as

those noticed for the previous period. Kanauj and Gujarat were the most

important. The Palas and Senas ruled in Bengal, the Tomaras at Delhi,

the Chohans in Ajmer and subsequently in Delhi too. The Mohammedans

conquered all these states at the end of the twelfth century. Their

advance was naturally less rapid towards the south. In the Deccan the

old Hindu dynasties had been replaced by the Hoysalas (c. 1117-1310

A.D.) and the Yadavas (1180-1309 A.D.) with capitals at Halebid and

Daulatabad respectively. Both were destroyed by Malik Kafur, the slave

general of Sultan Ala-ud-Din, but the spirit of the Deccan was not

broken and within a few years the brothers Bukka and Harihara founded

the state of Vijayanagar, "the never-to-be-forgotten Empire" as a native

scholar has aptly termed it, which for more than two centuries was the

centre of Hindu political power. The imposing ruins of its capital may

still be seen at Hampi on the Tungabhadra and its possessions comprised

everything to the south of this, and, at times, also territory to the

north, for throughout its existence it was engaged in warfare with the

Bahmani dynasty or the five sultanates. Among its rulers the most

notable was Krishnadeva (1509-1529) but the arrogance and weakness of

his successors provoked the five Moslim Sultans to form a coalition.

They collected an immense army, defeated the troops of Vijayanagar at

the battle of Talikota and sacked the city (1565).

In two other districts the Hindus were able to retain political

independence until the time of Akbar, namely Orissa and Rajputana. In

the former the best known name is Anantavarman Colaganga (1076-1147) who

built the temple of Jagannath at Puri, established the Eastern Ganga

dynasty and ruled from the Godaveri to the Ganges. The Mohammedans never

occupied Rajputana, and though they captured the principal fortresses,

they did not retain them. The State of Mewar can even boast that it

never made any but a nominal and honourable submission to the Sultans of

Delhi. Akbar incorporated the Rajputs in his Empire and by his

considerate treatment secured their support.

The history of the Mughals may be divided into three periods. In the

first Baber acquired (1526 A.D.) the dominions of the Lodi dynasty as

well as Jaunpur, but his death was followed by a troubled interval and

it was not till the second period (1556-1707) comprising the reigns of

Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jehan and Aurungzeb that the Empire was securely

established. Akbar made himself master of practically all India north of

the Godaveri and his liberal policy did much to conciliate his Hindu

subjects. He abolished the poll tax levied from non-Moslims and the tax

on pilgrimages. The reform of revenue administration was entrusted to an

orthodox Hindu, Todar Mall. Among the Emperor's personal friends were

Brahmans and Rajputs, and the principal Hindu states (except Mewar) sent

daughters to his harem. In religion he was eclectic and loved to hear

theological argument. Towards the end of his life he adopted many Hindu

usages and founded a new religion which held as one of its principal

tenets that Akbar was God's Viceregent. His successors, Jehangir and

Shah Jehan, were also tolerant of Hinduism, but Aurungzeb was a

fanatical Moslim and though he extended his rule over all India except

the extreme south, he alienated the affection of his Hindu subjects by

reimposing the poll tax and destroying many temples. The Rajputs, Sikhs

and Marathas all rebelled and after his death the Empire entered into

the third period in which it rapidly disintegrated. Hindu states, like

the Maratha confederacy and Rajputana, asserted themselves. Mohammedan

governors declared their independence in Oudh, Bengal, the Nizam's

dominions and elsewhere: Persians and Afghans raided the Panjab: French

and English contended for the possession of southern India.

It would be outside the purpose of this book even to outline the

establishment of British authority, but I may mention that direct

European influence began to be felt in the sixteenth century, for Vasco

da Gama arrived in Calicut in 1498 and Goa was a Portuguese possession

from 1510 onwards. Nor can we linger over the fortunes of the Marathas

who took the place of Vijayanagar as the Hindu opposition to

Mohammedanism. They are, however, important for us in so far as they

show that even in matters political the long Moslim domination had not

broken the spirit of the Hindus. About 1660 a chieftain named Sivaji,

who was not merely a successful soldier but something of a fanatic with

a belief in his divine mission, founded a kingdom in the western Ghats

and, like the Sikh leaders, almost created a nation, for it does not

appear that before his time the word Maratha (Mahârâshṭra) had any

special ethnic significance. After half a century the power of his

successors passed into the hands of their Brahman ministers, known as

Peshwas, who became the heads of a confederacy of Maratha chiefs,

including the Rajas of Gwalior, Berar and Orissa, Indore and Baroda.

About 1760 the Marathas were practically masters of India and though the

Mughal Emperor nominally ruled at Delhi, he was under their tutelage.

They had a chance of reviving the glories of Asoka and the Guptas, but,

even apart from the intervention of Europeans, they were distracted by

jealousy and quarrels.

CHAPTER III

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INDIAN RELIGION

1

In the first chapter we enquired whether there are any religious ideas

common to Eastern Asia as a whole and found that they amount to little

more than a background of nature worship and ancestor worship almost

universally present behind the official creeds. Also the conception of a

religious system and its relation to beliefs which do not fall within it

are not quite the same in these countries as in Europe, so that the

inhabitants sometimes follow more than one religion.

Let us now examine the characteristics common to Indian creeds. They are

numerous and striking. A prolonged study of the multitudinous sects in

which Indian religion manifests itself makes the enquirer feel the truth

of its own thesis that plurality is an illusion and only the one

substratum real. Still there are divergent lines of thought, the most

important of which are Hinduism and Buddhism. Though decadent Buddhism

differed little from the sects which surrounded it, early Buddhism did

offer a decided contrast to the Brahmanic schools in its theories as to

human nature as well as in ignoring tradition and sacerdotalism. We may

argue that Buddhism is merely Vaishnavism or Śaivism in travelling

dress, but its rejection of Brahmanic authority is of capital

importance. It is one of the reasons for its success outside India and

its disappearance in India meant that it could not maintain this

attitude. Yet many features of Buddhism are due to the fact that

Hinduism, and not Islam or Christianity, was the national expression of

religion in India and also many features of Hinduism may be explained by

the existence of this once vigorous antagonist.

Hinduism[124] has striking peculiarities which distinguish it from

Christianity, Islam and even from Buddhism. It recognizes no one master

and all unifying principles known to other creeds seem here to be

absent. Yet its unity and vitality are clear and depend chiefly on its

association with the Brahman caste. We cannot here consider the complex

details of the modern caste system but this seems the place to examine

the position of the Brahmans, for, from the dawn of Sanskrit literature

until now, they have claimed to be the guides of India in all matters

intellectual and religious and this persistent claim, though often

disputed, has had a great measure of success.

The institution of caste is social rather than religious and has grown

gradually: we know for instance that in the time of the Buddha it had

not attained to anything like its present complexity and rigidity. Its

origin is explicable if we imagine that the Indo-Aryans were an invading

people with an unusual interest in religion. The Kshatriyas and Vaiśyas

mark the distinction between the warriors or nobles and the plebs which

is found in other Aryan communities, and the natives whom the Aryans

conquered formed a separate class, recognized as inferior to all the

conquerors. This might have happened in any country. The special feature

of India is the numerical, social and intellectual strength of the

priestly caste. It is true that in reading Sanskrit literature we must

remember that most of it is the work of Brahmans and discount their

proclivity to glorify the priesthood, but still it is clear that in

India the sacerdotal families acquired a position without parallel

elsewhere and influenced its whole social and political history. In most

countries powerful priesthoods are closely connected with the Government

under which they flourish and support the secular authority. As a result

of this alliance, kings and the upper classes generally profess and

protect orthodoxy, and revolutionary movements in religion generally

come from below. But in ancient India though the priests were glad

enough to side with the kings, the nobles during many centuries were not

ready to give up thinking for themselves. The Hindu's capacity for

veneration and the small inclination of the Brahmans to exercise direct

government prevented revolts against sacerdotal tyranny from assuming

the proportions we should expect, but whereas in many countries history

records the attempts of priests to become kings, the position is here

reversed. The national proclivity towards all that is religious,

metaphysical, intellectual and speculative made all agree in regarding

the man of knowledge who has the secret of intercourse with the other

world as the highest type. The priests tended to become a hereditary

guild possessed of a secret professional knowledge. The warrior caste

disputed this monopoly and sought with less learning but not inferior

vigour to obtain the same powers. They had some success during a

considerable period, for Buddhism, Jainism and other sects all had their

origin in the military aristocracy and had it remained purely Hindu, it

would perhaps have continued the contest. But it was partly destroyed by

Turanian invaders and partly amalgamated with them, so that in 500 A.D.

whereas the Brahmans were in race and temperament very much what they

were in 500 B.C. the Kshatriyas were different. It is interesting to see

how this continuity of race brought triumph to the Brahmans in the

theological sphere. At one time the Buddhists and even the Jains seemed

to be competitors for the first place, but there are now hardly any

Indian Buddhists in India[125] and less than a million and a half of

Jains, whereas Hinduism has more than 217 million adherents. The power

of persistence and resistance displayed by the priestly caste is largely

due to the fact that they were householders not collected in temples or

monasteries but distributed over the country in villages, intensely

occupied with the things of the mind and soul, but living a simple

family life. The long succession of invasions which swept over northern

India destroyed temples, broke up monasteries and annihilated dynasties,

but their destructive force had less effect on these communities of

theologians whose influence depended not on institutions or organization

but on their hereditary aptitudes. Though the modern Brahmans are not

pure in race, still the continuity of blood and tradition is greater

among them than in the royal families of India. Many of these belong to

districts which were formerly without the pale of Hinduism: many more

are the descendants of the northern hordes who century after century

invaded India: few can bring forward any good evidence of Kshatriya

descent. Hence in India kings have never attained a national and

representative position like the Emperors of China and Japan or even the

Sultans of Turkey. They were never considered as the high priests of the

land or a quasi-divine epitome of the national qualities: the people

tended to regard them as powerful and almost superhuman beings, but

somewhat divorced from the moral standard and ideals of their subjects.

In early times there was indeed the idea of a universal Emperor, the

Cakravartin, analogous to the Messiah but, by a characteristic turn of

thought, he was thought of less as a deliverer than as a type of

superman, recurring at intervals. But monarchs who even approximated to

this type were rare, and some of the greatest of them were in early ages

Buddhists and in later Mohammedans, so that they had not the support of

the priesthood and as time went on it became less and less possible to

imagine all India rendering sympathetic homage to one sovereign.

In the midst of a perturbed flux of dynasties, usually short lived,

often alien, only occasionally commanding the affection and respect of

the population, the Brahmans have maintained for at least two

millenniums and a half their predominant position as an intellectual

aristocracy. They are an aristocracy, for they boldly profess to be by

birth better than other men. Although it is probable that many clans

have entered the privileged order without genealogical warrant, yet in

all cases birth is claimed[126]. And though the Brahmans have

aristocratic faults, such as unreasonable pride of birth, still

throughout their long history they have produced in every age men of

intelligence, learning and true piety, in numbers sufficient to make

their claims to superiority seem reasonable. In all ages they have been

sensual, ambitious and avaricious, but in all ages penetrated by the

conviction that desire is a plague and gratification unsatisfying. It is

the intelligent sensualist and politician who are bound to learn that

passion and office are vanity.

A Brahman is not necessarily a priest. Although they have continually

and on the whole successfully claimed a monopoly of sacred science, yet

at the present day many follow secular callings and probably this was so

in early periods. And though many rites can be performed by Brahmans

only, yet by a distinction which it is difficult for Europeans to grasp,

the priests of temples are not necessarily and, in many places, not

usually Brahmans. The reason perhaps is that the easy and superstitious

worship offered in temples is considered trivial and almost degrading in

comparison with the elaborate ceremonial and subtle speculation which

ought to occupy a Brahman's life.

In Europe we are accustomed to associate the ideas of sacerdotalism,

hierarchy and dogma, mainly because they are united in the greatest

religious organization familiar to us, the Roman Catholic Church. But

the combination is not necessary. Hinduism is intensely sacerdotal but

neither hierarchical nor dogmatic: Mohammedanism is dogmatic but neither

sacerdotal nor hierarchical: Buddhism is dogmatic and also somewhat

hierarchical, since it has to deal with bodies of men collected in

monasteries where discipline is necessary, but except in its most

corrupt forms it is not sacerdotal. The absence of the hierarchical idea

in Hinduism is striking. Not only is there no Pope, but there is hardly

any office comparable with a Bishopric[127]. The relationships

recognized in the priesthood are those springing from birth and the

equally sacred ties uniting teacher and pupil. Hence there is little to

remind us of the organization of Christian Churches. We have simply

teachers expounding their sacred books to their scholars, with such

combination of tradition and originality as their idiosyncrasies may

suggest, somewhat after the theory of congregational churches. But that

resemblance is almost destroyed by the fact that both teachers and

pupils belong to clans, connected by descent and accepted by the people

as a superior order of mankind. Even in the most modern sects the

descendants of the founder often receive special reverence.

Though the Brahmans have no ecclesiastical discipline, they do not

tolerate the interference of kings. Buddhist sovereigns have summoned

councils, but not so Hindu monarchs. They have built temples, paid

priests to perform sacrifices and often been jealous of them but for the

last two thousand years they have not attempted to control them within

their own sphere or to create a State Church. And the Brahmans on their

side have kept within their own province. It is true that they have

succeeded in imposing—or in identifying themselves with—a most exacting

code of social, legal and religious prescriptions, but they have rarely

aimed at temporal power or attempted to be more than viziers. They have

of course supported pious kings and received support—especially

donations—from them, and they have enjoyed political influence as

domestic chaplains to royal families, but they have not consented to any

such relations between religion and the state as exist (or existed) in

England, Russia, Mohammedan countries or China. At the ancient

coronation ceremony the priest who presented the new ruler to his

subjects said, "This is your King, O people: The King of us Brahmans is

Soma[128]."

2

These facts go far to explain some peculiar features of Hinduism.

Compared with Islam or Christianity its doctrines are extraordinarily

fluid, multiform and even inconsistent: its practice, though rarely lax,

is also very various in different castes and districts. The strangeness

of the phenomenon is diminished if one considers that the uniformity and

rigidity of western creeds are due to their political more than to their

religious character. Like the wind, the spirit bloweth where it listeth:

it is governed by no laws but those which its own reverence imposes: it

lives in changing speculation. But in Europe it has been in double

bondage to the logic of Greece and the law of Rome. India deals in

images and metaphor: Greece in dialectic. The original thought of

Christianity had something of this Indian quality, though more sober and

less fantastic, with more limitation and less imagination. On this

substratum the Greeks reared their edifices of dialectic and when the

quarrels of theologians began to disturb politics, the state treated the

whole question from a legal point of view. It was assumed that there

must be a right doctrine which the state should protect or even enforce,

and a wrong doctrine which it should discourage or even forbid. Hence

councils, creeds and persecutions. The whole position is logical and

legal. The truth has been defined: those who do not accept it harm not

only themselves but others: therefore they should be restrained and

punished.

But in religious matters Hindus have not proceeded in this way as a

rule. They have adopted the attitude not of a judge who decides, but of

the humane observer who sees that neither side is completely right or

completely wrong and avoids expressing his opinion in a legal form.

Hindu teachers have never hesitated to proclaim their views as the whole

and perfect truth. In that indeed they do not yield to Christian

theologians but their pronouncements are professorial rather than

judicial and so diverse and yet all so influential that the state,

though bound to protect sound doctrine, dare not champion one more than

the other. Religious persecution is rare. It is not absent but the

student has to search for instances, whereas in Christian Europe they

are among the most conspicuous facts of history.

Restless, subtle and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone

than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by

too stringent definition. It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors

and figures. It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate

different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the

divine within the limits of a logical phrase. Attempts to explain how

the divine and human nature were combined in Christ convulsed the

Byzantine Empire and have fettered succeeding generations with their

stiff formulae. It would be rash to say that the ocean of Hindu

theological literature contains no speculations about the incarnations

of Vishnu similar to the views of the Nestorians, Monophysites and

Catholics, but if such exist they have never attracted much interest or

been embodied in well-known phrases[129]. The process by which a god can

be born as a man, while continuing to exist as a god, is not described

in quasi-legal language. Similarly the Soma offered in sacrifices is a

god as well as a drink. But though the ritual of this sacrifice has

produced an infinity of discussion and exegesis, no doctrine like

transubstantiation or consubstantiation has assumed any prominence.

The Hindu has an extraordinary power of combining dogma and free

thought, uniformity and variety. For instance it is held that the Vedas

are a self-existent, eternal revelation made manifest to ancient sages

and that their correct recitation ensures superhuman results. Yet each

Veda exists in several recensions handed down by oral tradition in

separate schools, and though the exact text and pronunciation are

matters of the utmost importance, diversities of opinion respecting them

are tolerated and honoured. Further, though the early scriptures were

preserved with scrupulous care the canon was never closed. It is

impossible to say how many Upanishads there are, nor does a Hindu think

the less of an Upanishad because it is not found in a certain list. And

in mediaeval and modern times these ancient sacred books have been

replaced for all except Brahmans by more recent Sanskrit works, or by a

vernacular literature which, though having no particular imprimatur,

claims the same authority as the Vedas[130].

The only essential tenets of Hinduism are recognition of the Brahman

caste and divine authority of the Vedas. Those who publicly deny these

doctrines as the Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs have done, put themselves

outside the pale, but the recognition required to ensure orthodoxy or at

least to avoid excommunication must not be compared with that implied by

such phrases as recognizing the authority of the Bible, or the supremacy

of the Pope. The utmost latitude of interpretation is allowed and the

supposed followers of the Veda comprise sects whose beliefs seem to have

no relation to one another or to the Veda, philosophic atheists and

demonolaters whose religious ideas hardly rise above those of African

savages.

One explanation may be, that every nation insists on liberty at the

expense of logic in the matters which interest it most. We do this in

politics. It might be difficult to make an untravelled oriental

understand how parliamentary institutions can continue for a day, how

socialists and republicans can take part in the government of a

monarchical country, and why the majority do not muzzle the opposition.

Yet Englishmen prefer to let this curious illogical muddle continue

rather than tolerate some symmetrical and authoritative system which

would check free speech and individuality. It is the same in Indian

religion. In all ages the Hindu has been passionately devoted to

speculation. He will bear heavy burdens in the way of priestly exaction,

social restrictions, and elaborate ceremonies, but he will not allow

secular or even ecclesiastical authority to cramp and school his

religious fancy, nor will he be deterred from sampling an attractive

form of speculation merely because it is pronounced unorthodox by the

priesthood, and the priesthood, being themselves Hindus, are discreet in

the use of anathemas. They insist not so much on particular doctrines

and rites as on the principle that whatever the doctrine, whatever the

rite, they must be the teachers and officiants. In critical and

revolutionary times the Brahmans have often assured their pre-eminence

by the judicious recognition of heresies. In all ages there has been a

conservative clique which restricted religion to ceremonial observances.

Again and again some intellectual or emotional outburst has swept away

such narrow limits and proclaimed doctrines which seemed subversive of

the orthodoxy of the day. But they have simply become the orthodoxy of

the morrow, under the protection of the same Brahman caste. The

assailants are turned into champions, and in time the bold reformers

stiffen into antiquated saints.

Hinduism has not been made but has grown. It is a jungle not a building.

It is a living example of a great national paganism such as might have

existed in Europe if Christianity had not become the state religion of

the Roman Empire, if there had remained an incongruous jumble of old

local superstitions, Greek philosophy and oriental cults such as the

worship of Mithra or Serapis. Yet the parallel is not exact, for in Rome

many of the discordant religious elements remained exotic, whereas in

India they all, whatever their origin, became Indian and smack of the

soil. There was wanting in European paganism the bond of union supplied

by the Brahmans who by sometimes originating, sometimes tolerating and

adapting, have managed to set their seal upon all Indian beliefs.

3

Thus the dominance of the Brahmans and their readiness to countenance

every cult and doctrine which can attract worshippers explains the

diversity of Indian religion, but are there no general characteristics

which mark all its multiple forms? There are, and they apply to Buddhism

as well as Hinduism, but in attempting to formulate them it is well to

say that Indian religion is as wilful and unexpected in its variations

as human nature itself and that all generalizations about it are subject

to exceptions. If we say that it preaches asceticism and the subjection

of the flesh, we may be confronted with the Vallabhâcâryas who inculcate

self-indulgence; if we say that it teaches reincarnation and successive

lives, we may be told that the Lingâyats[131] do not hold that doctrine.

And though we might logically maintain that these sects are unorthodox,

yet it does not appear that Hindus excommunicate them. Still, it is just

to say that the doctrines mentioned are characteristic of Hinduism and

are repudiated only by eccentric sects.

Perhaps the idea which has had the widest and most penetrating influence

on Indian thought is that conception of the Universe which is known as

Saṃsâra, the world of change and transmigration. The idea of rebirth and

the wandering of souls from one body to another exists in a fragmentary

form among savage tribes in many countries, but in India it makes its

appearance as a product of ripening metaphysics rather than as a

survival. It plays no part in the Vedic hymns: it first acquires

importance in the older Upanishads but more as a mystery to be

communicated to the elect than as a popular belief and to some extent as

the special doctrine of the military class rather than of the Brahmans.

At the time of the Buddha, however, it had passed beyond this stage and

was as integral a part of popular theology as is the immortality of the

soul in Europe.

Such expressions as the transmigration of souls or metempsychosis

imperfectly represent Indian ideas. They are incorrect as descriptions

of Buddhist dogmas, which start by denying the existence of a soul, and

they are not entirely suitable to those Vedantic schools which regard

transmigration as part of the illusory phenomenal world. The thought

underlying the doctrine is rather that as a child grows into youth and

age, so the soul passes from life to life in continuity if not in

identity. Whatever the origin of the idea may have been, its root in

post-Vedic times is a sense of the transitoriness but continuity of

everything. Nothing is eternal or even permanent: not even the gods, for

they must die, not even death, for it must turn into new life.

This view of life is ingrained in Indian nature. It is not merely a

scientific or philosophical speculation, but it summarizes the outlook

of ordinary humanity. In Europe the average religious man thanks or at

least remembers his Creator. But in India the Creator has less place in

popular thought. There is a disinclination to make him responsible for

the sufferings of the world, and speculation, though continually

occupied with the origins of things, rarely adopts the idea familiar to

Christians and Mohammedans alike, that something was produced out of

nothing by the divine fiat. Hindu cosmogonies are various and discordant

in details, but usually start with the evolution or emanation of living

beings from the Divinity and often a reproductive act forms part of the

process, such as the hatching of an egg or the division of a Divinity

into male and female halves. In many accounts the Deity brings into

being personages who continue the work of world-making and such entities

as mind, time and desire are produced before the material world. But

everything in these creation stories is figurative. The faithful are not

perplexed by the discrepancies in the inspired narratives, and one can

hardly imagine an Indian sect agitated by the question whether God made

the world in six literal days.

All religious doctrines, especially theories about the soul, are matters

of temperament. A race with more power of will and more delight in life

might have held that the soul is the one agent that can stand firm and

unshaken midst the flux of circumstance. The intelligent but passive

Hindu sees clearly that whatever illusions the soul may have, it really

passes on like everything else and continueth not in one stay. He is

disposed to think of it not as created with the birth of the body, but

as a drop drawn from some ocean to which it is destined to return. As a

rule he considers it to be immortal but he does not emphasize or value

personality in our sense. In previous births he has already been a great

many persons and he will be a great many more. Whatever may be the

thread between these existences it is not individuality. And what he

craves is not eternal personal activity, but unbroken rest in which

personality, even if supposed to continue, can have little meaning.

The character of the successive appearances or tenements of the soul is

determined by the law of Karma, which even more than metempsychosis is

the basis of Indian ideas about the universe. Karma is best known as a

term of the Buddhists, who are largely responsible both for the

definition and wide diffusion of the doctrine. But the idea is Brahmanic

as well as Buddhist and occurs in well-known passages of the Upanishads,

where it is laid down that as a man acts so shall he be in the next

life[132]. The word (which means simply _deed_) is the accepted

abbreviation for the doctrine that all deeds bring upon the doer an

accurately proportionate consequence either in this existence, or, more

often, in a future birth. At the end of a man's life his character or

personality is practically the sum of his acts, and when extraneous

circumstances such as worldly position disappear, the soul is left with

nothing but these acts and the character they have formed as, in Indian

language, the fruit of life and it is these acts and this character

which determine its next tenement. That tenement is simply the home

which it is able to occupy in virtue of the configuration and qualities

which it has induced in itself. It cannot complain.

One aspect of the theory of Saṃsâra which is important for the whole

history of Indian thought is its tendency towards pessimism. This

tendency is specially definite and dogmatic in Buddhism, but it is a

marked characteristic of the Indian temperament and appears in almost

every form of devotion and speculation. What salvation or the desire to

be saved is to the ordinary Protestant, Mukti or Moksha, deliverance, is

to the ordinary Hindu. In Buddhism this desire is given a dogmatic basis

for it is declared that all existence in all possible worlds necessarily

involves dukkha or suffering[133] and this view seems to have met with

popular as well as philosophic assent. But the desire for release and

deliverance is based less on a contemplation of the woes of life than on

a profound sense of its impermanence and instability[134]. Life is not

the preface to eternity, as religious Europeans think: the Hindu justly

rejects the notion that the conduct of the soul during a few score years

can fix its everlasting destiny. Every action is important for it helps

to determine the character of the next life, but this next life, even if

it should be passed in some temporary heaven, will not be essentially

different from the present. Before and behind there stretches a vista of

lives, past, present and to come, impermanent and unsatisfying, so that

future existences are spoken of not as immortality but as repeated

death.

4

This sense of weary reiteration is increased by two other doctrines,

which are prevalent in Hinduism, though not universal or uncontested.

The first of them identifies the human soul with the supreme and only

Being. The doctrine of Saṃsâra holds that different forms of existence

may be phases of the same soul and thus prepares the way for the

doctrine that all forms of existence are the same and all souls parts

of, or even identical with the Âtman or Self, the divine soul which not

only pervades the world but _is_ the world. Connected with this doctrine

is another, namely, that the whole world of phenomena is Mâyâ or

illusion. Nothing really exists except the supreme Âtman: all perception

of plurality and difference is illusion and error: the reality is unity,

identity and rest. The development of these ideas leads to some of the

principal systems of philosophy and will claim our attention later. At

present I merely give their outlines as indicative of Hindu thought and

temperament. The Indian thinks of this world as a circular and unending

journey, an ocean without shore, a shadow play without even a plot. He

feels more strongly than the European that change is in itself an evil

and he finds small satisfaction in action for its own sake. All his

higher aspirations bid him extricate himself from this labyrinth of

repeated births, this phantasmagoria of fleeting, unsubstantial visions

and he has generally the conviction that this can be done by knowledge,

for since the whole Saṃsâra is illusion, it collapses and ceases so soon

as the soul knows its own real nature and its independence of phenomena.

This conviction that the soul in itself is capable of happiness and in

order to enjoy needs only the courage to know itself and be itself goes

far to correct the apathy which is the great danger of Indian thought.

It is also just to point out that from the Upanishads down to the

writings of Rabindranath Tagore in the present day Indian literature

from time to time enunciates the idea that the whole universe is the

manifestation of some exuberant force giving expression to itself in

joyous movement. Thus the Taittirîya Upanishad (III. 6) says: "Bliss is

Brahman, for from bliss all these beings are born, by bliss when born

they live, into bliss they enter at their death."

It is remarkable that Indian thought, restless and speculative as it is,

hardly ever concerns itself with the design, object or end of the world.

The notion of [Greek: Telos] plays little part in its cosmogony or

ethics[135]. The Universe is often regarded as a sport, a passing whim

of the divine Being, almost a mistake. Those legends which describe it

as the outcome of a creative act, generally represent the creator as

moved by some impulse to multiply himself rather than as executing some

deliberate if mysterious plan. Legends about the end of the world and

the establishment of a better order are rare. Hindu chronology revels in

periods, whose enormous length though expressed in figures leaves no

real impression on the mind, days and nights of Brahma, Kalpas,

Manvantaras and Yugas, in which gods and worlds are absorbed into the

supreme essence and born again. But there is no finality about these

catastrophes: the destruction of the whole universe is as certain as the

death of a mouse and to the philosopher not more important[136].

Everything is periodic: Buddhas, Jinas and incarnations of all sorts are

all members of a series. They all deserve great respect and are of great

importance in their own day, but they are none of them final, still less

are they able to create a new heaven and earth or to rise above the

perpetual flux of Saṃsâra. The Buddhists look forward to the advent of

Maitreya, the future Buddha, and the Hindus to the reappearance of

Vishnu as Kalkî, who, sword in hand and mounted on a white horse, will

purge India of barbarians, but these future apparitions excite only a

feeble interest in the popular conscience and cannot be compared in

intensity with such ideas as the Jewish Messiah.

It may seem that Indian religion is dreamy, hopeless, and unpractical,

but another point of view will show that all Indian systems are

intensely practical and hopeful. They promise happiness and point out

the way. A mode of life is always prescribed, not merely by works on law

and ceremony but by theological and metaphysical treatises. These are

not analogous to the writings of Kant or Schopenhauer and to study them

as if they were, is like trying to learn riding or cricket by reading

handbooks. The aphorisms of the Sânkhya and Vednâta are meant to be read

under the direction of a teacher who will see that the pupil's mind is

duly prepared not only by explanation but by abstinence and other

physical training. Hindu religions are unpractical only in so far that

they decline to subordinate themselves to human life. It is assumed that

the religious man who is striving towards a goal beyond this world is

ready to sacrifice the world without regret and in India the assumption

is justified surprisingly often.

As mentioned already the word god has more than one meaning. In India we

have at least two different classes of divinities, distinguished in the

native languages. First there is Brahman the one self-existent,

omnipresent, superpersonal spirit from whom all things emanate and to

whom all things return. The elaboration of this conception is the most

original feature of Indian theology, which tends to regard Brahman as

not merely immanent in all things, but as being all things, so that the

soul liberated from illusion can see that it is one with him and that

nothing else exists. Very different is the meaning of Deva: this

signifies a god (which is not the same as God, though our language

insufficiently distinguishes the two) roughly comparable with the gods

of classical mythology[137]. How little sense of divinity it carries

with it is seen by the fact that it became the common form of address to

kings and simply equivalent to Your Majesty. In later times, though Siva

is styled Mahâdeva, it was felt that the great sectarian gods, who are

for their respective worshippers the personal manifestations in which

Brahman makes himself intelligible, required some name distinguishing

them from the hosts of minor deities. They are commonly spoken of by

some title signifying the Lord: thus Siva is Îśvara, Vishnu and his

incarnations are more often styled Bhagavad.

From the Vedic hymns onwards the gods of India have been polymorphic

figures not restricted by the limitations of human personality. If a Jew

or a Moslim hears new views about God, he is disposed to condemn them as

wrong. The Hindu's inclination is to appropriate them and ascribe to his

own deity the novel attributes, whether they are consistent with the

existing figure or not. All Indian gods are really everything. As the

thought of the worshipper wanders among them they turn into one another.

Even so sturdy a personality as Indra is declared to be the same as Agni

and as Varuna, and probably every deity in the Vedic pantheon is at some

time identified with another deity. But though in one way the gods seem

vague and impersonal, in another the distinction between gods and men is

slight. The Brâhmaṇas tell us that the gods were originally mortal and

obtained immortality by offering sacrifices: the man who sacrifices like

them makes for himself an immortal body in the abode of the gods and

practically becomes a Deva and the bliss of great sages is declared

equal to the bliss of the gods[138]. The human and divine worlds are not

really distinct, and as in China and Japan, distinguished men are

deified. The deification of Buddha takes place before our eyes as we

follow the course of history: the origin of Krishna's godhead is more

obscure but it is probable that he was a deified local hero. After the

period of the Brâhmaṇas the theory that deities manifest themselves to

the world in avatâras or descents, that is in our idiom incarnations,

becomes part of popular theology.

There are other general characteristics of Indian religion which will be

best made clear by more detailed treatment in succeeding chapters. Such

are, firstly, a special theory of sacrifice or ritual which, though

totally rejected by Buddhism, has survived to modern times. Secondly, a

belief in the efficacy of self-mortification as a means of obtaining

super-human powers or final salvation. Thirdly, an even more deeply

rooted conviction that salvation can be obtained by knowledge. Fourthly,

there is the doctrine that faith or devotion to a particular deity is

the best way to salvation, but this teaching, though it seems natural to

our minds, does not make its appearance in India until relatively late.

It is not so peculiarly Indian as the other ideas mentioned, but even at

the outset it is well to insist on its prevalence during the last two

thousand years because a very false impression may be produced by

ignoring it.

There also runs through Indian religion a persistent though

inconspicuous current of non-theistic thought. It does not deny the

existence of spirits but it treats them as being, like men, subject to

natural laws, though able, like men, to influence events. The ultimate

truth for it is not pantheism but fixed natural laws of which no

explanation is offered. The religion of the Jains and the Sânkhya

philosophy belong to this current. So did the teaching of several

ancient sects, such as the Âjîvìkas, and strictly speaking Buddhism

itself. For the Buddha is not an Avatâra or a messenger but a superman

whose exceptional intelligence sees that the Wheel of Causation and the

Four Truths are part of the very nature of things. It is strange too

that asceticism, sacrifices and modern tantric rites which seem to us

concerned with the relations between man and God are in India penetrated

by a non-theistic theory, namely that there are certain laws which can

be studied and applied, much like electricity, and that then spirits can

be coerced to grant what the ascetic or sacrificer desires. At the same

time such views are more often implied than formulated. The Dharma is

spoken of as the teaching of the Buddha rather than as Cosmic Order like

the Tao of the Chinese and though tantric theory assumes the existence

of certain forces which can be used scientifically, the general

impression produced by tantric works is that they expound an intricate

mythology and ritual.

CHAPTER IV

VEDIC DEITIES AND SACRIFICES

1

Our knowledge of early Indian religion is derived almost entirely from

literature. After the rise of Buddhism this is supplemented to some

extent by buildings, statues and inscriptions, but unlike Egypt and

Babylonia, pre-Buddhist India has yielded no temples, images or other

religious antiquities, nor is it probable that such will be discovered.

Certainly the material for study is not scanty. The theological

literature of India is enormous: the difficulty is to grasp it and

select what is important. The enquirer is confronted with a series of

encyclopædic works of great bulk and considerable antiquity, treating of

every aspect of religion which interested the Brahmans. But he

continually feels the want of independent testimony to check their

statements. They set forth the views of their authors but whether those

views met with general acceptance outside the Brahmanic caste and

influenced Indian life as a whole or whether classes, such as the

military caste, or regions, such as western India and Dravidian India,

had different views, it is often hard to say. Even more serious is the

difficulty of chronology which affects secular as well as religious

literature. The feats of Hindus in the matter of computing time show in

the most extravagant form the peculiarities of their mental temperament,

for while in their cosmogonies æons whose length the mind can hardly

grasp are tabulated with the names of their superhuman rulers there are

few[139] dates in the pre-Mohammedan history which can be determined

from purely Indian sources. The fragments of obscure Greek writers and

the notes of a travelling Chinaman furnish more trustworthy data about

important epochs in the history of the Hindus than the whole of their

gigantic literature, in which there has been found no mention of

Alexander's invasion and only scattered allusions to the conquests of

the Sakas, Kushans and Hûnas. We can hardly imagine doubt as to the

century in which Shakespeare or Virgil lived, yet when I first studied

Sanskrit the greatest of Indian dramatists, Kalidasa, was supposed to

have lived about 50 B.C. His date is not yet fixed with unanimity but it

is now generally placed in the fifth or sixth century A.D.

This chronological chaos naturally affects the value of literature as a

record of the development of thought. We are in danger of moving in a

vicious circle: of assigning ideas to an epoch because they occur in a

certain book, while at the same time we fix the date of the book in

virtue of the ideas which it contains. Still we may feel some security

as to the sequence, if not the exact dates, of the great divisions in

Indian religious literature such as the period of the Vedic hymns, the

period of the Brâhmaṇas, the rise of Buddhism, the composition of the

two great epics, and the Puranas. If we follow the opinion of most

authorities and accept the picture of Indian life and thought contained

in the Pali Tripitaka as in the main historical, it seems to follow that

both the ritual system of the Brâhmaṇas and the philosophic speculations

of the Upanishads were in existence by 500 B.C.[140] and sufficiently

developed to impress the public mind with a sense of their futility.

Some interval of mental growth seems to separate the Upanishads from the

Brâhmaṇas and a more decided interval separates the Brâhmaṇas from the

earlier hymns of the Rig Veda, if not from the compilation of the whole

collection[141]. We may hence say that the older Upanishads and

Brahmaṇas must have been composed between 800 and 500 B.C. and the hymns

of the Rig Veda hardly later than 1000 B.C. Many authorities think the

earlier hymns must date from 2000 rather than 1000 B.C. but the

resemblance of the Rig Veda to the Zoroastrian Gathas (which are

generally regarded as considerably later than 1000 B.C.) is plain, and

it will be strange if the two collections prove to be separated by an

interval of many centuries. But the stage of social and religious

culture indicated in the Vedic hymns may have begun long before they

were composed, and rites and deities common to Indians and Iranians

existed before the reforms of Zoroaster[142].

It may seem that everything is uncertain in this literature without

dates or authors and that the growth of religion in India cannot be

scientifically studied. The difficulties are indeed considerable but

they are materially reduced by the veneration in which the ancient

scriptures were held, and by the retentiveness of memory and devotion to

grammar, if not to history, which have characterized the Brahmans for at

least twenty-five centuries. The authenticity of certain Vedic texts is

guaranteed not only by the quotations found in later works, but by

treatises on phonetics, grammar and versification as well as by indices

which give the number of words in every book, chapter and verse. We may

be sure that we possess not perhaps the exact words of the Vedic poets,

but what were believed about 600 B.C. to be their exact words, and there

is no reason to doubt that this is a substantially correct version of

the hymns as recited several centuries earlier[143].

In drawing any deductions from the hymns of the Rig Veda it must be

remembered that it is the manual of the Hotri priests[144]. This does

not affect the age or character of the single pieces: they may have been

composed at very different dates and they are not arranged in the order

in which the priest recites them. But the liturgical character of the

compilation does somewhat qualify its title to give a complete picture

of religion. One could not throw doubt on a ceremony of the Church,

still less on a popular custom, because it was not mentioned in the

missal, and we cannot assume that ideas or usages not mentioned in the

Rig Veda did not exist at the time when it was composed.

We have no other Sanskrit writings contemporary with the older parts of

the Rig Veda, but the roots of epic poetry stretch far back and ballads

may be as old as hymns, though they neither sought nor obtained the

official sanction of the priesthood. Side by side with Vedic tradition,

unrecorded Epic tradition built up the figures of Siva, Râma and Krishna

which astonish us by their sudden appearance in later literature only

because their earlier phases have not been preserved.

The Vedic hymns were probably collected and arranged between 1000 and

500 B.C. At that period rites and ceremonies multiplied and absorbed

man's mind to a degree unparalleled in the history of the world and

literature occupied itself with the description or discussion of this

dreary ceremonial. Buddhism was a protest against the necessity of

sacrifices and, though Buddhism decayed in India, the sacrificial system

never recovered from the attack and assumed comparatively modest

proportions. But in an earlier period, after the composition of the

Vedic hymns and before the predominance of speculation, skill in

ceremonial was regarded as the highest and indeed only science and the

ancient prayers and poems of the race were arranged in three collections

to suit the ritual. These were the Rig Veda, containing metrical

prayers: the Yajur Veda (in an old and new recension known as the Black

and the White) containing formulæ mainly in prose to be muttered during

the course of the sacrifice: and the Sâma Veda, a book of chants,

consisting almost entirely of verses taken from the Rig Veda and

arranged for singing. The Rig Veda is clearly older than the others: its

elements are anterior to the Brahmanic liturgy and are arranged in less

complete subservience to it than in the Yajur and Sâma Vedas.

The restriction of the words Veda and Vedic to the collection of hymns,

though convenient, is not in accordance with Indian usage, which applies

the name to a much larger body of religious literature. What we call the

Rig Veda is strictly speaking the mantras of the Rig Veda or the

Rig-Veda-Saṃhitâ: besides this, there are the Brâhmaṇas or ceremonial

treatises, the Âraṇyakas and Upanishads containing philosophy and

speculation, the Sûtras or aphoristic rules, all comprised in the Veda

or Śruti (hearing), that is the revelation heard directly by saints as

opposed to Smṛiti (remembering) or tradition starting from human

teachers. Modern Hindus when not influenced by the language of European

scholars apply the word Veda especially to the Upanishads.

For some time only three[145] Vedas were accepted. But the Epics and the

Puranas know of the fourfold Veda and place the Atharva Veda on a level

with the other three. It was the manual of two ancient priestly

families, the Atharvans and Angirasas, whose speciality was charms and

prophylactics rather than the performance of the regular sacrifices. The

hymns and magic songs which it contains were probably collected

subsequently to the composition of the Brâhmaṇas, but the separate poems

are older and, so far as can be judged from their language, are

intermediate between the Rig Veda and the Brâhmaṇas. But the substance

of many of the spells must be older still, since the incantations

prescribed show a remarkable similarity to old German, Russian and

Lettish charms. The Atharva also contains speculative poems and, if it

has not the freshness of the Rig Veda, is most valuable for the history

of Indian thought and civilization.

I will not here enquire what was the original home of the Aryans or

whether the resemblances shown by Aryan languages justify us in

believing that the ancestors of the Hindus, Greeks, Kelts, Slavs, etc.,

belonged to a single race and physical type. The grounds for such a

belief seem to me doubtful. But a comparison of language, religion and

customs makes it probable that the ancestors of the Iranians and Hindus

dwelt together in some region lying to the north of India and then, in

descending southwards, parted company and wandered, one band westwards

to Persia and the other to the Panjab and south-east[146]. These latter

produced the poets of the Rig Veda. Their home is indicated by their

acquaintance with the Himalayas, the Kabul river, the Indus and rivers

of the Panjab, and the Jamna. The Ganges, though known, apparently lay

beyond their sphere, but the geography of the Atharva extends as far as

Benares and implies a practical knowledge of the sea, which is spoken of

somewhat vaguely in the Rig Veda. It is probable that the oldest hymns

were composed among the rivers of the Panjab, but the majority somewhat

further to the east, in the district of Kurukshetra or Thanesar. At some

period subsequent to the Aryan immigration there was a great struggle

between two branches of the same stock, related in a legendary form as

the contest between the Kauravas and Pâṇḍavas. Some have thought that we

have here an indication of a second invasion composed of Aryans who

remained in the mountainous districts north of the Hindu Kush when the

first detachment moved south and who developed there somewhat different

customs. It is also possible that the Atharva Veda may represent the

religious ideas of these second invaders. In several passages the

Mahâbhârata speaks of the Atharva as the highest Veda and represents the

Pâṇḍavas as practising polyandry, a custom which still prevails among

many Himalayan tribes.

The Rig Veda depicts a life not far advanced in material arts but,

considering the date, humane and civilized. There were no towns but

merely villages and fortified enclosures to be used as refuges in case

of necessity. The general tone of the hymns is kindly and healthy; many

of them indeed have more robust piety than interest. There are few

indications of barbarous customs. The general impression is of a free

and joyous life in which the principal actors are chiefs and priests,

though neither have become tyrannical.

The composition of this anthology probably extended over several

centuries and comprised a period of lively mental growth. It is

therefore natural that it should represent stages of religious

development which are not contemporaneous. But though thought is active

and exuberant in these poems they are not altogether an intellectual

outburst excited by the successful advance into India. The calm of

settlement as well as the fire of conquest have left their mark on them

and during the period of composition religion grew more boldly

speculative but also more sedentary, formal and meticulous. The earliest

hymns bear traces of quasi-nomadic life, but the writers are no longer

nomads. They follow agriculture as well as pasturage, but they are still

contending with the aborigines: still expanding and moving on. They

mention no states or capitals: they revere rivers and mountains but have

no shrines to serve as religious centres, as repositories and factories

of tradition. Legends and precepts have of course come down from earlier

generations, but are not very definite or cogent: the stories of ancient

sages and warriors are vague and wanting in individual colour.

2

The absence of sculpture and painting explains much in the character of

the Vedic deities. The hymn-writers were devout and imaginative, not

content to revere some undescribed being in the sky, but full of

mythology, metaphor and poetry and continually singling out new powers

for worship. Among many races the conceptions thus evolved acquire

solidity and permanence by the aid of art. An image stereotypes a deity,

worshippers from other districts can see it and it remains from

generation to generation as a conservative and unifying force. Even a

stone may have something of the same effect, for it connects the deity

with the events, rites and ideas of a locality. But the earliest stratum

of Vedic religion is worship of the powers of nature—such as the Sun,

the Sky, the Dawn, the Fire—which are personified but not localized or

depicted. Their attributes do not depend at all on art, not much on

local or tribal custom but chiefly on imagination and poetry, and as

this poetry was not united in one collection until a later period, a

bard was under no obligation to conform to the standards of his fellows

and probably many bards sang without knowing of one another's existence.

Such a figure as Agni or Fire—if one can call him a figure—illustrates

the fluid and intangible character of Vedic divinities. He is one of the

greatest in the Pantheon, and in some ways his godhead is strongly

marked. He blesses, protects, preserves, and inspires: he is a divine

priest and messenger between gods and men: he "knows all generations."

Yet we cannot give any definite account of him such as could be drawn up

for a Greek deity. He is not a god of fire, like Vulcan, but the Fire

itself regarded as divine. The descriptions of his appearance are not

really anthropomorphic but metaphorical imagery depicting shining,

streaming flames. The hymns tell us that he has a tawny beard and hair:

a flaming head or three heads: three tongues or seven: four eyes or a

thousand. One poem says that he faces in all directions: another that he

is footless and headless. He is called the son of Heaven and Earth, of

Tvashṭri and the Waters, of the Dawn, of Indra-Vishnu. One singer says

that the gods generated him to be a light for the Aryans, another that

he is the father of the gods. This multiple origin becomes more definite

in the theory of Agni's three births: he is born on earth from the

friction of fire sticks, in the clouds as lightning, and in the highest

heavens as the Sun or celestial light. In virtue of this triple birth he

assumes a triune character: his heads, tongues, bodies and dwellings are

three, and this threefold nature has perhaps something to do with the

triads of deities which become frequent later and finally develop into

the Trimûrti or Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Siva. But there is nothing fixed or

dogmatic in this idea of Agni's three births. In other texts he is said

to have two, one in Heaven and one on Earth, and yet another turn of

fancy ascribes to him births innumerable because he is kindled on many

hearths. Some of the epithets applied to him become quasi-independent.

For instance, Agni Vaiśvânara—All men's fire—and Agni Tanunapat, which

seems to mean son of himself, or fire spontaneously generated, are in a

later period treated almost as separate deities. Mâtariśvan is sometimes

a name of Agni and sometimes a separate deity who brings Agni to

mankind.

In the same way the Rig Veda has not one but many solar deities. Mitra,

Sûrya, Savitri, and perhaps Puśan, Bhaga, Vivasvat and Vishnu, are all

loose personifications of certain functions or epithets of the sun.

Deities are often thought of in classes. Thus we have the Maruts, Rudras

and Vasus. We hear of Prajâpati in the singular, but also of the

Prajâpatis or creative forces.

Not only does Agni tend to be regarded as more than one: he is

identified with other gods. We are told he is Varuṇa and Mitra, Savitri

and Indra. "Thou art Varuṇa when born," says one hymn, "thou becomest

Mitra when kindled. In thee, O son of strength, are all the gods[147]."

Such identifications are common in the Vedas. Philosophically, they are

an early manifestation of the mental bias which leads to pantheism,

metempsychosis, and the feeling that all things and persons are

transitory and partial aspects of the one reality. But evidently the

mutability of the Vedic gods is also due to their nature: they are

bundles of epithets and functions without much personal or local centre.

And these epithets and functions are to a large extent, the same. All

the gods are bright and swift and helpful: all love sacrifices and

bestow wealth, sons and cows. A figure like Agni enables us to

understand the many-sided, inconsistent presentment of Siva and Vishnu

in later times. A richer mythology surrounds them but in the fluidity of

their outline, their mutability and their readiness to absorb or become

all other deities they follow the old lines. Even a deity like Gaṇeśa

who seems at first sight modern and definite illustrates these ancient

characteristics. He has one or five heads and from four to sixteen arms:

there are half a dozen strange stories of his birth and wonderful

allegories describing his adventures. Yet he is also identified with all

the Gods and declared to be the creator, preserver and destroyer of the

Universe, nay the Supreme Spirit itself[148].

In Soma, the sacred plant whose juice was offered in the most solemn

sacrifices, we again find the combination of natural phenomena and

divinity with hardly any personification. Soma is not a sacred tree

inhabited by some spirit of the woods but the Lord of immortality who

can place his worshippers in the land of eternal life and light. Some of

the finest and most spiritual of the Vedic hymns are addressed to him

and yet it is hard to say whether they are addressed to a person or a

beverage. The personification is not much more than when French writers

call absinthe "La fée aux yeux verts." Later, Soma was identified with

the moon, perhaps because the juice was bright and shining. On the other

hand Soma worship is connected with a very ancient but persistent form

of animism, for the Vedic poets celebrate as immortal the stones under

which the plant is pressed and beg them to bestow wealth and children.

Just so at the present day agricultural and other implements receive the

salutations and prayers of those who use them. They are not gods in any

ordinary sense but they are potent forces.

But some Vedic deities are drawn more distinctly, particularly Indra,

who having more character has also lasted longer than most of his

fellows, partly because he was taken over by Buddhism and enrolled in

the retinue of the Buddha. He appears to have been originally a god of

thunder, a phenomenon which lends itself to anthropomorphic treatment.

As an atmospheric deity, he conquers various powers of evil,

particularly Vritra, the demon of drought. The Vedas know of evil

spirits against whom the gods wage successful war but they have no

single personification of evil in general, like our devil, and few

malevolent deities. Of these latter Rudra, the prototype of Siva, is the

most important but he is not wholly malevolent for he is the god of

healing and can take away sickness as well as cause it. Indian thought

is not inclined to dualism, which is perhaps the outcome of a practical

mind desiring a certain course and seeing everywhere the difficulties

which the Evil One puts in the way of it, but rather to that pantheism

which tends to subsume both good and evil under a higher unity.

Indra was the tutelary deity of the invading Aryans. His principles

would delight a European settler in Africa. He protects the Aryan colour

and subjects the black skin: he gave land to the Aryans and made the

Dâsyus (aborigines) subject to them: he dispersed fifty thousand of the

black race and rent their citadels[149]. Some of the events with which

he is connected, such as the battles of King Sudas, may have a

historical basis. He is represented as a gigantic being of enormous size

and vigour and of gross passions. He feasts on the flesh of bulls and

buffaloes roasted by hundreds, his potations are counted in terms of

lakes, and not only nerve him for the fray but also intoxicate him[150].

Under the name of Sakka, Indra figures largely in the Buddhist sûtras,

and seems to have been the chief popular deity in the Buddha's lifetime.

He was adopted into the new creed as a sort of archangel and heavenly

defender of the faith. In the epics he is still a mighty deity and the

lord of paradise. Happiness in his heaven is the reward of the pious

warrior after death. The Mahâbhârata and the Puranas, influenced perhaps

by Buddhism, speak of a series of Indras, each lasting for a cycle, but

superseded when a new heaven and earth appear. In modern Hinduism his

name is familiar though he does not receive much worship. Yet in spite

of his long pre-eminence there is no disposition to regard him as the

supreme and only god. Though the Rig Veda calls him the creator and

destroyer of all things[151], he is not God in our sense any more than

other deities are. He is the personification of strength and success,

but he is not sufficiently spiritual or mystical to hold and satisfy the

enquiring mind.

3

One of the most interesting and impressive of Vedic deities is Varuṇa,

often invoked with a more shadowy double called Mitra. No myths or

exploits are related of him but he is the omnipotent and omniscient

upholder of moral and physical law. He established earth and sky: he set

the sun in heaven and ordained the movements of the moon and stars: the

wind is his breath and by his law the heavens and earth are kept apart.

He perceives all that exists in heaven and earth or beyond, nor could a

man escape him though he fled beyond the sky. The winkings of men's eyes

are all numbered by him[152]: he knows all that man does or thinks. Sin

is the infringement of his ordinances and he binds sinners in fetters.

Hence they pray to him for release from sin and he is gracious to the

penitent. Whereas the other deities are mainly asked to bestow material

boons, the hymns addressed to Varuṇa contain petitions for forgiveness.

He dwells in heaven in a golden mansion. His throne is great and lofty

with a thousand columns and his abode has a thousand doors. From it he

looks down on the doings of men and the all-seeing sun comes to his

courts to report.

There is much in these descriptions which is unlike the attributes

ascribed to any other member of the Vedic pantheon and recalls Ahura

Mazda of the Avesta or Semitic deities. No proof of foreign influence is

forthcoming, but the opinion of some scholars that the figure of Varuṇa

somehow reflects Semitic ideas is plausible. It has been suggested that

he was originally a lunar deity, which explains his association with

Mitra (the Persian Mithra) who was a sun god, and that the group of

deities called Âdityas and including Mitra and Varuṇa were the sun, moon

and the five planets known to the ancients. This resembles the

Babylonian worship of the heavenly bodies and, though there is no record

whatever of how such ideas reached the Aryans, it is not difficult to

imagine that they may have come from Babylonia either to India[153] or

to the country where Indians and Iranians dwelt together. There is a

Semitic flavour too in the Indian legend of the Churning of the

Ocean[154]. The Gods and Asuras effect this by using a huge serpent as a

rope to whirl round a mountain and from the turmoil there arise various

marvellous personages and substances including the moon. This resembles

in tone if not in detail the Babylonian creation myths, telling of a

primæval abyss of waters and a great serpent which is slain by the Gods

who use its body as the material for making the heavens and the

earth[155].

Yet Varuṇa is not the centre of a monotheistic religion any more than

Indra, and in later times he becomes a water god of no marked

importance. The Aryans and Semites, while both dissatisfied with

polytheism and seeking the one among the many, moved along different

paths and did not reach exactly the same goal. Semitic deities were

representations of the forces of nature in human form but their

character was stereotyped by images, at any rate in Assyria and

Babylonia, and by the ritual of particular places with which they were

identified. Semitic polytheism is mainly due to the number of tribes and

localities possessing separate deities, not to the number of deities

worshipped by each place and tribe. As villages and small towns were

subordinate to great towns, so the deities of minor localities were

subordinate to those of the greater. Hence the Semitic god was often

thought of as a king who might be surrounded by a court and then became

the head of a pantheon of inferior deities, but also might be thought of

as tolerating no rivals. This latter conception when combined with moral

earnestness gives us Jehovah, who resembles Varuṇa, except that Varuṇa

is neither jealous nor national. Indian polytheism also originated in

the personification of various phenomena, the sun, thunder, fire,

rivers, and so forth, but these deities unlike the Semitic gods had

little to do with special tribes or localities and the philosophic

Indian easily traced a connection between them. It is not difficult to

see that sun, fire and lightning have something in common. The gods are

frequently thought of as joined in couples, triads or larger companies

and early worship probably showed the beginnings of a feature which is

prominent in the later ritual, namely, that a sacrifice is not an

isolated oblation offered to one particular god but a series of

oblations presented to a series of deities. There was thus little

disposition to exalt one god and annihilate the others, but every

disposition to identify the gods with one another and all of them with

something else. Just as rivers, mountains and plains are dimly seen to

be parts of a whole which later ages call nature, so are the gods seen

to be parts of some divine whole which is greater than any of them. Even

in the Rig Veda we find such sentiments as "The priests speak of the One

Being in many ways: they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtariśvan[156]." Hence it

is not surprising that when in the later Vedic period a tendency towards

monotheism (but monotheism of a pantheistic type) appears, the supreme

position is given to none of the old deities but to a new figure,

Prajâpati. This word, meaning Lord of living creatures, occurs in the

Rig Veda as an epithet of the sun and is also occasionally used as the

name of the Being by whom all gods and worlds were generated and by

whose power they continue to exist. In the Brâhmaṇas and later ritual

literature he is definitely recognized as the supreme deity, the

Creator, the first sacrificer and the sacrifice itself. It is perhaps

owing to his close connection with ceremonial that enquiring and

speculative minds felt Prajâpati not to be a final or satisfactory

explanation of the universe. He is identified with Brahmâ, the active

personal creator, and this later name gradually ousts the other but he

does not, any more than Indra or Varuṇa, become the Âtman or supreme

universal Being of the Upanishads.

The principal Vedic deities are male and the few goddesses that are

mentioned such as Ushas. the Dawn, seem to owe their sex to purely

dramatic reasons. Greece and Rome as well as India felt it appropriate

to represent the daybreak as a radiant nymph. But though in later times

such goddesses as Durgâ assumed in some sects a paramount position, and

though the Veda is familiar with the idea of the world being born, there

are few traces in it of a goddess corresponding to the Great Mother,

Cybele or Astarte.

In an earlier period of Vedic studies many deities were identified with

figures in the classical or Teutonic mythology chiefly on philological

grounds but most of these identifications have now been abandoned. But a

few names and figures seem to be found among both the Asiatic and

European Aryans and to point to a common stock of ideas. Dyaus, the Sky

God, is admittedly the same as Zeus and Jupiter. The Aśvins agree in

character, though not in name, with the Dioscuri and other parallels are

quoted from Lettish mythology. Bhaga, the bountiful giver, a somewhat

obscure deity, is the same word as the Slavonic Bog, used in the general

sense of God, and we find _deva_ in Sanskrit, _deus_ in Latin, and

_devas_ in Lithuanian. Ushas, the Dawn, is phonetically related to

[Greek: 'Êhôs] and Aurora who, however, are only half deities. Indra, if

he cannot be scientifically identified with Thor, is a similar personage

who must have grown out of the same stock of ideas. By a curious

transference the Prophet Elias has in south-eastern Europe inherited the

attributes of the thunder god and is even now in the imagination of the

peasantry a jovial and riotous being who, like Indra, drives a noisy

chariot across the sky.

The connection with ancient Persian mythology is closer. The Avestan

religion was a reformation due to the genius of Zoroaster and therefore

comparable with Buddhism rather than Hinduism, but the less systematic

polytheism which preceded it contained much which reminds us of the

Vedic hymns. It can hardly be doubted that the ancestors of the Indians

and Iranians once practised almost identical forms of religion and had

even a common ritual. The chief features of the fire cult and of the

Soma or Haoma sacrifice appear in both. The sacrifice is called Yajña in

the Veda, Yasna in the Avesta: the Hotri priest is Zaotar, Atharvan is

Athravan, Mitra is Mithra. Vâyu and Âpaḥ (the divine waters) meet us in

the Avesta in almost the same forms and Indra's epithet of Vritrahan

(the slayer of Vritra) appears as Verethragna. Ahura Mazda seems to be a

development of the deity who appears as Varuṇa in India though he has

not the same name, and the main difference between Indian and Iranian

religion lies in this, that the latter was systematized by a theistic

reformer who exalted one deity above the others, whereas in India, where

there was more religious vitality, polytheistic and pantheistic fancies

flourished uncurbed and the greatest reformer, the Buddha, was not a

theist.

One peculiarity of Indians in all ages is that they put more into

religion than other races. It received most of the energy and talent

which, elsewhere, went into art, politics and philosophy. Hence it

became both intense and manifold, for deities and creeds were wanted for

every stage of intelligence and variety of taste, and also very

tolerant, for sects in India, though multitudinous, are not so sharply

divided or mutually hostile as in Europe. Connected with the general

interest which religion inspired is its strongly marked speculative

character. The Rig Veda asks whether in the beginning there was being or

not being, and the later Vedas and Brâhmaṇas are filled with discussions

as to the meaning of ceremonies, which show that the most dreary

formalism could not extinguish the innate propensity to seek for a

reason. In the Upanishads we have the same spirit dealing with more

promising material. And throughout the long history of Hinduism religion

and philosophy are seldom separated: we rarely find detached

metaphysicians: philosophers found new sects or support old ones:

religion absorbs philosophy and translates it into theology or myths.

4

To the age of the Vedas succeeds that of the Brâhmaṇas or sacrificial

treatises. The two periods are distinct and have each a well-marked

tone, but they pass into one another, for the Yajur and Sâma Vedas

pre-suppose the ritual of the Brâhmaṇas. These treatises introduce us to

one feature of Indian religion mentioned above, namely the extraordinary

elaboration of its ritual. To read them one would suppose that the one

occupation of all India was the offering of sacrifices. The accounts are

no doubt exaggerated and must often be treated as specimens of

sacerdotal imagination, like the Biblical descriptions of the rites

performed in the Tabernacle during the wanderings of the Israelites. But

making all allowance for priestly enthusiasm, it still remains true that

the intellect of India, so far as it is preserved in literature, was

occupied during two centuries or so with the sacrificial art and that

philosophy had difficulty in disentangling itself from ceremonies. One

has only to compare Greek and Sanskrit literature to see how vast are

the proportions assumed by ritual in India. Our information about the

political institutions, the wars and chronology of ancient Greece is

full, but of the details of Greek worship we hear little and probably

there was not much to tell. But in India, where there are no histories

and no dates, we know every prayer and gesture of the officiants

throughout complicated sacrifices and possess a whole library describing

their correct performance.

In most respects these sacrifices which absorbed so much intellect and

energy belong to ancient history. They must not be confounded with the

ceremonies performed in modern temples, which have a different origin

and character. A great blow was struck at the sacrificial system by

Buddhism. Not only did it withdraw the support of many kings and nobles

(and the greater ceremonies being very costly depended largely on the

patronage of the wealthy), but it popularized the idea that animal

sacrifices are shocking and that attempts to win salvation by offerings

are crude and unphilosophic. But though, after Buddhism had leavened

India for a few centuries, we no longer find the religious world given

over to sacrificing as it had been about 600 B.C., these rites did not

die out. Even now they are occasionally performed in South India and the

Deccan. There are still many Brahmans in these regions who, if they have

not the means or learning to perform the greater Vedic ceremonies, at

any rate sympathize with the mental attitude which they imply, and this

attitude has many curious features.

The rite of sacrifice, which in the simple form of an offering supposed

to be agreeable to the deity is the principal ceremony in the early

stages of most religions, persists in their later stages but gives rise

to clouds of theory and mystical interpretations. Thus in Christianity,

the Jewish sacrifices are regarded as prototypes of the death of Christ

and that death itself as a sacrifice to the Almighty, an offering of

himself to himself, which in some way acts as an expiation for the sins

of the world. And by a further development the sacrifice of the mass,

that is, the offering of portions of bread and wine which are held to be

miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Christ by the

manipulations of a qualified priest, is believed to repeat every day the

tragedy of Calvary. The prevalence of this view in Europe should make us

chary of stigmatizing Hindu ideas about sacrifice as mental aberrations.

They represent the fancies of acute intellects dealing with ancient

ceremonies which they cannot abandon but which they transform into

something more congenial to their own transitional mode of thought.

Though the Brâhmaṇas and Upanishads mix up ritual with physical and

metaphysical theories in the most extraordinary fashion, their main

motive deserves sympathy and respect. Their weakness lies in their

inability to detach themselves (as the Buddha succeeded in doing) from a

ritual which though elaborate was neither edifying nor artistic: they

seem unable to see the great problems of existence except through the

mists of altar smoke. Their merit is their evident conviction that this

formalism is inadequate. Their wish is not to distort and cramp nature

by bringing it within the limits of the ritual, but to enlarge and

expand the ritual until it becomes cosmic. If they regard the whole

universe as one long act of prayer and sacrifice, the idea is grandiose

rather than pedantic, though the details may not always be to our

taste[157]. And the Upanishads pass from ritual and theology to real

speculation in a way unknown to Christian thought. To imagine a

parallel, we must picture Spinoza beginning with an exposition of the

Trinity and transubstantiation and proceeding to develop his own system

without becoming unorthodox.

The conception of the sacrifice set forth in the Brâhmaṇas is that it is

a scientific method of acquiring immortality as well as temporal

blessings. Though originally a mere offering in the _do ut des_

principle, it has assumed a higher and more mysterious position[158]. We

are told that the gods obtained immortality and heaven by sacrifice,

that they created the universe by sacrifice, that Prajâpati, the

creator, _is_ the sacrifice. Although some writers are disposed to

distinguish magic sharply from religion, the two are not separated in

the Vedas. Sacrifice is not merely a means of pleasing the gods: it is a

system of authorized magic or sacred science controlling all worlds, if

properly understood. It is a mysterious cosmic force like electricity

which can be utilized by a properly trained priest but is dangerous in

unskilful hands, for the rites, if wrongly performed, bring disaster or

even death on bunglers. Though the Vedic sacrifices fell more and more

out of general use, this notion of the power of rites and formulae did

not fade with them but has deeply infected modern Hinduism and even

Buddhism, in both of which the lore of spells and gestures assumes

monstrous proportions. The Vedic and modern tantric rituals are

different but they are based on the same supposition that the universe

(including the gods which are part of it) is regulated by some

permeating principle, and that this principle can be apprehended by

sacred science and controlled by the use of proper methods[159]. So far

as these systems express the idea that the human mind can grasp the

universe by knowledge, they offer an example of the bold sweep of the

Hindu intellect, but the methods prescribed are often fatuous.

The belief in the potency of words and formulae, though amplified and

embellished by the Hindus, is not an Indian invention but a common

aspect of early thought which was less emphasized in other countries. It

is found in Persia and among the tribes of Central and Northern Asia and

of Northern Europe, and attained a high development in Finland where

_runot_ or magical songs are credited with very practical efficacy. Thus

the Kalevala relates how Wäinämöinen was building a boat by means of

songs when the process came to a sudden stop because he had forgotten

three words. This is exactly the sort of thing that might happen in the

legends of a Vedic sacrifice if the priest had forgotten the texts he

ought to recite.

The external features of Vedic rites are remarkable and unlike what we

know of those performed by other nations of antiquity. The sacrifice is

not as a rule a gift presented to a single god to win his favour.

Oblations are made to most members of the pantheon in the course of a

prolonged ceremony, but the time, manner and recipients of these

oblations are fixed rather by the mysteries of sacrificial science, than

by the sacrificer's need to propitiate a particular deity. Also the

sacrifice is not offered in a temple and it would appear that in

pre-Buddhist times there were no religious edifices. It is not even

associated with sacred spots, such as groves or fountains haunted by a

deity. The scene of operations requires long and careful preparation,

but it is merely an enclosure with certain sheds, fireplaces and mounds.

It has no architectural pretensions and is not a centre round which

shrines can grow for it requires reconsecration for each ceremony, and

in many cases must not be used twice. There is little that is national,

tribal or communal about these rites. Some of them, such as the

Aśvamedha or horse sacrifice and the Râjasaya, or consecration of a

king, may be attended by games and sports, but that is because they are

connected with secular events. In their essence sacrifices are not

popular festivals or holidays but private services, performed for the

benefit of the sacrificer, that is, the person who pays the fees of the

priests. Usually they have a definite object and, though ceremonies for

the attainment of material blessings are not wanting, this object is

most frequently supramundane, such as the fabrication of a body in the

heavenly world. It is in keeping with these characteristics that there

should be no pomp or spectacular effect: the rites resemble some

complicated culinary operation or scientific experiment, and the

sacrificial enclosure has the appearance of a laboratory rather than a

place of worship.

Vedic ritual includes the sacrifice of animals, and there are

indications of the former prevalence of human sacrifice. At the time

when the Brâhmaṇas were composed the human victims were released alive,

but afterwards the practice of real sacrifice was revived, probably

owing to the continual incorporation into the Hindu community of

semi-barbarous tribes and their savage deities. Human victims were

offered to Mahâdevî the spouse of Siva until the last century, and would

doubtless be offered now, were legal restrictions removed. But though

the sporadic survival of an old custom in its most primitive and

barbarous form is characteristic of Hinduism, the whole tendency of

thought and practice since the rise of Buddhism has been adverse to

religious bloodshed, even of animals. The doctrine of substitution and

atonement, of offering the victim on behalf of the sacrificer, though

not absent, plays a smaller part than in the religions of Western Asia.

Evidently it was not congenial: the Hindu has always been inclined to

think that the individual earns his future in another world by his own

thoughts and acts. Even the value of the victim is less important than

the correct performance of the ceremony. The teaching of the Brâhmaṇas

is not so much that a good heart is better than lavish alms as that the

ritually correct sacrifice of a cake is better than a hecatomb not

offered according to rule.

The offerings required by the Vedic ritual are very varied. The simplest

are cakes and libations of melted butter poured on the fire from two

wooden spoons held one over the other while Vedic verses are recited.

Besides these there was the animal sacrifice, and still more important

the Soma[160] sacrifice. This ceremony is very ancient and goes back to

the time when the Hindus and Iranians were not divided. In India the

sacrifice lasted at least five days and, even in its simpler forms, was

far more complicated than any ceremony known to the Greeks, Romans or

Jews. Only professional priests could perform it and as a rule a priest

did not attempt to master more than one branch and to be for instance

either a reciter (Hotri) or singer (Udgâtri). But the five-day

sacrifices are little more than the rudiments of the sacrificial art and

lead on to the Ahînas or sacrifices comprising from two to twelve days

of Soma pressing which last not more than a month. The Ahinas again can

be combined into sacrificial sessions lasting a year or more[161], and

it would seem that rites of this length were really performed, though

when we read of such sessions extending over a hundred years, we may

hope that they are creations of a fancy like that of the hymn-writer who

celebrated the state

Where congregations ne'er break up And Sabbaths never end.

The ritual literature of India is enormous and much of it has been

edited and translated by European scholars with a care that merited a

better object. It is a mine of information respecting curious beliefs

and practices of considerable historical interest, but it does not

represent the main current of religious ideas in post-Buddhist times.

The Brahmans indeed never ceased to give the sacrificial system their

theoretical and, when possible, their practical approval, for it

embodies a principle most dear to them, namely, that the other castes

can obtain success and heaven only under the guidance of Brahmans and by

rites which only Brahmans can perform. But for this very reason it

incurred the hostility not only of philosophers and morally earnest men,

but of the military caste and it never really recovered from the blow

dealt it by Buddhism, the religion of that caste. But with every

Brahmanic revival it came to the front and the performance of the

Aśvamedha or horse sacrifice[162] was long the culminating glory of an

orthodox king.

CHAPTER V

ASCETICISM AND KNOWLEDGE

1

As sacrifice and ceremonial are the material accompaniments of prayer,

so are asceticism and discipline those of thought. This is less

conspicuous in other countries, but in India it is habitually assumed

that the study of what we call metaphysics or theology needs some kind

of physical discipline and it will be well to elucidate this point

before describing the beginnings of speculation.

Tapas, that is asceticism or self-mortification, holds in the religious

thought and practice of India as large a place as sacrifice. We hear of

it as early, for it is mentioned in the Rig Veda[163], and it lasts

longer, for it is a part of contemporary Hinduism just as much as prayer

or worship. It appears even in creeds which disavow it theoretically,

_e.g._ in Buddhism, and evidently has its root in a deep-seated and

persistent instinct.

Tapas is often translated penance but the idea of mortification as an

expiation for sins committed, though not unknown in India, is certainly

not that which underlies the austerities of most ascetics. The word

means literally heat, hence pain or toil, and some think that its origin

should be sought in practices which produced fever, or tended to

concentrate heat in the body. One object of Tapas is to obtain abnormal

powers by the suppression of desires or the endurance of voluntary

tortures. There is an element of truth in this aspiration. Temperance,

chastity and mental concentration are great aids for increasing the

force of thought and will. The Hindu believes that intensity and

perseverance in this road of abstinence and rapture will yield

correspondingly increased results. The many singular phenomena connected

with Indian asceticism have been imperfectly investigated but a

psychological examination would probably find that subjective results

(such as visions and the feeling of flying through the air) are really

produced by the discipline recommended and there may be elements of much

greater value in the various systems of meditation. But this is only the

beginning of Tapas. To the idea that the soul when freed from earthly

desires is best able to comprehend the divine is superadded another

idea, namely that self-mortification is a process of productive labour

akin to intellectual toil. Just as the whole world is supposed to be

permeated by a mysterious principle which can be known and subdued by

the science of the sacrificing priests, so the ascetic is able to

control gods and nature by the force of his austerities. The creative

deities are said to have produced the world by Tapas, just as they are

said to have produced it by sacrifice and Hindu mythology abounds in

stories of ascetics who became so mighty that the very gods were

alarmed. For instance Râvaṇa, the Demon ruler of Lanka who carried off

Sîtâ, had acquired his power by austerities which enabled him to extort

a boon from Brahmâ. Thus there need be nothing moral in the object of

asceticism or in the use of the power obtained. The epics and dramas

frequently portray ascetics as choleric and unamiable characters and

modern Yogis maintain the tradition.

Though asceticism resembles the sacrifice in being a means by which man

can obtain his wishes whether religious or profane, it differs in being

comparatively easy. Irksome as it may be, it demands merely strength of

will and not a scientific training in ritual and Vedic texts. Hence in

this sphere the supremacy of the Brahman could be challenged by other

castes and an instructive legend relates how Râma slew a Śûdra whom he

surprised in the act of performing austerities. The lowest castes can by

this process acquire a position which makes them equal to the

highest[164].

Of the non-Brahmanic sects, the Jains set the highest value on Tapas,

but chiefly as a purification of the soul and a means of obtaining an

unearthly state of pure knowledge[165]. In theory the Buddha rejected

it; he taught a middle way, rejecting alike self-indulgence and

self-mortification. But even Pali Buddhism admits such practices as the

Dhûtângas and the more extravagant sects, for instance in Tibet, allow

monks to entomb themselves in dark cells. According to our standards

even the ordinary religious life of both Hindus and Buddhists is

severely ascetic. It is assumed as a _sine qua non_ that strict chastity

must be observed, nourishment be taken only to support life and not for

pleasure, that all gratification coming from the senses must be avoided

and the mind kept under rigid discipline. This discipline receives

systematic treatment in the Yoga school of philosophy but it is really

common to all varieties of Hinduism and Buddhism; all agree that the

body must be subdued by physical training before the mind can apprehend

the higher truths. The only question is how far asceticism is directly

instrumental in giving higher knowledge. If some texts speak slightingly

of it, we must remember that the life of a hermit dwelling in the woods

without possessions or desires might not be regarded by a Hindu as

_tapas_ though we should certainly regard it as asceticism. It is also

agreed that supernatural powers can be acquired by special forms of

asceticism. These powers are sometimes treated as mere magic and

spiritually worthless but their reality is not questioned.

2

We have now said something of two aspects of Indian religion—ritual and

asceticism—and must pass on to the third, namely, knowledge or

philosophy. Its importance was recognized by the severest ritualists.

They admitted it as a supplement and crown to the life of ceremonial

observances and in the public estimation it came to be reputed an

alternative or superior road to salvation. Respect and desire for

knowledge are even more intimately a part of Hindu mentality than a

proclivity to asceticism or ritual. The sacrifice itself must be

understood as well as offered. He who _knows_ the meaning of this or

that observance obtains his desires[166].

Nor did the Brahmans resent criticism and discussion. India has always

loved theological argument: it is the national passion. The early

Upanishads relate without disapproval how kings such as Ajâtaśatru of

Kâśi, Pravâhaṇa Jaivali and Aśvapati Kaikeya imparted to learned

Brahmans philosophical and theological knowledge previously unknown to

them[167] and even women like Gârgî and Maitreyî took part in

theological discussions. Obviously knowledge in the sense of

philosophical speculation commended itself to religiously disposed

persons in the non-sacerdotal castes for the same reason as asceticism.

Whatever difficulties it might offer, it was more accessible than the

learning which could be acquired only under a Brahman teacher, although

the Brahmans in the interests of the sacerdotal caste maintained that

philosophy like ritual was a secret to be imparted, not a result to be

won by independent thought.

Again and again the Upanishads insist that the more profound doctrines

must not be communicated to any but a son or an accredited pupil and

also that no one can think them out for himself[168], yet the older ones

admit in such stories as those mentioned that the impulse towards

speculation came in early periods, as it did in the time of the Buddha,

largely from outside the priestly clans and was adopted rather than

initiated by them. But in justice to the Brahmans we must admit that

they have rarely—or at any rate much less frequently than other

sacerdotal corporations—shown hostility to new ideas and then chiefly

when such ideas (like those of Buddhism) implied that the rites by which

they gained their living were worthless. Otherwise they showed great

pliancy and receptivity, for they combined Vedic rites and mythology

with such systems as the Sânkhya and Advaita philosophies, both of which

really render superfluous everything which is usually called religion

since, though their language is decorous, they teach that he who _knows_

the truth about the universe is thereby saved.

The best opinion of India has always felt that the way of knowledge or

Jñâna was the true way. The favourite thesis of the Brahmans was that a

man should devote his youth to study, his maturity to the duties and

ceremonies of a householder, and his age to more sublime speculations.

But at all periods the idea that it was possible to know God and the

universe was allied to the idea that all ceremonies as well as all

worldly effort and indeed all active morality are superfluous[169]. All

alike are unessential and trivial, and merit the attention only of those

who know nothing higher. Human feelings and interests qualified and

contradicted this negative and unearthly view of religion, but still

popular sentiment as well as philosophic thought during the whole period

of which we know something of them in India tended to regard the highest

life as consisting in rapt contemplation or insight accompanied by the

suppression of desire and by disengagement from mundane ties and

interests. But knowledge in Indian theology implies more intensity than

we attach to the word and even some admixture of volition. The knowledge

of Brahman is not an understanding of pantheistic doctrines such as may

be obtained by reading _The Sacred Books of the East_ in an easy chair

but a realization (in all senses) of personal identity with the

universal spirit, in the light of which all material attachments and

fetters fall away.

The earlier philosophical speculations of the Brahmans are chiefly found

in the treatises called Upanishads. The teaching contained in these

works is habitually presented as something secret[170] or esoteric and

does not, like Buddhism or Jainism, profess to be a gospel for all. Also

the teaching is not systematized and has never been unified by a

personality like the Buddha. It grew up in the various _parishads_, or

communities of learned Brahmans, and perhaps flourished most in north

western India[171]. There is of course a common substratum of ideas but

they appear in different versions: we have the teaching of Yâjñavalkya,

of Uddâlaka Âruṇi and other masters and each teaching has some

individuality. They are merely reported as words of the wise without an

attempt to harmonize them. There are many apparent inconsistencies due

to the use of divergent metaphors to indicate different aspects of the

indescribable, and some real inconsistencies due to the existence of

different schools. Hence, attempts whether Indian or European to give a

harmonious summary of this ancient doctrine are likely to be erroneous.

There are a great number of Upanishads, composed at various dates and

not all equally revered. They represent different orders of ideas and

some of the later are distinctly sectarian. Collections of 45, 52 and 60

are mentioned, and the Muktikâ Upanishad gives a list of 108. This is

the number currently accepted in India at the present day. But

Schrader[172] describes many Upanishads existing in MS. in addition to

this list and points out that though they may be modern there is no

ground for calling them spurious. According to Indian ideas there is no

_a priori_ objection to the appearance now or in the future of new

Upanishads[173]. All revelation is eternal and self-existent but it can

manifest itself at its own good time.

Many of the more modern Upanishads appear to be the compositions of

single authors and may be called tracts or poems in the ordinary

European sense. But the older ones, unless they are very short, are

clearly not the attempts of an individual to express his creed but

collections of such philosophical sayings and narratives as a particular

school thought fit to include in its version of the scriptures. There

was so to speak a body of philosophic folk-lore portions of which each

school selected and elaborated as it thought best. Thus an apologue

proving that the breath is the essential vital constituent of a human

being is found in five ancient Upanishads[174]. The Chândogya and

Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka both contain an almost identical narrative of how the

priest Âruṇi was puzzled and instructed by a king and a similar story is

found at the beginning of the Kausîhtaki[175]. The two Upanishads last

mentioned also contain two dialogues in which king Ajâtaśatru explains

the fate of the soul after death and which differ in little except that

one is rather fuller than the other[176]. So too several well-known

stanzas and also quotations from the Veda used with special applications

are found in more than one Upanishad[177].

The older Upanishads[178] are connected with the other parts of the

Vedic canon and sometimes form an appendix to a Brâhmaṇa so that the

topics discussed change gradually from ritual to philosophy[179]. It

would be excessive to say that this arrangement gives the genesis of

speculation in ancient India, for some hymns of the Rig Veda are purely

philosophic, but it illustrates a lengthy phase of Brahmanic thought in

which speculation could not disengage itself from ritual and was also

hampered by physical ideas. The Upanishads often receive such epithets

as transcendental and idealistic but in many passages—perhaps in the

majority—they labour with imperfect success to separate the spiritual

and material. The self or spirit is sometimes identified in man with the

breath, in nature with air, ether or space. At other times it is

described as dwelling in the heart and about the size of the thumb but

capable of becoming smaller, travelling through the veins and showing

itself in the pupil: capable also of becoming infinitely large and one

with the world soul. But when thought finds its wings and soars above

these material fancies, the teaching of the Upanishads shares with

Buddhism the glory of being the finest product of the Indian intellect.

In India the religious life has always been regarded as a journey and a

search after truth. Even the most orthodox and priestly programme admits

this. There comes a time when observances are felt to be vain and the

soul demands knowledge of the essence of things. And though later

dogmatism asserts that this knowledge is given by revelation, yet a note

of genuine enquiry and speculation is struck in the Vedas and is never

entirely silenced throughout the long procession of Indian writers. In

well-known words the Vedas ask[180] "Who is the God to whom we shall

offer our sacrifice? ... Who is he who is the Creator and sustainer of

the Universe ... whose shadow is immortality, whose shadow is death?"

or, in even more daring phrases[181], "The Gods were subsequent to the

creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it sprang? He who in

the highest heaven is the overseer of this universe, he knows or even he

does not know." These profound enquiries, which have probably no

parallel in the contemporary literature of other nations, are as time

goes on supplemented though perhaps not enlarged by many others, nor

does confidence fail that there is an answer—the Truth, which when known

is the goal of life. A European is inclined to ask what use can be made

of the truth, but for the Hindus divine knowledge is an end and a state,

not a means. It is not thought of as something which may be used to

improve the world or for any other purpose whatever. For use and purpose

imply that the thing utilized is subservient and inferior to an end,

whereas divine knowledge is the culmination and meaning of the universe,

or, from another point of view, the annihilation of both the external

world and individuality. Hence the Hindu does not expect of his saints

philanthropy or activity of any sort.

As already indicated, the characteristic (though not the only) answer of

India to these questionings is that nothing really exists except God or,

better, except Brahman. The soul is identical with Brahman. The external

world which we perceive is not real in the same sense: it is in some way

or other an evolution of Brahman or even mere illusion. This doctrine is

not universal: it is for instance severely criticized and rejected by

the older forms of Buddhism but its hold on the Indian temperament is

seen by its reappearance in later Buddhism where by an astounding

transformation the Buddha is identified with the universal spirit.

Though the form in which I have quoted the doctrine above is an epitome

of the Vedânta, it is hardly correct historically to give it as an

epitome of the older Upanishads. Their teaching is less complete and

uncompromising, more veiled, tentative and allusive, and sometimes

cumbered by material notions. But it is obviously the precursor of the

Vedânta and the devout Vedântist can justify his system from it.

3

Instead of attempting to summarize the Upanishads it may be well to

quote one or two celebrated passages. One is from the

Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka[182] and relates how Yâjñavalkya, when about to retire

to the forest as an ascetic, wished to divide his property between his

two wives, Kâtyâyanî "who possessed only such knowledge as women

possess" and Maitreyî "who was conversant with Brahman." The latter

asked her husband whether she would be immortal if she owned the whole

world. "No," he replied, "like the life of the rich would be thy life

but there is no hope of immortality." Maitreyî said that she had no need

of what would not make her immortal. Yâjñavalkya proceeded to explain to

her his doctrine of the Âtman, the self or essence, the spirit present

in man as well as in the universe. "Not for the husband's sake is the

husband dear but for the sake of the Âtman. Not for the wife's sake is

the wife dear but for the sake of the Âtman. Not for their own sake are

sons, wealth, Brahmans, warriors, worlds, gods, Vedas and all things

dear, but for the sake of the Âtman. The Âtman is to be seen, to be

heard, to be perceived, to be marked: by him who has seen and known the

Âtman all the universe is known.... He who looks for Brahmans, warriors,

worlds, gods or Vedas anywhere but in the Âtman, loses them all...."

"As all waters have their meeting place in the sea, all touch in the

skin, all tastes in the tongue, all odours in the nose, all colours in

the eye, all sounds in the ear, all percepts in the mind, all knowledge

in the heart, all actions in the hands....As a lump of salt has no

inside nor outside and is nothing but taste, so has this Âtman neither

inside nor outside and is nothing but knowledge. Having risen from out

these elements it (the human soul) vanishes with them. When it has

departed (after death) there is no more consciousness." Here Maitreyî

professes herself bewildered but Yâjñavalkya continues "I say nothing

bewildering. Verily, beloved, that Âtman is imperishable and

indestructible. When there is as it were duality, then one sees the

other, one tastes the other, one salutes the other, one hears the other,

one touches the other, one knows the other. But when the Âtman only is

all this, how should we see, taste, hear, touch or know another? How can

we know him by whose power we know all this? That Âtman is to be

described by no, no (neti, neti). He is incomprehensible for he cannot

be comprehended, indestructible for he cannot be destroyed, unattached

for he does not attach himself: he knows no bonds, no suffering, no

decay. How, O beloved, can one know the knower?" And having so spoken,

Yâjñavalkya went away into the forest. In another verse of the same work

it is declared that "This great unborn Âtman (or Self) undecaying,

undying, immortal, fearless, is indeed Brahman."

It is interesting that this doctrine, evidently regarded as the

quintessence of Yâjñavalkya's knowledge, should be imparted to a woman.

It is not easy to translate. Âtman, of course, means self and is so

rendered by Max Müller in this passage, but it seems to me that this

rendering jars on the English ear for it inevitably suggests the

individual self and selfishness, whereas Âtman means the universal

spirit which is Self, because it is the highest (or only) Reality and

Being, not definable in terms of anything else. Nothing, says

Yâjñavalkya, has any value, meaning, or indeed reality except in

relation to this Self[183]. The whole world including the Vedas and

religion is an emanation from him. The passage at which Maitreyî

expresses her bewilderment is obscure, but the reply is more definite.

The Self is indestructible but still it is incorrect to speak of the

soul having knowledge and perception after death, for knowledge and

perception imply duality, a subject and an object. But when the human

soul and the universal Âtman are one, there is no duality and no human

expression can be correctly used about the Âtman. Whatever you say of

it, the answer must be _neti, neti_, it is not like that[184]; that is

to say, the ordinary language used about the individual soul is not

applicable to the Âtman or to the human soul when regarded as identical

with it.

This identity is stated more precisely in another passage[185] where

first occurs the celebrated formula Tat tvam asi, That art Thou, or Thou

art It[186], _i.e._ the human soul is the Âtman and hence there is no

real distinction between souls. Like Yâjñiavalkya's teaching, the

statement of this doctrine takes the form of an intimate conversation,

this time between a Brahman, Uddâlaka Âruṇi, and his son Śvetaketu who

is twenty-four years of age and having just finished his studentship is

very well satisfied with himself. His father remarks on his conceit and

says "Have you ever asked your teachers for that instruction by which

the unheard becomes heard, the unperceived perceived and the unknown

known?" Śvetaketu enquires what this instruction is and his father

replies, "As by one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, and

the change[187] is a mere matter of words, nothing but a name, the truth

being that all is clay, and as by one piece of copper or by one pair of

nail-scissors all that is made of copper or iron can be known, so is

that instruction." That is to say, it would seem, the reality is One:

all diversity and multiplicity is secondary and superficial, merely a

matter of words. "In the beginning," continues the father, "there was

only that which is, one without a second. Others say in the beginning

there was that only which is not (non-existence), one without a second,

and from that which is not, that which is was born. But how could that

which is be born of that which is not[188]? No, only that which is was

in the beginning, one only without a second. It thought, may I be many:

may I have offspring. It sent forth fire." Here follows a cosmogony and

an explanation of the constitution of animate beings, and then the

father continues--"All creatures have their root in the Real, dwell in

the Real and rest in the Real. That subtle being by which this universe

subsists, it is the Real, it is the Âtman, and thou, Śvetaketu, art It."

Many illustrations of the relations of the Âtman and the universe

follow. For instance, if the life (sap) leaves a tree, it withers and

dies. So "this body withers and dies when the life has left it: the life

dies not." In the fruit of the Banyan (fig-tree) are minute seeds

innumerable. But the imperceptible subtle essence in each seed is the

whole Banyan. Each example adduced concludes with the same formula, Thou

art that subtle essence, and as in the Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka salt is used as a

metaphor. "'Place this salt in water and then come to me in the

morning.' The son did so and in the morning the father said 'Bring me

the salt.' The son looked for it but found it not, for of course it was

melted. The father said, 'Taste from the surface of the water. How is

it?' The son replied, 'It is salt.' 'Taste from the middle. How is it?'

'It is salt.' 'Taste from the bottom, how is it?' 'It is salt.' ... The

father said, 'Here also in this body you do not perceive the Real, but

there it is. That subtle being by which this universe subsists, it is

the Real, it is the Âtman and thou, Svetaketu, art It.'"

The writers of these passages have not quite reached Śankara's point of

view, that the Âtman is all and the whole universe mere illusion or

Mâyâ. Their thought still tends to regard the universe as something

drawn forth from the Âtman and then pervaded by it. But still the main

features of the later Advaita, or philosophy of no duality, are there.

All the universe has grown forth from the Âtman: there is no real

difference in things, just as all gold is gold whatever it is made into.

The soul is identical with this Âtman and after death may be one with it

in a union excluding all duality even of perceiver and perceived.

A similar union occurs in sleep. This idea is important for it is

closely connected with another belief which has had far-reaching

consequences on thought and practice in India, the belief namely that

the soul can attain without death and as the result of mental discipline

to union[189] with Brahman. This idea is common in Hinduism and though

Buddhism rejects the notion of union with the supreme spirit yet it

attaches importance to meditation and makes Samâdhi or rapture the crown

of the perfect life. In this, as in other matters, the teaching of the

Upanishads is manifold and unsystematic compared with later doctrines.

The older passages ascribe to the soul three states corresponding to the

bodily conditions of waking, dream-sleep, and deep dreamless sleep, and

the Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka affirms of the last (IV. 3. 32): "This is the Brahma

world. This is his highest world, this is his highest bliss. All other

creatures live on a small portion of that bliss." But even in some

Upanishads of the second stratum (Mâṇḍukya, Maitrâyaṇa) we find added a

fourth state, Caturtha or more commonly Turîya, in which the bliss

attainable in deep sleep is accompanied by consciousness[190]. This

theory and various practices founded on it develop rapidly.

4

The explanation of dreamless sleep as supreme bliss and Yâjñavalkya's

statement that the soul after death cannot be said to know or feel, may

suggest that union with Brahman is another name for annihilation. But

that is not the doctrine of the Upanishads though a European perhaps

might say that the consciousness contemplated is so different from

ordinary human consciousness that it should not bear the same name. In

another passage[191] Yâjñavalkya himself explains "when he does not

know, yet he is knowing though he does not know. For knowing is

inseparable from the knower, because it cannot perish. But there is no

second, nothing else different from him that he could know." A common

formula for Brahman in the later philosophy is Saccidânanda, Being,

Thought and Joy[192]. This is a just summary of the earlier teaching. We

have already seen how the Âtman is recognized as the only Reality. Its

intellectual character is equally clearly affirmed. Thus the

Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka (III. 7. 23) says: "There is no seer beside him, no

hearer beside him, no perceiver beside him, no knower beside him. This

is thy Self, the ruler within, the immortal. Everything distinct from

him is subject to pain." This idea that pain and fear exist only as far

as a man makes a distinction between his own self and the real Self is

eloquently developed in the division of the Taittirîya Upanishad called

the Chapter of Bliss. "He who knows Brahman" it declares, "which exists,

which is conscious, which is without end, as hidden in the depth of the

heart, and in farthest space, he enjoys all blessings, in communion with

the omniscient Brahman.... He who knows the bliss (ânandam) of that

Brahman from which all speech and mind turn away unable to reach it, he

never fears[193]."

Bliss is obtainable by union with Brahman, and the road to such union is

knowledge of Brahman. That knowledge is often represented as acquired by

tapas or asceticism, but this, though repeatedly enjoined as necessary,

seems to be regarded (in the nobler expositions at least) as an

indispensable schooling rather than as efficacious by its own virtue.

Sometimes the topic is treated in an almost Buddhist spirit of

reasonableness and depreciation of self-mortification for its own sake.

Thus Yâjñavalkya says to Gârgî[194]: "Whoever without knowing the

imperishable one offers oblations in this world, sacrifices, and

practises asceticism even for a thousand years, his work will perish."

And in a remarkable scene described in the Chândogya Upanishad, the

three sacred fires decide to instruct a student who is exhausted by

austerities, and tell him that Brahman is life, bliss and space[195].

Analogous to the conception of Brahman as bliss, is the description of

him as light or "light of lights." A beautiful passage[196] says: "To

the wise who perceive him (Brahman) within their own self, belongs

eternal peace, not to others. They feel that highest, unspeakable bliss

saying, this is that. How then can I understand it? Has it its own light

or does it reflect light? No sun shines there, nor moon nor stars, nor

these lightnings, much less this fire. When he shines everything shines

after him: by his light all the world is lighted."

In most of the texts which we have examined the words Brahman and Âtman

are so impersonal that they cannot be replaced by God. In other passages

the conception of the deity is more personal. The universe is often said

to have been emitted or breathed forth by Brahman. By emphasizing the

origin and result of this process separately, we reach the idea of the

Maker and Master of the Universe, commonly expressed by the word Îśvara,

Lord. But even when using this expression, Hindu thought tends in its

subtler moments to regard both the creator and the creature as

illusions. In the same sense as the world exists there also exists its

creator who is an aspect of Brahman, but the deeper truth is that

neither is real: there is but One who neither makes nor is made[197]. In

a land of such multiform theology it would be hazardous to say that

Monotheism has always arisen out of Pantheism, but in the speculative

schools where the Upanishads were composed, this was often its genesis.

The older idea is that a subtle essence pervades all nature and the

deities who rule nature: this is spiritualized into the doctrine of

Brahman attributed to Yâjñavalkya and it is only by a secondary process

that this Brahman is personified and sometimes identified with a

particular god such as Siva. The doctrine of the personal Îśvara is

elaborated in the Śvetâśvatara Upanishad of uncertain date[198]. It

celebrates him in hymns of almost Mohammedan monotheism. "Let us know

that great Lord of Lords, the highest God of Gods, the Master of

Masters, the highest above, as God, as Lord of the world, who is to be

glorified[199]." But this monotheistic fervour does not last long

without relapsing into the familiar pantheistic strain. "Thou art

woman," says the same Upanishad[200], "and Thou art man: Thou art youth

and maiden: Thou as an old man totterest along on thy staff: Thou art

born with thy face turned everywhere. Thou art the dark-blue bee: Thou

the green parrot with the red eyes. Thou art the thunder cloud, the

seasons and the seas. Thou art without beginning because Thou art

infinite, Thou, from whom all worlds are born."

CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS LIFE IN PRE-BUDDHIST INDIA

In reading the Brâhmaṅas and older Upanishads we often wish we knew more

of the writers and their lives. Rarely can so many representative men

have bequeathed so much literature and yet left so dim a sketch of their

times. Thought was their real life: of that they have given a full

record, imperfect only in chronology, for though their speculations are

often set forth in a narrative form, we hear surprisingly little about

contemporary events.

The territory familiar to these works is the western part of the modern

United Provinces with the neighbouring districts of the Panjab, the

lands of the Kurus, Pancâlas, and Matsyas, all in the region of Agra and

Delhi, and further east Kâśi (Benares) with Videha or Tirhut. Gândhâra

was known[201] but Magadha and Bengal are not mentioned. Even in the

Buddha's lifetime they were still imperfectly brahmanized.

What we know of the period 800 to 600 B.C. is mostly due to the

Brahmans, and many Indianists have accepted their view, that they were

then socially the highest class and the repository of religion and

culture. But it is clear from Buddhist writings (which, however, are

somewhat later) that this pre-eminence was not unchallenged[202], and

many admissions in the Brâhmaṅas and Upanishads indicate that some

centuries before the Buddha the Kshatriyas held socially the first rank

and shared intellectual honours with the Brahmans. Janaka, king of

Videha[203], and Yâjñavalkya, the Brahman, meet on terms of mutual

respect and other Kshatriyas, such as Ajâtaśatru of Kâśi and Pravâhaṅa

Jaivali are represented as instructing Brahmans, and the latter in doing

so says "this knowledge did not go to any Brahman before but belonged to

the Kshatriyas alone[204]." But as a profession theology, both practical

and speculative, was left to the Brahmans.

The proper relation between the nobles and Brahmans finds expression in

the office of Purohita[205] or domestic chaplain, which is as old as the

Vedas and has lasted to the present day. In early times he was not

merely a spiritual guide but also a councillor expected to advise the

king as to his enterprises and secure their success by appropriate

rites. By king we should understand a tribal chief, entrusted with

considerable powers in the not infrequent times of war, but in peace

obliged to consult the clan, or at least the aristocratic part of it, on

all matters of importance. A Purohita might attain a very high position,

like Devabhaga, priest of both the Kurus and Srinjayas[206]. The

Brahmans did not attempt to become kings, but the sacred books insist

that though a Brahman can do without a king, yet a king cannot do

without a Brahman. The two castes are compared to the deities Mitra and

Varuṅa, typifying intelligence and will. When they are united deeds can

be done[207]. But "the Gods do not eat the food of a king who is without

a Purohita." Other castes can offer sacrifices only by the mediation of

Brahmans, and it does not appear that kings disputed this, though they

claimed the right to think for themselves and may have denied the

utility of sacrifice[208]. Apart from kings the duties and claims of the

Brahman extend to the people at large. He has four virtues, "birth,

deportment, fame and the perfecting of the people," and in return the

people owe him respect, liberality, security against oppression and

against capital punishment.

Towns in this period must have been few and those few essentially forts,

not collections of palaces and temples. We hear of Kâśi (Benares) but

the name may signify a district. People are said to go to the Kurus or

Pancâlas, not to Mithilâ or any other city. It was in village life—which

is still the life of the greater part of India—that Brahmanism grew up.

Probably then as now Brahman families occupied separate villages, or at

least quarters, and were allowed to hold the land rent free as a reward

for rendering religious services to the king. They followed various

professions but the life which was most respected, and also most

lucrative, was that devoted to the study and practice of sacred science,

that is the learning and recitation of sacred texts, performance of

ceremonies, and theological discussion. The later law books divide a

Brahman's life into four stages or âśramas in which he was successively

a student, a householder, a hermit and an ascetic[209]. The third and

fourth stages are not very clearly distinguished. A hermit is supposed

to renounce family life and live in the forest, but still to perform

sacrifices, whereas the Sannyâsi or perfect ascetic, in many ways the

ideal of India, subsists on alms, freed alike from duties and passions

and absorbed in meditation. In the older Upanishads three stages are

indicated as part of contemporary practice[210]. For a period of from

nine to thirty-six years, a Brahman dwelt with a teacher. While his

state of pupilage lasted he lived on alms and was bound by the severest

vows of obedience and chastity. The instruction given consisted in

imparting sacred texts which could be acquired only by hearing them

recited, for writing, though it may have been known in India as early as

the seventh century B.C., was not used for literature. The Śatapatha

Brâhmaṇa recommends the study not only of the four Vedas but of the

precepts (perhaps grammar, etymology, etc.), the sciences (perhaps

philosophy), dialogues (no doubt such as those found in the Upanishads),

traditions and ancient legends, stanzas and tales of heroes[211],

showing that, besides the scriptures, more popular compositions which

doubtless contained the germs of the later Epics and Puranas were held

in esteem.

On terminating his apprenticeship the young Brahman became a householder

and married, moderate polygamy being usual. To some extent he followed

the occupations of an ordinary man of business and father of a family,

but the most important point in establishing a home of his own was the

kindling of his own sacred fire[212], and the householder's life was

regarded as a series of rites, such as the daily offering of milk, the

new and full moon ceremonies, seasonal sacrifices every four months and

the Soma sacrifice once a year, besides oblations to ancestors and other

domestic observances. The third stage of life should begin when a

householder sees that his hair is turning grey and a grandson has been

born. He should then abandon his home and live in the forest. The

tradition that it is justifiable and even commendable for men and women

to abandon their families and take to the religious life has at all

times been strong in India and public opinion has never considered that

the deserted party had a grievance. No doubt comfortable householders

were in no hurry to take to the woods and many must always have shirked

the duty. But on the other hand, the very pious, of whom India has

always produced a superabundance, were not willing to bear the cares of

domestic life and renounced the world before the prescribed time. On the

whole Brahmanic (as opposed to Buddhist) literature is occupied in

insisting not so much that the devout should abandon the world as that

they must perform the ritual observances prescribed for householders

before doing so.

The Brahman's existence as drawn in the law-books is a description of

what the writers thought ought to be done rather than of the general

practice. Still it cannot be dismissed as imaginary, for the

Nambutiri[213] Brahmans of Travancore have not yet abandoned a mode of

life which is in essentials that prescribed by Manu and probably that

led by Brahmans in the seventh century B.C. or earlier[214].

They are for the most part landowners dwelling in large houses built to

accommodate a patriarchal family and erected in spacious compounds. In

youth they spend about eight years in learning the Veda, and in mature

life religious ceremonies, including such observances as bathing and the

preparation of meals, occupy about six hours of the day. As a

profession, the performance of religious rites for others is most

esteemed. In food, drink and pleasures, the Nambutiris are almost

ascetics: their rectitude, punctiliousness and dignity still command

exaggerated respect. But they seem unproductive and petrified, even in

such matters as literature and scholarship, and their inability to adapt

themselves to changing conditions threatens them with impoverishment and

deterioration.

Yet the ideal Brahmanic life, which by no means excludes intellectual

activity, is laid out in severe and noble lines and though on its good

side somewhat beyond the reach of human endeavour and on its bad side

overloaded with pedantry and superstition, it combines in a rare degree

self-abnegation and independence. It differs from the ideal set up by

Buddhism and by many forms of Hinduism which preach the renunciation of

family ties, for it clearly lays down that it is a man's duty to

continue his family and help his fellow men just as much as to engage in

religious exercises. Thus, the Śatapatha Brâhmaṇa[215] teaches that man

is born owing four debts, one to the gods, one to the Rishis or the

sages to whom the Vedic hymns were revealed, one to his ancestors and

one to men. To discharge these obligations he must offer sacrifices,

study the Veda, beget a son and practise hospitality.

The tranquil isolation of village life in ancient India has left its

mark on literature. Though the names of teachers are handed down and

their opinions cited with pious care, yet for many centuries after the

Vedic age we find no books attributed to human authors. There was an

indifference to literary fame among these early philosophers and a

curious selflessness. Doctors disputed as elsewhere, yet they were at no

pains to couple their names with theories or sects. Like the Jewish

Rabbis they were content to go down to posterity as the authors of a few

sayings, and these are mostly contributions to a common stock with no

pretension to be systems of philosophy. The Upanishads leave an

impression of a society which, if reposeful, was also mentally alert and

tolerant to an unusual degree. Much was absent that occupied the

intelligence of other countries. Painting, sculpture and architecture

can have attained but modest proportions and the purview of religion

included neither temples nor images. India was untroubled by foreign

invasions and all classes seem to have been content to let the

Kshatriyas look after such internal politics as there were. Trade too

was on a small scale. Doubtless the Indian was then, as now, a good man

of business and the western coast may have been affected by its

relations with the Persian Gulf, but Brahmanic civilization was a thing

of the Midland and drew no inspiration from abroad. The best minds were

occupied with the leisurely elaboration and discussion of speculative

ideas and self-effacement was both practised and preached.

But movement and circulation prevented this calm rustic world from

becoming stagnant. Though roads were few and dangerous, a habit of

travel was conspicuous among the religious and intellectual classes. The

Indian is by nature a pilgrim rather than a stationary monk, and we

often hear of Brahmans travelling in quest of knowledge alone or in

companies, and stopping in rest houses[216]. In the Śatapatha

Brâhmaṇa[217], Uddâlaka Âruṇi is represented as driving about and

offering a piece of gold as a prize to those who could defeat him in

argument. Great sacrifices were often made the occasion of these

discussions. We must not think of them as mere religious ceremonies, as

a sort of high mass extending over several days. The fact that they

lasted so long and involved operations like building sheds and altars

made them unlike our church services and gave opportunities for debate

and criticism of what was done. Such competition and publicity were good

for the wits. The man who cut the best figure in argument was in

greatest demand as a sacrificer and obtained the highest fees. But these

stories of prizes and fees emphasize a feature which has characterized

the Brahmans from Vedic times to the present day, namely, their

shameless love of money. The severest critic cannot deny them a

disinterested taste for intellectual, religious and spiritual things,

but their own books often use language which shows them as professional

men merely anxious to make a fortune by the altar. "The sacrifice is

twofold," says the Śatapatha Brâhmaṇa, "oblations to the gods and gifts

to the priests. With oblations men gratify the gods and with gifts the

human gods. These two kinds of gods when gratified convey the worshipper

to the heavenly world[218]." Without a fee the sacrifice is as dead as

the victim. It is the fee which makes it living and successful[219].

Tradition has preserved the names of many of these acute, argumentative,

fee-loving priests, but of few can we form any clear picture. The most

distinguished is Yâjñavalkya who, though seen through a mist of myths

and trivial stories about the minutiae of ritual, appears as a

personality with certain traits that are probably historical. Many

remarks attributed to him are abrupt and scornful and the legend

indicates dimly that he was once thought a dangerous innovator. But, as

has happened so often since, this early heretic became the corner stone

of later orthodoxy. He belonged to the school of the Yajur Veda and was

apparently the main author of the new or White recension in which the

prayers and directions are more or less separate, whereas in the old or

Black recension they are mixed together. According to the legend he

vomited forth the texts which he had learnt, calling his fellow pupils

"miserable and inefficient Brahmans," and then received a new revelation

from the Sun[220]. The quarrel was probably violent for the Śatapatha

Brâhmaṇa mentions that he was cursed by priests of the other party. Nor

does this work, while recognizing him as the principal teacher, endorse

all his sayings. Thus it forbids the eating of beef but adds the curious

remark "Nevertheless Yâjñavalkya said, I for one eat it, provided it is

tender[221]." Remarkable, too, is his answer to the question what would

happen if all the ordinary materials for sacrifices were absent, "Then

indeed nothing would be offered here, but there would be offered the

truth in faith[222]." It is probable that the Black Yajur Veda

represents the more western schools and that the native land of the

White recension and of Yâjñavalkya lay further east, perhaps in Videha.

But his chief interest for us is not the reforms in text and ritual

which he may have made, but his philosophic doctrines of which I have

already spoken. Our principal authority for them is the Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka

Upanishad of which he is the protagonist, much as Socrates is of the

Platonic dialogues. Unfortunately the striking picture which it gives of

Yâjñavalkya cannot be accepted as historical. He is a prominent figure

in the Śatapatha Brâhmaṇa which is older than the Upanishad and

represents an earlier stage of speculation. The sketch of his doctrines

which it contains is clearly a preliminary study elaborated and

amplified in the Upanishad. But if a personage is introduced in early

works as expounding a rudimentary form of certain doctrines and in later

works is credited with a matured philosophy, there can be little doubt

that he has become a great name whose authority is invoked by later

thought, much as Solomon was made the author of the Proverbs and

Ecclesiastes and the Song which bears his name.

Yâjñavalkya appears in the Bṛihad-Âraṇyaka as the respected friend but

apparently not the chaplain of King Janaka. This monarch celebrated a

great sacrifice and offered a thousand cows with a present of money to

him who should prove himself wisest. Yâjñavalkya rather arrogantly bade

his pupil drive off the beasts. But his claim was challenged: seven

Brahmans and one woman, Gârgî Vâcaknavî, disputed with him at length but

had to admit his superiority. A point of special interest is raised by

the question what happens after death. Yâjñavalkya said to his

questioner, "'Take my hand, my friend. We two alone shall know of this.

Let this question of ours not be discussed in public.' Then these two

went out and argued, and what they said was Karma and what they praised

was Karma[223]." The doctrine that a man's deeds cause his future

existence and determine its character was apparently not popular among

the priesthood who claimed that by their rites they could manufacture

heavenly bodies for their clients.

2

This imperfect and sketchy picture of religious life in India so far as

it can be gathered from the older Brahmanic books has reference mainly

to the kingdoms of the Kuru-Pancâlas and Videha in 800-600 B.C. Another

picture, somewhat fuller, is found in the ancient literature of the

Buddhists and Jains, which depicts the kingdoms of Magadha (Bihar) and

Kosala (Oudh) in the time of the Buddha and Mahâvîra, the founder of

Jainism, that is, about 500 B.C. or rather earlier. It is probable that

the picture is substantially true for this period or even for a period

considerably earlier, for Mahâvîra was supposed to have revived with

modifications the doctrines of Parśvanâtha and some of the Buddhas

mentioned as preceding Gotama were probably historical personages. But

the Brahmanic and Buddhist accounts do not give two successive phases of

thought in the same people, for the locality is not quite the same. Both

pictures include the territory of Kâśi and Videha, but the Brahmanic

landscape lies mainly to the west and the Buddhist mainly to the east of

this region. In the Buddhist sphere it is clear that in the youth of

Gotama Brahmanic doctrines and ritual were well known but not

predominant. It is hardly demonstrable from literature, but still

probable, that the ideas and usages which found expression in Jainism

and Buddhism existed in the western districts, though less powerful

there than in the east[224].

A striking feature of the world in which Jainism and Buddhism arose was

the prevalence of confraternities or religious orders. They were the

recognized form of expression not only for piety but for the germs of

theology, metaphysics and science. The ordinary man of the world kept on

good terms with such gods as came his way, but those who craved for some

higher interest often separated themselves from the body of citizens and

followed some special rule of life. In one sense the Brahmans were the

greatest of such communities, but they were a hereditary corporation and

though they were not averse to new ideas, their special stock in trade

was an acquaintance with traditional formulæ and rites. They were also,

in the main, sedentary and householders. Somewhat opposed to them were

other companies, described collectively as Paribbâjakas or Samanas[225].

These, though offering many differences among themselves, were clearly

distinguished from the Brahmans, and it is probable that they usually

belonged to the warrior caste. But they did not maintain that religious

knowledge was the exclusive privilege of any caste: they were not

householders but wanderers and celibates. Often they were ascetics and

addicted to extreme forms of self-mortification. They did not study the

Vedas or perform sacrifices, and their speculations were often

revolutionary, and as a rule not theistic. It is not easy to find any

English word which describes these people or the Buddhist Bhikkhus. Monk

is perhaps the best, though inadequate. Pilgrim and friar give the idea

of wandering, but otherwise suggest wrong associations. But in calling

them monks, we must remember that though celibates, and to some extent

recluses (for they mixed with the world only in a limited degree), they

were not confined in cloisters. The more stationary lived in woods,

either in huts or the open air, but many spent the greater part of the

year in wandering.

The practice of adopting a wandering religious life was frequent among

the upper classes, and must have been a characteristic feature of

society. No blame attached to the man who abruptly left his family,

though well-to-do people are represented as dissuading their children

from the step. The interest in philosophical and theological questions

was perhaps even greater than among the Brahmans, and they were

recognized not as parerga to a life of business or amusement, but as

occupations in themselves. Material civilization had not kept pace with

the growth of thought and speculation. Thus restless and inquisitive

minds found little to satisfy them in villages or small towns, and the

wanderer, instead of being a useless rolling stone, was likely not only

to have a more interesting life but to meet with sympathy and respect.

Ideas and discussion were plentiful but there were no books and hardly

any centres of learning. Yet there was even more movement than among the

travelling priests of the Kurus and Pancâlas, a coming and going, a

trafficking in ideas. Knowledge was to be picked up in the market-places

and highways. Up and down the main roads circulated crowds of highly

intelligent men. They lived upon alms, that is to say, they were fed by

the citizens who favoured their opinions or by those good souls who gave

indiscriminately to all holy men—and in the larger places rest houses

were erected for their comfort. It was natural that the more commanding

and original spirits should collect others round them and form bands,

for though there was public discussion, writing was not used for

religious purposes and he who would study any doctrine had to become the

pupil of a master. The doctrine too involved a discipline, or mode of

life best led in common. Hence these bands easily grew into communities

which we may call orders or sects, if we recognize that their

constitution was more fluid and less formal than is implied by those

words. It is not easy to say how much organization such communities

possessed before the time of the Buddha. His Sangha was the most

successful of them all and doubtless surpassed the others in this as in

other respects. Yet it was modelled on existing institutions and the

Vinaya Pitaka[226] itself represents him as prescribing the observance

of times and seasons, not so much because he thought it necessary as

because the laity suggested that he would do well to follow the practice

of the Titthiya schools. By this phrase we are to understand the

adherents of Makkhali Gosâla, Sâñjaya Belaṭṭhiputta and others. We know

less about these sects than we could wish, but two lists of schools or

theories are preserved, one in the Brahmajâla Sutta[227] where the

Buddha himself criticises 62 erroneous views and another in Jain

literature[228], which enumerates no fewer than 363.

Both catalogues are somewhat artificial, and it is clear that many views

are mentioned not because they represent the tenets of real schools but

from a desire to condemn all possible errors. But the list of topics

discussed is interesting. From the Brahmajâla Sutta we learn that the

problems which agitated ancient Magadha were such as the following:--is

the world eternal or not: is it infinite or finite: is there a cause for

the origin of things or is it without cause: does the soul exist after

death: if so, is its existence conscious or unconscious: is it eternal

or does it cease to exist, not necessarily at the end of its present

life but after a certain number of lives: can it enjoy perfect bliss

here or elsewhere? Theories on these and other points are commonly

called vâda or talk, and those who hold them vâdins. Thus there is the

Kâla-vâda[229] which makes Time the origin and principle of the

universe, and the Svabhâva-vada which teaches that things come into

being of their own accord. This seems crude when stated with archaic

frankness but becomes plausible if paraphrased in modern language as

"discontinuous variation and the spontaneous origin of definite

species." There were also the Niyati-vâdins, or fatalists, who believed

that all that happens is the result of Niyati or fixed order, and the

Yadricchâ-vâdins who, on the contrary, ascribed everything to chance and

apparently denied causation, because the same result follows from

different antecedents. It is noticeable that none of these views imply

theism or pantheism but the Buddha directed so persistent a polemic

against the doctrine of the Âtman that it must have been known in

Magadha. The fundamental principles of the Sânkhya were also known,

though perhaps not by that name. It is probably correct to say not that

the Buddha borrowed from the Sânkhya but that both he and the Sânkhya

accepted and elaborated in different ways certain current views.

The Pali Suttas[230] mention six agnostic or materialist teachers and

give a brief but perhaps not very just compendium of their doctrines.

One of them was the founder of the Jains who, as a sect that has lasted

to the present day with a considerable record in art and literature,

merit a separate chapter. Of the remaining five, one, Sâñjaya of the

Belaṭṭha clan, was an agnostic, similar to the people described

elsewhere[231] as eel-wrigglers, who in answer to such questions as, is

there a result of good and bad actions, decline to say either _(a)_

there is, _(b)_ there is not, _(c)_ there both is and is not, _(d)_

there neither is nor is not. This form of argument has been adopted by

Buddhism for some important questions but Sâñjaya and his disciples

appear to have applied it indiscriminately and to have concluded that

positive assertion is impossible.

The other four were in many respects what we should call fatalists and

materialists[232], or in the language of their time Akriya-vâdins,

denying, that is, free will, responsibility and the merit or demerit of

good or bad actions. They nevertheless believed in metempsychosis and

practised asceticism. Apparently they held that beings are born again

and again according to a natural law, but not according to their deeds:

and that though asceticism cannot accelerate the soul's journey, yet at

a certain stage it is a fore-ordained and indispensable preliminary to

emancipation. The doctrines attributed to all four are crude and

startling. Perhaps they are exaggerated by the Buddhist narrator, but

they also reflect the irreverent exuberance of young thought. Pûraṇa

Kassapa denies that there is any merit in virtue or harm in murder.

Another ascetic called Ajita of the garment of hair teaches that nothing

exists but the four elements, and that "fools and wise alike are

annihilated on the dissolution of the body and after death they are

not." Then why, one asks, was he an ascetic? Similarly Pakudha Kaccâyana

states that "when a sharp sword cleaves a head in twain" the soul and

pain play a part similar to that played by the component elements of the

sword and head. The most important of these teachers was Makkhali

Gosâla. His doctrine comprises a denial of causation and free will and

an assertion that fools and wise alike will make an end of pain after

wandering through eighty-four hundred thousand births. The followers of

this teacher were called ÂjÎvikas: they were a distinct body in the time

of Asoka, and the name[233] occurs as late as the thirteenth century in

South Indian inscriptions. Several accounts[234] of the founder are

extant, but all were compiled by bitter opponents, for he was hated by

Jains and Buddhists alike. His doctrine was closely allied to Jainism,

especially the Digambara sect, but was probably more extravagant and

anti-social. He appears to have objected to confraternities[235], to

have enjoined a solitary life, absolute nudity and extreme forms of

self-mortification, such as eating filth. The Jains accused his

followers of immorality and perhaps they were ancient prototypes of the

lower class of religious mendicants who have brought discredit on

Hinduism.

3

None of the phases of religious life described above can be called

popular. The religion of the Brahmans was the thought and science of a

class. The various un-Brahmanic confraternities usually required their

members to be wandering ascetics. They had little to say to village

householders who must have constituted the great majority of the

population. Also there are signs that priests and nobles, however much

they quarrelled, combined to keep the lower castes in subjection[236].

Yet we can hardly doubt that then as now all classes were profoundly

religious, and that just as to-day village deities unknown to the Vedas,

or even to the Puranas, receive the worship of millions, so then there

were gods and rites that did not lack popular attention though unnoticed

in the scriptures of Brahmans and Buddhists.

We know little of this popular religion by direct description before or

even during the Buddhist period, but we have fragmentary indications of

its character. Firstly several incongruous observances have obtruded

themselves into the Brahmanic ritual. Thus in the course of the

Mahâvrata ceremony[237] the Hotri priest sits in a swing and maidens,

carrying pitchers of water on their heads and singing, dance round an

altar while drums are beaten. Parallels to this may be found to-day. The

image of Krishna, or even a priest who represents Krishna, is swung to

and fro in many temples, the use of drums in worship is distressingly

common, and during the Pongol festivities in southern India young people

dance round or leap over a fire. Other remarkable features in the

Mahâvrata are the shooting of arrows into a target of skin, the use of

obscene language (such as is still used at the Holi festival) and even

obscene acts[238]. We must not assume that popular religion in ancient

India was specially indecent, but it probably included ceremonies

analogous to the Lupercalia and Thesmophoria, in which licence in words

and deeds was supposed to promote fertility and prosperity.

We are also justified in supposing that offerings to ancestors and many

ceremonies mentioned in the Gṛihya-sûtras or handbooks of domestic

ritual were performed by far larger classes of the population than the

greater sacrifices, but we have no safe criteria for distinguishing

between priestly injunctions and the real practice of ancient times.

Secondly, in the spells and charms of the Atharva[239], which received

the Brahmanic imprimatur later than the other three Vedas, we find an

outlook differing from that of the other Vedas and resembling the

popular religion of China. Mankind are persecuted by a host of evil

spirits and protect themselves by charms addressed directly to their

tormentors or by invoking the aid of beneficent powers. All nature is

animated by good and evil spirits, to be dealt with like other natural

advantages or difficulties, but not thought of as moral or spiritual

guides. It is true that the Atharva often rises above this phase, for it

consists not of simple folk-lore, but of folk-lore modified

under-sacerdotal influence. The protecting powers invoked are often the

gods of the Rig Veda[240], but prayers and incantations are also

addressed directly to diseases[241] and demons[242] or, on the other

hand, to healing plants and amulets[243]. We can hardly be wrong in

supposing that in such invocations the Atharva reflects the popular

practice of its time, but it prefers the invocation of counteracting

forces, whether Vedic deities or magical plants, to the propitiation of

malignant spirits, such as the worship of the goddesses presiding over

smallpox and cholera which is still prevalent in India. In this there is

probably a contrast between the ideas of the Aryan and non-Aryan races.

The latter propitiate the demon or disease; the Aryans invoke a

beneficent and healing power. But though on the whole the Atharva is

inclined to banish the black spectres of popular demonology with the

help of luminous Aryan gods, still we find invoked in it and in its

subsidiary literature a multitude of spirits, good and bad, known by

little except their names which, however, often suffice to indicate

their functions. Such are Âśâpati (Lord of the region), Kshetrapati

(Lord of the field), both invoked in ceremonies for destroying locusts

and other noxious insects, Śakambhara and Apvâ, deities of diarrhoea,

and Arâti, the goddess of avarice and grudge. In one hymn[244] the poet

invokes, together with many Vedic deities, all manner of nature spirits,

demons, animals, healing plants, seasons and ghosts. A similar

collection of queer and vague personalities is found in the popular

pantheon of China to-day[245].

Thirdly, various deities who are evidently considered to be well known,

play some part in the Pali Pitakas. Those most frequently mentioned are

Mahâbrahmâ or Brahmâ Sahampati, and Sakka or Indra, but not quite the

same as the Vedic Indra and less in need of libations of Soma. In two

curious suttas[246] deputations of deities, clearly intended to include

all the important gods worshipped at the time, are represented as

visiting the Buddha. In both lists a prominent position is given to the

Four Great Kings, or Ruling Spirits of the Four Quarters, accompanied by

retinues called Gandhabbas, Kumbhandas, Nâgas, and Yakkhas respectively,

and similar to the Nats of Burma. The Gandhabbas (or Gandharvas) are

heavenly musicians and mostly benevolent, but are mentioned in the

Brâhmaṇas as taking possession of women who then deliver oracles. The

Nâgas are serpents, sometimes represented as cobras with one or more

heads and sometimes as half human: sometimes they live in palaces under

the water or in the depths of the earth and sometimes they are the

tutelary deities of trees. Serpent worship has undoubtedly been

prevalent in India in all ages: indications of it are found in the

earliest Buddhist sculptures and it still survives[247]. The Yakkhas (or

Yakshas) though hardly demons (as their name is often rendered) are

mostly ill disposed to the human race, sometimes man-eaters and often of

unedifying conduct. The Mahâsamaya-sutta also mentions mountain spirits

from the Himalaya, Satagiri, and Mount Vepulla. Of the Devas or chiefs

of the Yakkhas in this catalogue only a few are known to Brahmanic

works, such as Soma, Varuṇa, Veṇhu (Vishnu), the Yamas, Pajâpati, Inda

(Indra), Sanan-kumâra. All these deities are enumerated together with

little regard to the positions they occupy in the sacerdotal pantheon.

The enquirer finds a similar difficulty when he tries in the twentieth

century to identify rural deities, or even the tutelaries of many great

temples, with any personages recognized by the canonical literature.

In several discourses attributed to the Buddha[248] is incorporated a

tract called the Sîla-vagga, giving a list of practices of which he

disapproved, such as divination and the use of spells and drugs. Among

special observances censured, the following are of interest. (_a_) Burnt

offerings, and offerings of blood drawn from the right knee. (_b_) The

worship of the Sun, of Siri, the goddess of Luck, and of the Great One,

meaning perhaps the Earth. (_c_) Oracles obtained from a mirror, or from

a girl possessed by a spirit or from a god.

We also find allusions in Buddhist and Jain works as well as in the

inscriptions of Asoka to popular festivals or fairs called Samajjas[249]

which were held on the tops of hills and seem to have included music,

recitations, dancing and perhaps dramatic performances. These meetings

were probably like the modern _mela_, half religion and half

entertainment, and it was in such surroundings that the legends and

mythology which the great Epics show in full bloom first grew and

budded.

Thus we have evidence of the existence in pre-Buddhist India of rites

and beliefs—the latter chiefly of the kind called animistic—disowned for

the most part by the Buddhists and only tolerated by the Brahmans. No

elaborate explanation of this popular religion or of its relation to

more intellectual and sacerdotal cults is necessary, for the same thing

exists at the present day and the best commentary on the Sîla-vagga is

Crooke's _Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India_.

In themselves such popular superstitions may seem despicable and

repulsive (as the Buddha found them), but when they are numerous and

vigorous, as in India, they have a real importance for they provide a

matrix and nursery in which the beginnings of great religions may be

reared. Sâktism and the worship of Râma and Krishna, together with many

less conspicuous cults, all entered Brahmanism in this way. Whenever a

popular cult grew important or whenever Brahmanic influence spread to a

new district possessing such a cult, the popular cult was recognized and

brahmanized. This policy can be abundantly illustrated for the last four

or five centuries (for instance in Assam), and it was in operation two

and a half millenniums ago or earlier. It explains the low and magical

character of the residue of popular religion, every ceremony and deity

of importance being put under Brahmanic patronage, and it also explains

the sudden appearance of new deities. We can safely assert that in the

time of the Buddha, and _a fortiori_ in the time of the older

Upanishads[250] and Brâhmaṇas, Krishna and Râma were not prominent as

deities in Hindustan, but it may well be that they had a considerable

position as heroes whose exploits were recited at popular festivals and

that Krishna was growing into a god in other regions which have left no

literature.

CHAPTER VII

THE JAINS[251]

1

Before leaving pre-Buddhist India, it may be well to say something of

the Jains. Many of their doctrines, especially their disregard not only

of priests but of gods, which seems to us so strange in any system which

can be called a religion, are closely analogous to Buddhism and from one

point of view Jainism is part of the Buddhist movement. But more

accurately it may be called an early specialized form of the general

movement which culminated in Buddhism. Its founder, Mahâvîra, was an

earlier contemporary of the Buddha and not a pupil or imitator[252].

Even had its independent appearance been later, we might still say that

it represents an earlier stage of thought. Its kinship to the theories

mentioned in the last chapter is clear. It does not indeed deny

responsibility and free will, but its advocacy of extreme asceticism and

death by starvation has a touch of the same extravagance and its list of

elements in which physical substances and ideas are mixed together is

curiously crude.

Jainism is atheistic, and this atheism is as a rule neither apologetic

nor polemical but is accepted as a natural religious attitude. By

atheism, of course, a denial of the existence of Devas is not meant; the

Jains surpass, if possible, the exuberant fancy of the Brahmans and

Buddhists in designing imaginary worlds and peopling them with angelic

or diabolical inhabitants, but, as in Buddhism, these beings are like

mankind subject to transmigration and decay and are not the masters,

still less the creators, of the universe. There were two principal world

theories in ancient India. One, which was systematized as the Vedânta,

teaches in its extreme form that the soul and the universal spirit are

identical and the external world an illusion. The other, systematized as

the Sânkhya, is dualistic and teaches that primordial matter and

separate individual souls are both of them uncreated and indestructible.

Both lines of thought look for salvation in the liberation of the soul

to be attained by the suppression of the passions and the acquisition of

true knowledge.

Jainism belongs to the second of these classes. It teaches that the

world is eternal, self-existent and composed of six constituent

substances: souls, dharma, adharma, space, time, and particles of

matter[253]. Dharma and adharma are defined by modern Jains as subtle

substances analogous to space which make it possible for things to move

or rest, but Jacobi is probably right in supposing that in primitive

speculation the words had their natural meaning and denoted subtle

fluids which cause merit and demerit. In any case the enumeration places

in singular juxtaposition substances and activities, the material and

the immaterial. The process of salvation and liberation is not

distinguished from physical processes and we see how other sects may

have drawn the conclusion, which apparently the Jains did not draw, that

human action is necessitated and that there is no such thing as free

will. For Jainism individual souls are free, separate existences, whose

essence is pure intelligence. But they have a tendency towards action

and passion and are misled by false beliefs. For this reason, in the

existence which we know they are chained to bodies and are found not

only in Devas and in human beings but in animals, plants and inanimate

matter. The habitation of the soul depends on the merit or demerit which

it acquires and merit and demerit have respectively greater or less

influence during immensely long periods called Utsarpinî and Avasarpinî,

ascending and descending, in which human stature and the duration of

life increase or decrease by a regular law. Merit secures birth among

the gods or good men. Sin sends the soul to baser births, even in

inanimate substances. On this downward path, the intelligence is

gradually dimmed till at last motion and consciousness are lost, which

is not however regarded as equivalent to annihilation.

Another dogmatic exposition of the Jain creed is based on seven

principles, called soul, non-soul, influx, imprisonment, exclusion,

dissipation, release[254]. Karma, which in the ordinary language of

Indian philosophy means deeds and their effect on the soul, is here

regarded as a peculiarly subtle form of matter[255] which enters the

soul and by this influx (or âsrava, a term well-known in Buddhism)

defiles and weighs it down. As food is transformed into flesh, so the

Karma forms a subtle body which invests the soul and prevents it from

being wholly isolated from matter at death. The upward path and

liberation of the soul are effected by stopping the entrance of Karma,

that is by not performing actions which give occasion to the influx, and

by expelling it. The most effective means to this end is

self-mortification, which not only prevents the entrance of new Karma

but annihilates what has accumulated.

Like most Indian sects, Jainism considers the world of transmigration as

a bondage or journey which the wise long to terminate. But joyless as is

its immediate outlook, its ultimate ideas are not pessimistic. Even in

the body the soul can attain a beatific state of perfect knowledge[256]

and above the highest heaven (where the greatest gods live in bliss for

immense periods though ultimately subject to transmigration) is the

paradise of blessed souls, freed from transmigration. They have no

visible form but consist of life throughout, and enjoy happiness beyond

compare. With a materialism characteristic of Jain theology, the

treatise from which this account is taken[257] adds that the dimensions

of a perfected soul are two-thirds of the height possessed in its last

existence.

How is this paradise to be reached? By right faith, right knowledge and

right conduct, called the three jewels, a phrase familiar to Buddhism.

The right faith is complete confidence in Mahâvîra and his teaching.

Right knowledge is correct theology as outlined above. Knowledge is of

five degrees of which the highest is called Kevalam or omniscience. This

sounds ambitious, but the special method of reasoning favoured by the

Jains is the modest Syâdvâda[258] or doctrine of may-be, which holds

that you can (1) affirm the existence of a thing from one point of view,

(2) deny it from another, and (3) affirm both existence and

non-existence with reference to it at different times. If (4) you should

think of affirming existence and non-existence at the same time and from

the same point of view, you must say that the thing cannot be spoken of.

The essence of the doctrine, so far as one can disentangle it from

scholastic terminology, seems just, for it amounts to this, that as to

matters of experience it is impossible to formulate the whole and

complete truth, and as to matters which transcend experience language is

inadequate: also that Being is associated with production, continuation

and destruction. This doctrine is called _anekânta-vâda_, meaning that

Being is not one and absolute as the Upanishads assert: matter is

permanent, but changes its shape, and its other accidents. Thus in many

points the Jains adopt the common sense and _primâ facie_ point of view.

But the doctrines of metempsychosis and Karma are also admitted as

obvious propositions, and though the fortunes and struggles of the

embodied soul are described in materialistic terms, happiness is never

placed in material well-being but in liberation from the material

universe.

We cannot be sure that the existing Jain scriptures present these

doctrines in their original form, but the full acceptance of

metempsychosis, the animistic belief that plants, particles of earth and

water have souls and the materialistic phraseology (from which the

widely different speculations of the Upanishads are by no means free)

agree with what we know of Indian thought about 550 B.C. Jainism like

Buddhism ignores the efficacy of ceremonies and the powers of priests,

but it bears even fewer signs than Buddhism of being in its origin a

protestant or hostile movement. The intellectual atmosphere seems other

than that of the Upanishads, but it is very nearly that of the Sânkhya

philosophy, which also recognizes an infinity of individual souls

radically distinct from matter and capable of attaining bliss only by

isolation from matter. Of the origin of that important school we know

nothing, but it differs from Jainism chiefly in the greater elaboration

of its psychological and evolutionary theories and in the elimination of

some materialistic ideas. Possibly the same region and climate of

opinion gave birth to two doctrines, one simple and practical, inasmuch

as it found its principal expression in a religious order, the other

more intellectual and scholastic and, at least in the form in which we

read it, later[259].

Right conduct is based on the five vows taken by every Jain ascetic, (1)

not to kill, (2) not to speak untruth, (3) to take nothing that is not

given, (4) to observe chastity, (5) to renounce all pleasure in external

objects. These vows receive an extensive and strict interpretation by

means of five explanatory clauses applicable to each and to be construed

with reference to deed, word, and thought, to acting, commanding and

consenting. Thus the vow not to kill forbids not only the destruction of

the smallest insect but also all speech or thought which could bring

about a quarrel, and the doing, causing or permitting of any action

which could even inadvertently injure living beings, such as

carelessness in walking. Naturally such rules can be kept only by an

ascetic, and in addition to them asceticism is expressly enjoined. It is

either internal or external. The former takes such forms as repentance,

humility, meditation and the suppression of all desires: the latter

comprises various forms of self-denial, culminating in death by

starvation. This form of religious suicide is prescribed for those who

have undergone twelve years' penance and are ripe for Nirvana[260] but

it is wrong if adopted as a means of shortening austerities. Numerous

inscriptions record such deaths and the head-teachers of the Digambaras

are said still to leave the world in this way.

Important but not peculiar to Jainism is the doctrine of the periodical

appearance of great teachers who from time to time restore the true

faith[261]. The same idea meets us in the fourteen Manus, the

incarnations of Vishnu, and the series of Buddhas who preceded Gotama.

The Jain saints are sometimes designated as Buddha, Kevalin, Siddha,

Tathâgata and Arhat (all Buddhist titles) but their special appellation

is Jina or conqueror which is, however, also used by Buddhists[262]. It

was clearly a common notion in India that great teachers appear at

regular intervals and that one might reasonably be expected in the sixth

century B.C. The Jains gave preference or prominence to the titles Jina

or Tîrthankara: the Buddhists to Buddha or Tathâgata.

2

According to the Jain scriptures all Jinas are born in the warrior

caste, never among Brahmans. The first called Rishabha, who was born an

almost inexpressibly[263] long time ago and lived 8,400,000 years, was

the son of a king of Ayodhyâ. But as ages elapsed, the lives of his

successors and the intervals which separated them became shorter.

Parśva, the twenty-third Jina, must have some historical basis[264]. We

are told that he lived 250 years before Mahâvîra, that his followers

still existed in the time of the latter: that he permitted the use of

clothes and taught that four and not five vows were necessary[265]. Both

Jain and Buddhist scriptures support the idea that Mahâvîra was a

reviver and reformer rather than an originator. The former do not

emphasize the novelty of his revelation and the latter treat Jainism as

a well-known form of error without indicating that it was either new or

attributable to one individual.

Mahâvîra, or the great hero, is the common designation of the

twenty-fourth Jina but his personal name was Vardhamâna. He was a

contemporary of the Buddha but somewhat older and belonged to a

Kshatriya clan, variously called Jñâta, Ñâta, or Ñâya. His parents lived

in a suburb of Vaiśâlî and were followers of Parśva. When he was in his

thirty-first year they decided to die by voluntary starvation and after

their death he renounced the world and started to wander naked in

western Bengal, enduring some persecution as well as self-inflicted

penances. After thirteen years of this life, he believed that he had

attained enlightenment and appeared as the Jina, the head of a religious

order called Nirgaṇṭhas (or Nigaṇṭhas). This word, which means

unfettered or free from bonds, is the name by which the Jains are

generally known in Buddhist literature and it occurs in their own

scriptures, though it gradually fell out of use. Possibly it was the

designation of an order claiming to have been founded by Parśva and

accepted by Mahâvîra.

The meagre accounts of his life relate that he continued to travel for

nearly thirty years and had eleven principal disciples. He apparently

influenced much the same region as the Buddha and came in contact with

the same personalities, such as kings Bimbisâra and Ajâtasattu. He had

relations with Makkhali Gosâla and his disciples disputed with the

Buddhists[266] but it does not appear that he himself ever met Gotama.

He died at the age of seventy-two at Pâvâ near Râjagaha. Only one of his

principal disciples, Sudharman, survived him and a schism broke out

immediately after his death. There had already been one in the fifteenth

year of his teaching brought about by his son-in-law.

3

We have no information about the differences on which these schisms

turned, but Jainism is still split into two sects which, though

following in most respects identical doctrines and customs, refuse to

intermarry or eat together. Their sacred literature is not the same and

the evidence of inscriptions indicates that they were distinct at the

beginning of the Christian era and perhaps much earlier.

The Digambara sect, or those who are clothed in air, maintain that

absolute nudity is a necessary condition of saintship: the other

division or Śvetâmbaras, those who are dressed in white, admit that

Mahâvîra went about naked, but hold that the use of clothes does not

impede the highest sanctity, and also that such sanctity can be attained

by women, which the Digambaras deny. Nudity as a part of asceticism was

practised by several sects in the time of Mahâvîra[267] but it was also

reprobated by others (including all Buddhists) who felt it to be

barbarous and unedifying. It is therefore probable that both Digambaras

and Śvetâmbaras existed in the infancy of Jainism, and the latter may

represent the older sect reformed or exaggerated by Mahâvîra. Thus we

are told[268] that "the law taught by Vardhamâna forbids clothes but

that of the great sage Parśva allows an under and an upper garment." But

it was not until considerably later that the schism was completed by the

constitution of two different canons[269]. At the present day most

Digambaras wear the ordinary costume of their district and only the

higher ascetics attempt to observe the rule of nudity. When they go

about they wrap themselves in a large cloth, but lay it aside when

eating. The Digambaras are divided into four principal sects and the

Śvetâmbaras into no less than eighty-four, which are said to date from

the tenth century A.D.

Apart from these divisions, all Jain communities are differentiated into

laymen and members of the order or Yatis, literally strivers. It is

recognized that laymen cannot observe the five vows. Killing, lying, and

stealing are forbidden to them only in their obvious and gross forms:

chastity is replaced by conjugal fidelity and self-denial by the

prohibition of covetousness. They can also acquire merit by observing

seven other miscellaneous vows (whence we hear of the twelvefold law)

comprising rules as to residence, trade, etc. Agriculture is forbidden

since it involves tearing up the ground and the death of insects.

Mahâvîra was succeeded by a long line of teachers sometimes called

Patriarchs and it would seem that their names have been correctly

preserved though the accounts of their doings are meagre. Various

notices in Buddhist literature confirm the idea that the Jains were

active in the districts corresponding to Oudh, Tirhut and Bihar in the

period following Mahâvîra's death, and we hear of them in Ceylon before

our era. Further historical evidence is afforded by inscriptions[270].

The earliest in which the Jains are mentioned are the edicts of Asoka.

He directed the officials called "superintendents of religion" to

concern themselves with the Niganṭḥas[271]: and when [272] he describes

how he has provided medicine, useful plants and wells for both men and

animals, we are reminded of the hospitals for animals which are still

maintained by the Jains. According to Jain tradition (which however has

not yet been verified by other evidence) Samprati, the grandson of

Asoka, was a devout patron of the faith. More certain is the patronage

accorded to it by King Khâravela of Orissa about 157 B.C. which is

attested by inscriptions. Many dedicatory inscriptions prove that the

Jains were a flourishing community at Muttra in the reigns of Kanishka,

Huvishka and Vasudeva and one inscription from the same locality seems

as old as 150 B.C. We learn from these records that the sect comprised a

great number of schools and subdivisions. We need not suppose that the

different teachers were necessarily hostile to one another but their

existence testifies to an activity and freedom of interpretation which

have left traces in the multitude of modern subsects.

Jainism also spread in the south of India and before our era it had a

strong hold in Tamil lands, but our knowledge of its early progress is

defective. According to Jain tradition there was a severe famine in

northern India about 200 years after Mahâvîra's death and the patriarch

Bhadrabâhu led a band of the faithful to the south[273]. In the seventh

century A.D. we know from various records of the reign of Harsha and

from the Chinese pilgrim Hsüan Chuang that it was nourishing in Vaiśâlî

and Bengal and also as far south as Conjeevaram. It also made

considerable progress in the southern Maratha country under the Câlukya

dynasty of Vatapi, in the modern district of Bijapur (500-750) and under

the Râshṭrakûta sovereigns of the Deccan. Amoghavarsha of this line

(815-877) patronized the Digambaras and in his old age abdicated and

became an ascetic. The names of notable Digambara leaders like Jinasena

and Guṇabhadra dating from this period are preserved and Jainism must in

some districts have become the dominant religion. Bijjala who usurped

the Câlukya throne (1156-1167) was a Jain and the Hoysala kings of

Mysore, though themselves Vaishnavas, protected the religion.

Inscriptions[274] appear to attest the presence of Jainism at Girnar in

the first century A.D. and subsequently Gujarat became a model Jain

state after the conversion of King Kumarapala about 1160.

Such success naturally incurred the enmity of the Brahmans and there is

more evidence of systematic persecution directed against the Jains than

against the Buddhists. The Cola kings who ruled in the south-east of the

Madras Presidency were jealous worshippers of Siva and the Jains

suffered severely at their hands in the eleventh century and also under

the Pândya kings of the extreme south. King Sundara of the latter

dynasty is said to have impaled 8000 of them and pictures on the walls

of the great temple at Madura represent their tortures. A little later

(1174) Ajayadeva, a Saiva king of Gujarat, is said to have raged against

them with equal fury. The rise of the Lingâyats in the Deccan must also

have had an unfavourable effect on their numbers. But in the fourteenth

century greater tolerance prevailed, perhaps in consequence of the

common danger from Islam. Inscriptions found at Sravana Belgola and

other places[275] narrate an interesting event which occurred in 1368.

The Jains appealed to the king of Vijayanagar for protection from

persecution and he effected a public reconciliation between them and the

Vaishnavas, holding the hands of both leaders in his own and declaring

that equal protection would be given to both sects. Another inscription

records an amicable agreement regulating the worship of a lingam in a

Jain temple at Halebid. Many others, chiefly recording grants of land,

testify to the prosperity of Jainism in the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar

and in the region of Mt Abu in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries[276]. The great Emperor Akbar himself came under the influence

of Jainism and received instruction from three Jain teachers from 1578

to 1597.

Persecution and still more the steady pressure and absorptive power of

Hinduism have reduced the proportions of the sect, and the last census

estimated it at one million and a third. It is probable, however, that

many Jains returned themselves as Hindus, and that their numbers are

really greater. More than two-fifths of them are found in Bombay,

Rajputana, and Central India. Elsewhere they are generally distributed

but only in small numbers. They observe caste, at least in some

districts, and generally belong to the Baniyas. They include many

wealthy merchants who expend large sums on the construction and

maintenance of temples, houses for wandering ascetics and homes for

cattle. Their respect and care for animal life are remarkable. Wherever

Jains gain influence beasts are not slaughtered or sacrificed, and when

old or injured are often kept in hospitals or asylums, as, for instance,

at Ahmadabad[277]. Their ascetics take stringent precautions to avoid

killing the smallest creature: they strain their drinking water, sweep

the ground before them with a broom as they walk and wear a veil over

their mouths. Even in the shops of the laity lamps are carefully

screened to prevent insects from burning themselves.

The principal divisions are the Digambara and Śvetâmbara as above

described and an offshoot of the latter called Dhundia[278] who refuse

to use images in worship and are remarkable even among Jains for their

aversion to taking life. In Central India the Digambaras are about half

the total number; in Baroda and Bombay the Śvetâmbaras are stronger. In

Central India the Jains are said to be sharply distinguished from Hindus

but in other parts they intermarry with Vaishnavas and while respecting

their own ascetics as religious teachers, employ the services of

Brahmans in their ceremonies.

4

The Jains have a copious and in part ancient literature. The oldest

works are found in the canon (or Siddhânta) of the Śvetâmbaras, which is

not accepted by the Digambaras. In this canon the highest rank is given

to eleven works[279] called Angas or limbs of the law but it also

comprises many other esteemed treatises such as the Kalpasûtra ascribed

to Bhadrabâhu. Fourteen older books called Puvvas (Sk. Pûrvas) and now

lost are said to have together formed a twelfth anga. The language of

the canon is a variety of Prakrit[280], fairly ancient though more

modern than Pali, and remarkable for its habit of omitting or softening

consonants coming between two vowels, _e.g._ sûyam for sûtram, loo for

loko[281]. We cannot, however, conclude that it is the language in which

the books were composed, for it is probable that the early Jains,

rejecting Brahmanical notions of a revealed text, handed down their

religious teaching in the vernacular and allowed its grammar and

phonetics to follow the changes brought about by time. According to a

tradition which probably contains elements of truth the first collection

of sacred works was made about 200 years after Mahâvîra's death by a

council which sat at Pataliputra. Just about the same time came the

famine already mentioned and many Jains migrated to the south. When they

returned they found that their co-religionists had abandoned the

obligation of nakedness and they consequently refused to recognize their

sacred books. The Śvetâmbara canon was subsequently revised and written

down by a council held at Valabhi in Gujarat in the middle of the fifth

century A.D. This is the edition which is still extant. The canon of the

Digambaras, which is less well known, is said to be chiefly in Sanskrit

and according to tradition was codified by Pushpadanta in the second

century A.D. but appears to be really posterior to the Śvetâmbara

scriptures[282]. It is divided into four sections called Vedas and

treating respectively of history, cosmology, philosophy and rules of

life[283].

Though the books of the Jain canon contain ancient matter, yet they

seem, as compositions, considerably later than the older parts of the

Buddhist Tripitaka. They do not claim to record recent events and

teaching but are attempts at synthesis which assume that Jainism is well

known and respected. In style they offer some resemblance to the

Pitakas: there is the same inordinate love of repetition and in the more

emotional passages great similarity of tone and metaphor[284].

Besides the two canons, the Jains have a considerable literature

consisting both of commentaries and secular works. The most eminent of

their authors is Hemacandra, born in 1088, who though a monk was an

ornament of the court and rendered an important service to his sect by

converting Kumârapâla, King of Gujarat. He composed numerous and

valuable works on grammar, lexicography, poetics and ecclesiastical

biography. Such subjects were congenial to the later Jain writers and

they not only cultivated both Sanskrit and Prakrit but also had a

vivifying effect on the vernaculars of southern India. Kanarese, Tamil,

and Telugu in their literary form owe much to the labours of Jain monks,

and the Jain works composed in these languages, such as the

Jîvakacintâmaṇi in Tamil, if not of world-wide importance, at least

greatly influenced Dravidian civilization.

Though the Jains thus occupy an honourable, and even distinguished place

in the history of letters it must be confessed that it is hard to praise

their older religious books. This literature is of considerable

scientific interest for it contains many data about ancient India as yet

unsifted but it is tedious in style and rarely elevated in sentiment. It

has an arid extravagance, which merely piles one above the other

interminable lists of names and computations of immensity in time and

space. Even more than in the Buddhist suttas there is a tendency to

repetition which offends our sense of proportion and though the main

idea, to free the soul from the trammels of passion and matter, is not

inferior to any of the religious themes of India, the treatment is not

adequate to the subject and the counsels of perfection are smothered

under a mass of minute precepts about the most unsavoury details of life

and culminate in the recommendation of death by voluntary starvation.

5

But observation of Jainism as it exists to-day produces a quite

different impression. The Jains are well-to-do, industrious and

practical: their schools and religious establishments are well ordered:

their temples have a beauty, cleanliness, and cheerfulness unusual in

India and due to the large use made of white marble and brilliant

colours. The tenderness for animal life may degenerate into superstition

(though surely it is a fault on the right side) and some observances of

the ascetics (such as pulling out the hair instead of shaving the head)

are severe, but as a community the Jains lead sane and serious lives,

hardly practising and certainly not parading the extravagances of

self-torture which they theoretically commend. Mahâvîra is said to have

taught that place, time and occasion should be taken into consideration

and his successors adapted their precepts to the age in which they

lived. Such monks as I have met[285] maintained that extreme forms of

_tapas_ were good for the nerves of ancient saints but not for the

weaker natures of to-day. But in avoiding rigorous severity, they have

not fallen into sloth or luxury.

The beauty of Jainism finds its best expression in architecture. This

reached its zenith both in style and quantity during the eleventh and

twelfth centuries which accords with what we know of the growth of the

sect. After this period the Mohammedan invasions were unfavourable to

all forms of Hindu architecture. But the taste for building remained and

somewhat later pious Jains again began to construct large edifices which

are generally less degenerate than modern Hindu temples, though they

often show traces of Mohammedan influence. Hathi Singh's temple at

Ahmadabad completed in 1848 is a fine example of this modern style.

There is a considerable difference between Jain and Buddhist

architecture both in intention and effect. Jain monks did not live

together in large communities and there was no worship of relics. Hence

the vihâra and the stûpa—the two principal types of Buddhist

buildings—are both absent. Yet there is some resemblance between Jain

temples (for instance those at Palitâna) and the larger Burmese

sanctuaries, such as the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. It is partly due to the same

conviction, namely that the most meritorious work which a layman can

perform is to multiply shrines and images. In both localities the

general plan is similar. On the top of a hill or mound is a central

building round which are grouped a multitude of other shrines. The

repetition of chapels and images is very remarkable: in Burma they all

represent Gotama, in Jain temples the figures of Tîrthankaras are

nominally different personalities but so alike in presentment that the

laity rarely know them apart. In both styles of art white and jewelled

images are common as well as groups of four sitting figures set back to

back and facing the four quarters[286]: in both we meet with veritable

cities of temples, on the hill tops of Gujarat and in the plain of Pagan

on the banks of the Irawaddy. As some features of Burmese art are

undoubtedly borrowed from India[287], the above characteristics may be

due to imitation of Jain methods. It might be argued that the

architectural style of late Indian Buddhism survives among the Jains but

there is no proof that the multiplication of temples and images was a

feature of this style. But in some points it is clear that the Jains

have followed the artistic conventions of the Buddhists. Thus

Pârśvanâtha is sheltered by a cobra's hood, like Gotama, and though the

Bo-tree plays no part in the legend of the Tîrthankaras, they are

represented as sitting under such trees and a living tree is venerated

at Palitâna.

As single edifices illustrating the beauty of Jain art both in grace of

design and patient elaboration of workmanship may be mentioned the

Towers of Fame and Victory at Chitore, and the temples of Mt Abu. Some

differences of style are visible in north and south India. In the former

the essential features are a shrine with a portico attached and

surmounted by a conical tower, the whole placed in a quadrangular court

round which are a series of cells or chapels containing images seated on

thrones. These are the Tîrthankaras, almost exactly alike and of white

marble, though some of the later saints are represented as black. The

Śvetâmbaras represent their Tîrthankaras as clothed but in the temples

of the Digambaras the images are naked.

In the south are found religious monuments of two kinds known as Bastis

and Bettus. The Bastis consist of pillared vestibules leading to a

shrine over which rises a dome constructed in three or four stages. The

Bettus are not temples in the ordinary sense but courtyards surrounding

gigantic images of a saint named Gommateśvara who is said to have been

the son of the first Tîrthankara[288]. The largest of these colossi is

at Sravana Belgola. It is seventy feet in height and carved out of a

mass of granite standing on the top of a hill and represents a sage so

sunk in meditation that anthills and creepers have grown round his feet

without breaking his trance. An inscription states that it was erected

about 983 A.D. by the minister of a king of the Ganga dynasty[289].

But even more remarkable than these gigantic statues are the collections

of temples found on several eminences, such as Girnar and

Satrunjaya[290], mountain masses which rise abruptly to a height of

three or four thousand feet out of level plains. On the summit of

Satrunjaya are innumerable shrines, arranged in marble courts or along

well-paved streets. In each enclosure is a central temple surrounded by

others at the sides, and all are dominated by one which in the

proportions of its spire and courtyard surpasses the rest. Only a few

Yatis are allowed to pass the night in the sacred precincts and it is a

strange experience to enter the gates at dawn and wander through the

interminable succession of white marble courts tenanted only by flocks

of sacred pigeons. On every side sculptured chapels gorgeous in gold and

colour stand silent and open: within are saints sitting grave and

passionless behind the lights that burn on their altars. The multitude

of calm stone faces, the strange silence and emptiness, unaccompanied by

any sign of neglect or decay, the bewildering repetition of shrines and

deities in this aerial castle, suggest nothing built with human purpose

but some petrified spirit world.

Soon after dawn a string of devotees daily ascends the hill. Most are

laymen, but there is a considerable sprinkling of ascetics, especially

nuns. After joining the order both sexes wear yellowish white robes and

carry long sticks. They spend much of their time in visiting holy places

and usually do not stop at one rest house for more than two months. The

worship performed in the temples consists of simple offerings of

flowers, incense and lights made with little ceremony. Pilgrims go their

rounds in small bands and kneeling together before the images sing the

praises of the Jinas.

6

It is remarkable that Jainism is still a living sect, whereas the

Buddhists have disappeared from India. Its strength and persistence are

centred in its power of enlisting the interest of the laity and of

forming them into a corporation. In theory the position of the Jain and

Buddhist layman is the same. Both revere and support a religious order

for which they have not a vocation, and are bound by minor vows less

stringent than those of the monks. But among the Buddhists the members

of the order came to be regarded more and more as the true church[291]

and the laity tended to become (what they actually have become in China

and Japan) pious persons who revere that order as something extraneous

to themselves and very often only as one among several religious

organizations. Hence when in India monasteries decayed or were

destroyed, little active Buddhism was left outside them. But the

wandering ascetics of the Jains never concentrated the strength of the

religion in themselves to the same extent; the severity of their rule

limited their numbers: the laity were wealthy and practically formed a

caste; persecution acted as a tonic. As a result we have a sect

analogous in some ways to the Jews, Parsis, and Quakers[292], among all

of whom we find the same features, namely a wealthy laity, little or no

sacerdotalism and endurance of persecution.

Another question of some interest is how far Jainism should be regarded

as separate from Buddhism. Historically the position seems clear. Both

are offshoots of a movement which was active in India in the sixth

century B.C. in certain districts and especially among the aristocracy.

Of these offshoots—the survivors among many which hardly outlived their

birth—Jainism was a trifle the earlier, but Buddhism was superior and

more satisfying to the intellect and moral sense alike. Out of the

theory and practice of religious life current in their time Gotama

fashioned a beautiful vase, Mahâvîra a homely but still durable pot. The

resemblances between the two systems are not merely obvious but

fundamental. Both had their origin outside the priestly class and owed

much of their success to the protection of princes. Both preach a road

to salvation open to man's unaided strength and needing neither

sacrifice nor revealed lore. Both are universal, for though Buddhism set

about its world mission with more knowledge and grasp of the task, the

Jain sûtras are addressed "to Aryans and non-Aryans" and it is said that

in modern times Mohammedans have been received into the Jain Church.

Neither is theistic. Both believe in some form of reincarnation, in

karma and in the periodical appearance of beings possessed of superhuman

knowledge and called indifferently Jinas or Buddhas. The historian may

therefore be disposed to regard the two religions as not differing much

more than the varieties of Protestant Dissenters to be found in Great

Britain. But the theologian will perceive real differences. One of the

most important doctrines of Buddhism---perhaps in the Buddha's own

esteem the central doctrine—is the non-existence of the soul as a

permanent entity: in Jainism on the contrary not only the human body but

the whole world including inanimate matter is inhabited by individual

souls who can also exist apart from matter in individual blessedness.

The Jain theory of fivefold knowledge is unknown to the Buddhists, as is

their theory of the Skandhas to the Jains. Secondly as to practice

Jainism teaches (with some concessions in modern times) that salvation

is obtainable by self-mortification but this is the method which the

Buddha condemned after prolonged trial. It is clear that in his own

opinion and that of his contemporaries the rule and ideal of life which

he prescribed differed widely from those of the Jains, Âjîvikas and

other wandering ascetics.

BOOK III

PALI BUDDHISM

BOOK III

In the previous book I have treated chiefly the general characteristics

of Indian religion. They persist in its later phases but great changes

and additions are made. In the present book I propose to speak about the

life and teaching of the Buddha which even hostile critics must admit to

be a turning point in the history of Indian thought and institutions,

and about the earliest forms of Buddhism. For twelve centuries or more

after the death of this great genius Indian religion flows in two

parallel streams, Buddhist and Brahmanic, which subsequently unite,

Buddhism colouring the whole river but ceasing within India itself to

have any important manifestations distinct from Brahmanism.

In a general survey it is hardly possible to follow the order of strict

chronology until comparatively modern times. We cannot, for instance,

give a sketch of Indian thought in the first century B.C., simply

because our data do not permit us to assign certain sects and books to

that period rather than to the hundred years which preceded or followed

it. But we can follow with moderate accuracy the two streams of thought

in their respective courses. I have wondered if I should not take

Hinduism first. Its development from ancient Brahmanism is continuous

and Buddhism is merely an episode in it, though a lengthy one. But many

as are the lacunæ in the history of Buddhism, it offers more data and

documents than the history of Hinduism. We know more about the views of

Asoka for instance than about those of Candragupta Maurya. I shall

therefore deal first with Buddhism and then with Hinduism, while

regretting that a parallel and synoptic treatment is impracticable.

The eight chapters of this book deal mainly with Pali Buddhism[293]--a

convenient and non-controversial term—and not with the Mahayana, though

they note the tendencies which found expression in it. In the first

chapter I treat of the Buddha's life: in the second I venture to compare

him with other great religious teachers: in the third I consider his

doctrine as expounded in the Pali Tripitaka and in the fourth the order

of mendicants which he founded. The nature and value of the Pali Canon

form the subject of the fifth chapter and the sixth is occupied with the

great Emperor Asoka whose name is the clearest landmark in the early

history of Buddhism, and indeed of India.

The seventh and eighth chapters discuss topics which belong to Hinduism

as well as to Buddhism, namely, meditation and mythology. The latter is

anterior to Buddhism and it is only in a special sense that it can be

called an addition or accretion. Indian thought makes clearings in the

jungle of mythology, which become obliterated or diminished as the

jungle grows over them again. Buddhism was the most thorough of such

clearings, yet it was invaded more rapidly and completely than any

other. The Vedânta and Sânkhya are really, if less obviously, similar

clearings. They raise no objection to popular divinities but such

divinities do not come within the scope of religious philosophy as they

understand it.