INDIA
II. _Brahmanism_
The period in which the songs were collected by the Aryans dwelling
in the Punjaub was succeeded by a period of wars and troubles, after
which the successful race is found to have spread further towards the
East, and to have settled on the Ganges and its tributaries. Along
with this change of position a great change has also taken place in
the spirit of the people, a change which is strikingly seen in their
religion. The priesthood has come to occupy the position of a
separate class to an extent not formerly the case, and all the
phenomena are apparent which are generally found associated with a
hierocracy or rule of priests. The early religious writings have been
formed into a sacred canon: there is an active production of new
works which explain the old ones; the sacrifices grow more elaborate
and new virtues are attributed to them; and along with this hardening
and formalising of the outward parts of religion there is a religious
speculation of great volume and of great freedom of character.
The Caste System: The Brahmans.--The key to the whole movement is to
be found in the new position of the priesthood, or in the
establishment at this period of the system of caste. Though this
system is only once mentioned in the Rigveda, and that in a hymn of
late date, scholars find traces of it in the arrangement of the
hymns, and as it is found in Persia, the Indians probably had it
before they entered India. It may even, it is judged, be traceable to
the division of ranks among the primitive Aryan families. Teutonic as
well as Indian legends are found explaining how mankind were divided
from the first into different classes.[1] But the primitive
differences of rank must have had a great development before they
took shape in the rigid caste system of India. This system appears to
be organised with a view expressly to the exaltation of the
priesthood, and must have been the result of a struggle between the
priests and the warrior or ruling classes. The priests have made
themselves indispensable in nearly all religious acts. Their very
title shows this. While _Brahman_, as the name of a god, means
primarily growth, and later, devotion or prayer, _brahmana_ (neut.)
signifies the ritual texts according to which worship is performed,
and _brahman_ (mas.) is the name of those who use such texts, and
comes to stand for the highest caste of Indian society. Without the
brahman there can be no satisfactory worship, because there can be no
security that any rite is performed correctly; and a rite which is
not performed correctly has no efficacy. Religion, therefore, is in
the hands of this caste, whose sacredness is hereditary, and cannot
be acquired in any other way than by birth. The members of that caste
and they alone are qualified to superintend religious observances,
and without them the intercourse between man and the gods cannot be
kept up. From his birth the brahman is a being of superior holiness;
he is destined for higher ends than other men, and the distinction
between him and them must be manifested in all his acts and habits
throughout his life. He is the natural lord of all the classes.
[Footnote 1: Compare Hans Sachs, _Die Ungleichen Kinder Eva's_.]
If the highest caste is strictly defined, so also are the others. The
second caste is that of the Kshatriyas, warriors or rulers, the third
that of the Vaisyas or farmers. These three have rank, they are the
twice-born classes (their second birth answers to confirmation, and
takes place when a young man is invested with the sacred thread). The
Sudras are the fourth and lowest class; no duty is assigned to them
in the law books but that of serving meekly the other castes. It has
been thought that the Sudras represent the conquered aborigines, the
three classes of rank belonging to the Aryan invaders, but this is
open to question.
The student of religion has to fix his attention on the Brahmans, who
have secured themselves in the position of the leading caste. We
speak first of the literary movement in which they were concerned,
then of the sacrifices they conducted, and of their gods. We shall
then say something of the practical operation of their religion as a
rule of life, and lastly we shall come to the speculative work of
their period, which is not, however, to be set down to them alone.
1. The Growth of the Sacred Literature.--The Vedas rose in sacredness
after the age which produced them passed away. A few centuries after
they were written they were not generally intelligible; they needed
interpretation, but at the same time the doctrine of their
inspiration rose higher and higher. The brahmans had both to
interpret the words of the old hymns and to explain how, when used at
the sacrifice, they produced the effect ascribed to them. This led to
the production of the earliest Indian prose, the brahmanas or ritual
treatises. Primarily intended to be directories of worship for the
priests, these works were enriched with all sorts of ideas about the
sacrifices, their origin, and their effects; points in the ritual are
explained in them by mythological stories which we should not
otherwise know, and we see from them that many superstitions, to
which the Vedas gave no encouragement, yet lived among the people.
Each Samhita, or collection of hymns, had its Brahmana, and some of
the collections had several. These works, though transcending in
dreariness most directories of worship, are yet of great value for
the light they throw on the history of Indian manners and ideas, as
well as on that of mythology. And as it happened among the Jews in
their later period so it happened here;--the sanctity of the text was
extended to the commentary, the brahmana also was held to be
god-given and inspired, and by some was even more highly esteemed
than the hymns themselves. A third class of inspired writings
consists of the Upanishads, or speculative treatises, of which we
shall speak later. The "Veda" in the larger sense is made up of these
three bodies of compositions, mantras, brahmanas, and upanishads.
These three belong to revelation or "S'ruti," _i.e._ hearing; what is
contained in these is to be regarded as having been heard by inspired
men from a higher source. The counterpart of S'ruti is "smriti,"
_i.e._ recollection, tradition. This embraces the Sutras or works
dealing with ceremonial in the way of short rules gathered from the
older literature, with the exposition of the Vedas, with domestic
rites and conventional usages. The law books, the epics, and the
Puranas, or ancient legendary histories, also belong to this class.
The doctrine of the Vedas, of their sacredness and of their virtues,
played a great part in Indian thought. They were revered not as a
written word, for they were not written but handed down by
memory,--the Brahman still knows his sacred literature by heart,--but
as hymns possessing supernatural powers and of far higher than human
origin. They were raised to the rank of a divinity, they were said to
have had to do with the creation of the world, or to have been among
the first created beings. The value of the study of them was not to
be exaggerated; he who engages in it, we hear, offers a complete
sacrifice, obtains for himself the world which does not pass away,
and becomes united with Brahma. The class of men who had installed
themselves as the authorised interpreters of the hymns, had evidently
taken up a very strong position.
2. Sacrifice.--Indian ritual is an immense subject. In the Vedic
period there were several orders of sacrifice--the hymns of the
Rigveda have to do with the Soma-sacrifice alone--and several kinds
of priests, and it stands to reason that an elaborate ritual derived
from a distant age and cherished by a priestly caste which was
growing in power, could not quickly change. In spite of the
considerable amount of materials accessible in the Brahmanas and
Sutras, a history of Indian sacrifice as a whole has still to be
written.
It is characteristic of early Indian sacrifice that it is not
confined to a temple or to any sacred spot, and that it does not
require any image of the deity. Instructions are always given for
choosing and preparing a place for the rite, and for erecting an
altar; a place had to be prepared on each occasion. The gods were
asked to come, or were thought to be seated in heaven looking on; the
sacrifice is in the open air. While the celebration proceeded
according to a certain ritual, it lay with the worshippers to fix to
what god or gods the sacrifice should be addressed. There was not one
ritual for Agni and another for Indra, but the same would serve for
either or for both. The sacrifices of which we hear in the Brahmanas
are domestic rites; they are offered by the heads of the household,
who invite ancestors also to be present. A Brahman is present to
direct those who sacrifice and the inferior priests who assist them,
and the benefits of the act extend to all the dependants of the
household. The time was determined by natural seasons or by household
events. Some sacrifices were greater than others, the more elaborate
ones requiring several days, months, or even years for their
celebration. Among the kinds of offerings which might be made we find
that of man enumerated; human sacrifice, however, if it had prevailed
in earlier times, had now grown obsolete.
The rise of the Brahmans into a caste changed the character of the
sacrifice by making its due celebration depend more on special
knowledge, and by increasing its elaborate mystery. Once the hymn was
recognised as an essential element of such an act, the person who
could interpret the hymn and explain its effects acquired great
importance. And when the explanation of all the various features of
the sacrifice was once begun, a wide door was opened to minute
ingenuity. It is astonishing to what trifles these priestly
directories descend, what explanations are brought from every part of
earth and heaven of the most trivial circumstances, and what
sacredness is found in the very blades of grass around the altar. Now
the effect of such a treatment of ritual is inevitably that the rite
itself, the outward mechanical performance, comes to be regarded as
important, and that the ethical and religious end which was
originally aimed at, is lost sight of. The priest and those he acts
for are so intent on the minutiae of their celebration that they
forget about the god it is intended for. And as they are quite
convinced that the sacrifice, if offered with perfect correctness and
with nothing left out, must produce its effect, the sacrifice itself
comes to appear as the agent of the desired blessing; the god grows
less but the sacrifice grows more. This process, which may be
observed wherever ritualism exists, was carried in the period of
Brahmanism to its utmost length. In this period the old gods lost the
strong hold they had before over the people's mind; men ceased to
look for their gods to the sky or to the tempest, and began to look
instead to the long ceremonies of the priest or to the hymn he
chanted at the altar, or to the austerities he practised. Gods of a
new type now make their appearance. As in the Vedic period we saw
that Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, had a place beside Indra and
Varuna, so now we see that the supreme deity is named Brahma. The
prayer connected with the sacrifice has given its name to the ruler
of the universe. Other names for the supreme are also found to be
making their way to general use, as the old historical and
mythological gods fall into the background, and an abstract divine
unity is sought after. Prajapati, lord of creatures, who is little
heard of in the hymns, is frequently invoked as the head of all the
gods, and a triad of gods is heard of, consisting of Agni, Vayu,
Surya, fire, the air, the sun, and summing up the divine energies.
The attributes of the gods are personified, and a set of pale
abstractions is thus added to the Pantheon; and spirits and goblins
not heard of in the hymns, though not therefore necessarily unknown
in the former period, make their appearance. These are, perhaps, the
gods of the aborigines, who thus revenge themselves, as the religion
of the invaders which at first suppressed them loses its earlier
vigour. The strong gods retire and weak gods, many and shadowy, and
bad as well as good, are worshipped. The Asuras were formerly the
gods generally, now they are evil beings with whom the good gods have
to contend.
3. Practical Life.--We possess very complete pictures of Indian life
and manners in the period of Brahmanism. Of the codes of ancient
sages by which Hindu society was supposed to be governed many are
extant to us; and in Mr. Max Mueller's _Sacred Books of the East_ the
English reader may make himself acquainted with several of these. The
most famous and the longest, is the laws of Manu, a mythical
progenitor of mankind. In the form in which we have it this work
dates probably from the second century A.D., but the body of the work
is much older. Originally a local collection of rules, it extended
its authority gradually over the entire Hindu population of India.
With other collections, also of local origin, it represents to us the
condition of Indian society after the caste system became fixed; but
much of the law thus handed down to us must have had its origin in
prehistoric times.
The law of Manu hinges on the superiority of the Brahman over the
other castes. The Brahmans form the centre of the state and really
control everything; but their life, in turn, is framed in strict
rules, and their whole history and actions are laid down for them to
the last detail from the moment of their birth. The life of the
Brahman is divided into four periods. For a quarter of his life he is
a student living with a teacher and learning from him the sacred
knowledge of the Vedas. Every act of study begins with the so-called
Savitri-verse, "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine
Vivifier. May he enlighten our understandings." This prayer, with the
mystic syllable, Om (thought to have to do with the three gods of a
triad, but probably the original meaning is Yes, an abstract
all-embracing yes, in which nothing but pure being is affirmed), is
repeated at every return to study, and also with great frequency at
other times. The teacher is more to the student than his father, and
is to be treated with the greatest deference and courtesy; these
years are a training in gentle and seemly conduct as well as in law.
His student days completed, the Brahman offers his first sacrifice,
marries, and becomes a householder. Little is said of earning a
living; the Brahman is not to be worldly, but he is to be independent
if he can. He is, however, allowed to beg if in want. But more stress
is laid on the continued pursuit of knowledge, and on the domestic
sacrifices to gods and manes which are to be his daily care. After he
has brought up a son to take charge of his house and goods, the third
stage of his life is reached; he may retire from the world and become
a recluse, giving himself to contemplation and austerities. The
fourth stage is that of the ascetic, _bhikku_ or _sannyasin_, the
aged man who having given up all possessions, all human society, and
the practice of all rites, and subsisting only on alms, seeks to
purge his heart of all desire and to become united by deep meditation
with the supreme soul, thus attaining union with Brahma and final
liberation. In this section of the laws of Manu an ideal of moral
perfection is set forth, which is not demanded at the earlier stages
of life.
"_Let him not desire to die; let him not desire to live; let him wait
for his time as a servant for the payment of his wages._
"_Let him patiently bear hard words, let him not insult any one, nor
become any one's enemy for the sake of this perishable body. Against
an angry man let him not in return show anger; let him bless when he
is cursed._"
He is to be sedulously careful not to injure any living creature, he
is to meditate on the supreme soul which is present in all organisms,
both the highest and the lowest. He is to give up all attachments,
and in this way, as his body decays, he enters even here into a state
of perfect freedom and repose and union with the great spirit.
Such ideas prove that the mind of Brahmanism was not occupied with
sacrifices alone. Manu speaks of the superintendence of sacrifices as
only one of several careers which the Brahman might choose; and if he
might with equal right devote himself to study or to self-discipline,
we see that another side of religion than that directing itself to
external gods or occupying itself with outward acts, was pressing
itself forward. The inner world of the mind is growing larger as the
outward gods grow shadowy; it is being found that salvation may be
reached by inwards efforts as well as by outward rites, that the
search for wisdom and the work of self-conquest, and a union with the
deity which is quite apart from any offering or from any form of
worship, also lead to salvation. It is objected to the ethics of Manu
that the ideal they set up is not an active but a suffering one; the
ascetic is placed on a higher platform than the householder, men are
encouraged to withdraw from the performance of their duties in the
family and in society, and to devote themselves to an aim which,
however lofty, is personal and, so far, selfish. It is certainly a
weakness in the religion that it has no higher aim than this to set
before its most eager minds. Apart from this, life is regulated in a
way we cannot but admire. Amid the mass of trivialities and
formalities in which every action is involved there breathes a grave
humane and gentle spirit, and a sound practical morality, and the
ordinary household of the Brahman may have been a scene of activity
and cheerfulness. The Sudra, however, is spoken of everywhere as a
being whose degradation can never be removed, and to touch whom is to
be defiled. Those who belonged to no caste were in a still worse
plight and lived in the greatest misery.
4. Philosophy.--We have seen how both in the ritual system they
administered and in the ideal they formed of the highest good, the
Brahmans were led forward from the old ground of the Vedic
nature-worship to a more inward and subjective religious attitude.
The exaltation of Brahma, the power of prayer, to be the supreme god,
was an advance from an external deity to a deity both external and
present in man's own experience; and the appearance of a new way of
salvation, though only permitted at first to the world-weary ascetic,
in which inner contemplation and absorption could lead to the highest
consummation of life, also showed that a new form of religion was at
hand. In the philosophy of the Brahmanic period, the transition is
made from the service of gods external to man, by the mechanism of
rites, to the acknowledgment of a divine being with whom man feels
himself to be inwardly akin and to whom he draws near by his own
spiritual effort. In this movement, to which we learn that members of
the lay aristocracy and even women of intellectual distinction made
important contributions, and which may have appeared in its
beginnings as a sceptical revolt against their own system, the
Brahmans yet took part, and the works in which the record of it is
contained became a part of revelation. The "Upanishads" or
"communicated doctrines," form the third branch of the sacred
knowledge, and much of this literature belongs to the period before
Buddhism. These books are read still by the educated Hindu as part of
scripture, and the philosophy of them is a part of his religion. We
can only point out the principal terms and notions of that
philosophy.
Seeking to escape from the confusion of many gods the Indian mind is
looking out even from the Vedic period for some means to conceive of
them all as one. In the earliest period each reigned in turn as the
supreme; a god is supreme not because he is essentially the greatest
of the gods, but because circumstances have brought him to the front.
This is Henotheism. Then we have attempts to sum them all up in one
expression. Prajapati, lord of creatures, Visvakarman, maker of all
things, represent such attempts. Then we have as the supreme, Brahma,
the power of prayer,[2] a being of a different character from all his
predecessors. Brahma is an intellectual deity. He is a thinker, a
knower, he is the "Mahan Atma" or great spirit, which sits in
unbroken calm above the change and distraction of the universe. In
rendering Mahan Atma by great spirit, however, we are anticipating.
Atma, originally breath or life, comes, afterwards, to mean the
person, the self when all that is accidental is removed from it, the
essential, innermost self. Now Brahma is the great self, the inmost
essence of all things, which was before them, and is unaffected by
their changes. But man also has an atma, a self; it may be very small
and lodge in a part of the body where it cannot be detected, but it
is there, and the small atma is the same as the great one. By what
physiological doctrines this is upheld, cannot here be traced; but
the notion of the atma, the great form of which in Brahma is
identical with its small form in man, lies at the basis of Brahmanic
thought.
[Footnote 2: On the etymology of Brahma see Mr. Max Mueller's _Hibbert
Lectures_, p. 366.]
In Brahma one god has been reached, but he has been reached by
thinking away from him everything concrete. All predicates are
unsuitable to him, as any predicate implies a limitation; he can only
be described in negatives, or in questionable metaphors. He is meant
to satisfy the religious craving for a being quite free from any
imperfection and entirely supreme--and it is the penalty of this that
he has no clear outline or character. And how indeed is he to be
related to the world? This world of change and decay, of
disappointment and sorrow, what has the perfect being to do with
that? Did he make it, and is he responsible for it? The answer to
this in Hindu thought is that the world is due to Maya, illusion. It
was due to an aberration in Brahma, which is represented in various
ways, that the transition was made from the one to the many, and this
error has been productive of all that has been suffered on the earth.
Or else it is held that it was not Brahma who became subject to
illusion, but that the illusion resides in man's views and thoughts
about the world; and if a man could free himself from the meshes of
Maya by recognising that the world is an illusion, and that nothing
exists but Brahma only, then he would have done something for his own
emancipation, the Brahma in him would be free from illusion, and he
would also have done something, though little, for the salvation of
the world from its great error.
That the whole world-process is nothing but an illusion, a confused
and troubled dream passing over the mind of Brahma, who himself alone
is real, this is the cardinal doctrine of Brahmanism, from which
Buddhism also, as we shall see, sets out. The world is really nothing
but an apparent world; and the true wisdom, the only salvation
consists in knowing this, and in living a life in accordance with
that knowledge. The wise man should regard a world which he knows to
be illusion, with complete indifference; it can do nothing to him, he
can do nothing for it; it affects him only with an ineradicable
regret that it exists at all, and with a longing for its
disappearance. The practical outcome of the state of matters which he
recognises is firstly negative, that he must not allow the world to
influence him at all, and, secondly, positive, that he must strive to
be united with Brahma. The negative task is performed by withdrawing
the mind from all particular things, and letting it be filled with
the general, the absolute alone; and similarly by forbidding the
desires to fasten on any worldly objects, by extinguishing desire and
ceasing to be affected in any way by worldly things. The positive
task is performed by means of a mental process which we cannot here
describe, but by which the mind returns to the self that is within
and realises it as it is, cleared from all particular thoughts and
affections. These exercises cannot be called moral; where all is
illusion morality disappears. There is no good, no evil, no effort to
promote the good and lessen the evil. It is not because the world is
bad that it is condemned, but because it exists. The energy which in
other faiths is devoted to a moral struggle, is here poured into the
ascetic discipline by which the individual looks to escape altogether
from the world as it is. There are no good works, what is good is to
abstain from all works; there is no benevolence further than that the
mind must be kept clear of all that confuses or degrades; the
salvation of the individual alone is sought after; there is no desire
to spread the light and save others, since few are capable of that
knowledge of the illusive nature of all things by which alone
salvation is possible.
This, it is plain, could never be a popular religion. Brahma, the
abstract one, does not appeal to the imagination; he could not drive
out the popular nature-gods with their definite myths and attributes.
Nor could a religion spread among the people, which regarded the
social and the domestic state as inferior, and could only be
practised by one who had left his home and family. The hermits and
ascetics and begging monks may form the religious aristocracy; but a
teaching of a different nature was necessary for the people. And we
find, in fact, two religions prevailing in India in the period of
Brahmanism; that which we have described for the enlightened, who
escapes in it from all law, all creed, all ritual, whose whole
religion more than any other which ever flourished in the world is
within the mind;[3] and on the other hand, a religion in which
outward gods are worshipped, an outward law enforced which is counted
sacred because a god or gods inspired it, and in which superstitions
gathered from all quarters find shelter. The higher religion by no
means killed the lower one, as we see in India to this day. On the
contrary, the withdrawal of the higher religion of the country to a
region whither the people could not follow, left the religion of the
people to sink into a degradation unknown before. One doctrine must
here be noticed. The belief in transmigration which Buddhism received
from the religion it found existing in India, does not belong to the
higher thought of Brahmanism described in this section; the atman or
self, which is identical with the supreme self, belongs to quite a
different order of thought from the soul which was formerly in some
one else, is now in me, and may yet come to be in many another being.
The doctrine is thought to have been an importation into India about
the time we are speaking of. It admits of being made a powerful
deterrent from vice and incentive to virtue. If my present sufferings
are due not to my acts, but to the acts of the person in whom my soul
dwelt before, it is possible for me so to act that my soul's future
existence may be better and not worse than this one, and that it
shall not sink but rise in the order of beings, and draw nearer to
its final deliverance. Of this we shall hear more in connection with
Buddhism.
[Footnote 3: "From the standpoint of unity with Brahma, the gods are
no-gods, the Vedas no-Vedas."]
The further development of Indian religion, apart from Buddhism, is
in two directions. There is a philosophical movement, in which the
Brahmanic ideas on God, the world, the soul and its changes, are
further worked out, and which leads to the six schools of Hindu
philosophy. On the other hand, the gods have their history. Brahma
remains the great god, but as his character is so undefined he is
little worshipped. Indra, the old national god, yields to Vishnu, the
old sun-god of the three steps (heaven, the air, the earth), who
becomes the favourite deity. The stern and destructive S'iva is a new
figure, and seems to be partly an adaptation of a god of the savage
aborigines: his worship is the most fanatical. These three, the
Creator, the Upholder, and the Destroyer, form the Trimurti, or
divine trinity of India,--a trinity arrived at not by unfolding the
riches of the one great god, but by compounding the claims of three
gods who were rivals. The doctrine of incarnation is also found here.
Vishnu has ten avatars or incarnations in human form; he comes down
to the earth when there is a special reason for his interference. In
these avatars, especially in Krishna, the dark god, whose exploits as
a hero are told in the great epic the Mahabharata, the need is to
some extent met, of which both Buddhism and Christianity lay hold, of
a divine figure who is not too far away from man, and who can be
regarded with personal affection.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
Most of the books mentioned at the end of last chapter deal also with
Brahmanism.
Of the Brahmanic literature given in the Sacred Books of the East,
the following may be mentioned:--
Vols. i. and xv. Upanishads.
Vols. ii. and xiv. Sacred Laws of the Aryas.
Vol. vii. The Institutes of Vishnu.
Vols. xii., xxvi., and xli. The Satapatha-Brahmana (Sacrificial
Rituals).
Vol. xxv. Manu.
Vols. xxix., and xxx. Grihya-Sutras (Domestic Ceremonies).
Vol. xxxiv. Vedic Hymns. xlvi. Hymns to Agni.
Vols. xlii.-xliv. Hymns of the Atharva-Veda.
Vols. xxxiv., xxxviii., xlviii. Vedanta Sutras.
Muir's _Sanscrit Texts_.
Weber, _Indische Skizzen_.
Haug, _Aitareya Brahmana_.