his inanimate form, and after he had taken food and water and wine he
called for a ready writer, to whom he dictated the tale of what he had
seen. Guided by Srosh the Pious and Ataro the Angel (Virgil and
Beatrice) the traveller visited heaven and hell. At the outset he saw
the meeting of a righteous soul and its Fravashi. This soul crosses the
Chinvat bridge in safety, and on the other side passes into an
atmosphere laden with an ineffably sweet perfume which emanates from the
direction of the presence of God. Here it meets a damsel more wondrously
fair than aught it has beheld in the land of the living. Enraptured at
the sight, it asks her name and receives the answer: “I am thine own
good actions.” Every good deed embellishes the human soul’s archetype,
every evil deed mars and stains it with the hideousness of sin. This
poetic and beautiful conception was not due to the author of Ardâ Vîrâf:
it is taken from the venerable pages of the Avesta itself.
In the abode of Punishment the most impressive penalties are those
undergone by the souls which have tortured helpless infants or dumb
animals. The mother who feeds another’s child from greed and starves her
own, is seen digging into an iron hill with her breasts while the cry of
her child for food comes ever from the other side of the hill, “but the
infant comes not to the mother nor the mother to the infant.” Here the
supreme anguish is mental: it is caused by the awakening of that
maternal instinct which the woman stifled on earth. Has the _Inferno_
any thought so luminously subtle as this? The woman-soul will never
reach her child “till the renewal of the world.” Till the renewal of the
world! Across the hell-fog penetrates the final hope!
The unfaithful wife who destroys the fruit of her illicit love suffers a
horrible punishment. It is strange that if we wish to find an analogy to
these severe judgments on offences against infancy, we must go to a
small tribe of Dravidian mountaineers in the Nilgiri hills, among whose
folk-songs is one which describes a vision of heaven and hell. In this a
woman is shown who is condemned to see her own child continually die,
because she refused help to a stranger’s child, saying: “It is not
mine!”
Those who treated their beasts cruelly, who overworked them, overloaded
them, gave them insufficient food, continued to work them when they
suffered from sores caused by leanness instead of trying to cure the
sores, are seen by Ardâ Vîrâf hung up head downwards while a ceaseless
rain of stones falls on their backs. Those who wantonly killed animals
have a knife driven ceaselessly into their hearts. Those who muzzled the
ox which ploughed the furrows are dashed under the feet of cattle. The
same punishment falls to those who forget to give water to the oxen in
the heat of the day or who worked them when hungry and thirsty. Demons
like dogs constantly tear the man who kept back food from
shepherds’-dogs and house-dogs or who beat or killed them: he offers
bread to the dogs, but they eat it not and only tear the more.
Ardâ Vîrâf tells a story which belongs to the cycle of “Sultan Murad,”
immortalised by Victor Hugo. A certain lazy man named Davânôs, who never
did any other thing of good during all the years when he governed many
provinces, once cast a bundle of grass with his right foot to within the
reach of a ploughing-ox. Hence his right foot is exempted from torment
while the rest of his body is gnawed by noxious creatures.
It is easy to imagine that the realistic picture of heaven and hell by a
poet of no little power produced the deepest effect on the minds of
people, who for the most part took it to be literally true. No Oriental
work ever became more popular or was more widely read and translated.
People still living can remember the time when it was the habit of the
Parsis at Bombay to have public readings of Ardâ Vîrâf, on which
occasions the audience, especially the feminine part of it, broke into
violent sobbing from the excitement caused by the description of the
punishment of the wicked. The Parsis have abandoned now the theory that
the book is other than a work of imagination, but it may be hoped that
they will not cease to regard it as a cherished legacy from their
fathers and a precious bequest to their children.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
A RELIGION OF RUTH
AN Englishman who went to see a Hindu saint was deterred from entering
the cave where the holy man lived by the spectacle of numerous rats. The
hermit, observing his hesitation, inquired what was the matter? “Don’t
you see them?” answered his visitor. “Yes,” was the brief reply. “Why
don’t you kill them?” asked the Englishman. “Why should I kill them?”
said the native of the land. Finding the whole onus of the discussion
thrown on his shoulders, the English traveller felt that it would be
difficult with his limited knowledge of the language to express a
European’s ideas about rats. He thought to sum up the case in one
sentence: “We people kill them.” To which the saint answered: “We people
don’t kill them.”
In another country, but still among a race which has inherited the habit
of looking at questions between man and animals not exclusively from the
man’s point of view, a learned professor proposed to an old gardener at
Yezd that they should dig up an ant-hill to ascertain if the local
prejudice were true which insisted that inside each ant-hill there
lodged two scorpions. The old Persian declined to be a party to any such
proceeding. “As long as the scorpions stay inside,” he said with
decision, “we have no right to molest them and to do so would bring
ill-luck.”
These anecdotes show, amusingly and convincingly, the wall of
demarcation between Eastern and Western thought by which the son of the
West is apt to find his passage barred. They serve my purpose in quoting
them the better because they are not connected with the religious sect
whose precepts I am going to sketch. They illustrate what I believe to
be true, namely, that this sect and Buddhism itself would not have made
their way in so wonderful a manner, seemingly almost without effort, had
they not found the ground prepared by a racial tendency to fly to the
doctrine of _Ahimsa_, or “non-killing,” which forms part of their
systems.
No religion prevails unless it appeals to some chord, if not of the
human heart everywhere, at least of the particular human hearts to which
it is directed. In the West a religion based on Vegetarianism would not
have a chance. Not that there exists no trace of the life-preserving
instinct among Western peoples—far from that. All nice children have it
and all saints of the type of him of Assisi. Other people have it who
are neither children, nor saints, nor yet lunatics (“though by your
smiling you seem to say so”). I know an old hero of the Siege of Delhi
who to this day would stoop to lift a worm from his path. But the
sentiment, which in the West is rather a secret thing, forming a sort of
freemasonry among those who feel it, asserts its sway in the East in the
broad light of day. No one there would mind giving the fullest publicity
to his opinion that the scorpion has as good a right to live undisturbed
in his domestic ant-hill as you have in your suburban villa.
Long before the Jainas made _Ahimsa_ a gateway to perfection,
innumerable Asiatics practised and even preached the very same rule. It
was the bond of union between all the religious teachers and ascetics
who constituted a well-defined feature in Indian life from remote if not
from the earliest antiquity. The founders of Jainism and of Buddhism,
too, were Gurus like the rest, only they possessed an intensified
magnetic influence and, at least in Buddha’s case, an unique genius.
Every Eastern religion has been taught by a Guru, not excepting the most
divine of them all.[4]
Footnote 4:
“It is stated of the Divine Founder of the Christian religion that
without a parable spoke He not to the people. Christ, in fact, acted
and taught as an _Oriental Guru_, a character which none of the
European writers of Christ’s life has invested Him with” (Rev. J.
Long: v. “Oriental Proverbs” in the Report of the Proceedings of the
Second Congress of Orientalists).
In the occurrence of a new religious evolution much depends on the
individual, but much also on the fulness of time. When Buddhism and
Jainism arose, the psychological moment was come for a change or
modification in the current faith. To some degree, both were a revolt
against Sacerdotalism. Men were told that they could work out their
salvation without priestly aid or intervention. The new teachers, though
each springing from the class of the feudal nobility, won to their side
the surging wave of the only kind of democratic yearning which, till
now, Asia has known—the yearning for religious equality. Professor
Hermann Jacobi (the foremost authority on Jainism, to whom all who study
the subject owe an unbounded debt) suggests that there was a certain
friction between the highly meritorious of the noble and the priestly
castes because the priests were inclined to look down on the layman
saint. To this category belonged Sakya Muni, who was the younger son of
a prince, or, as we should say, a feudal lord, and who renounced rank
and riches to become a recluse. The same family history is told of
Mahavira, whom the Jainas claim to be their founder. For a long time
Europeans believed the two religions to have but one source, and Jainism
was dismissed as a Buddhist sect. The Jainas, however, always strongly
held that they had a founder of their own, namely, Mahavira, and they
even declared that Buddha was not his master but his disciple. After
much research, Professor Jacobi decided the case in their favour by
assigning to them a separate origin. Both Sakya Muni and Mahavira are
generally believed to have flourished in the sixth century B.C.
The confusion of the Jainas with the Buddhists and even with the
Brahmans has made it difficult to reckon their present numbers: in the
census of 1901 they are estimated at 1,334,138, chiefly living in the
Bombay Presidency, but this does not tell us their real number. Jainas
are to be found almost everywhere in Upper India, in the West and South
and along the Ganges. They inhabit the towns more than the country. In
treating ancient Indian religions the living document is always round
the corner, ready to be called into the witness-box, and the Jainas of
to-day can give a good account of themselves. Every one has a good word
for them; a friend of mine, than whom few know India better, describes
them thus: “A tall, fair, handsome, good and humble lot they are and
terribly bullied they are by their more bellicose fellow-countrymen, who
all look on Jainas as made for them to pilfer, but the Jainas never turn
on their persecutors.” In spite of their meekness, they are good men of
business, which is proved by their remarkable success in commerce.
Perhaps it is not such bad policy to be peaceful, and helpful, and
honest as a cynical century supposes.
The Jainas say of Mahavira that he was one of a long line of holy
ascetics twenty-four of whom are venerated in their temples under the
name of Tirthakaras or Jinas, “Conquerors” in the sense of having
conquered the flesh. Needless to point out that the founders of great
religious systems invariably accept this principle of evolution: they
complete what others began, and in due time a new manifestation will
arrive either in the form of a more perfect revelation of themselves or
in that of a fore-destined successor. The Buddhists now await Matreya,
or “the Buddha of kindness.” The Jainas have not added to their
twenty-four glorified beings, but there is nothing to prevent them from
doing so. To these specimens of perfected humanity they have raised some
of the most glorious temples ever lifted by the hand of man towards
heaven. Tier on tier mount the exquisitely beautiful towers of the Jaina
cathedrals in the most lonely part of the Muklagerri hills. They seem
like the Parsifal music turned into stone: an allegory of the ascent of
the soul from corruption to incorruption, from change to permanency. The
desire to worship something finds a vent in the reverence paid to the
Tirthakaras, but the Jaina religion admits neither relics nor the
iteration of prayers. The building of splendid shrines and of refuges
for man and beast are the particular means of grace open to the Jaina
who cannot comply in all respects with the exacting demands of his
scriptures, which, were they literally fulfilled, would leave no one on
the world but ascetics. The wealthy Jaina is only too glad to avail
himself of the chance of acquiring some merit, however far it must fall
short of the highest. Besides this, in moments of religious fervour
temple-building becomes a frenzy: whole races are swept along by the
blind impulse to incarnate their spiritual cravings in spires or pagodas
or minarets pointing to the sky—the eternal symbol. The greatest of
Jaina temples mark the epoch of some such wave of spiritual emotion.
The Jaina scriptures, which were first collected from aural report and
written down by a learned man in the sixth century A.D., are really a
Rule of Discipline for monks, and not a guide for the mass of mankind.
If we could imagine the only Christian Scripture being the immortal book
of Thomas à Kempis, we should form the idea of a very similar state of
things. It is surprising not how little but how much of this rigid rule
is followed by every Jaina to this day, be he monk or layman. The
vegetarian principle involved in _Ahimsa_ is observed rigorously by
all—clearly with no bad effect on health after a trial of about
twenty-four centuries, for the Jainas’ physique is excellent, and they
are less subject to disease than the other communities. They strain and
boil water before drinking, and whatever may be said of the motive, the
practice must be highly commended. They are also often to be seen
wearing a mouth-cloth to prevent them from swallowing flies, and they
carry little brooms with which they sweep insects out of their path. The
hospitals for sick animals begin to be better managed than formerly,
when they incurred much censure as mere conglomerations of hopeless
suffering to relieve which practical means were not taken. A folly
adopted by the more fanatical Jainas at the time of their origin was
that of going “sky-clad,” which makes it probable that they were the
gymnosophists known to the Greeks. They saw well later to limit this
practice to certain times and occasions or to abandon it for the far
more pleasant one of wearing white garments. Buddha warned his followers
against the “sky-clad” aberration. He disagreed with the Jainas on a
more vital point in the view he took of penance and self-inflicted
torture. It shows the high intellectuality of the man that towards the
end of his life he pronounced penance, though he had gone through much
of it himself, to be vanity of vanities. The Jainas took the opposite
view: “Subdue the body just as fire consumes old wood.” They hold that
merit is bound up with a certain definite and tangible thing: the
Buddhist, more philosophically, makes it consist in intention. This is
the chief doctrinal difference between Jaina and Buddhist, and though
each is bound to charity and the Jaina is particularly enjoined by his
scriptures not to turn other people’s religion into ridicule, it has to
be confessed that in their frequent disputes they spare no pains and
neglect no arts of Socratic reasoning to reduce each other’s theories to
an absurdity. Irony is a weapon always used in Indian religious
discussion.
Mahavira himself “fulfilled the law” by allowing gnats, flies, and other
things to bite him and crawl over him for four months without ever once
losing his equanimity. It is told that he met all sorts of pleasant or
unpleasant events with an even mind whether they arose from divine
powers, men, or animals. The Jainas did not deny that there were divine
powers: there might be any number of them, and the influence they
wielded for good or for ill (I think especially for ill) was not
inconsiderable. Only they were not morally admirable like a man
victorious through suffering. The greater willingness of the Jainas to
admit gods into the wheel of being, and even to allow some homage to be
paid to them, was one reason why they clashed less with the Brahmans.
After the subsidence of Buddhism the Jainas managed to go on existing,
somewhat despised and annoyed, but tolerated.
While both Buddhists and Jainas place the prohibition to take life at
the head of their law, its application is infinitely more thoroughgoing
among the Jainas, who also attach to it ideas which have no place in
Buddhist metaphysics. From the Jaina position, it seems to imply a
tendency to primitive animism, though it is hard to say whether this
comes from a real process of retrogression or simply from the Indo-Aryan
desire for a synthesis—the more easily attained the more you assume. It
is startling to hear that in the last census over eight millions were
returned as animists—it proves that the old credences die hard. The
Jainas took into their soul-world fire, water, wind, shooting plants and
germinating seeds. The disciplinary results must have been inconvenient,
but a religion was never less popular because it put its devotees to
inconvenience. Those who still clung to animistic beliefs were already
prepared to see a soul in the flickering fire, the rushing water, the
growing blade. We all have odds and ends of animism; did not Coventry
Patmore say: “There is something human in a tree?” With more detail the
Jaina observes that trees and plants are born and grow old; they
distinguish the seasons, they turn towards the sun, the seeds grow up:
how, then, shall we deny all knowledge to them? “The asoka buds and
blossoms when touched by a fair girl’s feet.” Can we help recalling the
familiar lines in the “Sensitive Plant?”—
“I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers thro’ all their frame.”
Now, Science, which is on the way to becoming very kind to man’s early
beliefs, comes forward in the person of Mr. Francis Darwin to tell us
that plants _have_ “mind” and “intelligence,” especially the hop and the
bryony. All fairy-tales will come true if we wait long enough.
Once, and once only, in Jaina writings I have noticed it given as a
distinct reason for sparing plants and trees, that they may contain the
transmigrated soul of a man. Even in the case of animals the doctrine of
transmigration is rarely adduced as the reason for not killing them,
though it is fully accepted by Jainas in common with all the Indian
sects sprung from Brahmanism by which it was started. Coming to the
Indian views of animals from those which antiquity represented as the
preaching of Pythagoras, we expect to see this argument put forward at
every turn, but it is not. In Jaina writings the incentive is humanity:
to do to others as we would be done by. It is true that as an aid to
this incentive, the cruel are threatened with the most awful
punishments. In Indian sacred writings one is wearied by the nice
balance constantly drawn between every deed and its consequences to the
doer for a subsequent millennium. In mediæval monkish legends we find
exactly the same device for keeping the adept in the paths of virtue,
but wherever we find it, we sigh for the spontaneous emotion of pity of
the Good Samaritan who never reflected “If I do not get off my ass and
go to help that Jew, how very bad it will be for my Karman!”
We ought not to forget in this connexion that rewards and punishments
have not the same meaning to the Indian as to us: they are not
extraneous prizes or penalties, but the working out of a mathematical
problem which we both set and solve for ourselves. It is utterly
impossible to escape from the consequences of our evil acts: they are
debts which must be paid, though we may set about performing good acts
which will make our future happiness exceed our future misery in time
and extent. The highest good comes of itself, automatically, to him who
merits it, as is illustrated with great beauty in the Jaina story of the
White Lotus. This flower, the symbol of perfection, bloomed in the
centre of a pool and was descried by many who made violent efforts to
reach it, but they were all set fast in the mud. Then came a holy
ascetic who stood motionless on the bank. “O white Lotus, fly up!” he
said, and the White Lotus flew to his breast. Even among Indian sects
which all abound in this kind of composition the Jainas are remarkable
for their wealth of moral tales and apothegms. As is well known, they
possess a parable called “The Three Merchants,” closely resembling the
parable of the Talents as told by Matthew and Luke, and still more
exactly agreeing with the version given in the so-called “Gospel
according to the Hebrews.”
The theory of Karman suggests several modern scientific speculations
such as the idea that the brain retains an ineffaceable print of every
impression received by it, and again, the extreme view of heredity which
makes the individual the moral and physical slave of former generations.
It is a theory which has the advantage of disposing of many riddles.
Different sects have slightly varying opinions about the nature of the
Karman: the Jainas see in this receptacle of good and evil deeds a
material, though supersensual, reality with a physical basis. Each
individual consists of five parts: the visible body, the vital energy
thought to consist of fire, or, as we might say, of electricity, the
Karman and two subliminal selves which appear to be only latent in most
persons, but by which, when called into activity, the individual can
transform himself, travel to distances and do other unusual things. That
each man is provided with a wraith or double is an old and widely-spread
belief; but in Western lore the double does not seem to be commanded by
its pair: it rather moves like an unconscious, wandering photograph of
him.
The Jainas have the same word for the soul and for life: _gîva_, and
this name they bestow on the whole range of things which they consider
as living: the elements, seeds, plants, animals, men, gods. One would
think that the sense of personal identity would become vague in the
contemplation of voyages over so vast a sea of being, but, on the
contrary, this identity is the one thing about which the individual
seems perfectly sure. We have frequently such utterances as: “My own
self is the doer and the undoer of misery and happiness; my own self is
friend and foe.” A sort of void seems spread round the individual which
even family affection, very strong though it has always been in India,
is powerless to bridge. A lovely testimony to this affection, and at the
same time an avowal of its unavailingness, is to be found in the one
single exception to the Jaina law that the wholly virtuous man must
desire nothing, not even Nirvana must he desire, much less earthly love
or friendship. But he may desire to take upon him the painful illness of
one of his dear kindred. It is added sadly, however, that never has such
a desire been fulfilled, for one man cannot take upon him the pains of
another, neither can he feel what another feels.
“Man is born alone, he dies alone, he falls alone, he rises alone. His
passions, consciousness, intellect, perceptions and impressions belong
to him exclusively. Another cannot save him or help him. He grows old,
his hair turns white, even this dear body he must relinquish—none can
stay the hour.”
Again it is written:—
“Man! thou art thy own friend, why wishest thou for a friend beyond
thyself?”