"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific
military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more
often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a
kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in
it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We
shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution'
is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he
says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that
actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea,
raising up splendors in one nation after another in order
_geographically,_ and with no haphazard about it. Its first and
largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I
can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years
apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being
governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as
well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces
the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that
recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in
manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C.; West Asia, from 1890 to 390;
Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D. So in the time of Alexander
West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The
Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara,
had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy;
but in its universal aspect--in its strongest force--it had to
roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China
when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which
sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it
travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China
lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya;
you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's
passing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering
ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you
lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say
that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I
doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense;
it is _our_ Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the
highest thing in civilization in the world at that time. We may
take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all
esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and
left a record, were impressed with that fact. You shall see;
out of their own mouths we will convict them. It is the very
burden of Megasthenes' song.
Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one
must admire in him. Though he overthrew the Persians, he never
made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race. On the
contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them
and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which
the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he
felt in Europeans. The Law made use of his intention, partially,
and to the furtherance of its own designs.--His method of
treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or
Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent
than barbarous. He took a short cut to his broad ends, and
married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the
example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive
women very differently. So that it was a kind of enlightenment
he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan,
and into the Punjab,--which, we may note, was but the outskirts
of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may
yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but
let that be. So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought
us where we are to spend this evening.
For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even
--to use a very vile drudge of a word--'unique' about India. Go
else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a
high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make
some shift to arrange the history. None need boggle really at
any Chinese date after about 2350 B.C.; Babylon is fairly
settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on assigned
Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of
dynasties back through four or five millennia. But come to
India, and alas, where are you? All out of it, chronologically
speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of
several hundred thousand years. I have no doubt the Puranas are
crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to
be taken as plain fact; how much as 'blinds'; how much as
symbolism--only the Adepts know. The three elements are mingled
beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly
tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium,
Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma. You are
in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous
blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all
in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the
computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your
surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science,
and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say
any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it
than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them
quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of
esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for
little. Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I
think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history
would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us: we should know
too much for our present moral or spiritual status. As usual,
our own _savants_ are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring
everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the
native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you
should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as
the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet.
They do not choose that their ancient history should be known;
so all things are in a hopeless muddle.
One thing to remember is this: it is a continent, like Europe;
not a country, like France. The population is even more
heterogeneous than that of Europe. Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb
--at least for many thousands of years--was ever even nominally
master of the whole of it. There are two main divisions, widely
different: Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains
and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the
peninsular part to the south. The former is the land of the
Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan--a race
called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in
Hindustan, and assimilated; but whom in the Deccan, though they
have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion,
they never quite conquered or supplanted. Well; never is a long
day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages
of pre-history.
The Aryans came down into India through its one open door--that
in the northwest. But when?--Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C.,
says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity
altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and
their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others
had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had
been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is
sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that
Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their
speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in
Central Asia. But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns
and changes as incontinently as in dress. Scholars rose to
launch a new name for the race: _Indogermanic;_ and to prove
Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created. Then others, to
dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which
at least must have the honor;--it could not be conceded to
_inferior_ Asia. All the languages of the group were examined
and worried for evidence. Men said, 'By the names of trees we
shall run it to earth'; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for
some time. Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and
find in what territory that tree is indigenous: that will
certainly be the place. As thus; I will work out for you a
suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what
strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:--
Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all
Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are _potato_ and _tobacco._
'From Greenland's icy mountains to Ceylon's sunny isle, Whereever
prospect pleases, And only man is vile.'--you shall nearly always
hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day
meal by some term akin to _potato,_ and the subtle weed that
companions their meditations, by some word like _tobacco._
_Argal,_ the Aryan race used these two words before their
separation; and if the two words, the two plants also. You
follow the reasoning?--Now then, seek out the land where these
plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both
have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find
the native seat of the primitive Aryans. And, glory be to
Science! they do; both come from Virginia. Virginia, then, is
the Aryan Garden of Eden.
Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the
race--the Teutons--unacquainted with the word _potato._ You may
argue that the French are too: but luckily, Science has the
seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances. The
French say _pomme de terre;_ but this is evidently only a
corruption--_potater, pomdeter_--twisted at some late period by
false analogy into _pomme de terre,_ ('apple of the earth'.) But
the Teuton has _kartoffel,_ utterly different; argal again, the
Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the
Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming.
They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia: paddle their
own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild
Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the
Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony. But even the Teutons have the word
_tobacco._ Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the
primitive civilization of our forefathers! They knew, it seems,
the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single
murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards: and
the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland
of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty
lunch-bags. What a life-like picture rises before our eyes!
These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco
was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their
civilization.--Then presently, after the Teutons had gone,
someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes--long
enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green
plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root
of it which one could EAT. Think of the joy, the wonder, of that
momentous discovery! Did he hide it away, lest others should be
as happy as himself? Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy
out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon
him at last visibly? We shall never know. Or did he call in his
neighbors at once and annouce it? Did someone ask: 'What shall
we name this God-given thing?'--and did another reply: 'It looks
to me like a _potato;_ let's call it that!'? That at least must
have been how it came by it name. They received the suggestion
with acclamations: and all future out-going expeditions took
sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to
call it _potato_ to this day. For you must not that being the
only food with a name common to all the languages--or almost all
--it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of
before their separation. Even the words for _father, mother,
fire, water,_ and the like, have a greater number of different
roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.
To say the truth, a dawning perception of the possibilities
of this kind of reasoning chilled the enthusiasm of the
Aryan-hunters a good deal; it was the bare bodkin that did
quietus make for much philological pother and rout. No; if
you are to prove racial superiority or exclusiveness, you had
much better avail yourself of the simplicity of a stout bludgeon,
than rely upon the subtleties of brain-mind argumentation; for
time past is long, and mostly hidden; and lots of things have
happened to account for your proofs in ways you would never
suspect. The long and short of it is, that after pursuing
the primitive Aryans up hill and down dale through all parts
of Europe, Science is forced to pronouce her final judgement
thus: _We really know nothing about it._
The ancestors of this Fifth Root-Race emigrated to Central Asia
to escape the fate of Atlantis; whither too went several
Atlantean peoples, such as the forefathers of the Chinese,--who
were not destined to be destroyed. It is a vast region, and
there was room for them all. That emigration may have been as
long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to
America; probably it was; or longer. But it happened, at any
rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of
water will flow under the bridges. You may call English
a universal language now; it might conceivably become so
absolutely, after a few centuries. But history will go on and
time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law. These are
not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot
evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;--which, I
suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times 'since
created man.' In a million years from now the world will have
contracted and expanded often. We have seen, in our little period
called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there
have been contractions, too. But contractions there will be,
major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action
and reaction are equal and opposite: it is a fundamental law.
Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call
ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and
there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia
will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote
descendants. Then what will have become of the once universal
English language?--It will have split into a thousand fragment
tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology--the
great expansion having happened again--will have as much
confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the
Indo-European.--In a million years?--Bless my soul, in a poor
little hundred thousand!
The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading
out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one
imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing
through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,--or
however long it may be; just as they have been doing in
historical times. You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian
come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through
English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic,
and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek;
Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and
conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.
Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a
momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it
becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon
laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a
symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring;
it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more
than the fragment of a bar.
You all know the teaching of _The Secret Doctrine_ about the
Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally
called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into
seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and
each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes. According
to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years.
The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and
that of a family-race, about 30,000. So then, four sub-races
would have occupied the first 840,000 years of the Fifth Race's
history; and our present fifth sub-race would have been in being
during the last 160,000 years; in which time five family-races
would have flourished and passed; and this present sixth
family-race would be about ten millenniums old. Now, no single
branch of the Aryans: by which term I mean the sixth family-race;
I shall confine it to that, and not apply it to the Fifth Root-Race
as a whole,--no single race among the Aryans has been universal,
or dominant, or prominent even, during the whole of the last ten
thousand years. The Teutons (including Anglo-Saxons), who loom so
largely now, cut a very small figure in the days when Latin was,
in its world, something more universal than English is in ours;
and a few centuries before that, you should have heard Celtic,
and little else, almost anywhere in Europe. This shows how
fleeting a thing is the sovereignty of any language; within the
three thousand years we know about, three at least of the Aryan
language-groups have been 'universal'; within the last ten
milleniums there has been time enough, and to spare, for a
'universality' each of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Slavonic, Latin,
Teutonic, and Celtic. So evidently none of these is the language
of the family-race: we may speak of the Aryan Family-Race; not
of the Celtic or Slavonic.
But it does not follow that the whole sub-race is not Aryan too.
Mr. Judge says somewhere that Sanskrit will be the universal
language again. Supposing that there were some such scheme of
evolution here, as in the world-chain? You know the diagram in
_The Secret Doctrine,_ with the teaching as to the seven rounds.
_As above, so below;_ when H. P. Blavatsky seems to be giving
you a sketch of cosmic evolution, often she is at the same time,
if you can read it, telling you about the laws that govern your
own and the race's history. I suspect some such arrangement as
this: when the sub-race began, 160,000 years ago, Sanskrit was
its 'universal' language; spoken by all the Aryans that moved
out over Europe and into India. An unaccountable Sanskrit
inscription has been found in Asia Minor;* and there is
Lithuania, a little speech-island in northeastern Central
Europe, where a nearly Sanskrit language, I believe, survives.
Then Sanskrit changed imperceptibly (as American is changing from
English) into the parent language of the Persian group, which
became the general speech of the sub-race except in India, where
Sanskrit survived as a _seed-speech_ for future resurrection.
Then, perhaps _pari passu_ with further westward expansion,
Persian changed into the parent of the Slavonic group, itself
living on as a seed-speech in Iran; and so on through all the
groups; in each case the type-language of a group remaining, to
expand again after the passage of ages and when its cycle should
return, in or about its corresponding psychic center on the
geographical plane. Then this evolution, having reached its
farthest limit, began to retrace its course; I would not attempt
to say in what order the language groups come: which is
globe A in the chain, which Globe D, and so on; but merely
suggest that a 'family race' may represent one round from
Sanskrit to Sanskrit; and the whole Fifth Sub-race, seven
such complete rounds.
------
* _Ancient India,_ by E. J. Rapson
------
What came before? What was the Fourth Sub-race? Well: I imagine
we may have the relic, the _sishta_ or seed of it, in the Hamitic
peoples and languages: the Libyans, Numidians, Egyptians,
Iberians, and Pelasgians of old; the Somalis, Gallas, Copts,
Berbers, and Abyssinians of today. We are almost able to discern
a time--but have not guessed when it was--when this Iberian race,
having perhaps its central seat in Egypt, held all or most lands
as far as Ireland to the west, and Japan and New Zealand
eastward; we find them surviving, mixed with, but by no means
submerged under, Aryan Celts in Spain--which is Iberia; we find
their name (I imagine) in that of Iverne, Ierine, Hibernia, or
Ireland; we know that they gave the syntax of their language to
that of the Celts of the British Isles; and that the Celtic races
of today are mainly Iberian in blood--I daresay all Europe is
about half Iberian in blood, as a matter of fact;--that the
Greeks found them in Greece: I suspect that the main difference
between Sparta and Athens lay in the fact that Sparta was pure
Aryan, Athens mainly Iberian.--It seems to me then that we can
almost get a glimpse of the sub-race preceding our own. Some have
been puzzled by a seeming discrepancy between Katherine Tingley's
statement that Egypt is older than India, and H. P. Blavatsky's,
that Menes, founder of the Egyptian monarchy, went from India to
Egypt to found it. But now suppose that something like this
happened--would it not solve the problem?--In 158,000 B. C., or
at the time this present Aryan Sub-race began, Egypt, one state
in the huge Iberian series, was already a seat of civilization as
old as the Iberian race. There may have been an Iberian Empire,
almost world-wide; which again may have split into many
kingdoms; and as the star of the whole race was declining, we
may suppose Egypt in some degree of pralaya; or again, that it
may have been an outlying and little-considered province _at that
time._ In Central Asia the Sanskrit-speaking tribe begins to
increase and multiply furiously. They pour down into Iberian
Hindustan. They are strong, and the Gods are leading them; the
Iberians have grown world-weary with the habit of long empire.
The Iberian power goes down before them; the Iberians become a
subject people. But there is one Menes among the latter, of the
royal house perhaps, who will not endure subjection. He stands
out as long as he may; then sails west with his followers for
Iberian lands that the Aryans have not disturbed, and are not
likely to. In their contests with the invaders of India, they
have thrown off all world-weariness, and become strong; Prince
Menes is hailed in Egypt (as the last of the Ommevads, driven out
from the East by the Abbasids, was hailed in Spain); he wakens
Egypt, and founds a new monarchy there.--I am telling the tale of
very ancient and unknown conditions in terms of historic
conditions we know about and can understand; it is only the
skeleton of the story I would stand for.
And to put Menes back at 160,000 years ago--what an amusing idea
that will seem!--But the truth is we must wage war against this
mischievous foreshortening of history. I have no doubt there have
been empires going, from time to time, in Egypt, since before
Atlantis fell; people have the empire-building instinct, and it
is an eminently convenient place for empire-building. I have no
doubt there have been dozens of different Meneses--that is,
founders of Egyptian monarchies,--with thousands of years
between each two. But I think probably the one that came from
India to do it, came about the time when the fifth sub-race rose
to supplant the fourth as that section of humanity in which
evolution was chiefly interested.
Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the
'white man's burden,' and all such nonsense as that. We might
learn a lesson here. Think: since that time, during how many
thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been
the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place
where all things were doing? All the Setis, the grand Rameseses
and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory
of Egypt. You never know rightly when to say that the life of a
sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period
cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only
mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.--
But now to India.
We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken:
it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it
is now--literary language preserved by the high castes. In the
days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars
grown out of it: Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.--We
have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of
Europe: the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance;
or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian
and the rest sprang. No matter; they remain in the ideal world,
and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall
return to them, take them up, and pass through them again. But
it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu
provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the
archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved.
The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of
the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation:
they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages
did not flow. By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have
really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as
we have not done with ours. As if that which is to be preserved
forever, must be preserved in secret; and silence were the only
durable casket for truth.
The Greeks, they say, were very gifted liars; but I do not
see why we should suppose them lying, when they sang the
superiorities of Indian things and people;--_as they did._ The
Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of
greater distinction and prouder bearing. The air and water of
their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in
the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts. Almost
always they gathered two harvests in the years; and _famine had
never visited India._--You see, railways, quick communications,
and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do
as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization
could do for her in manvantara.--Then he goes on to show how that
civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and
incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but
much higher than our own. I said Manu provided in advance
against the main destructiveness of war: here was the custom,
which may have been dishonored in the breach sometimes, but still
_was the custom._--The whole continent was divided into any
number of kingdoms; mutually antagonistic often, but with
certain features of homogeneity that made the name Aryavarta more
than a geographical expression. I am speaking of the India
Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long.
It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I
think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing
war. It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or
world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so:
which means were military. As this was a well-recognised
principle, wars were by no means rare. But with them all, what a
Utopia it was, compared to Christendom! There was never a draft
or conscription. Of the four castes, the Kshatriya or warrior
alone did the fighting. While the conches brayed, and the war-
cars thundered over Kurukshetra; while the pantheons held their
breath, watching Arjun and mightiest Karna at battle--the
peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew
no one was making war on them. They trusted Gandiva, the goodly
bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and
sacred to the tilling of the soil. Megasthenes notes it with
wonder. War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction
of crops, no battering down of buildings, no harm whatever
to non-combatants.
Kshatriya fought Kshatriya. If you were a Brahmin: which is to
say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or
what not of the kind--you were not even called up for physical
examination. If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with
your 'business as usual.' A mere patch of garden, or a peddler's
tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire.
Kshatriya fought Kshatriya, and no one else; and on the
battlefield, and nowhere else. The victor became possessed of
the territory of the vanquished; and there was no more fuss or
botheration about it.
And the vanquished king was not dispossessed, Saint Helenaed, or
beheaded. Simply, he acknowledged his conqueror as his overlord,
paid him tribute; perhaps put his own Kshatriya army at his
disposal; and went on reigning as before. So Porus met Alexander
without the least sense of fear, distrust, or humiliation at his
defeat. "How shall I treat you?" said the Macedonian. Porus
was surprised.--"I suppose," said he in effect, "as one king
would treat another"; or, "like a gentleman." And Alexander rose
to it; in the atmosphere of a civilization higher than anything
he knew, he had the grace to conform to usage. Manu imposed his
will on him. Porus acknowledged him for overlord, and received
accretions of territory.--This explains why all the changes of
dynasty, and the many conquests and invasions have made so little
difference as hardly to be worth recording. They effected no
change in the life of the people. Even the British Raj has been,
to a great degree, molded to the will of Manu. Each strong
native state is ruled by its own Maharaja, who acknowledges the
Kaiser-i-Hind at London for his overlord, and lends him at need
his Moslem or Kshatriya army.--All of which proves, I think, the
extreme antiquity of the svstem: which is so firmly engraved in
the prototypal world--the astral molds are so strong--that no
outside force coming in has been able materially to change it.
The Greek invasion goes wholy unnoticed in Indian literature.
Which brings us back to Alexander. If he got as far as to the
Indus;--he got no farther. There were kingdoms up there in
the northwest--perhaps no further east than Afghanistan and
Baluchistan--which had formed part of the empire of Darius
Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece;
and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus's successor.
But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very
different from those in Persia: there was no "unquestionable
superiority of the European to the Asiatic," nor nothing like.
Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges
valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down
synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to
witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the
Asiatic to the European." But thither the Macedonians refused to
follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their
insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of
terrene limits. For he knew well that there was plenty more world
to conquer, could one conquer it: rich and mighty kingdoms
beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to
cross. He knew, because there were many to tell him: exiled
princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his
plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a
catspaw. Among them one in particular: as masterful a man as
Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself. He was
(probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the House of
Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called
Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors
for some centuries. King Suddhodana, the Buddha's father, had
reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king
of Magadha; which statement I let pass, well aware that the
latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a
republic--perhaps with soviets,--and King Suddhodana himself into
a mere ward politician.
This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to
tell of the wealth of his kinsman's kingdom, and of the extreme
unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which
Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him. But two of a
trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule
empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to
flee the camp. Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless
reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and
the enterprise with a stomach in't was, as soon as Alexander's
back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons. This
done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered
Magadha, slew his old enemy the Nanda king with all male members
of the family, and reigned in his stead as Chandragupta I, of
the house of Maurya. That was in 321. Master then of a highly
trained army of about 700,000, he spread his empire over all
Hindustan. In 305, Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in
Asia, crossed the Indus with an army, and was defeated; and in
the treaty which followed, gave up to Chandragupta all claim to
the Indian provinces, together with the hand of his daughter in
marriage.--and received by way of compensation 500 elephants
that might come in useful in his wars elsewhere. Also he sent
Megisthenes to be his ambassador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta's
capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from
his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian,--we get a kind of
window wherethrough to look into India: the first, and perhaps
the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering.
Here let me flash a green lantern. If at some future time it
should be shown that the Chandragupta Maurya of the Sanskrit
books was not the same person as the Sandacottos of Megasthenes;
nor his son Bindusara Amitraghata, the Amitrochidas of the
Greeks; nor his son and successor, Asoka, the Devanampiya
Piadasi whose rock-cut inscriptions remain scattered over
India; nor the Amtiyako Yonaraja--the "Ionian King Antiochus"
apparently,--Atiochus Theos, Selecus Nicator's granson: as is
supposed; nor yet the other four kings mentioned in the same
instricption in a Sanskrit disguise as contemporaries, Ptolemy
Philadelphos of Egypt (285-247); Magas of Cyrene (285-258);
Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon (277-239), and Alexander of Epirus,
who began to reign in 272;--if all these identifications should
fall to the ground, let no one be surprised. There are passages
in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky that seem to suggest there is
nothing in them; and yet, after studying those passages, I do
not find that she says so positively: her attitude seems rather
one of withholding information for the time being; she supplies
none of a contrary sort. The time may not have been ripe then for
unveiling so much of Indian history; nor indeed, in those days,
had the pictures of these kings, and particularly of Asoka, so
clearly emerged: inscriptions have been deciphered since, which
have gone to fill out the outline; and the story, as it his been
pieced together now, has an air of verisimilitude, and hangs
together. Without the Greek identifications, and the consequent
possibility of assigning dates to Chandragupta and his son, we
should know indeed that there was a great Maurya empire, which
lasted a matter of thirteen decades and a few odd years; but we
should hardly know when to place it. Accepting the Greek
identifications, and placing the Mauryas where we do in time--you
shall see how beautifully the epoch fits into the universal
cycles, and confirms the teaching as to Cyclic Law. So,
provisionally, I shall accept them, and tell the tale.
First a few more items from Megasthenes as to India under
Chandragupta. There was no slavery, he notes; all Indians were
free, and not even were there aliens enslaved. Crime of any kind
was rare; the people were thoroughly law-abiding. Thievery was
so little known, that doors went unlocked at all times; there
was no usury, and a general absence of litigation. They told the
truth: as a Greek, he could not help noticing that. The men
were exceptionally brave; the women, chaste and virturous.
But "in contrast to the general simplicity of their style,
they loved finery and ornaments. Their robes were worked
in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wore flowered
garments of the finest muslin. Attendants walking behind
held umbrellas over them...."
The system of government was very highly and minutely evolved.
"Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the markets,
others of the city, others of the soldiers; others superintend
the canals, and measure the land, or collect the taxes; some
construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and
distances from place to place. Those who have charge of the city
are divided into six boards of five members apiece: The
first looks after industrial art. The second attends to the
entertainment of strangers, taking care of them, sound or sick,
and in the event of their death, burying them and sending their
property to their relatives." The third board registered births
and deaths; the fourth, fifth and sixth had supervision of things
commercial. Military affairs were as closely organized: there
were Boards of Infantry, Cavalry, War Chariots, Elephants, Navy,
and Bullock Transport. And behind all these stood Chandragupta
himself, the superman, ruthless and terrifically efficient; and
Chanakya, his Macchiavellian minister: a combination to hurry
the world into greatness. And so indeed they did.
Under Asoka, Chandragupta's grandson, the age culminated. H. P.
Blavatsky says positively that he was born into Buddhism; this
is not the general view; but one finds nothing in his edicts,
really, to contradict it. His father Bindusara, of whom we know
nothing, may have been a Buddhist. But it would appear that Asoka
in his youth was the most capable, and also the most violent and
passionate of Bindusara's sons. During his father's lifetime, he
held one of the great vice-royalties into which the empire was
divided; he succeeded to the throne in 271. His domains at that
time included all Aryavarta, with Baluchistan, and as much of
Afghanistan as lies south of the Hindoo Koosh; and how much of
the Deccan it is difficult to determine. Nine years later he
extended this realm still further, by the conquest of the
Kalingas, whose country lay along the coast northward from
Madras. At the end of that war he was master of all India north
of a line drawn from Pondicherry to Cannanore in the south;
while the tip of the Deccan and Ceylon lay at least within his
sphere of influence.
He was easily the strongest monarch of his day. In China--between
which country and India there was no communication: they had not
discovered each other, or they had lost sight of each other for
ages--an old order was breaking to pieces, and all was weakness
and decay. In the West, Greek civilization was in decadence, with
the successors of Alexander engaged in profitless squabbles.
Rome, a power only in Italy, was about to begin her long struggle
with Carthage; overseas nobody minded her. The Crest-Wave was in
India, the strongest power and most vigorous civilization, so far
as we can tell, in the world, and at the head of India stood this
Chakravartin, victorious Asoka, flushed with conquest, and a
whole world tempting him out to conquer.--
He never went to war again. For twenty-nine years after that
conquest of the Kalingas, until his death in 233, he reigned in
unbroken peace. He left his heart to posterity in many edicts and
inscriptions cut on rocks and pillars; thirty-five of these
remain, or have so far been discovered and read. In 257, or five
years after the Kalinga War, he published this:
"Devanamipiya Piadasi"--
It means literally 'the Beloved of the Gods, the Beautiful of
Countenance'; but it is really a title equivalent to "His
Gracious Majesty,' and was borne by all the Maurya kings;--
"Devanampiya Piadasi feels remorse on account of the conquest of
the Kalingas; because, during the subjugation of a preciously
unconquered country slaughter, death, and taking away captives of
the people necessarily occur; whereat His Majesty feels profound
sorrow and regret..."
It would be in keeping with the Southern Buddhist tradition as to
the ungovernable violence of Asoka's youth, that he should have
introduced into war horrors quite contrary to Manu and Indian
custom; but here I must say that H. P. Blavatsky, though she
does not particularize, says that there were really two Asokas,
two 'Devanampiya Piadasis,' the first of whom was Chandragupta
himself, from whose life the tradition of the youthful violence
may have been drawn; and there remains the possibility that this
Kalinga War was waged by Chandragupta, not Asoka; and that it
was he who made this edict, felt the remorse, and became a
Buddhist. However, to continue (tentatively):--
"The loss of even the hundredth or the thousandth part of the
persons who were then slain, carried away captive, or done to
death in Kalinga would now be a matter of deep regret to His
Majesty. Although a man should do him any injury, Devanampiya
Piadasi holds that it must patiently be borne, so far as it
possibly can be borne... for His Majesty desires for all animate
beings security, control over the passions, peace of mind, and
joyousness. And this is the chief of conquests, in His Majesty's
opinion: the Conquest of Duty."
Some time later he took the vows of a Buddhist monk, 'entered the
Path'; and, as he says, 'exerted himself strenuously.'
He has been called the 'Constantine of Buddhism'; there is much
talk among the western learned, about his support of that
movement having contributed to its decay. They draw analogy from
Constantine; even hint that Asoka embraced Buddhism, as the
latter did Christianity, from political motives. But the analogy
is thoroughlv false. Constantine was a bad man, a very far-gone
case; and there was little in the faith he adopted, or favored,
as it had come to be at that time, to make him better;--even if
he had really believed in it. And it was a defined religio-
political body, highly antagonistic to the old state religion of
Rome, that he linked his fortunes with. But no sovereign so
mighty in compassion is recorded in history as having reigned, as
this Asoka. He was the most unsectarian of men. Buddhism as it
came to him, and as he left it, was not a sect, but a living
spiritual movement. For what is a sect?--Something _cut off_--
from the rest of humanity, and the sources of inner life. But for
Asoka, as for the modern Theosophical Movement, there was no
religion higher than--_Dharma_--which word may be translated,
'the (higher) Law,' or 'truth.' or 'duty.' He never ceased to
protect the holy men of Brahminism. Edict after edict exhorts his
people to honor them. He preached the Good Law; he could not
insist too often that different men would have different
conceptions as to this _Dharma._ Each, then, must follow his own
conception, and utterly respect his neighbors'. The Good Law,
the Doctrine of the Buddhas, was universal; because the
objective of all religions was the conquest of the passions and
of self. All religions must manifest on this plane as right
action and life; and that was the evangel he proclaimed to the
world. There was no such sharp antagonism of sects and creeds.
There is speculation as to how he managed, being a world-sovereign
--and a highly efficient one--to carry out the vows of a
Buddhist monk. As if the begging bowl would have been anything
of consequence to such an one! It is a matter of the status of
the soul; not of outward paraphernalia. He was a practical man;
intensely so; and he showed that a Chakravartin could tread the
Path of the Buddhas as well as a wandering monk. One can imagine
no Tolstoyan playing at peasant in him. His business in life was
momentous. "I am never satisfied with my exertions and my
dispatch of business," he says.
"Work I must for the public benefit,--and the root of the matter
is in exertion and dispatch of business, than which nothing is
more efficacious for the public welfare. And for what end do I
toil? For no other end than that I may discharge my debt to
animate beings."
And again:
"Devanampiya Piadasi desires that in all places men of all
religions may abide, for they all desire purity of mind and
mastery over the senses."
Well; for nine and twenty years he held that vast empire warless;
even though it included within its boundaries many restless and
savage tribes. Certainly only the greatest, strongest, and wisest
of rulers could do that; it has not been done since (though
Akbar came near it). We know nothing as to how literature may
have been enriched; some think that the great epics may have
come from this time. If so, it would only have been recensions of
them, I imagine. But in art and architecture his reign was
everything. He built splendid cities, and strewed the land with
wonderful buildings and monoliths. Patna, the capital, in
Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and
built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately
sculptured. Education was very widespread or universal. His
edicts are sermons preached to the masses: simple ethical
teachings touching on all points necessary to right living.
He had them carved on rock, and set them up by the roadsides
and in all much-frequented places, where the masses could
read them; and this proves that the masses could read. They
are all vibrant with his tender care, not alone for his human
subjects, but for all sentient beings. "Work I must.... that
I may discharge my debt to all things animate." And how he
did work without one private moment in the day or night, as his
decrees show, in which he should be undisturbed by the calls of
those who needed help. He specifies; he particularizes; there
was no moment to be considered private, or his personal own.
And even then he was not content. There were foreign lands; and
those, too, were entitled to his care. I said that the southern
tip of India, with Ceylon, were within his sphere of influence:
his sphere of influence was much wider than that, however. Saying
that a king's sphere of influence is wherever he can get his will
done, Asoka's extended westward over the whole Greek world. Here
was a king whose will was benevolence; who sought no rights but
the right to do good; whose politics were the service of
mankind:--it is a sign of the Brotherhood of Man, that his writ
ran, as you may say--the writ of his great compassion,--to the
Mediterranean shore:--
"Everywhere in the dominions of Devanampiya Piadasi, and likewise
in the neighboring realms, such as those of the Chola, Pandya,
Satiyaputra and Keralaputra, in Ceylon, in the dominions of the
Greek king Antiochus, and in those of the other kings subordinate
to that Antiochus--everywhere, on behalf of His Majesty, have two
kinds of hospitals been founded: hospitals for men, and
hospitals for beasts. Healing herbs, medicinal for man and
medicinal for beasts, wherever they were lacking, have been
imported and planted. On the roads, trees have been planted, and
wells have been dug for the use of men and beasts."
And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his
missionaries preaching the Good Law. And some of these came to
Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called
the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to
teach the Good Law--by name, Jesus of Nazareth.--Now consider the
prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his
agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in
Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free,
and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched
out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests
should be the conquests of duty. Devanampiya Piadasi: the
Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the Gods: an Adept King like
them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of
history.