sound still more startling, and yet is a fact that can easily be
ascertained by anybody who doubts it--at the present moment, if every
MS. of the Rig-Veda were lost, we should be able to recover the whole
of it--from the memory of the _S_rotriyas in India. These native
students learn the Veda by heart, and they learn it from the mouth of
their Guru, never from a MS., still less from my printed edition--and
after a time they teach it again to their pupils.
I have had such students in my room at Oxford, who not only could
repeat these hymns, but who repeated them with the proper accents (for
the Vedic Sanskrit has accents like Greek), nay, who, when looking
through my printed edition of the Rig-Veda, could point out a misprint
without the slightest hesitation.
I can tell you more. There are hardly any various readings in our MSS.
of the Rig-Veda, but various schools in India have their own readings
of certain passages, and they hand down those readings with great
care. So, instead of collating MSS., as we do in Greek and Latin, I
have asked some friends of mine to collate those Vedic students, who
carry their own Rig-Veda in their memory, and to let me have the
various readings from these living authorities.
Here then we are not dealing with theories, but with facts, which
anybody may verify. The whole of the Rig-Veda, and a great deal more,
still exists at the present moment in the oral tradition of a number
of scholars who, if they liked, could write down every letter, and
every accent, exactly as we find them in our old MSS. Of course, this
learning by heart is carried on under a strict discipline; it is, in
fact, considered as a sacred duty. A native friend of mine, himself a
very distinguished Vedic scholar, tells me that a boy, who is to be
brought up as a student of the Rig-Veda, has to spend about eight
years in the house of his teacher. He has to learn ten books: first,
the hymns of the Rig-Veda; then a prose treatise on sacrifices, called
the Brahma_n_a; then the so-called Forest-book or Ara_n_yaka; then the
rules on domestic ceremonies; and lastly, six treatises on
pronunciation, grammar, etymology, metre, astronomy, and ceremonial.
These ten books, it has been calculated, contain nearly 30,000 lines,
each line reckoned as thirty-two syllables.
A pupil studies every day during the eight years of his theological
apprenticeship, except on the holidays, which are called "non-reading
days." There being 360 days in a lunar year, the eight years would
give him 2880 days. Deduct from this 384 holidays, and you get 2496
working days during the eight years. If you divide the number of
lines, 30,000, by the number of working days, you get about twelve
lines to be learned each day, though much time is taken up, in
addition, for practising and rehearsing what has been learned before.
Now this is the state of things at present, though I doubt whether it
will last much longer, and I always impress on my friends in India,
and therefore impress on those also who will soon be settled as civil
servants in India, the duty of trying to learn all that can still be
learned from those living libraries. Much ancient Sanskrit lore will
be lost forever when that race of _S_rotriyas becomes extinct.
But now let us look back. About a thousand years ago a Chinese of the
name of I-tsing, a Buddhist, went to India to learn Sanskrit, in order
to be able to translate some of the sacred books of his own religion,
which were originally written in Sanskrit, into Chinese. He left China
in 671, arrived at Tamralipti in India in 673, and went to the great
College and Monastery of Nalanda, where he studied Sanskrit. He
returned to China in 695, and died in 703.[271]
In one of his works which we still possess in Chinese, he gives an
account of what he saw in India, not only among his own
co-religionists, the Buddhists, but likewise among the Brahmans.[272]
Of the Buddhist priests he says that after they have learned to recite
the five and the ten precepts, they are taught the 400 hymns of
Mat_rik_eta, and afterward the 150 hymns of the same poet. When they
are able to recite these, they begin the study of the Sutras of their
Sacred Canon. They also learn by heart the _G_atakamala,[273] which
gives an account of Buddha in former states of existence. Speaking of
what he calls the islands of the Southern Sea, which he visited after
leaving India, I-tsing says: "There are more than ten islands in the
South Sea. There both priests and laymen recite the _G_atakamala, as
they recite the hymns mentioned before; but it has not yet been
translated into Chinese."
One of these stories, he proceeds to say, was versified by a king
(_K_ie-zhih) and set to music, and was performed before the public
with a band and dancing--evidently a Buddhist mystery play.
I-tsing then gives a short account of the system of education.
Children, he says, learn the forty-nine letters and the 10,000
compound letters when they are six years old, and generally finish
them in half a year. This corresponds to about 300 verses, each
_s_loka of thirty-two syllables. It was originally taught by
Mahe_s_vara. At eight years, children begin to learn the grammar of
Pa_n_ini, and know it after about eight months. It consists of 1000
_s_lokas, called Sutras.
Then follows the list of roots (dhatu) and the three appendices
(khila), consisting again of 1000 _s_lokas. Boys begin the three
appendices when they are ten years old, and finish them in three
years.
When they have reached the age of fifteen, they begin to study a
commentary on the grammar (Sutra), and spend five years on learning
it. And here I-tsing gives the following advice to his countrymen,
many of whom came to India to learn Sanskrit, but seem to have learned
it very imperfectly. "If men of China," he writes, "go to India,
wishing to study there, they should first of all learn these
grammatical works, and then only other subjects; if not, they will
merely waste their labor. These works should be learned by heart. But
this is suited for men of high quality only.... They should study hard
day and night, without letting a moment pass for idle repose. They
should be like Confucius, through whose hard study the binding of his
Yih-king was three times cut asunder, being worn away; and like
Sui-shih, who used to read a book repeatedly one hundred times." Then
follows a remark, more intelligible in Chinese than in English: "The
hairs of a bull are counted by thousands, the horn of a unicorn is
only one."
I-tsing then speaks of the high degree of perfection to which the
memory of these students attained, both among Buddhists and heretics.
"Such men," he says, "could commit to memory the contents of two
volumes, learning them only once."
And then turning to the _heretics_, or what we should call the
orthodox Brahmans, he says: "The Brahma_n_as are regarded throughout
the five divisions of India as the most respectable. They do not walk
with the other three castes, and other mixed classes of people are
still further dissociated from them. They revere their Scriptures, the
four Vedas, containing about 100,000 verses.... The Vedas are handed
down from mouth to mouth, not written on paper. There are in every
generation some intelligent Brahmans who can recite those 100,000
verses.... I myself saw such men."
Here then we have an eye-witness who, in the seventh century after
Christ, visited India, learned Sanskrit, and spent about twenty years
in different monasteries--a man who had no theories of his own about
oral tradition, but who, on the contrary, as coming from China, was
quite familiar with the idea of a written, nay, of a printed
literature: and yet what does he say? "The Vedas are not written on
paper, but handed down from mouth to mouth."
Now, I do not quite agree here with I-tsing. At all events, we must
not conclude from what he says that there existed no Sanskrit MSS. at
all at his time. We know they existed. We know that in the first
century of our era Sanskrit MSS. were carried from India to China,
and translated there. Most likely therefore there were MSS. of the
Veda also in existence. But I-tsing, for all that, was right in
supposing that these MSS. were not allowed to be used by students, and
that they had always to learn the Veda by heart and from the mouth of
a properly qualified teacher. The very fact that in the later
law-books severe punishments are threatened against persons who copy
the Veda or learn it from a MSS., shows that MSS. existed, and that
their existence interfered seriously with the ancient privileges of
the Brahmans, as the only legitimate teachers of their sacred
scriptures.
If now, after having heard this account of I-tsing, we go back for
about another thousand years, we shall feel less skeptical in
accepting the evidence which we find in the so-called Prati_s_akhyas,
that is, collections of rules which, so far as we know at present, go
back to the fifth century before our era, and which tell us almost
exactly the same as what we can see in India at the present moment,
namely that the education of children of the three twice-born castes,
the Brahma_n_as, Kshatriyas, and Vai_s_yas, consisted in their passing
at least eight years in the house of a Guru, and learning by heart the
ancient Vedic hymns.
The art of teaching had even at that early time been reduced to a
perfect system, and at that time certainly there is not the slightest
trace of anything, such as a book, or skin, or parchment, a sheet of
paper, pen or ink, being known even by name to the people of India;
while every expression connected with what we should call literature,
points to a literature (we cannot help using that word) existing in
memory only, and being handed down with the most scrupulous care by
means of oral tradition.
I had to enter into these details because I know that, with our ideas
of literature, it requires an effort to imagine the bare possibility
of a large amount of poetry, and still more of prose, existing in any
but a written form. And yet here too we only see what we see
elsewhere, namely that man, before the great discoveries of
civilization were made, was able by greater individual efforts to
achieve what to us, accustomed to easier contrivances, seems almost
impossible. So-called savages were able to chip flints, to get fire by
rubbing sticks of wood, which baffles our handiest workmen. Are we to
suppose that, if they wished to preserve some songs which, as they
believed, had once secured them the favor of their gods, had brought
rain from heaven, or led them on to victory, they would have found no
means of doing so? We have only to read such accounts as, for
instance, Mr. William Wyatt Gill has given us in his "Historical
Sketches of Savage Life in Polynesia,"[274] to see how anxious even
savages are to preserve the records of their ancient heroes, kings,
and gods, particularly when the dignity or nobility of certain
families depends on these songs, or when they contain what might be
called the title-deeds to large estates. And that the Vedic Indians
were not the only savages of antiquity who discovered the means of
preserving a large literature by means of oral tradition, we may learn
from Caesar,[275] not a very credulous witness, who tells us that the
"Druids were said to know a large number of verses by heart; that some
of them spent twenty years in learning them, and that they considered
it wrong to commit them to writing"--exactly the same story which we
hear in India.
We must return once more to the question of dates. We have traced the
existence of the Veda, as handed down by oral tradition, from our days
to the days of I-tsing in the seventh century after Christ, and again
to the period of the Prati_s_akhyas, in the fifth century before
Christ.
In that fifth century B.C. took place the rise of Buddhism, a religion
built up on the ruins of the Vedic religion, and founded, so to say,
on the denial of the divine authority ascribed to the Veda by all
orthodox Brahmans.
Whatever exists, therefore, of Vedic literature must be accommodated
within the centuries preceding the rise of Buddhism, and if I tell you
that there are three periods of Vedic literature to be accommodated,
the third presupposing the second, and the second the first, and that
even that first period presents us with a collection, and a systematic
collection of Vedic hymns, I think you will agree with me that it is
from no desire for an extreme antiquity, but simply from a respect for
facts, that students of the Veda have come to the conclusion that
these hymns, of which the MSS. do not carry us back beyond the
fifteenth century after Christ, took their origin in the fifteenth
century before Christ.
* * * * *
One fact I must mention once more, because I think it may carry
conviction even against the stoutest skepticism.
I mentioned that the earliest inscriptions discovered in India belong
to the reign of King A_s_oka, the grandson of _K_andragupta, who
reigned from 259-222 before Christ. What is the language of those
inscriptions? Is it the Sanskrit of the Vedic hymns? Certainly not. Is
it the later Sanskrit of the Brahma_n_as and Sutras? Certainly not.
These inscriptions are written in the local dialects as then spoken in
India, and these local dialects differ from the grammatical Sanskrit
about as much as Italian does from Latin.
What follows from this? First, that the archaic Sanskrit of the Veda
had ceased to be spoken before the third century B.C. Secondly, that
even the later grammatical Sanskrit was no longer spoken and
understood by the people at large; that Sanskrit therefore had ceased,
nay, we may say, had long ceased to be the spoken language of the
country when Buddhism arose, and that therefore the youth and manhood
of the ancient Vedic language lie far beyond the period that gave
birth to the teaching of Buddha, who, though he may have known
Sanskrit, and even Vedic Sanskrit, insisted again and again on the
duty that his disciples should preach his doctrines in the language of
the people whom they wished to benefit.
* * * * *
And now, when the time allotted to me is nearly at an end, I find, as
it always happens, that I have not been able to say one half of what I
hoped to say as to the lessons to be learned by us in India, even with
regard to this one branch of human knowledge only, the study of the
origin of religion. I hope, however, I may have succeeded in showing
you the entirely new aspect which the old problem of the _theogony_,
or the origin and growth of the Devas or gods, assumes from the light
thrown upon it by the Veda. Instead of positive theories, we now have
positive facts, such as you look for in vain anywhere else; and though
there is still a considerable interval between the Devas of the Veda,
even in their highest form, and such concepts as Zeus, Apollon, and
Athene, yet the chief riddle is solved, and we know now at last what
stuff the gods of the ancient world were made of.
But this theogonic process is but one side of the ancient Vedic
religion, and there are two other sides of at least the same
importance and of even a deeper interest to us.
There are in fact three religions in the Veda, or, if I may say so,
three naves in one great temple, reared, as it were, before our eyes
by poets, prophets, and philosophers. Here too we can watch the work
and the workmen. We have not to deal with hard formulas only, with
unintelligible ceremonies, or petrified fetiches. We can see how the
human mind arrives by a perfectly rational process at all its later
irrationalities. This is what distinguishes the Veda from all other
Sacred Books. Much, no doubt, in the Veda also, and in the Vedic
ceremonial, is already old and unintelligible, hard, and petrified.
But in many cases the development of names and concepts, their
transition from the natural to the supernatural, from the individual
to the general, is still going on, and it is for that very reason that
we find it so difficult, nay almost impossible, to translate the
growing thoughts of the Veda into the full-grown and more than
full-grown language of our time.
Let us take one of the oldest words for god in the Veda, such as d e v a,
the Latin _deus_. The dictionaries tell you that d e v a means god and
gods, and so, no doubt, it does. But if we always translated d e v a in
the Vedic hymns by god, we should not be translating, but completely
transforming the thoughts of the Vedic poets. I do not mean only that
_our_ idea of God is totally different from the idea that was intended
to be expressed by d e v a; but even the Greek and Roman concept of gods
would be totally inadequate to convey the thoughts imbedded in the
Vedic d e v a. D e v a meant originally bright, and nothing else. Meaning
bright, it was constantly used of the sky, the stars, the sun, the
dawn, the day, the spring, the rivers, the earth; and when a poet
wished to speak of all of these by one and the same word--by what we
should call a general term--he called them D e v a s. When that had been
done, D e v a did no longer mean "the Bright ones," but the name
comprehended all the qualities which the sky and the sun and the dawn
shared in common, excluding only those that were peculiar to each.
Here you see how, by the simplest process, the D e v a s, the bright ones,
might become and did become the D e v a s, the heavenly, the kind, the
powerful, the invisible, the immortal--and, in the end, something very
like the [Greek: theoi] (or _dii_) of Greeks and Romans.
In this way one Beyond, the Beyond of Nature, was built up in the
ancient religion of the Veda, and peopled with Devas, and Asuras, and
Vasus, and Adityas, all names for the bright solar, celestial,
diurnal, and vernal powers of nature, without altogether excluding,
however, even the dark and unfriendly powers, those of the night, of
the dark clouds, or of winter, capable of mischief, but always
destined in the end to succumb to the valor and strength of their
bright antagonists.
* * * * *
We now come to the second nave of the Vedic temple, the second
_Beyond_ that was dimly perceived, and grasped and named by the
ancient Rishis, namely the world of the Departed Spirits.[276]
There was in India, as elsewhere, another very early faith, springing
up naturally in the hearts of the people, that their fathers and
mothers, when they departed this life, departed to a Beyond, wherever
it might be, either in the East from whence all the bright Devas
seemed to come, or more commonly in the West, the land to which they
seemed to go, called in the Veda the realm of Yama or the setting sun.
The idea that beings which once had been, could ever cease to be, had
not yet entered their minds; and from the belief that their fathers
existed somewhere, though they could see them no more, there arose the
belief in another Beyond, and the germs of another religion.
Nor was the actual power of the fathers quite imperceptible or extinct
even after their death. Their presence continued to be felt in the
ancient laws and customs of the family, most of which rested on their
will and their authority. While their fathers were alive and strong,
their will was law; and when, after their death, doubts or disputes
arose on points of law or custom, it was but natural that the memory
and the authority of the fathers should be appealed to to settle such
points--that the law should still be their will.
Thus Manu says (IV. 178): "On the path on which his fathers and
grandfathers have walked, on that path of good men let him walk, and
he will not go wrong."
In the same manner then in which, out of the bright powers of nature,
the Devas or gods had arisen, there arose out of predicates shared in
common by the departed, such as p i t _r i_ s, fathers, p r e t a, gone
away, another general concept, what we should call _Manes_, the kind
ones, _Ancestors_, _Shades_, _Spirits_, or _Ghosts_, whose worship was
nowhere more fully developed than in India. That common name, P i t _r
i_ s or _Fathers_, gradually attracted toward itself all that the
fathers shared in common. It came to mean not only fathers, but
invisible, kind, powerful, immortal, heavenly beings, and we can watch
in the Veda, better perhaps than anywhere else, the inevitable, yet most
touching metamorphosis of ancient thought--the love of the child for
father and mother becoming transfigured into an instinctive belief in
the immortality of the soul.
It is strange, and really more than strange, that not only should this
important and prominent side of the ancient religion of the Hindus
have been ignored, but that of late its very existence should have
been doubted. I feel obliged, therefore, to add a few words in support
of what I have said just now of the supreme importance of this belief
in and this worship of ancestral spirits in India from the most
ancient to the most modern times. Mr. Herbert Spencer, who has done so
much in calling attention to ancestorship as a natural ingredient of
religion among all savage nations, declares in the most emphatic
manner,[277] "that he has seen it implied, that he has heard it in
conversation, and that he now has it before him in print, that no
Indo-European or Semitic nation, so far as we know, seems to have
made a religion of the worship of the dead." I do not doubt his words,
but I think that on so important a point, Mr. Herbert Spencer ought to
have named his authorities. It seems to me almost impossible that
anybody who has ever opened a book on India should have made such a
statement. There are hymns in the Rig-Veda addressed to the Fathers.
There are full descriptions of the worship due to the Fathers in the
Brahma_n_as and Sutras. The epic poems, the law books, the Pura_n_as,
all are brimful of allusions to ancestral offerings. The whole social
fabric of India, with its laws of inheritance and marriage,[278] rests
on a belief in the Manes--and yet we are told that no Indo-European
nation seems to have made a religion of the worship of the dead.
The Persians had their Fravashis, the Greeks their [Greek: eidola], or
rather their [Greek: theoi patrooi] and their [Greek: daimones],
[Greek: esthloi, epichthonioi, phylakes thneton anthropon;
hoi rha phylassousin te dikas kai schetlia erga,
eera hessamenoi pante phoitontes ep' aian,
ploutodotai] (Hesiodi Opera et Dies, vv. 122-126);[279]
while among the Romans the _Lares familiares_ and the _Divi Manes_
were worshipped more zealously than any other gods.[280] Manu goes so
far as to tell us in one place (III. 203): "An oblation by Brahmans
to their ancestor transcends an oblation to the deities;" and yet we
are told that no Indo-European nation seems to have made a religion of
the worship of the dead.
Such things ought really not to be, if there is to be any progress in
historical research, and I cannot help thinking that what Mr. Herbert
Spencer meant was probably no more than that some scholars did not
admit that the worship of the dead formed the whole of the religion of
any of the Indo-European nations. That, no doubt, is perfectly true,
but it would be equally true, I believe, of almost any other religion.
And on this point again the students of anthropology will learn more,
I believe, from the Veda than from any other book.
In the Veda the Pit_ri_s, or fathers, are invoked together with the
Devas, or gods, but they are not confounded with them. The Devas never
become Pit_ri_s, and though such adjectives as d e v a are sometimes
applied to the Pit_ri_s, and they are raised to the rank of the older
classes of Devas (Manu III. 192, 284, Ya_gn_avalkya I. 268), it is
easy to see that the Pit_ri_s and Devas had each their independent
origin, and that they represent two totally distinct phases of the
human mind in the creation of its objects of worship. This is a lesson
which ought never to be forgotten.
We read in the Rig-Veda, VI. 52, 4: "May the rising Dawns protect me,
may the flowing Rivers protect me, may the firm Mountains protect me,
may the Fathers protect me at this invocation of the gods." Here
nothing can be clearer than the separate existence of the Fathers,
apart from the Dawns, the Rivers, and the Mountains, though they are
included in one common Devahuti, however, or invocation of the gods.