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INDIA:
WHAT CAN IT TEACH US?
A Course of Lectures
DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
BY
F. MAX MUeLLER, K.M.
_TEXT AND FOOT-NOTES COMPLETE._
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
PROF. ALEXANDER WILDER, M.D.
NEW YORK:
FUNK & WAGNALLS, PUBLISHERS,
10 AND 12 DEY STREET.
* * * * *
_NOTE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHERS._
This volume contains the entire text of the English edition, also all
the footnotes. Those portions of the Appendix which serve to
illustrate the text are inserted in their appropriate places as
footnotes. That part of the Appendix which is of special interest only
to the Sanscrit scholar is omitted.
Professor Max Mueller writes in this book not as a theologian but as a
scholar, not intending either to attack or defend Christian theology.
His style is charming, because he always writes with freedom and
animation. In some passages possibly his language might be
misunderstood. We have thought it best to add a few notes. The notes
of the American editor are signed "A.W.;" ours, "Am. Pubs."
* * * * *
DEDICATED
TO
E. B. COWELL M.A., LL.D.,
PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND FELLOW OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.
* * * * *
MY DEAR COWELL: As these Lectures would never have been written or
delivered but for your hearty encouragement, I hope you will now allow
me to dedicate them to you, not only as a token of my sincere
admiration of your great achievements as an Oriental scholar, but also
as a memorial of our friendship, now more than thirty years old, a
friendship which has grown from year to year, has weathered many a
storm, and will last, I trust, for what to both of us may remain of
our short passage from shore to shore.
I must add, however, that in dedicating these Lectures to you, I do
not wish to throw upon you any responsibility for the views which I
have put forward in them. I know that you do not agree with some of my
views on the ancient religion and literature of India, and I am well
aware that with regard to the recent date which I have assigned to the
whole of what is commonly called the Classical Sanskrit Literature, I
stand almost alone. No, if friendship can claim any voice in the
courts of science and literature, let me assure you that I shall
consider your outspoken criticism of my Lectures as the very best
proof of your true and honest friendship. I have through life
considered it the greatest honor if real scholars, I mean men not only
of learning, but of judgment and character, have considered my
writings worthy of a severe and searching criticism; and I have cared
far more for the production of one single new fact, though it spoke
against me, than for any amount of empty praise or empty abuse.
Sincere devotion to his studies and an unswerving love of truth ought
to furnish the true scholar with an armor impermeable to flattery or
abuse, and with a visor that shuts out no ray of light, from whatever
quarter it may come. More light, more truth, more facts, more
combination of facts, these are his quest. And if in that quest he
fails, as many have failed before him, he knows that in the search for
truth failures are sometimes the condition of victory, and the true
conquerors often those whom the world calls the vanquished.
You know better than anybody else the present state of Sanskrit
scholarship. You know that at present and for some time to come
Sanskrit scholarship means discovery and conquest. Every one of your
own works marks a real advance, and a permanent occupation of new
ground. But you know also how small a strip has as yet been explored
of the vast continent of Sanskrit literature, and how much still
remains _terra incognita_. No doubt this exploring work is
troublesome, and often disappointing, but young students must learn
the truth of a remark lately made by a distinguished member of the
Indian Civil Service, whose death we all deplore, Dr. Burnell, "that
no trouble is thrown away which saves trouble to others." We want men
who will work hard, even at the risk of seeing their labors
unrequited; we want strong and bold men who are not afraid of storms
and shipwrecks. The worst sailors are not those who suffer shipwreck,
but those who only dabble in puddles and are afraid of wetting their
feet.
It is easy now to criticise the labors of Sir William Jones, Thomas
Colebrooke, and Horace Hayman Wilson, but what would have become of
Sanskrit scholarship if they had not rushed in where even now so many
fear to tread? and what will become of Sanskrit scholarship if their
conquests are forever to mark the limits of our knowledge? You know
best that there is more to be discovered in Sanskrit literature than
Nalas and _S_akuntalas, and surely the young men who every year go out
to India are not deficient in the spirit of enterprise, or even of
adventure? Why, then, should it be said that the race of bold
explorers, who once rendered the name of the Indian Civil Service
illustrious over the whole world, has well-nigh become extinct, and
that England, which offers the strongest incentives and the most
brilliant opportunities for the study of the ancient language,
literature, and history of India, is no longer in the van of Sanskrit
scholarship?
If some of the young candidates for the Indian Civil Service who
listened to my Lectures, quietly made up their minds that such a
reproach shall be wiped out, if a few of them at least determined to
follow in the footsteps of Sir William Jones, and to show to the world
that Englishmen who have been able to achieve by pluck, by
perseverance, and by real political genius the material conquest of
India, do not mean to leave the laurels of its intellectual conquest
entirely to other countries, then I shall indeed rejoice, and feel
that I have paid back, in however small a degree, the large debt of
gratitude which I owe to my adopted country and to some of its
greatest statesmen, who have given me the opportunity which I could
find nowhere else of realizing the dreams of my life--the publication
of the text and commentary of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient book of
Sanskrit, aye of Aryan literature, and now the edition of the
translations of the "Sacred Books of the East."
I have left my Lectures very much as I delivered them at Cambridge. I
am fond of the form of Lectures, because it seems to me the most natural
form which in our age didactic composition ought to take. As in ancient
Greece the dialogue reflected most truly the intellectual life of the
people, and as in the Middle Ages learned literature naturally assumed
with the recluse in his monastic cell the form of a long monologue, so
with us the lecture places the writer most readily in that position in
which he is accustomed to deal with his fellow-men, and to communicate
his knowledge to others. It has no doubt certain disadvantages. In a
lecture which is meant to be didactic, we have, for the sake of
completeness, to say and to repeat certain things which must be familiar
to some of our readers, while we are also forced to leave out
information which, even in its imperfect form, we should probably not
hesitate to submit to our fellow-students, but which we feel we have not
yet sufficiently mastered and matured to enable us to place it clearly
and simply before a larger public.
But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. A lecture, by keeping a
critical audience constantly before our eyes, forces us to condense
our subject, to discriminate between what is important and what is
not, and often to deny ourselves the pleasure of displaying what may
have cost us the greatest labor, but is of little consequence to other
scholars. In lecturing we are constantly reminded of what students are
so apt to forget, that their knowledge is meant not for themselves
only, but for others, and that to know well means to be able to teach
well. I confess I can never write unless I think of somebody for whom
I write, and I should never wish for a better audience to have before
my mind than the learned, brilliant, and kind-hearted assembly by
which I was greeted in your University.
Still I must confess that I did not succeed in bringing all I wished
to say, and more particularly the evidence on which some of my
statements rested, up to the higher level of a lecture; and I have
therefore added a number of notes containing the less-organized matter
which resisted as yet that treatment which is necessary before our
studies can realize their highest purpose, that of feeding,
invigorating, and inspiriting the minds of others.
Yours affectionately,
F. MAX MUeLLER.
OXFORD, December, 1882.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
DEDICATION,
INTRODUCTION,
LECTURE I. WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?
" II. ON THE TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS,
" III. THE HUMAN INTEREST OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE,
" IV. OBJECTIONS,
" V. THE LESSONS OF THE VEDA,
" VI. VEDIC DEITIES,
" VII. VEDA AND VEDANTA,
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.
Professor Max Mueller has been so long and widely known in the world of
letters as to render any formal introduction unnecessary. He has been
from his early youth an assiduous student of philology, justly
regarding it as an important key to history and an invaluable
auxiliary to intellectual progress. A glance at his personal career
will show the ground upon which his reputation is established.
Friedrich Maximilian Mueller, the son of Wilhelm Mueller, the Saxon
poet, was born at Dessau, December 6th, 1823. He matriculated at
Leipzig in his eighteenth year, giving his principal attention to
classical philology, and receiving his degree in 1843. He immediately
began a course of Oriental studies, chiefly Sanskrit, under the
supervision of Professor Brockhaus, and in 1844 engaged in his
translation of the "Hitopadesa." He removed from Leipzig to Berlin,
and attended the lectures of Bopp, Ruecker, and Schelling. The next
year he went to Paris to listen to Eugene Burnouf at the College de
France. He now began the collecting of material for his great quarto
edition of the "Rig-Veda Sanhita" and the "Commentary of
Saganadranja." He visited England for this purpose to examine the
manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and at the Indian House. At the
recommendation of H. H. Wilson, the Orientalist, he was commissioned
by the East India Company to publish his edition in England at their
expense. The first volume appeared in 1849, and five others followed
during the next few years.
In 1850 he delivered a course of "Lectures on Comparative Philology"
at Oxford, and the next year was made member of Christ Church,
curator, etc., and appointed Taylorian Professor of Modern European
Languages and Literature. He received also numerous other marks of
distinction from universities, and was made one of the eight foreign
members of the Institute of France. The Volney prize was awarded him
by the French Academy for his "Essay on the Comparative Philology of
Indo-European Languages and its Bearing on the Early Civilization of
Mankind."
His writings have been numerous. Besides editing the translations of
the "Sacred Books of the Principal Religions," he has published a
"Handbook for the Study of Sanskrit," a "Sanskrit-English Dictionary
and Grammar," "Lectures upon the Science of Language," "An
Introduction to the Science of Religion," "Essays on Mythology,"
"Chips from a German Workshop," etc. He seems to have no intermission,
but penetrates where others would not have ventured, or have faltered
from utter weariness. In the field of philology he has few peers,
while in early Sanskrit learning he has virtually taken the part of an
innovator. While reverently following after Sir William Jones,
Colebrooke, Windischmann, Bopp, and others of equal distinction, he
sets aside the received views in regard to chronology and historical
occurrences. The era of Vikramaditya and the Golden Age of Sanskrit
literature, bearing a date almost simultaneous with the Augustan
period at the West, are postponed by him to a later century. It may be
that he has overlooked some canon of interpretation that would have
modified his results. Those, however, who hesitate to accept his
conclusions freely acknowledge his scholarly enthusiasm, persistent
energy, and great erudition.
Sanskrit in his judgment constitutes an essential element of a liberal
education. While heartily admiring the employment of some of the best
talent and noblest genius of our age in the study of development in
the outward world, from the first growth of the earth and the
beginning of organic life to the highest stages, he pleads earnestly
that there is an inward and intellectual world also to be studied in
its historical development in strict analogy with the other, leading
up to the beginning of rational thought in its steady progress from
the lowest to the highest stages. In that study of the history of the
human mind, in that study of ourselves, our true selves, India
occupies a place which is second to no other country. Whatever sphere
of the human mind may be selected for special study, whether language,
religion, mythology, or philosophy, whether laws, customs, primitive
art or primitive science, we must go to India, because some of the
most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are
treasured up there, and there only. He inveighs most eloquently
against the narrowing of our horizon to the history of Greeks and
Romans, Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of Palestine, Egypt,
and Babylon, leaving out of sight our nearest intellectual relatives,
the Aryans of India, the framers of that most wonderful language the
Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our fundamental
concepts, the fathers of the most natural of natural religions, the
makers of the most transparent of mythologies, the inventors of the
most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most elaborate laws. It
is the purpose of historical study to enable each generation to
profit from the experience of those who came before, and advance
toward higher aims, without being obliged to start anew from the same
point as its ancestors after the manner of every race of brutes. He
who knows little of those who preceded is very likely to care little
for those coming after. "Life would be to him a chain of sand, while
it ought to be a kind of electric chain that makes our hearts tremble
and vibrate with the most ancient thoughts of the Past, as well as
with the most distant hopes of the Future."
In no just sense is this an exaggeration. Deep as science and research
have explored, extensive as is the field which genius and art have
occupied, they have an Herculean labor yet to perform before India
will have yielded up all her opulence of learning. The literature of
the world in all ages has been richly furnished, if not actually
inspired, from that fountain. The Wisdom of the Ancients, so much
lauded in the earlier writings of Hebrews, Greeks, and Phoenicians,
was abundantly represented in the lore of these Wise Men of the East.
The first Ionian sages lighted the torch of philosophy at the altar of
Zoroaster. The conquest of Asia Minor by the Persians brought Thales,
Anaximenes, and Herakleitos into contact with the Eranian dogmas. The
leaven thus imparted had a potent influence upon the entire mass of
Grecian thought. We find it easy to trace its action upon opinions in
later periods and among the newer nations. Kant, Hegel, Stewart, and
Hamilton, as well as Plato, Zeno, and Aristotle, had their prototypes
in the world and antiquity beyond. Even the first Zarathustra was an
exponent and not the originator of the Religion and Science of Light.
We are thus carried by this route back to the ancient Aryan Home for
the sources from which so many golden streams have issued. In the
Sanskrit books and mantras we must look for the treasures that make
human souls rich. Perhaps we have been too much disposed to regard
that former world as a wonderland, a repertory of folk-lore, or a
theatre of gross and revolting superstition. We are now required by
candor and justice to revise such notions. These primeval peoples, in
their way and in a language akin to ours, adored the Father in heaven,
and contemplated the future of the soul with a sure and certain hope.
Nor did they, while observing the myriads of races intervening between
man and the monad, regard the world beyond as waste and void.
Intelligences of every grade were believed to people the region
between mortals and the Infinite. The angels and archangels, and the
spirits of the just made perfect--_devas_ and _pitris_ they called
them--ministered about the throne of the Supreme Being, and abode in
the various spheres of universal space. Much of the difference between
our thought and theirs consists in the names and not in the substance
of our beliefs.
We may thus be prepared to receive what India can teach us. In her
classic dialect, the Sanskrit, we may read with what success the
children of the men who journeyed from the ancient Aryan Home into the
Punjab and Aryavartta have ventured "to look inward upon themselves,
upward to something not themselves, and to see whether they could not
understand a little of the true purport of that mystery which we call
life upon earth." It was perfectly natural, as well as perfectly
right, that as the beholder caught a glance of the Infinite Beyond,
the image impressed itself upon his sensorium, as would be the case
from looking at the sun, and he would as a result perceive that
Infinite in all that he looked upon. Thus to the Sanskrit-speaking
Aryan, as to the enlightened mind of to-day, not to see it was utter
blindness. What we call science, law, morality, religion, was in his
view pervaded alike throughout by this concept of Divine presence, or
else it would have been less than a dream that had not come to the
awaking. He was a follower of the light, not from the senses or the
logical understanding, but from the eternal world. Let us not dwell on
any darker shade of the picture. Clouds are dark to those who are
beneath them; but on the upper side, where the sun shines, they glow
with golden splendor. Let us be willing to contemplate India
fraternally, and upon that side where the radiance of the Divine sheds
a refulgent illumination.
ALEXANDER WILDER.
NEWARK, N. J., May 14th, 1883.
* * * * *
INDIA.
LECTURE I.
WHAT CAN INDIA TEACH US?
When I received from the Board of Historical Studies at Cambridge the
invitation to deliver a course of lectures, specially intended for the
candidates for the Indian Civil Service, I hesitated for some time,
feeling extremely doubtful whether in a few public discourses I could
say anything that would be of real use to them in passing their
examinations. To enable young men to pass their examinations seems now
to have become the chief, if not the only object of the universities;
and to no class of students is it of greater importance to pass their
examinations, and to pass them well, than to the candidates for the
Indian Civil Service.
But although I was afraid that attendance on a few public lectures,
such as I could give, would hardly benefit a candidate who was not
already fully prepared to pass through the fiery ordeal of the three
London examinations, I could not on the other hand shut my eyes
completely to the fact that, after all, universities were not meant
entirely, or even chiefly, as stepping-stones to an examination, but
that there is something else which universities can teach and ought to
teach--nay, which I feel quite sure they were originally meant to
teach--something that may not have a marketable value before a Board
of Examiners, but which has a permanent value for the whole of our
life, and that is a real interest in our work, and, more than that, a
love of our work, and, more than that, a true joy and happiness in our
work. If a university can teach that, if it can engraft that one small
living germ in the minds of the young men who come here to study and
to prepare themselves for the battle of life, and, for what is still
more difficult to encounter, the daily dull drudgery of life, then, I
feel convinced, a university has done more, and conferred a more
lasting benefit on its pupils than by helping them to pass the most
difficult examinations, and to take the highest place among Senior
Wranglers or First-Class men.
Unfortunately, that kind of work which is now required for passing one
examination after another, that process of cramming and crowding which
has of late been brought to the highest pitch of perfection, has often
the very opposite effect, and instead of exciting an appetite for
work, it is apt to produce an indifference, if not a kind of
intellectual nausea, that may last for life.
And nowhere is this so much to be feared as in the case of candidates
for the Indian Civil Service. After they have passed their first
examination for admission to the Indian Civil Service, and given proof
that they have received the benefits of a liberal education, and
acquired that general information in classics, history, and
mathematics, which is provided at our public schools, and forms no
doubt the best and surest foundation for all more special and
professional studies in later life, they suddenly find themselves torn
away from their old studies and their old friends, and compelled to
take up new subjects which to many of them seem strange, outlandish,
if not repulsive. Strange alphabets, strange languages, strange names,
strange literatures and laws have to be faced, "to be got up" as it is
called, not from choice, but from dire necessity. The whole course of
study during two years is determined for them, the subjects fixed, the
books prescribed, the examinations regulated, and there is no time to
look either right or left, if a candidate wishes to make sure of
taking each successive fence in good style, and without an accident.
I know quite well that this cannot be helped. I am not speaking
against the system of examinations in general, if only they are
intelligently conducted; nay, as an old examiner myself, I feel bound
to say that the amount of knowledge produced ready-made at these
examinations is to my mind perfectly astounding. But while the answers
are there on paper, strings of dates, lists of royal names and
battles, irregular verbs, statistical figures and whatever else you
like, how seldom do we find that the heart of the candidates is in the
work which they have to do. The results produced are certainly most
ample and voluminous, but they rarely contain a spark of original
thought, or even a clever mistake. It is work done from necessity, or,
let us be just, from a sense of duty, but it is seldom, or hardly
ever, a labor of love.
Now why should that be? Why should a study of Greek or Latin--of the
poetry, the philosophy, the laws and the art of Greece and Italy--seem
congenial to us, why should it excite even a certain enthusiasm, and
command general respect, while a study of Sanskrit, and of the ancient
poetry, the philosophy, the laws, and the art of India is looked upon,
in the best case, as curious, but is considered by most people as
useless, tedious, if not absurd?
And, strange to say, this feeling exists in England more than in any
other country. In France, Germany, and Italy, even in Denmark, Sweden,
and Russia, there is a vague charm connected with the name of India.
One of the most beautiful poems in the German language is the
_Weisheit der Brahmanen_, the "Wisdom of the Brahmans," by Rueckert, to
my mind more rich in thought and more perfect in form than even
Goethe's _West-oestlicher Divan_. A scholar who studies Sanskrit in
Germany is supposed to be initiated in the deep and dark mysteries of
ancient wisdom, and a man who has travelled in India, even if he has
only discovered Calcutta, or Bombay, or Madras, is listened to like
another Marco Polo. In England a student of Sanskrit is generally
considered a bore, and an old Indian civil servant, if he begins to
describe the marvels of Elephanta or the Towers of Silence, runs the
risk of producing a count-out.
There are indeed a few Oriental scholars whose works are read, and who
have acquired a certain celebrity in England, because they were really
men of uncommon genius, and would have ranked among the great glories
of the country, but for the misfortune that their energies were
devoted to Indian literature--I mean Sir William Jones, "one of the
most enlightened of the sons of men," as Dr. Johnson called him, and
Thomas Colebrooke. But the names of others who have done good work in
their day also, men such as Ballantyne, Buchanan, Carey, Crawfurd,
Davis, Elliot, Ellis, Houghton, Leyden, Mackenzie, Marsden, Muir,
Prinsep, Rennell, Turnour, Upham, Wallich, Warren, Wilkins, Wilson,
and many others, are hardly known beyond the small circle of Oriental
scholars; and their works are looked for in vain in libraries which
profess to represent with a certain completeness the principal
branches of scholarship and science in England.
How many times, when I advised young men, candidates for the Indian
Civil Service, to devote themselves before all things to a study of
Sanskrit, have I been told, "What is the use of our studying Sanskrit?
There are translations of _S_akuntala, Manu, and the Hitopade_s_a, and
what else is there in that literature that is worth reading? Kalidasa
may be very pretty, and the Laws of Manu are very curious, and the
fables of the Hitopade_s_a are very quaint; but you would not compare
Sanskrit literature with Greek, or recommend us to waste our time in
copying and editing Sanskrit texts which either teach us nothing that
we do not know already, or teach us something which we do not care to
know?"
This seems to me a most unhappy misconception, and it will be the
chief object of my lectures to try to remove it, or at all events to
modify it, as much as possible. I shall not attempt to prove that
Sanskrit literature is as good as Greek literature. Why should we
always compare? A study of Greek literature has its own purpose, and a
study of Sanskrit literature has its own purpose; but what I feel
convinced of, and hope to convince you of, is that Sanskrit
literature, if studied only in a right spirit, is full of human
interests, full of lessons which even Greek could never teach us, a
subject worthy to occupy the leisure, and more than the leisure, of
every Indian civil servant; and certainly the best means of making any
young man who has to spend five-and-twenty years of his life in India,
feel at home among the Indians, as a fellow-worker among
fellow-workers, and not as an alien among aliens. There will be
abundance of useful and most interesting work for him to do, if only
he cares to do it, work such as he would look for in vain, whether in
Italy or in Greece, or even among the pyramids of Egypt or the palaces
of Babylon.
You will now understand why I have chosen as the title of my lectures,
"What can India teach us?" True, there are many things which India has
to learn from us; but there are other things, and, in one sense, very
important things, which we too may learn from India.
If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most
richly endowed with all the wealth, power, and beauty that nature can
bestow--in some parts a very paradise on earth--I should point to
India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most full
developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the
greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them
which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato
and Kant--I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from
what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost
exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic
race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in
order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more
universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only,
but a transfigured and eternal life--again I should point to India.
I know you will be surprised to hear me say this. I know that more
particularly those who have spent many years of active life in
Calcutta, or Bombay, or Madras, will be horror-struck at the idea that
the humanity they meet with there, whether in the bazaars or in the
courts of justice, or in so-called native society, should be able to
teach _us_ any lessons.
Let me therefore explain at once to my friends who may have lived in
India for years, as civil servants, or officers, or missionaries, or
merchants, and who ought to know a great deal more of that country
than one who has never set foot on the soil of Aryavarta, that we are
speaking of two very different Indias. I am thinking chiefly of India
such as it was a thousand, two thousand, it may be three thousand
years ago; they think of the India of to-day. And again, when thinking
of the India of to-day, they remember chiefly the India of Calcutta,
Bombay, or Madras, the India of the towns. I look to the India of the
village communities, the true India of the Indians.
What I wish to show to you, I mean more especially the candidates for
the Indian Civil Service, is that this India of a thousand, or two
thousand, or three thousand years ago, ay the India of to-day also, if
only you know where to look for it, is full of problems, the solution
of which concerns all of us, even us in this Europe of the nineteenth
century.
If you have acquired any special tastes here in England, you will find
plenty to satisfy them in India; and whoever has learned to take an
interest in any of the great problems that occupy the best thinkers
and workers at home, need certainly not be afraid of India proving to
him an intellectual exile.
If you care for geology, there is work for you from the Himalayas to
Ceylon.
If you are fond of botany, there is a flora rich enough for many
Hookers.
If you are a zoologist, think of Haeckel, who is just now rushing
through Indian forests and dredging in Indian seas, and to whom his
stay in India is like the realization of the brightest dream of his
life.
If you are interested in ethnology, why India is like a living
ethnological museum.
If you are fond of archaeology, if you have ever assisted at the
opening of a barrow in England, and know the delight of finding a
fibula, or a knife, or a flint in a heap of rubbish, read only General
Cunningham's "Annual Reports of the Archaeological Survey of India,"
and you will be impatient for the time when you can take your spade
and bring to light the ancient Viharas or colleges built by the
Buddhist monarchs of India.
If ever you amused yourselves with collecting coins, why the soil of
India teems with coins, Persian, Carian, Thracian, Parthian, Greek,
Macedonian, Scythian, Roman,[1] and Mohammedan. When Warren Hastings
was Governor-General, an earthen pot was found on the bank of a river
in the province of Benares, containing one hundred and seventy-two
gold darics.[2] Warren Hastings considered himself as making the most
munificent present to his masters that he might ever have it in his
power to send them, by presenting those ancient coins to the Court of
Directors. The story is that they were sent to the melting-pot. At all
events they had disappeared when Warren Hastings returned to England.
It rests with you to prevent the revival of such vandalism.
In one of the last numbers of the _Asiatic Journal of Bengal_ you may
read of the discovery of a treasure as rich in gold almost as some of
the tombs opened by Dr. Schliemann at Mykenae, nay, I should add,
perhaps, not quite unconnected with some of the treasures found at
Mykenae; yet hardly any one has taken notice of it in England![3]
The study of Mythology has assumed an entirely new character, chiefly
owing to the light that has been thrown on it by the ancient Vedic
Mythology of India. But though the foundation of a true Science of
Mythology has been laid, all the detail has still to be worked out,
and could be worked out nowhere better than in India.
Even the study of fables owes its new life to India, from whence the
various migrations of fables have been traced at various times and
through various channels from East to West.[4] Buddhism is now known
to have been the principal source of our legends and parables. But
here, too, many problems still wait for their solution. Think, for
instance, of the allusion to the fable of the donkey in the lion's
skin, which occurs in Plato's Cratylus.[5] Was that borrowed from the
East? Or take the fable of the weasel changed by Aphrodite into a
woman who, when she saw a mouse, could not refrain from making a
spring at it. This, too, is very like a Sanskrit fable; but how then
could it have been brought into Greece early enough to appear in one
of the comedies of Strattis, about 400 B.C.?[6] Here, too, there is
still plenty of work to do.
We may go back even farther into antiquity, and still find strange
coincidences between the legends of India and the legends of the West,
without as yet being able to say how they travelled, whether from East
to West, or from West to East. That at the time of Solomon there was a
channel of communication open between India and Syria and Palestine is
established beyond doubt, I believe, by certain Sanskrit words which
occur in the Bible as names of articles of export from Ophir, articles
such as ivory, apes, peacocks, and sandalwood, which, taken together,
could not have been exported from any country but India.[7] Nor is
there any reason to suppose that the commercial intercourse between
India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was ever
completely interrupted, even at the time when the Book of Kings is
supposed to have been written.
Now you remember the judgment of Solomon, which has always been
admired as a proof of great legal wisdom among the Jews.[8] I must
confess that, not having a legal mind, I never could suppress a
certain shudder[9] when reading the decision of Solomon: "Divide the
living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other."
Let me now tell you the same story as it is told by the Buddhists,
whose sacred Canon is full of such legends and parables. In the
Kanjur, which is the Tibetan translation of the Buddhist Tripi_t_aka,
we likewise read of two women who claimed each to be the mother of the
same child. The king, after listening to their quarrels for a long
time, gave it up as hopeless to settle who was the real mother. Upon
this Vi_s_akha stepped forward and said: "What is the use of examining
and cross-examining these women? Let them take the boy and settle it
among themselves." Thereupon both women fell on the child, and when
the fight became violent the child was hurt and began to cry. Then one
of them let him go, because she could not bear to hear the child cry.
That settled the question. The king gave the child to the true mother,
and had the other beaten with a rod.
This seems to me, if not the more primitive, yet the more natural form
of the story--showing a deeper knowledge of human nature and more
wisdom than even the wisdom of Solomon.[10]
Many of you may have studied not only languages, but also the Science
of Language, and is there any country in which some of the most
important problems of that science, say only the growth and decay of
dialects, or the possible mixture of languages, with regard not only
to words, but to grammatical elements also, can be studied to greater
advantage than among the Aryan, the Dravidian, and the Mu_n_da
inhabitants of India, when brought in contact with their various
invaders and conquerors, the Greeks, the Yue-tchi, the Arabs, the
Persians, the Moguls, and lastly the English?
Again, if you are a student of Jurisprudence, there is a history of
law to be explored in India, very different from what is known of the
history of law in Greece, in Rome, and in Germany, yet both by its
contrasts and by its similarities full of suggestions to the student
of Comparative Jurisprudence. New materials are being discovered every
year, as, for instance, the so-called Dharma or Samaya_k_arika Sutras,
which have supplied the materials for the later metrical law-books,
such as the famous Laws of Manu. What was once called "The Code of
Laws of Manu," and confidently referred to 1200, or at least 500 B.C.,
is now hesitatingly referred to perhaps the fourth century A.D., and
called neither a Code, nor a Code of Laws, least of all, the Code of
Laws of Manu.
If you have learned to appreciate the value of recent researches into
the antecedents of all law, namely the foundation and growth of the
simplest political communities--and nowhere could you have had better
opportunities for it than here at Cambridge--you will find a field of
observation opened before you in the still-existing village estates in
India that will amply repay careful research.
And take that which, after all, whether we confess or deny it, we care
for more in this life than for anything else--nay, which is often far
more cared for by those who deny than by those who confess--take that
which supports, pervades, and directs all our acts and thoughts and
hopes--without which there can be neither village-community nor empire,
neither custom nor law, neither right nor wrong--take that which, next
to language, has most firmly fixed the specific and permanent barrier
between man and beast--which alone has made life possible and bearable,
and which, as it is the deepest, though often-hidden spring of
individual life, is also the foundation of all national life--the
history of all histories, and yet the mystery of all mysteries--take
religion, and where can you study its true origin,[11] its natural
growth, and its inevitable decay better than in India, the home of
Brahmanism, the birthplace of Buddhism, and the refuge of
Zoroastrianism, even now the mother of new superstitions--and why not,
in the future, the regenerate child of the purest faith, if only
purified from the dust of nineteen centuries?
You will find yourselves everywhere in India between an immense past
and an immense future, with opportunities such as the old world could
but seldom, if ever, offer you. Take any of the burning questions of
the day--popular education, higher education, parliamentary
representation, codification of laws, finance, emigration, poor-law;
and whether you have anything to teach and to try, or anything to
observe and to learn, India will supply you with a laboratory such as
exists nowhere else. That very Sanskrit, the study of which may at
first seem so tedious to you and so useless, if only you will carry it
on, as you may carry it on here at Cambridge better than anywhere
else, will open before you large layers of literature, as yet almost
unknown and unexplored, and allow you an insight into strata of
thought deeper than any you have known before, and rich in lessons
that appeal to the deepest sympathies of the human heart.
Depend upon it, if only you can make leisure, you will find plenty of
work in India for your leisure hours.
India is not, as you may imagine, a distant, strange, or, at the very
utmost, a curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe, it
has its place in the Indo-European world, it has its place in our own
history, and in what is the very life of history, the history of the
human mind.
You know how some of the best talent and the noblest genius of our age
has been devoted to the study of the development of the outward or
material world, the growth of the earth, the first appearance of
living cells, their combination and differentiation, leading up to the
beginning of organic life, and its steady progress from the lowest to
the highest stages. Is there not an inward and intellectual world also
which has to be studied in its historical development, from the first
appearance of predicative and demonstrative roots, their combination
and differentiation, leading up to the beginning of rational thought
in its steady progress from the lowest to the highest stages? And in
that study of the history of the human mind, in that study of
ourselves, of our true selves, India occupies a place second to no
other country. Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for
your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology,
or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or
primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you
like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive
materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in
India only.
And while thus trying to explain to those whose lot will soon be cast
in India the true position which that wonderful country holds or ought
to hold in universal history, I may perhaps be able at the same time
to appeal to the sympathies of other members of this University, by
showing them how imperfect our knowledge of universal history, our
insight into the development of the human intellect, must always
remain, if we narrow our horizon to the history of Greeks and Romans,
Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of Palestine, Egypt, and
Babylon,[12] and leave out of sight our nearest intellectual
relatives, the Aryans of India, the framers of the most wonderful
language, the Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our
fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most natural of natural
religions, the makers of the most transparent of mythologies, the
inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most
elaborate laws.
There are many things which we think essential in a liberal education,
whole chapters of history which we teach in our schools and
universities, that cannot for one moment compare with the chapter
relating to India, if only properly understood and freely interpreted.
In our time, when the study of history threatens to become almost an
impossibility--such is the mass of details which historians collect in
archives and pour out before us in monographs--it seems to me more
than ever the duty of the true historian to find out the real
proportion of things, to arrange his materials according to the
strictest rules of artistic perspective, and to keep completely out of
sight all that may be rightly ignored by us in our own passage across
the historical stage of the world. It is this power of discovering
what is really important that distinguishes the true historian from
the mere chronicler, in whose eyes everything is important,
particularly if he has discovered it himself. I think it was Frederick
the Great who, when sighing for a true historian of his reign,
complained bitterly that those who wrote the history of Prussia never
forgot to describe the buttons on his uniform. And it is probably of
such historical works that Carlyle was thinking when he said that he
had waded through them all, but that nothing should ever induce him to
hand even their names and titles down to posterity. And yet how much
is there even in Carlyle's histories that might safely be consigned to
oblivion!
Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized
part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one
of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each
generation need not start again from the same point and toil over the
same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came
before, may advance toward higher points and nobler aims. As a child
when growing up might ask his father or grandfather _who_ had built
the house they lived in, or who had cleared the field that yielded
them their food, we ask the historian whence we came, and how we came
into possession of what we call our own. History may tell us afterward
many useful and amusing things, gossip, such as a child might like to
hear from his mother or grandmother; but what history has to teach us
before all and everything, is our own antecedents, our own ancestors,
our own descent.
Now our principal intellectual ancestors are, no doubt, the _Jews_,
the _Greeks_, the _Romans_, and the _Saxons_, and we, here in Europe,
should not call a man educated or enlightened who was ignorant of the
debt which he owes to his intellectual ancestors in Palestine, Greece,
Rome, and Germany. The whole past history of the world would be
darkness to him, and not knowing what those who came before him had
done for him, he would probably care little to do anything for those
who are to come after him. Life would be to him a chain of sand, while
it ought to be a kind of electric chain that makes our hearts tremble
and vibrate with the most ancient thoughts of the past, as well as
with the most distant hopes of the future.
Let us begin with our religion. No one can understand even the
historical possibility of the Christian religion without knowing
something of the Jewish race, which must be studied chiefly in the
pages of the Old Testament. And in order to appreciate the true
relation of the Jews to the rest of the ancient world, and to
understand what ideas were peculiarly their own, and what ideas they
shared in common with the other members of the Semitic stock, or what
moral and religious impulses they received from their historical
contact with other nations of antiquity, it is absolutely necessary
that we should pay some attention to the history of Babylon, Nineveh,
Phoenicia, and Persia. These may seem distant countries and
forgotten people, and many might feel inclined to say, "Let the dead
bury their dead; what are those mummies to us?" Still, such is the
marvellous continuity of history, that I could easily show you many
things which we, even we who are here assembled, owe to Babylon, to
Nineveh, to Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia.
Every one who carries a watch owes to the Babylonians the division of
the hour into sixty minutes. It may be a very bad division, yet such
as it is, it has come to us from the Greeks and Romans, and it came to
them from Babylon. The sexagesimal division is peculiarly Babylonian.
Hipparchos, 150 B.C., adopted it from Babylon, Ptolemy, 150 A.D., gave
it wider currency, and the French, when they decimated everything
else, respected the dial-plates of our watches, and left them with
their sixty Babylonian minutes.
Every one who writes a letter owes his alphabet to the Romans and
Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the
Phoenicians learned it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect
alphabet--as all the students of phonetics will tell you--yet, such as
it is and has been, we owe it to the old Phoenicians and Egyptians,
and in every letter we trace, there lies imbedded the mummy of an
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic.
What do we owe to the Persians? It does not seem to be much, for they
were not a very inventive race, and what they knew they had chiefly
learned from their neighbors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Still,
we owe them something. First of all, we owe them a large debt of
gratitude for having allowed themselves to be beaten by the Greeks;
for think what the world would have been if the Persians had beaten
the Greeks at Marathon, and had enslaved--that means, annihilated--the
genius of ancient Greece. However, this may be called rather an
involuntary contribution to the progress of humanity, and I mention it
only in order to show how narrowly, not only Greeks and Romans, but
Saxons and Anglo-Saxons too, escaped becoming Parsis or
Fire-worshippers.
But I can mention at least one voluntary gift which came to us from
Persia, and that is the relation of silver to gold in our bi-metallic
currency. That relation was, no doubt, first determined in Babylonia,
but it assumed its practical and historical importance in the Persian
empire, and spread from there to the Greek colonies in Asia, and
thence to Europe, where it has maintained itself with slight variation
to the present day.