Han Chaoti died in 63 B.C.; his successor is described as a
"boor of low tastes";--from that time the great Han impetus goes
slowing down and quieting. China was recuperating after Han
Wuti's flare of splendor; we may leave her to recuperate, and
look meanwhile elsewhere.
And first to that most tantalizing of human regions, India;
where you would expect something just now from the cyclic
backwash. As soon as you touch this country, in the domain of
history and chronology, you are certain, as they say, to get
'hoodooed.' Kali-Yuga began there in 3102 B.C., and ever since
that unfortunate event, not a single soul in the country seems to
have had an idea of keeping track of the calendar. So-and-so,
you read, reigned. When?--Oh, in 1000 A.D. Or in 213 A.D. Or
in 78 A.D. Or in a few million B.C., or 2100 A.D. Or he did
not reign at all. After all, what does it matter?--this is
Kali-Yuga, and nothing can go right.--You fix your eyes on a
certain spot in time, which, according to your guesses at
the cycles, should be important. Nothing doing there, as
we say. Oh no, nothing at all: this is Kali-Yuga, and what
should be doing? .... Well, if you press the point, no doubt
somebody was reigning, somewhere.--But, pardon my insistence,
if seems--. Quite so, quite so! as I said, somebody must
have been reigning.--You scrutinze; you bring your lenses
to bear; and the somebody begins to emerge. And proves
to be, say, the great Samundragupta, emperor of all India
(nearly); for power and splendor, almost to be mentioned
with Asoka. And it was the Golden Age of Music, and perhaps
some other things.--Yes, certainly; the Guptas were reigning
then, I forgot. But why bother about it? This is Kali-Yuga,
and what does anything matter?--And you come away with the
impression that your non-informant could reveal enough and
plenty, if he had a mind to.
Which is, indeed, probably the case. All this nonchalant
indefiniteness means nothing more, one suspects, than that the
Brahmans have elected to keep the history of their country
unknown to us poor Mlechhas. Then there are Others, too: the
Guardians of Esotericism in a greater sense; who have not chosen
so far that Indian history should be known. So we can only take
dim foreshadowings, and make guesses.
We saw the Maurya dynasty,--that one seemingly firm patch to set
your feet on in the whole morass of the Indian past,--occupy the
thirteen decades from 320 to 190 B.C., (or we thought we did);
now the question is, from that _pied-a-terre_ whither shall we
jump? If you could be sure that the ebb of the wave would be
equal in length to its inrush,--the night to the day:--that the
minor pralaya would be no longer or shorter than the little
manvantara that preceded it--why, then you might leap out
securely for 60 B.C., with a comfortable feeling that there would
be some kind of turning-point in Indian history there or
thereabouts. Sometimes things do happen so, beautifully, as if
arranged by the clock. But unfortunately, enough mischief may be
done in thirteen decades to take a much longer period to
disentangle; and again, it is only when you strike an average
for the whole year, that you can say the nights are equal to the
days. We are trying to see through to the pattern of history;
not to dogmatize on such details as we may find, nor claim on the
petty strength of them to be certain of the whole. So, our
present leap (for we shall make it), while not quite in the dark,
must be made in the dusk of an hour or so after sunset. There
must be an element of faith in it: very likely we shall splash
and sink gruesomely.
Well, here goes then! From 190 B.C. thirteen decades forward to
60 B.C., and,--squish! But, courage! throw out your arm and
clutch--at this trailing root, _57 B. C.,_ here within easy
reach; and haul yourself out. So; and see, now you are
standing on something. What it is, _Dios lo sabe!_ But there is
an Indian era that begins in 57 B.C.; for a long time, dates
were counted from that year. That era rises in undefined
legendary splendor, and peters out ineffectually you don't just
know where. There is nothing to go upon but legends, with never
a coin nor monument found to back them;--never mind; dates you
count eras from are generally those in which important cycles
begin. The legends relate to Vikramaditya king of Ujjain,--which
kingdom is towards the western side of the peninsula, and about
where Hindoostan and the Deccan join. He is the Arthur-Charlemain
of India, the Golden Monarch of Romance. In the lakes of his
palace gardens the very swans sang his praises daily--
"Glory be to Vikramajeet
Who always gives us pearls to eat";
and when he died, the four pillars that supported his throne rose
up, and wandered away through the fields and jungle disconsolate:
they would not support the dignity of any lesser man.* Such
tales are told about him by every Indian mother to her children
at this present day, and have been, presumably, any time these
last two thousand years.
------
* _India through the Ages,_ by Mrs. Flora Annie Steel.
------
Of his real existence Historical Research cannot satisfy itself
at all;--or it half guesses it may have discovered his probable
original wandering in disguise through the centuries of a
thousand years or so later. But you must expect that sort of
thing in India.
At his court, says tradition, lived the "Nine Gems of Literature,"
--chief among them the poet-dramatist Kalidasa; whom Historical
Research (western) rather infers lived at several widely
separated epochs much nearer our own day. Well; for the
time being let us leave Historical Research (western) to stew in
its own (largely poisonous) juices, and see how it likes it,--and
say that there are good cyclic chances of something large here,
in the half-cycle between the Ages of Han Wuti and Augustus.
We may note that things Indian must be dealt with differently
from things elsewhere. You take, for example, the old story
about the Moslem conquerors of Egypt burning the Alexandrian
Library. The fact that this is mentioned for the first time by a
Christian who lived six hundred years after the supposed event,
while we have many histories written during those six hundred
years which say nothing about it at all,--is evidence amounting
to proof that it never happened; especially when you take into
account the known fact that the Alexandrian Library had already
been thoroughly burnt several times. But you can derive no such
negativing certainty, in India, from the fact that Vikramaditya
and Ujjain and Kalidasa may never have been mentioned together,
not associated with the era of 57 B.C., in any extant writing
known to the west that comes from before several centuries later.
Because the Brahman were a close corporation that kept the
records of history, and kept them secret; and gave out bits
when it suited them. Say that in 1400 (or whenever else it
may have been) they first allowed it to be published that
Kalidasa flourished at Vikrmaditya's court:--they may have been
consciously lying, but at least they were talking about what
they knew. They were not guessing, or using their head-gear
wrongfully, their lying was intentional, or their truth warranted
by knowledge. And no motive for lying is apparent here.--It
would be very satisfactory, of course, were a coin discovered
with King Vikrmaditya's image and superscription nicely engraved
thereon: _Vikramaditya De Gratia: Uj. Imp.; Fid. Def.; 57 B.C._
But in this wicked world you cannot have everything; you must be
thankful for what you can get.
You may remember that Han Wuti, to solve the Hun problem, sent
Chang Ch'ien out through the desert to discover the Yueh Chi'
and that Chang found them at last in Bactria, which they had
conquered from Greeks who had held it since Alexander's time. He
found them settled and with some fair degree of civilization;
spoke of Bactria under their sway as a "land of a thousand
cities";--they had learned much since they were nomads driven out
of Kansuh by the Huns. Also they were in the midst of a career
of expansion. Within thirty years of his visit to them, or by
100 B.C., they had spread their empire over eastern Persia, at
the expense of the Parthians; and thence went down into India
conquering. By 60 B.C. they held the Punjab and generally the
western parts of Hindoostan; then, since they do not seem to
have got down into the Deccan, I take it they were held up. By
whom?--Truly this is pure speculation. But the state of Malwa,
of which Ujjain was the capital, lay right in their southward
path; if held up they were, it would have been, probably, by
some king of Ujjain. Was this what happened?--that the peril of
these northern invaders roused Malwa to exert its fullest
strength; the military effort spurring up national feeling; the
national feeling, creative energies spiritual, mental and
imaginative;--until a great age in Ujjain had come into being.
It is what we often see. The menace of Spain roused England to
Elizabethanism; the Persian peril awakend Athens. So King
Vikramaditya leads out his armies, and to victory; and the Nine
Gems of Literature sing at his court. It is a backwash from Han
Wuti's China, that goes west with Chang Ch'ien to the Yueh Chi,
and south with them into India. And we can look for no apex of
literary creation at this time, either in China or Europe. In
the Roman literature of that cycle it is the keen creative note
we miss: Virgil, the nearest to it, cannot be said to have
possessed quite; and Han literature was probably its first
culmination under Han Wuti, and its second under the Eastern
Hans. One suspects that great creation is generally going on
somewhere, and is not displeased to find hints of its presence in
India; is inclined to think this may have been, after all,
the Golden Age of the Sanskrit Drama.--At which there can be
at any rate no harm in taking a glance at this point; and,
retrospectively, at Sanskrit literature as a whole;--a desperately
inadequate glance, be it said.
I ask you here to remember the three periods of English Poetry,
with their characteristics; and you must not mind my using my
Welsh god-names in connexion with them. First, then, there was
the Period of Plenydd,--of the beginnings of _Vision;_ when the
eyes of Chaucer and his lyricist predecessors were opened to the
world out-of-doors; when they began to see that the skies were
blue, fields and forests green; that there were flowers in
the meadows and woodlands; and that all these things were
delectable. Then there was the Period of Gwron, Strength; when
Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton evolved the Grand Manner;
when they made the great March-Music, unknown in English before,
and hardly achieved by anyone since:--the era of the great
Warrior-poetry of the Tragedies and of _Paradise Lost._ Then
came, with Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the Age of Alawn,
lasting on until today; when the music of intonation brought
with it romance and mystery and Natural Magic with its rich glow
and wizard insight. And you will remember how English Poetry, on
the uptrend of a major cycle, is a reaching from the material
towards the spiritual, a growth toward that. Though Milton and
Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,--by virtue of a cosmic
force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,--you
cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such
clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in
Swinburne's _Songs before Sunrise;_ nor was the brain-mind of
either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such
conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's. There was an evolution
upward and inward; from Chaucer's school-boy vision, to
Swinburne's (in that one book) clear sight of the Soul.
We appear to find in Sanskrit literature,--I speak in a very
general sense,--also such great main epochs or cycles. First a
reign of Plenydd, of Vision,--in the Age of the Sacred Books.
Then a reign of Gwron,--in the Age of the heroic Epics. Then a
reign of Alawn, in the Age of the Drama.
But the direction is all opposite. The cycle is not upward, from
the sough of a beastly Iron Age towards the luminance of a coming
Golden; but downward from the peaks and splendors of the Age of
Gold to where the outlook is on to this latter hell's-gulf
of years. Plenydd, when he first touched English eyes, he
was Plenydd the Lord of Spiritual vision, the Seer into the
Eternities. Wordsworth at his highest only approaches,--
Swinburne in _Hertha_ halts at the portals of, the Upanishads.
Now, what may this indicate? To my mind, this: that you are not
to take these Sanskrit Sacred Books as the fruitage of a single
literary age. They do not correspond with, say, the Elizabethan,
or the Nineteenth-Century, poetry of England; but are rather the
cream of the output of a whole period as long (at least) as that
of all English literature; the blossoming of a Racial Mind
during (at least) a manvantara of fifteen hundred years. I do
not doubt that the age that gave birth to the _Katha-Upanishad,_
gave birth to all manner of other things also; flippancies and
trivialities among the rest;--just as in the same England, and in
the same years, Milton was dictating _Samson Agonistes,_ and
Butler was writing the stinging scurrilities of _Hudibras._ But
the Sanskrit Hudibrases are lost; as the English one will be,
even if it takes millenniums to lose it. Full-flowing time has
washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left
standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The
Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide _Paradise Lost;_ it made
the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron;
the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the
latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference:
all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,--Dante and
Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away
the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the
rock-built palaces of the Soul; and these,--not complete,
perhaps;--repaired to a degree by hands more foolish;--a little
ruinous in places,--but the ruins grander and brighter than all
the pomps, all the new-fangled castles of genii, of later times,
--come down to us as the Sacred Books of India, the oldest extant
literature in the world. How old? We may put their epoch well
before the death of Krishna in 3102 B. C.,--well before the
opening of the Kali-Yuga; we may say that it lasted a very long
time;--and be content that if all scholarship, all western and
modern opinion, laughs at us now,--the laugh will probably be
with us when we have been dead a long time. Or perhaps sooner.
They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-classical literature,
wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great
manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation. These
three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas,
and the Upanishads. The Vedas consist of hymns to the Gods;
and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the Gods
a sufficient expression of religion. Where, say, Reincarnation
was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one
doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it:
--you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up
in the morning--or not as a rule. You make poems upon a reaction
of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,--
and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful and
Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire,
the Winds and Waters. Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in
them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of
Eternal Beauty. It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as
some folk do, a 'primitive' state of society; we have not the
keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people
among whom those hymns arose. Poetry in every succeeding age has
had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her
native spheres: were all spiritual truth granted, she would need
do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the
wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would
flood into the minds of her hearers. But now she must labor
difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory
by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce. So the
Vedas tell us little unless we separate ourselves from our
preconceptions about 'primitive Aryans'; whose civilization may
have been at once highly evolved and very spiritual.
The _Brahmanas_ are priest-books; the _Upanishads,_ it is
reasonable to say are Kshattriya-books;--you often find in them
Brahmans coming to Kshattriyas to learn the Inner Wisdom. The
_Brahmanas_ are books of ritual; the _Upanishads_ came much
later that the _Brahmanas:_ that they represent a reaction
towards spirituality from the tyranny of a priestly caste. But
probably the day of the Kshattriyas was much earlier than that of
the priests. The Marlow-Shakespear-Milton time was the
Kshattriya period in English poetry; also the period during
which the greatest souls incarnated, and produced the greatest
work. So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-classical
Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the
first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian,
simple and pure,--a time in which the Mysteries really ruled
human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the
wonder and freeddom of their being. Think, perhaps, as the cycle
mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour
forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving: mighty egos
incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the
_Upanishads:_ there may have been a descent towards matter, to
call forth these more explicit declarations of the Spirit. The
exclusive caste-system had not been evolved by any means, nor was
to be for many ages: the kings are at the head of things; and
they, not the priests, the chief custodians of the Deeper
Wisdom.--And then, later, the Priest-cast made its contribution,
evolving in the _Brahmanas_ the ritual of their order; with an
implication, ever growing after the beginning of the Kali-Yuga,
that only by this ritual salvation could be attained. Not that
it follows that this was the idea at first. Ritual has its
place: hymns and chantings, so they be the right ones, performed
rightly, have their decided magical value; we can understand
that in its inception and first purity, this Brahmana literature
may have been a growth or birth, under the aegis of Alawn of the
Harmonies, of the magic of chanted song.
And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that
to attribute these three branches of literature to a single
manvantara is a woeful foreshortening. I suppose the Rig-Veda
is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our
calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.
The _Upanishads_ affect us like poetry; even in Max Muller's
translation, which is poor prose, they do not lose altogether
their uplift and quality of song. They sing the philosophy of
the divine in Man; I suppose we may easily say they are the
highest thing in extant literature. They do not come to us whole
or untainted. We may remember what the Swami Dayanand Sarasvati
said to H. P. Blavatsky: that he could show the excellent "Moksh
Mooller" that "what crossed the Kalapani from India to Europe
were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our
sacred books." Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part
of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching;
the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the
truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books. Also
the Buddha was a Kshattriya; so the ancient eminence of the
Kshattriyas had to be obscured a little;--it was the Brahmans, by
that time, who were monopolizing the teaching office. And no
doubt in the same way from time to time much has been added:
the Brahmans could do this, being custodians of the sacred
literature. Yet in spite of all we get in them a lark's song,--
but a spiritual lark's song, floating and running in the golden
glories of the Spiritual Sun; a song whose verve carries us
openly up into the realms of pure spirit; a wonderful radiance
and sweetness of dawn, of dawn in its fresh purity, its
holiness,--haunted with no levity or boisterousness of youth, but
with a wisdom gay and ancient,--eternal, laughter-laden,
triumphant,--at once hoary and young,--like the sparkle of snows
on Himalaya, like the amber glow in the eastern sky. Here almost
alone in literature we get long draughts of the Golden Age: not
a Golden Age fought for and brought down into our perceptions
(which all true poetry gives us), but one actually existing, open
and free;--and not merely the color and atmosphere of it, but the
wisdom. One need not wonder that Madame Blavatsky drew so freely
on India for the nexus of her teachings. That country has
performed a marvelous function, taking all its ages together, in
the life of humanity; in preserving for us the poetry and wisdom
of an age before the Mysteries had declined; in keeping open for
us, in a semi-accessible literature, a kind of window into the
Golden Age.--Well; each of the races has some function to
fulfil. And it is not modern India that has done this; she has
not done it of her own good will,--has had no good will to do it.
It is the Akbars the Anquetil Duperrons and Sir William Joneses,
--and above all, and far above all, H. P. Blavatsky,--whom we
have to thank.
So much, then, for the age of the Vedic literature. It passed,
and we come to an age when that literature had become sacred. It
seems to me that in the natural course of things it would take a
very long time for this to happen. You may say that in the one
analogy we have whose history is well known,--the _Koran,_--we
have an example of a book sacred as soon as written. But I do
not believe the analogy would hold good here. The _Koran_ came
as the rallying-standard of a movement which was designed to work
quick changes in the outer fabric of the world; it came when the
cycles had sunk below any possibility of floating spiritual
wisdom on to the world-currents;--and there were the precedents
of Judaism and Christianity, ever before the eyes of Mohammed,
for making the new religious movement center about a Book. But
in ancient India, I take it, you had some such state of affairs
as this: classes there would be, according to the natural
differences of egos incarnating; but no castes; religion there
was,--that is to say, an attention to, an aspiration towards, the
spiritual side of life; but no religions,--no snarling sects and
jangling foolish creeds. Those things (a God's mercy!) had not
been invented then, nor were to be for thousands of years. The
foremost souls, the most spiritual, gravitated upward to the
headship of tribes and nations; they were the _kings,_ as was
proper they should be: King-Initiates, Teachers as well as
Rulers of the people. And they ordained public ceremonies in
which the people, coming together, could invoke and participate
in the Life from Above. So we read in the Upanishads of those
great Kshattriya Teachers to whom Brahmans came as disciples.
Poets made their verses; and what of these were good, really
inspired, suitable--what came from the souls of Poet-Initiates,--
would be used at such ceremonies: sung by the assembled
multitudes; and presently, by men specially trained to sing
them. So a class rose with this special function; and there
were other functions in connexion with these ceremonies, not
proper to be performed by the kings, and which needed a special
training to carry out. Here, then, was an opening in life for
men of the right temperament;--so a class arose, of _priests:_
among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the
Adept-Kings. They had the business of taking care of the
literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,--for convenience
we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,--at which they
performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal
parts. It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and
down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these
religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a
close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their
custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given
them;--how that literature would have come to be not merely
sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of
the Soul behind it really is;--but credited with an extra-human
sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are
gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration?
--To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may
answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their
churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's _The World is
too much with us,_ or Henley's _I am the Captain of my Soul._
And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can
imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely
from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration,
--but as revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or
tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he
founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the
spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance,
and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with
us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our
unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.
Well, the age of the Vedas passed, and pralayas came, and new
manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Classical
Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics. This too is a
Kshattriya age. Whether it represents a new ascendency of the
Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one: whether the
priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and
somewhat fallen from it again,--or whether their rise was still
in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings
from their lead,--who can say? But this much, perhaps, we may
venture without fear: the Kshattriyas of the Epic age were not
the same as those of the Upanishads. They were not Adept-Kings
and Teachers in the same way. By Epic age, I mean the age in
which the epics were written, not that of which they tell. And
neither the _Mahabharata_ nor the _Ramayana_ was composed in a
day; but in many centuries;--and it is quite likely that on them
too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work. Some parts of
them were no doubt written in the centuries after Christ; there
is room enough to allow for this, when you think that the one
contains between ninety and a hundred thousand, the other about
twenty-four thousand couplets;--the _Mahabharata_ being about
seven times, the _Ramayana_ about twice as long as the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_ combined. So the Age of the Epics must be
narrowed down again, to mean the age that gave birth to the
nuclei of them.
As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue
to be found. Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to
reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as
possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones. Mr.
Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems
in the late nineties, says of the _Mahabharata_ that the great
war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the
thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the
_Ramayana,_ that it tells the story of nations that flourished in
Northern India about a thousand years B. C.--Is believed by whom,
pray? It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in
India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the _Mahabharata,_
died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of
Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the _Ramayana,_ was the
seventh. Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most
untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circumstantial
evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very
warily;--it is always likely that half the circumstances remain
un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the
hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change
the whole complexion of the case. And this kind of criticism
leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down
what was built of old. So I think we must be content to wait for
real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it;
and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point;
--say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the
thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier;
and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere
between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,--somewhere between 2500
and 5000 years ago.
Why before Buddha?--Because they are still Kshattriya works;
written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when
the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;--and because
Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman
ascendency well established then,--a revolt that by Asoka's time
had quite overthrown the Brahman power. Why, then, should we not
ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's
reign itself, for example?--Well, it has been done; but probably
not wisely. Panini in his _Grammar_ cites the Mahabharata as an
authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is
disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C.
Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. _En passant,_
we may quote this from the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ as to
Panini's _Grammar:_ "For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic
facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the
vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled
in the literature of any language."--Panini, then, cites the
_Mahabharata;_ Panini lived certainly before Asoka's time; the
greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period
of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary
creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such
period;--and from all this I think we may argue without much fear
that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long
before the reign of Asoka. Besides, if it had been written
during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more
Buddhism in it than we do. There is some;--there are ideas that
would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth
of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem
written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been
structurally and innately, as the _Mahabharata_ is, martial.
There is this difference between the two epics,--I speak of the
nucleus-poems in each case;--the _Mahabharata_ seems much more a
natural growth, a national epic,--the work not of one man, but of
many poets celebrating through many centuries a tradition not
faded from the national memory;--but the _Ramayana_ is more a
structural unity; it bears the marks of coming from one creative
mind: even western criticism accepts Valmiki (whoever he may
have been) as its author. To him it is credited in Indian
tradition; which ascribes the authorship of the _Mahabharata_
to Vyasa, the reputed compiler of the _Vedas;_--and this last is
manifestly not to be taken literally; for it is certain that a
great age elapsed between the _Vedas_ and the Epics. So I think
that the _Mahabharata_ grew up in the centuries, many or few,
that followed the Great War,--or, say, during the second
millennium B.C.; that in that millennium, during some great
'day' of literary creation, it was redacted into a single poem;--
and that, the epic habit having thus been started, a single poet,
Valmiki, in some succeeding 'day,' was prompted to make another
epic, on the other great traditional saga-cycle, the story of
Rama. But since that time, and all down through the centuries,
both poems have been growing _ad lib._
This is an endeavor to take a bird's-eye view of the whole
subject; not to look at the evidence through a microscope, in
the modern critical way. It is very unorthodox, but I believe it
is the best way: the bird's eye sees most; the microscope sees
least; the former takes in whole landscapes in proportion;
the latter gets confused with details that seem, under that
exaggeration, too highly important,--but which might be negatived
altogether could you see the whole thing at once. A telescope
for that kind of seeing is not forthcoming; but the methods of
thought that H. P. Blavatsky taught us supply at least the first
indications of what it may be like: they give us the first
lenses. As our perceptions grow under their influence, doubtless
new revelations will be made; and we shall see more, and
further. All we can do now is to retire from the confusion
brought about by searching these far stars with a microscope; to
look less at the results of such searching, than at the old
traditions themselves, making out what we can of them through
what Theosophic lenses we have. We need not be misled by the
ridiculous idea that civilization is a new thing. It is only the
bias of the age; the next age will count it foolishness.--But to
return to our epics.--
First to the _Mahabharata._ It is, as it comes down to us,
not one poem, but a large literature. Mr. Dutt compares it,
both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of
Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy,
Blackstone's _Commentaries,_ Percy's Ballads, and the writings
of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,--all done into blank verse and
incorporated with _Paradise Lost._ You have a martial poem like
the _Iliad,_ full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and
blazonry of war;--and you find the _Bhagavad-Gita_ a chapter in
it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions
to it: Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with
new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house,
or hero. And it is hard to separate these accretions from the
original,--from the version, that is, that first appeared as an
epic poem. Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be
almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and
never missed. Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material;
which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any
consistent Soul-symbol. And yet its chief personages seem all
real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;--says Mr.
Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer.
Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the
wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;--as if they had been
actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the
age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from
the life. That might imply that poets began writing about them
not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of
their deeds was fresh. We are to understand, however,--all India
has so understood, always,--that the poem is a Soul-symbol,
standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this
symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it,
or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their
writings into an epic for the first time.
For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on
the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it
stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,--
the darkness. There are traces of this submerged diversity of
opinion. Just as in the _Iliad_ it is the Trojan Hector who is
the most sympathetic character, so in the _Mahabharata_ it is
often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies
unavoidably flow. We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly
depraved and villainous; but not seldom their actions belie the
assertion,--with a certain Kshattriya magnamity for which they
are given no credit. Krishna fights for the sons of Pandu; in
the _Bhagavad-Gita_ and elsewhere we see him as the incarnation
of Vishnu,--of the Deity, the Supreme Self. As such, he does
neither good nor evil; but ensures victory for his protegees.
Philosophically and symbolically, this is sound and true, no
doubt, but one wonders whether the poem (or poems) ran so
originally; whether there may not be passages written at first
by Kuravist poets; or a Brahminical superimposition of motive on
a poem once wholly Kshattriya, and interested only in showing
forth the noble and human warrior virtues of the Kshattriya
caste. I imagine that in that second millennium B. C., in the
early centuries of Kali-Yuga, you had a warrior class with their
bards, inspired with high Bushido feeling,--with chivalry and all
that is fine in patricianism--but no longer under the leadership
of Adept Princes;--the esoteric knowledge was now mainly in the
hands of the Priest-class. The Kshattriya bards made poems about
the Great War, which grew and coalesced into a national epic.
Then in the course of the centuries, as learning in its higher
branches became more and more a possession of the Brahmans,--and
since there was no feeling against adding to this epic whatever
material came handy,--Brahmin esotericists manipulated it with
great tact and finesse into a symbol of the warfare of the Soul.
There is the story of the death of the Kurava champion Bhishma.
The Pandavas had been victorious; and Duryodhana the Kurava king
appealed to Bhishma to save the situation. Bhishma loved the
Pandava princes like a father; and urged Duryodhana to end the
war by granting them their rights,--but in vain. So next day,
owing his allegiance to Duryodhana, he took the field; and
"As a lordly tusker tramples on a field of feeble reeds,
As a forest conflagration on the parched woodland feeds,
Bhishma rode upon the warriors in his mighty battle car.
God nor mortal chief could face him in the gory field of war." *
------
* The quotations are from Mr. Romesh Dutt's translation.
------
Thus victorious, he cried out to the vanquished that no appeal
for mercy would be unheard; that he fought not against the
defeated, the worn-out, the wounded, or "a woman born." Hearing
this, Krishna advised Arjuna that the chance to turn the tide had
come. The young Sikhandin had been born a woman, and changed
afterwards by the Gods into a man. Let Sikhandin fight in the
forefront of the battle, and the Pandavas would win, and Bhishma
be slain.--Arjuna, who loved Bhishma as dearly as Bhishma loved
him and his brothers, protested; but Krishna announced that
Bhishma was so doomed to die, and on the following day; a fate
decreed, and righteously to be brought about by the stratagem.
So it happened:
"Bhishma viewed the Pandav forces with a calm unmoving face;
Saw not Arjun's bow Gandiva, saw not Bhima's mighty mace;
Smiled to see the young Sikhandin rushing to the battle's
fore
Like the white foam on the billow when the mighty storm
winds roar;
Thought upon the word he plighted, and the oath that he had
sworn,
Dropt his arms before the warrior that was, but a woman
born;"
--and so, was slain.... and the chiefs of both armies gathered
round and mourned for him.--Now it seems to me that the poets who
viewed sympathetically the magnanimity of Bhishma, which meets
you on the plane of simple human action and character, would not
have viewed sympathetically, or perhaps conceived, the strategem
advised by Krishna,--which you have to meet, to find it acceptable,
on the planes of metaphysics and symbolism.
There is a quality in it you do not find in the _Illiad._ Greek
and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their
combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable
self-knowledge: each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of
hexameters, the weak points in his opponent's character. They
are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir
their enthusiasm highly;--but as to faults, neither takes thought
for his own; each concentrates on the other's; and a war of
words is the appetiser for the coming banquet of deeds. Before
fighting Hector, Achilles reviled him; and having killed him,
dragged his corpse shamefully round the walls of Troy. But
Bhishma, in his victorious career, has nothing worse to cry to
his enemies than--_Valiant are ye, noble princes!_ and if you
think of it on the unsymbolic plane, there is a certain nobility
in the Despondency of Arjuna in the _Bhagavad-Gita._