QfarneU Httiucraitg Htbraty BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library BR252 .B98 Religious thought and heresy,,,!", }*}f,, Jjf''''' olin 3 1924 029 233 314 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029233314 RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND HERESY IN THE MIDDLE AGES RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND HERESY IN THE MIDDLE AGES BY THE REV. F. W. BUSSELL, D.D. (Oxon.) Perpetual Curate of Brushford, Devon Rector of Northolt, Middlesex Fellow and sometime Vice-Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford Hampton Lecturer, 1905 LONDON: ROBERT SCOTT ROXBURGHE HOUSE PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G. 1918 ?\5(lt>C|S0 TO THE PRINCIPAL AND FELLOWS OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE A SMALL TOKEN OF GRATITUDE AT THE CLOSE OF THIRTY HAPPY YEARS OF SERVICE IN THEIR MIDST CONTENTS ' Short Analysis PAGE Introduction — Part I. General Scope of the Work „ II. The Church in the Middle Ages and the In- fluences AT Work during 600-1300 a.d. Division A. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia . B. Islam : Its Sects and Philosophy C. Greek Thought and Chaldeism : The Nearer East and Christian Heresy .... D. Authority and Free Thought in the Middle Ages 3 II 301 509 645 Complementary Essays Chapter A. Social and Economic Conditions of Western Christendom after 600 a.d. .... 807 B. The New Influences ..... 829 C. Forces and Needs which Produced the Modern Secular State ; or, The Triumph and Defeat of Nominalism. Appendix : Democratic Absolutism 844 ,, D. The Papacy and the Modern State ; a Study in Transition to Secular and Central Govern- ment ........ 861 1 Indices of proper names and authorities cited will be found after divisions A, C (for B and C), and D, i.e. after pp. 300, 644 and 874. VI Contents Longer Analysis DIVISION A HINDUSTAN AND THE RELIGIONS OF FURTHER ASIA PART I. ARYAN AND DRAVIDIAN CREEDS IN INDIA Chapter A. The Two Racial Factors § i § ii The Aryans ...... (a) The Dravidians of the North . (b) The Dravidians of the South . § iii Brahman and Brahmanism § iv Retrospect on early Indian history 1500-500 B.C. PAGE II 24 30 31 34 Chapter B. The New Military Movement in Thought § V Novel Theories (Autotheism, Sankhya, Yoga). . 38 § vi Theism (c. 500 e.g.) ..... 43 § vii (a) The Bhagavad-Gita and Military Theism . 45 (b) The Bhagavat Church as modified by Alien In- fluences. ....... 50 § viii Analogous Movements towards Theism in Dravidian India ........ 52 Chapter C. Theism and Its Antagonists § ix § xi § xii Sivaite Theology Part A. Its Barbarous Origins ... 56 Note : Barbarous Dravidian Survivals 62 „ B. Its Lofty Development ... 64 The Reforms and Compromises of Sankara the Monist (800 A.D.) ....... 66 Final Form of Autotheism or the Vedania System . 68 Later Development of semi-Theism in Indian Sects . 74 DIVISION A— PART II. THE GREAT HERESIES, OR RATIONAL HUMANISM INTRODUCTION : JAINS AND BUDDHIST INDIVIDUALISM Chapter A. Doctrines of the * Atheistic ' Schools § i Jain Metaphysics .... § ii Jain Ethics ...... § iii General Survey of Jainism .... § iv Buddhism, its Teachings and Motive-force 98 103 106 109 III Contents vii Chapter B. Aims of the New Irreligious Humanism PAGE § V The Monk's Gladness as World-goal . . . ii5 § vi ' Welt-anschauung ' : The Cosmic Order as Moral and Rational . ... .120 § vii (a) Buddhist Philosophy of History . . 123 (6) Conception of Nirvana {or Nibbana) . 126 Note 1 128 Note II. Is Gautama's Doctrine Original ? . 129 § viii Hinduism or the Brahman Recovery and Compromise 1 30 Chapter C. Godless Theories in Hindustan § i Denial of a Supreme Lord . . 135 § ii Materialism . . . .138 DIVISION A. PART III. OBLIGATIONS AND INFLUENCE OF HINDU THEOSOPHY I. Foreign Contact Chapter A. Possible Foreign Influences on Hindu Culture § i Babylon, Persia, Greece . . . . .146 § ii Christianity in Central Asia and Hindustan . .149 Chapter B. The Aryans and the Relations of India and the West § i Hellenic Religion . . . . . .160 § ii Eastern Influence upon early Greek Thought . 169 Chapter C. II. Theology fails to support Morals : Faith sup- plants Works § i Problems of the World as Place of Requital or Moral Arena . . . 177 § ii The Inactive Soul . 183 Chapter D. Antinomian Adiaphory § i Morality superseded by Knowledge 187 § ii State of the Emancipated Soul . .192 DIVISION A. PART IV. MEDIEVAL DEVELOPMENT OF BUDDHISM IN AND BEYOND HINDUSTAN I. In India and China Chapter A. (a) Mahayana or Great Vehicle and Decline of Buddhism in India to iooo a.d. . . 201 ,, (b) Fortunes of Buddhism in Cathay : protests OF Nationalism and Enlightenment . .217 Chapter B. Chinese Buddhism : Fusion with Tao and Doc- trinal Changes ...... 229 VIU Contents II. In Japan and the South Chapter C. Buddhism and its Sects in Japan Chapter D. Part I Buddhism in Mongolia and Tibet , „ II Buddhism in Burma, Siam, Ceylon PAGE 263 278 . 285 ISLAM DIVISION B ITS SECTS AND PHILOSOPHY PART I. PECULIAR DEVELOPMENTS IN SEMITIC CREED AND POLITICS Chapter A. Chapter B. Chapter C. I. Religious Brigandage in Islam Rise of Islam and Fortunes of the Caliphate {A ) Life and Teaching of Mahomet . . 3° I (B) Insoluble Problems of Muslim Law and Government 315 Note A : Tradition. Note B : Ijma. . 318 (C) Internal Conflict and Rationalist Compromise 318 (£)) Gradual Changes in the Central Government : Limits of Autocracy ... . 320 The Antinomian Sects and Shiite Groups. § i Scholastic and Scepticism ..... 346 § ii Religious and Political Sects in Islam : Shiism . 348 § iii Communistic Chiliasm : Incarnationism and Denial of Morality 350 2. Muslim and Hebrew Speculation Sources of Development of ' Arab Philosophy ' : A General Survey. I ' Persian ' School in the East under the liberal Caliphs 384 II Arab Philosophy in Spain .... 392 Chapter D. Development in Jewish Doctrine 400 DIVISION B— PART II. SYNCRETIZING INFLUENCES : PAR- SISM, ISLAM, BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIAN HERESY THE Divine Chapter A. Persian Revolt against Islam ; Imamate ..... . . Chapter B. Buddhism and Heresy : from Quaker to Anarchist § i Early Buddhist Ideals . witness of Asoka and the Hellenes ....... Note : Primitive Type and Name of Bhikku § ii Blend with Lower Cults : Antinomian Nihilism in India and Central Asia .... 424 439 447 447 Contents IX PART II (ii). FINAL FORM OF ARABISM PAGE Chapter C. Culture under the Liberal Caliphate (to Avicenna) § i Foreign Influences in Irak and Arabia . . 452 § ii Farabi and the Basrene Brethren .... 463 § iii Avicenna ........ 469 Chapter D. Doctrine of the Spheres and Active Intellect : averroes § i Theory of God and the World .... § ii Theory of Man and the Reason .... 477 489 DIVISION C GREEK THOUGHT AND CHALDEISM : THE NEARER EAST AND CHRISTIAN HERESY A. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM IN GREECE Part I. Aristotle ... ... Part II. Orphism and Chaldeism, or Astral Theory § i Mystic and Empiric Psychology among the Greeks § ii Babylon and Star-worship ..... B. ZOROASTER'S CREED AND ITS DEVELOPMENT Part III. Parsi Religion and its kindred ; the Gnostics and Mani § i Zoroaster's Dualism ...... § ii Amalgam of Astrology and Mazdeism in the Greek World § iii Soul-A scent and Doctrine of Deliverance (Gnostics) . §iv Gnostic Sects leading to Manicheism Part IV. Mitraism as a Possible World-Religion 509 531 538 542 546 549 555 561 DIVISION D AUTHORITY AND FREE THOUGHT IN THE MIDDLE AGES PART I. THE MONISTIC CHURCH Chapter I. General Introduction to the Period § i Powers and Competence of the Church . . . 645 § ii Characters and Aims of the Enlightened Opposition 655 Chapter II. Austin and Pelagius : The Whole and the Part § i The Donatists and Pelagian Individualism . . 662 § ii Relations of the Divine and the Human Elements (Christology, Anthropology) .... 667 Chapter III. Triumphant Realism § i The Dogmatics and Logical Conclusion of Realism : John Scotus Erigena ..... 672 § ii Mysticism and Philosophy ..... 679 Contents Chapter IV. First Stage of Interrogation page § i The Age of Abelard and Bernard . . . .688 § ii Reaction of Pietism and close of First Scholastic Period 695 PART II. THE DUALISTIC OPPOSITION Chapter V. Dualism travels Westwards § i Vitality of A dopiianism in the East : The Paulician Sectaries ....... § ii Priscillianists and Balkan Schismatics 699 706 Chapter VI. Doubt and Dualism invade the Thought of Monistic Christendom ..... 715 Chapter VII. History of Cathars and Albigenses § i Struggle of Authority and the Sects to 1330 735 § ii Growth in Theory and Practice of Religious Persecution 738 Chapter VIII. The State Church Retaliates § i The Inquisition .... § ii The Holy Office and Secular Statecraft 743 747 Chapter IX. (a) The Mendicant Orders § i The Orthodox Franciscans § ii The False Franciscans or Little Brothers 770 774 (yff) New Movements after 1200 § i The New Apocalyptic : Joachim and his Followers . 777 § ii Fanatics and Puritans in Teutonic Lands . . 784 § iii Materialistic Pantheism : A malric and David . .789 § iv Great Scholastic Systems Challenge of Nominalism . 793 Chapter X. The Templars § i Their Wealth and Sudden Catastrophe § ii Their Indictment and Apologists . 795 802 SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS Preface ........... 807 A. Social and Economic Conditions of Christendom after 600 : Chief Impulses to Development § i Under Theodoric and Charles the Great . . . 807 § ii Rise of the Communes : New Monetary Basis for Social Exchange . . . . . .816 § iii Influence of the Church : Commercial Morality and Slavery : Foreig n Stimuli . . . .821 Contents XI B. Social Units (i) The Village (ii) Evolution of the Town and Borough § I . The Roman Type : German Free-towns . § 2. Municipal Life in Medieval Italy . § 3. The French Communes § 4. Growth of the Borough System in England PAGE 829 . 832 837 . 839 c. Forces and Needs that produced the Modern Secular State ; or the Triumph and Defeat of Nominalism § I. New Powers succeed to the Heritage of the In- competent Rulers : Royalty and Economics . § 2. Political Theory (1300) ; Dante and Marsilius § 3. Civilian Absolutism . The desaro-papism of Frederic II ..... . § 4. Democratic Absolutism aimed against Papal Claims ....... D. The Papacy and the Modern State (a Study in Central and Secular Government) . . ..... 850 852 856 861 (Series I) Appendix A. f> B. C. )j D. )j E. F. >> G. (Series Appendis H) : H. 71 I. )» J- (Series III) Appendix K. It L. M. N. (Series Appendix IV) 0. P. Q. APPENDICES TO DIVISION A PAGE The Sankhya : a further inquiry into its origin from upanisad doctrine . . ..... .82 Parentage and Asceticism ; the Conflict of Ideals . . . 85 ' Autotheism ' or Spiritual Pantheism ..... 88 The Vedas supplanted and disparaged ; Indifierentism in morals as well as ritual . ... ... 90 Pessimism : how far is the name justified ? .... 92 Atman and the Problem of Divine Transcendence ... 93 Soul-migration ......... 95 Indian History Part I. Northern Dynasties, Hindu Dynasties after Alexander 142 „ II. Native Dynasties in the South . . . 144 Infusion of Mongol and Semitic Element .... 145 Table of Nestorian Missions in Asia ...... 325 Vedantine Attitude to Gods : Eternal Realm of Platonic Forms or Archetypes ......... 195 ' The Twofold Truth ' .... ... 197 Sankara's Use of the Upanisads. ...... 199 Return of Blessed Soul to Life as Missioner .... 199 Sources of Indian Buddhism . . . . . . .211 Buddha, personal or impersonal : a Prophet or the Truth ?. . 212 Transition to the Mahayana 221 xli Contents PAGE (Series V) Appendix R. Present Condition of Buddliism as a religious system in Ctiina . 238 „ S (i). China's Debt to India : Syncretism of Buddhism and Tao . 240 „ S (ii). Tao and Buddha's teaching of a Moral World-Order . . 240 „ T (i). The;Series of Quietist Patriarchs until their Settlement in China 242 „ T (ii). Chief Events and Dogmatic Conflicts in China before Bodhid- harma's arrival ......... 243 „ U (i). Bodhidharma's arrival : his Contemplative Nihilism and its Affinities ......... 245 U (ii). Bodhidharma's Reaction and Pure Faith from Book-Learning . 247 ,, V. Chinese Translators of Buddhist Scriptures .... 249 ,, W (i). Further Decadence amid Continual Protests of the Confucian Party 250 „ W (ii). Buddhism under the Mongols, Sungs and Manchus. . . 253 „ X. Letters and Philosophy in the Far East i. In China 255 / ii. In Japan ......... 256 ,, Y. Conflict of Ideals in Buddhism : Arhat or Bodhisatva ? . 258 (Series VI) Table of Principal Events in the Religious History of Japan . . . 269 Appendix A. Present Condition of Buddhism in Japan : Self Criticism . 270 ,, B. Buddhism in Ceylon .... . 294 „ C. Theistic Development in Buddhism : Adibudclha, Avalokitesvara 295 „ D. Theism in Nepal : Adibuddha . . . . 298 APPENDICES TO DIVISION B (Series I) Appendix AA. Schools of Legal Interpretation 314 (Series II) Appendix A. Development under Ommiads and Abbasids .... 333 (i) To the End of Arab Supremacy (750) . . .... 333 (ii) The Masters or Persecutors of the Abbasid Caliphate to its extinction . 337 (iii) Retrospect : Causes of Decline ........ 343 Appendix B. The Carmathians : an Independent Rebel State .... 353 C. The Fatimite Caliphate : a Rival and Schismatic Dynasty . 354 „ D. The Druzes . . .... 359 „ E. Maronites and Nosairi ........ 363 ,, F. Surviving Congeners of Anatolic Religion : Kizil Bash and Yezidi 365 „ G. The Assassins ...... ... 367 Table of Dates in Assassin Chronicles . . 371 „ H. A Modern Derivative : Freemasonry . . 371 „ I. Sufism and the Dervishes ........ 374 „ 00. Three Semitic Speculators [out of place] ..... 326 (Series III) Appendix J. Political Fortunes of the Jewish People 409 K. ["Jewish Thought in the Middle Age : Movements leading to the Cabbala 412 Note : Modern Opinion on the Cabbala .... 422 (Series IV) Appendix L. Syncretism in Ismailian Preaching : Further Details on Fatimite Egypt and the State of Bahrein ..... 431-447 (Series V) Appendix' M. Averroism : Modern Analogies 502 Contents xni (Series I) Appendh : A. »> B. (Series 11) Appendix ; C. )) D. E. >> F. (Series Ill) Appendix :G. H. (Series IV) Appendix I. Appendix J. (Series V) Appendix K. APPENDICES TO DIVISION C Greek Demonology and King- worship . Platonic Soul-Theory (as Demon) PAGE 528 529 Dr. Mills' estimate of the Avesta ...... 544 The Fravashi (as Guardian-angels, Archetypes and Sphere-Spirits) 557 Further Details on Mitra .... . . 566 Successive Modifications in Parsi Religion : Manicheism as Final Product .......... 569 The Magi : Dualism and Origin of Evil ..... Some Ambiguous Sects (i) Essenes and Therapeuts ...... (ii) Nazarenes and Ebionites : the earlier form of the ' Clemen- tines '......... (iii) Further Note on Ebionism .... Further Notes on the Sources and Affinities of Gnosis (i) The Systems of Valentine and Basilides .... (ii) Anti-Semitism and the Judaizers : Ophites, Cainites, and others . ....... Further Notes on the Mandeans, Sabians and the Star-worship of Harran (i) The Mandean Survival in Chaldea . . . . (ii) The Sabians — genuine and pseudonymous (iii) The Mandeans (Brandt's latest account) .... Further remarks on the System of Mani ..... Historic Origins of Christian Pantheism : Hellenizing Tendencies and their Culmination . ...... Part V. Final Result of Mystical Development in the East Appendix M. Pantheism in Edessa : Bar-sudaili N. The Euchite Sect Note : Anarchic Dualism : Mazdak and Babek 576 581 585 587 589 599 601 607 608 612 621 633 638 642 618 Appendix A. f) B. SJ C. >} D. It E. APPENDICES TO DIVISION D Further Details in the History of the Paulicians . 705 Waldenses ..... . • 732 Long Persecution of Heresy and Witchcraft : its Motives . 752 Free Thought in the Courts of Southern France . . 757 Popular Dualism : attested by Folklore . . 761 Note : Reineke Fuchs . . ' • 766 Manichee Revivalism in Modern Russia . 767 Note : Beghards and Beguines . . . • 786 Antichrist and Christian Chiliasm . • • 792 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages INTRODUCTION PART I General Scope of the Work This work is intended to throw light upon the motives and developments of religion in its social aspects during the Middle Age. This period begins with the rise of religion to secular power in the Papacy and in Islam ; it ends in the West with the disap- pearance of the Medieval Empire, the Church's rival, and all its representative ideals. It is one of the most fertile and incon- sistent ages in the history of religion : everywhere in West and East alike it gathers up and remoulds the past into new forms. At every point we are obliged to retrace our steps far backwards to arrive at the primitive source and origin of later phenomena. It is not pretended that the descent or affiliation of beliefs in East and West is clearly proved ; all that is clear is that from the earliest times there has been current the same limited number of solutions for the cosmic and religious problem, so that a knowledge of the past can only be obtained by a patient study of the whole. One excuse for gathering at first sight unwieldy and disparate material may be pleaded : it is only within the last few years that the special studies of experts in oriental matters has been freely placed at the disposal of amateurs or general students. Only recently has it become possible to appreciate the true meaning e.g. of buddhism, or to codify the new views on the most primitive 2 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages creeds of Hindustan, and the earliest character of our kinsmen, its invaders. Yet without this help it would be hopeless to estimate the influences at work in our period upon the world's religions. In studying the evolution of hindu thought, perhaps closely connected with the remarkable developments of Islam under the Caliphate, in tracing the blends of Chaldeism and greek peripatetic philo- sophy with Christian, parsi, or arabian ideas — the chief aim before the writer has of course been the illustration of western movements within or just outside the Catholic Church. Light is thrown upon that notable decay of Idealism in Europe which follows the overthrow of Emperor and Pope as effective forces. The writer's standpoint will be already familiar to readers of the Bampton Lectures for 1905.^ The importance of such figures as Frederic II and Phihp the Fair is due to their heralding of the purely secular aims and powers of the modern State. Again, the savage repression of heresy as a contagion inimical to the whole social life can only be explained and (to a certain extent) justified when all the circumstances are understood. The break up of the attempted Monism of the medieval Church-State divided .human life into the competitive nations, and hostile departments in which we find it to-day. Henceforth unity can be achieved not by a harmony or reconcilement of the parts — as Scholastic and the Holy Roman Empire hoped — but by a resolute denial of them, by refusal to recognize this region of the diverse and particular : that is, by a return to the very ancient Absolutism of India. It cannot be doubted that the cultured and enlightened class gained in the following ages a very substantial measure of freedom and of toleration, owing to the decay of moral conviction and of rehgious belief. But it will be seen how slowly this has been won and how little the average individual, who is neither cultured nor enlightened, has gained in the process. It cannot be said that the present study warrants any very bright hopes for the immediate future of mankind ; but it will serve to illustrate some permanent phases and tendencies of the human mind, some fundamental hopes and beliefs which no perfectly organized secular State can satisfy or abolish. 1 He is permitted to refer to a very thoughtful survey and sympathetic appreciation of his ideas by the Reverend John Lendrum, M.A., of Elgin {InUrpreUr, July 1Q15). The Church in the Middle Ages and the Influences at Work 3 It will be impossible to escape blame in the matter and arrangement of a work claiming to cover so wide a survey. There will be grave difference of opinion as to the relative importance of passages in large and small type : some parts will be deemed wholly superfluous or out of place by strict critics, and in others a certain repetition of material (which to the writer seems unavoidable) will be held up to rebuke. The aim has been to make each section complete in itself. The whole book is but part of a comprehensive study of Human Thought and Ideals from the dawn of history — a work only rendered possible to a sjmthetizing philosopher by the patient labour and research which has been displayed by recent specialists. That completeness or accuracy in such a synoptic attempt is beyond the reach of any one student must not deter the human mind from making it. Philosophy, often merely barren and d, priori, must be wedded to the new wealth of material opened by historic inquiry before it can serve the purpose of a wider circle than that of a few mystics or quietists. The restoration of western ideals after the present war will indeed depend mainly upon native instincts, feelings and convictions. But a truer knowledge of the past will help us to avoid the foolish compla- cence, shallow optimism, narrow prejudice, or culpable blindness which, in spite of its achievement in many departments of life, will for ever be considered the true marks of the nineteenth century. PART II The Church in the Middle Ages and the Influences at work during 600—1300 a.d. Assured Conviction of the Church.- — Authority in the Middle Ages must always suggest the Church : strictly speaking her rival, the State, did not possess or use authority, either as policy firmly conceived and inflexibly carried out, or as coercive power able to enforce its rules over a wide area without respect of person or privilege. Only the Church knew its own mind, and had made out a definite system or program of living for its subjects, which comprised both this world and the next, and met and satisfied (as was believed) every human need and aspiration. In exer- cising this social power churchmen were assured and unhesitating, fully convinced that they had a divine mission to the world and represented in their tutelage the best and final form of earthly polity. In other classes of society, shut out from each other by exclusive franchises, faulty intercourse and above all, by mutual ignorance, there was no assurance and no conviction. Elsewhere uncertainty and improvisation. — Kings had no 4 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages theory of their rights except what from time to time the Chm^ch taught them. The exquisite and formal symmetry of the feudal system was a legal or artistic fiction, which only arose when the substance had passed away : the laws of chivalry were only codified when there were no more knights. The town-centres had no exact plan of municipal politics ; merchants schemed and made leagues from day to day : it was use and necessity and circum- stance, not human foresight, that crystalhzed their institutions. Only the Church was sure of itself and frankly believed that it held within its grasp all mysteries and the key to every secret of life. This is true both in East and West ; we must not forget Byzantium when we speak of the Middle Age. In both a sacro- sanct power, a mixed sacerdotium and regnum, represented and sus- tained the final form of Christ's kingdom, so far as this could be realized upon earth. First great event : rise of Islam. — Now the first great event in our period is the rise of Islam. Fear of this menace was the great lever in politics, East and West, during the greater part of it : we need no further witness that the old self-conscious spirit, defensive yet bold, has passed away for ever when Pius II preaches a last crusade to unheeding ears, when Alexander VI and Francis I make covenants with the Great Turk. Results of Crusades — disintegrating. — Much earlier than this, the result of the Crusades (rapidly becoming secular movements of worldly greed and ambition) and the incoming of arab philo- sophy, suggested to the lay world that the danger was not after all so terrible and that the two creeds and cultures had more in common than was supposed. Against this easy tolerance the Church protested with all her might. Attacks on Christian Orthodoxy : (i) Iconoclasm. — In the East, orthodoxy was attacked by the Iconoclasts {717-842 ; with some intervals) who had doubtless borrowed much as thinkers from the muslim, against whom they fought as emperors. (2) Paulicians. — Half a century before Leo III the Syrian, that pecuHar movement of heresy emerged into the Hght which we know under the names of pauUcian, bogomile, catharist and finally albigensian. This was only externally Hnked with the muslim attack on eastern Christendom ; for in doctrine it had httle in common. But it arose because the monopoly of the orthodox church had been challenged, and an opening was given The Church in the Middle Ages and the Influences at Work 5 to sectarian malcontents to express their feelings and possibly regain their liberty. The paulician heresy is a lengthy and unfinished chapter in byzantine history ; its remnants were not merely discovered in cent, xii by Alexius Comnenus, but survive to the present hour ; the rapid advance of Islam in Bosnia and Albania owed much to the sympathy and adherence of the sect. (3) Albigenses : The chief foes of Christendom in the west. — The movement, passing westwards and settHng where Islam had been expelled or at least humbled by Charles Martel, became the chief foe of that organized churchly society of which Rome was the centre and stronghold. If we are tracing, not the rest- less and opportunist movements of barons or traders fighting for their own hand, but the striving of independent thought, we can- not deny that the suppression of heresy and the extirpation of a wholly alien element in the populace seemed to be the chief need of the church — even if we hesitate to admit that it was the chief duty. Panic of the Church as the only State with convictions and a policy. — The fact remains plain to be seen (whatever our verdict) that the Church was terribly afraid of the new spirit and shrank in the end from no cruelty that it might be rid of it for ever. In cent, xi it was already conscious of the enemy within the gate before it went forth to attack Islam in its own house. Per- secution began early in that century and in the first stages marked a new departure in civil policy rather than in ecclesiastical : the pious king Robert was ' consenting unto the death ' of the canons of Orleans, and at first it was feared that the clergy would be supine in the repression of heresy. As time went on and the brilliant society of Southern France, while openly scof&ng at heresy, became more and more heretical, the Church became thoroughly alarmed. It was not the petulance of resentful dog- matists that kindled the fires but the genuine fear that an anti- social poison was penetrating mankind, that the future of Christen- dom was at stake and the faith itself in jeopardy. Although this panic changed its object later, it was the same feeling that prompted the savage pursuit of witches in the most enlightened and humane countries down to the year 1700. Only in the very last years of cent, xii was a radical attempt made by Innoccent III to stamp out heresy ; after the Albigenses were suppressed as a ' political ' 6 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages party the Inquisition still continued the task of uprooting any sporadic growth of ' free thought.' In Spain, the chief zone of danger from the earliest times, the Holy Office has not to-day been aboHshed for a full century. In Russia and Latin America it is still possible to find traces of the old intolerance which sprang from fear and was in the main a popular movement, only headed by Authority lest worse things befall if hostile feelings were left to uncontrolled mob-law. Just at the same time (1200) there entered the last and most insidious phase of eastern thought, in the commentators and translators (both Arab and Jew) who brought in an heretical philosophy through Spain from the extreme East : ' Averroism ' (as it was somewhat unfairly called) forms a long episode in our period, perhaps only of late years reduced to its proper perspective and true proportions. The new learning stirred the mental powers to recover an earlier and now lost truth, sometimes moving the mind to science, sometimes to strange apocalyptic vision ; now to a conviction that a fresh outpouring of the Spirit was im- pending, now to pantheistic denial of all explicit revelation or positive religion, now to a defiant sectarian communism, now to the wild self-torture of ascetic individualism. Whatever the form, all were animated by a genuine hostility to the powers that were and to the established Church-state, within which nations, no less than individuals, were growing up to self-consciousness and a demand for free expansion. Aristotle first as foe then ally : harmony of Reason and Faith. — The Church, on the defensive, after an early ban placed upon Aristotle, was thankful to recognize a useful ally in him on closer acquaintance : he was pronounced to be our Saviour's prae- cursor in naturalibus and under his guidance dogma was finally elaborated into a complete system of rational thought. For Albert and Aquinas are rather apologists than dogmatic formalists of set purpose : their aim is to show (for how brief a space !) the complete accord of the faith and reason, of acceptance on belief and conviction by argument, which had been already challenged by the Double Truth. Apostasy and Collapse of the Empire. — Meantime in the political world the empire, for long the partner, but sometimes the reformer, of the spiritual power, had suddenly apostatized in Frederic II. From the East again had come that belief in The Church in the Middle Ages and the Influences at Work 7 many incarnations of the divine which, foisting itself on the barren and wholly uncongenial ground of Islam, had contrived to beget strange heresies, sects and development in Irak and Egypt and at last took possession of the unbalanced brain of that King of Sicily, who, by a strange irony, was also Roman Emperor. Sternness of Church justified. — Of his sympathy with musHm in creed and politics there was no doubt whatever ; nor of his hatred of the papacy. We may regret the atrocities of the albigensian Crusade but we can justify and explain the sternness of the chief agents. So in the sad disaster of the welf and wibelline quarrel we must recognize that the fears and hostility of the popes were well grounded : was heresy to be rooted out in Provence only to be permanently enthroned with Caesar ? Mean- time, to complete the tragic drama of the Middle Ages, the pope only triumphed over his rival and became for a brief moment the sole leader of Europe, to succumb to the rising forces of national- ism, and to vanish as an effective factor until the humbler and more spiritual days of the great Counter- Reformation. Divisions of the work : The movements of ' Free Thought ' leading to bondage. — It will be our task to trace the mission and influence of oriental thought from the earliest days of Hindustan, through Persia to the west, down to the heresy which reached its zenith about 1200 ; next the rise of arab philosophy (so-called) in Islam, and its effects on western thought ; the independent growth of antinomian or ascetic doctrines on the fringe of the churches : and lastly the new system of government and politics which appeared first in Frederic II the herald and pioneer of the modern absolutist and secular State. All these are move- ments of ■ free thought ' — by no means in the sense of a desire to attain individual freedom for life and conduct, but as protests against a visible system which prescribed a single and (as it was held) erroneous view of the universe and man's place within it. Heresy represents pre-Christian ideas. — For the heretics were an off-shoot of a pre-Christian theory of the world, with which had been embodied certain early and imperfect Christian ideas : they demanded a freedom and tolerance for this view which would in the end have destroyed all civil and rehgious supremacy in the Church-state. The new philosophy again, in part mystic and in part naturalistic, displaced man from the position of 8 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages central exclusiveness given by the Christian scheme of redemption. Henceforth the mark of the irreconcilable party was to believe the universe ' uncreated and eternal,' the human unit a passing and accidental phase of a single Being. Here again was a claim put forward to hold tenets which, however destructive of the social and religious framework no less than of individual hopes and worth, might certainly bear the collective name ' free- thought.' In the last and most^ conspicuous sphere, that of the State, a violent revolution occurred, in the rejection of a moral and ecumenical power or arbiter, in the recognition of the new secular claim of localism and nationality, ruled with coercive and summary force by a king who resented any papal counsels or intervention. Here, once more, there is little (as we know to-day) that makes for freedom in any ordinary or accepted meaning : the impersonal State and its absolute ruler may be technically free but the individual subject is not. In place of the intermittent violence of the medieval mesne-lord he was subject henceforth to the hourly control and dictation of the state official. Protest of Nominalism and Individualism in Renaissance. — Finally then we have to notice one last phase, which inaugurates a conflict which is raging as fiercely in our own age as in any other. The Renaissance and the ' humanism ' it brought with it really demanded, what the other movements had not pursued, personal freedom of thought and action, liberty for the subject to en- franchise himself from servitude to the great objectives — church, state, gild, corporation, dogma, tradition, moraUty — and to lead his own life. This is the first movement of Individualism, which produces then and in all subsequent time the conflict of the two ultimate and irreconcilable sovereignties — of the State and of the Individual. An inquiry then into the causes and demands of this consciously atomic tendency must complete any survey of the struggle of free-thought against Authority : — because in it alone does any element appear of that which we understand to-day by the term Liberty. Thus keeping the title Authority for the system, poHcy and control of Rome we shall find, after the first onslaught of Islam, definitely hostile forces or momenta in the defiance or challenge thrown down : — ^to the Christian rehgion itself, the last effort of a pagan and pre-Christian world-theory allied with many Christians resentful of church abuses : to the dogmatic exposition of the Faith on the part of a The Church in the Middle Ages and the Influences at Work 9 small circle of philosophers, uniting elements from the first group with peripatetic and later platonic teaching : against clericaUsm or churchly and papal supervision on the part of the modem nation-state and its secularizing rulers — in effect, a claim to restrict morality and submission to the private life of citizens and subjects and to set the state-organism free from moral restraint : lastly (the only case in which the unit becomes pro- minent and is seen fighting for his own hand) the movement towards individual liberty of choice in the ideals and theories of life against the (supposed) exclusiveness of the churchly ideal. First, it will be needful to describe clearly the sources both of orthodoxy and of heretical theories and to inquire carefully into the earliest movements in India, the last results both of patristic learning and of independent greek thought, — the rehgious schemes of redemption that met and blended with it in Syria and Chaldea. DIVISION A Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia PART I Aryan and Dravidian Creeds in India CHAPTER A. THE TWO RACIAL FACTORS Section I. The Aryans Study of hindu thought : a needful part of our inquiry. — We cannot to-day exclude the forms of Indian thought and religion from any survey that claims to be inclusive. To com- prehend th ese phases, slowly revealing to the reverent and careful study of the west, does not imply dogmatism about origins, influence, indebtedness. There is no reason, for example, to seek for actual connection between the names and persons and teachings of Buddha, Confucius and Pythagoras in that movement of the years 550-500 which must be called the Great Awakening of the human intellect. But a parallel treatment of these kindred tendencies can hardly be avoided ; — in any case one will be found to illustrate the other and to exhibit, by the strange points of contact or contrast, if not the actual borrow- ing of a disciple, at least the fundamental unity of our human mind. To omit mention of eastern thought in this epoch [600- 1300) is both unwise and unfair, for even if the origins be inde- pendent and isolated, we must allow in a later period for a large margin of actual intercourse and unconscious influence. If the chief age of medieval thought was awakened to life by Arabs and Albigenses [1200-1300], the behefs of these schools, flourish- ing on the extreme borders of the west, have their roots deeply U 12 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages but obscurely planted in the further east. Averroes impHes not merely the whole circuit of greek thought but a steady Persian influence and a certain element from Hindustan. If Mani stands behind the whole anti-Christian movement (cul- minating, ignorant of its strange parentage, in our Reformation) behind Mani again Hes the entire evolution of Indian asceticism, — though it may not be easy to show how far the great heresi- arch was consciously indebted to this. It is certainly possible to trace from India (known through Alexander) a stimulus to hellenic quietism, though this is by no means the chief formative influence : just as Plotinus is a true Greek completing the work of Plato, Aristotle and the subjective schools, but at the same time stands within the area of genuine eastern influence and finds in its teaching, not the origin, but the ratification, of his prejudices. Thus once again our own rehgion is quite indepen- dent in its doctrinal system of any purely mechanical impression from without, but it is not an accident (nor a mark of servi- tude) that these dogmas are cast in the forms set by greek thought and meet and satisfy aspirations sent up by the reflective eastern mind from the very dawn of history. It is not there- fore in any assertive spirit that we begin to survey the 'religious feeUng of mankind in the Dark Ages on the indian continent — a land whose forms of thought and belief have impressed by far the greater part of our race from the earliest times. Novelty and difficulty of the synoptic 'Problem.' — It is only of late years that such a survey is in any degree possible. We are not even now fully acquainted with the material for an exhaustive study or a final judgment. But it is not too much to say that within these first years of this century new light has been thrown, not only on the material but on the interpretation, of every historic problem. In the matter of Comparative Religion, the result is perhaps the most strik- ing. But the task of the earliest systematizers is all the more difficult. The complexity of special work in the rapidly multiplying sub-departments of knowledge places a synoptic inquiry beyond the power of any single student, and any such venture must seem an impertinence. In this attempt at harmony every general statement ought to leave behind it such a full knowledge of the particulars as is unattainable. The older commonplaces and truisms must receive careful scrutiny Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 13 and be accepted with reserve and on trial. The calm assurance of the western mind in relation to life's problems and aims — an attitude, however, largely assumed to hide our growing doubts and anxieties — must certainly be profoundly modified in the course of the present war. To contrast and compare other stan- dards in a humble spirit must in any case be one outcome at least ; and for some time to come there will be either a suspension of impartial scliolarship or at least such a rift between its chief professors and representatives as must gravely hinder further unification. Thus, though the present seems a fitting moment for trying to adjust the particulars of specialized study, such an effort must of course be merely tentative and provisional. It will be no shame to have failed, but rather not to have attempted — in a time when to lie fallow and become sterile is criminal alike in student and in man of action. Doubtful points in Aryan History. — Most of the nations of Europe are related in some obscure way to the so-called ' Aryans ' of India and Persia, if only through their common tongue. But the first home and later diffusion of the ' aryan race ' are still under dispute : and the proportion of Hindus who are genuine kinsmen to western peoples, classical or modern, is very doubtful. Few historical subjects are more obscure. It is again very uncertain what culture and faith the settlers in Punjab (c. 1800-1500 at the earUest) and Ganges-valley {1500-1000) brought with them. Critics tend to discredit their superiority to the native races, chiefly in S. India ; who, for long remaining aloof and untouched by their influence, produced when the time came their own literature and reUgious forms, and to-day preserve both in popular rites and educated belief a genu- ine independence thinly veiled under recognition of the brahman caste. We know now that the aim of this caste has been every- where and at all times the same ; to preserve continuity and avoid sudden rupture, to smooth over violent opposition and effect compromise, to acknowledge and admit every indigenous form of worship (subject to its own general control) and to arrange quite irreconcilable standards of Ufe and creed in a formally perfect series or hierarchy. In any case we must carefully analyze what we can discover of Aryan and Dravidian origins and (so far as is possible) refer to each its due share in the final blend. Original home and religion ? — The original equipment of the 14 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages aryan mind seems very inferior and it will be our first task to inquire how far its claims can be justified. Since Gruppe, we have been taught to mistrust the loftiness of aryan religious sense, though we may be reluctant to agree that they were ' devoid of religion ' and borrowed all that they exhibit from Asia or from Egypt ! Their domestic purity has been assailed as well : they were free neither from Shamanism nor Sail : it seems proved (in the opinion of many credible authors) that the lingam-cvlt, formerly referred to the ' low and sensuous Dravidian native ', was in truth introduced by the northern immigrant. One thing is certainly clear : the early immigrants were at no higher stage in culture and thought than Homer's Acheans or their later kinsfolk the Norsemen,^ — whose inroad created modern Europe, just as the two former conquests (or perhaps infiltrations) created India and Greece and Italy. Such a chival- rous society of nobles and their dependants has in any age its specific virtues, but among them religious coherence and depth of thought are not conspicuous. If the marvellous later develop- ment is really due to aryan thought, it is under the strong in- fluence of climate and native ideas : just as ' greek philosophy ' is a blend and most certainly not the peculiar product of a con- quering tribe from the north. In both countries the nucleus must have been suppHed by the deep brooding spirit of the long-settled original inmates, Dravidian or Mgean, — just as our prominent norman scholastics may have promoted, but assuredly did not originate, medieval philosophy. Extent of influx and influence doubtful. — If we have reason to doubt the extent of both the influx and influence of Aryans in India, it has been reserved for a native, Iyengar, ^ to deny their arrival altogether : ' between 2000 and 1000 there was. no ' appreciable racial drift, but a foreign tongue and culture were ' somehow adopted by tribes later taking the name aryan to ' distinguish their race from other natives and neighbours.' This may be an extreme statement but it is a natural reaction against a most unfair emphasis. The exact proportion of culture given and received by either factor will never be known ; but it will not again be forgotten that the peninsulas of the world — 1 Jouvn. Roy. As. Soc. 1912 — a conclusion which Risley, the famous author of the Census Report 190 1, seems also inclined to accept. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia i$ India, Greece, Italy — must contain the most mixed peoples and on this account the most complex and perhaps most perfect civihzations. A theory has even been started that the buddhist movement is not aryan at all, but comes from a burman-malay source of the furthest east, wholly at variance in its extreme quietism and world-surrender with the instincts of aryan Ksa- triyas (even allowing for some centuries of an enervating climate in Ganges-valley). Low stage of primitive culture : the two cults, sotds and spirits. — ^The incoming aryan tribes, if assumed at all, were at a low stage of culture, not much superior to that of the indigens whom they dispossessed in the north. Certain primitive features common to all users of aryan dialects may be distinguished in them. They had (like most people) two quite separate worships — of souls and of spirits. The cult of the Fathers (pitara), hopelessly irreconcilable either with their nature-cult or specu- lation, still holds its own to-day, — the reUgion of a continuous family line, in which the several members fit in as links in a chain having but little personal import and no further duty beyond handing on the torch of life. Fustel de Coulanges is here com- pletely justified, often as he has been assailed, for his stress on patriarchal institutions and the domestic cult of the hearth. The whole social and religious life of India from earliest times has depended on a cult of ancestors, which makes celibacy in- conceivable or a heinous sin, and regards the unit as one in an undying series or unbroken chain. The extreme individualism of the later subjective reaction cannot be harmonized by any logical experiment, and therefore, as in the case of castes, the different schools are merely superimposed. There still survives in parts of White Russia that combined reverence and fear of the departed which is probably common to the whole aryan family : dis- respect and neglect bring all sorts of evil, family quarrels, loss of crops and cattle, even the faUing of the hills on guilty survivors. When ancestors are begged to intercede with a supreme being, we have clearly a later compromise with an imported rehgion (in the stricter sense) : at first (as in every savage tribe) they are independent powers, world-rulers with effective control over their descendants' fortunes. To-day Indians ask the pitara for chil- dren. These souls are invited at set times to return to the world they have left, but when they have partaken of good cheer and 1 6 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages kindly welcome they are again urged to depart. (So Indians, Letts, and classical Greeks, cf. Harrison's Prolegomena). The family ghosts are a peevish crew, sensitive to slight, and apt to take offence on trivial pretext, ryptue? Svaopyrjroi k. ;(/a\e7roi Tolf i/nreXd^ova-i. The truculent ghost AchiUes demanding human victims and revived from a shadow-life by gory draughts is the true type. In all funeral customs fear and respect, affec- tion and dislike seem almost equally blended. Survival of the Dead : {a) in the tomb ; (6) in some distant paradise. — Meantime rehgious belief as to the future lot of the dead has altered : at first the dead man lives on in the tomb, surrounded by objects needful in this life and so presumably in the next, carefully protected from damage to his bodily envelope or at least to his osseous structure. To the same stratum of eschatology belong the cairn or dolmen-tombs of the megalithic builders all over the world, from the west and north of Europe through Africa and Palestine to India, Corea and Japan : not other were the earliest beliefs of Egypt, in providing the god- king with an indestructible body and an eternal abode. Nearly everywhere (as in the Roman forum) burial and burning are found together, but burning is the later usage and implies a new theory of the Soul. There are signs in Early Bronze Age of a decay of this primitive faith in ancestors living near descendants in their cemetery and taking heed of their fortunes from a short distance. The neolithic peoples inter ; only after an interval and in the Bronze Age do they cremate their dead. The horror felt by the different tribes (in Herodotus' well-known story) for each others' funeral customs accurately reflects the gulf between the two stages of thought. The aim is no longer to protect the material frame, to confine it to the sepulchre that it may not become vampire, and to offer respectful homage on set occasions — but to purify and set free from all earthly contagion that principle which must be called spiritual. As long as the body lasts, the poor soul is tied to it, and instead of being preserved this material vehicle must be destroyed : gifts once lowered into the tomb are now burnt with it, or at least broken, to ensure a pas- sage to the other world. ^ New homes and paradises are dis- 1 It may here be said once and for all that the attempt to exonerate the aryan family from Sati has failed ; it is a practice common all the Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 17 covered for the soul thus set free, — often in the west, according to a myth (no doubt solar) found in nearly every savage race. The tribal cemetery no longer confines the ancestor ; he has gone on a much longer journey from home : the ground which is truly holy is remote, not near at hand. Remote Homes for dead according to desert. — It is easy to trace here the effect of migration and conquest. Kingly families are descended from the Sun and their representatives return like Pharaoh to the heaven which has only lent them to earth for a season. Breasted (writing on the Osiriac Cult) and others have well traced the moralizing and democratizing process which trans- formed this eschatology : ^ the heaven of divine favouritism, or by right of birth, becomes less exclusive ; it is opened to all and is gained by goodness : in like manner the small Hades or tartarus of a few ' paradigmatic ' criminals is prepared for the purging and punishment of all sinners of whatever rank. The Way of the Fathers is the simplest and most ancient scheme in Hindustan, and the next life is a family reunion (just as the continuance of the family on earth may be due to a return of ancestors in a new birth). To their tribal god the Gets of Hero- dotus send at intervals envoys, and willing victims immolated on spears — like Frazer's ' divine victims ' all over the world. This home lies beyond the earthly surface, in sun or moon : but it can never wholly replace the original abode of the dead in or under the earth, where they are planted as seed ' in sure and certain hope ' : an idea which also provides us with one link or point of transition to the second form of aryan worship, the cult oi nature and the propitiation of spirits. Second religion : Animism ; early science rather than religion. — Animism is here used for the cult of nature not of ancestors, of spirits not of souls, of the unknown and incalculable rather than of the known tradition and the tribal custom. I am aware that much reverence for the dead arises from fear of world over from which they are by no means exempt ; it is found among Scyths, Mongols, Thracians, Slavs, Teutons, and Letts. But it seems true that the Vedic Indian had abandoned it. Garbe and Risley (Cens. Rep. 190 1) believe it was never quite extinct but reappeared with savage emphasis soon after the time of Buddha, or about the age of Panini (450- 400). 1 Devel. of. Rel. and Thought in Anc. Egypt. London : Hodder & Stoughton, 1912. C i8 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages their new power and changed characters when disembodied : we still to-day read blood-curdling romances of those who become vampires in the next life against their will and can only be saved from themselves by a horrible ritual. But on the whole the aim of true ancestral worship is to preserve the family and main- tain the tribal usage. With the world of Nature it is different : man is face to face with the untrustworthy and capricious, though he may seek to represent it as having will and desires Uke his own. It would however be a very great mistake to sup- pose that Animism deals at first with fully matured personalities, conceived by analogy with ourselves and hiding behind pheno- mena which nevertheless they are able to escape and transcend, as a man his instrument or vehicle. This is the later stage of self-conscious hellenic rationalizing with its strong humanist bias and its romantic delight in clear-cut characters. But it is not the key of all mythology and has often led inquirers astray. Animism is early science rather than primitive religion : it leads on to theurgy not to theology. It recognizes in things a Something forceful and fatal, an impersonal impulse which can be controlled, diverted or counteracted. It is a spiritual force or a spirit, but it is not a soul which can be addressed in the confident fashion in which we couch appeals to an ancient fore- father of the tribe. Nor is its worship one of custom or normal usage ; it is not the elders who can hold intercourse with it ; a special faculty, personal or inherited by a family set apart, marks off the shaman who can interpret nature. I am aware that shamans often claim to communicate with offended ances- tors ; and that on the other hand the ritual of the vegetation- god is recurrent, customary and mostly familiar. But on the whole the distinction drawn holds good ; that very different rites, methods and mediaries are found employed in these two chief branches of ancient religion. These vague potencies behind phenomena are certainly not conceived as persons, as the term Animism perhaps unhappily suggests, nor (at least at first) as resembling man in character or as sympathetic with human interests. The ' departmental gods ' (solemnly reckoned up by Varro and Censorin, laughed at by St. Augustin) are not individuals, for ever engrossed in a never finished task or else summoned into momentary being by the need (or imagination) of the worshipper. The three male teutonic gods (so Kaufmann) Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 19 by the side of Great Mother Freya (Tacitus' Ncrthus or Hcrthus) are not men or persons, but actually wind, thunder, sky. For aryan ' animism ' the first stage is not far from fetish worship, in which quite irrelevantly and without explanation or warn- ing a certain natural object is found to contain accumulated force — e.g. the Svayambhu stones of later hindu thought. By degrees the motley congeries of spiritual objects were united under fewer forces and at last under a single one ; just as Ionia explained the manifold as phases in the transmutation of the one eternal Substance. The mark of all primitive aryan thought is that Sky itself and the Shining Ones form the nucleus ; that fire (the earthly element most akin to heaven) should among Indo-aryans, Persians, and later Romans provide the earliest embodiment or symbol of the divine principle. Not personal at first : in the tribe personality emerges late : from fatalism to freedom. — ^That physical forces and heavenly bodies were not first conceived as personal seems certain ; the hymns to Agni are addressed to an elemental potency not to an anthropomorphic deity. As with pelasgic, thracian, celtiberian numina, these forces are anonymous. Personality is not under- stood or emphasized until ' history and political aggregation produces personages ' within man's actual experience, as Schrader of Breslau very well says. When kings, nobles, and champions in war, or leaders in successful migration, stand out of the ranks, the hitherto impersonal numina are invested with the same strik- ing qualities. First man separates himself as superior from the world of nature, then from his old friends and rivals, the animals, lastly (in kingship and nobility) from his own kin. He begins to demand behind phenomena a reflex of himself ; and this humanist movement marks his awakening to full self- consciousness. Fate is no longer something that works irre- sistibly, careless of man, but something against which it is good to struggle, which at times it is possible to divert or even thwart . It has been noticed that the last aryan family to enter the arena of history, the russian Slav, is also absorbed in fatalism, has few national heroes and has been obliged to depend for political cohesion on the rule of foreigners. It is the Heroic Age, that is the age of ' norse ' pirates and freebooters, which teaches the supremacy of man as end and ideal both over nature and his fellow and crushes the old democracy of settled communities by 20 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages the new chivalry of migration. There is no doubt that the primi- tive aryan was deeply impregnated with this Slavonic fatalism and sense of dependence, which only wore off by degrees when he found himself the master of alien slaves or clients. It returned once again under the stress of a depressing climate to teach him a new theology. His gods are all secondary and derived ; there is never a real Creator. In homeric Greece Zeus himself is subject to destiny, karma is stronger than divine wiU and refuses to spare Sarpedon when his appointed hour is come. It is likely that Saliuiwv has nothing to do with wisdom or cunning {Sa^/uLwv) but is derived from Salofiai, the lot distributed to each, dwelling with him and working itself out in his life ; sometimes in Greece the K^p, like the Egyptian Ka, is one of man's souls, passed on from father to son, — like the inherited taint of tragedy.^ That man should rise above his tribe, above nature, above the char- acter of deities his ancestors bequeathed him, is the beginning of freedom, the initial step towards winning a spiritual liberty. The soul is filled and fired by heroic deeds ; thus the Eastern Slavs, clinging longest to family tradition and equality, remaining latest near their original home, are still the most pagan and fatalist division of aryan-speaking peoples. Such as they are, the early invaders of Hindustan must have been. Caste, pro- gress in culture, militarism, sacerdotal claims, and theology at once independent and sceptical — these arose from the success of conquering raids and gave hindu thought that peculiar ten- dency to an arrogant individualism which soon united •with pantheism.^ Is anthropomorphic element in creed a loan ? — It is even held that the personal or anthropomorphic element in an aryan creed must be a loan and that the roman religion has most faithfully preserved these vague potencies working in national objects, impalpable and intangible. Oldenberg suggests that the Light Gods or Shining Ones {Mitra, Varuna, and Aditya) were borrowed 1 The Norse fylgja, something analogous to Persian fravasM : there is besides the mother's dower, which no doubt helped on the Cult of the Mothers (cf. Goethe's Faust), and met and blended with dravidian beliefs : in norse myth (not to mention greek and latin) the Norns are quite inde- pendent of Wodan until he is transformed into a sovereign Deity under foreign influences. ^ In a modified and peculiar sense as the sequel will show. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 21 from Sumerians or Semites. It seems possible to some that the Persians learnt to sacrifice to a personal god from Arabs or Assy- rians ; that the Greeks derived from the east the personal char- acters of their deities. ^ The Roman never seriously admitted the vivid individuals of the greek pantheon except for a state- cult vs^hich every one felt to be unreal ; the real numina were mysterious powers, rarefied if potent abstractions and in no sense human. Lastly the Teutons, as we know from Tacitus, did not liken their deities to any human shape or confine them in temples ; grove-and tree worship was the earliest reUgious phase and they only learnt in two centuries of contact with a hellenized Rome to put names to deities and regard them as persons. Prayer to a person is long subsequent to magic con- straint of inherent forces.^ Agni in vedic hymns is after all only the element of fiame ; Homer's Zeus (though by that time represented as a superman) is really a natural power {ve(pe\riyepeTt]9) upon whom epithets from human relations sit clumsily [/uLrjTieTr];, ^eVioy) : only by degrees (as Westermarck) were natural powers brought into contact with mankind as ' guardians of morality.' Apollo is at first ' he of the cattle-pen ', Hermes ' he of the cairn ' (Usener, Schrader) It was in the cult of the dead, not in the worship of natural forces, that they found a basis for conduct ; the KaQeaTWTa vofufia are under the protection of ancestral souls jealously watching over the institutions of the tribe. In the Veda, inferior gods seem to prefer animal rather than human shape ; there is no distinct barrier between these two branches or stages of organic life. Certainly in Greece, deities were zoomorphic (as Artemis, she-bear, Juno the ox-eyed /3oft)7rty, so E. Meyer and Harrison). In teutonic myth, we have snake, wolf, bear, goat as Vehicles of the divine Donar (thunder) and other gods ; Frey's boar is well known in two passages of Tacitus {Germ. § 45, formas aprorum gestant and Hist, iv 22, • Any aegean debt of this sort is very unpopular to-day, and Foucart is almost treated as obsolete because he still insists on tracing greek mys- teries to Egypt : it was rather the Heroic Age of Homer that converted nature--povfers into human personalities. = That is, in any religious evolution of which we can trace the record : the beUef in a primitive monotheism (from which later creeds are perver- sions) is by no means extinct, and is certainly not rejected as a possible hypothesis by the present writer. 22 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages ferarum imagines). In India an early personation was Father- Sky, accounted (as in China) the male or positive principle and wedded to the feminine and receptive earth. Scyths and Bithy- nians call Zeus -TraTnrato^ or irainrSio's : in the myth of Zeus and Semele, there is certainly the story of the soil's infecundation, not through rain but by the lightning, and zmelja in thracian dialect is the ground. Humanism did not create, either in Greece or in India, an orderly divine world guided by a single sovereign. The gods are forces independent of each other with an accidental or provisional immortality : they live by the Sowa-draught or the welcome offerings of worshippers : in norse legend they have to recover their waning strength by eating Iduna's apples : —if man needs them they assuredly need man. Where we have the notion of a single universe obeying fixed laws, the aryan mind is indebted to a foreign influence (so Oldenberg and Schrader of Breslau) : rta and asa are not ideas native to their mind. Magic and priestly specialism : Spirit cult needs an expert. — We must now find a place for magic and a speciaUzed priest- hood, of which there are germs even in the earHest vedic times. Once again we notice the sharp distinction between the cults of souls and of spirits : to Family-worship no stranger is admitted (though the slave can be) ; but in Nature-worship anyone who knows the constraining gesture or formula is welcome. Like the typical ruler in history, the favourite priest is often a for- eigner. If domestic customs are in the hands of the elders and, as in german royal houses to-day, remain separate from the law of the land, there rises a new code, man's relation to the unseen powers of nature, to which only experts can guide him : hence ' justice ' falls into the hands of a specialized class like the druids. It is likely that the raman bridge-builders (pontifices) were a class whose special knowledge enabled them to strengthen the pontoons by charms and sacrifices. Magic as we have said pre- cedes, in any given history, the appeal for favour to a personal God. Early rites are acts, not of pious worship but of rudi- mentary science. Primitive man oscillates between too lofty and too humble a view of nature : either its forms are immeasur- ably superior or he can control them by the slightest effort ; he lights a fire to help the sun to rise. Use and conception of sacrifice : (i) food for the dead ; (2) Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 23 banquet to strengthen a divine friend ; (3) or magical rite. — When the gods become personal, they are still inferior or at least dependent upon man's bounty ; he spreads out his gifts and frankly invites them to come to share his banquet. Early sacrifice has no elaborate theory behind it : it is too natural to need any such, and hospitality to a friend or powerful neigh- bour requires no argument to justify it. There is no need even of the formula do ut des : this belongs to the logical refinement of religious instinct which we have found to-day so full of pit- falls. It seems certain that at first food was offered only to the dead ; a man did not give it to the non-human potencies of nature until they were conceived as personal and like himself. Magic, though it merely sees and uses natural forces for its own end, neither justifying nor vilifying nature, is yet apt to con- ceive and deal with it as in the main unfriendly. When the god was more like a man, he might be a friend, and he was invited to share in food (which only later became a sacrifice) as a wel- come guest. Later reflection saw in food offered to gods their necessary sustenance : the worshipper wants to make his chosen helper strong in his service. It is curious to trace how this rite of sacrifice becomes once more a magic power, and not an offer- ing to a personal being who can be a friend. Among sacrifices there are victims for expiation and atonement, human sacrifices which (as seems certain to-day) are as common among the aryan as in other families of mankind. Contrast of family priest and Shaman (from latter come all aryan priesthoods). — For magic and for sacrifice, the services of special experts are needed. For household worship and family prayers the head of the group is the proper officiant ; but for the unknown region outside, with man's precarious relations to it, certain gifted persons or classes must act as mediators. The brahman, a neuter word like the latin flamen,''- stands for such a mediary, who slowly acquired the sole and exclusive right of corresponding with the unseen and eternal, at least, of supervising and directing all such methods.^ Among the letto- ^ With which it is very hkely connected, so Schrader suggests against Walde's denial of any etymological tie : other possibly kindred forms will be noted later. ' The brahman is nOt strictly himself a priest or sacrificant, but a director of sacrifice. 24 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages pruss tribes, the last remnants of aryan heathenism, lived the Waidlers} hereditary famiUes who knew the right way to appease the gods, and handed down jealously the proper rites and forms to their children, as roman patricians the secret knowledge of the kalendar and the dies nefasti : the miraculous gift akin to second-sight, died out when the family itself became extinct (Praetorius). This special endowment, handed down in certain classes was a special feature, so far as we can judge, in the develop- ment of all aryan priesthoods. Those sacred classes ^ tend to become local as well as hereditary and lead on to the holy city with its temple and sacred enclosure, protected mart or fair — the religious origin of urban nuclei being clear, e.g. from the early history of Sumer and Accad. A great power was lodged in this priestly lineage ; they could break up the temple or oracle, carry elsewhere the divine influence and their own special powers of mediation. Hence the fear of offending the priesthood ; the gods, we read in Aitareya Brahmana ' do not eat the gifts of a king who has no purohita.' The rise of every hierocracy may be traced to the exceptional powers of one man gifted with (we may say) second sight or some natural capacity for explain- ing and controlling abnormal phenomena : the faculty is sup- posed to descend in his line and is jealously preserved. The Druids, the Brahmans, and the priests of Egypt and Israel (under one aspect) had no other origin : their prototype is always the Shaman or medicine-man. Section II. (A) The Dravidians of the North The Dravidian Aborigines : their Shamanistic Animism. — The term dravidian like aryan denotes only a distinction of speech, but it corresponds in the main to a clear physical dif- ference. A process of mutual assimilation has been going on from earliest times ; the aryan type becoming accentuated in 1 It is possible that the word is connected with Sanscrit. Vidya vedas, latin vates, wizard, dru-vid, even our Old -English waits, minstrels who Uke Plato's Orphic priests go round to houses and offer up a hymn in return for food or largess. 2 Hindu vasisthas, visvamitras etc., so the eumolpids, cinyrads, hesychids and other hellenic families : the divine or priest-king retained his sacred duties, when robbed of civil power, because he understood the necessary formula. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 25 the north, where tribes are slowly but surely hinduized, the hill tribes being everywhere the last to succumb. Yet there is a dravidian element even in the aryan speech of the north, as it is still a strong factor in the population. ^ The indigenous Dra vid- ians were certainly not savages ; no doubt there were then as now forest -folk at a very low level of culture, as modern ', Gonds or Mundas, nomads of the type of Bediyas and Sansiyas to-day. Some kingdoms had forts, treasures and well defined political powers ; nearly all had cattle and tilled the ground. If they had no word for soul they certainly equipped the dead with articles to be of use in the hfe to come. Probably (so Crooke of the Bengal C.S.) ^ in material culture as well as reHgious beliefs and practice they were not very far below the standard of the mass of Aryans : some writers go further and believe them superior. They are the dasya or krsna trac (black skin)' which excited the wrath and contempt of the invaders. They had no words for priest, idol, soul, sin (Caldwell) though ' God ' is ko and his temple, ko-il. Their less advanced tribes are said to-day to recognize, but not to worship, a supreme being, and their real religious interest is the control or appeasement of natural forces. Wilson [Sirsa Settlement Report 1883) thought that the average hindu peasant of the Punjab (where however the 1 60 millions use dravidian dialects (Tamil c. i8, Telegu c. 21, Kanarese 11, Malayalam 6) : the speech is mostly confined to India south of the Vindhya, but is even found on the banks of the Ganges ; the Kui (a hill-tribe) are ' an isolated island in the sea of aryan speech ' (Sten Konow of Christiania). Beluchistan contains the Brahui -with a decaying dravidian dialect, but they are now Iranian in race and physique ; no doubt sprung from southern settlers who like Hungarians with us have lost early features and become merged in a superior race. The Dravidians of India are so far as we judge, aboriginal, and their tongue has no kindred (unless we detect a link with AustraUan) . J. D. Anderson beUeves the race to be akin to the african negro ; language as yet without known connexion with any scythian or mongoUan tongue. Racially, it has no obvious af&nity with N. Indian. Thurston cannot decide if it is autochthonous or immigrant. Their literature is indebted to aryan models, though it goes back to an early date. Bishop Caldwell's Compar. Grammar (London 1856, 1875) is still a work of authority and his surmises on their primitive culture derived from their vocabulary are still of value. Cf. Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, Calc. 1906 ; Sten Konow's article on Munda and dravidian languages. " To whose untiring energy and vast learning in matters Indian every student of religion is deeply indebted. 26 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages dra vidian element is least certain) recognizes one Supreme Being, who knows all things, punishes guilt and provides heaven and hell for those who deserve them ; his general social standard and instincts to good are much the same as among normal Euro- peans, but are of course limited to the narrow tribal environ- ment. But this ' rational deism ' is a very late stage in human religion, so far as actual history can trace it. This attitude must be the result of musUm or Christian influence and is quite at variance with other data. Early reUgion is very rarely indi- vidualistic ; and must in such tribes consist largely of unreflect- ing observance of custom, tradition and caste rules. Fagan seems much nearer to the truth in laying stress rather on their placation of demons, whether ghosts or spirits, than on any belief in a Supreme God. ^ They are thus closely united with the chief ■ rehgion ' of central and E. Asia — Shamanism with its hypnotic trance and the devil-dance which controls or eludes the evil spirits. There seems little doubt that this was their earliest belief and practice ; the animism of the dra vidian hill-tribes to-day seeks (without any attempt to define accurately) to appease whatever hostile or dangerous influence may lurk in natural objects. These potencies or numina ,are not conceived as personal (Risley) but as elemental forces ; here once again religion is rather dawning natural science than any sense of gratitude or devout surrender.^ Here also there is a conflict or at least a rivalry, between the cults of souls and of spirits, just as amongst the men of aryan speech. For religious rites like a marriage or a funeral the proper celebrant is a member of the family, sometimes the elders or senior members, sometimes 1 Traces of this indifferent monotheism are found all over the world, and in almost no mythology is the earhest parent of the gods still the actual sovereign ; the older line (as in Uranus and Cronus) has either been forcibly ejected {functus officio) or, as in Plato (following a very primitive savage belief revived by the gnostics), the chief God delegates the entire work of Creation to subalterns or only permits it. Hence (as said above) it is possible that a single deity is recognized much more widely than actual religious rites would prove, offered as they are to purely local dsemonic forces or to ancestral souls. 2 In Assam and among the Santals, there is a benevolent Supreme Being somewhere in the background ; but the dreaded and effective deities are the much nearer spirits of evil, appeased in Assam by the charms and ritual of regular hereditary priests. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 27 the sister's son ^ as 'among the Haris and Doms to-day at the offering ten days after the funeral, or among the Bhuiyars and Kols. Specialized Shaman clans. — But the speciahzed ' levitical ' clans for nature-worship are selected and valued precisely because they are in no way connected by blood. It is certain that thie Aryans preserved the natives who knew the ways and could cal- culate the temper of the local spirits. It is often noticed (Baden Powell, Ind. Vill. Comm.) that the recognized priest for some momentous rite or offering is generally an alien or a member of a despised class. ^ In Chota Nagpur the baiga is found in nearly every village ; he must be a man of non-aryan lineage and looks ; he is chosen preferably from the more remote tribes ; it is felt that the less he is contaminated with hinduism the more power he will retain over the ancient spirits of the district.^ He is the ' keeper of custom ' and must be able, like the bailiff of an English Manor, to point out each family's rightful tenure or plot of ground, in disputes on rent or landmarks he is the recognized arbiter. Among the Gonds each village has a medicine-man who knows the mantra of service against tigers, drought, cholera — matters which have nothing to do with ancestors. The Mundas select from the earliest settlers one who knows the ' demonic ' ways : he is sometimes chosen by the tribal vote [chota), sometimes he enjoys the place by right of heritage, sometimes by personal choice and miracle, sometimes (certainly among the Oraons) ^ The Arakhs of the Unit. Prov. also employ him if they cannot procure a brahman — a curious sign of transition ; they are not yet completely hin- duized and still retain the infallible sign of the matriarchy or (not to use a possibly -misleading term) the matrilinear system. It need not be said that this method of reckoning children and kinship by no means impHes polyandry, early promiscuity, or a low standard of morals ; though no doubt these (on the whole) abnormal conditions are to be now and again discovered among such " distaff ' or matrilinear tribes. ^ In W. Bengal the mauliks, as representing the ' oldest inhabitants ' are often sent for in trouble, in preference to the local priests : but further instances are not needed, it being one of the essential features of hindu religion : are not certain rajahs crowned and legalized by a savage from the hills, with whom at other times they would have no intercourse ? ^ Here we have a trace of the common belief that culture destroys certain primitive gifts of savage peoples and their powers of understanding the unseen. It is not a Uttle singular that the favorite and most successful government or priesthood in human history is invariably a foreign one. 28 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages by the selection of innocent children who Stop before a certain house, sometimes (as among Malers) by the direct urgency of the spirit who calls him away into the desert to commune alone with the unseen world. Such a one, like the Nazarite, does not cut his hair : he must be invested by the headman of the tribe, and at the bullock sacrifice must drink the blood. Among the Kandhs self-election to this onerous post is the most usual method ; the future shaman or priest ijanni) becomes drowsy, and absent- minded, his soul being away in the spirit -world ; he qualifies for his sacred calling by being as unlike normal men as possible, his spiritual powers depending on this.^ In the highest grade of this singular hierarchy, the Great Janni must live a life of horrible squalor. While other lesser ranks are allowed to marry and may drink (but not eat) with other men, he exists in a condition of nameless filth, may wash only with his own spittle, must remain immured in his noisome hut unless (at the spirit call) he wanders forth to get drunk on palm juice, and is regaled at sacrifices with the choice morsel no other man would touch, grilled skin and feet of buffalo, heads of fowls and half the headskin and one ear of a deer. Among these animistic hill-tribesmen of N. India, it is curious to note that the belief in Metempsychosis is either now extinct or has never existed. This statement is not easy to accept. Metempsychosis is far more a savage ' prejudice ' than a reasoned belief, and most students hold that the later aryan doctrine is at least strongly indebted to native influence ; that the keen sense of vivid and valued personality," clearly suitable to an heroic or homeric age, was blunted under such influence : each life of itself became a single link in a chain, and the real individual was the continuous (or recurrent) being, the sum of all the several lives or the vague impersonal unity running through the series. The return of an ancestor as a newborn infant is commonly believed not merely in Asia but among the AustraHans, who 1 So amongst many N. American tribes and some N. Asiatic, a boy of refined or feminine type acts like a giri and is transferred into the sex ; his very abnormaUty being a guarantee of his weird and miraculous power. We can thus easily understand the terror which the name, the heresy, and the (supposed) peculiar vices of the Bulgarians excited in the medieval mind, — also the savage penalties still found in the codes for homosexual offences. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 29 (it is said) know no other method of generation but demonic possession of women by an ancestral ghost desiring to come back to active hfe. It is very much later that we find, as in Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato and the most typical hindu thinkers, this natural and instinctive belief called into alliance with morality, to explain and justify man's lot. But of this more must be said hereafter. Cult of canonized saints or angry dead : Lingam and Sakti. — The Dravidian of N. India fears the angry dead and tries (as we saw) to appease the only half-impersonated nature-powers. He readily accepts the hero-cult of some dead brahman or muslim saint ; we can see here (as students tell us) new gods in the making. A certain Diwan or prime minister of a native State (Charkar) was killed by bandits or thugs in 1768 ; from the forest he ran headless to his proper burying-ground and has ever since received honours. Such instances are common and a violent death (as elsewhere in religious history) is no bar but rather a recommendation for apotheosis. There are souls who take up a posthumous abode in trees or in animals ; the personal and human thus winning over the natural and converting it to its own uses. Early fetichism is of course nature-worship in its most primi- tive stage ; stones are supposed to be the abode not of disem- bodied ghosts, but of vague or electric potencies, which can be discharged or held in reserve by one who knows their secret. So cairns and pillars have been honoured and the images or natural objects called svayamhhu,'^ existing of their own accord, highly charged with divine mana, pervaded by a spiritual energy which awaits the clever manipulator. The 8uireTe^ ayaXfxa in various classical shrines will occur to the reader (e.g. Emesa) ; the Black Stone of Mecca which even Mahomet dared not deconsecrate ; and the constant references of Pausanias to herms and very un-hellenic ^oava, the unhewn nameless stones of the popular cults. It is now held by many critics that the lingam-cvlt is not in origin dravidian but aryan and indeed due to hellenic influ- ence in large measure.^ Such a cult was not openly practised until the close of the Epic Period ; i.e. after 200 a.d. with the rise of Siva-worship. Others (as Fergusson) beheve it to be modelled ' e.g. of mysterious light issuing from a hill, in Vansavali or History of Nepal 78 (ed. Daniel Wright, Cambridge 1877). 2 The bull Nandi seems to come certainly from Dionysus. 30 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages on buddhist shrine or dagoba and to have had no genesiac mean- ing till much later times. The Dravidians would naturally worship Sakti or female energies rather than the male power in creation ; some have said (as Oppert) that there is no evidence of any native cult of the lingam, that no indigenous tribe is given to phallic worship. In any case it seems clear that as practised to-day it is not in the least indecent or suggestive : the erotic side of hindu religion comes in from quite another quarter. (B) Dravidians of the South In South strong Native Element persists : evolution to pure form of Theism. — The above remarks refer mainly to the scattered animistic hill-tribes of N. India, where the dravidian element has never had a fair chance of free development. In the South matters are quite different. The Vindhya barrier en- abled them to retain language, faith, and perhaps literature intact : in the latter we may surely find some traces of pre-aryan times. ^ The South stood quite aloof and isolated in the first millennium of the aryan inroads. Panini c. 450-400 B.C. merely notes the existence of the Andhras dynasts ; his commen- tator (perhaps 150 years later) names the Pandya and Chola kingdoms. Only under Asoka {250 B.C.) is a sudden knowledge of these regions shown ; his edicts and his script seem to be recog- nized in dravidian lands, and his kinsman Mahendra becomes an evangelist to Ceylon, the outpost of dravidian culture. Even when brahman missioners came to convert the south and racial blending went on apace, the native substratum was never over- whelmed. The indigenous people can show an evolution in religion as remarkable and as spontaneous as can aryan priests and ksatriyas of the North. The whole gamut of religious feeling is displayed in their beliefs and practice, from vague ani- mism and gloomy superstition to a living faith and love towards a personal God — than which no other region of the pagan world can show a purer or more ardent form. The dravidian genius, says Frazer, has advanced to literary and religious concepts worthy to stand side by side with the most exalted of human achieve- ments.2 It is now time to turn to the aryan development in the 1 As in Rome this literature is something quite artificial and unpopular : the forms of the tamil and telegii vehicles are so archaic that natives cannot understand them without special training. - But if the temper and impulse are native the terms are borrowed — ■ Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 31 north, long anterior to any genuine movements in religious belief of the South. Section III. Brahman and Brahmanism Magic and Naturalism submerges Aryan Humanism : Science overpowers religion.- — It seems clear that after the early vedic mixture of semi-personal, semi-elemental theology, there was a gradual recovery of the latter so that the humanistic tendency was completely submerged.^ We have seen the traces of magical science or theurgy amongst the Aryans, and the usage of brahman only extends and confirms the theory. It does not mean prayer to a personal deity, but a compelling charm or hymn which is effec- tive, like a chemical or algebraic formula when properly applied, ex opere operato. Here once again we have science rather than religion ; and the mind or disposition of the agent who sets this tremendous force in movement, is indifferent.^ In the heroic and personal age, gods, priests and rsis are regarded as authors and revealers of these ' runes of power.' The electric current or resistless energy begins to act when the hymn is recited and the sacred soma-juice pressed — a mystical power is evoked from latent to active form by certain rites and words. Unifying reflec- tion converts it into the force which lies behind nature and the gods in virtue of which all things have their being and efficacy. It is of course impersonal, a unity from which the multiple rises only to sink into it again. But before this profounder philoso- phizing, it had already been identified with the sacrifice over which the brahman class presided.^ hhakti is Sanscrit, and the original impulse may come from Jainism, just as the later development (700-900 a.d.) can hardly be claimed as exempt from Christian influences, as will be seen. 1 The system of avatars and divine births belong to the exoteric faith and is a mere compromise or concession made to the weaker brethren. ^ We have noted the supposed connection with an identical neuter-form in latin, f,amen : others connect it with Irish brioM, magic spell, icel. and norweg. hragr — scarcely far-fetched, when we remember the asiatic origin (even in myth) of all the chief doctrines of norse religion : may not the norse or gothic gudia be identical with the khojas, the priestly caste who usurped power under the later Jengizid Dynasties, claiming descent from Abubekr and Omar ? (cf. Schefer and Sir H. Howorth, cited in Tarikh-i- Rashidi, ed. EKas & Ross, London 1875). ^ Not that he actually sacrificed ; but his presence alone ensured its due efficacy. 32 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages Brahmans, a caste knowing runes and ritual of now magical sacrifice. — When the ritual of the sacrifice became more complex a supervisor was needed to direct the various ministrants : that this official had much in common with the ancient shaman seems clear from his position — ^he stood by the southern fire, the region of demons. 1 In the Brahmanas {800-500) there is a distinctly non-vedic element and many novel deities, and divine revelation is made solely for the purpose of disclosing the method and ritual of the sacrifice : this is now ceasing to be a frank offer of hos- pitality or a means of strengthening and gratifying the divine beings that they may be staunch and powerful in their wor- shippers' service. It is now purely external magic ; there is no mention of devotion, pious intention, or moral duties. The route elsewhere followed is here exactly reversed ; whatever personal element the Veda shows is now suppressed. The aim is a direct scientific effect as of an experiment in a laboratory. The gods invoked are only accessories and instruments to help in complet- ing (as it were) the electric circuit. He who knows the magic sacrifice is master of the world ; did not the gods (or God) create the world by means of sacrifice ? It was by magic that they had in the first instance secured the prize of godhead ; ' by this art ' {hac arte Pollux etc.) that they won their rank. Later, when the personal and inward receive more attention, this divinity is said to be the result of ascetic practice [tapas). In this pre-moral Age of Magic, the sacrifice is (with Haug), ' a kind of machinery, ' a sort of great chain,' binding earth to the divine throne ; or it is a staircase by which to ascend to heaven. ' The ideal sacrifice ' it has been said is " reality set in motion ' for the service of man : its efficacy always exists but it is ever and again called forth anew, this invisible latent power which binds the whole world in fetters of adamant. When unrolled it extends right up from the sacri- ficial flames into heaven itself, acting as bridge or ladder down which spirits come at man's behest and man himself rises above his own earthly lot (cf . Manoah and the Angel in Judges). Every piece must exactly tally and be rightly fitted into the whole ; or else the effect is nullified.^ If the forms are vitiated as in 1 The atharvaveda is consecrated to him and without doubt includes a large non-aryan and foreign admixture. 2 The American Indian kills the man who gets out of step in the sacred dance ; and the punctilious euc/nj/ieire, bona verba qvosso, favete Unguis of the classical peoples will readily occur. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 33 the case of the foolhardy necromancer, the gain becomes instead mischief and ruin. For this complex ceremonial then, the brah- man is recognized as chief director and supervisor, to whom it falls to heal and atone for any unwitting error or neglect. Wizard exalted above the demons he compels. — Thus he usurps the place and dignity of the gods who are degraded to be his servitors. Already in the Rig ^ Indra is derided, and distinct traces of careless scepticism are found, the gods being denied by some as boldly as by certain hellenic sophists ; these priests are less concerned to exalt a god in the worshippers' eyes than to display the momentous scientific ef&cacy of the sacrifice duly performed and their own good offices in securing it. As a fact neither in the primitive nor in any subsequent age did the gods as such represent the eternal, the highest or the best. When subjective rationalism entered (with Jains and Buddhists) it took no trouble to exorcize or eject the gods, but left them to the enjoyment of those transient and illusory heavens which the wise man scorned. Spiritual protest against mechanical and selfish cultus. — Against this selfish and mechanical cultus, the Aranyaka and Upanisads were the natural protest and reaction. The move- ment might be compared to the mystics of the Middle Ages, to St. Bernard, the Victorines, Thomas a Kempis or the teutonic preachers of cent, xiv who led forwards to the Reformation. It is characteristic of hindu theology that it is continuous and will admit no breaks in its history : it would rather offend every canon of logic than confess a regret for the past, a breach, or a new departure. The brahmans, however bitterly opposed, have been able in the end to absorb the rival element and include it as an essential ' moment ' in their own system. It was the aim of an anti-clerical party to discover something more real than the mystical Sacrifice itself (in which gods and men and things alike seem to have vanished). There are three stages in this rebellion, autotheism (often miscalled pantheism), ascetic practice, rational morality. Each of these is a deliberate defiance of brahman ideals and rules. It will be weU at this point to recapitulate the early history of the migration and its result, that the right of the new elements to emerge and win recognition may be the more clearly seen. 1 Rig. IV 24, X 119, II 12, VIII 100. D 34 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages Section IV. Retrospect on Early Indian History 1500-500 B.C. The Midland Sacerdotal. — In the long period of migration (1500-1000) down to the probable date of collection for the vedic hymns, the Aryans were engaged in tribal feuds. When they had advanced to the Ganges, the Midland [madhyadesa) and the region round the present capital, Delhi, remained the central nucleus under the Kurus. It was here that Sanscrit developed, the sacred hymns were compiled, the brahmanic supremacy was con- firmed. Many hymns show features of northern scenery and land- scape and are certainly earlier than 1000 : but this district was, if not the actual cradle, at least the publishing centre, of this oldest religious literature (Grierson). The later priestly reflection falsified history to avoid any appearance either of abrupt change, of alien influence, ^ or of internecine disputes. Up to 650, just a century before Gautama's birth, writing was not generally known and hymns were handed down orally in priestly families who possessed in them a valuable monopoly.^ Asoka's inscriptions 1 A difficult yet insistent problem : some writers attribute [a) to Babylonian influence the cult of Nana (6) to Persian, the emphasis on a solar cult and the Shining Ones of heaven, (but rather to be held a common heritage of the patriarchal sky-worshipping Aryans in contrast to the matrilinear votaries of a Cthonian Mother-Goddess), (c) Egypt : Fhnders Petrie seems to find traces of a hindu colony at Memphis, with seated figures of the aryan punjab type, and beUeves that here is vsdtness to contact between E. and W. during the age of Asoka (250 B.C.) ' of whose missions we have hitherto lacked proof ' ; it is obvious however that this testimony does not plainly refer to our more primitive times. The per- sistent traditions of the Land of Punt, of early maritime adventure in the Persian Gulf and of the chaldean culture-hero Ea (or Cannes) from overseas, are really better witness ; they make one pause before a dog- matic denial of foreign incentives to Indian development. The influence of greek art and reUgious thought is later and unquestioned ; but by the time of such prevaUing influence from Bactria, hindu religion, or rather theosophy had put forth all its most significant traits. 2 Hindu alphabets show a Semitic origin (some time subsequent to 800) and undoubtedly lend some support to the hypothesis of a still earUer connexion by marine trade-routes, cf. A. H. Macdonell in Biihler Ind.Ary. Philol. 1897, where also he ruthlessly dismisses the old identifications Varuna ovpavos, Manu Minos, gandharva centaur, sarameya ipfi.ua'i, Sarvara Cerberus, etc. — while retaining Mitra=persian Mithra, Soma = haoma, hotar =:zaotar, Yama ^Yima : — so too deva as connected with iranian dia, lettish diewas norse iivar. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 35 are the earliest known, and the most primitive remains of sacred building are due, not to brahmans, but to jains and buddhists. For these early ages there is then, we are bound to confess, but little positive witness. Phase A. Vedic and Dravidian Animism {impersonal) ; theurgy precedes iheosophy. — The_^rs^ phase we may call Vedic Animism, in which we can really discover but a higher form of fetichism ; anything capable of exerting influence is adored and no effort is made to define what the potency behind phenomena is in itself. No doubt certain hymns show conviction of a personal relation to a personal god, but this is an exception and the tendency is soon suppressed by other currents peculiar to hindu development. What myths of a personal character there are, present (like all savage rudiments) very objectionable features, and there is little trace of reverence, piety or genuine devotion. We have shown that (as in other aryan branches) the magical element is by no means wanting ; theurgy has a long start of any attempt at iheosophy, and these shamanic or fetish elements, common to the invaders and their foes, very soon blended. For the savage mind it is enough to know that power is there, accessible and convertible to human use by those who approach it properly. To this mana ^ is referred all effects in nature which are plainly beyond human power.^ The idea (such is the witness of Risley) at the root of the jungle-folks' religion is power ; he seeks to direct and propitiate a shifting number of unknown forces making rather for evil than for good ; he does not wish to get closer to them or define them more precisely ; he does not stop to ask if they are associated with spirits or ancestral ghosts : later they are divided into active and passive powers, and the good are nearly always placed in the latter class.' 1 A convenient name for the indwelling numen, hoxTOwed from Melanesia (Codrington) ; it corresponds to algonquin manitu and iroquois orenda. 2 Which it must be remembered is very widely beheved to be the sole cause of death. ' I must repeat that there is nothing unlikely A priori in a pre-vedic ' Monotheism,' if it is any comfort to the orthodox to discover such a behef here and in China at the very dawn of historic development. It is possible to conceive (as Andrew Lang inclines) the various vedic deities as but dif- ferent forms, powers, or theophanies of a single Being. But history only shows us peoples with whom this unifying beUef must have decayed long before they enter its purview. It is perhaps needless here to repeat that 36 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages Cheerful outlook of early Vedic Age : gives place to Pessimism (Hesiod and the Sophists). — Now this first period of animism (sometimes coming very near to personal worship) is marked like the homeric age in Greece by cheerfulness, an easy and independent attitude to divine beings and a belief that the gods are guiding their chosen favourites to victory. ^ The ' Norseman ' with his love of fighting for its own sake, his birserker rapture, his eager anticipation of the delights of possessing a land which it costs his people so dear to win, is a type found in all three descents of a blonde conquering race on an ancient culture already effete.2 But it is only in the process of attaining a desired object that real pleasure — always a ' genesis ' — can be found. In place of joie de vivre and readiness to die fighting we have ennui, dis- illusion and a restless leisure. The world is only comprehensible or tolerable when there is something to be won, another effort to be made, a final peak to climb. By witness of Homer's pages — the records of a heroic age which acts and does not reflect — the Hellenes acquired a most unmerited name for optimism, content- ment and the even poise of a mind in complete harmony with nature and itself. ^ The leading note is cheerfulness only in a heroic age when there is little thinking and the poor and oppressed are perforce silent. The Punjab gives way to the Midland as the arena, fraternal strife succeeds to victories over foreigners, and the cult of souls and of spirits (=natural numina) are not successive or exclusive ; but running parallel and distinct, found side by side from the earliest times : cf. Clodd. Fortn. Rev. June 1907. It is important to reserve the useful (but provisional) term animism for the worship ad- dressed to the as yet unknown and undefined powers of nature, though it is unfortunate that it so powerfully suggests disembodied souls and an assimilation of external events to impulses of human will. 1 Rhys Davids speaking of Metempsychosis says truly that there is a helplessness about this creed in direct and striking contrast with the ' childlike fulness of hope and the strong desire for hfe revealed in the • Vedas.' 2 We may say four, if we choose to separate the Normans proper (c. 900 A.D.) from their cousins the Teutons five centuries earUer. * This curious fallacy is even to-day repeated again and again as an acknowledged axiom even by writers of the acumen of Pringle Pattison : it finds a parallel in the imperfect vindication of democracy as an ideal for all time, because it existed at Athens under personal influence for perhaps half a century in a genuine form. Of such 'prejudices' our mind divests itself with great reluctance : it would be interesting to know how much error in religion, pohtics, philosophy takes its rise from these two fallacies. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 37 the depressing climate of the Ganges valley begins to affect both thought and will. This vedic age may be placed in 1200-800. Phase B. The Brahmanas 800-500 B.C. — The second phase, of the brahmanas (800-500), is marked by loss of spirit and energy, by pessimistic legalism, and by a degraded view of the divine beings. A new horror is felt at the thought of ' becoming again and again the food of death ' when metempsychosis took the place of personal immortality and a happy home with Yama and the forefathers. There were in this period two tendencies ; the priestly class were devoted to the elaboration of the cultus, the military to the task of explaining the destiny and the nature of the soul. There seems to be a growing agreement among scholars (i) that the belief in transmigration arose from native contact, although some authors of repute reject this theory ; (ii) that the speculative thought of the Hindus is not a priestly creation but rather a reaction against mechanical sacerdotalism. See further note on p. 508. CHAPTER B. THE NEW MILITARY MOVEMENT IN THOUGHT Section V. Novel Theories (Autotheism, Sankhya, Yoga) Anti-clerical reactions of the Outland and Warrior Caste. — After this brief historic interlude we take up once more the development of the anti-clerical reaction. The warrior-class seem to have given a new meaning to the purely magical and external word brahman, because they had not yet lost the sense of the value of the inward and personal. It is not a little curious that such a protestant movement against a magical ' Catholicism ' should employ this word brahman to support its main thesis. The Outland protested against the Midland where the priests were establishing their supremacy : the Ksatriya class on east and south and west showed a keen interest in speculative theology, and later history (though edited by brahmans) could not eject references to learned and pious kings of whom the priests did not disdain to become the disciples.^ It is held by soihe (e.g. Deussen and Grierson) that the revival of personal theism is owed to the same military influence ; a cult not unconnected with the old solar worship and therefore, like Mitraism in the armies of Imperial Rome, highly suited to the soldier's temperament — ■ indeed marking a survival of the joyous days of heroic combat when death was not dreaded but gave the only sure passport to paradise. Perhaps every military race or militant creed has a firm hold upon a happy personal Hfe hereafter : at the same moment life is held cheap and of value, death a good : it is the commonest article of savage behef that only the heroes who fall in battle or meet violent death gain the highest immortality. Autotheism : identity of Self and God. — But without doubt 1 Kapila (though perhaps mythical) founder of the Sankhya, was of Rajah stock ; Mahavira, Hke Gautama his contemporary, was a ksatriya. These only gave a pecuHar turn and perhaps a novel direction to the doctrines already anonymously spread in the Aran, and Upan. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 39 the chief miUtary doctrine reflects a somewhat different spirit. Brahman is conceived as the ens generalissimum (not an active or fighting partizan) ; supreme cause of all physical and psychic potencies, and yet best expressed by their negation. The highest without is identical with the highest within, the ' Inward Controller ' (the stoic riye/jLoviKov) and this simple axiom expresses the whole cycle of doctrine, Brahman =Atman, God = the Self. We have called this autotheism. It is not precisely solipsism, and most cer- tainly it should not be called pantheism. The Absolute has nothing in common with the vedic gods. It is not even conceived as their parent : like everything else, they are the product of its dreaming. Though it transcends all being and every predicate, it is very near us, being our own self : through our minds the Absolute looks forth with myriad eyes (which are yet the same) upon a world of mirage which He (or it) has produced by som- nambulism. There is much delight in the discovery of this secret ; the upanisads are not steeped in melancholy, and like the Bhagavad Gita i show a glad appreciation of the nearness of the divine. Here we only briefly introduce the system which finds its end and completion in the vedanta : it demands a fulness of treatment which would at this point only interrupt the account. The ' Way of Works ' : tapas and ascetism, an intensified Shamanism. — Side by side with this new ksatriya teaching on the identity of God and the Self must have arisen a novel theory of works, which was to modify profoundly the hieratic and mechanical cultus, and to set up an ideal of personal holi- ness wholly irreconcilable with brahmanic teaching. There existed then two methods of attaining salvation : (i) the way of works, of the external cultus, Karma-marga, and (2) the path of knowledge jnana-marga. The one corresponds to the stage of TTidTiii or obedience to churchly rules and guidance in Clement of Alexandria, the other to the stage of ^vwai^ where the believer appropriates and realizes in himself the previously external dogma.2 Now the way of works took suddenly a new personal turning. There had probably always been in India a class of ' Later, but certainly pre-Christian in its original form. ^ The later bhakti-marga is the name of the great dravidian revival of personal theism following a military movement ; the three stages find a parallel (not to be too closely pressed), in the triple doctrine of St. James, St. John 1 and St. Paul. 40 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages men who desired to attain assurance of salvation by personal effort, and not by priestly rite or vicarious mediation. In the ordinary sacrificial cult, the worshipper was in the position of a rich man, unable or unwilling to dance, who paid nautch-dancers to perform in his stead. Such passivity and mechanical external- ism did not satisfy those who felt reUgion to be a matter for the inward self. Asceticism (tapas) taught that a man could neglect or override ordinances and punctilious rites and conquer himself alone. This Yoga method was nothing but an intensified Sham- anism ; — there the shaman himself chose his lot and the means to attain communion with the divine (or rather personal release from passion and the flesh) . Reverence for such ascetics is a com- mon feature in all early religions. The medicine-man only wins and retains his place by suffering, just as the N. American boy is tortured and tested before he is admitted as a man and a full tribal member.^ In Rig V. x. 136 we read of munis who (quite in the manner of the self-taught wizard) boast of magical powers won by ascetic practice : in the later Brahmanas we hear of the Sramanas, mentioned in conjunction with the brahmans but as already their rivals. The Gods jealous of this personal holiness. — Very early it was supposed that this over-holiness in man was intensely dis- tasteful to the gods, who would, like Indra, send apsaras to tempt the too persistent ' Saint Antony ' from the path of con- tinence and mortification. Penance led to the development of magical powers which challenged a divine (and a priestly) mono- poly. The orthodox hierarchy could only by a patent anomaly include in the stages of a holy life one which transcended all need of works in the ritual sense. An anchorite could wrest boons from the gods by virtue, and become their equal and even superior. It was now held that the rsis, or saints of old, rose to their dignity not by sacrifice but by penance. During the years of transition and ferment (from Gautama to the close of the Epic age) the ideal had completely changed ; the third stage of the asramas or the Ufe in the forests disappeared, and the fourth or ascetic took its place. This new ideal then of hoUness won by personal effort supplanted the sacrificial order and set 1 The parallel to this is the conversion after spiritual conflict demanded in the strictest Methodism before full Church membership is granted. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 41 a certain class of men entirely free from sacerdotal control.^ The ' atheistic ' Sankhya (only in a very modified sense). — There is still another primitive movement of thought which has exerted and still exerts the deepest influence in Hindustan, the Sankhya of the perhaps fabulous Kapila, said to be the founder of an atheist system, as Patanjali of the Yoga just named. ^ Here it may be said once for all that neither the Sankhya nor the jain or buddhist systems deny the gods any more than did Epicurus.3 Nor did they deny heaven and hell ; they only professed to show ' a more excellent way.' But there is no Creator or Supreme Deity ; only an Absolute from which (in a fashion never explained) various souls arise to return thither again. Hindu gods, as Jacobi and many others clearly show, are not gods in our sense ; rather Plutarch's dsemons who live a very long time but are not immortal in their own right : in India they Uve thirty-two or thirty-three sagavopamos or oceans of years but not for ever. So even amongst the jains (whose main object is to exalt a perfect human nature at the expense of the divine) prayers are offered to the jinas or sanctified human saints but actually rewarded by the gods ; for the canonized mortals have passed into perfect peace and cannot be disturbed to listen to us. Buddhism probably led in India, as elsewhere, rather to a multiplying than to a denial of various heavens and hells ; in each of which, for a time only, a soul growing nearer the great Deliverance might find respite or purgation. With this preface, which answers our wonder that the Sankhya should ever have been included among orthodox sects in philosophy, let us examine the chief tenets of this remarkable system. ^ Of Yoga there are two kinds, hatha, aiming at magical powers, raja, at spiritual perfection and purity ; dhyana (concentration) is the best method for the latter purpose by which a man gets to know the structure of the Universe and the nature of God (Bohn). 2 Patanjali is called founder of the Yoga by Garbe, but he is no more original in his doctrine than Mahavira or Confucius, or Gautama himself. He lived some time after the Sankhya had become widely known and while introducing a personal deity into his own system really adopted their physical tenets and strove to make them in this manner acceptable to the orthodox. ' Or his latin editor, Lucretius, whose address to the great Mother- Goddess is, until Apuleius, the sole genuinely emotional and devotional passage in roman literature. 42 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages Sankhya dualism : the end, return of soul to its own true life. — It is an unresolved dualism [dvaita] between mind and matter : between these two self-subsisting entities a bond or the semblance of a bond has arisen which must be untied. There is no explana- tion either of their origin or of their nexus : the whole philosophy has but one aim, to set the soul free from its entanglement. This thought-system must have arisen not long before the appearance of the orphic psychology in the west — an independent witness to the ' home-sickness ' of the human soul for some true native land.^ The end is freedom through knowledge that the nexus is unreal, and is the return of the soul to its own true life avTT) Ka9' avTTjv as Plato would say. What this state was no hindu thinker could ever explain, and hence the continual dilemma, does this or that sect teach or deny immortality ? First theoretic basis of Pessimism (so-called) : sole aim deliver- ance : the Universe moral. — It was the ascetic system of Yoga and the philosophic duahsm of Sankhya which first provided a theoretic basis for pessimism — an attitude of which there is little trace in the Ufanisads. The whole future thought of Hindustan is centred henceforth on the single problem of release. It is now taken for granted that this must be a man's personal work on his own behalf ; " no man may deliver his brother ' nor make agreement unto God for him, for it cost more to redeem ' his own soul, so that he must let that alone for ever.' And nothing but kno^\iedge can give deliverance ; even ascetic practice only prepares the way, and in some systems (as bud- dhism) is rejected as an indispensable propedeutic. Salvation is a state of wisdom in which man, after recognizing the unerring law of the universe and acquiescing in it, rises altogether above it by his own strength of will. Now there are two axioms of science, or rather one in two forms, which the primitive mind seems from the first to have accepted ; nothing without a cause, ex nihilo nihil fit. Hence the idea of creation is always strange and unfamiliar — just as Ionian thought starts with the given universe which shifts, contracting or expanding, according to 1 Garbe, Jacobi and Deussen are all convinced that the Sankhya system has a primitive and historic character (in spite of the doubts about the person of Kapila) and is certainly anterior as a system to buddhism which resembles a restatement of the doctrine, but from different points of view and with some reserves. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 43 fixed rules. For human practice this becomes the survival of old energy in some new form, the reaping of that which is sown, the exact recompense of desert. The profound thought behind this sense of inexpiability, the futility of penance and sacrifice, is the belief that the Universe in itself is moral. The rationahst schools about the year 500 while they seem at first sight to reject ' humanism ' — the conviction that behind phenomena a counter- part is found to our human will and character — nevertheless only bring it back in an intenser form. Mahavira and Gautama really leave nothing in the world but the constant operation of moral cause and effect. In such a system there is no place for a creator or need for any Supreme Being. Fichte (in one phase of his theosophy) would have thoroughly approved : God was the moral order of the world and no one ought to ask for any other deity. It is clear then, fluid as we may suppose the theo- logy (or rather theodicy) of India to be, that every school be- Ueves the problem of desert and retribution to be finally settled and to have left no doubts behind. A man is in every system just what he has made himself, and will be hereafter what he is making himself now. Against this extreme pelagianism the rehgion of personal theism ranged itself in the Bhagavad Gita. Section VI. Theism (c. 500 b.c.) Stage I : Personal theism of Krsna — possibly a coeval of Zoroaster. — It is believed by some ^ that the ksatriya class tended towards monotheism ; though their theology is chiefly concerned with another form of belief. We have noticed that a solar cult is suitable for the military mind : we can find a parallel for it in later mitraism. This worship of light is the common heritage of the indo-iranian stock and marks off the southern branch from the cthonian religions of the dravidian natives. Some two centuries before 400 b.c. Krsna Vasudeva ^ became its reUgious pioneer. He taught those features of theism which, famihar enough to the western world, indeed the presupposition of any rehgious feeling whatever amongst us, have never been accepted by hindu theosophy. God is a single Being, simple, supreme, 1 e.g. Grierson of the Bengal C.S., Garbe and Professor Bhandarkar. ^ A real historic character — as many students accept to-day, a pupil of Ghora Angirasa after whose teaching he 'never thirsted again.' 44 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages adorable ; infinite, eternal and good : man's salvation, highest bliss or final aim is not immersion in a neuter substance but personal immortality in his presence. If we cannot trace any active perso-magian influence in this revival, we can at least say that one instinct of the aryan mind found expression in India as it had earher in Zoroaster's preaching. i It was a reaction against the exclusively physical conception of godhead, and the pure fatalism which seems to follow. Krsna, later deified by his devoted followers, found no welcome for his doctrines among the priestly class ; he therefore turned to the ' atheistic ' systems of sankhya and yoga. Neither school was directly concerned with normal ethics or with personal rehgion ; the yoga was certainly the more interested in moral conduct, though it saw nothing ultimate or satisfying in the restless and imperfect life of common morality. The yoga paid a price for an alliance which gave it a popular form ; it accepted God. A refined shamanism was brought to admit a personal deity of good will towards men ; it changed its object from concentration upon self to devotion towards a deity distinct from the worshipper.^ Alliance — (i) with yoga, (2) with brahmanism. — In the second stage this theistic belief was reconciled with brahmanic doctrine and accepted (though with reluctance) as orthodox.* Brahman- ism found in Gautama's movement a serious foe and as the price of aUiance accepted the Adorable as identical with the ancient vedic sun-god Visnu.* It is certain that during the Epic Period 1 It may be noted that although most writers agree to refer Zoroaster's date to c. 1000 e.g., some students have assigned a much later era, about a century before that of Buddha. " The nebulous Deity adopted by the yoga bears some resemblance to Leibnitz' Supreme Monad, a ' constitutional ' sovereign, guide and persuader of other souls, not the absolute power or rather substance of Spinoza ; he is a particular soul, not the universal Creator and parent of all, exalted over all the others only in virtue of his superior knowledge ; the yoga call him Purusa — soul, or Narayana the Primal Male — a curious point of contact with later gnostical thought and with the Cabbala based upon it. ' For this early phase of the Midland hierocracy Hopkins suggests the useful term Brahmaism as the ' unsystematic teaching of the earlier ' Upan.' before the formal development into the Vedanta. * In Mahahh. God Himself the Adorable is said to teach Narada, who in turn imparted the doctrine to the Sun. In Bhagavata theology the saved soul passes through the sun (cf. the curious coincidence of Plutarch's Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 45 {200 B.C.-200 A.D. or even later) the brahmans altered their policy of haughty exclusiveness for one of almost eager compre- hension. They discovered and accepted the legends of ksatriya ' doctors ' ; ^ beUeved that Janaka became a brahman and that warriors could by merit change their class ; Manu is said to be a warrior and in the (very late) redaction of his Law it is allowed that in certain cases a brahman may go to learn of a ksatriya : ^ thus they even admitted that their chief hero Parasu-Rama, a brahman incarnate for the sole purpose of destroying the miUtary order, was in the end defeated.^ In effect, at this moment the hieratic caste began that policy of inclusion from which it has never since deviated : we can witness to-day the success of such overtures. Local and native gods, even though abhorrent to the highest aryan sentiment, are made welcome and discovered to be embodiments of Siva, declared to be raj puts or brahmans. Aboriginal customs are not touched but are somehow included and ' within two generations ' (it is said) ' these natives will be- • come staunch adherents of brahmanism though still in the ' stage of fetich cult.' Section VII (A). The Bhagavad-Gita and Military Theism The Treaty of Peace between priests and warriors ; or the Bhagavad-Gita : its irreconcilable strata. — The Bhagavad-Gita surmises in Fades in Orbe Lunce with common Mndu belief, Deussen) ; Nimbarka an early reformer is said to be an incarnation of the Sun ; Rama-chandra was of solar (as Krsna of lunar) descent. ■"• Among theologians of the royal or miUtary class we may name Janaka king of Mithila prominent in debate with brahman divines ; the Ksatriya Ajatasatru of Kasi taught the brahman Gargya ; Jaivali lived among the Panchalas to E. and S. of the orthodox Midland and confuted or instructed the brahmans ; among his pupils was Gautama non-buddha (cf . Chandog. Upan. wherein V iii 7 he claims that his religious system is the peculiar property of the mihtary class) ; in W. Punjab, a region clearly not remote from persian influence, a brahman consulted by earnest seekers after truth, sends them on to a ksatriya king, Asvapati. All this witness to an independent (if not superior) theology, the brahmans allowed to remain in their editions of the Upanisads. But they had no love for their teachers as the Epics clearly show ; in Satap. Br. vii 4 4 bad arguments are scornfully compared to ' the words of a warrior.' ' In Mahabh, Satap. Br. and Visnu Prasna. ^ That Rama-chandra was a Ksatriya incarnate is slurred over in the Ramayana but without success i. y$. 46 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages marks this new alliance ; it is a compromise and a treaty of peace. The noble ethical sentiment comes from the solar (' mitraic ') cult of the soldier-class; the now deified Vasudeva is fully identified with Visnu, and Krsna, the personal name of the prophet, is an incarnation. There is then a union of pantheism and theism which in the frankest manner seems rather to parade than disguise its ahomaUes. It is well to inquire more closely into the origin and fortunes of this remarkable writing. In it Krsna is repre- sented in three different guises, each a stage in an ascending scale of theology ; a human hero on the way to be recognized as semi-divine ; a phenomenal form of Visnu ; lastly identified with Brahman the All-Soul. Garbe, in this theory agreeing with Grierson, says : ' he was probably a leader of a warrior ' and shepherd tribe of non-brahmanic race ' (he is certainly the Dark or Black One) and lived long ' before Buddha, becoming ' the eponymous hero of the race and the founder of an ethical ■ religion independent of the vedic ceremonies. . . . The brah- ' mans claimed this important manifestation of the divine and ' made it an incarnation of Visnu ... his adherents, called ' Bhagavatus were thus merged in brahmanism '. The Gita was the text-book of the sect, but in its present form it is much modified and interpolated. A personal deity reveals himself as a hero and asks for love and devotion ; then, manifested as superhuman, he promises admittance to his heavenly abode after death. He calls himself Creator and ruler of a real world (not of a mirage). Yet side by side with this is introduced the conception of a neuter impersonal Absolute, in which it is the supreme end of man to be merged : phenomena are maya and cosmic illusion. It is not said, be it noted, as in the later Vedanta that the theistic attitude is for the less enhghtened, an exoteric cult to those who cannot dispense with a personal object. But the two irreconcilable beliefs are calmly juxtaposed, receiving alternate emphasis, as if there was no essential difference ' either ' in contents or in value ' (Garbe) . We cannot doubt which is the earlier element — the theistic. The whole character of the poem in design and execution, as well as the historical data, point to this conclusion.^ It is the ' brahmaistic ' ^ As against several eminent scholars, e.g. Holtzmann, Mahabh, 1893, who believes pantheism original, the theistic element only an adaptation of the Visnu- Krsna cult. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 47 recension which admits the neuter Absolute ; the true basis is the theology of sankhya-yoga duaUstic creeds which can admit a personal god, but not a higher term to embrace the two hostile antitheta. (i) God transcendent and from time to time incarnate as man. ■ — God is transcendent, that is, distinct from the world and from souls ; He deposits in matter a germ which evolves of itself (xix 3, 4) : a trace of the spontaneous matter or prakriii of the Sankhya. He is father of all creatures ; matter is the womb. He superintends the origin, development and catastrophe of the world. He determines the deeds of his creatures, making the figures revolve as in a puppet-show (xviii 61) . All his actions are for the sake of His universe ; and as this interest is wholly unself- ish He is never entangled in the flux of the world-process, as souls are (in sankhya and in orphic platonism) . He loves those who know and seek Him and dehvers them from all sin and evil ; He takes human form from time to time to support the right. B. Gita iv 5-8 : ' Many births have passed of men and of thee, ' Arjuna ; all these I know, but thou, slayer of foes, knowest ' them not. I, unborn, and soul eternal. Lord of all creatures, ' taking upon me mine own nature, I arise by mine own power. ' For whensoever righteousness decays and there is a rising up of ' evil, then myself do I create, for the protecting of the good and ' the overthrow of evil-doers : for the setting up of righteousness ' do I arise from age to age.' It is very hard to beUeve that there is no connexion between this theory and the Incarnation of the Clementine (Christian) and the Shiite (musUm) doctrine.^ (2) Matter : (3) the Passive Soul — all three eternal. — Primitive Matter is not created by God, but coexists from eternity, subject (like platonic v^v in Timaeus) to incessant change. It evolves from chaos the present universe and returns again to it, like the primal homogeneous substance of the lonians, of Spencer and the now perhaps obsolete Nebulist School. These world-periods are from the sankhya. The soul is also eternal ^ and is enchained by the gunas, but in itself is immutable and dwells in body quite inactive and uninterested.* It neither acts nor inspires acts (v 1 The B.G. has been carefully tr. by Kashinath Trimbak Teland (1840- 1893) into English verse and prose. , I" Thus there are three eternals. » Of i/'vx'^ as a pure spectator or unwilling guest in the body there are curious traces in Homer and Pindar. 48 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages 13) and remains as in Valentine and other Gnostics quite un- affected by the emotions of the body : this, being a mere occa- sional vesture, may be put off without regret. All this is pure sankhya philosophy with a religious turn added at the price of logic and consistency.^ Entering into union with matter with a mission (here it differs from Sankhya teaching) its chief duty is so to behave under this trial that it can return quickly to its source, when the recall is sounded. (4) Methods of Deliverance: Works and Knowledge or faith. — There are two ways of release ; by moral conduct and good acts (jrpa^L'i) or by withdrawal from action and true knowledge (fieaipia). The military original puts the moralist tendency in the foreground (iii 8, v 2, xviii 7). But the superior value of speculation is too ingrained in the hindu mind to be safely dis- lodged in any system bidding for popular favour.^ At times quietism is praised above action (vi 3) with the same neglect of consistency that we find in the theology, as it oscillates between a personal god and the Absolute. Without regard to moral conduct, knowledge can save from rebirth ; that is, the redeem- ing knowledge of the Sankhya which discriminates soul from body, showing that the former has no concern in the doings of its gar- ment of flesh (xiii 23, xiv 19).^ But as a rule this self-knowledge is only a preparation for the higher knowledge of God. The second path by good acts, is repeatedly enjoined as the true way to salvation.* But good acts must expect no fruit, and only win their reward when no reward is looked for : they must be done for duty's sake alone, or rather because of love towards God. ' Do what is right and leave the rest to God, never troubling about the effect or success of your works.' This is the lesson of such passages as iv 22, 23 ; ix 27, 28 ; xviii 12, 17. (5) Express rejection of Pharisaic Ritualism. — Legalism or 1 Soul is sometimes held to be a part of God not an independent sub- stance XV 7, xvi 18, xvii 6. 2 India shows that the people (in a wide sense) prefer the hermit and ascetic to the active priest or philanthropist ; interest in others is really a sign that the spiritual nature is not yet perfect and has not attained its goal ; cf. Kipling's well known story of Sir Purun Dass. 8 This, as Garbe reminds us, is ' an isolated recognition of the pure ' Sankhya ideal.' * Deussen urges the unethical character of Sankhya and the very remarkable and almost unique emphasis of B.G. on moral conduct. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 49 ritual morality is expressly condemned in the strongest terms : abandon all sacred rites (xviii 66) . The vedic promises are scorned (ii 42-45) as dealing only with this material world and transient bliss in some secondary heaven (ix 20, 21), indifference to vedic prescriptions is indispensable (ii 52, 53) for salvation — a state or attitude of the soul which outward acts are powerless either to create or to impair. Thus the karma-marga or efhcacy of works is rejected ; so are all brahman rites which minister to earthly desires and personal greed. Also man's freedom to act and to carve out his destiny seems throughout taken for granted ; it is left to him whether he will rise, to the highest bliss in the service of God : nothing is said of fatal predestination. The hindrances to his true self-development are (as in most other systems) selfish passion and desire (iii 27, 43) — man's chief and domestic enemy — and the ignorance which finds vent in unbelief and wrong standards of Mfe. To kill earthly desires a moderate ascesis is recommended ; yoga, even if it does not lead to the truest state of the soul, will bring rebirth in a better condition and so ultimately the goal will be within reach (ii40, vi4i). (6) Stress on a blissful and personal immortality. — This happy state of the released is of course not absorption in a neuter Absolute but conscious bliss ^ in God's presence : the problem of conscious survival without material organs of life does not enter their purview. This doctrine of immortality is a pillar of theistic belief without which theism or belief in any personal god or providence would be inconceivable or at least wholly superfluous. It is most certainly as ancient as the earliest ksatriya revival under Vasudeva, attributed by some to a date much anterior to that of Buddha. The Sankhya-yoga (of which jain and buddhist systems are but modifications) lays no stress upon conscious survival. Even in this poem, side by side with these almost Christian expressions are found the complement of pantheistic theology in a doctrine of absorption of the single soul into the World-Soul. This pantheizing stratum can never be clearly marked off from the original and theistic. This ' As in almost every religious immortality all over the world : the goal of the Sankhya-yoga is perhaps unconscious — certainly in any usual sense ; but, as in buddhism, it is foolish to conclude summarily that this implies a positive extinction of being — about which the hindu is very properly discreetly silent. E 50 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages latter cannot be much later than 200-100 B.C. in the view of the latest scholars : and the brahmanic may be placed in 100-200 A.D. It must be left open to question whether Christian influence can be traced in the age of this ' orthodox ' recension : it is certain that it is not to be found in the first form of Bhagavat doctrine which arose spontaneously out of the " rich storehouse ' of hindu thought (Garbe). It is a joyful anthem in praise of devotion to God — pauline faith. (7) Faith of itself (without caste or works) ensures this salva- tion. — It is therefore a message free to all mankind ; it knows no caste distinctions. Like modern nonconformity the appeal is made without respect to birth, race or former conduct and deserts. Bhakti ensures vmkti (deliverance from the birth- cycle) not only in the vaisya or third aryan class, but in women and in sudras, the fourth or dravidian caste ix 30 32. Beheving evil-doers if converted on a death-bed and directing their whole thought to God, will carry this temperament of faith and love as a passport into the next world (viii 6, 9, 10, 13). In sum the Giia is the best expression of the Bhagavata School founded by Vasudeva, itself a strong movement against mechanical vedic brahmanism, an almost pure Sankhya-yoga philosophy coupled with strong personal theism and immortality. It is with all its startUng and unresolved anomalies an attempted concordat between two incompatible systems. (B) The Bhagavat Church as modified by alien influences Negative influence of Brahman Theology : worship of Avatars. — Yielding to the overtures of brahmanism, the Bhagavat theology became negative, and the warm personal object of faith gave way to an abstraction. We come across the deity expressed by an interrogative ' Who ? ' of which neither being nor not-being can be predicated. Yet again, in evident reaction, in other places God is represented as having substance and form, as revealed to the saints in the body. Thus the original Adorable being removed into inaccessible darkness (as in later apophatic western theology) all genuine cultus is directed to the incarna- tions, which suppHed the need of a personal and inteUigible object of devotion. In special favour were the two final ksatriya embodiments of the divine Rama-chandra and Krsna — even Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 51 the Buddha was sometimes so regarded.^ Incarnations, at first ten in number were increased to twenty-four, that every religious sect and every temper of tire human mind might be able to find an appropriate object of faith. Tulasi-dasa, a renowned poet of the movement (c. 1580) sums up the position ' Why try to gaze on Him Who is invisible ? Pray to Rama ' and all (the divine) is at once seen.' Influence of Dravidian Sakti worship; syncretism resulting in complete medley. — But two new influences, beside frigid and abstract brahmanism, appear to have reached and modified this faith : the dravidian cult of female power or sakti, united in Lakshmi, God's consort, one with him and yet distinct ; and the Christian doctrine of the Holy Ghost. ^ Thus there arose a sort of trinity, the Adorable, his successive incarnations on earth, and his single Sakti (or collective feminine potencies) . The other hindu gods were reduced to Visnu's deputies : Brahma is a lower being created by him, Rudra like Satan is made to fight against him, and when he acknowledges his defeat and inferior place God said : — ' He who knoweth me knoweth thee also, and who ■ foUoweth thee, followeth me '.^ Thus even Siva is accepted (towards the close of the Epic period) as a form of the Highest, while other gods are reduced to mere sateUites. Attempts to reconcile or find a place for. all needs of thought went on apace, until as in the Bhagavad Gita, the hindu Scripture becomes in Grierson's terms, ' a medley of unrelated and mutually contra- ' dictory conceptions.' All this anomaly the pious, uncritical and unifying mind of India accepted without demur — each reading into the text what he chose or actually finding it there. So each of the three-fold ' practices ' karma, jnana, bhakti, found a welcome in the system : a man might purify himself by rehgious rite or concentrate his mind on the divine qualities, or (last and highest stage) might see and experience nothing but God Himself in the warmth of his own faith and love. We 1 Other zoomorphic or totemistic avatars of Visnu were fish, tortoise, boar, lion — before man and dwarf. ' Believed by tlie Nestorians and quite possibly by still earlier arrivals from the persian church to be female, and by some identified with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Cf. note on Elkesai, p. 428. ^ Another later and reflective legend represents Siva as wrath born out of his forehead — somewhat in Bohme's spirit : Hegel (Phi. Rel.) appears much interested in this instance of hindu speculation. 52 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages may here leave the Bhagavata, down to the time of the monistic reactions of Sankara (c. 800 a.d.). Section VIII. Analogous movements towards Theism in Dravidian India Influences on S. Dravidian Development : (i) Bhagavat, (2) Christian, (3) Jain. The Tamil Classics. — We have already spoken of the fervent rehgious emotion and fine literary powers which arose among the southern natives of India. If we remem- ber the date of these devotional writings we shall certainly recognize two influences — the Bhagavat creed and the Christian settlers.^ During early Christian centuries there was regular intercourse held between Pandya and Chera kingdoms and the Empire of Rome : it is hard to beUeve that there was not also an interchange of ideas, and it is certainly possible that from 100- 500 A.D. two systems, northern rationalism and personal theism from the far west, may have competed for victory among the races of southern India. In these early centuries Dr. Pope saw every- where an extension to the South of Bhagava'd doctrine — Siva only being substituted for Visnu : in the Siva tract Agamanta we have the famihar simile for the two theories of divine grace (austinian and semi-pelagian or a modified Synergism), the cat taking the kitten in her mouth to a place of safety, whilst the young of the monkey lay hold of the mother's tail. But the date of the Agamanta is by no means certain. In the former hypo- thesis the fervent love of the believer is the only possible return he can make and transcends every kind of outward religious observ- ance. The dravidian tongues have no word for faith, and the Sanscrit bhakti (which must have come in from the north) is first found in tamil some time after 700 a.d. But the first trans- forming influence was neither ' orthodox ' from the Midland, nor Christian from overseas, but jain. Writings in tamil are found after the year 750 ^ and flourish in the following centuries under jain influence. If there are vestiges of a northern influence in the surviving instances, a desire to oppose brahman ideas and create a popular rehgious series can certainly be traced. 1 Cf. Grierson's very moderate and convincing Modern Hinduism and Debt to Nestorians. Jl. Roy. Asiatic Soc. 2 The date of a document granting terms to a hebrew settlement at Cochin ; so Dr. Burnell. Some claim a much earlier date, 385 a.d. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 53 The augustan age of tamil letters is found under jain supremacy in the Pandya kingdom c. 850 to 1200— ]ust the period covered by the present survey. A certain antipathy to the north is found : ' many southroners have entered the way of salvation ■ [svargam], while many in the north have lived in vain.' The Naladiyar is perhaps the earUest composition, an ethical poem on the objects of existence : next comes the famous Rural by Tiruvalluvan, in 1330 stanzas deahng with virtue, riches and enjoyment. These gnomic couplets, somewhat in the style of Theognis, were accepted at the tamil academy as good guidance for the laymen or audientes (as we might call them) of the fain brotherhood ; 800 of their professed anchorites are said to have met at the Madura court to discuss practical ethics. These monks also issued 400 quatrains serving as a ' book of wisdom ' for daily use, teaching the usual lessons of northern pessimism, weariness of life, soul lost in round of rebirth, evil deeds and joyful release. A very interesting parallel may be found in the neopla- tonic Hymns of Synesius Bishop of the Cyrenaica and coeval with Augustin (c. 422 a.d.) : but in the East the similar evolution is quite independent. As opposed to any notion of ' compelling grace ' it is throughout clearly asserted that every man's future depends on his own deeds. ^ But there was also a much earlier period of jain influence ; the denial of God and the Soul was in vogue in cultured circles between 25-220 a.d. and the great revolt of the Dravidians against the rationalism from the north was marked by the revival of Sivaism. This took place between 400- 600 at least anterior to the visit of Huen Tsang the Chinese pilgrim. It seems clear that in the earlier centuries of our era, jain, buddhist and polytheist had lived together in peace and no doubt the sceptical views were confined to refined circles. Sivaite Revival : reaction of theistic Piety against Nihilism. — In the third great tamil classic, jains and sivaites attack buddhists ; and Tsang seems to represent many viharas of the latter as in ruins. During that period {400-600 a.d.) southern India became the land of beUef in a benevolent First Cause who, of his grace, created the world that souls might work out their karma and 1 It must be noted that although the dates of tamil works are given as c. 850-1200 ace. to Reinhold Rost, there are some authors who prefer an earlier age, as Frazer who writes on ' South Dravidians ' in Enc. Rel. Eth. 54 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages escape the ' haunting terror of endless hells '. Perhaps just after the visit of Tsang or c. 650 a.d., Sambandhar, a renowned sage and saint, began to write devotional hynans to be sung in Siva's temples : he looked on the overthrow of jains and buddhists as the great aim of his life and in every anthem the tenth verse is an attack on their tenets.'- Even he seems to have found a prototype in Nakkirar Devar, a still earlier hymnodist (before 600). Others continued the work in the ninth century, e.g. Vachakar who ousted the heretics and set up a Siva-temple at Chola. Collections of the hymns were often made by compilers ; a ninth (c. 1050) , tenth and eleventh are found.^ In the* doubtful atmosphere of this earlier age we can at least be certain that a literature of personal devotion grew up some time later than 400 A.D. and had a life of intermittent activity never wholly interrupted down to the present day. Both jain and buddhist negations failed to make a lasting impression. In 907 ^ a temple of Siva was covered with gold at Chidambaram, and nearly fifty years later a Chola king marked a success by building a temple atTanjore, in 955 a.d., at incredible cost. Vachakar opposed to the Humeian doctrine of personal instability and denial of soul or ego, the need of a constant and personal element which per- ceives : ' if knowledge appears and disappears in a moment of ' time what is it that survives all flux ? ' He asks what use is it to debate as to revealed truth if understanding (which demands a persistent centre of consciousness) has long since passed away before the interlocutor had stopped speaking ? The buddhist is represented as inquiring ' since thou sayest that we from the ' north possess neither god nor salvation, tell me then what is thine ? ' Later influences after the Expulsion of the Nihilists : San- kara's Compromise. — The hymns of devotion (very likely under Christian -influence) may have turned the popular mind away from jain and buddhist tenets ; some have held that it was owing 1 He is said to have induced (like Elijah and the prophets of Baal) the Pandyan king of Madura to put 8ooo jains to death. 2 A later development in cent, xvi-xvii does not here concern us ; e.g. the psalms of the ' David ' of Sivaism, Jayumana^'ar, were written c. 1650 ; the ■ sacred sports ' of Siva (=ways of manifesting his Saftii) were gathered together in the latter century. 3 When Rost believes the jains supreme in the Pandya kingdom. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 55 to them that the two latter sects became extinct by the year 900.^ But other powers were at work. Kumarila Bhatta preached a cru- sade against the heretics (c. 750) and the famous monist Sankara of Malabar gave them a death blow and laid the basis of philoso- phic Sivaism. Dravidian India could never have accepted the genuine esoteric teaching of this philosopher, any more than the reUgious consciousness of England could be satisfied with Mr. Bradley's Absolutism. The ' realism ' of personal worship and a personal God was required by these non-brahmanic races. Sankara allowed them a cultus of all Siva's manifestations, as being forms of the All-Spirit. He founded monasteries to compete with the still remaining buddhist viharas and the present guru or abbot of the southern convents is thirty-third in un- broken descent for over looo years. A somewhat later in- fluence seemed to have arrived (within our period) from Kashmir ; the exposition of practical Sivaite theology by Mey-kandar Devar (c. 122S) represents the system taught them about 1000 by Abhinava Gupta.^ An inscription dating perhaps from c. 1200 (so Thurston Castes and Tribes of S. India, Madras : 1909) says that Siva specially created a man to stop the hostile observ- ances of jains and buddhists ; an incarnation of the bull Nandi took place in a brahman called Basava, who procured the slaughter of the usurping jains.^ 1 A date very difficult to reconcile with Rost's chronology and Augustan Age of tamil letters given above. ' Cf. Dr. Burnett, //. Roy. Asiatic Soc, July, 1910 ; he traces both to the Svetasvaiara Upan. There is some doubt however if this formulated doctrine came from S. to N. or the reverse way ; certainly the Svet. was familiar in both regions c. 500 a.d. when Sivaite devotion put forth its earliest shoots ; and we know that Sanscrit was used in the S. for literary purposes. 3 Basava, brahman from the Belgaum district (cent, xi or xii) set up a reaction against Sankara 's sacerdotal Monism and founded or rather reformed a sect of phallophorous sivaites [lingayats) which has spread all over S. India and to-day (Cems. Rep. 1901) numbers i J millions, including most of the officiant priests at Siva's shrines. They still show a certain hostility to brahman claims, yet in accordance with an irresistible tendency may be expected to find their way back to the ancient fold (see Eggeling of Edinburgh) . Basava early in life renounced his caste and went to reside at Kalyana, capital of the Chalukya realm, and at a very early date seat of a Christian bishopric. Here as in the case of Ramanuja we cannot exclude a direct influence of western doctrine. CHAPTER C. THEISM AND ITS ANTAGONISTS Section IX Sivaite Theology Part A. Its barbarous origins Doubtful position of Siva : a composite figure. — It may never be decided amongst scholars whether Rudra-Siva is a deity of the aryan invaders or of the natives ; whether his almost invariable emblem, the linga, is aryan, dra vidian, hellenic or even hunnic in origin.^ With the reflective syncretism that produced the trimurti and later forms of hindu belief and worship we have little concern : it is just here, in the dearth of spon- taneous forms and in the predominance of calculating thought, that philosophical interest wanes. But Siva is connected with a genuine rehgious feehng as well as with priestly systematizing and must claim our notice as a pioneer preparing the way for the revival of devotion. Sir Charles Lyall very rightly sees in him the earliest and universal impression of Nature upon man — ' one of endless and pitiless change '. Under his patronage as bhutesvara, ' lord of the dead ', was placed the demonolatry of the non-aryan tribes. His emblem may well suggest a rude patriarchal society as opposed to a perhaps more gentle and refined matriarchal stage ^ ; the powers of the sky as confronting those of mother-earth and the children of her womb. There can be no doubt however that the extension of lingam-sym- bohsm is due to the Aryans and also that there is no sort of obscene or even erotic connotations with a cult of the most austere kind (so H. H. Wilson and most subsequent students). Since Siva is the typical ascete, the Great Yogi, it might even be supposed 1 Siva, invariably represented white, is said to appear at beginning of present age as Sveia the Wliite for the benefit of brahmans ; Visnu always depicted in dark-blue colour has Krsna (black) as subordinate form ; it is hard not to see here racial features. 2 The gentleness is however contradicted by the frequent ferocity of sacrifices to the Mother-Goddess, e.g. Hinglaj. 56 Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 57 (this is the suggestion of Fergusson) that this symbol is not genesiac but represents a buddhist tope — a sign of renunciation, not of Hfe. Yet, as in the case of Dionysus, the choruses of the BacchcB (as Murray and others well show) display both the wild revelry of bacchantic mountaineers with all their gory rites and the pure contemplative calm of nature-mysticism. There are sudden transitions to wild cruelty and destructiveness. But this patronage of the ascetic type was late : for the Yogi is a product of aboriginal shamanism and of the godless Sankhya. There can be no doubt that it was a democratic protest against caste and ritual : for it was a way of salvation open to all and attained by personal effort without ' works of the law ' ; in the Mahabh. psychical concentrations and magic formulas begin to supersede sacrifice. We learn from Megasthenes [300 B.C.) not merely the prevalence of ascetics and gymnosophists as an essential feature of hindu life but also the branding of their cattle by the Sibae of the Punjab with the trident. Siva's image with the bull Nandi (? a greek loan) is found on the coins of the Kusan Kadphises II ij 90-100 a.d.). King Vasudeva {185-226) is known to have been a patron of Siva and it is be- lieved that between 200-300 a.d. the cult was firmly estabhshed throughout the Continent. Yet adopted in S. India as chief brahman deity. — In Southern India the cult of Siva was the oldest form of brahmanism ; its first teacher, Lakulisa, is said to have preached there c. 50 A.D., just when the Gospel was penetrating the Gentile west and China was opening her gates to buddhism. The spread of this worship was the work of mission-priests. Kumarila the Mimansist (c. 750 a.d.) is said to have taught that creation is a divine act not a fatal necessity, and to have enjoined a per- secution of jains and buddhists. His pupil was the great San- kara, whose special work as a Vedantine wiU occupy the next section. 1 The sole object of the scriptures to this ' inspired genius ' (as Frazer calls him), was to reveal the delusive appearance of that which sense represents as real, to pierce beyond reality itself to the point where God and matter are identical. But 1 ,W. Crooke, and perhaps Frazer Lit. Hist. Ind. seem to give Sankara's date as 737-769 instead of the usual 788-820 ; but we adhere with other recognized authorities to the latter. 58 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages although Sankara no doubt accepted Siva as a traditional object of exoteric worship, he could not be said to popularize the cult. This was reserved for Basava : abrahman (cf. p. 55), whoseE^awifa- daramayya ^ attacks brahman supremacy and professes to receive from Siva's own priests (jangama) the eight-fold sacrament.^ Feminine cult closely allied with Sivaism : Sakti or Female Energy. — Closely connected with Siva is the worship of Sakti, female energy, which may have been introduced in the age of the Puranas (the earliest of which may have dated from the close of the Epic Period or c. 350 a.d.). The wives of the gods are here taken as their creative or rather material powers. They corre- spond to the vedantine Maya, or cosmic illusion, or to the plastic matter Prakriti of the dualist Sankhya. These mythical relations as consort and spouse show the mystical union of the two eternal principles for the production of the world-spirit and matter, yang and yin or heaven and earth in China, the active and passive (or receptive) elements in the Porch. Such a worship is chiefly offered to Siva's wife ; and we are thus driven again to raise the question of this god's nationality and origin. It is in S. India among a non-aryan folk that traces of matriarchy still survive (Nairs etc.) and it is certain that in India as in Europe a rough distinction between the natives (dravidian or aegean) and the immigrants was found in the patriarchal system of the latter.^ Primitive cult of the Earth-mother or Mother-goddess. — The most primitive * monotheism was worship of the Earth- Mother, which comes only with settled life and husbandry and is a mark of the importance of women in fixing a home and main- taining sedentary pursuits while the men are absent in foray or hunt. We cannot however deny all traces of female-worship among the aryans.^ Even in the Rig we have the mystical union of Dyaus (that is, Zeus) and Prithivi, but this cult is quite differ- 1 Re-written in present form c. 11 80. 2 This sect does not cremate its dead or observe caste-rules or pilgrim- ages ; at present they tend to revert to orthodox brahmanism though there still remain traces of the old animosity (cf . note on Basava in previous section). ^ As well as in the sky or light-worship to which the aborigines were also strangers. '■ In stages of historic development ; I do not say earliest in time. ^ Or (if preferred) those hindu tribes who received a dialect and social culture from aryan sources. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 59 ent from that of the Dra vidians.^ This rested on the belief that Earth exhausted by her motherhood must be renewed and invigorated after harvest.^ This is the source of the patting of the soil or (as on greek vases) violently striking of the earth's surface with mallets : it is to arouse a dormant power to new- activities.^ Secondly, Earth must at intervals be refreshed with human gore as the stream of life ; thirdly, she must be married at the proper season to her consort. There is a cult of a Divine pair (as in the Nearer East, from earliest times) in the whole range of dravidian myth and ritual ; e.g. in Bengal ' Old Man and Old Woman ' in sacred village tree, among Kharwars, Chandob and Chanda, or Darkar and Dakin, — in Behar, Chordeva and Chordevi : the goddess of small pox Sitala has a husband Ghan- takarana (Bengal) ; and in Rajputana Gauri the yellow lady of the barley has for spouse Siva Svara, a deity of phallic origin. So the monkey-god Hanuman is her husband. There are curious nuptial rites in Chota Nagpur ; an oblong stone covered like that at Hinglaj with red ochre is flung into a chasm dressed in wedding garments. It is clear that both in myth and earlier rite, marriage with a divinity was soon expiated (and consum- mated by death : the bridegroom is married and then slain like Dulka Deo a god of vegetation — a story tells how he violated the tabu and disappeared. In Baroda the Mother is represented by a huge boulder from a fallen hill-top, before which are offered clay images of men, clearly (as the wicker figures in Rome) substitutes for real human victims : in Baroda too a human victim or scapegoat is merely slapped and chased away h-^ the children, to be once more brought back by them into human society. Among forest tribes in the Central Hills the Mother lives in a cairn of stones and the native priest or baiga offers ^ The correct rendering of the famous Rig X. 129, suggests the severance or bifurcation into two halves of an original neutrum.: ' The One breathed ' breathless by his own inherent power [svadha) ; beyond him was nothing ■ whatever : by heat was generated that one living germ enclosed in the ■ void ; then first came upon it desire which was the first seed of the mind ; ' fertilizing forces there were {svadha) below, prayati above ' : a dualism which places will in the upper region and kama or desire in the lower. ^ Cf. Grainger Worship of Romans, 1895. ^ Kols of Chota Nagpur kneel and pat earth; among the Oraons harvest- dance ends with a resounding smack analogous to many hellenic, or rather pre-hellenic, rites. 6o Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages flowers and a goat in sacrifice : adult women do not share in this but have a ritual and feast of their own, showing perhaps a double aspect of this worship, cthonian and terrible, creative and beneficent. The Mother-goddess is held to assume any form she likes, even the shape of a tiger ; also she is identified with snakes as dweUing in dark holes and as guardian of hidden treasure. In S. India there is an image of a serpent in her shrine. Sometimes her head, also as on greek vases, is seen just emerging from the soil. The dravidian cult of a female principle, cruel and kindly by turns, is beyond dispute the most important ele- ment which hinduism has received. Though accepted as orthodox this worship is most akin to the primitive Animism which for both races formed the under-current of all rehgious belief. ^ We find such a cult in the Caves of Karli blended to the present day with buddhist ritual, with which at the outset it could have nothing in common. Her cult is common in Western India ^ where it may weU have given or received influence from the earliest days.^ Wide and various patronage of Rudra-Siva and his Spouse. — Rudra, father of the Maruts or storm-gods, like Wodan the wild hunter, malign, slayer of men and cattle, became the god most favourably accepted in S. India. He appears to be a complex, or rather abstraction, of the various evil spirits or hobgoblins or mountain-sprites : as in the later greek attempt to unify all such influence under a Pan living behind nature objects. So Megasthenes {300 b.c.) tells us he is worshipped on the mounts, but Heracles (Krsna) on the plains. If not dravidian in origin, this figure of Rudra-Siva soon blends with congenial native ideas : he is lord of ghosts {bhutas) and bhutesvara : here shamanic devil-cult prepared the way. He is also lord of ascetics (yogisvara\ ; represented as Death no less than as vanquisher of Death, with his garland of skulls, his seat on a corpse. He is thus the first regular and recognized ruler of the demoniac forces. In early times he is called Satasudrija and lord of robbers : Siva is a euphemism, ' the Gracious ' and his double or paradoxical attitude he never loses ; he creates but only to reduce again his ^ Cf. the strange cholera-goddess Devi who is supposed to be actually incarnate in the patient. 2 Every Rajput clan in Kathiawar has its Mata. 3 I need not again refer to Hinglaj. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 6i work to ashes. His wife, Kali, for whom we have seen the way preparing, is scarcely inferior in power to her spouse and is like him a fusion of several notions. ^ Like Siva she is ' Lady of the Hills ' and patroness of female bacchants ; she is thought by some to be the primitive tutelar goddess of lofty mountain-chains, Parvati of the Himalayas and Vindhyas. As Durga, ' not to 'be approached,' she is the object of a sanguinary cult.^ Kali (black) and Karali are names derived from two of the seven tongues of Agni's fiame.^ It is however possible that this is merely the female partner of Kala, God of Time who produces and devours all things : the Kali-puja is celebrated on the darkest night of the month following the autumnal equinox ; it repre- sents her as a naked black woman (certainly of dravidian type) four-armed, wearing skull-garlands round head and neck, dancing on Kala's breast with open mouth and protruding tongue. She is also called devi ' goddess ' in a very special sense, jagan-mata world-mother. In connexion with Sakta cult, the tantric theo- logy has devised a system of female figures as attendants on Kali — arrayed in groups as the great Sciences [Mahavidyas], the Mothers eight or nine in number [Mataras) sometimes called the great Mothers {Mahanatatas) who are consorts of the chief gods, the eight Mistresses, and lastly witches and ogresses (yoginis, dakinis, sakinis) . In this priestly refinement of a very early and untutored belief, each god has his own special sakti or feminine energy as a complement which enables him to perform his cosmic function and to come into relation with the lower world. Passage of terrible Mother-goddess into ' Motherland '. The hindu novehst Chatterji {1838-1891) wrote the well-known patriotic hymn Bande Mataram which Grierson claims as an invocation of Kah, the great Mother-goddess — the idea of a motherland or national State with claims upon its children (accepted by Cotton) being wholly alien to hindu ideas. J. D. Anderson suggests that it marks a blend of western thought with 1 In part a cannibal deity, e.g. the Cumoris are said to snare and eat little children, and with her are associated the Dread Mothers {Mataras). ■ ^ Weber believes this title equals Nirrii, a vedic goddess of evil. ^ There seems no doubt that we can assign the evolution of Visnu and Siva to a popular movement lasting through the Epic Period [c. 200 b.c- 200 A.D.) and preceding the Age of the Puranas (from 350 a.d.) ; their cult is attested by coins and inscriptions of the early Christian centuries. 62 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages eastern ; — side by side with black Kali, who is the Mother that was, is set up by the mystical insurgents of the novel, a white marble statue of the Mother that shall be, the land of Bengal or Kali puriiied, — the poem addressing both idols. Though the motive of the author was harmless, he keeps alive the notion of Durga bearing ten weapons, and the hymn was used to inspire the rebels against the british raj. It is most certain that to the average hindu it both suggests the terrible world-mother and is the trumpet-note of sedition. A parallel, interesting from more than one point of view, is found in the aryan propaganda in Asia Minor under the persian Great Kings : whether to gain a people strong in matriarchal tradition and cult of the Mother-Goddess or because the native faith reacted on the aryan, is uncertain, but aramaic inscriptions are found in Cappadocia where Bel the indigenous God recognizes din Mazdayasnish — mazdeism per- sonified as a female — as sister and wife (Lidzbarski, Ephem. Semit. Epigr. i 59). A similar syncretism is found in the cult of Anaitis, Mitra the youthful sun god taking the place of the young favourite familiar in all female worships of the Nearer East. NOTE Barbarous Dravidian Survivals I cannot here do more than refer to the able article of J. H. Powell, Folk-Lore June 1914 on ' Hook-Swinging in India.' Here we observe a rite almost confined to dravidian India which has probably taken the place of human sacrifice ; and it is always offered to a goddess — Siva being qiiite a later hindu patron introduced by brahmanic syncretism upon a wholly aboriginal cult of the Earth-Goddess (who is summoned, aroused or pro- pitiated by slapping the soil before the hooks are attached to the votary's back 152, 195, 196). The real patroness is Durga (who safeguards the rite and prevents accidents to the rotating victim) ; Kali (goddess of cholera and plague), Manasa (of snakes and scorpions) and Bhadu (of children) are other tutelary Mothers. Dubois (c. 1800), E. Thurston (at Chennapatna in Mysore), and Dr. M. Phillips (in Evol. of Hinduism) say that the chidi-inari is self-torture offered to Mariamma ' one of the most ' evil minded and bloodthirsty of all the deities of India '. Anantha Iyer on Cochin Tribes etc., gives Kali as patroness of kite-swinging and boat- swinging, both rites in fulfilment of a vow performed by Nairs, kammalans, and kuruppans : it symbolizes the fight of Kah with demon Darika, the goddess leaping on his back and drinldng his blood (at Travancore she is called Bhadra Kali). In the Belgaum district the goddess is Yellama, at whose shrine 175 persons were ' swung ', or rather rotated, in 1834. It seems clear that it is a dravidian and aboriginal usage, scorned by the Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 63 brahmans unless for purposes of their own they consent to become its patrons ; it is a substitute for human sacrifice, a practice lasting far later among Dravidians than among Aryans. Upon Siva (whom Powell accepts as hindu), was fathered a practice doubtless in vogue 'long prior to the 'time at which he became recognized member of the village pantheon.' There is no mention in hindu scriptures or even in Tantras. It is a humane modification of the Kandhs' meviah (or willing human victim who by appeasing the fertility-goddess on behalf of the little community earns blessedness hereafter and renown ; Frazer, Spirits of Corn I 245). In it some blood (essential for a fertilizing rite) is shed, but not fatally. The rotation marks a survival of the common practice of leading round the altar and displaying a victim to all points of compass (Cf. Salamis, temple of Diomede, Frazer Adonis I 145) ; to this usage perhaps belongs the en- circling of the walls of Jericho. May the processions of buddhists round tope, containing holy men's relics, be a peaceable form of a horrid rite ? The last civilized change is seen when the ' victim ' is not hooked but slung on ropes and so made to rotate or revolve on a pivot or in a wheeled car (so the name charak-puja) round a shrine. This note is added for the proof it gives of a sanguinary aboriginal cult of the earth-goddess and the subsequent intrusion of a male god into the ritual. The cult of girls is certainly derived from an indigenous worship of the earth-goddess, in her less terrible theophanies ; while it degenerated into the orgies of left-hand Saktas (on whom see H. H. Wilson) it certainly originated in a very pure and austere fashion. In the Deccan (W. Crooke : Dasahra in Folk-Lore, March 1915), at the autumn festival to the Mother- Goddess, offerings are given to young girls on each successive day. In Bengal, after the Goddess has been roused from slumber, and magical life imparted to her by invocations and anointing both idols, the day closes with devotion to a young brahman maiden. At Bastar (Central Province) though the brahmans patronize the native cult it is none of their making, and a chief part is played in the Dasahra, by a Mahar girl of seven or eight years who impersonates the goddess of fertility until puberty, living in strict continence ; after offerings of fruit to the dread Goddess Chamunda on the ninth day, nine unmarried girls are worshipped and fed, as embodiments of the goddess. Only a short time ago, two unwedded maidens at Kapurthala were announced as divine incarnations and for some time were held in the greatest respect ; but, lio good result accruing, the cult fell into abeyance (Census Report. Punjab 190 1). In the early days of the present war, in September 1914, it was given out at Meerut that a Bengali girl-saint was coming from Calcutta to conquer a two-headed dragon appearing there ; great crowds assembled, but the amazon St. George did not come forward. It seems quite certain that the primitive Thugs were also of southern (and dravidian) origin and made the early custom of human sacrifice a business and a source of gain ; they were staunch worshippers of Kali (Devi or Durga). In the north they are first heard of amongst the mus- lim in 1290. Firoz Shah did not imitate Hulagu's righteous vengeance on the Assassins some thirty years earlier, but sent them in detach- ments from Delhi in a body, about 1000 in number, to live freely, but apart 64 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages from mankind, at Lakhnanti. It is possible that the Assassins may have had before them tliis earlier model of murder, as a fine art and a religious rite. It cannot be doubted that the indigenous stratum, holding human blood to be necessary for the welfare of the land and appeasement of demons, took these secret means of satisfying Kali's thirst after the practice had been condemned both by hindu feeling and muslim authority. Part B. Sivaite Theology : its lofty development Sivaite Doctrine of God and his creative purpose. — Yet from these very primitive beliefs and barbarous origins was evolved a pure theism. Sivaite theology, of which no new modification has since arisen, had its chief forms fixed at an early date. There is one Supreme God, all other divinities being only highest or perfected souls dependent on him (as the demons in Plato's TimcBUs) and doing his will. He is himself without form and all representations are purely symbolic such as lingam and lingi. God and his energy Sakti are inseparable : by it he comes into relation with the world, creating, sustaining and at last destroying to create anew. God is pure thought {sit) and bUss [ananda] as in Aristotle's doctrine ; these are farasaktis, supreme qualities or energies : from them are developed those of will, action, wisdom by which he is brought into relation with the world. ^ Creation is both an eternal necessity and an act of grace, for souls (as above in the Bhagavad Gita) need a cosmos wherein to work out their karma. They are eternal (as in Sankhya) and do not vary in number. It is only in a world like ours that they can rid themselves of impurity, eat the now matured fruitage of their former works and attain release {niukti) : the deeds of karma need a forcing-ground to ripen them before they can be consumed ; the doer become in turn the sufferer. Only when their account is exactly balanced is final union attained and the redeemed soul has no longer any use for a ' scene of probation '. But at the end of every aeon a fresh universe is needed for the multitude of souls whose accounts do not tally. We have then as regulative ideas of the average dravidian mind, all the famiUar tenets of theism : a personal deity, a real universe and immortal souls, to whom he gives award of deeds and in the end saves 1 Of course this is merely the commonplace of all reflective theology and is the same in every system, however widely divided in space or time : it is the essential outcome of any speculative division between God as He is in Himself a,nd God in His relation to His creatures. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 65 from migration by means of the useful purgatory of this world.i Pure Maya exists, like the souls, coeternal with God and supplies the necessary material for their discipline. This trinity of co- eternals we have already seen in the northern systems : it is of course borrowed direct from the Sankhya dualism which becomes a triad when a directing deity is accepted from outside. There is besides an impure maya (? the residue of immature or not yet assimilated karma) with inherent malas or impurities. The mula frakriti or actual material is not eternal and the Sankhya is reproved for supposing that it can of itself evolve a cosmos (hylozoism) ; its source is the Maya and it is perishable as an earthen vessel. Soteriology or Soul's Deliverance. — The Soul is from all time enclosed in a fine subtle body or envelope, persisting in its com- pany through all its migrations : it is from eternity associated with the malas of ignorance and with the impure matter which contains them.^ The triple bond of the soul can only be des- troyed by Siva's grace, by the -parasakti of pure knowledge : we must rouse this grace (arul) of God, ere we can gain full understanding of our essential oneness with him. The states of souls are threefold : (a) human or divine and demonic ; (6) those which await new birth ; (c) those who are set free from deed and maya or illusion and have no need of rebirth, but await full union with Siva.' In this life the receptivity of knowledge and of divine grace must be aroused by a personal teacher or guru, standing to his pupil as a divine and infallible mentor. The disciple must listen to him, abstract his mind from objects of sense and repeat the mystic names ; he may acquire magic and ^ A careful comparison with Origenism, a system certainly complete before 250 a.d., will make it not unlikely that the two theories had points of contact and intimacy. 2 Thus all the elements of our world (including souls, not perfect at the outset and then somehow fallen, but vicious from the start) coexist from the very beginning : no new factors or elements are introduced ; and so, unlike the orphic (?) or Christian theory, there is no history in the strict sense, only a ceaseless process which here and there has an ending for certain rare and happy souls. And this is the true doctrine of buddhism also. ' There are two curious points which are not quite clear ; God's arul (grace) is to be stirred that it may appear as an obscuring energy, and the souls in the highest condition are said to be ignorant still ; cf . Nallaswami Pillai Sivaite Religion, Madras 1909. F 66 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages supernatural power. ^ At last the soul released has conscious immortality, and sharing the bliss and wisdom of Siva is not absorbed into His essence but leads a bhssful life in his presence. Section X. The Reforms and Compromises of Sankara the MONIST {800 A.D.) Autotheistic Reaction (in its esoteric philosophy) : Sankara 's uncertain position.^ — Mention has already been made of the revival of brahman (or ksatriya ?) monism under Sankara (c. 800 a.d.) and his compromise with the popular cults of southern and dravi- dian India. In him (as Deussen has very minutely pointed out) hindu philosophy reaches its limit, its final and systematic form ■ — the Vedanta. Hitherto we have followed rather the religion and exoteric piety of the east and have traced its spiritual affinity to western standards. It will now be needful to examine at greater length the esoteric philosophy which ran counter to the theistic tendency, whenever this showed signs of independent culture and reflection ; though it was quite prepared, as is shown in modern hinduism under thin brahmanic veneer, to give a welcome to the lowest forms of native superstition. Sankara was born c. 788 at Kaladi in Malabar, and a brahman of the Nambudri class. Though he died at the age of thirty-two [820 ; in the Himalayas) he completed an immense work which had a wide influence on the current and later hfe of India. He was looked on as an incarnation of Siva for his wisdom and strict- ness of nfe.2 He aimed at restoring brahmanic purity, and succeeded on the esoteric side. Himself a votary of Siva he desired to recall the doctrine of Brahma, coupled with the joint worship of the trimurii. His school took its name Smartas from sinriti (tradition), the author professing only to revive the old faiths. Without doubt he occupied a somewhat insincere position ; for the people at large he posed as a champion against the heretical and atheist sects of northern rationalism, yet in truth he was almost as hostile as they to the theistic principles of the Bhagavata. His real doctrine, apart from polemics, was 1 This concession to the ineradicable passion of the hindu mind is made by even the very loftiest systems of thought. 2 His works take the form of comments on the Upanisads, the Bhagavad- Gita, and the Vedanta Sutras : perhaps the latest appreciation of his position is Sri Sankaracharya by Aiyar and Tattvabaushan, Madras, 1902. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 67 a strict monistic theory ; but his influence in the south led to a modelling of a hindu cult comprehensive and ' national ' (if the term can be admitted) at a moment when Buddhism was rapidly losing ground : whereas in the north he reduced an indefinite Brahmaism to order and set for all later time the true standard of orthodox theo-philosophy. Sankara's unique tenet : that of Parmenides. — The disputes and successes of this itinerant apostle of the Upanisads are told by his own disciple Anandagiri [Sankara-dig-vijaya, 'S. world- conquest ') and in another work of the same name by the more famous Madhva. Sankara interprets the aphorisms ^ ascribed to Badarayana, and he again is said to be identical with Vyasa, fabulous arranger of the Vedas and supposed founder of the Vedanta. Sankara has in truth but a single doctrine to preach — ^that the phenomenal world is illusion and in itself unreal. His attitude is that of Zeno and Parmenides : he does not refuse to recognize the world altogether, but gives it a value for con- vention and ignorance only [vyavaharika) : it has no true or transcendental existence (paramarthika) . Therefore there are two kinds of knowledge, esoteric and exoteric, just as in the eleatic poem the way of truth and the way of error or opinion stand contrasted and yet must in a sense be held together. The personal creator and separate soul are beliefs which must be con- ceded to the average man, to the mind sunk in illusion and ignor- ance. No moral aim or purpose must be attributed to the Absolute Spirit, and the mirage or phantasmagoria can only arise from sheer sportiveness (lila). These points, with the unvarjdng brahman ^^ atman or ' god is the self,' constitute the whole of Sankara's advaita teaching. As this is the chief move- ment in thought as distinct from theology, within the Umits of our period, we must inquire by what stages this final form of hindu philosophy was reached. ^ These Sutras are translated in our English edition of Sacred Books of East by G. Thibaut, and by the unwearying though prolix German student, P. Deussen, Leipzig 1887 ; he had then already published his System of Vedanta 1883 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1906. Deussen's works are translated into English [The Phil, of the Upan. tr. Geden T. & T. Clarke Edinb. 1908, being the second volume of the Indian division of his General Hist. Phil, and S. of Ved. (as above) by C. Johnston, Bengal C.S. Open Court Publ. Chicago 1912. These two valuable but diffuse writings very much overlap one another.) 68 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages Section XL Final form of Autotheism or the Vedanta System Vedic Periods : A Old, B New, and C Post- Vedic— After the previous survey it will be easier to understand the following summary of aryan history and development : (A) the Old Vedic Age and hymns of the Rig composed perhaps from 1500-1000 B.C. within the border of India (Punjab) but no doubt preserving poems composed 2000-1500, (B) The Neo- Vedic 1000-500, marked by the gradual conquest of the western region until the whole northern plain bounded by Himalaya, Ganges and Vindhya M. was occupied — to this period belong the three later Vedas {Yajur, Sama, Atharva) ^ and also the Brahmanas and Upanisads. (C) The Post- Vedic Age in which appear the heretical tendencies, and personal rationalism which elevates man above the gods and does not (as the upanisads of the second period) regard absorp- tion in the Absolute as the goal [either as a fact already realized here and now by those who can understand, or as an ideal in- finitely remote and painfully to be won, but nevertheless always in sight.) The Gods not genuinely connected with religion or morality. — It is clear that from the first a sceptical and disintegrating tend- ency was active and that a very imperfect connexion was made between the natural and moral agency of the early Vedic gods. Where they are conceived as genuinely personal, they are supreme egoists and an increasing sense of ethical requirement led to a separation of the province of conduct from any real divine juris- diction. Not that their magical power was denied, but their worshippers were supposed to be greedy of gain (in this world or hereafter) and purely selfish and calculating in offering the sacrifice. Rig x 117 ^ recommends benevolence without placing it under the patronage of the gods. In ii 12 ' this terrible god ' Indra whose being men doubt ' asking where is he ? nay whom ' they deny, saying he is not — ^he will destroy his foes like children's toys' : ix 112 suggests that Indra is quite selfish, and is (xiig) much given to intoxication with Soma, like his own priests as 1 It is to be noted that even this latest (and to some non-canonic) Veda bears in its name witness to the prehistoric identity of the indo- iranian family. 2 As Deussen notes Outline Ind. Phil. Curtius, Berhn 1907. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 69 they gambol around like frogs (vii 103) : in x 82 the Vedic minstrels are ridiculed as wrapped in a fog of unmeaning verbiage and as travelling about to make gain (hke Plato's Orphic priests and Cybele's mendicant fraternity in later times). Beginnings of Monism (in reaction) : the Atman or God within. — But already speculators had guessed at the unity lying behind : Rig i 164 refers to the ' One Being of which the hymns speak under divine names : x 129 (the most famous of all) re- presents, after Hesiod's fashion, the birth of Love from primal chaos or being which is identical with non-being : x 121 finds a name for this new yet aboriginal deity, Prajapati. Now this, it is to be noted, is ingenious reflexion and priestly refinement : this new God is the great wizard who by rite and charm, and above all by penance (tapas), created the world, or rather transmutes himself into it, falling to pieces like the norse giant Hrymir, and intermittently restored by those who know the magic ritual of sacrifice. The effort to find the underlying Unity was carried a step further (as we saw) by this later emphasis on rite : brah- man or power of prayer, it is this which compels Prajapati, and it is self or Atman, all that remains when the perishable notself is taken away and man reaches the depths of his being. These two terms (which are one thing) form the sole subject of the upanisads and the Yajnavalkya chapters of Brihad-aranyaka Upan. are the oldest of all : our Atman is the only real, is itself unknowable, and cannot be object, since it is eternal stibject of knowledge. This is idealism which has not yet raised the problem of Solipsism. The Atman, once existing alone, thought ' I will ' be manifold and make the worlds issue forth ' ; and having created them he entered his creation as its soul. In theistic systems God creates souls ; here he multiplies himself in the playfulness of divine power and becomes all and many by illusion or glamour, yet remaining all the time one. Within the same being, man, live the true and the illusory Self {Svetasv. Up.) ; the true as one bird on a tree which only quietly looks on, while the other bird as the false self, is busily eating the fruit of works. ^ Therefore ' Here is the doctrine common to all mysticism and often leading to a dangerous adiaphorism ; the true soul is quite passive (aTra^r/s) in the body and cannot be soiled by sin ; so Aristotle's vovs is really the veritable man and yet is not interested in or qualified by any of the changes of his ethical character or the deeds of his hfe. 70 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages the Highest is already within us ; and we have no need of prayer or magic to bring Him nearer. Salvation (if only we knew it) is already realized and assured ; it wants no superfluous comple- ment of futile works, nor postulate of any further transcendental deity. Autotheism : man is everything and God superfluous : the saving knowledge. — This insistence on the immediate deity of self is very curious : hindu thought in its pure subjective idealism is just the very reverse of all pantheism, whether of thought, of will (as in the hebrew or muslim theology) or of matter. So far from God being everything and man nothing or contemptible, man is everything and God is superfluous. ^ A keen sense of immortahty, in contrast with the neglect or indifference of the Semites, is ' from oldest times a patrimony of the indo-germanic ' race.' The complete surrender of this assurance of personal value by the Rationalists arose not from any scorn of the personal but from a ' fear of dying again and again.' Their aim was to win a lasting state of bliss instead of a brief sojourn in Indra's heaven, soon to be followed by another fall to earth.^ Hence, though strictly inadmissible in a theory of an unchanging selfhood (subject only to a mere illusion of change and the manifold). Metempsychosis is adopted seriously^ and not merely moraUzed but made the basis of all hindu morahty (such as it is) down to the present hour. Even Yajnavalkhya the ideahst for whom nothing exists but the abiding divine self, can say of the vain struggle of the world of illusion and the prospect after death : — ' What they spoke of was work and what they praised was the deed ; verily a man becomes holy by good works and wicked by evil.' Migration is just as real as the empirical world for the stage of exoteric knowledge ; but from a higher point of view both pass away or are seen to be but mirage. Saving knowledge is to know the self to be one with the Highest ; he fears nothing for there is nothing beyond himself to fear, and will injure nothing because everything is himself. Those who still wish to retain theism and a humble attitude of devotion speak of this knowledge 1 Hence ' atheist ' Sankhya is admitted as an orthodox system because it leaves the self and denies God; but jain and buddhist are excluded as denying both. 2 This repeated death and rebirth is called pimarmrityu. " No doubt a loan from the earlier races. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 7^ as the gift of God's grace ; the pure autotheist however knows there is no reahty and no higher being, beyond his own thought. Upanisads contain every germ of later developments (except their pessimism). — The chief developments, or ' orthodox ' sys- tems, are (as we have already seen) Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta ; these (it must be remembered) are not new or original but legiti- mate deductions from the Upanisads, — each laying an exclusive stress on one particular aspect of a body of doctrines not yet fused in a homogeneous system. Deussen (as against undue praise of buddhism) is quite right : ' the only systems of value for ' metaphysics are Sankhya and Vedanta and even these are not ' to be considered original creations of the reflecting mind : for ' the common basis of both — still more of buddhism and jainism — ' is to be found in the Upanisads, those ideas which by a kind of ' degeneration, have developed into Sankhya on one side and ' buddhism on the other '.^ Buddhism is but a clear, popular and unmetaphysical way of stating for the benefit of mankind the Upanisad truths set forth by Yajnavalkhya. As to the much debated point of its psychology, Deussen very justly remarks : ' If buddhism in its opposition to brahmanic belief goes so far ' as to deny soul, the denial is only apparent since it maintains ■ the theory of transmigration effected by karma . . . this must ' in each case have an individual hearer and this is what Upanisads ' call atman and buddhism inconsistently denies.' It is this purely apparent denial of self or self-denial which has led the uncritical west into a flood of irrelevant sentiment about the great disinterested religion of the east : it should of course be plain that buddhisTi is a purely subjective and indeed eudsemon- istic system and very rarely ventures forth beyond the con- fines of the self at all : its somewhat inert but not insincere benevolence is of course a natural and logical corollary from its value of self, not an impulse of active altruism. It must be noted that, while the Upanisads are still joyous and optimistic in tone, Sankhya and its derivative buddhism start from pain and seek, to end it by negation ; whereas true philosophy is not in the main practical but issues from an eager curiosity for know- 1 I venture to alter the order of the last two schools ; elsewhere Deussen (with, I believe, all important critics to-day) insists on the priority of Sankhya and the entire indebtedness of Gautama to earlier systems — for all but his own wonderful personality. 72 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages ledge : ' it is a symptom of decadence both in Greece and India ■ when it begins to be considered as a remedy for the pains of life ' (Deussen). The Sankhya (with its sense of pain and its self- pity) is founded on dualistic realism for purposes of subjective satisfaction. Matter is real and the soul is real and the two being coeternal are inexplicably linked and entangled. The sole aim is negative, to be released from the actual. Sankara's aim ; to correct the self-pity and realism of Sankhya. — The work of Sankara then is to sound a recall to primitive truth, corrupted and disfigured by the self-pitying pessimism which appeared in the ' degenerate ' Sankhya. ^ Against this independ- ence of matter or empiric realism he raised his voice. He is an eastern Luther reviving the pure word. At the same time he is no fanatic or sectarian : he desires only to unify. So, as in the grades of life or asramas, he admits three forms of thought, an exoteric theology, an esoteric, and an ideahst philosophy (which strictly speaking excludes both the others). It is his rendering of the Vedanta which to-day hves in the heart and mind of every thoughtful Hindu. ^ God and the self are — rather is — inaccessible to human thought. The Atman can only be expressed by neti neti ' or by the wise Bahva's obstinate silence when questioned upon its nature. This ding-an-sich, as Kant has shown, is inconceivable under the categories of our intellect which only operates with the forms of space, time, causality. ' We ' are for ever excluded from a knowledge of the spaceless, timeless, ' godless reahty '. Yet all the time we have it in fact, full and wholly, within us : when we leave the mirage of the external world and return to the secret depths of our own nature, we come ' And to a less extent in Gautama's system ; but it must not be forgotten that the chief doctrine of buddhism is after all optimistic (as will presently appear). 2 Deussen who is entirely in sympathy with Sankara advaita tells us that of 100 Vedantines seventy-five follow Sankara : of the remaining 25 per cent. 15 adhere to Ramanuja and 5 apiece to Madhva and Vallabha — all of whom recede from his psychical monism to some form of dualism — at least recognizing, no doubt under Christian, Jewish, or muslim influence, the distinction of God and the soul. ' The fact ' he says ' may be a great ' source of comfort for poor India in so many misfortunes, for the eternal ' interests are higher than those of time.' 3 ' Not thus, not thus ' ; cf. Royce's use of this negation. World and Individual 170 (Macmillan 1900). Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 73 to God — not (as in Sankhya) by objective and scientific know- ledge, but by absorption into self {aruhhava) ; man in this act knows himself as sum and totality of all being. There is no external world at all ; it is illusion which vanishes as we come near, like the terror of a serpent which is found to be only a piece of rope. Phenomena are but mirage : the soul's true life : parallel in Taoism. — When we die we awaken from a heavy dream and stand in the presence of reality, or rather find it to be within our self. Thus in this and every other hindu Way of Deliverance, the true state of the self is really positive, though from our earthly point of view we have to express it as pure negation. Every true mystic very rightly declines to discuss the state of the redeemed soul when it has found its goal. He knows that it is incommunic- able to any user of the terms of understanding. It is enough for him that it is a felt experience which, once gained, must be eternal. About 600 B.C. in China ^ an attempt was made to define soul in its native home and true state : life reaches earth from some dazzling and remote centre in space, distant beyond the range of human conception. This centre (says H. A. Giles) appears to be ' a home of eternal principles ', " the abode of a First Cause ', somewhat analogous to Plato's Plain of Truth or Ideal World. Here pure and spotless beings drink of the spiritual and feed on force, and likeness exists without form (?). To get back to that primeval state should be the aim of all men ; and this we can attain only by a process of purifying mind and body, to be prolonged through all conditions of existence until perfection is reached. When soul and body are fitted for the great change, there comes what men call death ; the pure being closes his eyes to awake forthwith in his original glory from the sleep which mortals call life.^ The True Real (which we are in virtue of our inmost core) is timeless, spaceless and unchanging ; outside of this, all is maya or mirage.^ But Sankara does not deny that our ' godly nature ' is obscured and concealed, any more than he denies the appearance of a visible universe. We are here in ^ Or possibly under Chuang Tzu somewhat later c. 330-260 B.C. ^ Deussen who is a dogmatist in metaphysics, believes that Kant and Schopenhauer finally proved the doctrine which Plato (from Parmenides) and the Vedanta only surmised ; the two worlds of being and non-being ; of. his Elements of Metaphysics, tr. C. M. Duff, London, 1894. 3 Cf. Suzuki's Hist. Chin. Philos., Probsthain 1914. 74 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages sin and misery ; why, we cannot know and it is impious to ask : of this alone we can be certain — we know a way out, and that is enough. The knowledge that ' I am God ' does not produce salvation, but is already salvation. Section XII. Later Development of semi-Theism in Indian Sects Rapid spread of Theism after the Mahommedan Inroads : Mysti- cal devotion. — After Sankara the next striking figure in theology is Ramanuja {1017-1090) born'near Madras, who suffered persecu- tion from the sivaite king of the Chola, Rajendrath II {1070- 1118) 1 for his persistent advocacy of Visnu. Following in this the early bhagavata movement, he retained also their faith in a personal god and a real ~ soul. This theistic creed rapidly spread over India from the south : Ramanandra (between 1300-1400), also from the same district of Madras, completed its success and hinduism began to revive all over the continent.^ Among sup- porters of the cult of Visnu must be named his sivaite coeval Madhva {1331-1390) * who became a fierce foe of advaita and all doctrines which confuse or identify God and the soul. Revert- ing to the realism of common sense he held that matter was real and eternal and that salvation was attained through bhakti directed to Visnu's son Vayu. In this conflict between aryan monism and dravidian dualism the latter wins the day : it seems certain that other foreign influences cooperated to secure this result. The cult of Visnu as related to sivaism is roughly as humanism to nature-worship ; but the former admits theriolatry (either aryan or dravidian in origin) : a generalized conception of a divine potency Ues behind the animal forms and finds occa- sional expression. Sayce believes that in Babylon god was at first theriomorphic and only later represented in human guise, the animals then becoming mere satelhtes like Mars' 1 It will be seen that the century covered by these two persons corre- sponds to the age of Cathar persecution in the west and the attack on the paulician sect in the Balkans by Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118). 2 i.e. not a ' transient theophany ', to be presently absorbed into the Deity. = The curious homogeneity of thought (at least the easy passage of universal propagandist movements over an area politically disunited) reminds one of the philosophic Germany of cent, xviii. * Grierson 'seems to give him as a con temp, of Ramanuja in cent. xi. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 75 picus, or a very momentary vehicle. Visnu is (as in Lyall's Asiatic Studies) clearly the human preserver in the ever-increasing flux and change ; while Siva's natural vicissitudes are governed by fate and are quite indifferent to our special welfare, Visnu constantly revisits the earth, when demand arises, either as man or as animal. Two other notable apostles were Vidyapati and Chaitanya (cent, xv) in the north, chiefly in Behar and Bengal. A division, analogous to the position of Pelagius and S. Austin, now arose ; the northern school admitting the presence of male and female energies in God and laying stress on the need of human cooperation, on the concomitance of the human will in the scheme of salvation, — the southern holding that the divine grace and fiat of election were irresistible. ^ In a devout work (c. 1213) the Artha Panchala Loka says that in religion 'faith ' becomes rapturous and intense ; effort is merged in craving ' and self-assertion give place to self-surrender ; the heart is ' poured into the intellect or rather intellect becomes fused • with heart.' 2 Principal tenets of the Theistic Church : theology, creation, psychology. — It must be remembered that Sankara in bringing back the Vedantine doctrine of the Midland was forced to attack the Bhagavata with vigour. This sect (in the main the- istic) were now divided ; some remained faithful to the old alliance with brahman orthodoxy, ^ others finally broke with it and returned to the ancient Sankhya-yoga doctrine. The dispute (according to Grierson) culminated in the two representatives Ramanuja and Madhva — both, as we saw, natives of southern India. The generally accepted tenets of the Bhagavata Church may be thus stated : ' God exists from eternity and creates ' everything from frakriti — which, at first represented as nothing ' or as an emission from the divine, afterwards becomes a duahstic ^ They are thus divided like the sivaites by the simile of the mother- ape and young, and the cat and kittens, the latter exerting no will or influence upon their own movements. ^ Cf. Govinda in Jl. Roy. Asiatic Soc. July 1910, and his Lives of the Arvars, Mysore 1902, where he describes these devout mystics in true Sufi style as drunk or drowned or maddened with love towards God ; we compare also Schleiermacher's (quite unwarranted) eulogy of Spinoza's piety, in the term ' god-intoxicated man ' ^ To which must be referred the ' pantheistic ' interpolations of the Bhagavad Gita. 76 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages ' matter already coexisting. From him issue souls {jiva), to be ' henceforth indestructible and separate entities. He creates ' the lesser gods Brahma and Siva, who may receive reverence, ' but are not entitled to worship ' — a refinement analogous to the hovXeia and Xarpeta of the Greek Church. ' It is to them however that he leaves the burden and care of world-ruUng ' (as the Demiurge in TimcBus) : ' but when occasion arises, of ' his infinite grace {-prasada) Visnu becomes incarnate and saves ' the earth from the rising tide of evil and his faithful elect from ' trouble.! Of these avatars one is yet to come, the highest ' in the past incarnations being those of Ramachandra and Krsna. ' In creating, God first produces prakriti from himself and emits ' the separate conscious souls, considered as parts or amsa of ' him. He himself passes from the phase of unrelated Absolute ' into that of conditioned Spirit. These two in partnership pro- ' duce vianas (equivalent to the Sankhya buddhi) : after several ' stages the grosser elements are formed and a personal deity, ' Brahma, who fashions the world.' The soul if it desires to be saved must be a unitarian monotheist ; if it acts from desire for reward or the sake of fruit [phala) there will be recompense and after this is worked out a return to the weary round of rebirth. If acts are pure, disinterested {niskama), and dedicated to God, he accepts them and confers his eternal nature on their fruits. The deity enters into the soul and confers the gift of bhakti which really brings assured salvation in its train. There are four classes : (i) buddha, tied to earth and its joys ; (2) nutmuksu, awakened sinners who wish to be good ; (3) bhakta, the pure in heart already on the path of salvation ; (4) mukta , released souls enjoying a conscious immortality at the feet of God. The soul at death passes into the sun where the subtle body is burnt up ; and, in the reverse order of the creative process, passes into aniruddha, pradywnna and a further stage, finally into the presence of God himself. In spite of some traces of pantheistic absorption, the tenet is consistently maintained throughout that the saved will enjoy a conscious and separate life. The Four Great Doctors and their sects. — Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka (or Nimbaditya), Visnusvamin formed sects within this revived hinduism which hardly attained to the dignity of 1 From the very earliest bhagavad writings, the doctrine of God's free grace {prasada) has an important place. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 77 schismatic bodies. Their differences are really trifling, depending on the precise attitude to Sankara's Vedanta : none are opposed to the mother-church though particular teachers lay stress on special tenets. The first of these teachers seems to revert to the old ' brahmaism ' of the Midland (Hopkins) and rejects the vedantine refinements of Sankara. He is only in a qualified sense non-dualist ; for God is -personal and possessed of all good positive quaUties, though he embraces all things within himself and emits alike from his essence both soul and matter, to be hence- forth separate and discernible : he pervades the universe as its 'inward regulator' [antaryamin, stoic rjyefiovevov).'^ The second teacher, Madhva, reverts to Sankhya-yoga dualism and objects to Ramanuja's doctrine as disguised buddhism. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion of a strong Jewish, Christian or muslim influence — perhaps traces of all three can be found in him. He lays stress on the five eternal distinctions ; between God, the soul and matter, and again between these two latter ; between one soul and another, and one material particle and another. He prefers to call the Supreme God, Visnu. The monistic fol- lowers of Advaita detest this dualizing sect and consign them in a body to the fiercest torments of Hell (in the Pasanda-chapetika) . The sect of Nimbarka the third doctor is said to be the oldest of all ^ and its scripture to date from the end of century xi (say 1080) ; if this is so, there is strong evidence that this religion was from the first a protest against monism. He preaches a distinct duality or rather trinity — God, soul and matter being quite distinct but intimately connected as the coils with a snake or as waves with the water : God is unknowable but his nature can be interpreted and understood so far as visible creation reveals it. The actual facts or mythologies of the divine avatars or peri- odic incarnations are of small value, so long as we do not fail to 1 This branch (really the mother-church) is strong in S. India, but is not popular in the north ; its food-restrictions are severe ; some of its members prefer the feminine cult of Laksmi, but worship is often directed to divine incarnations, chiefly that of Ramachandra. ^ The present mahaut of. the chief convent near Mathura claims direct descent from him, and he is placed in cent, v by some ; a date plainly too remote. He is perhaps an earlier coeval of Ramanuja (Eggeling) and his pupil Jayadeva may be identical with the mathematician Bhaskara who wrote c. 1150 A.D. 78 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages see God's love shining behind them.^ The fourth school, without doubt the latest, also hails from the south about a century after our period closes (c. 1425) : it is again a monistic restatement of non-duality. Of God's three qualities [sat, chit, ananda) soul has bliss suppressed, matter consciousness of bliss, leaving only essence : the released soul regains this blessedness and becomes in nature identical with the Adorable — but, it must be supposed, enjoys a separate life without absorption. Visnusvamin's followers, unlike the other three sects, encourage marriage for their ' clergy ' and it is they who accept the cult of Rada and the youthful Krsna (as Bala Gopala) : the Vaishnavas of Bengal profess much the same doctrine and, together with a small section of Nimbarka's adherents, carry erotic and mystical devotion to somewhat doubtful lengths. Inclusive tendencies in Religion : culminate in Kabir. — History shows a progressive desire to extend the boundaries of the Church in an inclusive sense : even Ramanuja taught that in theory and in the sight of God castes were equal, but he chose his leaders only from pure brahmans. Ramanandra threw open church-membership to all men and released them from every shackle of ordinance and ritual : among his ' twelve apostles ' (an obvious imitation) were found a muslim, a barber and a worker in leather. The last point in inclusiveness was reached by Kabir (1440-1518), perhaps a true mushm by birth, who mixed hindu doctrine with islamic Sufism and Christian beliefs.^ True to the strict unitarianism of his early training, he neglected the divine embodiments (such as Ramachandra) and directed prayer to the Adorable in person. We have already outstripped the true limits of our period but we never pass beyond tendencies already seen to be working within it. Later hindu development has been due in great 1 Of this branch there are but few surviving adherents mostly in N. and N.W. India (Rajputana) : the greater part adore Krsna. 2 Many passages in Kabir's writing are little more than a paraphrase of St. John ; he was almost certainly a disciple of Ramanandra and thus a vaishnava or visnuite ; he was an important pioneer in N. India and first tried to unite Hindus and Muslim ; from him Nanak Shah borrowed his composite and eclectic faith. Malcolm (1810), though H. H. Wilson contests this, described his tenets as a blend with Sufism and orthodox islam ; with the former view Westcott of Lucknow in a work pubUshed at Cawnpore agrees [Kabir and Kabir Panthis, c. 1907-8). Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 79 measure to external circumstances ; for instance the reforms of Charan-Das [1703-1782] date from Aurungzeb's persecution when men turned to ascetic pietism for the comfort which brah- manic exercises and ordinances could not give. His views are much like the sikh doctrine of Nanak, both betraying a rational sjmcretism which considers outward observances superfluous, directs a worship of the heart to a single deity and holds that salvation is won by faith and an unceasing repetition of the divine name. High position granted to the Spiritual Director : Humanism and the ' Name '. — The guni or spiritual adviser ^ becomes almost superhuman in these systems ; he is the true mediator who ' with one arm rescues the soul from sin, with the other presents ' it saved before the Throne.' In one sense the guru is more powerful than God, for he can protect his disciples from God's wrath. The believer must know that the guru and Hari are one : he is god incarnate and has complete power (over family and estate etc.). Here is found a trace of the tendency to divert cultus from an inaccessible deity to a visible embodiment — a relic of early magic and shamanism which, with the lamaism of Mongolia and Tibet, elevates certain men above the gods, just as savage magic in early times made man feel superior tc nature (Hegel Phil. Rel.) . Now the creed of the ' Word of Power ' [an-had) ^ held by Kabir Charan Das and found also in the sikh scriptures, adds one further class to the Ways of Salvation— Sahda-marga. The conception seems af&Uated with the jewist and Christian Logos (so R. Burn) and with parsism : — for an-haa is expressed as limitless time and space, the unceasing music the Eternal Son who abides even in the heart of self as the in- dwelUng spirit. It has (like om) no letters, no articulate sound it is in itself the Supreme Deity and he who muses on it am repeats it unceasingly becomes God : ' measureless glory h< ' puts on and hears the Limitless speaking ; error flies, earthlj ' desires are all killed, good and evil actions lose their fruit. 1 As among Catholics the choice of a guru or spiritual director mus be made by these Kabir Panthis with great care, but once chosen tb confessor is to be implicitly obeyed, for his voice is that of God. Th Vallahhacharis offer body and soul to this gosain. If in the Sabda-margi the word is sometimes mystical, as divine inspiration, it is often merel; the concrete advice or command of the director, 2 A half-arabic, half-indian compound. 8o Religious Thoughhand Heresy in the Middle Ages Charan Das is quite explicit ; ' meditation on the name of Rama destroys all sin, even the worst.' In all these systems the Supreme is personal, and the creed though certainly mystical does not teach the absorption of the soul, but a blissful eternity in God's presence. Resulting Tendency to Solifidian Indifferentism. — It was to this solifidian indifferentism that Kabir's teaching led : there was no caste, no need for ascetic practices, alms or fasting : salvation was won neither by good works nor by knowledge, but by ardent faith (bhakti) alone. The cult of many gods — here speaks a follower of Zoroaster — is wrong : Maya ^ created them and they are the cause of all sin in us. His followers of to-day believe in heaven and hell, enjoyed or suffered in the intervals between rebirth. Kabir ^ himself is curiously represented as den3dng a distinct and real heaven or hell ; they are but symbolic names for states of bliss or misery in this world. ^ If so, this sceptical secularism is wholly out of keeping with the vaishnava tenets and with hindu thought in general, but singularly re- sembles the views attributed to the innermost circle of the ' A peculiar use of Maya may be noted in these cognate systems which may or may not show a gnostical or manichean impress ; the First Cause through the operation of Maya created the universe, and by means of it ap- pears at periodic intervals in mortal form, the common tenet of the muslim Shiites and much more primitive Incarnationists. But the modern behever, under foreign influence more personalist than his forefathers, uses Maya for the inferior demiurge which creates the world with all its faults, either in subordination to God or in ignorance of him or in defiance. For Tulasi-Dasa the great poet of this later theistic religion (c. 1580), Maya seems to occupy a place like that of Satan in the Book of Job. As to God's incarnation, Nanak taught (Uke the Hindus) twenty-four embodi- ments, and among the Kabirs these twenty-four different phases of the di- vine are utihzed as the several patrons of the various vocations [nistha) which the faithful may pursue. Nanak and his nine successors are regarded by the Sikhs as only one person, as in the Clementine writings, the light of the first guru's soul being transmitted in turn to each — ■a, clear repro- duction of the shiite deification of AH. 2 Kabir refers to his spiritual parents Jaideo and Nama (first marathi poets c. 1250) ; he is said to have died 1449 after spending most of his life at Benares ; the author of the Padmawat shows {c. 1550) how intimate were relations between K. and the early Sikhs — the modern sect (cf. the great work of Macauliffe in six volumes, Oxford to 1909) of 2J millions in Punjab are without any doubt his spiritual descendants. 3 Cf., besides Westcott {lib. cit.), Bhandarkar's work on the Religion of Visnu and Siva (Strassburg, 191 3). Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 8i Assassins. It is moreover clear that Kabir believed in the divine origin of the soul and its ultimate happiness with God : life is God's gift and must not be taken away. His followers resemble Quakers and lead harmless lives ; but it cannot be denied that the extreme emphasis on bhakti and a purely spiritual cult, the re- jection of any official priesthood, might in certain cases lead to the moral indifferentism which, both in east and west, excited such terrible reprisals from a suspicious or pharisaic society. Note A. — Ramanuja's doctrine was specially directed against lingam- worship, dissociated though it was from any sensuous practice or belief. It was certainly a protest of humanism against a watoye-worship which both in exoteric or esoteric form seems to submerge man as an agent in a power not himself ; for in spite of Sankara's professed autotheism the effect on the average mind is pantheistic. Strict sivaites cannot approve of Incarnationism which is the belief which really enlists the sympathies and evokes the religious feeling of average man. The brahmans hold it derogatory to the divine changelessness and have perhaps only been induced to adopt Visnu's avatars to counteract buddhism with its attractive doctrine of human merit. The austere Siva (as Julius Eggeling justly remarks) never made effective appeal to the warrior-caste or to the hearts and feelings of the common people. Ramanuja aimed of set purpose at contradicting the special tenets of the great Vedantine, whose mendicants were forbidden to touch fire and lived on alms like the early buddhist friars. He enjoined the use of fire and would not allow his disciples to eat food prepared by strangers. Hence as in some very primitive tribes the meal is a punctilious and religious rite, reserved for privacy after a ritual bath, and consumed only in certain prescribed garments. Madhvacharya (born at Kanara, 1199) was less intolerant of lingam-woiship and aimed to reconcile the cults of Visnu and Siva ; but he is a constant opposer of monism and asserts the soul's distinct being, here and hereafter. Note B. — Pharisaism or barbaric food-to6Ms were set aside by Raman- anda ; he was as a novice suspected of laxity in these complex regulations and on disobeying the order to dine alone he left his convent and set up a schism in Benares. His choice of apostles proves that he accounted the rules of caste as futile. His teaching was of a popular kind and he might be reckoned among the earliest democratic levellers in India. The writings of the sect are composed in the popular tongue. Tulasi-dasa's version of the Sanscrit Ramayana has wielded immense influence on the hindu mind. His pupil Kabir was Nanak's master and thus each stage shows a further step in an eclectic and liberal tendency towards the creation of an inclusive creed. 82 Religious Thousht and Heresy in the Middle Ages APPENDIX A The Sankhya : a further inquiry into its origin from wpawwaii doctrine Realism creeps back into pure Spiritualism : Creationism. — Accepting idealism (solipsist autotheism) as the primitive form of Ksatriya theory, we may note with interest its gradual blending with, or corruption by, other and more familiar thought-forms. Yajnavalkhya taught that atman was real, to know it was to know all, there is no change and no manifold, nature is a pure fantasy or illusion. Realism crept back in a doctrine more nearly akin to pantheism which allowed a certain truth to the visible world but still identified this with the atman : that which is infinitely small within us is the infinitely great outside. But this identity (the core and substance of XJpan. doctrine) gave way before the necessity for (empirical) thought to conceive of this identity in causal relation : atman as cause or creator, world as effect and creature. Just in the same way Anaxagoras (in spite of his expressed disUke of ' splitting things asunder ' as with an axe ') had finally severed thought and things — which before had been unified or alleged as one in Parmenides. The old cosmogonies of the Rig were revived and altered to suit the new theory : after Atman has created the universe it enters into its various parts as soul or animating principle.^ This is not yet theism, which only appears when a class-distinc- tion is drawn between atman as creator and atman as soul or souls, — ^when God is something out and beyond the aggregate of animating centres, when he is believed to send them forth as his messengers to do his service. This is the stage reached in Svetasvatara — where as on a palimpsest the other shades of theory are to be recognized. ^ God becomes superfluous.- — But this recognition of the real being of particular souls was fatal to the universal. At first contrasted with their creator they soon became independent : they existed coeval and apart. Instead of a cosmogonic activity, one single function remained for a Supreme Being ; to provide a sphere in which souls might work out their destiny, ' to fashion forth material nature as the arena of recompense ' for the deeds done by autonomous souls ' (Deussen). If by the hypothe- sis of spontaneous evolution Nature could be charged with the duty instead, God would become superfluous : He would not be needed either as original creator or as moral judge and aUotter of retribution. We are 1 For this stage Deussen invents the convenient, if ugly, term cosmogon- ism (Upan. Pt. ii. ' Cosmology ' ix § 3). " Deussen well says : ' It is characteristic of this work that, side by ■ side with its proper and peculiar theism, all the preliminary steps are ' retained.' Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 83 left then with the two primitive elements of the atheistic Sankhya (i) a number of souls {purusa) burdened with a heritage of deeds and working out their fruits from birth, and (2) matter or prakriti always evolving to provide a stage for this unending drama or tragedy. Sankhya : Realism and Dualism : Salvation, to recognize separateness. — The rise of Sankhya is, by the confession of most modern students, one of the obscurest problems in hindu philosophy. But the general lines of its parentage are not doubtful : it is the extreme form of that realism which arose to contest the ksatriya idealism and insisted on attributing true and independent being both to nature and to the souls. Prakriti and purusa are distinct and coeternal essences ; there is a duaUsm here as complete as in the cartesian system. No effort is made to show their ' ultimate identity in a higher sphere ' (to use hegehan language) or to postulate a common origin. The purusa in themselves are mere knowing subjects and as a whole would be entirely identical and ' indiscernible ' if they were not differentiated by their empirical characters, by the separ- ate parts of prakriti with which they believe themselves connected (though as will be seen this is very subtle and rarefied matter). Thus, as with many-of the Schoolmen, the principium individuationis is matter. The soul as a simplex substantia has in itself no real quahties, and the more pro- perties or predicates it loses, the more real it is and the closer to its true intrinsic nature : hence mysticism, which is on one side at least, scorn of the particular and a desire to return to the universal. Souls, in a sense a single being but nevertheless existing from the very outset in plurality, are disengaged from, yet connected with, matter or nature, prakriti, as subject from and with its object. Knowledge of this secret — that it is entirely separate and distinct from prakriti — is the soul's true salvation. As in other systems the recognition of identity is the saving knowledge, so here' it is the recognition of complete severance or a fundamental dualism. ' The world is none of my business and its sufferings even in so ' near a part as my own body are quite alien from myself.' Prakriti when its sufferings cease to be reflected in purusa also gains redemption. The latter must cease to illuminate the illusory griefs of the former. In- deed in a paradox dehverance or redemption affects the prakriti alone — • for nothing ever happens or can happen to purusa ; and it is its unfor- tunate yoke-fellow that ' is fettered, a wanderer and at length ransomed ' when by the detachment of purusa it ceases to be conscious of pain.^ In this practical and redemptive school the process and release concern the individual alone. Each several soul for itself must attain knowledge ; for each, as the light dawns upon it, is the process repeated. Nature : its aim and evolution. — Prakriti is even represented as having a conscious aim in unfolding itself before the souls — like a dancing troupe before a rajah in his palace. This is done, not to claim kinship with the * Cf. Rom. viii 22, ' the whole creation groaneth and]' travaileth ' in pain together ' — the ' manifestation of the sons of God ' takes the place of knowledge and distinctness (in hindu thought) or of mystical suicide (for individual or race) in modern pessimism. 84 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages psychical factor but to urge it to repudiate connexion and break away from it. With tlie usual serious mystification of hindu pseudo-science the stages of prakriti in evolution are traced with care : first Buddhi (consciousness), then from it Ahamkara (the fashioner of ' ego '), from this again (in a twofold emanation) manas and the ten organs of knowledge and act {indriyas), and the five subtle [tanmatras) and five gross elements (bhutas). These eighteen first products of praknti form the ' subtle body ' (the avestan and manichean ' tunic ', the gnostic aWipLov oxr]f.a or vehicle) which accompanies soul in all its manifold wanderings. In a somewhat ambiguous place come the three gunas or factors, sattvam (radiant or intellectual) finjas (active or emotional) tamas (dark or inert) ; to the different admixture of these are due the fifty different states of the Lingam, collective name for the eighteen products. All this solemn trifling and arbitrary classification is a suggestive feature in hindu thought, and may be entirely omitted (as in buddhism) without any detriment to the doctrinal core. Plainly it is not a mark of extreme care or subtle discrimination ; it marks simply the need of numbered divisions or classes and analysis — for oral teaching ; and it has little value beyond that of a memoria technica. This dualism marks a relapse of philosophy : which becomes purely medicinal. — If true philosophy is always a monism, as is often asserted, then a distinct dualism must mark a lapse, ' the wane of the unifying or ' philosophic spirit ' which finds itself at home everywhere in the world,' in the true hegelian fashion. The postulate of two eternal and coexisting reals meeting in infinite space and time is a very serious demand on intelligence and creates more problems than it can solve. In this arbitrary dualism nothing can be said about origin or relation, no one can explain how they came to cooperate so well for a common end — the strong but blind man and the lame with good eyes, who seemingly need each other and cannot dispense with mutual good services. How is it that this accidental union forms a world, the disentanglement of which is so wearisome and lengthy a process ? It will be noted that Soul is no longer an animating principle or platonic source of activity, but an unwelcome and reluctant guest or rather prisoner. The creative faculties were transferred from God to matter and He became (as we saw) superfluous. As to the plurality of souls we recommend a comparison with the system of McTaggart, to whom the Absolute is most certain plural, active and developing, instead of a dead unity in which all particulars are lost.^ This Dualism can be traced back to Brihad, i 4 where deeds and souls are the only two factors : ' this only, • Or must pretend to. 2 This is of course a reaction of british nominalism which, as in politics or ethics, holds strongly to the value of particulars above their aggregate or sum, or collective group-name — against a revived pcmtheism which like Saturn devours all its children. When Deussen asks : " a plurality ' of knowing subjects ! What philosophic mind can admit this thought? ' he is already answered ; indeed, he answers himself. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 85 food and eater, is this entire universe.' The Maitr. vi lo gives earliest notice of the Sankhya system and interprets these two terms food and eater as pmkriti and purusa : the direct contrast set up in this chapter— a real- istic dualism — is quite at variance with usual upanisad teaching. In the desire to reach the notion of soul as simple substance, the Sankhya actually traces intelligence to the evolution of raatitr—huddhi or mahan. As in Rig ix 121 the first-born comes forth from the waters, so here mind, sus- tainer of phenomena, issues from the prakriti and in turn from it all the elements of individuality and selfhood emerge. The Gunas likewise are present in prakriti. In deliverance it is the spirit [purusa] that rids itself of a gross world of matter which for it no longer exists : as of the two birds one is onlooker, the saved and disinterested ; of the two rams (Svetas. iv 5) : ' the one leaps on the red and white and blackish she-goat ' (the three gunas) whilst the other ram abandons her to his " late com- panion ",' and becomes a passive spectator.' Saving knowledge is not to recognize the world as pure illusion, glamour, phantasmagoria — but to see that soul's union with it is unreal. But, it must be asked, how can mere knowledge effectively sever an actually existing union ? ^ What is interesting in the Sankhya is its practical and pessimistic character, which assimilates it, with the jain and buddhist doctrines, to the subjective and self-pitying schools of Greece after Alexander. The speculative element is nearly extinct, that serene temper of mind which makes its home and finds itself welcome everywhere in the object, because the j'ea^ is the rational. But for the Sankhya, philosophy is nothing but the search for a remedy for suffering : it is wholly practical and medicinal. ' Philo- 'sophy, at first based on pure desire for knowledge and having no aim ' beyond truth ' has now become mere means to an end, the personal desire to escape a purposeless suffering. APPENDIX B Parentage and Asceticism : the Conflict of Ideals A. Parentage (i) a religious duty in ancestor cult : (2) means of shifting guilt. — The ancestor-cult of souls which has nothing to do with belief in gods or spirits survives in India to the present time, curiously ' It is not to be doubted that the verse refers to and expresses well the chief thought of Sankhya : elsewhere these three elements are called, heat, water and food (!) : in western thought they might be said to find their counterpart in joy or cfiiXia, pain or viiKo%, indifference or airdOua. In the passage cited there is g. kinship to Hartmann's simile of the evil satyr Will leaping on the maiden nymph Idea and producing our universe, the bastard child which ought never to have been born. ^ Deussen traces the gradual emergence of the cloud of pessimism from the still genial atmosphere of the earlier Upan. : it is but the size of a ' man's hand ' in these, but it occupies increasing space in Kaihakc. ; and still more in Maitr. i (speech of Brihadratha). 86 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages incompatible with other theories, of aims in this world and recompense in the hereafter. Immortality in the company of Yama and the fore- fathers is something quite different from admission to a divine heaven by sacrifice and the god's favour : it is of course wholly irreconcilable with migration in the strict sense and with an ultimate absorption in brahm. In the Rig ix 1 1 3 there is an attempt to unite the pitrayana with the devay- anas in Yama's paradise, the fathers in realms of hght inexhaustible are represented as dwelUng with the gods and are with them invoked to draw near and partake of the sacrifice. In Rig viii 48 the marvels of the universe are ascribed (quite in the fashion of some savage cosmogonies) to the fathers as well as to the gods ; they helped them to adorn the sky with stars (x 68) and to bring forth the sun (x 107) The ancestors therefore seem to stand on a level with the divine beings, and all later degrees of blessedness and separate heavens are as yet absent. The Rig knows nothing of migration. Other difficulties arise when a private and ascetic moraUty takes the place of normal tribal duty ; the supreme duty of parentage for the tribal welfare and due worship of the fathers is still recognized.' To beget children is a religious duty, enjoined (e.g. Taitt. i 9) side by side with scripture study and teaching ; the pupU dismissed from his lessons is charged by his master (i i) to ' take care that the thread of his ' race be not broken '. Parenthood is even oddly spoken of as a means of transferring guilt ; ' he who in life continues rightly to spin the thread of ' lineage in begetting transfers his guilt to the fathers.' ^ Having left behind his child as a vicarious sufferer he continues his Ufe in the world of men (Brihad. i 5) and is admitted to the fathers' realm to consummate his good deeds. {Aitay. ii 4) ; 'if aught has been perversely committed ' by him his son will expiate it all' {Brih. l.c.).^ With a very confident belief in eugenics and control of offspring [Brih. vi 4), the master imparts advice to his retiring pupil how to beget a son or daughter of a certain disposition. B. Ascetic celibacy, Shamanistic : conflict of tribal and individual interest. — Entirely at variance with this rule of life is the ascetic tendency which disparages the family ties, the rank and duties of grihastha in the asramas. In the same Upan. {Brih. iii 5) it is said of brahmans who have known atman that they hold aloof from the desire for offspring or estate or worldly honours, and wander around as mendicants. In iv 4, we read 1 Attention must be drawn to the extraordinary, indeed unique, traducianist passage in Aitareya ii 2 ; an idea utterly abhorrent to the hindu mind and its theories and not to be reconciled with any doctrine of deeds or migration : the child is merely the man's self seeking a new home. 2 Mahanarayana Ixiii 8 which according to Detissen belongs to the second or metrical group, subsequent to Mundaka and Svetas. 3 A doctrine curiously like that set forth in Dion Chrysostom's Chari- dewMs, where men of rebel Titan blood (the true orphic doctrine) are here imprisoned and punished by angry gods until they have left behind one or more new victims to suffer in their stead : I have elsewhere noted the traces in Dion of a possible acquaintance (a.d. 100) with things Indian. Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 87 ' This our forefathers knew when they ceased to desire children and said, ' What need have we of offspring, we whose soul is this universe ? ' In the later Mahan. (Ixii 7, Ixiii 8 sq) continence is exalted above parentage ; in Prasnai. 13 the world of brahman is open only to those who mortify themselves, in whom true chastity is fixed firmly. The ascetic ideal (with its self-centred individualism) strikes right across the tribal or social duty and the tradition of family. In its origin it is without doubt sham- anist ; the shaman or janni has to be as unlike other men as possible and is accepted by the tribe as a medicine-man just because he is so. He is something abnormal and eccentric and therefore is supposed to be able to reach and propitiate the abnormal in the invisible world. He who knows atman is exalted above the threefold asramas (scholar, householder, forest-anchorite) Svetas. vi 21 : he has found that which the ascetic only seeks (Maitr. i 2) — complete release from individuality (Brihad. iii 5, iv 22). Therefore is he Sannyasin, one who casts all from him, a homeless vagrant (parivraj), a mendicant iphiksu). This Shaman-sannyasin really rejects the whole brahmanic mode of hfe or rather orderly system of successive hfe- standards. In his utter disregard of the external he protests against all ritual observance and merit thus sought. He is aheady a dead man, must not live with his wife and need offer nothing to his ancestors. After one last concluding sacrifice to the gods, he renounces it for ever ; he lays aside the sacred thread and lock of hair that mark his caste and family. He bids a final farewell to his son who may not shed tears. He is allowed but the simplest equipment ; which one passage [Kanthasruti 5) rejects altogether, leaving the saint in a naked and helpless state. He may beg food from all former castes, their distinctions having ceased to be valid for him. In Paratmanamsa 4 it is said ' For him exist no longer ■ vedic scriptures, or meditation or worship, no visible or invisible, joined ' or disjoined, I and thou and the world . . . the motions of every im- ' pulse have been stilled, he abides only in knowledge, firmly founded ' on the atman.' Some texts even permit the day of release to be hastened, as in the endura of the albigenses [Kanth. 4, Jahala 5). Then may he ' enter on the great pilgrimage by abstaining from food, throwing himself ' into fire or water, or choosing a hero's death — or he may repair to a 'hermitage for the aged.' C. Triumph of the Unsocial Ideal : Quietism and World Surrender. — It is therefore quite clear that the finally victorious ideal is anti-tribal, anti-vedic, anti-hrahmanic. It is indeed in the oldest upanisads that opposition is most marked ; the famous simile of the ' house dogs of the gods ' occurs in Brihad. i 4. ' He who worships another god (than the ' self or atman) sa3dng It is one and I am another is not wise but resembles ' a house dog . . . and each man is a useful housedog to the gods. If ' one dog is stolen (by those who teach atman) it is disagreeable for the ■ owner, how much more so if many ? Therefore it is not pleasing to the ' gods that men should know this doctrine ! ' As with the Greeks ' the ' divine character is full of envy ', and Prometheus is a better friend to man than Zeus : the hindu gods do not want man to become too holy — they send beauteous Apsaras to tempt him — or too wise ; or they would 88 Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages lose all their offerings. These Ksatviya writings are wholly opposed to the sacrificial cult of the Vedas. Only later did brahmans admit and modify a doctrine which was too strong to be ousted. ' In brahmanism ' itself was ripening a world-concept which though outwardly bound up with ' it was inwardly opposed to it in its very basis ' (Deussen, Ved. Systm. Introd.). So while religious worship and secular knowledge are purely egoistic and utilitarian, either for this world or the next, atman-conscious- ness leaves the whole sphere of desire (kama) behind, annuls all differences of position in outer life between brahmans, warriors and the rest ; and lifts us to the knowledge that soul is not in the least entangled in the ' cycle of rebirth [samsara) . ' This truth ' says Sankara plainly, ' is not implied ' in the injunction of the work of sacrifice but is rather in contradiction ■ of it. The Canon of Ordinances . . does not rise above the province ' of ignorance.' This conviction cannot again be made the basis of any strenuous action or moral appeal : what concern has such a soul with a world of illusion and misleading ' severalty ' ? Quite rightly does Deussen call our notice to the illogical exhortation in Bhagavad Gita to manly acts — where this military and theistic phase is allowed to remain un- modified side by side with mystical autotheism : ' only painfully and • artificially has this writing the skill to derive from these premisses a ' demand for heroic action ' which in quietism has no place or relevance. ' When the knowledge of atman has been gained every act, and therefore ' also every moral act, has been deprived of meaning.' Hence the true and salient doctrine of the upanisads is not merely hostile to vedic tradition and brahmin supremacy but cannot be reconciled either with common social duties or with the belief in migration, another illusion hke the mjrth of a realistic world and an autonomous soul. This is at most a fable, suitable for those who are like Kant unable to transcend a frigid moralistic standpoint, and therefore find immortality in approximation to a goal ever receding and in the end unattainable. The unceasing return of soul is realized not in the future and in other regions, but here already and in the present moment ; but this here is everywhere and this present is eternal. This immediacy of salvation is altogether out of keeping with the careful brahmanic hierarchy of castes and grades of fife, the various duties and proficiencies. The doctrine is plainly aimed, like all mystical teaching, against pharisaism and mediation. But it overthrows not merely formal church ordinances but some of the chief foundations of human fellowship. APPENDIX C ' Autotheism ' or Spiritual Pantheism Consistent Autotheism cannot be maintained — nor consistent doctrine of God as Unique Cause. — ' This entire universe,' says Deussen, 'with its ' relations of time and space, its manifold, its dependence on apprehending ' mind, rests solely on illusion ; in truth there is One Being alone, eternal, ' exalted above space and time, above change and the multiple, self- Hindustan and the Religions of Further Asia 89 ' revealing in all the forms of nature, and by me myself who am also one ' and undivided, — discovered and realized within as my very self, the ' atman.' This is of course the language not of a proud and pelagian autotheism but of a reUgious and augustinian pantheism. Deussen seems to approve of Christian humility [Romans vii i8) : only by God can good be wrought in us (Philipp. ii 13). He notices that the Church has found it difficult to rest satisfied with this denial of man's cooperation ; ' because ' behind the sole operative power which makes God the source of all ' good she saw standing (like some fearsome apparition) the grim mon- ■ strosity of Predestination.' Yet the Christian conception ' God as sole ' Agent ' has to be connected with the Jewish realism which sets God and ' man over against each other as two mutually exclusive substances. Every effect in the universe is wrought by the Atman {Kaush. iii 8) : It is he who causes the man to do good works ' whom he will lead on high from ' these worlds ; and the man, whom he will lead downwards, to do evil.' The Kena Upanisad says that the gods do their task only by virtue of the power which Atman confers on them ; and Brihad. iii 8, 9, expands this notion of universal energy in a passage of wonderful poetic beauty. He compares the PauUne suggestion, identifying (?) God with the avOpwiro^ ■n-viVjianKo's (i Cor. xv 47) and Kant's explication of the Categoric Imperative, as the real man (ding-an-sich) laying down the law to the phenomenal apparition of his true self. In any case Deussen here repre- sents the vedantine doctrine and the Christo-mystical as substantially the same. Certainly Aristotle's vov