migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward towards the 'Seven
Rivers' (the Indus, the five rivers of the Penjab, and the Sarasvati),
and ever since India has been called their home. That before this time
they had been living in more northern regions, within the same
precincts with the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians,
Germans, and Celts, is a fact as firmly established as that the
Normans of William the Conqueror were the Northmen of Scandinavia. The
evidence of language is irrefragable, and it is the only evidence
worth listening to with regard to ante-historical periods. It would
have been next to impossible to discover any traces of relationship
between the swarthy natives of India and their conquerors whether
Alexander or Clive, but for the testimony borne by language. What
other evidence could have reached back to times when Greece was not
yet peopled by Greeks, nor India by Hindus? Yet these are the times of
which we are speaking. What authority would have been strong enough to
persuade the Grecian army, that their gods and their hero ancestors
were the same as those of king Porus, or to convince the English
soldier that the same blood might be running in his veins and in the
veins of the dark Bengalese? And yet there is not an English jury
now-a-days, which, after examining the hoary documents of language,
would reject the claim of a common descent and a spiritual
relationship between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton. Many words still live
in India and in England that have witnessed the first separation of
the northern and southern Aryans, and these are witnesses not to be
shaken by any cross-examination. The terms for God, for house, for
father, mother, son, daughter, for dog and cow, for heart and tears,
for axe and tree, identical in all the Indo-European idioms, are like
the watchwords of soldiers. We challenge the seeming stranger; and
whether he answer with the lips of a Greek, a German, or an Indian, we
recognise him as one of ourselves. Though the historian may shake his
head, though the physiologist may doubt, and the poet scorn the idea,
all must yield before the facts furnished by language. There was a
time when the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the Slavonians, the
Greeks and Italians, the Persians and Hindus, were living together
beneath the same roof, separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and
Turanian races.
It is more difficult to prove that the Hindu was the last to leave
this common home, that he saw his brothers all depart towards the
setting sun, and that then, turning towards the south and the east, he
started alone in search of a new world. But as in his language and in
his grammar he has preserved something of what seems peculiar to each
of the northern dialects singly, as he agrees with the Greek and the
German where the Greek and the German differ from all the rest, and as
no other language has carried off so large a share of the common Aryan
heirloom--whether roots, grammar, words, mythes, or legends--it is
natural to suppose that, though perhaps the eldest brother, the Hindu
was the last to leave the central home of the Aryan family.
The Aryan nations who pursued a north-westerly direction, stand before
us in history as the principal nations of north-western Asia and
Europe. They have been the prominent actors in the great drama of
history, and have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of
active life with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected
society and morals, and we learn from their literature and works of
art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of
philosophy. In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and
Turanian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history,
and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world
together by the chains of civilisation, commerce, and religion. In a
word, they represent the Aryan man in his historical character.
But while most of the members of the Aryan family followed this
glorious path, the southern tribes were slowly migrating towards the
mountains which gird the north of India. After crossing the narrow
passes of the Hindukush or the Himalaya, they conquered or drove
before them, as it seems without much effort, the aboriginal
inhabitants of the Trans-Himalayan countries. They took for their
guides the principal rivers of Northern India, and were led by them to
new homes in their beautiful and fertile valleys. It seems as if the
great mountains in the north had afterwards closed for centuries their
Cyclopean gates against new immigrations, while, at the same time, the
waves of the Indian Ocean kept watch over the southern borders of the
peninsula. None of the great conquerors of antiquity,--Sesostris,
Semiramis, Nebuchadnezzar, or Cyrus,--disturbed the peaceful seats of
these Aryan settlers. Left to themselves in a world of their own,
without a past, and without a future before them, they had nothing but
themselves to ponder on. Struggles there must have been in India also.
Old dynasties were destroyed, whole families annihilated, and new
empires founded. Yet the inward life of the Hindu was not changed by
these convulsions. His mind was like the lotus leaf after a shower of
rain has passed over it; his character remained the same, passive,
meditative, quiet, and thoughtful. A people of this peculiar stamp was
never destined to act a prominent part in the history of the world;
nay, the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas in which they
lived could not but exercise a detrimental influence on the active and
moral character of the Indians. Social and political virtues were
little cultivated, and the ideas of the useful and the beautiful
hardly known to them. With all this, however, they had, what the Greek
was as little capable of imagining, as they were of realising the
elements of Grecian life. They shut their eyes to this world of
outward seeming and activity, to open them full on the world of
thought and rest. The ancient Hindus were a nation of philosophers,
such as could nowhere have existed except in India, and even there in
early times alone. It is with the Hindu mind as if a seed were placed
in a hothouse. It will grow rapidly, its colours will be gorgeous, its
perfume rich, its fruits precocious and abundant. But never will it be
like the oak growing in wind and weather, and striking its roots into
real earth, and stretching its branches into real air beneath the
stars and the sun of heaven. Both are experiments, the hothouse flower
and the Hindu mind; and as experiments, whether physiological or
psychological, both deserve to be studied.
We may divide the whole Aryan family into two branches, the northern
and the southern. The northern nations, Celts, Greeks, Romans,
Germans, and Slavonians, have each one act allotted to them on the
stage of history. They have each a national character to support. Not
so the southern tribes. They are absorbed in the struggles of thought,
their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of
existence; and the present, which ought to be the solution of both,
seems never to have attracted their attention, or called forth their
energies. There never was a nation believing so firmly in another
world, and so little concerned about this. Their condition on earth is
to them a problem; their real and eternal life a simple fact. Though
this is said chiefly with reference to them before they were brought
in contact with foreign conquerors, traces of this character are still
visible in the Hindus, as described by the companions of Alexander,
nay, even in the Hindus of the present day. The only sphere in which
the Indian mind finds itself at liberty to act, to create, and to
worship, is the sphere of religion and philosophy; and nowhere have
religious and metaphysical ideas struck root so deep in the mind of a
nation as in India. The shape which these ideas took amongst the
different classes of society, and at different periods of
civilisation, naturally varies from coarse superstition to sublime
spiritualism. But, taken as a whole, history supplies no second
instance where the inward life of the soul has so completely absorbed
all the other faculties of a people.
It was natural, therefore, that the literary works of such a nation,
when first discovered in Sanskrit MSS. by Wilkins, Sir W. Jones, and
others, should have attracted the attention of all interested in the
history of the human race. A new page in man's biography was laid
open, and a literature as large as that of Greece or Rome was to be
studied. The Laws of Manu, the two epic poems, the Ramaya_n_a and
Mahabharata, the six complete systems of philosophy, works on
astronomy and medicine, plays, stories, fables, elegies, and lyrical
effusions, were read with intense interest, on account of their age
not less than their novelty.
Still this interest was confined to a small number of students, and in
a few cases only could Indian literature attract the eyes of men who,
from the summit of universal history, survey the highest peaks of
human excellence. Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, and Goethe, discovered
what was really important in Sanskrit literature. They saw what was
genuine and original, in spite of much that seemed artificial. For the
artificial, no doubt, has a wide place in Sanskrit literature.
Everywhere we find systems, rules and models, castes and schools, but
nowhere individuality, no natural growth, and but few signs of strong
originality and genius.
There is, however, one period of Sanskrit literature which forms an
exception, and which will maintain its place in the history of
mankind, when the name of Kalidasa and _S_akuntala will have been long
forgotten. It is the most ancient period, the period of the Veda.
There is, perhaps, a higher degree of interest attaching to works of
higher antiquity; but in the Veda we have more than mere antiquity. We
have ancient thought expressed in ancient language. Without insisting
on the fact that even chronologically the Veda is the first book of
the Aryan nations, we have in it, at all events, a period in the
intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any other
part of the world. In the hymns of the Veda we see man left to himself
to solve the riddle of this world. We see him crawling on like a
creature of the earth with all the desires and weaknesses of his
animal nature. Food, wealth, and power, a large family and a long
life, are the theme of his daily prayers. But he begins to lift up his
eyes. He stares at the tent of heaven, and asks who supports it? He
opens his ears to the winds, and asks them whence and whither? He is
awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and him
whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily
pittance of his existence, he calls 'his life, his breath, his
brilliant Lord and Protector.' He gives names to all the powers of
nature, and after he has called the fire Agni, the sun-light Indra,
the storms Maruts, and the dawn Ushas, they all seem to grow naturally
into beings like himself, nay, greater than himself. He invokes them,
he praises them, he worships them. But still with all these gods
around him, beneath him, and above him, the early poet seems ill at
rest within himself. There too, in his own breast, he has discovered a
power that wants a name, a power nearer to him than all the gods of
nature, a power that is never mute when he prays, never absent when he
fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers, and yet to
listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to support him and
all around him. The only name he can find for this mysterious power is
Brahman; for brahman meant originally force, will, wish, and the
propulsive power of creation. But this impersonal brahman, too, as
soon as it is named, grows into something strange and divine. It ends
by being one of many gods, one of the great triad, worshipped to the
present day. And still the thought within him has no real name; that
power which is nothing but itself, which supports the gods, the
heavens, and every living being, floats before his mind, conceived but
not expressed. At last he calls it Atman; for atman, originally breath
or spirit, comes to mean Self and Self alone--Self whether divine or
human, Self whether creating or suffering, Self whether one or all,
but always Self, independent and free. 'Who has seen the first-born,'
says the poet, 'when he who has no bones (i. e. form) bore him that
had bones? Where was the life, the blood, the Self of the world? Who
went to ask this from any that knew it?' (Rv.I. 164, 4). This idea of
a divine Self once expressed, everything else must acknowledge its
supremacy, 'Self is the Lord of all things, Self is the King of all
things. As all the spokes of a wheel are contained in the nave and the
circumference, all things are contained in this Self; all selves are
contained in this Self.[32] Brahman itself is but Self.'[33]
[Footnote 32: B_r_ihad-ara_n_yaka, IV. 5, 15 ed. Roer, p. 487.]
[Footnote 33: Ibid. p. 478. _K_handogya-upanishad, VIII. 3, 3-4.]
This Atman also grew; but it grew, as it were, without attributes. The
sun is called the Self of all that moves and rests (Rv. I. 115, 1),
and still more frequently self becomes a mere pronoun. But Atman
remained always free from mythe and worship, differing in this from
the Brahman (neuter), who has his temples in India even now, and is
worshipped as Brahman (masculine), together with Vish_n_u and _S_iva,
and other popular gods. The idea of the Atman or Self, like a pure
crystal, was too transparent for poetry, and therefore was handed over
to philosophy, which afterwards polished, and turned, and watched it
as the medium through which all is seen, and in which all is reflected
and known. But philosophy is later than the Veda, and it is of the
Vaidik period only I have here to speak.[34]
[Footnote 34: In writing the above, I was thinking rather of the
mental process that was necessary for the production of such words as
brahman, atman, and others, than of their idiomatic use in the ancient
literature of India. It might be objected, for instance, that brahman,
neut. in the sense of creative power or the principal cause of all
things, does not occur in the Rig-veda. This is true. But it occurs in
that sense in the Atharva-veda, and in several of the Brahma_n_as.
There we read of 'the oldest or greatest Brahman which rules
everything that has been or will be.' Heaven is said to belong to
Brahman alone (Atharva-veda X. 8, 1). In the Brahma_n_as, this Brahman
is called the first-born, the self-existing, the best of the gods, and
heaven and earth are said to have been established by it. Even the
vital spirits are identified with it (_S_atapatha-brahma_n_a VIII. 4,
9, 3).
In other passages, again, this same Brahman is represented as existing
in man (Atharva-veda X. 7, 17), and in this very passage we can watch
the transition from the neutral Brahman into Brahman, conceived of as
a masculine:
Ye purushe brahma vidus te vidu_h_ paramesh_t_hina_m_,
Yo veda paramesh_t_hina_m_, ya_s_ _k_a veda pra_g_apatim,
_G_yesh_t_ha_m_ ye brahma_n_a_m_ vidus, te skambham anu sa_m_vidu_h_.
'They who know Brahman in man, they know the Highest,
He who knows the Highest, and he who knows Pra_g_apati (the lord of
creatures),
And they who know the oldest Brahma_n_a, they know the Ground.'
The word Brahma_n_a which is here used, is a derivative form of
Brahman; but what is most important in these lines is the mixing of
neuter and masculine words, of impersonal and personal deities. This
process is brought to perfection by changing Brahman, the neuter, even
grammatically into Brahman, a masculine,--a change which has taken
place in the Ara_n_yakas, where we find Brahman used as the name of a
male deity. It is this Brahman, with the accent on the first, not, as
has been supposed, brahman, the priest, that appears again in the
later literature as one of the divine triad, Brahman, Vish_n_u,
_S_iva.
The word brahman, as a neuter, is used in the Rig-veda in the sense of
prayer also, originally what bursts forth from the soul, and, in one
sense, what is revealed. Hence in later times brahman is used
collectively for the Veda, the sacred word.
Another word, with the accent on the last syllable, is brahman, the
man who prays, who utters prayers, the priest, and gradually the
Brahman by profession. In this sense it is frequently used in the
Rig-veda (I. 108, 7), but not yet in the sense of Brahman by birth or
caste.]
In the Veda, then, we can study a theogony of which that of Hesiod is
but the last chapter. We can study man's natural growth, and the
results to which it may lead under the most favourable conditions. All
was given him that nature can bestow. We see him blest with the
choicest gifts of the earth, under a glowing and transparent sky,
surrounded by all the grandeur and all the riches of nature, with a
language 'capable of giving soul to the objects of sense, and body to
the abstractions of metaphysics.' We have a right to expect much from
him, only we must not expect in his youthful poems the philosophy of
the nineteenth century, or the beauties of Pindar, or, with some
again, the truths of Christianity. Few understand children, still
fewer understand antiquity. If we look in the Veda for high poetical
diction, for striking comparisons, for bold combinations, we shall be
disappointed. These early poets thought more for themselves than for
others. They sought rather, in their language, to be true to their own
thought than to please the imagination of their hearers. With them it
was a great work achieved for the first time to bind thoughts and
words together, to find expressions or to form new names. As to
similes, we must look to the words themselves, which, if we compare
their radical and their nominal meaning, will be found full of bold
metaphors. No translation in any modern language can do them justice.
As to beauty, we must discover it in the absence of all effort, and in
the simplicity of their hearts. Prose was, at that time, unknown, as
well as the distinction between prose and poetry. It was the attempted
imitation of those ancient natural strains of thought which in later
times gave rise to poetry in our sense of the word, that is to say, to
poetry as an art, with its counted syllables, its numerous epithets,
its rhyme and rhythm, and all the conventional attributes of 'measured
thought.'
In the Veda itself, however--even if by Veda we mean the Rig-veda only
(the other three, the Saman, Ya_g_ush, and Atharva_n_a, having solely
a liturgical interest, and belonging to an entirely different
sphere)--in the Rig-veda also, we find much that is artificial,
imitated, and therefore modern, if compared with other hymns. It is
true that all the 1017 hymns of the Rig-veda were comprised in a
collection which existed as such before one of those elaborate
theological commentaries, known under the name of Brahma_n_a, was
written, that is to say, about 800 B.C. But before the date of their
collection these must have existed for centuries. In different songs
the names of different kings occur, and we see several generations of
royal families pass away before us with different generations of
poets. Old songs are mentioned, and new songs. Poets whose
compositions we possess are spoken of as the seers of olden times;
their names in other hymns are surrounded by a legendary halo. In some
cases, whole books or chapters may be pointed out as more modern and
secondary, in thought and language. But on the whole the Rig-veda is a
genuine document, even in its most modern portions not later than the
time of Lycurgus; and it exhibits one of the earliest and rudest
phases in the history of mankind; disclosing in its full reality a
period of which in Greece we have but traditions and names, such as
Orpheus and Linus, and bringing us as near the beginnings in language,
thought, and mythology as literary documents can ever bring us in the
Aryan world.
Though much time and labour have been spent on the Veda, in England
and in Germany, the time is not yet come for translating it as a
whole. It is possible and interesting to translate it literally, or in
accordance with scholastic commentaries, such as we find in India from
Yaska in the fifth century B.C. down to Saya_n_a in the fourteenth
century of the Christian era. This is what Professor Wilson has done
in his translation of the first book of the Rig-veda; and by strictly
adhering to this principle and excluding conjectural renderings even
where they offered themselves most naturally, he has imparted to his
work a definite character and a lasting value. The grammar of the
Veda, though irregular, and still in a rather floating state, has
almost been mastered; the etymology and the meaning of many words,
unknown in the later Sanskrit, have been discovered. Many hymns, which
are mere prayers for food, for cattle, or for a long life, have been
translated, and can leave no doubt as to their real intention. But
with the exception of these simple petitions, the whole world of Vedic
ideas is so entirely beyond our own intellectual horizon, that instead
of translating we can as yet only guess and combine. Here it is no
longer a mere question of skilful deciphering. We may collect all the
passages where an obscure word occurs, we may compare them and look
for a meaning which would be appropriate to all; but the difficulty
lies in finding a sense which we can appropriate, and transfer by
analogy into our own language and thought. We must be able to
translate our feelings and ideas into their language at the same time
that we translate their poems and prayers into our language. We must
not despair even where their words seem meaningless and their ideas
barren or wild. What seems at first childish may at a happier moment
disclose a sublime simplicity, and even in helpless expressions we may
recognise aspirations after some high and noble idea. When the scholar
has done his work, the poet and philosopher must take it up and finish
it. Let the scholar collect, collate, sift, and reject--let him say
what is possible or not according to the laws of the Vaidik
language--let him study the commentaries, the Sutras, the Brahma_n_as,
and even later works, in order to exhaust all the sources from which
information can be derived. He must not despise the tradition of the
Brahmans, even where their misconceptions and the causes of their
misconceptions are palpable. To know what a passage cannot mean is
frequently the key to its real meaning; and whatever reasons may be
pleaded for declining a careful perusal of the traditional
interpretations of Yaska or Saya_n_a, they can all be traced back to
an ill-concealed argumentum paupertatis. Not a corner in the
Brahma_n_as, the Sutras, Yaska, and Saya_n_a should be left unexplored
before we venture to propose a rendering of our own. Saya_n_a, though
the most modern, is on the whole the most sober interpreter. Most of
his etymological absurdities must be placed to Yaska's account, and
the optional renderings which he allows for metaphysical, theological,
or ceremonial purposes, are mostly due to his regard for the
Brahma_n_as. The Brahma_n_as, though nearest in time to the hymns of
the Rig-veda, indulge in the most frivolous and ill-judged
interpretations. When the ancient Rishi exclaims with a troubled
heart, 'Who is the greatest of the gods? Who shall first be praised by
our songs?'--the author of the Brahma_n_a sees in the interrogative
pronoun 'Who' some divine name, a place is allotted in the sacrificial
invocations to a god 'Who,' and hymns addressed to him are called
'Whoish' hymns. To make such misunderstandings possible, we must
assume a considerable interval between the composition of the hymns
and the Brahma_n_as. As the authors of the Brahma_n_as were blinded by
theology, the authors of the still later Niruktas were deceived by
etymological fictions, and both conspired to mislead by their
authority later and more sensible commentators, such as Saya_n_a.
Where Saya_n_a has no authority to mislead him, his commentary is at
all events rational; but still his scholastic notions would never
allow him to accept the free interpretation which a comparative study
of these venerable documents forces upon the unprejudiced scholar. We
must therefore discover ourselves the real vestiges of these ancient
poets; and if we follow them cautiously, we shall find that with some
effort we are still able to walk in their footsteps. We shall feel
that we are brought face to face and mind to mind with men yet
intelligible to us, after we have freed ourselves from our modern
conceits. We shall not succeed always: words, verses, nay, whole hymns
in the Rig-veda, will and must remain to us a dead letter. But where
we can inspire those early relics of thought and devotion with new
life, we shall have before us more real antiquity than in all the
inscriptions of Egypt or Nineveh; not only old names and dates, and
kingdoms and battles, but old thoughts, old hopes, old faith, and old
errors, the old Man altogether--old now, but then young and fresh, and
simple and real in his prayers and in his praises.